Uncategorized | Sadie Hasler

What are you?

Posted on September 18, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

A friend just sent me a quote. It’s one of my favourites. Roald Dahl. “If a person has ugly thoughts it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it. A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. you can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”

It was linked to Theresa May looking like demonic hag and to a dishevelled Jeremy Corbyn with his kind eyes.

But this isn’t about them. It’s about us all. It’s about you, reading this now.

As part of my job(s) I have to do a lot of social media. Most people do nowaways. I have to push my plays, I share my columns and other writing, I share events I’m doing, projects I’m involved in. And I work for an arts organisation who, amongst many other things, puts on events. A lot of blood sweat toil and occasionally tears goes into our projects. And ideas, good intentions, and love. Lots of that.

As part of running events we get a lot of people offering other ideas, feedback, criticism. Quite often vitriol and spite. People who think they know better how to run an event that twenty thousand people attend every year to mostly jubilant response. Have they ever done it themselves? Mostly not. Because it’s hard. Anything mass scale can never be perfect. Anything that revolves around humans is never perfect, because humans are not perfect, and you can’t control their singular behaviour. Things can go wrong. Good people tackle it and try to get better. Because they are doers. Bad people moan and fire grenades. They tend to be people who do less, who have less to do, and worse, delude themselves that their venomous little splurges have something of value.

Facebook has increasingly become a wallowing pit for people who prefer wading in thick muck and bile to clear waters and positivity. People who get their sole satisfaction from ranting on media platforms seldom think enough to realise they are not reaching the core issue, but are merely reaching one or two people trying to do a job. Who take in their words and carry them around in their personal lives, who take their energy home, to the bath, to bed, and into their hearts. It’s like having a go at the till girl because you don’t like a brand. Which are you? Are you a muck-flinger or a clean water paddler? Ask yourself quickly, now. I wonder if you are right. I wonder if what you think about yourself is what others think about you.

People who fire their ire into the ether think they are assertive, righteously angry, the product of a society which now thinks moaning and attacking as the primary approach is the best way to get what you want. It never is. Even if you achieve the outcome you want – the compensation, the apology, the plain weary receding of someone else’s opinion – you have still lost something by resorting to negative energy and spite. I believe the energy we send out there lingers like clouds. It reflects us, it affects people’s moods, and it is hard to forget.

People who know they are quick to jump to aggression – why? Does it make you happy? I’d say you owe yourself, your life as a creation you are in control of, and the people around you who soak up your clouds, to keep a watch on it.

It is not always assertiveness. It is often tiring, poisonous, unproductive, and beyond tedious. Make a real change. Do things, create things, counter things in a truly enlightening and positive way. Use better more powerful language in your criticism. There is no value in being a critic of things when it does not co-exist alongside something else, something which makes you a valuable human to have around.

Are you the best kind of assertive you can be? Are you doing good? Are you making a difference, or are you just spaffing out an energy that is of no use to anyone, that speaks of a deeper dissatisfaction in your own life, targeted outwards to others, who can’t help the person you’ve allowed yourself to become.

What are you? Look deep; do it. What are you really? Are you sunbeams, or are you black clouds? Are you clean blood, or are you cancer?

Change. History. Time. Feet.

Posted on September 18, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

I need to grow up and get better shoes. You can’t traipse around London for three days solid in worn-out Converse and not expect your feet to hate you by the end of it. Those soles are thin at their best, when they’re new, but when you’ve worn them the equivalent of ten times round the United Kingdom, you are definitely on course for some intense post-walk pangs de pied.

I spent a long weekend in London, two nights in a hotel were presented as a birthday gift by my boyfriend as a subtle hint to switch my brain off. It takes acts of bossy kindness like that from loving others for me to take the hint and accept I need downtime; enforced mini breaks, maternal rants, being strapped into a deckchair for a summer lobotomy. That kind of thing.

As part of the prescribed relaxation I decide to do away with the tube and walk everywhere. I wanted to see London. I didn’t want to zoom through underground tunnels and magically reach my destination without seeing anything; I wanted to join the dots overground. With my feet.

I wouldn’t ordinarily have the time to do it; trips into town are usually for one purpose and bookended by rushing. A rush to get there, a rush to get back. Occasionally I’ll manage to see friends when going in for a meeting or to do a show, but mostly I go there for the thing itself then dash away again. Time. It’s tricky to get it right, isn’t it?

But this weekend I walked. I strolled that bad boy London. I perambulated the nation’s capital like a boss. I mooched the living bejesus out of the big smoke.

