Coming Back For More

I like Gavin's style. He tagged me back for a further review of things you may not know about me. Can there be more? There must be more, and still enough left over to leave me with at least a small air of mystery.

So here goes. Be warned, there are some lengthy stories here:

1. I'll get this one out of the way immediately. I didn't make any New Year's Resolutions for 2007. Ha ha! A revelation that reveals nothing. Or does it?



2. Injustice and inconsistency are the things I find hardest to deal with. The two things are linked in my mind because inconsistency in a person's behaviour often leads to unjust actions. I've seen that most in my working life. I had my first lesson in different kinds of injustice when I was ten years old. There may have been earlier lessons on the topic, but this is the first one I remember where it all turned out rather well. It was a small-scale event from where I sit now, but it filled the world of a ten year old.
   
   A new end to school break times was being trialed. Instead of the whistle being blown and the kids all running or dawdling into classes in a rowdy fashion, we had to stand still for two minutes, in total silence. Only after we'd achieved this were we allowed back inside, continuing our silence. Anyone who made a sound was sent to stand outside the head's office to wait for the wrath of the teacher on duty.
   
   This one break time someone in my group laughed after the whistle. I won't say who it was. It wasn't me. I must have had the guiltiest face, or perhaps I was the one smiling, because Miss Jones pointed me out with the evil finger, and I had to make the walk of shame, alone, past all the other silent pupils into the school. Miss Jones followed me in to let me know how disappointed she was, in me of all people! Later, my class teacher was mad at me too.
   
   That's when something snapped in my head. I didn't mean to be a snitch, but I couldn't stand how they were making me out to be badder than bad, just because they assumed me always to be good - and this time I hadn't even done anything! So I told my class teacher, Mrs Gundy, that it wasn't me. She believed me, but that wasn't the end of it. Just like in all the best police dramas, she wouldn't let me off until I gave her a name. I'm not sure I felt any better for doing that.
   
   I don't remember the other girl getting into trouble, nor giving me the cold shoulder, so perhaps nothing was said to her. I do remember how Miss Jones came to me the next day and said, "You've been dealt an injustice." Injustice was a serious and loaded word in my head, involving governments, laws, courts and prison, so I didn't understand what she meant at first. Then she apologised for what happened after the whistle. "There are all kinds of ways injustice can be experienced," she said. Miss Jones restored me in that moment. I admired her for that. Miss Jones taught me Maths, but this was her best lesson. It made me realise that the smallest things I might say (or not say) in my daily communication with others can have a dramatic effect.



3. A lot of things happened when I was ten. I read once that ten is meant to be the happiest year in a child's development. I'm not sure how that can be true for all children, or how they tested that statistically. Maybe it's about having one's sense of self more solidly recognised by other people. Reaching double figures is quite something.
   
   Perhaps something that happened when I was ten helped me understand I was a lesbian. Perhaps it opened up the possibility. It happened during a residential school trip to London with all of my class, plus a small group of children from another Herefordshire school. It was late June and a typical British summer. So why would any of us need our coats or waterproofs? That's the decision the lead teacher of our party made. "It's beautiful sunshine. We've got a lot of walking to do. Coats will just weigh you down. Leave your coats on the bus."
   
   It started pissing down with rain on the way to Big Ben. Quite a way from Big Ben, and there was no time to shelter because we were due to hear the great clock chime the hour. There would be other hours, of course, but we were booked in at this particular hour. You can't just walk up Big Ben any time you please.
   
   I was soaked, and the higher we got up the tower the colder I felt. We stood around for what seemed like forever and I shivered and shivered. I was part of a smaller group, led by Mrs Jones*, the only teacher from the other school. It wasn't Mrs Jones who made the decision about the coats. No mother would do that! I somehow know she was a mother; maybe because I watched her help two children out of the back seat of her car when, in a brief moment of astonished excitement, I saw her a couple of years later outside our local shops. But I didn't see her as a mother at the top of Big Ben. Nor even a teacher. She was already interesting because she had no existing relationship to me, none of the traditional authority figure presence that was within my ten year old's understanding. She was almost magical. It was as if she had appeared from nowhere to accompany us on a week's holiday.
   
