Bereavement is a pinball machine. You are the pinball.

Recently I started reading random bereavement books. When I was seeing a bereavement counsellor, a completely brilliant woman whose combination of empathy and good sense pushed exactly the right buttons in my messed up, overwrought head, I told her people kept handing me articles and books to read and that it was driving me nuts. Well, don't read them, she said. Put them away somewhere. Could be that in a while you might find you want to read them. Or you might just chuck them out. Up to you, she said. Giving this advice to a woman barely able to work out how to put her pyjamas on seemed a bit radical at the time, but I managed to do it. I opened my clothes cupboard, moved the shoes over, and chucked the lot in the back corner where it happily gathered dust until a few days ago. I am not too sure what prompted me to get them out. I suddenly had an urge. I think it was because I was going through another weary round of hopelessness generally associated with really, really wanting to tell my sister something, and then computing for the hundredth time that it wasn't going to happen, not today, not at the weekend, not ever. Recently these waves have left me feeling really lonely. The main reason for this is because everyone who cares about me except for closest family who are going through the same thing or worse, has got bored and moved on. This may read  like bitterness but it isn't. Other people have lives. They are wonderful to you but unless they have been through a loss like this themselves few understand that proceeding through the pain of loss is not a linear thing. It keeps coming back, and it can come back just as bad as if I were back on day one.  As the months go by people see you getting on with your life and assume you are dealing with it. And if you are getting up in the morning and getting yourself through your routine I'd say you probably are. But, getting on with it means, growing an internal armour designed to live with a new pain that is going to visit you for the rest of your life. Anyway. I was mid-wave, didn't really feel able to call a friend and say, I know it's been six months but I've been feeling terrible, so I reached for a book to see if I could find company in the text of someone who had given some thought to what I was going through. I leafed through one, and then another. I picked up an article, and read an interview. I browsed bereavement poetry and bereavement eulogies, bereavement songs  and bereavement psychoanalysis. And after a few hours of it I put the lot in a bin liner and took it to the recycling centre. Why? Reading it all felt the way you feel when you eat fast food. Like you have just wasted the opportunity to ingest something more worth the calories. A sense of uneasiness and a perceptible feeling of regret.  What a load of tosh was in those books. There are not five stages of grief. There are not seven. There are hundreds. And they are not linear. You ricochet backwards and forwards, buffeted by the momentum of impact from lurching into them - pain, anger, denial, pain again, sometimes pain and anger, loss, guilt, regret, acceptance, then guilt again, sometimes guilt and acceptance simultaneously. You might have a few days or even a few weeks of feeling OK, like you might even have found a place for this somewhere in your head, and then something happens - a family event, a flash of colour, a smell, someone on the street who looks like her, a food at a restaurant that looks like one of her dinners - and you are right back in Grief Hell.  It may well be that our experience of grief differs from each other as significantly as does the nature of each of our relationships with our loved ones who we have lost. So I am not in the business of telling anyone else how to cope with this. For all I know any of you reading this have experienced a loss in a far less chaotic fashion than mine. But if you are a pinball like me, then I will say this. I have no idea how to make loss feel more controllable, predictable, manageable. I think I might not bother to try and find out. I think I am going to just go with it. But when it becomes too much, and I would say that the feeling of really struggling with it is a frequent one - then the way I cope with it is by building my own buffers. Right now, for example, I am stirring a white and dark chocolate brownie mix, mesmerisingly, taking comfort in my ability to create something that will bring so much enjoyment to others. An hour ago I was gardening with a frenzy like energy, putting out tomato plants, feeding lettuce seeds, watering my meadow lawn, clearing up abandoned leaves. It might be a long walk, a glass of wine, a night out with my husband, or a night in without him, lost in a book, watching Masterchef, or listening to music. These activities, or non-activities, help to rebalance despair. I don't try to talk myself out of my loss. I just live through it, and then make sure something else happens in the day that recreates happiness, or at least brings release. That's it. That's my roadmap. It won't sell books. On the other hand that leaves a lot more cupboard room for my shoes.