And I remembered to look up. I was like a magpie for all the hidden bits; the old street signs, the plaques memorialising long-gone taverns, the chimneys and church steeples and turret rooms and broken windows and strange shops and old walls and hidden doorways and mysterious doorbells. Grandeur and hovels, side by side. Valiant preservation and cruel unthinking destruction. Things simply fading away under the weight of newness. Change. History. Time. My eyes were hungry for it all. I loved London that day in a way I had not allowed myself for a long time. Because I took the time to.

At one point, after picking up the pace again after a well-earned pint of lager and lime in Drury Lane, I wondered if my walking London might be a bit like where Forrest Gump starts running and keeps on going until he gets tired and just stops in the middle of a desert road, all beardy and pooped but with a yawn of strange clarity. I wondered if I might be silently protesting against something, hitting my feet against endless pavements driven by some inner voice until the voice just quietens and I would look down and realise I’d worn my legs down like pencil lead. Walking is meditative; it doesn’t just take your body to other places, it carries your mind away too. I think I needed it. Time and space and walking.

And then of course you get home after three days of being the Barbican’s answer to Bear Grylls and take your shoes off and wince and think maybe you should buy yourself some nice Scholls. “You’re 37 now, Hasler. It’s time. Those arches could drop at any minute.” You look at your feet – the same ones you’ve had all your life, the ones that have walked you everywhere – and you see your own history there, every room and street and moment you have ever walked through used those very feet – and you might even remember to thank them.

The Zen Phosphorescence of General Knowing

Posted on September 18, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

I was thinking that being 37 is a funny age. But they’re all funny ages aren’t they? Because we’ve never lived them before, so they all feel a bit odd and clunky, like new shoes that need to be worn in. Just as you think you’ve got one era of your life straight you move onto a new one, a fresh new bundle of five years tightly bound with the twine of time so you can despatch them in convenient manageable batches as they pass. A stack of experience to be filed away in the sprawling room of retrospect. Early twenties is different to your late twenties, early thirties different to your late thirties, and presumably similarly onwards until your own unique allotment of age runs out and you shuffle off this mortal coil in your slippers, scratching your head and wondering why there’s so much stuff left on your to-do list.

I find myself sat squat in the middle of the latter half of my thirties, just a few crispy autumn months shy of 37 and a half. Aside from the occasional shrieking shock of existential age-versus-success related panic (“I HAVE GREY HAIRS BUT WILL NEVER HAVE A MORTGAGE”, and other witching hour joys), it’s alright. Thirties are pretty great, on the whole. Mostly when you remember to take it easy on yourself.

You even allow yourself the odd moment of feeling wise. Everyone starts looking terribly young and foolish, like they’re blindly wandering the lands of youthful misdemeanor and mild peril and you now get to comfort and dole out nuggets of wisdom from your pouch of experience feeling like you are terribly useful, like baby wipes to a spillage or Smints to a post-sick scenario. Those little blighters need you. You have lived. You have loved. You have mucked countless things up. You have got loads to bang on about until they get bored and lose the will to live.

The wisdom never lasts long. Because you realise you still haven’t got a clue. Your life is lacking in any real foundation, structure, meaning, direction, and purpose, than in fact a whole TED talk could be written on why everyone should do the exact opposite of what you’re doing because you’re an idiot. That you have made some terrible decisions and laughable turns, but that you’d be really good at taking stock and making significant changes if only some benevolent stranger would pay for you to go to Thailand for a 6 month lie-down, where a transformation would come upon you like a slow-growing tan. You’d probably get dreadlocks, and your arms would fill up with meaningful beads and potent charms on string, and your cranium would take on a sort of natural saint-like glow from all the zen phosphorescence of General Knowing shooting out of your follicles. It’d be great. You’d be great. You could be so goddamn great. If only things were somehow…different.

When you find yourself caught between what was, what is, and what could be, turning in small circles like a robot running out of batteries, you need to turn to other wisdom. To books, podcasts maybe, music. To history, to science, to philosophy. To people. People you see all the time, to people you don’t see enough. To whatever makes you feel connected and less lost.

I turn to people. I turn to older friends, to people a few stages on from me. I soak in their thoughts and their advice and their stories and their experience and their love. Their knowing and not knowing. Feeling like you aren’t much different to everyone else might not make the answers come and bonk you in the face like a neon sign of definitive acumen, and it gives you comfort and bravery to keep moving forwards.

Pie & Miles Davis

Posted on September 18, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

I was going to write about pie. We made one yesterday and I still can’t move and now it’s all I can think about. Pie. But have you ever tried writing about pie while listening to Miles Davis? It can’t be done, even about a really memorable pie. You start writing about pie while listening to Miles Davis and stuff gets weird. The pie stops being something you made on a Sunday afternoon with Bake-Off on in the background and becomes something you once devoured with your bare hands in a Manhattan diner on an accidental night out in 1952 with a grizzly four-piece from the Bronx after they made you smoke that funny cigarette and you all ended up sleeping in a bathtub in Greenwich Village. And that never happened, it’s just that Miles Davis makes you feel like it did. The tinker.