   It seems unlikely that I would be the only one shivering. But I'm the one that Mrs Jones instinctively, naturally, yes, maternally, took in her arms and hugged and hugged. It was such a fantastic moment of human warmth, I loved her for it.



4. I enjoy watching The World's Strongest Man. It's an annual event which is so much a part of the Christmas/New Year holiday for me, and I look forward to it every year.
   
   Do I watch it as a form of human freakery? I'm not sure that I do, although there is something fascinating about the human body's potential to recreate itself out of the realms of the ordinary. I do make assessments of these men's bodies. There is certainly more appeal to the well-toned solid muscle men than those whose sheer bulk is padded out with flab. And yet these men all compete against each other, all heights, weights and body shapes. And there can be surprising winners!
   
   The World's Strongest Man is on TV every night this week. The final's on Friday. It doesn't encourage me to take up body-building, or consider the muscle tone of men outside of such a contest, but I certainly enjoy being a spectator at this high-end of the sport.



5. In the summer of 1989 I worked in a psychiatric hospital as a cleaner. This is how I learned that I have an allergy to rubber gloves. I learned quite a few other things there. But say no more - for now!

*And yes, both teachers depicted in 2. and 3. really were called Jones.

Five Things You May Not Know About Me

I'm honoured that Julie R. Enszer has tagged me for another meme. This one could be a bit difficult because I have a tendency to give a lot away; things simply spill out sometimes. And perhaps I enjoy talking about myself a little too much. Don't we all?

One thing I'd like to ask readers of this blog (although perhaps not now, and perhaps there aren't even very many of those readers) is: what are the main five things you already think you know about me? Some of those would be obvious, I'm sure, but I hope there might be a few surprises in there. Anyway, putting that aside, here are five things you maybe didn't know about me.

1. It's impossible not to be influenced a little by the person who tags you, so I've also come up with an election theme for my first "thing". When I was fourteen, a mock election was held at my school and my English class was chosen to address the whole school as prospective candidates. Not being one to follow the crowd, I decided to stand for The Stronger Knicker Elastic Party - unknown until I invented them. I wish I still had my speech, because it was very uplifting (ho ho ho!), and I remember having props on stage (unless I fantasised that part later!) I was miles behind when all votes were counted. That didn't matter. What I remember most about this early political opportunity is the backing I got from the teachers and some of the Fifth Formers (the oldest students). The teachers weren't eligible to vote but a number of them walked through "my door" out of the assembly hall in order to indicate support. The younger students just thought I was being silly, but the teachers recognised I wasn't disrespecting or making fun of the task itself. They made me feel I was making a strong satirical and intellectual challenge to traditional party politics. And I believe I was. Even if I didn't know it when I started out. I've believed in the power of well-placed irony ever since.



2. When I was eight or nine (maybe even a little older) I made up scenes in my head where I starred as Jim Bob from the Waltons. What more do you want me to say? Jim Bob was the only dude to be. The others were too old, and Elizabeth wasn't butch enough.



3. I love playing those crane machines in the amusement arcades when I'm on holiday. I'm pretty good at it too. I've won quite a pile of unnecessarily ugly soft toys over the years. I will happily feed 20 pences, and sometimes pound coins into those machines until the jaw-like/claw-like mechanism rewards me with a win. I wander round them all carefully first, checking out the different prizes. I won't play for just any old tat or crap. Monkeys and gorillas are particular favourite winnings. One of my favourite wins of all time, though, has to be Andrew the Penguin. Do you remember him, from Creature Comforts? (I can't believe Andrew doesn't get a mention on that page!)
   
