Toddler Group Phobia

Before I had Eli, toddler groups filled me with dread and from what I can gather this isn’t unusual. If ever I expressed it, it was met with murmurs of agreement and an occasional shudder.

When we first moved to Shadwell I thought it might be nice to volunteer for a toddler group that ran in my church so I could get to know some locals and support the church a bit. On my first morning there I found myself marooned in a conversation about stirrups and labour (an experience I was yet to live through). “That sounds so hard” I’d said in a soothing voice, backing slowly towards the fire exit. I went home afterwards needing a G&T and a slap just to snap out of the headspace it put me in.

Then when I got pregnant with Eli I was determined to resist the inevitable morphing into a mother who would be into all things fluffy/cuddly/baby/breasty and remain as much myself as possible. Was the ‘nursery’ ready? No! Would I go to breast feeding groups? Never! Did I know what a breast pump was? Gross…and above all I swore never to subject myself to the clawing madness of a toddler group again. This tiny person will not take over my life I thought. Fool.

I was working in A&E until most of the way through my eighth month of pregnancy, an environment that didn’t exactly encourage the soft and sensitive and honestly I think took a bit of pride in my ability to tolerate the tough stuff whilst growing a child in my body. This won’t change me, I said, I’ll be back when the baby’s 3 months old.

Really? Reeeeeaaally….?

Well you just can’t predict the way becoming a parent may change you. The breast pump ended up being my best friend. Breast feeding support was a total godsend. I experience euphoric joy when Eli eats green vegetables. I’ve cried not once but twice when the dog dies in Marly and Me. And toddler groups? Well. The value of these bizarre social gatherings has dawned on me slowly but now I am 100% convinced of their necessity in community and value in a child’s life.

My friend Juliana and I took over running one of our local groups a little over a year ago and I feel like I’ve learnt a lot about life from it.

Parenthood is a shared bond that can sneak through any barrier, whether ethnic, religious, political or otherwise. Recently we had 11 mums at our group and it blew my mind to learn that there were 9 different nationalities among us. I was in awe all over again at the diversity of our neighbourhood and how little it mattered to these women in this context that they didn’t have a common country of origin. What a great message of unity to teach our children.

Of course there are huge variations in how parenting is carried out but I’m realising that the essence of being a parent can only be fully understood from within the walls of the role. I say walls because it is isolating. Some parents may go days without an adult conversation. Getting the kids out if the house may be a huge challenge, especially for those working against post natal depression. Sometimes it feels so much easier to stay at home instead of wrestle with multiple pairs of shoes and broken coat zippers let alone braving the Everest that is convincing a toddler to do anything you think is a good idea.

I have a relatively straight forward experience of motherhood and can’t complain. I’m privileged not to have had to juggle a paid job alongside being a mum for very much of Eli’s life so far and I have an attentive husband who loves being a dad and only one child to manage at present. Even with all that, I can think of countless mornings (often rainy ones) where I was banging my head against the kitchen doorframe by 9am desperate for somewhere to go. On these mornings, a warm space full of toys and a table laden with cake and hot drinks and a few other mums and dads who can empathise with my frustration that my child only ate dried pasta for breakfast is like the deepest kind of therapy.

I’ve learnt that toddler groups enable a whole other level of connection. Long term friendships can develop between parents, parenting tips are swapped, recipes given. People talk and listen (amid interruptions for crisis management and conflict resolution i.e. teaching about ‘sharing’ and kissing shins/heads/elbows better). Sometimes they sit side by side in quiet understanding that talking is too tiring.

Some mums I’ve chatted to have talked of poor self esteem, their child’s learning difficulties, domestic violence, terminal illness, divorce. Bonds form over deep hurt, bone numbing tiredness, management of a difficult child. We come ragged and worn and recover, sometimes just a little, over a cup of tea and a nod of understanding.

Once I yelled at Eli in a fit of frustration in front of a room full of parents at our toddler group. Ashamed as I was at the time, I was comforted when a wise friend said to me ‘maybe that was the most reassuring thing they saw all day, that someone else loses it at their kid.’ When we can be vulnerable (sometimes unintentionally) connection happens, and connection breaks down loneliness, depression and isolation. Brene Brown said ‘true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world.’ This is not only invaluable in a community but absolutely necessary. We can’t and shouldn’t survive in isolation, we were created to be in community.