A brand new garden

All my adult life I've inherited scrubby gardens. And frankly I've never really thought to do much about it. I've been content to sunbathe on straw grass so scratchy it felt like lying on a bed of nails. Or I would recline on a deckchair saved from the civic recycling centre - posh term for the local dump - on a scorched patch of earth, rejoicing in my acquisition of a ground floor flat that gave me such unparalleled access to the Great Outdoors. Occasionally I would plant a random rose bush some relative would have given me, hopefully, as a housewarming gift. Invariably it would languish and eventually commit suicide, driven to it by the unforgiving and nutrient free earth into which I had dumped it. Lots of builders do a great trade in topsoil plundered from houses they have built and into which I move. Wherever that topsoil is, that's where the rose bushes grow. Me, I have lived a topsoil free existence. Until now. Until last year actually, when in the aftermath of my sister's death, my husband suggested to me that we do something we had talked about for years but never quite managed to prioritise - build our own garden.  Over the years I've become a keen vegetable gardener. The amazing thing about growing vegetables is how, by and large, most of them will defy my cackhanded efforts and grow and grow. The pride that I experience when I put homegrown potatoes or beans on my family table has to be right up there with the first time Neanderthal Man brought home his first deer head. Anyway. The more success I would have with my vegetable growing, the more disconsolate the state of my garden would make me feel. I would potter about outside, stopping to stare at my scrubby, patchy grass and sigh, or cast a look at my parched beds with lone, brave daffodils, and fantasise clumps and bushes of wild purple and blue. After my sister died, my husband and I wondered whether building our garden might help heal things. Since I had already discovered that a walk in the open air did amazing things for my outlook on life, the ability to cultivate things might take me that step further. So we went for it. Found a designer, who interviewed us so minutely on what we wanted that it felt almost personally invasive ("and what exactly do you plan to DO in your garden", she asks, pen poised over pad, and I am DYING  to say, we want to have lots of sex on our beach towels without the neighbours seeing - but I chicken out and mumble something about smelling nice flowers and cultivating herbs. What a missed opportunity). She disappears off for four weeks, then calls us, her voice bubbling with creative enthusiasm, to tell us she has The Plans. She brings them over that evening, we pore over them as she talks, and we begin to realise what we are in for. Her plans project swirls and twists and turns. They are a creative riot of texture, depth and height. We fall for it hook, line and sinker. We tender for the job. A bunch of distractingly good looking Aussie gardeners win it by a mile. They move in for two months. They gut my old, grungy garden, turning it into an interesting looking, dystopian wasteland. We survey it worriedly, wondering whether it might not have been a good idea to have lived with our scrubby lawn. At least we'd have had some green in our lives! They dig a hole. The hole becomes enormous. It's a yawning chasm. The kids scramble up and down it, covering themselves in icky mud. The gardeners install a pump. They take our trampoline down, a massive 12 ft thing. They place it over the hole.  They build up a beautiful slope next to the trampoline. They cover it with meadow grass, that flowers randomly. They put down a smaller circle of pristine grass at the back of the garden. They plant beautiful flowering trees and small clusters of shrubs, and pear trees and clematis and climbing roses. They put up new fences with proper wires and joists to hold and encoruage our climbing plants. They plant herbs. They create a swirling path of pebble stones. They put down a patio of recycled York stone and build contrasting steps of amber rock. They create wooden seating around our patio. While they are busy at their Christopher Wren of a garden design, I am propagating pea seeds and tomato seeds and kale and spring onions, hopping from one foot to the other. Finally they finish. And we have the most glorious cottage garden, transformed into the circles and swirls of our garden designer's plans. My pea plants go straight into my new veggie patch, bordered with rosemary and thyme. All right I know it's a cliche! But it works, I'm telling you! I go and sit on the wooden benches. And on the trampoline. And on the meadow slope. And on the patch of grass. It is glorious. It's beautiful. It is healing. And it's mine.