   
4. I taught myself to juggle one Christmas (I think it must have been 1991) with a set of juggling bunnies. This was pretty fortunate because it meant I could take part in an HIV/AIDS awareness-raising event organised by LASS (Leicestershire AIDS Support Services), where a group of us took to the streets of Leicestershire (deepest rural Leicestershire in some cases) in full fancy dress. We made our own juggling balls out of balloons and lentils (do try this at home!), and they turned out very well. What didn't go down so well in some places - Coalville, a former coal-mining town being one of them - was our attempt to hand out bright pink carrier bags with the words "Promoting Sexual Health" emblazoned on them. Oh well! A few years later (1995) I started working for LASS with the Women's Health in Prostitution (WHIP!) project and one day I made an emergency delivery of condoms, by bicycle, to a woman who worked from her home basement.
   
   
5. When I was a child my favourite colour was yellow. This was helpful because I have an older sister and brother whose favourite colours, respectively, were blue and red. So I always got to play with my favourite colour marker when we played games with red, blue, green and yellow icons (or versions thereof). Now, I'd say my favourite colour is orange. Closely followed by green, leaning to the khaki end of green when it comes to clothes.

I tag:

• Kellie of The Book of Kellies, because I hope she will be glad to know I'm still alive and well in the blogosphere


• Eloise of The Tyranny of Toast and Tea, because she was so good at responding to the last meme


• Gavin Stewart of Betwixt & Between, because he's just been awarded his PhD (congratulations Gavin!) and he must surely need something else to think about!

So - go on - write down five things about yourself that others probably don't know, and pass it on.

Stories of Origins

I just wanted to say that the memory project is continuing, but I've been going a little further back than usual recently as part of a discussion with my Woman-Stirred colleagues. So I'm going to reproduce here what I had to say over there on the origins of a writer.

***

I don't know what light my early poems and drawings might shed on the woman and poet I am now, but I know I'm very glad that I've kept them. The Woman-Stirred women have been discussing our earlier lives this week, and wondering why we choose to share certain stories and images with each other. Are we simply looking to build connection, and sharing whatever aims to do that best? Or are we deliberately constructing a particular image, a preferred image for all the others to see?

I wanted to be a writer as young as age seven, probably a lot earlier. In fact, my publishing ambitions may have their origins in a lecture Miss Lambert gave my first year infant class when I was still a small four-year old. A lecture? To four year olds? It had that effect on me, certainly. It was a stern and solemn lecture. In other words, a telling off. She told the class that we should all be ashamed of ourselves, for not one of us would be appearing in the school magazine that year.

This was an important lesson. It may have been my first real and personal understanding of injustice. I knew I had worked very hard in my first term, and this news hit me hard. I remember feeling hot and bothered and almost incapable of keeping still as I sat on the floor with legs crossed, struggling to remain silent. Perhaps it was not our efforts but our age that was against us?

In that moment, as Miss Lambert made me feel shame, I was determined never to find myself in this position again, not if I could help it. I never again wanted to have that feeling of underachievement. And that placed a whole new burden on me for the rest of my schooldays. I would work harder and harder, until my work was acknowledged. Except working harder and harder soon became the norm everyone expected from me.

This is a long preamble to a couple of poems I wrote as a seven or eight year old. I don't know what these poems have to tell the world now. Cartoons are good, perhaps. They fire the imagination; just don't watch too many. Be sure to maintain a balance and keep an eye on the natural world also. I don't know. Perhaps these poems say: never underestimate a child.

Tom and Jerry

Tom and Jerry
Were having a tug of war with a berry.
Jerry went ouch,
And Tom went eugh.
It splattered on the floor,
And Tom's bottom became sore.
Tom ran after Jerry,
Jerry hid in a bottle of sherry.
Tom drank the sherry,
And there was Jerry.
Jerry ran across the lawn,
And landed in a prawn.
Tom ate the prawn,
His tail felt like it had been sawn.
He spat Jerry out,
And Jerry looked about.
Tom turned red
And went to bed.

