Hi everyone,
I missed a week! Oops! As foreshadowed in my last email two weeks ago, I spent most of my reading week (3rd - 9th Nov) writing a 10,000 word chapter for what’s called an edited volume - basically a set of chapters from different authors on a similar theme. With three 10 hour days of writing I happily managed to finish it without too much fuss, but in all honesty it left me wanting to do anything but write, so the newsletter didn’t happen.
What did we miss? Here’s a bumper edition, two weeks in one!
3rd, 4th, 5th november - writing boot camp
I’d agreed with my supervisor Fabio to send him a draft by the end of Wednesday, and like I said last time I wrote (on the Sunday) I had around 6,000 words left to write, so there was a fair bit to do in a short space of time. Basically I just locked in and spent these three days at the Doctoral School, our quiet little corner of campus just for the PhD students.
It’s funny because when I was doing my undergrad I would always talk of having “essay crises” when I had several 2,000 word essays due at the same time. Undergrad me would have called my situation the mother of all essay crises. But it wasn’t actually that bad! My Cambridge writing training really kicked in and I just did what I had to do. I think it helped that I’d already planned out what I wanted to say, so I really did just need to write and see what came to me from all the fieldwork happenings that are still fresh in my mind.
I also took plenty of breaks so it felt almost… leisurely? Sit down in the morning, write a bit. Have lunch, write more. Afternoon snack and a walk while it was still light, write most of the day’s words with the power of end of the day motivation, wrap up for the evening. Rinse and repeat x3. I had some great walks around the squares in Bloomsbury (where our campus is), imagining I was Virginia Woolf or something, and enjoying the autumn leaves (which felt extra reflective given I was writing about last year’s autumn leaves, or lack thereof, in Tokyo). Here are some photos:
bloomsbury is so lovely
very virginia woolf vibes
i literally sat on a bench and looked up at these leaves against the sky and planned a whole section of my chapter
the doctoral school is on this street, we are very lucky
I also ate this absolutely banging meal at a local Lebanese bakery (called Ta’mini) which is nothing much in the looks department but tasted unbelievably good. It fuelled my entire last day of writing which is saying something. And also here is me feeling proud of myself for finishing!
and it even has some vegetables
sneak peek at my abstract ooooo
And of course after finishing my chapter I went to the pub to celebrate with some queer friends I haven’t seen in ages because of my evil Wednesday seminar schedule. Cheers!
6th november - ticking off my to do list
I was honestly so relieved to have my chapter finished that this day was about to be spent lounging around doing nothing, but I looked at the to do list I keep on my desk on a nice piece of Japanese stationery and inspiration struck: I would go to Ikea!
(explanation: I had some prints to frame and some light bulbs to change out and some room inspiration to be gotten. Plus I wanted lunch and, well, they have meatballs, it would be rude not to)
let’s goooooo (I had a headache lol)
one of the prints I wanted to frame! it’s the yamanote line stations as bonsai trees <3
I then went to the Queer Climbers London rope climbing event in the evening. This month they were finally in my local climbing gym, the Castle! Unfortunately I got carried away making spaghetti bolognese for dinner so I got there quite late. I definitely didn’t warm up properly and missed a lot of the climbing, but it was OK - I more than made up for it by hopping on the autobelays and doing kinda hyperactive laps of easy-ish routes until my arms felt like jelly. Climbing is a lot more fun when you’re not worried about falling down to the ground, as it turns out. And the pub was fun!
7th - 9th november - home time!
I headed back to Chester for the weekend to spend time with my parents and siblings - the first time we’ve all been together since my birthday weekend back in August! It was a very, very chill weekend and I spent quite a lot of it finessing 150cc on Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Good times.
train views ~~
fish tacos in the market
gorgeous autumn leaves in the sun in the country park near my parents’ house
chester has randomly really good matcha (honestly better than london)
dad’s lasagna *chefs kiss*
i love the low light at this time of year, you really don’t get that in Japan because the sun sets so much faster
On the Sunday, which was torrentially rainy, after a very slow start we decided to invite half our family round for tea in the afternoon since we were all at home. Cue chaos trying to ready the house for guests - tidying, decluttering, cleaning, and baking cookies because we realised we had no sweet treats to go with the tea. It all came off though and we had a lovely time hosting my grandpa, two aunties, an uncle, a cousin and her fiance! Plus we got to feel like proper grownups who host people. That’s a nice feeling.
frankie cat was very happy to get her seat back afterwards
this week - back to the usual rhythms!
It was already the end of reading week, so this week was back to teaching! I took it very slowly though. I think the act of slowing down over the weekend at home made me realise just how tired I actually was. Monday was mostly spent waiting for my supervisor to give me final comments on my chapter (he didn’t… at least not until 10pm after I stopped looking at my emails) and then polishing the formatting before I sent it off. I had intended to go climbing but it didn’t happen, I felt pretty drained still.