The Annual Cancer Check

I have been clear of cancer for over five years now. Five years is usually the point at which the medical profession decides the risk of your malignant tumours performing an encore is low enough for you to be downgraded, so of course I am pretty damn happy to be at this point, poignant though it is to have reached it in a year in which I lost my sister to a much more destructive version of the same horrible disease.  The McMillan centre at University College Hospital is an all singing, all dancing, bespoke cancer treatment centre, all shiny and gleaming off University Street in the West End, and that is where I go, mingling with hundreds of other Londoners at various stages of the same disease. Some might have it. Some know they have it and are working out their treatment. Some are all too visibly mid treatment, and some have reached the end with noplace else to go. The building is huge but it overflows with anxious relatives and friends. I don't know. Something about Cancer Country induces an automatic empathy. But there is also a thread in my thoughts of wanting really really hard to be anywhere but in this place. I think the information centre is fantastic. One of the worst things about getting cancer is the abject confusion, the inability to reconcile the reality with your innate confidence in your body, and more than anything the deluge of emotional stories in the press that skew your perception like nothing else can. I think the counselling suites are amazing - a place where a shoulder to cry on is as available as a blood test. I really love that there are two cafes - two!!! - with decent croissants, not nasty plastic sandwiches that curl on the end. but still every time I go there I want to run howling from the place. And as I leave I discover I am not the only visitor who feels that way. Outside the building there is a tall man clutching what looks like a medical appointment card, his hands raised to the heavens, and he is yelling. MY NAME IS RONAN, he shouts. I NEED HELP. People stop and stare at him. I NEED YOUR PRAYERS, he yells at the sky. IS ANYONE LISTENING TO ME??? People on the streets scratch their heads, giggle nervously, speed up their stride. But I get it. I listen to him yelling the same thing over and over, and think to myself, Ronan, you have my prayers. OK? Will that help any? I know exactly how you feel. But I tell you what Ronan. I'm going to have to get the hell out of here and give you my prayers at a distance, somewhere  not cancer related where I can get my head out of this twilight zone. And I head off to work.  Nice, normal office environment where people bury their personal skeletons, get their heads down and deliver. Which is just so much easier than hanging it all out there in a cancer clinic.

Commuting and colour

It is definitely Spring today in the UK. It was yesterday too, which given our last three months of near Ice Age existence, is little short of a climatalogical miracle. People joke about Brits flinging off their clothes and making for the icy sea in their bikinis at the first sign of weak sunrays. Me, I'm not one of those. I was out in my jeans and t shirt in the breeze all day yesterday, planting out my spring onions and chard, my tomatoes and peas. I oiled my bike, I sat out with a cup of tea and a book, I went for a cycle on the nearest towpath. No beach for me, I'm not quite that extreme. But when I commute, to judge from the incredulous stares of my fellow sludge-clad, bemuffled commuters, I apparently do the bikini thing with my workwear. By wearing colour. I woke up this morning, looked at the weather forecast (sunny, 15 degrees minimum in London), stuck my nose out of the front door, sniffed, returned to my wardrobe, had a good old think, and reached these conclusions: 1. As a longstanding citizen of London, the first rule of weather is that if it's warm, it's shortlived. Therefore if a summer wardrobe is in existence it's best to take the opportunity and wear some of it now. 2. Commuting to work is unmitigatedly depressing. Best to counteract it with colour. And 3. Sweaty legs are never attractive to anyone. So. Twenty minutes later I sailed out of the house clad in a bright read short sleeved heavy cotton dress, a thick cotton turquoise cardigan, black boots, no tights. Light accessories, black workbag, and an unsightly large black backpack containing my workout gear, my lunch, my laptop and, oh, probably a few other things I have been meaning to discard ever since around 2007. Halfway to the station I am conscious of more than one passing stare from fellow travellers. I check myself. Is my skirt inadvertently tucked into my knickers? Nope, no wardrobe malfunction there. Has the dress shrunk in any way - are my boobs in show? Nope, the dress is demure and, thank goodness, has maintained its shape, as have I, since the last sunny day on record, which was, oh, about a year ago. Well what is it then? I look around me. It dawns on me that everyone waiting at the bus stop is wearing a grey coat, black trousers, a scarf, and one of those hoods with fur on. Hoods with fur on? In 15 degrees? Every. Single. Commuter. Is wearing a coat, a sweater, a scarf and a hood. Some of them even gloves. I get stared at more and more often as I reach the station. Totally intimidated, I board the train and hide myself under my huge bags in a corner of the overheated train. I don't get it. I am experiencing the same weather as every other Londoner, right? I'm not having hot flushes or anything. I know it's early but I can SEE the sunlight streaming in through the train's windows. The woman next to me, muffled up to her nose, is shielding her eyes from it, so I know it's not just me hallucinating. Well then there is only one possible explanation. My fellow commuters are simply not buying it. Come on! They're all thinking. We know it's going to hurl by this evening, the temperature will have plummeted 20 degrees and we will get home to find frost on our succulents! So why invest the energy in swapping clothes over? This overheated sludgy clothing is a protest. We want our predictably awful weather back! And anyone who dares buck the trend with their bright red dresses and their cheerful turquoise cardigans is just ASKING for trouble. That's it. The psyche is at least 3 months behind the climate reality. If this weather sticks, the rash of colour will begin to spread. In the meantime either I join the fray with my M&S brown woolly tights, reserved only for days when I feel genuinely suicidal, and sweat it out. Or, I resign myself to becoming the resident Bridget Jones commuter. Fine. Bridget Jones it is.