Birds

Birds are singing,
Birds are swinging.
They build a nest
Away in the West.
The babys are squeaking and cheaping,
I can hear a bird weeping.
We have got twenty three budgirigars,
In budgirigars there is two r's.

© Nicki Hastie the Younger, 1976/1977

Perhaps I should be grateful to Miss Lambert. Did her words actually fire my desire and passion to write? Just look at those red teacher ticks I was getting for my drawings by age seven!

Memory Jig

I promised I would look out some material from an unfinished project which I began back in 2001, which attempts to adapt my teenage diaries into a more interactive multimedia affair. This project takes raw material from the 1980s and attempts to set this against the backdrop of the internet.

If I could have written the same words I wrote in my diary, and actually emailed them to a 'Secret Friend' who may have responded, what difference might that have made? What if the internet had existed when I was first coming out? These are some of the questions I hoped to consider.

This project is another aspect of my Coming Out Hypertext. In fact, I originally imagined these pages as part of that story, but hadn't yet found a way to weave them in. So it's worth starting the reading there, or with my commentary.

These next few links are previously unseen. I wanted to draw out the serious nature and poignancy of the subject matter, and also lighten it by drawing attention to my adolescent urgency and intensity, allowing myself to be self-mocking. That's where the Cagney and Lacey theme fits in.

I really was a paid-up and very proud member of the Cagney and Lacey Appreciation of the Series Society (CLASS) in the mid to late 1980s. I have no evidence to back this up, but even at the age of 16 I understood there were probably a number of lesbians behind the CLASS administration. Call it a Sharon Gless fan's intuition!

Start off with Nicki's Inbox or start at Nicki's Sent Items and click between the two using the link in the top right-hand corner.

If you don't follow the link from within one of the emails, you might also want to observe Nicki's first Chatroom experience at the imaginary Girl2Girl Zone. This page is very bare of images, I'm aware of that, and I'm still contemplating what images would be appropriate to convey a 1980s online literacy. Perhaps the absence of images is what's important.

There's a lot more to be done to really round-off (do I mean complete?) this project, so if you want to encourage me to take this and the Coming Out Hypertext further, I'll be really grateful for your comments - on the blog or by email.

For another persepctive and more background on this concept of re-working memory and diaries, you could also visit VirtualDayz, the blog of Elayne Zalis, whose work focuses on digital experiments with personal and cultural memory.

Gay Yet Wistful

After looking for a poem last night (indirectly reminded of it by one of the other writers on the course), I now have a copy of Verse and Worse: A Private Collection by Arnold Silcock sitting next to me. It's unfair to put books away once they're off the shelves. They need to lie around and be contemplated for a while, especially if they haven't been taken from the shelves for some time.

The poem wasn't in there, but there are some amazing chapter headings that you could probably only find in an anthology first published in 1952. These days, given such titles, you'd expect a very different collection of verse. I certainly would.

Grave Shades from the Churchyard Gaze On Gay Graves that the Churchyard Shades

This reminds me of my trip to Père Lachaise Cemetery (Cimetière du Père Lachaise) in Paris in 1991, particularly searching for the graves of Gertrude Stein, Alice B Toklas and Oscar Wilde. Interestingly, Alice B Toklas is not considered 'famous' enough to be listed on the virtual celebrity grave tour. Trust me, her grave is next to Stein's. I couldn't find a photo I'd taken of the graves, but here's one of me in Paris on the day in question, suitably dressed for a day of grave-searching.

Gay Yet Wistful

Plenty of reasons to be Gay Yet Wistful, not only where love is unrequited. [Pause here: can't you hear the extended GYW sigh?] I can really picture this working as an American bumpersticker, complete with rainbow flag.

Queer People - He on Him and Her: She on Her and Him In Jingle, Verse and Prayer, or Epitaph and Hymn

Very queer indeed.