Tuesday I had the usual lecture/office hours combo, after which I abandoned my usual rhythm of getting my lesson planning out the way early in favour of going climbing. Unfortunately it was what we call a “high gravity day” where I felt sluggish, uncertain and generally just not that into it despite having wanted to go climbing for days by this point. It happens, I’m glad I went anyway though. I’m just going to blame it on the weird psychedelic punk music they were playing in the almost empty gym - kinda creepy…
…anyway when I went home I finally cooked the sausage casserole I’d been thinking of making for ages! It was delicious, full of protein, and very cozy. I love a good bit of tavern food in late autumn. Evening redeemed.
me and the climbs I didn’t do (lol)
sausage casserole, yum
Wednesday was a return to my usual evil seminar schedule, this time with the added bonus of a) the student-staff forum from 1-3pm (which to be fair I didn’t have to go to, but it was great to get feedback from the students especially my lovely first years who are student reps!) and b) the fact I was presenting my chapter at the post-field seminar from 5-7pm, after 4 hours of being in meetings. My brain was totally fried by the end of all of this and I didn’t really take in much of the feedback I got in the seminar but I got through it, and a few of us went out for ramen afterwards which was pretty good*
*for the ramen aficionados out there, it was Ippudo which is almost the same as the one in Japan except much less salty, as is par for the course with British interpretations of ramen. Their signature broth is a light tonkotsu situation which is quite refreshing compared to the stand-your-spoon-up-in-it tonkotsu broths you get in Japan, which I quickly learned not to order for the sake of my health lol. I have never been that much into ramen as most of you know but I like a light broth sometimes - to be honest I miss the light but flavourful shio broths, which just aren’t really a thing in the UK where everything ends up being shoyu or tonkotsu. Apparently that makes me a proper Tokyoite according to my Japanese classmate - haha!
On Thursday I went to the dental hygienist* after six years (oops… thanks COVID pandemic and post-COVID NHS dentistry crisis…) and it wasn’t completely terrible, but still quite uncomfortable. The hygienist, who was lovely and called Olga, definitely made up for lost time. Ouch. Yay for adulting, although I didn’t feel like much of a grown up when I was being taught how to floss properly (turns out you don’t just clean between your teeth and around the bottom of them, you also go wayyyyy under your gums?? Who knew). Onwards and upwards… In my case my day definitely improved, as I finished my lesson planning, met Kathy for tea and cake (delightful as always, thank you Kathy!), and headed home nice and early for a cozy night in. The joys of being over 25!
*for those in London looking for an NHS dentist: it’s called Camden High Street Dental Practice and I think they’re still taking on new patients!
it’s me, taking a photo on Kathy’s film camera
Finally we find ourselves at Friday, which was mostly just teaching. This week we were discussing migration through two concepts from the readings - the “illegality industry” (basically the profitability of policing migration and making people ‘illegal’) and “border externalisation” (where usually western countries outsource their border policing to other countries with the idea of preventing migration ‘at source’, but usually with discriminatory consequences as more and more states end up cracking down on movement). I got them to use these concepts to critique the language used in two public-facing factsheets about UK government bills, the Illegal Migration Bill (now Act) from the Tories and the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill which is currently being run through Parliament by Labour. Although it was tempting to look at this issue through the media, I feel like we rarely get guided opportunities to unpick government policy, so I hoped to create that for my students. They made lots of great points especially about the fact that both bills cast migration as a crime in some way - either by migrants themselves (Tories) or by organised crime groups which facilitate migration (Labour) - and also bringing in their own incredibly diverse experiences of migration including as migrants themselves, as descendants of migrants, and/or as witnesses to the horrendously anti-migrant world we find ourselves in. Here are some of the questions I asked them about the factsheets in case you fancy thinking about it yourself:
How is illegality, or crime, being constructed in these factsheets? Who is made ‘illegal’? Are there any parts of the ‘illegality industry’ which are mentioned?
Do you think there are any examples of ‘border externalisation’? If not, how could you build on the idea of ‘border externalisation’ to explain what’s happening?
If you were going to design a research project to investigate migration in the context of policy, who would you speak to?
a walk in Cambridgeshire…
Saturday brought a welcome reprieve from the city, as I headed up to Cambridge for a walk around some villages and through the countryside. It was a misty, gloomy day - very atmospheric and exactly the kind of weather I missed so much in Japan last year, where things conversely get sunnier and sunnier as you get towards winter. I spent most of the walk revelling in the autumnal atmosphere as well as yapping with my friends <3
mist from a train window
a beautiful house in a village
a duck pond where we had a lovely sit down and watched the ducks swimming around (what is the collective noun for ducks??)
the mill where we ended our walk
a horse we saw along the way
we saw loads of mushrooms
what autumn is made for honestly
a homemade bus stop, served by the T5 upon which the driver forcefully refused to take payment (“I won’t tell you all again!”)
