The year they died

There was a night in Berlin last year- Autumn, October-ish, grey streets and everyone grumpy with the season-change flu- when I sat in the kitchen of the tiny flat I was staying in and smoked ten cigarettes and drank three beers, fast, and said nothing. Stared at peeling paint. Thought nothing. One of the women I was staying with hovered anxiously by me but it took ten cigarettes and three beers before I could speak.

My friend had died. Killed herself. The fabric of the world had shredded itself and there she had gone. Was never coming back. I had just found out.

I smoked instead of crying, and drank beer instead of talking. She was the third that year (or was she the second, and the third came just after? I don't remember, now).

A bus. Cancer. A choice. One, two, three.

(Four, five: a motorbike, a flight of stairs: four and five were acquaintances, not friends, but faces in my social fabric).

They stumble off my tongue awkwardly sometimes. There is no easy way to talk about your dead friends, no way they don't kill (hah) the conversation. OK, that's not always true: sufficiently drunk, and in the company of other people with dead friends, they trip lightly off the tongue and my grief becomes glad for a moment of being able to mention them. I hate that without the alcohol, and without the company of other people with dead friends, they are unmentionable. Like an STI or money problems: my dead friends, so awkward. Which is so stupid, because all of them were so good at talking, so good at making the conversation roll- why should death steal that too?

I think of one every time I dance to Michael Jackson. Every single fucking time (and I dance to Michael Jackson a lot, these days). I think of her when I see sparkling girls with particular wide smiles and pointed elbows, and every time a friend tells me about her roller derby dreams, and every time I am brave and do something I want to do but don't think I can do.

I see another out the corners of my eyes every time a dancefloor carries me away and the music is just right, and I am wrapped up in the clever trickery of the DJ, the pure artistry, and I want to look up and see her laughing at us carried away with her- or sneaking behind us on the dancefloor to lift me up in her arms or steal somebody's hat. Cheeky motherfucker that she was.

They're not important for what I remember of them. My friendships with them were only tiny parts of their lives, and not at all important compared to the many things that made them whole and alive and worth grieving. But my grief, and my memories, and my desire to talk about them sometimes at the bar without bringing the conversation to a screeching halt: that's all I've got. I don't get to check them out on Facebook any more and see how they're going, or run into their girlfriends and ask after them, or make plans to catch up for coffee next time I'm in the country.

2010. One, two, three (four, five) dead friends. 2011: the year I keep trying to learn how to remember them right.

Hello I am ALIVE!

It's been such a long time, but there's no way I could have forgotten. It's all still there, waiting to rush back at me: the filthy-handed battles to get plants in before the light fades, the frantic and expensive trips to the gardening centre, the anxious clucking over seeds a little slow to germinate. And the rich green smell of tomato leaves, the glistening of water drops on neatly staked seedlings, and the ferocious explosion into being of bean plants- rocketing out the soil, cracking it in their haste, still wearing their seed-covers as hats as they bellow "Hello! I'm ALIVE!"- as though the fierceness of life in them could go unnoticed anyhow.

I have purloined some space in a friend's front yard for a hasty little veggie garden, and a gigantic pot in another yard to grow some greens. I've struggled to stay away from the perfection-obsession of my earlier gardens. To settle for the seeds from the store rather than hunting down the best and most special seeds online, to focus on getting a few plants in and growing rather than drawing and re-drawing plans for the maximal use of space, to allow that growing something is good enough.

it's been barely four weeks since my friend told me I could use her yard, and I am giddy with it all (of course) but managing to hold the obsession in check (I hope). The row of beans (Scarlet Runner, Purple King & a backyard heirloom snakebean I begged off a friend's mum) is heading fast for the heavens, the chard and mustard are leafing out in their shadows, the zucchinis are putting on size at their usual alarming rate and opening their first flirty boy-flowers, the tomatoes have set a few little fruits (the random compost tomato has, at least- the store-bought varietals are taking their time), and the sole slug-surviving cucumber is throwing out tendrils in search of fences to climb.