Exercising, and exorcising

I cry fairly frequently at the gym. Weeping while exercising is not a new thing on me. I worked with a personal trainer a couple of years back to  complement my physiotherapy to get my knee working again after I had a torn ligament replaced. It was excruciating, as all physiotherapy is - since my very minor accident I read Melanie Reid's column religiously in the Times magazine every Saturday with a whole new understanding of what she might be going through. Exercise is one thing - usually fun if you have chosen somethng you enjoy. Physiotherapy? Most definitely not fun. When I do these painful routines on my own I have the luxury of being able to quit whenever I have had enough. Working with a physiotherapist is quite another matter. No place to hide, and a decent PT with a good understanding of sports science, as mine did, knows exactly how far to push, which is a lot further than I would suffer myself to go. So. Tears of, well, mostly self pity actually, since the truth is that if I dug into the pit of my stomach I could make the extra inch of stretch that my PT was insisting I talk my knee into making. But the pit of my stomach is also where, it seems, I feel most vulnerable. It stays protected 24/7. No surprises then that when my PT makes me reach deep into it, tears come. Does this happen with any of your other clients, I ask. Oh yes, he replies, unflappably. Most of them. Women? I ask. Inconceivable that blokes could weep over their kettle bells. More men than women, he says laconically. Wow. I am revelated. Since then I have discovered that exercising through a period of emotional trauma, while one level generates endorphins and helps me rebalance, also touches that core. Fairly often I will come up from my fifteenth abdominal crunch, look at the sky and feel my eyes fill. Or I will be halfway through a one minute plank and drip brine onto the workout mat.  Not nice for the other clients? Actually, they appear to be oblivious. Of course they're dripping sweat on to their workout mats so there isn't too much difference really, is there. And looking at the size of most people's headphones - Dr Dre finest - it would take a full ensemble of caterwauling toddlers to rouse them, so my one small moment of misery goes unnoticed, which is comforting. Exercise really is holistic. It makes my blood run faster, it strengthens my muscles, it makes me a little bit happier, it puts daily work hassles into perspective, and it is a space for me to exorcise some of the despairing grief that spills out of me when I drop my emotional guard. I cycle home after my teary ab crunches, whip up some sour cream breakfast buns, scatter cinnamon and brown sugar on them, make myself a cup of tea, wait for my family to follow their noses, put my feet up, read the paper. Physiotherapy. And psychotherapy.

Therapy walks, and cinnamon

I have been on another therapy walk. This has evolved into a monthly exercise, taking a whole day for myself, a weekday when kids are at school, colleagues are at work, friends are busy, and I have time to be with myself, by myself. I find I really, really need this time. I need it like never before. The emotional rollercoaster of the last six months since my sister died mean my brain can hit overdrive so fast it could implode without this precious time that I give to it, to let go, literally drain away the build up of tension and emotion. Every walk I have done so far has taken in beauty - art, architecture, history, nature. This one is a little different. It's beautiful all right - I am on the Kenwood estate, and plan to walk through it to Hampstead Heath. But although I enter Kenwood right by the little known Dairy (currently under construction but worth a visit even under scaffolding), a scene of enormous natural beauty, I am not there to look at stuff. This walk is about literally booting the thoughts out of my head with fresh air. There is plenty of it on Hampstead Heath, but this is not just fresh air. Firstly, it is absolutely bloody freezing. April, and it's all of 2 degrees at most, and there's a wind, so the chill factor makes it feel like Siberia. And secondly, the route I have chosen has miles of open space, and loads and loads of huge, old trees. In other words, I plan to overawe my brain with nature's majesty, and then freeze the emotion out of it. At the top of the knoll on which the Dairy sits, I breathe in the cold air, survey the rolling hills, and isolated runners (how, oh how, do runners do it??? In this weather??? Me, I am wrapped up to the nines so am relatively protected from this global warming fallout, but them?? A nano centimetre of lycra is all that stands between them and hypothermia...), and feel the effect of the air on my insides. It is as if the overdose of oxygen is making my blood run faster, relieving the tension that I can feel inside my head. It is almost like that scene in the Harry Potter movies where various wizards stick their wands to their heads, extract their thoughts in thin blue strands, and put them in test tubes for storage.  I walk down the knoll and on to a crunchy path, the wind whipping my ridiculously bushy Jewfro hair (no hat can contain it), and allow myself to experience the elements while I walk. Sounds like tosh? Yeah, it does a bit. So if you haven't tried this at home you'll have to take my word for it. A walk in a cold wind clears your head like no other walk. Part of it of course is about your body adapting itself to the change in environment and protecting itself  (from that hypothermia I mentioned earlier) all of which takes energy and a degree of concentration, relieving your thoughts and directing your attention elsewhere. Anything that directs my attention elsewhere these days is Good News. I walk further into the Heath, and make my way through huge trees. They are rocking a bit in the high wind. I climb up onto the lower branches of one of them and look up. It's a dizzying experience, feels just a little bit foolhardy, and gives me an adrenaline hit not a million miles away from my first rollercoaster ride. I climb back down. Head back. Get a bus home, chafing my hands. At home again, I bake cinnamon and oat cookies, make myself a cup of hot tea, take one of my cookies, just out of the oven, bite into it, take a gulp of tea, and sit back. Aaaaah. Cinnamon counteracts cold almost as effectively as sticking the central heating on. The kids come in from school, their noses following the scent. They head straight for the kitchen, school bags still on their backs, grab a cookie, sit down next to me, gloves still on their hands, and take a bite. Aaaah, they say. Goodwill spreads through each of us. A walk in cold high wind. And cinnamon. A truly healing combination.