Then, in the chapter called Old School Books, you'll find 'Personal Hygiene for Pussies'. Not surprisingly, penned by Anon.

My old school books were never like this. But then again, yes, they probably were. Some would say this was the time when language was innocent, before all those 'queer people' ruined such beautiful words as 'gay'. And before Mrs Slocombe discovered her pussy, no doubt. Yeah, right! At least Arnold sent his 'private collection' out into the world.

Wearing well

I promised myself I would have some fresh air this holiday weekend to break up the time spent in front of a computer. I managed 20 minutes this afternoon, sitting with my Spanish books in the back garden, before the rain fell. This all counts towards my Vitamin D intake. I like the outdoors, I really do. I'm just not always sure what I should be doing outdoors. I know where I am in front of the computer.

Still, at least I haven't been working, as in working for the employer who pays the wages. I've been doing a certain amount of communicating, reading and building connections. All good stuff.

I will get out more now that it's May. It's time to look out the spring/summer wardrobe - all those clothes that aren't actually stored away neatly in a wardrobe but sit in a great (washed) heap in the back room waiting for the warmer weather and lighter evenings to come round. It's more exciting this way, not being able to see all the possibilities at once. Every year I discover old friends - a shirt, a pair of shorts - "that's where you got to!" - and they rise to the top of the pile to become favoured garments for the next two months.

That's how life is - this rise and fall, the rough and tumble of the laundry pile. Soon I'll be ironing out the creases of winter, blowing off dust and cat hairs, letting my skin breathe.

There could be plans for a school reunion - although maybe not till 2010. It's 20 years since class of 1985 left Whitecross High School. A lot has changed with the school in those 20 years. (There is now a school website, which appears abandoned and badly needs updating. Perhaps while they're about it the web manager could learn how to spell 'governors'. It always helps if educational institutions can spell.)

I'm one of only 3 from our year who have dared to put photos on the Friends Reunited website. What that says about us, I'm not sure. However, I heard from one of the other photo-posters this week. He reckons I haven't changed a bit. Ah well, perhaps that means I did have an idea at 16 of who I was or was going to be. The glasses (a relatively recent addition, since 1998) and even shorter short hair might not be ageing me just yet, but give it time.

2010 it is. We still don't know who will organise this reunion but my old schoolfriend reckons this "would give us 5 yrs to get in touch with everyone, and enough time for all of us to get rid of those flabby bits etc."

On second thoughts, let's have it this year, while some of the bits are not quite as flabby as they might be.

Number 84

I'm not alone in seeking the significance of Number 84. It seems 84 is an abundant number, sometimes even an excessive number.

• Numberland has some interesting observations about 84, including a poem about a rude poem about Julius Caesar.
• Number 84 in the Phobos list of the 100 science fiction books you just have to read is Alice in Wonderland.
• There may be mystical significance for Number 84 in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

And in my forays into Google, I keep coming across these words or similar:

Every one knows that the numbers seven and twelve are the most glorious in Holy Scripture ... and 7 x 12 = 84 ... thus 84 really stands for the perfect consummation of God's salvation plan for all those whom God has chosen to save ...

That won't be me, then.

In searching for 'significance', I had hoped to reach out to something beyond maths or religion. Even though the two subject prizes I won at my secondary school prize-giving were for maths and religious education, I only ever wanted the English prize.

Perhaps that is the significance of Number 84.

In 1984, the year before I won those prizes, I realised I was in love (oh yes, far more than a crush) with my female English teacher.

So, for me, 84 indicates a beginning of sorts.

I could go on to add that 1984 was also the year I holidayed with my family in the Norfolk Broads, went out with a boy for 6 months with the pleasingly rhyming name of Sean Vaughan, bought a Wham! t-shirt, refused to read George Orwell's 1984, kept a diary in which I insisted on recording the time I got up and went to bed each day, strode out in a pair of red boots ...