I built the garden on top of work already done. My friends had, a few weeks earlier, pulled all the weeds out of it, laid newspaper, and covered the lot with straw mulch (before running out of ideas about what to do with the yard next, which they happened to mention within my earshot, and OBVIOUSLY that opportunity wasn't going to pass me by). With not much time or budget, I went for a straightforward option of layering a few bags of chicken & cow poo on top of the existing mulch and laying more straw on top of that, then planting seeds & seedlings into pockets of compost opened up in that mix, which roughly equates to a standard lasagne-style raised bed recipe. I've been a little concerned about soil fertility so the plants have been getting at-least-weekly seaweed-based organic fertiliser, but so far nothing like nutrient deficiencies is showing up and everything's looking as happy as one could expect from a hastily-assembled veggie garden in a narrow front yard in Newtown.

My first harvest was a fistful of chard and mustard leaves sliced into a miso soup. They were delicious, of course, but almost beside the point. I am back again in a place where I get breathless with excitement as I report on the progress of bean vines up bamboo stakes and the formation of little flower buds on the stumpy twisting zucchini vines, and that is easily worth everything.

So many things I don't know

There's this girl who runs away a lot.

She's very good at endings, and sort of good at beginnings, and pretty much rubbish at the bits in between.

She's pretty smart (she's always heard) but feels like an idiot, like she doesn't get it, that there is a cosmic It that is beyond her getting, that living is making shit up fast enough to speed along without ever getting It, without ever having read the manual, it's about passing the exam all the time when you never even glanced over the notes.

And life for her is like this thing that happened a lot in highschool, where there were some things that came so easy: standing up in front of a class to present a talk, except she hadn't done the research and had barely glanced at the assignment topic before she walked in to present, but her brain (easily distracted) stores a thousand cross-referenced details easily summoned into something like a compelling argument, with a grin and an emotion and some inspiring peak to end on, and she wouldn't just pass, she'd get A's.

And walking out she'd wonder, did she think less of herself for scamming it like that? Did she think less of all of them, the students and the teachers, for not seeing through her? Or was that just it, was that just success, these things that came easily and meant nothing and said nothing?

And ten years later, is that still success? Rattling and breezing your way through life on the path of least resistance and least effort and constant, surprising success, and the constant, wearing questioning of if it's you or them you judge most harshly for letting you get away with it?

My friend's a florist, I've written about her before. One day recently we were driving in her car and I was basking in the radiance of her success, of where her passion's taken her. I felt the threads of envy in me, envying her passion, envying that she had a thing that could direct her somewhere and give her- gifted, talented girl to whom success in other fields came easily- something a little difficult to do, and strive for, and succeed at. She's been a lot of other things before she became a florist, and we talked about that. We talked about the things that come easy, and the restlessness with them, and I saw that she had stepped beyond those and decided to do something else. I envied her.

I don't mean anything by this, except to take note of this progression. A few years ago I noticed that I was learning how to learn for the first time in my life. That for the first time in my life I was learning that in order to learn, you must first be really bad at something, and that being bad at it is the necessary first stage of actually learning how to do it. I realised that I have rarely learned anything at all, because so many things are so easy for me, and the risks of turning my attention to anything that starts off being hard have seemed so high, that I have been content to succeed at things that aren't success at all- just, a kind of meaningless on-going. The career I have when I'm desperately trying not to have a career, for example. It's one of the gifts the world is willing to grant a person with a vault of educational and circumstantial privilege supporting them, and I haven't earned it, I take it for granted, and I go nowhere with it.

So I learned, in short order, how to ride a bicycle (by first acknowledging that I did not know how to ride a bicycle, and that I would be bad at riding a bicycle as a necessary pre-cursor to being good at riding a bicycle). I learned about vegetable gardening, and karate, and how to swim across an open bay. I learned a little bit of driving cars, a little bit of speaking German, a little bit of organising an autonomous festival. Eventually, I learned a little bit of actually showing up to my jobs, a little bit about caring about my work, a little bit of doing more than taking these free gifts for granted.

