2011 was quite a year wasn’t it? With only 1 day left, it has already become passe to say ‘lots of stuff happened this year’ but, it did, so there. In my own life, I was made redundant for the second time and moved from Edinburgh to Oxford for a temporary but promising position. The year has thus been divided into 2 fairly intense chunks, and given the fact that my current position ends in June, I expect 2012 to be no different (though the divide next year may be before/ after the apocalypse). It should be exciting to start the year without any idea where you will be at the end of it, but I think that excitment only really applies to the finacnially solvent (or I dunno ‘optomists’).
I recognise I have been pretty lucky this year, despite losing a job that I loved, I found another good one in only 2 months. Even though I have moved to the dreaded south, turns out – some people there are pretty awesome – and don’t seem to mind being friends with me despite the amount I complain about how it’s not as good as Scotland. With all that’s going on in the world, I know I have quite a lot of privilege to ease the struggle, not to mention many excellent friends.
Anyway, with all this in mind – here is a list of highs and lows of 2011 as experienced through my own individual consciousness.
An Arbitary number of High points
- March 26th and the huge trade union march and actions in London were the first high point of the year for me. I came down on a bus from Glasgow, with a few friends, my sister, some drunken Glasgwegian Trade Unionists who could have stepped right off the set of a Ken Loach movie and THE BEST COACH DRIVER IN THE WORLD. Going down to anything in London from Scotland is great because people think you are amazing just for showing up ‘You came from GLASGOW, how on EARTH did you get here’. I marched, I went to Oxford street and watched the high street get shut down by rage and then I went home and spent the whole journey in adrenilien fuelled revolutionary conversations with students, trade unionists and the best coach driver in the world ever.
- Gig with Lashings of Ginger Beer at Feminist Cultural Action event in York One thing that people always forget about preaching to the converted, is that it’s really really fun. I did this gig in York a mere 3 days after finding out about my redundancy; I was a bit of an emotional wreck but it went down like a house on fire – lots of intellectual types came and read more into my material than was ever there in the first place. I also met some ace people and got to drink feminist themed cocktails AND I had my travel paid SCORE.
- Radical Seder at Occupy Glasgow I might be a gentile, but going to this with two close friends, eating food, drinking wine and thinking and reflecting was quite a high point this year. Also the occupiers of Glasgow University went on to win all their demands -wooo
- Shared Planet 2011 Ew, a work one! Still Shared Planet this year probably was one of the highlights of my new job, hurrah!
- Meeting lots of ace new people in Oxford Fairly self explanatory that one! Who knew the seat of elitism and privilege would also contain lots of ace people committed to social change?
- My cousin had a baby – who is cute as a button, cuter really ( I find buttons overrated).
An equally arbitrary number of lows…
- Losing my job. I was well gutted about getting made redundant – I told my former boss that it felt a bit like being dumped, which it did (you know it’s not your fault, you kind of feel like it is, your life changes quite drastically and your main coping mechanism is to go and drink until you puke)
- The NHS Bill passing I went to block the bridge because I really believed that the NHS bill is a massive mistake, it passed anyway -which shouldn’t have been a shock , but still -woe.
- ‘Activsim and #memes I am a little bit tired of activism as a thing that people do, and I have a lot of sympathy with this article, which complains about ‘activists’ becoming an elite category of people. I’m bored of witty placards and in jokes BORED – more than that, in jokes depend on a large proportion of people being outside them, which is shit.Also there have been times this year when all the awesome radical stuff has fallen short of what it needs to be.
- Comedy For a lot of boring reasons that I can’t be bothered to waffle on about, I haven’t done enough of this in the latter part of this year. Ditto blog writing, if I was in school my report card would read ‘could do better’ on both of these.
- The fucking tories No explanation required. Low points include, everything they said and everything they did.
Anyway, I will probably write an equally indulgent post of resolutions for next year soon – but till then, Happy Hogmany from Liztopia