The Auditory Assault of the City

One Sunday morning I stirred around 7am just as the pale blue of pre-dawn was slowly becoming a peachy haze. Being a closet suffer of SAD I was quietly relieved that it looked like it might be a sunny day after what felt like days and days of heavy cloud cover. Cold I can handle. Endless grey I cannot. I blame my enviably warm and sunny upbringing in the south of Portugal. In my memory it never rained though apparently it must have because there was still life and greenery in our garden at the end of our ten years of living there.

As the kettle spluttered to life I could hear Eli wittering to Biddy, Rabbit and Polar Bear in his cot. I could hear the gentle rumble of the trains outside our kitchen window going about their usual journeys for anyone brave enough to be outdoors this early on a Sunday morning in November. And even…was that birdsong?

And then there was a new noise. It started so gradually at first that I barely noticed it. The clank of metal on metal, a ladder maybe or lots of scaffolding poles. The unmistakable holler of one workman to another. Then there was muffled hammering, noticeable but not intrusive. I was able to forget about it when distracted by my tea bag missing the bin or the sound of poor Biddy hitting the back of Eli’s bedroom door at pace.

And then there was more. The piercing, rhythmic crack of a sledgehammer on concrete and eventually the head-splitting sound of an angle grinder and the fizzing of spitting sparks. Our Sunday morning symphony was complete (or so we thought) and set to continue like that for the rest of the day. It was close enough to our living room window that, if I wanted to, I could spit my gum over the barrier and into their workspace (maybe a Beebee gun would be more satisfying…)

So this was noisy but tolerable. We couldn’t exactly ignore it any more but showing Eli the sparks and watching the workmen chip away at what looked like a key part of the railway arch made it entertaining anyway. How is that staying up? And with he trains still trundling over it – amazing.

But then there was drilling. Not at building site number one, oh no. On the other side of the house was building site number two. The mosque across the way is flanked by scaffolding and has been for some time. And of course Sunday is as good a day as any to get cracking on that building work too. So now we were the unhappy filling in a building site sandwich. And until our friends upstairs decided to get going on their DIY it was actually pretty funny.

As a part of a course Matt and I did a couple of years ago at Regent College in Vancouver, we listened to a radio programme about the impact of city dwelling on stress levels. It comes as no surprise I’m sure that a main conclusion on the programme was that living in the city increases stress and conversely exposure to green, natural beauty is physiologically and psychologically beneficial to us. But the thing that stood out to me about the discussion we heard was the journey our brains go on in being exposed to city noises such as pneumatic drills, sirens and car horns. In order to cope with the constant assault on our ears, our brains have to be selective about what they process otherwise it all gets too tiring. Before long we start to block an amazing amount of the noises out. We become more and more numb to our surroundings. This then means that in moving from place to place, even from city to country again, we are more closed off to the things that benefit us as well as the things that don’t and are generally less connected to our environment.

We have a friend who is a Jesuit priest and he taught us a lot about the art of Phenomenology – ‘the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness’ (thank you Wikipedia) I.e the study of what it means to be present, aware, conscious.
What I’ve learnt from our Jesuit friend is that if we’ve intentionally moved into a neighbourhood to learn, absorb, love and struggle in it, then we can’t shut part of it off. It is all relevant and all informs how we understand each other and change in response to it. I think sometimes it can be easy to demonise urbanisation and idealise raw nature, well I’m definitely guilty of that anyway, having grown up building dens inside 150 year old olive trees. But I’m keen to take this city in, warts and all (even when all I want to do is run away and find somewhere peaceful to hide) because that’s when I learn most about what my friends and neighbours face every day. Which is one of the reasons we’re here. Move in and live deep. Work out what transformation means. A noisy building site is just the tip of the iceberg. If I shut that off, I’ll miss everything.

The beginning of the end of complacency

‘I was sick of being insecure. Sick of being sad and lonely. Most of all I was sick of being complacent about things that I give a shit about’

These words come from a woman who inspires me from a long way away. She writes a popular blog called Inked in Colour and one of her topics is a project she started called The Nothing New project. This was the decision to stop buying things she doesn’t need, build community and focus on the things that matter like being vulnerable and honest with people however uncomfortable it is.