And now the vistas ahead hold something like a piece of knowledge: that the things that come easily are not necessarily the things I ought to be doing. That ease is not, perhaps, the best indicator of a thing worth my time and effort.

Because another thing happened this year, which is that a lot of people I know died, and even more people in my not-very-extended community died. It was a rash of deaths, a relentless hammering of names and circumstances and gaps and losses- all different, all unrelated- all shining people I have loved. And I'm not even 30 yet (not even nearly-30) but I have a chronic illness that will almost certainly shorten my life, and a lot of my friends have died this year, and I know something like life is not forever. There isn't endless time. And maybe there's not actually enough time to coast, the way I've been doing for my entire life to date. Maybe coasting, maybe ease, isn't actually the best way to use up this short bank of years I'm granted.

I'm still stewing on these thoughts, still wondering what they mean. Still wondering if this Summer->Summer hemisphere-switching life is like being on hold all the time, and if I really have time for that. And if I don't, what do I have time for? If the things that come easy and effortless aren't the right things to do, then what ARE?

Borrowed love

There aren't many cats in Berlin. It's a dog's city, for sure. You can take your dog everywhere (when I get off the plane I grin at the rows and rows of dogs sitting patiently beside owners inside the airport, waiting for their people to appear).

When I lived in the big hospital squat last year my room was on the same level as an enormous puppy, a great shaggy Swiss Mountain Dog, already a giant at four months old. She was the friendliest dog I'd ever met in Berlin, puppy-eager and sweet, and liked to hurl herself at my feet, legs splayed for a belly-rub. Adored by the household. She could bring a tense house meeting to a warm and fuzzy standstill just by existing. When I visited her in her new apartment this year she had grown massive, but still threw herself into a delighted wiggling mess at my feet, and throughout the summer proved that she remembered me by occasionally dragging her owner towards me across busy marketplaces, footpaths and intersections.

Other dogs: the grey-muzzled Boxer down at the wagenplatz, followed everywhere by the cry: "Zita, NO!" as she aimlessly knocked over shopping carts, beer bottles, and tins of paint in her aimless wanderings. The maudlin Greyhound I often dog-sat, plagued by a deep and depressive malaise at almost all times, until the occasional moments at the park where for 35 seconds he'd remember that he was a puppy once, and erupt into a foot-flapping, tongue-wagging sprint- then stop, a few hundred meters away. Drop his nose to the ground. And return to his sulk.

In the house in Brisbane that fulfils some function of 'home' when I'm there, there was a lovely crested cockatiel, miniature relation of a cockatoo, who bobbed his head and danced as I attempted to teach him how to whistle. I never succeeded at getting him to mimic me, but he certainly would screech would I stopped whistling. And in the two weeks spent teaching him, I became a much better whistler than I've ever been before.

Berlin, again, my last few days there this time around. I was in a tiny, dark warren of an apartment, borrowing a room from a friend. In the hallway, in a cage, lived a guinea pig. He didn't show many signs of wanting to make friends, but whenever he heard the fridge door open in the kitchen up the hall he'd let out the most unearthly, inorganic squeals and beeps, like a UFO landing. This seemed to be a signal that I should feed him slices of cucumber, which he'd tug out of my hands with his teeth and scarper back into his house to eat.

In Sydney I sit in my parents' backyard while their multi-coloured flock of chickens scratch at the grass around my feet (one, the oldest and sweetest, will eat mulberries from my hands). Like glossy-feathered dinosaurs with their proud carriage, tiny eyes and tiny brains, fierce reptilian dignity.

Last weekend I was at a picnic, and a rabbit appeared. A tame, soft, lop-eared rabbit. We couldn't find where she'd come from, and we couldn't find anyone to take her in, and we certainly couldn't leave her in the park to become fox food, so I took her to my friends' house for the night. A week later she's settled in as though she's always belonged there, all soft fur, curious whiskers, lively company. House-rabbit happy, nothing like the bored, vegetative lumps living in tiny cages that I met often as a child. I feel a little bit like her fairy godmother.

