harry potter

Love Note – Corona-party

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On Tuesday 17th March 2020, I was told at 15:20, after a full day of teaching, that my placement was to be suspended with immediate effect. At this point, I am aware that my course will continue with online learning and seminars, that I have up-coming assignments that I will need to prepare and I have a stack of journal articles to read, but that I will be housebound for the foreseeable future. This has presented me with something of a paradox: being at home is both unnerving and reassuring; liberating from the busy-ness of normal life but may also create a void of emptiness that will leave me climbing the walls. As such, I am doing my best to come up with a daily routine of interesting things to do that will keep me calm. I think that, in spite of all the chaos, this is a really pertinent opportunity for me to dig into some of my interests and hobbies, learn some new things and keep staying curious. At this point, and it is still early days,  I have three books on the go, which I can barely believe myself, I am filling my days with interesting tasks and activities that prevent me from binging on television, and I am keeping positive and cheerful in light of a perfect storm of governmental confusion, media confusion and general upheaval.

‘What Would Boudicca Do?’ by E. Foley and B. Coates

Boudicca

This was a New Year’s gift from a dear friend and is a fun whistle-stop tour of remarkable women from history. I have decided to read a chapter a day over the course of whatever it is that is happening (am I self-isolating, in quarantine, living out a course suspension? Who knows). So far, I have read condensed histories of Boudicca and Mary Wollstonecraft. Tomorrow, Mae West. The book is fun, digestible, full of nuggets of important intersectional feminist history and reading just a chapter a day gives me something to look forward to for tomorrow.

Duolingo

Duolingo

I downloaded and started learning through Duolingo before the corona-party started, and I am now even more committed to keeping at it. Currently, I am refreshing and building up my French and I have started learning Welsh from scratch. I was inspired to start by a friend who is on a 200-day streak and I loved his commitment to the cause. Additionally, I was stunned by the fact that whilst I’ve been chugging away nonchalantly speaking, reading and writing in English alone, over half the world’s population is bilingual. Language learning is going to become more and more essential for Britons, especially in light of our new (sob) relationship with the EU, so I think it’s important that learning new languages and, by proxy, understanding the cultural contexts of different countries and their peoples, becomes more of a priority. French has always been of interest to me (I have delusions of grandeur about moving to Paris) and Welsh is an important part of my own personal heritage. My mum is a native speaker, as is my Grandma on my Dad’s side. Hilariously, they speak different dialects so can’t communicate with one another. Nevertheless, learning Welsh has been an absolute joy. I can just about tell people that I am a vegetarian from memory (dw’in ddim yn bwyta cig) and it is just delightful learning how to speak and write a language that so liberally uses the letters ‘w’ and ‘y’. Duolingo isn’t perfect, but it’s exactly what I need it to be right now: good for my brain, good for my cultural awareness and a diversion from binge-watching TV. Speaking of which…

The Good Place, Netflix *slight spoilers*

The Good Place

Of course a bit of Netflix was going to feature. MW and I are on the final series of this hilarious sitcom that incorporates trashbagism with the central tenets of moral philosophy. The writing is sharp, effortlessly condenses complex philosophical ideas into twenty minutes segments, has truly mind-blowing twists and a range of characters that I absolutely adore. Up there for me is Jason Mendoza, a hapless dimwit from Jacksonville, Florida, who has a heart of gold. Jason is one of the most stupid and naive characters I have ever encounterd but is extraordinarily emotionally intelligent. Whilst head haunch Michael has to scam and manipulate everyone else to get them to do the right thing, Jason is receptive, honest and the most in touch with what he needs. Our time with the show is coming to an end and I am going to miss it enormously.

Going for a walk

The Park Nottingham

MW and I went for a half an hour walk around the Park Estate in Nottingham today. We saw the first of the cherry blossoms coming out; a cute dog with a bandage on its paw who was still tugging its owner along; beautiful Lady-and-the-Tramp Fothergill architecture; my favourite cedar tree; and we talked about everything and nothing. It started trying to rain at one point and we both arrived home with rosy cheeks. Going for a walk was such a nice break from the work of the morning. We felt refreshed by it, we’d had some good exercise, and it helped us to disengage from our screens.

Staying connected

Meme FINAL

I don’t mean this in a mindless, compulsive way: more like checking in with friends and family members on a regular basis, if you can. I have had hilarious and lovely chats with my mum and Grandma today, as well as touching base with a variety of WhatsApp groups where the memes, bad jokes and cute pet photos are flowing. I think it would be quite easy to become very insular and isolated at this time. As much as it is nice to hole up for a while, we need to stay connected and active in a healthy way. Additionally, we need to be mindful of the isolation others may be feeling, particularly older people who are having to self-isolate. Age UK run a befriending service that I volunteered for last year, and I am sure they would appreciate more people signing up at this time. I wrote more about the importance of building relationships with older people here

 Yoga with Adriene, YouTube

Yoga With Adriene

As many of you know from my incessant ramblings, I have sworn by Adriene Mishler’s YouTube channel for years. It is free, full of warmth, wisdom and fantastic yoga practices, and is a go-to for grounding and exercise. Life is always uncertain, but we are experiencing that all the more keenly at this point: yoga is an amazing way to breathe into the uncomfortable feelings, emotions and sensations that may arise, especially if you are prone to anxiety. Her 30 day yoga journey, released in January and prophetically entitled ‘Home’ (where I am spending an awful lot of time at the moment), is one I will be gravitating towards. She also announced today a new yoga playlist that contains videos of practices that pertain to uncertainty and crisis. Just twenty minutes of tuning into my breath and dropping down into my body makes such an incredible difference to my day.