I like this idea for a number of reasons. One of them being that from where I sit I can see crazy hand made curtains that are a little too short for the window. I can see our white ikea lamp that has three big slashes in it made by my son’s Kung foo feet. I can see the other end of the sofa I’m sitting on that has a dip the size of my husband’s butt in it. And the world I currently live in is shouting at me that I need to get myself down to Dunelm Mill so everything matches perfectly and has no sign of life or history.

I would very much like to live in an inked in colour world where my inadequate curtains may make a visitor or neighbour feel a little less inadequate about his or her curtains whilst simultaneously teaching me a daily lesson in silencing the voice of perfectionism, consumerism and materialism in my head. Maybe they would even look at my slashed up lamp and say ‘your lamp looks really tired. I’ve got one I don’t need any more, would you like it? (P.s I can’t believe you stretch your curtains to meet each other in the middle and attach them with a green plastic peg)’ And in the process of exchanging tips we might become friends by laughing at our imperfect homes and lives. You may think this is far fetched but I don’t.

I have an old rusty trunk of the antique-ish variety. It accompanied my mother to boarding school when she was a child and it still bears the labels of long distance travel and a tag with her maiden name on it tied to a worn leather handle. It probably sounds like my mum is 100 years old from this. She isn’t, she’s only in her very early sixties and very glamorous, but I digress. A few decades later when I was 10 I then used this trunk myself at boarding school and it stored my things in it then and for 8 transformational years after that. At the beginning of every new term I lost the key to it and hacked at the lock with a hockey stick. It then sat in the basement of my aunt and uncle’s old Oxfordshire rectory for a number of years until it was spotted by my cousin and her husband and was subsequently used to help transport things in a house move. It then became their coffee table for a few years before being returned to me and it is now our coffee table. Alternatively I could have bought a coffee table from Oak Furniture Land for £250.

I agree with that statement from Inked in Colour. I am tired of being complacent about the things I really care about, and this is one of them. I believe God entrusted us with His creation to enjoy, to treat with respect and to steward it wisely as you would any other gift. There is enough stuff in the world already and constantly buying more is detrimental to the planet and our ability as human beings to find contentment. In fact our needs and our wants have become very confused. In the fifties the Ad men realised that if companies made things to last and advertising told us to just buy stuff when our other stuff breaks, they would never sell anything. Now we have the iPhone 6 with its 64-bit architecture, an A8 chip and an M8 motion coprocessor which is obviously absolutely crucial in enabling us to be happy in life. Here is the lie, and I have to remind myself every single day not to believe it. Your life will be perfect if you buy just one more perfect thing to complete it. I just wonder how different it could be if we just stopped before be bought something and asked ‘do I really need this’.

For a few awesome tips on up-cycling, recycling and second hand clothing (and reassurance for those who need it that second hand is far from shabby) here are just a few local social enterprises/ideas all started by friends of mine in the awesome East End. Check out their websites and be inspired.

dearfriendlondon.com (uses recycled materials and jewellery to make beautiful, unique creations and does so through workshops to train people up in new crafty skills)

Sew little time (Facebook page: up cycling old shirts and bags to make new clothes for children and other home crafted delights)

http://www.anchorandhopelondon.co.uk (Women’s fashion wear recycle boutique and London’s largest collection of second hand maternity wear)

…and finally The Story of Stuff on YouTube is proper dated now but if you haven’t seen it, sit down for a 20 minute cuppa and have a look:

 

 

Part of the furniture

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of being invited into a corner of history that I hadn’t walked around in before. Behind a lifeless brick frontage and through the buzz and clang of blue security gates,  it seemed an idyll of East End life survived just as it had done for generations.

Our church runs a monthly outreach project called Helping Hands. This involves visiting people who are unable to look after their own gardens any more due to age, illness, disability or any other reason. In groups of two or three we attack the tangled wilderness with sharp rusted implements until it is tamed and preferably still alive in some way. It is, as I’m sure you can imagine, hard work, very satisfying and more than a little treacherous. It is never boring because in my humble opinion nothing involving true East Enders ever is.

One such Helping Hands morning, Matt, Eli, myself and a lady who goes to our church visited a row of ground floor maisonettes on a road in Stepney. Despite the gentrification of a lot of areas in the east end, a lot of Stepney is largely the same as it was when it was redeveloped after over a third of the housing was flattened in the Blitz. Before this it was home to migrant workers and displaced poor and had a reputation for being a breeding ground for prostitution, overcrowding and violent behaviour. I tend to have a slightly heightened sensitivity to atmosphere but without wanting to be weird about it, I sometimes feel the history of it when I walk from street to street. Some areas even look like you could imagine they may have done before the war. Soot stained window frames and dark railway arches with sweaty, dripping wall moss. The lifeless face of a boarded up terraced house with a dandelion peeping through the letter box.