Fold & Roll

On Tuesday the 14th of October I was sitting on Sonnenallee in Berlin, drinking a comfortingly awful coffee (Berlin coffee is generally awful, unless it's from one of the couple of Australian-run cafes that ex-pats share between them as survival secrets, which often leads to tears and exclamations of joy as someone sips down their first Sydney-quality soy latte in months or years). It was from a Lebanese bakery around the corner from the house I'd been staying at for a few days, in the company of a sweet friend who took me on a rooftop adventure over the apartment buildings a few days before. Then I boarded a plane to London, and rolled myself and my (small) suitcase of worldly possessions along to a pub with a queer night to meet another friend, whose place I stayed at for two nights. Then two days on a plane. Two days in Sydney, crashing with more friends, days spent bleary-eyed and jet-lagged and wondering what the hell I was doing there. Then two days in a car with my parents, driving up the coast. Then a night at my sister's house, in the land of my nieces. A night at my friend's house in Brisbane. Then three nights on the Sunshine Coast, beach-front apartment, salt-water swims, moonrise over the ocean, extended family everywhere, my sister's wedding (I was a bridesmaid). Then Brisbane, for two nights. I leave tonight, back to Sydney for a job interview, and I know where I'll be sleeping tonight, but I have no idea about tomorrow night, or any night after that.

In that great rush and jumble of places and people streaming past me, I am so relieved to have so many places, in so many parts of the world, that fulfil some function of home. The flat in London that I know so well now, having slept on it's living room floor on every journey into and out of Europe. Friend's houses in Newtown in Sydney, and West End in Brisbane. Neighbourhoods that are familiar, places where I know the location and quality of the nearest coffee shop, transport systems I know how to navigate, kitchens that I've cooked in before. It's like packing myself up into my little rolling suitcase and unfolding myself like a page from a pop-up book in each new place, but not unfolding too much- need to keep track of all the parts of me so I can fold up again and roll on. But folding out enough to wash my clothes, take liberties with the tea and coffee, spend a day being not-much-of-a-guest (lurking in a bedroom on the net rather than presenting sunny and interesting to the world). Living in transit. It's not a holiday. It's nothing like one.

Without people willing to share their space with me, who seem to enjoy my flittering periodically through their houses and their lives, there would be nowhere that felt like home, and I love these people for their generosity and for making my life possible. For making it OK when I am a jet-lagged mess of uncertain destination and geographic angst, for picking up our friendship easily from the last time I came through and listening (with interest, even!) to my attempts to pull a coherent narrative out of where I've been and where the hell I might be going.

I cling to the familiar faces (although haircuts and names and pronouns may change) and familiar spaces (although the rooms might have been shifted) to ease the jolt of hemisphere-shifting shock, which wants to drown me in the weirdness of leaving autumn for spring, colder for warmer, a world where I make and sell hats for a living for a world where I am landing interviews for corporate IT jobs that pay amounts of money that make my eyes water. Heavy-laden apple-trees swapped for jasmine blooming. Autumn harvests for fresh spring shoots. Fantasies of baby tomato plants ready to shoot strong and green for the hot, bright heavens.

What I want is still out over the ocean somewhere, not quite caught up with my body yet. I have a plan, formed in Berlin, for a summer of work here and an early spring return to Berlin, but the ability to think of or hold onto plans lingers behind like my body clock when I travel like this, catching up with me maybe a few weeks later. Who I was and what I did in Berlin is behind there too, somewhere, making it hard to say much when people ask me how it was ("Oh, good, I guess. I love that city."). So life is extremely immediate, with a 48 hour bubble of vision of where I will go and I what I will do, and that's good enough for now.