Driving to the gym

I go to the gym a lot. A person who bakes as much as I do really needs to, you're probably thinking. In fact I eat a fraction of what I bake. I live with people who fall on it like wolves so most days it's hard to get a look in. I get most of my share in through the tasting of the various bits and pieces as I create it. But I create a lot, so a lot of tasting goes on, so yes you're right, without regular gym visits I probably would be the size of two buses. I also go to the gym for my ongoing physiotherapy challenge. It is a source of constant astonishment to me just how bloody long it takes to regain your body's equilibrium after an accident or an operation (I have had both). My left calf is still only two thirds the size of my right. This is great progress - when I began physiotherapy after I had major reconstructive surgery on my left foot, my calf looked like it belonged to the body of someone close to starvation. But it's been over a year and I'm still not where I was. Plus my new toe stubbornly refuses to activate itself so I can't stand on my toes on my left leg only, which might seem like a pointless exercise and therefore not much worth striving for. But the ability to stand on your toes speaks to muscle strength, stability and flexibility, all things I am going to really wish I had when I hit my older age. And finally I go to the gym because it makes me feel better. All those endorphins manage to kick in even when I am exercising among people younger, fitter, thinner than me, or all three. I have recently changed gyms, finally so disgusted with the innate scuzziness of the one I have been attending for years principally because it is cheaper than the others, but finally realised cheap does not equal value when half the machines don't work, there are buckets all over the show to trip over because the ceiling leaks in fifteen different places, the showers are so disgusting they probably harbour more bacteria than a science lab, and the clientele - and the staff - are so miserable that your endorphins go on strike in protest - anyway, the new (sleeker, more expensive, but much better equipped and staffed) gym can be reached through a river walk which means I can cycle there. I could always cycle to the other one but it meant braving busy roads and since I am a leisure cyclist, busy roads means road rage, so I used to walk. Not drive. Walk. Why do people drive to the gym?  I mean, people who live walking distance away, drive to the gym, get out, go up to the cardiovascular area, and then walk on the treadmill for 15 minutes to warm up. Why do that when you could get your warm up by walking to the gym in the first place? And be in the fresh air? I love my cycle route to the gym. If I can muster the energy to go first thing, then I hear birdsong all the way there until I hit the high road before I reach the fitness centre. It does the soul good. And so does the feeling of arriving with numb hamstrings at the gym having toiled up the last hilly 20 metres to chain up my bike next to all those cars which have expended so much in petrol and no little in physical energy. My warm up has been done (in fact, most of my work out has probably been done) in my bike ride, and I can crack straight on with my weight training or whatever my latest craze is. I did do a spin class twice but the second time I arrived on my bike and a fellow punter asked me what I was planning on doing at the gym. Spin, I told him. He looked at me and said, so you've cycled to the gym so you can do a cycling class? and guffaws in my face. Point taken. But still, I feel endlessly smug weaving my way through the drivers hunting down an elusive parking space at peak workout time. And smug I stayed until this morning's expedition, when, emerging from the river path into the road, I hear a roar behind me and sense that an enormous vehicle is comiing up behind me at speed. I hug the side of  the road as much as possible but the vehicle does not pass me. It honks, and the sound is like an aeroplane breaking the sound barrier. I keep my cool, maintain my speed, and keep to the side of the road, but the vehicle stays right up behind me, honking every few seconds, and I realise the driver is doing this deliberately to get me off the road. I stay my ground, reach the roundabout, sail round it, get to the turnoff for my gym, take it, and stop. The vehicle roars past me, the driver laughing and waving. It is a huge removal lorry. I am too enraged to do the sensible thing and take the licence plate number down. All I can think of is, ah. That is why people take their cycling exercise in the gym.

