bye november!

Hi everyone,

Another week gone and we find ourselves at the brink of Advent - it’s December tomorrow! Part of me can’t believe it’s already December (well almost), part of me can’t believe it isn’t already December with all the Christmas foreshadowing that’s been going on. In some ways I miss Japan where the run-up to Christmas was much more low-key, saving all the excitement for later on. Does that make me a scrooge?

Anyway, thankfully this week I managed to get my back to stop hurting, so hooray for that! Just in time, too, as I had a climbing competition yesterday which I’d been looking forward to for ages. More on that in a bit!

I was still in Cambridge on Monday, after our Bridgemas dinner last Sunday. Initially I thought I would head back to London in the morning, but I decided to stay and co-work with some of my Cambridge friends throughout the day. It was really nice to get stuff done together! Four of us (myself, Joanna, Rosie, and her boyfriend Luke) started off working from the living room in the morning, where I finished writing my newsletter and then procrastinated thesis work by organising my to-read list. Useful (especially because it was looking totally chaotic) but definitely not the first item on my to do list! But hey, I got it done.

After that we headed for lunch at Jesus College (maybe the last time I’ll have a friend in Jesus, as Joanna has finished her masters now with a distinction! Everybody say “congrats Joanna”!) and a few other friends joined us - Peter and Cathy (not Liza, who is incredibly busy at the moment with admissions interviews). I learned that this Monday lunch gathering is called ‘OAP lunch’ by my friends, I’m still not entirely sure why despite them explaining it to me, but apparently since I’m 26 now I’m old enough? Works for me!

Then Joanna and I decided to carry on the coworking vibes at a nearby cafe, The Locker, where we (appropriately) locked in on our work. Joanna polished up an article draft and wrote a blog post, I finally got going with some thesis work stuff by doing some writing exercises from an incredibly helpful ethnography writing guide called Alive In The Writing. The exercises tried to get to the essence of what I want to write in my thesis, from the prompt “I most hope to write…”. Given that my hope for the week was to write a thesis outline, it was a useful way to tap into the kinds of stories I want to tell! And then it was time to head back to London.

Honestly not much happened aside from the usual day of teacher stuff but I did manage to go climbing with my old housemate Fin and his friends! My back was still sore and I was worried about making it worse before my competition on Saturday so I just did easy climbs to avoid aggravating it. But actually despite feeling sore afterwards it felt much better the next morning - I think the movement was good! It’s so difficult to tell with these things whether it will be made better or worse by whatever you do. Looks like more climbing is very much back on the activity menu for me :)

The dreaded 4 hour seminar day, but at least the department seminar was interesting - Kelly Fagan Robinson came in to talk about her research project ‘Anthropology By Children’, where she basically teaches ethnographic research methods to kids and they produce their own knowledge, rather than her doing research about them. This project happened in Pupil Referral Units, where students who are expelled from other schools end up, as well as amongst primary school children from refugee backgrounds. She conveyed some quite affronting stories from the kids about their experiences, and talked about the kinds of structural change which could come from empowering kids to use their voices and more importantly, ensuring their voices are listened to. It was a powerful presentation and if you want to hear more about the project, the website is here.

A day all to myself, so I decided to crack on with thesis stuff. I realised as the week went on that my aversion to making a thesis outline was mostly an aversion to writing it in a word document. Writing that way is very 1 dimensional, just words in a line. So at Joanna’s suggestion from Monday (thanks Joanna!) I decided to make a thesis… map! Armed with a big sheet of A3 paper and some nice coloured pens, I headed to a cafe and got creative. I think it turned out well!

Then once I’d made a map and got a bit creative, I felt much more able to summarise it in a word document (for my supervisor) knowing that it didn’t have to convey the whole breadth of my thoughts on the matter. Writer’s block unblocked. I felt so good once it was done! Now to find out what my supervisor thinks…

I taught and then I was tired! But here’s a nice photo of the star decorations I was making with my housemates throughout the week - not actually as Christmas decorations (at least not straight away) but for a party that Kirstie was hosting for her friends. It was nice to do some straightforward crafts with the TV on.

The most exciting day of my week - the day of the climbing competition! I headed over to HarroWall in, you guessed it, Harrow, for the ‘London Big Comp’ (very creative naming there). I climbed for an entire 3.5 hours and after a thorough warmup my back gave me zero grief. Winning! I very much didn’t win the competition, as I’m still pretty novice at climbing even two years in, but the most important thing is that I had fun and I climbed some things that I didn’t think I would be able to do at the beginning. Speaking of which, here is my favourite climb:

All the tall blokes with long arms absolutely sailed through this one, because they could easily span the holds on either side of the problem. My 5 foot 4 self, however, had no chance of reaching the hold on the top right while holding on to any of the ones on the left, so instead I had to do some fancy ✨technique✨ by putting in some heel hooks (where you put your heel on a hold and kind of pull your body towards it to get a longer range of motion). It took lots of tries, and the top was downright scary, but it felt so good to find a solution that worked for me! I was proud of this one.

After my climbing was done, it was time to watch the finals, where the top 6 climbers in the open and women’s categories battled it out for podium spots on some specially set climbs. They looked SO difficult but it was amazing to watch the skill of the top 6 live and in person. Here’s a selection of the climbs they faced:

So yeah, a really fun day and despite coming very far down the rankings I’m proud of myself for effectively rehabbing my back into working order in the space of a week and doing some cool stuff on the wall! Onwards and upwards. Maybe I will finally start moving up the grades next year.

Honestly today I was pretty tired, but after a busy day yesterday I think I needed a chill Sunday! I also seem to be coming down with a cough, although maybe it’s just all the chalk dust I breathed in yesterday… Nevertheless I made it out for a sunny late afternoon walk to Stoke Newington, a very nice neighbourhood that I tried to live in to be close to the Castle climbing centre, but in hindsight I’m glad I didn’t because they only have fancy delis and no actual supermarkets where you can buy normally priced food. There are lots of London neighbourhoods like this, kind of A tier places if you were to rank them in terms of poshness (an idea for a future newsletter…?) While the S tier places are where actual millionaires live (think Knightsbridge and the fancy bits of Kensington), the A tier places are well to do areas but slightly more down to earth. They look relatively normal on the surface with modest townhouses and tidy public parks but riches abound - they have an independent greengrocers and a delicatessen and a nice wine seller and shops where you can buy beautiful locally made trinkets and homewares and candles. It’s lovely to visit but highly impractical to live there when you just want to get a cheap oven pizza on a wet Wednesday in November.

(Tokyo friends, I tried to think of a neighbourhood to compare it to, but honestly I think everywhere in Tokyo is practical and convenient… Maybe Den-en-Chofu? I don’t think there’s a supermarket there. Actually this is making me realise that the ways people display wealth are totally different in Tokyo and London, I think if people in Tokyo had mansions as big as the millionaires do here they would be hated forever)

I actually didn’t take any photos of Stoke Newington itself because I was busy being ~in the moment~ but here are some others to round out the newsletter:

That’s all for now I think - time for bed!

See you next week,

Stella x