Food For Many Friends

Coming back from the Copenhagen festival, where somehow the enormous camp kitchen (feeding 300 a meal) became my refuge among the political intensity, I knew I wanted to get involved in a voku project in Berlin. I have always loved voku culture here (volkskuche: people's kitchen), have intended to get more involved than just turning up & eating at the various vokus around town, but hadn't quite made it happen yet. But the Copenhagen experience of turning my mind to the problem of turning 20kg bags of dried pulses, 20kg bags of rice, 1kg tubs of spices, and crates and crates of vegetables into healthy, tasty food for enjoying together, and for fuelling the activity of the entire festival, was so invigorating- like a game of practical Tetris, of how long must this cook for/how many burners do we have/how do you drain a pot of simmering beans that weighs 30kg without burning anyone/protein carb ratios/deliciousness considerations that I came back determined, and found a voku in search of a co-ordinator, and put my name down, and got to it.

I've overseen two vokus now, and I love it. It's stressful for sure, and hard work, and I am so glad that my life in Berlin allows me the time to dedicate two days to each one, but I love it. My Wendy-complex thing about making sure all the Lost Queers of Neverland are healthy and well thrills to the sight of great groups of us sitting together and eating and talking. And it isn't just bringing people together to eat, it's bringing people together to cook- every voku attracts a handful of volunteers, and my job is to supply them with ingredients, instructions, tools, and time and space to sit together chopping veggies, peeling fruit, and talking.

So, as the co-ordinator, my first job is planning a menu. My first voku, this was my menu:
* Puerto Rican-ish beans, mostly following this recipe
* Tofu-based soy sour cream (3 blocks of tofu, a good glug of oil, juice of one lemon, splash of soy milk, salt, pepper, stick-blended til smooth & creamy)
* Fancy brown rice (brown rice cooked with carrots, turmeric, onion, garlic, and stock)
* Potato & Spinach salad
* Green salad with an AMAZING tahini dressing produced by somebody who blended an apple into it, which I have never seen done before but made for fantastic flavour & texture
* For dessert, a peach and mango crumble & an apple crumble.

Then I need to figure out shopping, which means figuring out quantities. This involves figuring out what's essential, and what's variable. I was planning to feed 40. Here's the quantities of the essentials that I bought:
* Beans: I bought 6kg, which when soaked & cooked was WAY TOO MUCH. Next time I will buy 3kg for 40!
* Rice: 3kg was a good quantity- we nearly ran out, but not quite.
* Tofu: 3 standard-sized tofu blocks, size of which I can't remember, was a good quantity but remember this was just for a dressing/side-dish. I'd get at least 8 blocks if it was the main protein.
* Onions: 2kg is a bare minimum for this quantity of cooking
* Garlic: 6 heads, again, a bare minimum- at least 4 full heads go into a cooked main dish for 40, and you want some left over for salad dressings & things.
* 1L of cooking oil
* 6 lemons
* So much more that I can't precisely remember!

The way the menu plan works is to pretty much decide on a protein & a carbohydrate, and then dumpster/skip/scrounge/see what can be had for a box-per-euro from the markets for the veggies & fruit portions. So we had potato-and-spinach salad rather than just potato salad cos I skipped a box of good spinach, we had mango, peach and apple crumbles because I got all of those fruits in large quantities out of a dumpster, and the green salad is made up of whatever looks good & cheap (generally it's pretty difficult to dumpster lettuce worth eating, so that gets bought, but tomatoes, cucumbers, salad onions, peppers/capsicums and so on are frequent dumpster scores).

The markets in Berlin around closing-time are full of people scrounging throw-outs for voku purposes. I do a lot of "swap half my box of tomatoes for half your box of peaches" type deals. Usually the only limit on how much food I dumpster or get for a euro-per-crate is how much I can carry home- 20kg is my limit with a backpack & a bicycle, but if I find myself a bike trailer and/or panniers I could go more. Another person with another backpack would also help!