I’m not just casually dropping Miles Davis into a column so you can be all like “Oh, jazz lover are you, Sadie?” and do that little associative link that people make with jazz like you must either be somehow culturally enlightened, or cerebrally developed like loving Jazz is a little extra tail flicking off the end of your DNA helix, along with other genetic distinctions like being able to curl your tongue in half and loving Marmite. No. I’m not responsible for this morning’s music pick. I can’t take credit and so nor can I take the blame. I’m being pummelled by the frenetic stabs of something on the more freeform side of things and it’s making me feel a bit mental this Monday morning if I’m honest. Miles Davis is making me twitch. I’m getting about five words down at a time, nothing on the wonders of pie at all, and then glazing over staring at the turntable spinning, my eyeballs all wide and oxygen-puffed, the steady bob of the needle like a musical woodpecker chipping into my temporal lobe and meddling with the natural order in there. If there is any.

I’m not dissing though, man. I can do jazz. I like a bit of jazz. I love the dirty sounding speakeasy stuff from the twenties and thirties, I like the smooth swaying stuff of the forties, Glenn Miller is a peach, Chet Baker makes me go woozy, I’ve tapped my feet to a shedload of live jazzy stuff down the pub and haven’t even been drunk. And I’ll definitely remember this Miles Davis album for when I need to write a character who’s having an intellectual breakdown at a posh Uni or a very tumultuous love affair that ends in one of them cutting all their hair off with a bread knife and running down the street half-dressed before drowning in a stagnant canal. For that it’ll be great. Man.

Choosing an album to listen to must be one of the sweetest things in modern life, a beautiful melding of the conscious and subconscious, a fusion of choice and abandon, of change and nostalgia, celebrating an old familiar thing or discovering something new, making a new friend. But when you’re at the mercy of someone else’s choices – pub jukeboxes or moochy mornings at home with someone else at the helm of the record player – the needle becomes a rudder of your mood for the next hour, and the ride isn’t entirely yours. But it’s nice giving in to the bends and sways of someone else’s journey, your brain in the sidecar, the wind in your hair.

So I was going to write about pie but it didn’t happen. And now the record’s been switched and Carole King’s on and I feel like I could maybe write about pie after all – a sad pie – dark cherry – the kind you stuff in one go after breaking up with the love of your life – but I’ve run out of words and that’s probably just as well.

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Well Hard Wild Nature

Posted on September 6, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

Say what you like about the world and all its faults but nature never stops giving you things for free. Nice views, food, inspiration, water… haircuts. Here’s a tip. Spend five minutes in a blackberry bush and come out with the best backcombing job since Barbarella and a compelling asymmetric blunt cut that will definitely glean a few looks if not actual admirers. Nature lavishes gifts upon you, and you get to give back by leaving a clump of your matted hair for birds to use as a winter duvet. The great outdoors is a big brilliant not entirely painless swap-shop.

I spent Sunday afternoon romping around the wild sea-blown hedgerows that snake through Wakering fields, falling away into the muddy marsh rivulets of the River Crouch, filling and draining with the tides. Our mission was sloe berries and blackberries for to stew head-pounding Christmas brews. My boyfriend hacks himself up in the hedges every year in this noble boozy pursuit. I was recruited as assistant berry-hand. I can do this, I thought. I am big into nature. I like leaves as much as the next person. I might have killed every plant I’ve ever owned within a month of having it but I have spent an inordinate amount of time saving suicidal snails in the rain. My dedication to nature is proven. Not many people can be bothered with snails. There was nothing to suggest I would decimate the bushes with my deathly presence alone, I just had to fill a bag with soft ripe berries begging to be picked before the birds pecked them to death. Easy. My black fingers would have no power here. Wild nature is well hard; it’s just houseplants that turn all namby-pamby on you, because they’ve been spoilt. It’s not my fault they’ve all died.

My childhood years of tomboying around the big parks of Leicestershire, the forests and overgrown quarries of North Wales, and the beaches and backyard alleyways of Essex came back in a flash as they always do. I threw myself into the mud and the thorns. Stuff going home with a bag of berries for christmas booze, I wanted to stay out for the full survival experience. I wanted to bind weeds into rope and weave it into some sort of sleep pod. I wanted to stitch huge spade-sized dock leaves together for tent sides and blankets and canopies. I wanted to pluck nettles and make a protective border against trolls. Dig deep traps and fill them with sharp bracken to fell chancing marauders. I am Enid Blyton regenerated as Bear Grylls. I am wasted on modern domestic life. Pit me into the wild and watch me not die. I can do it.