On this particular Sunday, we were invited into a modern housing complex only to be knocked sideways by the strength of the East End spirit hiding inside it. Doris, Mildred and Winifred (‘call me Winnie’) strong women of the ‘older’ East End contingent, all occupying houses adjacent to each other,  their gardens only separated by the flimsiest of rusted fencing (though apparently not too flimsy to lean on nonchalantly whilst commenting on each other’s business).

As the morning passed we witnessed a very comfortable little community; drinking tea, hanging up laundry, furry slippers with painted toenails peeping out the ends and all with the standard mixture of dry wit, tough love and mockery to go with it. Although we were gardening with our hands our minds and ears were completely elsewhere as we listened to the life stories of these women. This included a complex web of family members, friendship politics, a son who stayed and stayed and wouldn’t get a job, the arrival of a grandchild weighing only one pound, a beloved yappy dog who enjoys plant pots so much he literally obliterated one into tiny shards as Eli looked on in frozen horror. ‘He just LOVES them!’ says Mildred adoringly.

As we left, Winnie caught us up to have a little word about Doris whose garden we had been working on. when she reached us she stopped to look gravely at me beneath her eyebrows and adopted a conspiring, hushed tone. ‘I spent two hours doing Doris’ garden just last week. I’ve ‘ad me ‘ip replaced ‘n everyfin. Coupla days later I look over and it’s exactly like it was before! Blahdy waste of time…’ I looked at her and said ‘mmm’ because I wasn’t totally sure what else to say having just spent two hours doing Doris’ garden. At that she turned in her slippered feet and walked slowly back towards her garden, secure in the knowledge that she had passed on all the relevant information. I just watched her go, vaguely wishing I could come and hang out with them every afternoon.

 

 

‘Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.'(Winnie the Pooh)

The term ‘gardening’ conjures up a variety of responses from people. Some happily class themselves as ‘green fingered’ while others look at you with genuine bewilderment when asked whether they’re interested in it. In my limited experience, a common assumption is that it’s great for an eccentric minority (enter Alan Titchmarsh) and the rest of us would gladly leave it up to them and the vegetarians.

This is my confession; I get VERY excited about fruit and vegetables. This excitement only increases if said fruit and veg is discovered by chance growing where you least expect it or hanging from a branch in a conveniently accessible patch of ‘public space’ above a pavement (picking not illegal – bonus). It rises to what could only be classed as euphoria if said fruit and veg is discovered in our community garden, The Shadpatch.

David Abram in his book The Spell of the Sensuous wrote ‘We seem, today, so estranged from the stars, so utterly cut off from the world of hawk and otter and stone…I have hoped to begin to recall and re establish the rootedness of human awareness in the larger ecology’. I think our disconnect from the land is part of what he’s talking about and I share his hope (if a little less poetically) for reestablishing this relationship in the city. I am in good company in this part of London too: see Glamis Adventure Playground (http://www.shadwellcommunityproject.org/wordpress/?page_id=6) Mudchute farm (www.mudchute.org) and Stepney City Farm (stepneycityfarm.org) to name just a few incredible projects aiming to get kids and adults outside again.

The human desire to dig, sow and harvest runs deeper than the need to feed ourselves and deeper than an enjoyment of the exercise or psychological wellness that it provides. It is about where we came from and goes right down into the very depths of who we were created to be. Maybe in losing our connection with our agrarian roots we are actually making a big mistake.

When we sweat over something, filter out the rocks until we’re left with earthy goodness, nurture something dead and shrivelled until it produces silky newborn greenery, I think we discover a little more of who we are and even understand more about life as a whole. It’s a helpful reminder that the rocks and dirt serve a purpose and have a valid place in the wider picture, hard though it is to work through at the time. It’s that work that makes us who we are.

So if you’ve ever said ‘gardening’s not really my thing’ like I did a hundred times before I realised it actually was, I challenge you to give it one more proper try before you say it again.

Go to the Shadpatch facebook site and ‘Like’ it if you want to get updates, see what we get up to and even join in!