After the walk was done and it started raining, some of us headed back to Liza and Richard’s cozy little house and we had a slap-up dinner of Linda McCartney veggie burgers (apparently she makes more money these days than her husband Paul, of Beatles fame), salad and halloumi. We started watching Joe Wicks’s* documentary about the perils of ultraprocessed protein bars but the lack of citations bothered us - what a bunch of nerds we are! So we played Mario Kart World instead. Ridiculously chaotic.
*for the international audience, Joe Wicks is a fitness influencer who went viral during the COVID pandemic for his at-home workout videos, and has become a bit of a household name. Mostly because he’s very handsome!
a super high quality photo from me
…and a walk in London!
Finally, today I went on a walk up Primrose Hill with Safia! Somehow despite living in London for 3 years I’ve never been up to see one of the most famous views in the city. It’s only a small hill but you can see for miles, across all the famous buildings and skyscrapers in London. The park was lovely and autumnal too. A restful and leisurely end to what has been quite a busy time of year.
me with the view! honestly a top tier photo, thanks Safia ❤ featuring my handmade scarf too
some thoughts & reflections on remembrance
It has been busy, hasn’t it? In amongst all of this it was the time of year for remembrance. In the UK we have Remembrance Day on the 11th of November, plus Remembrance Sunday on the nearest Sunday to that date, when all the church services happen. Remembrance Day, originally Armistice Day, commemorates the end of World War One and is a day where we are supposed to remember those who died at war since then. In service of this, there is two minutes’ silence at 11am and people wear red poppies in the run up to the day, which are a charity fundraiser for the Royal British Legion who provide support to veterans and their families. The red poppies are a reference to the poppies which sprung up on the battlefields of Europe:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
This is all very well and good, but I have always felt uncomfortable with the way that this remembering of war often becomes tied up with promoting the armed forces - the carrying of the torch in the poem above. Amongst the solemnity of the occasion there are military parades in gleaming uniforms, poppy themed memorabilia of all kinds, advertisements for the army cadets. People in the public eye get hounded if they happen to forget to wear their red poppy at any point between the start of November and Remembrance Day. And the far right love the red poppies. They brandish them while egging on war and violence in the present day.
Meanwhile, war claims new victims every day. Beyond those who fight and die for various countries are the civilians killed while going about their lives, who are officially not part of the Royal British Legion’s remit, neither in the past nor the present. Nor is preventing future wars, simply remembering the past. I never understood this. How can we say that we are truly remembering the horrors of war if we don’t remember the incredible harms it causes to civilians and soldiers alike? If we don’t try to prevent it from happening again? I think of Wilfred Owen’s famous poem, which I learned in school:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
And I feel the irony even more keenly when I think of the horrors ongoing in Gaza. I haven’t said much about my feelings regarding the ceasefire - frankly, I don’t believe it is one if the historic and present injustices against the Palestinian people are allowed to continue, as they are continuing. As Mahmoud Darwish put it, years ago now:
The war will end.
The leaders will shake hands.
The old woman will keep waiting for her martyred son.
That girl will wait for her beloved husband.
And those children will wait for their hero father.
I don’t know who sold our homeland,
But I saw who paid the price.
For these reasons, I don’t wear a red poppy, and I haven’t since I was at school. Instead I wear a white poppy, which stands for three things: remembrance of all victims of war, challenging militarism, and a commitment to peace. They are distributed by the Peace Pledge Union, a charity who work to resist war in all its forms, including demonstrations at the largest arms fairs in the UK where arms dealers make their profits each year. I am very happy to support their work. You can find out more at their website. Maybe one day I will make it to their Alternative Remembrance Service in central London on Remembrance Sunday.
the explanatory leaflet which came with my poppies
the back of the leaflet
When I wear my white poppy, I think about all the people who have been affected by war, and a conversation we had as a family on Remembrance weekend about our relatives. My great-grandparents whose lives were forever shaped by war - traumatised great-grandpa Austin who never spoke of his experiences on the front lines, or great-grandma Jean who drove ambulances in Liverpool during the bombing of the city and whose work, alongside many others’, is forgotten through our obsession with soldiers. My grandparents’ generation who were so shaped by the consequences of war - my grandpa Harold, a conscientious objector to national service, my grandma Judy who was a lifelong activist and pacifist and was deeply concerned about the fall of Kabul days before she died, and my great uncle Brian, who was a young child at the end of World War Two and years later realised that the crosses in the sky he remembered seeing from his pram were warplanes. My mum, who helped to find homes for Ukrainian refugees just a few years ago. And of course, all the people around the world, in their millions, who aren’t related to me but have suffered because of war, whether as soldiers or not. They all deserve to be commemorated in the spirit of ‘never again’.
Most importantly, in the context of ongoing war all around us, I think about the ways I can resist militarism and violence to the best of my abilities in my everyday life, including through my actions towards others and my purchasing decisions. About how I can make ‘peace’ a verb, not just a wish or a symbol, and especially not just for two weeks in November.
Have a lovely and peaceful week,
Stella x