Pema Chodron

Pema

I couple my practice with reading a chapter of Pema Chodron’s ‘The Places That Scare You: a guide to fearlessness’. Chodron is a cornerstone of Buddhist wisdom and guidance, encouraging us to see our fears, anxieties and stuck points as opportunities for growth, self-knowledge and integration. Instead of pushing away or resisting old patterns that no longer serve us, we can get to know them, allow them to pass through, and grow our compassion for ourselves and, as a result, all human beings. We all struggle. We all have our edges that push us to our limits. In this time of collective uncertainty, chaos and fear, we have a real chance to see our lives clearly: we may not like what we see, but that’s OK. It’s better to be conscious of our choices than to live in ignorance or stuck in cycles of self-abandonment.

Music

Music

Over the past couple of days, I have revisited a lot of my musical favourites. I was partially inspired by Daniel Radcliffe’s ‘Desert Island Discs’ which was an absolutely delight. Since then, I have been listening to Father John Misty, Bob Dylan, Sade and Agnes Obel, with a little bit of Andrew Lloyd Webber thrown in (he did a Twitter poll for a song to perform and ‘All I Ask Of You’ from The Phantom of the Opera cam out on top. The whole thing is lovely: check it out). Normally at this time of the year I have my annual Stravinsky Rite of Spring binge due to the impending seasonal transition: it definitely still freaks me out even after all these years, but I wouldn’t be without it. I have started reading Tolstoy’s description of the Russian spring in Anna Karenina as a companion to Stravinsky. The violence and the vibrance of spring, with its renewal and rebirth, is both excruciating and profoundly beautiful.

 

N.B

I genuinely believe that coronavirus is forcing us to re-assess our social structures and our places within them. At no other time has such a compelling case been made for Universal Basic Income; the free childcare labour of grandparents has been shown to be so underappreciated; the undervaluing of the NHS, teaching, and ‘low skill’ jobs such as cleaning and delivery work has been exposed and challenged; rates of pollution dropped in China because of lockdown etc. This is a confusing and uncertain time, but it can be a fascinating time. I think it is giving us the chance to evaluate what most certainly is not working for us and what we can change in the most positive way. Business as usual wasn’t working before coronavirus, it certainly isn’t working now, and we would be fools to let this opportunity to enact progressive, socially aware and compassionate policies post-coronavirus to just slip away. I am not completely fluent in politics, I don’t know what the right answers are; but it is clear that we are in a unique situation where we can move to build a fairer, more just world where everyone is taken care of. I wish that people would stop worrying about market volatility as though it were something that wasn’t invented and perpetuated by humans in the first place. Let’s build something else.

Love Note – The Vogue Colouring Book

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I hate/love to sound like a two year old, but I was inspired to buy a colouring book after seeing my friend’s. She has a Harry Potter-themed one and had done a beautiful job of meticulously colouring in the scene of Harry and Ron flying Arthur Weasley’s Ford Anglia. Her shading was gorgeous. Where I would have coloured Harry and Ron in pink, she had expertly blended a combination of peach, yellow and cream to re-create the colour of white skin. I realised that good colouring requires a lot more skill than just picking a crayon and keeping between the lines. I had some arty things to learn.

When the Vogue colouring book was published I was all over it like it was a Selfridges sale (top tip you guys: Paige jeans. The best fitting jeans you will ever wear, will last forever if you wash them cold, ethically made in Los Angeles, £350 in real life but often reduced to £70 in the Selfridges sale. You can thank me later). As much as I would like to make clothing, I have never learnt how and it is unlikely to happen anytime soon. I tried my hand at designing clothing when I was in secondary school, have binged on multiple episodes of Project Runway and have taken a particular interest in fashion writing for many, many years, so the opportunity to colour in some glorious illustrations from the 1950s seemed like too much fun to miss. I nabbed a copy after visiting the Vogue 100 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 2016.

Ever since then, all of my fashion designing delusions of grandeur have been released in a healthy safe, way. I rarely follow the original description copy in the book, choosing to blaze my own (ridiculous) trail. With my box of crayons, I have tested my sartorial eye by colour clashing, at times imagining myself as Alessandro Michele, Raf Simons and Phoebe Philo, and even put Hubert de Givenchy to shame with a great replication of an LBD. Aside from colouring one woman’s arm in purple by accident, there have been no huge disasters.