 

The perils of cultural sensitivity

I made my first halal lasagne last week. As I watched the butcher pull a handful of beef strips out of a plastic washing up bowl and push it into the top of the mincer, I realised with creeping shame that it had taken me four years of living in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood to jump this hurdle. Fighting off images of a particularly grim scene involving an abattoir in The Honourable Woman as the beef disappeared into the depths of the mincer, I found myself thinking ‘How is this the first time I have done this?’

The first week that we moved here, our neighbours two floors down turned up on our doorstep with an amazing array of Bengali food and a friendly ‘welcome to the neighbourhood’. Having been a little apprehensive, it made us feel instantly at home and welcomed.

A few months later we made friends with a mum upstairs, and again it wasn’t long before she dropped delicious Mauritian/Polish food round. She had her own business selling home made food to labourers at a building site and anything she didn’t sell and couldn’t store she brought to us. We were so blessed by it and funnily enough she always said she was too. Her son was being mentored by someone at XLP, the charity Matt works for, and she said it made her feel like she was giving something back. I was the idle benefactor of her amazing goodwill and generosity in this situation and very grateful for it. And I’ll be honest,sometimes it was hard not to feel indebted and to just receive.

And we haven’t even touched on Ramadan and Eid yet. That’s when the fun really starts; samosas at the door, invites to Iftar (the breaking of the fast when the sun sets at the end of each day in Ramadan) and even invites to feast with our neighbours on the day of Eid itself.

I don’t really know why it took me so long to reciprocate. Maybe my frosty British roots. Maybe being too ‘busy’. Probably fear. Fear of doing the wrong thing, of offending (apparently a key character trait in my Myers-Briggs profile) of offering the wrong thing, fear of people thinking my food was disgusting, making something Bengalis don’t eat etc etc. Basically my hopes of being sensitive to culture and religion were paralysing me. So far I had made banana cake and chocolate cake and that’s it. And ask anyone, I pretty much suck at baking.

Then one afternoon, whilst dropping some dishes back to our neighbours after their Eid offering of amazing food I got into a conversation with their 17 year old. ‘I can’t get enough of western food’ he told me ‘give me a lasagne over curry any day!’ Who knew?? This was later confirmed by his mum who told me they were always asking for bolognese and meatballs and moaned every time she produced curry AGAIN. Clearly this was the permission I needed to get off my backside and cook something.

Two days later, I stood on the doorstep, halal lasagne in hand, and tentatively knocked. Their 6 year old, who for the purpose of this story I will call Sonic (the hedgehog. He loves him) opened the door. ‘That doesn’t smell very nice’ smiled Sonic. I bit my lip. If there’s any age you can count on for honesty it’s 6 year olds. If there’s any nationality you can count on for honesty it’s Bengalis. Here I have a 6 year old Bengali telling me my food smells bad. I’m not going to lie, it’s not going well so far. I gritted my teeth and called through to Habiba while I headed for her kitchen, telling her there was a lasagne on her counter. Sonic watched me all the way back to our front door with suspicion in his eyes.

Lessons are everywhere if you look hard enough and there was definitely a lesson in this. It was insecurity and fear that held me back. In fact I think it’s fair to say fear holds many of us back from a lot of things, some rightly so but often it costs us what could otherwise be a much more interesting and colourful life. Fear is very demotivating and I’m finding that, on its own, it’s rarely a good reason not to do something. I hope it’s obvious here that I’m not really talking about making lasagnes any more.

When our neighbours dropped all that food off, they didn’t know that we’re going to like it. Maybe sometimes we didn’t, but that didn’t mean we didn’t love that they made the effort. Even if they don’t like my food, they won’t not like me as a result. I realised that the food itself isn’t the key here important though it is, it’s that in sharing food something profound happens that connects us. Maybe it’s a mutual deep knowledge that food sustains us all and enables us to survive regardless of culture, race or religion. We all share in that simple human right to eat. In providing this sustenance for each other we’re saying in some small way, I care about you.

Private Jam

Yesterday I was joined in the bathroom by Eli and his double decker bus full of people. Fully aware these people are plastic, it remained a strange feeling being watched by eight pairs of eyes (nine including Eli’s) at a moment when one is generally entitled to absolute privacy. ‘Haha’ laugh all the parents who kissed their privacy goodbye the day they became parents. Gone are the days when your belly was un prodded by tiny fingers, your secret expletives unheard (and then repeated in awkward moments), the worst of your temper still mostly unwitnessed and your buttons un-pressed in that way only kids know how. Having kids is a great way of discovering just how human you really are.

