6th-13th october

Hey everyone,

Do you ever have weeks that feel like two weeks rolled into one? This week was one of those weeks. Strap in…

A local climbing wall were looking for part time staff and I sent an application - they didn't specify the hours on the advert so I wondered if I could squeeze in a shift a week and get the benefits of free climbing across London. It turned out they wanted someone who could do more hours so it didn't work out, but it was fun to see behind the scenes of the wall and meet some of the people who make it all work. Probably the most low stakes job interview I've ever been to! Bonus points because I had a nice time riding the overground there and back and reading All About Love by bell hooks.

This term I'm teaching a module called SOAS Anthropology Now, which is basically an intro to the department & our research and a welcome to the SOAS anthropology community for our first year undergrads. Very wholesome! Although my teaching contract (yet to be signed, thanks HR) is technically only for tutorials, on Tuesday I was given the opportunity to do a lecture introducing my own research, plus a Q&A with the students. It was fun (especially the questions, they were very thoughtful!) and surprisingly not that nerve-wracking. I think that generally putting myself out there all the time during fieldwork, in Japanese, has desensitised me to public speaking in English. I feel kinda invincible. Does it last??

Here are the slides if you're interested, why not (on the slide where I talk about fieldwork findings I didn't read those out but instead I told a story from the field, it's at the bottom of this email if you're interested):

Then I spent the whole week panicking slightly about being underprepared for the tutorials on Friday - to be honest I didn't really know how to plan a lesson or how it would go. But thankfully they went really well! I spent a good chunk at the beginning doing getting to know you things - after a round of introductions I asked the students to split into two groups where they found something unique about each of them, and something they all had in common, sharing only the latter with the whole room. Which varied from all having iPhones, to liking tea, to agreeing that there is a genocide going on in Gaza. Kind of a jarring combination but a microcosm of today's world. We then had a fairly basic conversation about how people approached the readings and which parts they found interesting or which gelled with their personal experiences (or not). Next week will be more advanced!

Other fun PhD moments included getting through a whole 2 hour department seminar without wanting to check my phone (yay restored attention span after deleting instagram/reddit/etc) and a fun MPhil/PhD/staff welcome (back) party 🥳

Richard popped down from Cambridge again for work so we went out for dinner, which was lovely & spent talking about his new job, my new job, the new Taylor Swift album (mixed reviews), how everyone in London seems to have a corporate ‘uniform’ of dark colours and trench coats, and a sprinkling of politics. I didn't take a photo of our food (mine was a pizza with figs & goats cheese & balsamic vinegar… tasty but was it really pizza, there was no tomato sauce?!) but we went for a walk around Waterloo after, and I showed him the Leake Street Arches, which are covered in graffiti:

And then Richard came out with a very profound sentence: “everyone in London seems to be going somewhere, but nobody ever arrives”. I think that's the thought of the week!

I also met up with Kathy this week, a fellow PhD student who's at UCL, for tea at what's becoming my favourite cafe in Bloomsbury, Store Street Espresso. I managed to spill my chai all over myself, thankfully it was the black tea kind and not a latte. The drama! We put the world to rights about PhD life and teaching and renting and sleep tactics. I was honoured to feature in her latest roll of film - stay tuned!

Would you like some seasonal photos? Here are some seasonal photos.

I listened to a fair bit of music this week while I was working, including a small amount of Taylor Swift’s back catalog because I was trying to ascertain whether her new album does actually sound like “generic Taylor Swift” as I said last week. Unsure as of yet but I listened to Fearless and Speak Now which I've never heard before and they're so… country?!?!

Honourable mention also to Brat, which I re-listened to after being inspired by Richard, and I think I appreciate it wayyyyy more than I did when it first came out. Every song is a banger! And to Blue Weekend by Wolf Alice, my final stop in listening to their entire discography. I'd been avoiding it because 2021 (when it came out) was a bit of a rough year for me and I was kind of apprehensive that my brain would've associated it with that feeling, but actually I haven't. And there are some much more upbeat songs on there than How Can I Make It OK? and The Last Man On Earth which were the melancholy songs that heavily featured in my playlists around that time. So that's nice.

But my favourite album this week goes to…

I love this album! It came out a few months ago and I finally got around to listening to it this week. I came across Grace Davies via the Spotify algorithm, she's an X Factor contestant from years ago and this is her debut album. Very relatable as a 26 year old and there are some incredibly catchy pop tunes on here. Give it a listen!