I usually make two trips for food, one to the markets for the dumpster/scrounge/buy veggies portion, then another to actual shops for beans, tofu, brown rice, cooking oil & so forth. Both times I fill up my backpack with at least 20kg worth of food. It seems to have worked out pretty well that 2 x 20kg backpack-loads of food= enough food for voku (OK, I confess that I have always cooked too much and there is always left-overs, but that hasn't been a problem because I do voku at a living project where they are quite happy not to have to cook dinner the next day).

So usually I do the market-trip the day before voku and deliver that load, then do a super-market run and drop that off, then if there are beans to put on for soaking I do that. Then I get up the next morning & run around picking up tofu (which can only be had from the Asian grocery here), brown rice (which can only be had from the expensive Bio shop- Berlin you are so frustrating this way!), coconut milk or whatever else I couldn't find at the supermarket or market, then I arrive at the wagenplatz at about 1pm. The aim is to have dinner served by 6pm, but, um. I have never had it on before 7pm.

I like to think that as I do more I will get better at calculating time-requirements over time. Dinner has been delayed by, the first time, the long cooking-time of a large quantity of brown rice, and the second time by the long cooking-time of curry-for-40. Lesson learnt: LARGE QUANTITIES OF FOOD TAKE LONG TIMES TO COOK, and strength of the burner matters! It can take over an hour for a large saucepan of rice or curry to come to a boil, and it needs to boil before it starts cooking, so add another hour onto that at least, and remember to get your rice & your curry on before 4pm if you want to serve at 6!

So at 1pm I am scurrying around setting up the cooking-space for when my volunteers arrive. I set up a compost bucket, veggie-washing stations (large saucepans or buckets filled with water for washing dumpster-scunge off veggies), chopping boards & knives. Whenever my volunteers arrive (it can be variable!), the first one ALWAYS gets the job of chopping the onions & garlic, because they will take a long time but need to be done before I can start cooking the hot dishes. Then everyone else gets to wash, sort, chop the ingredients. This usually takes HOURS. Like, way longer than you'd imagine. But it's fun & social, if also occasionally gross (depending on how well a bag of dumpstered veggies has held up to transport & overnight storage. Sometimes there is slimy badness).

Ah, and when I did the beans-from-dried-beans, I got those on cooking before I even started assigning volunteer jobs, because I knew they'd take forever. That 6kg of beans took about 3 hours of cooking after an all-night soak- not bad, actually.

So the order goes like this:
1. If there are dried beans, put them on to cook
2. Chop LOADS of onions & garlic
3. Wash & chop the rest of the veggies for cooked dishes
4. Get the cooked main dishes cooking- which means, get the onions & garlic cooking at least, even if the rest of the veg is still being prepped
5. And the rice on- I liked putting the rice on an outside burner so that it could be watched by people while they were making salad, and I'm running around inside the kitchen looking after a few cooked dishes.
5. So by now the extra hands are prepping the salad veggies & dressing
6. And dessert fruit is being washed & prepped
7. While the cooked dishes are still cooking (it takes forever, I told you) and I remember about side-dishes and dressings
8. So salad is made, dessert crumbles are ready to go into the oven, side-dishes are prepped, rice is finished, but cooked dishes are STILL cooking (and people are looking hungry) so...
9. Send somebody over to set up the serving-space with stacks of plates, bowls, knives & forks
10. Have somebody set up the washing-up station with a big tub of hot, soapy water & a drying rack
11. And somebody else writes up the menu with basic important ingredients (all of my dishes have been vegan but I list if they have soy or wheat or nuts in them)
12. Then HOPEFULLY the main dishes are finally cooked, and all the food can be carried over
12. And I remember that I need to put out a donation jar to recoup the cost of the shopping and
13. Finally, dinner is served
14. Except that I am usually still keeping an eye on dessert, and bring that over about halfway through dinner.

Then, finally, it is time for sitting & eating & drinking beer & soaking up a feeling of accomplishment.