But this got me thinking about this thing called privacy. These safe boundaries we put up around ourselves, our marriages, our family time and our friendships. Obviously some of them are absolutely right and necessary. But are they all? Do we let people see all our building blocks or just the fancy foyer? Where does privacy end and vulnerability begin?

I had a gutting moment a couple of years ago while I was getting to know a woman on our estate who I hoped would become my friend (for those who like happy endings, she did). We went to the pub together and she shared her life story with me. It was one full of hurt, rejection, brokenness and involved a very vulnerable admission on her part of doing a lot of things wrong. I was honoured that she would share it with me and touched that she trusted me with it. As we walked back to our estate together there was a lull in the conversation and she looked at me.
‘I’ve just told you everything about my life but it seems a bit like you don’t have any problems’. My heart sank. It was the worst feeling ever because I realised how safely distant I had kept her from any of the true struggles whilst safely occupying the role of ‘listener’. Although we can’t all pretend to have been through the same kinds of trouble in life just to form a connection, authenticity seems a non-negotiable when developing real friendship

What was worse was that I only knew she felt that way because she had the courage to tell me outright. How many others had I distanced through my inability to be vulnerable and honest about my struggles. I wasn’t going to get anywhere in this new community of ours if I wasn’t willing to be known as I am. Brene Brown in her book Daring Greatly talks about how connection with each other is what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. What gets in the way of that is shame, the fear that there are things about us that make us unworthy of acceptance and therefore of connection. In order for connection to happen we have to allow ourselves to be really seen.

Matt has a childhood friend who has been chronically mocked by their two families for his invention of ‘private jam’. Whenever they all had breakfast together, everyone was allowed whatever they wanted on their toast, but no one was allowed access to his private stash. Breakfast is way more interesting when you pass the spreads around, a little bit of this and that, maybe a conversation about how you hate the seeds in the raspberry or whether you’re a crunchy or smooth peanut butter person. Don’t tell me you’ve never bonded with someone over a mutual love/hate of marmite?

I think it’s going to take years, maybe even decades to figure out this vulnerability thing, but I believe in real relationship and I’m pretty sure this is the only way to get there. As Brene says, ‘Have the courage to be imperfect as a result of authenticity’. Amen.

More than a meal

I’ve been thinking a lot about food lately. Ok, I think a lot about food full stop. I think about it more since being married to a diabetic (keep him slim, help his heart/kidneys/arteries etc) and now that I’m a mum (make him grow, make him chubby) which are quite different missions and require some brain space to plan for on a daily basis. I walk around the supermarket with the words ‘cheap’, ‘healthy’ and ‘ethical’ swarming round my brain like a cluster of angry bees and food can be reduced to something stressful and worrisome.

The more I think about food, the more I talk about it, and the more I talk the more I realise how much people in general love this topic regardless of gender, age, stage, background, religion or profession. We all love to eat and then we love to talk about it!

This week the month of Ramadan begins and as it approached I asked some of my Bengali mum friends how they feel about it and the response is invariably the same. Despite the impending hours of hunger through the heat of the day without a drop of liquid to quench their thirst from when the sun breaches the horizon at daybreak to when it sinks behind it late at night, the response was always ‘I’m excited’. I looked at them unblinking, trying to show the respect I felt inside rather than the bewilderment.

They talk about the joys of sharing food together as family, how glorious that first drink of water is after a whole day of longing for it and the unity they feel battling the hunger and thirst together. One of my neighbours told me how strong his craving for a cigarette becomes once he’s had his first bite of food at the end of the fasting (‘that’s the devil in you’ his sister interjected wryly from the corner of the room). They talk about the excitement of Eid, the celebration that culminates the month of fasting when they spend the day in and out of each other’s houses feasting on food they’ve been preparing for days dressed in beautiful outfits of coloured silk, crystal beads and chiffon. Their appreciation for their sustenance is so heightened by the absence of it in that one month and they seem to relish that new level of enjoyment.