Religious worship brings out the Fashion Anarchist in Me

The dress code for men at work remains simple doesn't it. No matter what the Sunday supplements say about waistcoats, chinos, rolled up sleeves or pastel polos, the dress code if you want a career remains standard issue suit and tie, by and large. I mean, if you want to work at Google it's probably all Adidas and bum jeans for boys, fluorescent socks for girls, and a pet animal in every meeting room. But otherwise you pretty much know what you are going to need each day for your commute, if you are a bloke. If you are a woman, it is much more confusing. Suits for women at work are so very last decade. These days most women are wearing shirtwaist dresses and platforms, and the variation on this statement that says, I'm serious but sexy, I'm not anally serious and I'm not threateningly sexy, is so confusing as to present a daily challenge. I work with a woman  who has decided her palette for work is a strict black and white - so that, she says, they are not distracted by the canvas and focus instead on the brain. I do dresses in jewel colours with funky but not ridiculous accessories, which is a huge mistake as it pretty much means I spend every evening having a crisis about what combination to wear the next day. Invariably I run up stairs 3 nanoseconds before I am due to leave the house the next morning to change my necklace, my boots, or sometimes the whole ensemble. On weary days I get at least one component horribly wrong. I really, really wish that for work it was all about suits. So work dressing is stressful and that generally means that even on days when I get it right, and I like to think that in a good week I will hit the mark 3 days out of 5, my first action when I come home is to take off all my work clothes and put slouch stuff on if I am not going out for the evening. It is not just about chillaxing, it is about liberation from the statement I have chosen to make with my clothes, which is about how I need to appear among my peers, superiors and reportees. Of course at home, since I live exclusively with men, nobody gives a toss what I wear so sweatpants are de rigeur, but if I walked around in moth eaten pyjamas nobody would notice, which is refreshing. Community worship, a thing I participate in more or less once a week, therefore becomes my fashion experiment opportunity. I have to dress more or less straight down the line, wherever Vogue chooses to draw the line, that is, for work. So for visits to my community I tend to come over very Vivienne Westwood. I don't mean I wear her clothes exclusively. I probably would if I could afford them but I can't so no hope of proceeding to my seat in the main hall with a bustle the size of an Intercity 225. No, I mean the anarchic fashion attitude. When I dress to visit my local community, I throw open my wardrobe and search out my most eclectic apparel. If I am going to do a mutton/lamb thing, or a punk throwback, or a seventies revival, if I am going to raid American Apparel and celebrate yoof culture, this is the time when I will showcase it. I visit my community in neon tights, funky boots, velvet mini skirts, massive costume jewellery necklaces, huge red capes and ponchos, banana yellow sweaters with electric blue denim shortie culottes; I turn up in red sweater dresses with turquoise tights and a yellow handbag, or bright blue sweaters with pink chunky drop earrings. Why do I do this? I think because all week I am a category. I am a Working Woman. A Working Mum actually. I spend all week striving to look cool and employable within that category. In my community, where I go for company, meditation, a bit of space, an opportunity to sing my heart out, catch up on local gossip or just be - and, ironically, where categories are all too apparent (the families, the singles, the young marrieds, the yoof, the toddler group, the Learned Lot, etc etc), I make it my business to defy categories and interestingly I don't much care what people think about the clothes I turn up in. I mean, this is not a place I would walk into wearing nothing but frilly underwear. A bit of respect etc. Rather, I look at my community as a place where I don't expect to be judged and where I don't plan on judging anyone else either. We are all there for a bit of space. This is how I define mine.