It might all be a bit silly but I can safely say that I’ve had a whole lot of fun, expressed myself in a creative capacity when I’ve been bored and tempted to scroll through Instagram, and I’ve given myself a bit of styling education and practice. Here are some of my favourite exhibits and design notes:

Woman in beige

Kate Moss once said in conversation with Nick Knight that she would be loath to wear a beige suit, so I decided to try and make a beige suit look nice. I think it’s OK.

 

Woman in turqouise

This woman encapsulates all my turquoise-mermaid-dress-and-turban-combo ambitions. I love this look.

 

Woman who looks like Meryl Streep

This woman is spits of Meryl Streep. It’s ridiculous.

 

Woman in stripes

Beachwear that dreams are made of but I wish I’d done the glasses in tortoiseshell #hindsight #designerproblems

 

Woman done by Stanley

Sharing is caring and I let a little family member colour this woman in. I have to say, I’m liking the psychedelic vibes.

 

women-by-nicole-and-i.jpg

Similarly with these women. My sister did some really quite expert shading for the woman on the left, whilst I went for statement (millenial?) pink on the right. I also did the dog.

 

Woman who looks fabulous

This dress was inspired by Jennifer Lawrence’s dress at the SAG Awards in 2014. I don’t know why I remember that dress so clearly, but I do. Textbook Raf Simons.

 

Woman with dog and absinthe

So many life goals right here: cute dog in hand, a glass of Absinthe, killer hat, sassy gloves and black lipstick done well.

 

Woman in red

This woman reminds me of the fabulous Jacquie ‘Tajah’ Murdock, who was cast in a Lanvin advertising campaign in 2012 at the age of 82. When I am an older woman, I hope to pull off a red jumpsuit with this much grace.

 

Woman who looks like a Hitchcock film

I feel like I created a Hitchcock heroine here and I am thrilled. I didn’t realise that skirt suits come great in a cool grey, a green veil is all I’ve ever dreamed of and that all seagulls should be pink.

 

Pink hair don't care

Pink hair don’t care (I would LOVE to give this a go one day.). And yes. The Balmain sweepy on the right makes me weepy. I need a moment like this in a dress like that in the future sometime (please sartorial gods).

Love Note – Expecto Patronum

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It is a futile endeavour to try and name the single best thing about Harry Potter. The seven books in the series captured the imagination of millennial children like little else, and continue to be a source of escapism, fun, and belonging for many. Whilst the Lord of the Rings trilogy will always be my franchise of choice, Harry Potter was an integral part of my childhood. I cannot count the number of times I’ve saved people from the purgatory of not knowing which Hogwarts house they’re in by encouraging/forcing them to take the Pottermore Sorting Hat quiz, nor the number of extremely serious conversations I’ve had with people about the key issues of Snape’s morality, the discrepancies between feisty-cool Ginny in the books and lacklustre-wooden Ginny in the films, and about which magical career would have been my calling (Hogwarts professor? Wandmaker? Knight Bus Conductor? Who knows?!).[1] We have been offered a vivid, imaginative literary world to immerse ourselves in and I am here for that any day of the week.

The world has always been a dark and scary place, but in times like these, with right wing sentiments re-emerging across the world, bigotry and fear running rampant and uncertainty hanging around all us in a dense fog, it seems particularly, and uncannily, dangerous. We need hope and optimism more than ever. As such, the Patronus charm created by Rowling, and first seen in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, is the beautiful, protective and empowering force we all need in our lives right now. It is apparently a notoriously difficult spell to cast that affords protection from dark and devastating forces, acting as a guardian and defender. Indeed, the Latin translation of the incantation ‘Expecto Patronum’ is ‘I await a guardian’. I love everything about how this charm is presented in the book. Harry is in such a vulnerable position when he meets Professor Lupin (one of my all-time favourite HP characters) because he is a mere thirteen years old and, with a litany of traumatic experiences filling his past, is overpowered by the profound darkness and desolation brought upon by the Dementors. I would argue that out of all the adults across all of the books, Lupin gives Harry the greatest educational gift: he equips Harry with the ability to draw from his own internal resources to find protection, safety and joy. Lupin teaches and enables Harry to access hope and wonder when everything appears bleak beyond repair. He doesn’t necessarily save him, but instead offers him something much more valuable: the means to save himself.[2]

On Pottermore, the Patronus charm is described as ‘the awakened secret self that lies dormant until needed, but which must now be brought to light…’ and appears in the form of an animal. There is so much room here for a Jungian depth-psychology analysis, but let’s just leave it at this: whatever stories our chattering minds weave for us, strength, wisdom and courage resides in all of us, all the time. The Patronus charm may be just another abstraction from a wonderful creative mind. However, as with a lot of good writing, the Patronus is a literary representation of a psychological, cultural idea. It can take being broken open, a juncture, a confrontation with extreme fear or the very act of growing up to learn how to access them; but strength, courage and love are always there within us. And in times like these, we need those deep, wise, hidden reserves more than ever.

[1] I’m hopelessly inquisitive and shamelessly talk about books as if they’re real. I’m in Ravenclaw, could you tell?

[2] All whilst dealing with his own monthly lycanthropic nightmares, might I add. Such a babe.