A meal shouldn’t be reduced to a box-ticking activity focusing only on what needs it meets but rather should be a joyful event focused on good food and relationship. Some wise and wonderful friends of ours who are lecturers at Regent College in Vancouver taught us about the layers of meaning you can find in a meal. We had the pleasure a few years ago of eating a meal with them where they could tell us the life stories of the people who had made the crockery we were eating out of and there wasn’t a single food item in the meal which we hadn’t planted, watered, nurtured and harvested together in their back garden. They even hand made their own pasta. It may sound strange but it was a pretty emotional and dare I say it, spiritual experience. In identifying the various links in the chain (namely the people involved) and the hard work that brought the food to our table, it enabled a whole new level of appreciation for the food itself and the communion of eating the meal together. I know in many cases people don’t even have the time to tie their own shoelaces let alone make pasta, but just sitting down in our families and communities and sharing food once in a while is always worth slowing down for.

 

The stuff of Tower Hamlets

I may have jumped on the bandwagon. Doing things ten years after everyone else is always fun right? Inspired by blogging strangers, friends and family who keep me entertained with their philosophising, wisdom and fresh perspective on the world (and drawn in by a general curiosity about words like ‘widget’ and ‘vlog’) I have decided to crawl out of my octogenarianistic (real word) hole and learn something relevant to my generation for once.
We (Me, Matt, Eli…many many other people) live in what I believe to be one of the most interesting areas in the country (culturally, economically, religiously) and worry that as I coast through the weeks chasing after my two year old, I might forget or worse miss altogether the unique moments that happen around me every day. Writing them down helps me to connect. What I write may not be interesting to any body else but I trust if that’s the case they can just choose not to read it. It can be a very straightforward relationship.
So some stuff about this patch that you may or may not know (I knew none of this until I moved here…) Tower Hamlets covers much of the traditional East End of London. It contains, among other things, the Olympic park, the Docklands, Canary Wharf (where not long ago the average salary was £100,000) the trendy Hoxton and Shoreditch (think hairy jumpers, neckerchiefs, buttoned up Barbour jackets), the well known Brick Lane (curry +++) and the East London Mosque which serves the U.K’s largest Muslim community. It also contains Shadwell, our ward, which has the highest rate of child poverty in.the.country. From our front door you can see the gherkin (the building not the vegetable but you knew that) the walkie talkie (which I hear has been melting cars with its shiny windows in the heat…well done guys…) and can easily walk to Tower Bridge and the Tower of London. The irony is I haven’t even touched on the cool stuff yet, the stuff you only learn when you move in and live deep.

Some of the history around here is bonkers and well known and sadly I can’t write about it all (because let’s face it I don’t know the half of it) but a few things on the list are the Cable street riots which happened right outside our front door, the workhouses, the Blitz and obviously the continuously morphing cultural demographic from the Irish weavers, to the Ashkenazi Jews to now one of the highest ethnic minority populations in the London consisting mainly of Bangladeshi muslims. Some of the history has changed and moved on. Some is just the same. The poverty, domestic violence, the prostitution, the drugs are all largely the same. It’s a place of a lot of darkness as well as a lot of light.
We’re also part of an amazing bunch (muddle if you will) of Christians living in the area who love it as much as we do and live their days getting to know the people they live alongside, learning Sylhetti and learning how best to love, serve and understand each other better. We are blessed to call them friends and hope that just by brushing against them now and again we may become better people as a result.

So this is the stuff of Tower Hamlets and Shadwell, but as I said before, I have barely skimmed the surface of the true character of this place. My plan is to do that bit by bit in this blog. Some will be positive and beautiful, some is unavoidably crap and sad but there’s God’s joy and redemption in the full spectrum of life isn’t there? In the nitty gritty shittiness of it all?
I find it hard to write too deeply about faith because it’s so vulnerable (I plan on working on the vulnerability thing Brene don’t worry!) but we (Matt and I) really believe that God calls us to get messy, to find the brokenness and live alongside it because that’s where real relationship lives. As my sister Jo Swinney (joswinney.com) said in her blog recently, ‘It is a very human impulse to want to fix or minimise or retreat from other people’s pain.’ She goes on to write that what actually makes a difference is connection. What changes things is ‘climbing down into the black hole’ to be with people, allowing yourself to be close enough to feel and experience the same things. It’s really ruddy hard sometimes, for all of us because it’s vulnerable and painful. It’s bound to be. But that’s why it has to be a daily commitment to each other, in our families and to our neighbours, and for me and my house, we’re in it for the long haul.