Sketch Friday (2 week BUMPER SUMMER SPECIAL) 25th June 2021
This last fortnight, I’ve begun to feel the hamster wheel of lockdown coming loose. Things have been spinning hard. To be clear, I am still well and truly in that hamster wheel - still being super careful - but real life is coming back, with a vengeance. Upshot? Holy Frick Frack with fries and sides. It’s been a lot.
But, that said, there have been many, many good bits. There were loads of good bits. In many ways there were too many good bits. It's like, I have lost all of my stamina for exciting, real life, good bits. It's like, the only stamina I have now is for melancholic, stoic-damp-eyed, moon gazing. The new normal still contains that good shit (I love a bit of damp eyed moon gazing) but now also contains friends and family! Real friends and real family. Oh my god. YES. And it has contained train rides to Bradford and visits to work in rehearsal room RnD’s. It contained two of my own writing deadlines on the same day. Two. Two of them. It contained inspirations and conversations with my Writing Squad young writers. It contained runs up hills and seeing views that make the word green feel insulting and reductive. So many different greens exist. How didn’t I notice this till recently? It has contained drawing, and experiments with colour and transparency and opaqueness. Get me? But really, I’ve been thinking about ‘the mediums’ I draw with. Because this fortnight has contained my first tentative steps, working on real life, for real, illustrations. Like, as a little job. Probably, not surprisingly, this fortnight has also contained an actual, small but perfectly formed hangover for the first time in a long time, too. It has also contained dreams of travels. I’ve booked train tickets to London and Scotland.
Dreams of travel.
Wow.
But hand in hand with that. Perhaps especially because I have dared to dream of going to places beyond my own valley, the last fortnight has contained fear. And doubt. And a realisation that some people really have no idea that small pox and dyptheria and a whole ton of shit illnesses were things that killed people, but then stopped killing people, largely because everyone got vaccinated. Get vaccinated. Get vaccinated. No. Really. Get fucking vaccinated. Even so. This future, my new normal, contains people who can not and will never understand that. They will not get vaccinated. They just won’t. And I am livid and exhausted but determined to try and keep remembering that they think I am an asshole too. And nonetheless, we are all people. And this new future. The new normal? The new world, not far off now, where this pandemic subsides perhaps into a place of endemic? A place where covid just becomes a new chronic worry. Like the war on terror. Always with us in our dreams but lived with? Perhaps this is what is coming? Whatever the new normal is, the last fortnight has made it clear - a new commitment to holding space for myself, holding space for others and hoping others will hold it for me is going to be important. A reminder to bring my own vulnerabilities and welcome other peoples. A new gear change up, which involves making time for less. More humanity. More determination. More bloody-minded stubbornness. More rest. Much more saying ‘no’ to things because its not possible to do everything and its actually ok not to try. More choosing carefully what I do. More fully going for the things I am doing and really want to do.
This new normal is arriving fast now, but we have choices about how we help each other slow it down and make it human speed. Make it chunkable. Make it something we can all bear. We have choices and we have self care. I’m not talking about the monetised, goopy wellness selfcare here. I’m not talking about buying oneself a 200 dollar vagina scented candle, to burn in a darkened room while the world beyond your security fence goes to hell in a cart. I’m talking about the kind of clear eyed, honest appraisal / self knowledge type of self care Audrey Lorde describes here:
‘The old patterns, no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate progress, still condemn us to cosmetically altered repetitions of the same old exchanges, the same old guilt, hatred, recrimination, lamentation, and suspicion. For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house…’.
from Audrey Lorde’s ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House*
So, whatever is coming next, designing as much self-made calm, focus, care, listening (as well as fun, Obvs) into it, is going to be how I try and hold myself and others together as we hurtle-shuffle forward.
And that's the news. Love to all X
Drawings appearing this Sketch Friday include: Bradford Cathedral, Bradford Wool Exchange, poppies, sheep, hills, Matthew Bellwood, Matthew Bellowood’s Mum, Kerry Wright, Kirsty Armstrong, Lisa Allen, Colour experiments. That's it x
*In this essay Audrey Lorde is talking about the ways in which white feminist women, will not look at/acknowledge the differences of black women (for fear of confronting their own racism) and so instead erase black women from womanhood. It’s powerful, beautiful, humane and furious writing of the very best kind. You can find the whole essay here: https://images.xhbtr.com/v2/pdfs/1082/Sister_Outsider_Essays_and_Speeches_by_Audre_Lorde.pdf