Having only done two voku, I'm clearly not an expert on the topic. I'm still muddling my way through things like quantity calculations. I'm also pretty ambitious, and tend to be overly focused on deliciousness & variety over convenience or cheapness. If this was a fund-raising voku I might have to be a bit less focused on things like buying brown rice (which is healthier & tastier but for some reason also about 3x more expensive in Berlin than white rice), and it's possible that if I was doing it every week I might be more interested in basic, nutritious food (like the classic dahl + rice + salad voku menu) than going on some culinary adventure every single time. I know that if this was a regular gig that I was coordinating (which may well happen) I'd do longer-term planning and do things like borrow a friend with a car to buy bulk quantities of onions, oil, rice, spices, pulses & other basic stock foods- which would make it both cheaper & also less hassle for me than running around acquiring everything from scratch every two weeks.

For the sake of record-keeping, here is my menu for this past week, with basic notes:
* Tofu palak "paneer" (basic spinach curry with pre-fried pieces of tofu pretending to be paneer)
* Seitan + potato + cauliflower curry, following spice/gravy guides for a generally 'meaty' curry- I cooked the seitan at my place the night before (see what I mean about making things more difficult for myself than they need to be?) then pre-fried it before adding it to the curry
* Fancy brown rice again, as above
* Tofu-based soy raita, pretty much the tofu sour cream recipe above only with more lemon juice & a whole bunch of mint added
* Salad with a tahini garlic dressing
* Stewed peaches/nectarines/apricots with tapioca-coconut pudding for dessert.

Given that it turns out that I love doing this ('organisational masochist' says one friend, but I prefer to think of it as the Wendy groove of making sure all the Lost Queers are fed and healthy and happy enough for their big adventures) it seems likely that I will take it on as a regular thing once I'm long-term settled here. I have ambitions already to move from the vat-cooking-for-many model to more creative and intensive individual-items-for-many world (samosas for 50! Lasagnes for 60! WOOO!). If I do that I'll blog it, because the internet is definitely in need of more feeding-the-hungry-crowds resources.

Hats

Dirt cheap crafty bitch

Autumn-and-broke-Berlin, like, AGAIN. I spent a bit of time being down on myself about it, feeling shit about it, wondering how it was that I came to be in the same city in the same dire financial situation a whole year later, after being in so many other cities and so many other financial situations in between. Wondering where I went wrong, why every single one of my 'get a life & a job & some cash' plans sank with the summer sun, again. Watching the cold-and-rain set in with leaking boots and not enough warm clothes, again. But as much as it's doubly depressing to be here (AGAIN) it's twice as easy to yank myself out of the depression (again) because I know I got past it last time, and I'll get past it again.

And meanwhile, the cold sets in and the craft-urge twitches itself awake, but whoa, wait a second, crafting is expensive! Yarn costs a shitload of money! What's a flat-broke crafter to do?

Recycle yarn, of course! The freeboxes* of this city are brim-full of gigantic, heinous, lumpy wool sweaters and scarves made from a fuck-ton of lovely, salvageable yarn. The bigger & lumpier the original garment, the better- the more likely you are to be able to harvest satisfyingly huge skeins of unbroken wool from them. The other day I pulled apart a 3 meter pink scarf into a ball of unbroken wool the size of a soccer-ball.

I use the recycled wool to make hats (with button-on beards, and ears, and ear-flaps, and sometimes with the faces of brain-eating monsters), and sometimes I even manage to sell those hats, which improves my financial situation in tiny increments. I don't recommend crafting to anybody as a primary way to support yourself, unless you're for some reason happy to value your labour at a couple of euros an hour, but as a way to edge through the tight bits (one hat sold= the groceries, in some hungry weeks), it doesn't suck too bad.

Mostly though it thrills me that I don't need to give up crafting just cos I run out of cash. Where there is a willingness and the patience to unpick, there is always a way to craft.

*Freebox: the shelf, messy corner, or literal box in a squat, housing project or WG where people dump their no-longer-loved clothes, shoes etc to be picked over by other people who may love them. Or destroy them and make hats out of them. Like a charity shop, but free-er and a fuckload less jesus-y.