Celebrity Traitors, need I say more?? I totally thought it was on three days a week though. Oops.

(for my international friends, to whom I definitely need to say more: The Traitors is a TV show where they gather people in a very grand and probably haunted castle in Scotland, and among the players are Traitors whose job it is to murder a Faithful (non-Traitor) each night, evade detection by the Faithful who eliminate one player they suspect to be a Traitor each night at a very dramatic roundtable meeting, and generally commit sabotage and subterfuge. Also there's £100k up for grabs, and if any Traitors are left at the end, they steal the entire prize! In this edition it's celebrities instead of members of the public, which makes for excellent TV because they all know each other and there's so much drama as they stab each other in the back)

I had a lovely weekend with my sibling Eve and my cousin Kate! Kate is off on a trip around Southeast Asia (and maybe also Japan) very soon, and we actually haven't seen each other since she came to visit me in Japan in February, so I had to make it up to Leeds where her and Eve both live. It was a very chill weekend with some absolutely delicious food (some really left-field ice cream flavours in the Corn Exchange, tapas last night, Sunday roast today), lots of long awaited catch ups, and beautiful autumnal weather (including fog this morning!). I'm still nursing my food baby from Sunday lunch at the pub and that's the way Sundays ought to be. It was also Eve’s flatmate’s birthday this weekend, and Eve baked a fabulous carrot cake that I don't think I'm ever going to get over. Thankfully I brought a stash of it back to London! Thanks Eve ✨

In true Instagram story style, here is a photo dump!

Now I'm heading back to London on the train, for another week of term time madness. Things to look forward to:

See you next week,

Stella x

P.S. I promised the fieldwork story so here it is! An encounter with a shrine priest:

Kumiko creates beautiful seasonal stamps, like the ones in the image, which record a visit to the shrine. These ones are examples from winter, but I met her on an incredibly hot summers’ day, the kind which is increasingly becoming normal after three record-breaking summers in a row. I had to leave my house early, to give myself time to take it slowly on the metro and dry the sweat from my clothes, which were soaked despite me carefully choosing light linen fabrics. She welcomed me with a cup of cold green tea into the air conditioned room where she writes the stamps, and we got to talking about the seasons. Over the last few years she has made the seasons her job through her designs, and she pays close attention to them – the weather, the feeling in the air, the blessings that shrine patrons might be looking for, the fruit and vegetables she lays out as offerings to the gods who inhabit this place. She shared her concerns that summer was becoming too hot, and that people were struggling to cope. She also worried that spring and autumn were getting much shorter. But what surprised me is that she didn’t think this would affect the timing of her designs. To her, they conjure up a seasonal feeling, not necessarily reflecting the reality of plants and animals but the sense of the season and the rhythms of the year. And not only this, but she feels a steady resonance between the increasingly unsettled seasons and the Edo-era solar calendar, last used 150 years ago. Although these 24 solar terms describing seasonal changes throughout the year might seem narrow and prescriptive, each covering around two weeks, they offer her a wealth of wide-ranging aesthetic resources grounded in history, beyond what is happening outside her shrine – such as drawing snowflakes in midsummer, evoking the promise of cooler days to come. So although she finds climate change unsettling in some ways, most of the time her seasonal practice is able to continue largely as it was. She sees her role not to document the natural world, but to evoke a seasonal atmosphere that brings comfort to people worried about the shifting seasons, and to pass on Edo-period wisdom, through her designs, to younger generations.

Later that evening, I headed home and put on the TV while I cooked dinner, and saw a story about the upcoming elections, focused on how to deal with rice prices doubling in the space of a year – the talk of the nation, catastrophic for both households and the small businesses which form the bulk of Tokyo’s hospitality industry. Although the problem is partly driven by climate change, with unprecedented temperatures and lack of rainfall causing poor harvests, this was totally absent from peoples’ priorities according to election surveys. Instead, peoples’ concerns focused on government policy and immigration.

I hope this shows some of the tensions that I uncovered – between traditions like shrine stamps, which are evolving and adapting over time and possibly becoming even more seasonal than ever; the shifting seasonal happenings outside the door which seem to run counter to these traditions; the ways that people make sense of these shifts and bring them back into order with tradition again; and the relative lack of attention towards climate change in public discourses. Unfurling all of this and what it means will take time, but thankfully I have two years to think about it.