I don’t mind the sting and scratch of the delving arm. I don’t mind my face being whipped by defensive branches. I don’t mind going home ruddy-cheeked, bush-haired, thorn-pricked, bracken-nipped and sore. It’s nice. Getting stuck into something is meditative. I like the little questions that come from those quiet moments face to face with a tight entwinement of bushes and trees. Will this pretty red berry kill me if I lick it? Why are these leaves so soft, and these leaves so crunchy? How did this butter-shelled snail get six feet up in a hazardous dog rose bush? Did it slowly slide its way up, millimetre by millimetre, leaf by leaf, just to get a different view of the ground? Are snails dreamers, chancers, or do they just get lost a lot? Or did it hitchhike up there in the beak of a friendly bird? Lovely little mysteries. Nature might give you stuff for free, but it doesn’t always give you the answers and that’s good.

Death & A Chick Named Barry

Posted on August 15, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

It felt terribly twee driving out into the country to look at antiques on a Sunday afternoon in my late thirties in a skirt that came just below the knee. I mentally noted it. “Look at me, in a skirt below the knee, driving out to the country to look at musty old things on the day of rest.”, I thought. I was tempted to really go for it; pick flowers from a hedgerow for my hair; paddle in a babbling stream as a hot air balloon passed peacefully overhead; perhaps suckle a baby cow from my ‘all creatures great and small’ mother earth pap.

Then things got less twee. I saw a dark barn, promising macabre curiosities. I was drawn initially to the crimson and gold Victorian Freak Show sign outside, boasting half-man half-beast Joseph Merrick, the world famous Elephant Man. My heart plunged. I remembered my mum making me watch the David Lynch film as a teen, saying it was important. I ran upstairs as the poor man was taunted in a monkey cage and cried till my face hurt at the injustice and cruelty. Cut to years later, teaching a compulsory module on the Elephant Man for GCSE Drama, having to leave a colleague to watch the film with my kids because I couldn’t physically sit through it.

I stepped into the low-lit barn and found a bearded chap sat in a swivel chair, feet up. “Hullo!” I said, “Having a nice day?” “No.” he said, cheerily. ”Oh dear.” I faltered. “You get lots of closed-minded people here.” He explained. “Well, you won’t get that from me” I said as I paid him my quid.

Then I turned around and gasped at a dead cat. I quickly collected myself because I didn’t want to let him down. I might have been wearing a skirt that came below the knee but I was Well Hard. This complete stranger should definitely know that life has bashed me and my skirt about a bit and I am now Stoically Unknockable and Invincibly Curious.

I browsed the dark wonders inside. Crumbly-nosed human skulls and waxy false teeth, lizard skins and jars of tentacles, stuffed cats and rats, unidentifiable mummified fur and ornaments made from claws, spiders and beetles in resin blocks, coffins and ouija boards and gothic last rites kits. And everywhere, dotted about, glass-eyed stuffed ducklings with tags. They all had names. Dave and Mike and Frankie and Barry and Nigel. I couldn’t help but laugh as I petted them.

There is something scientifically funny about the names Nigel and Barry. I don’t know why, there just is. (Don’t worry Nigels and Barrys, my name isn’t great either. It always makes people think of ageing Jewish spinsters, gangland Glaswegian matriarchs, or cockney cleaning ladies who used to turn tricks on the side back in the day when their knees still worked.)

I trawled every surface, eyes flicking over every single item of curiosity like a hungry child. I wondered why some of us can be so instinctively repelled by dead things, dark things, the mordant, maudlin, and preserved, and why some of us are fascinated by it – drawn to it like a cliff edge, just to see what’s down beyond the drop. Perhaps our childhood magic is tweaked when death touches our lives. We choose to either embrace or avoid the one thing we ever really know – death comes to us all.

I used to balk at death before I knew what it was. Now I’ll examine its tiny trails, its teeth and its skulls and its stuffed fur-coats; little legacies, proof of existence; they were here. Dark celebrations of life. The opposite of cake.

After I left the man locked the big doors. Probably had his fill of the public mooching around, gasping and sighing and grumbling and giggling at his treasure. I liked to imagine he kissed all the dead souls on their furry heads and skulls, lit black candles and they all came alive and danced.

Salvo

Posted on July 24, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

When I was a kid I used to collect clowns. It was one of those fascinations that was adopted from someone else. My cousin Emma, who I worshipped – a year and two days older than me, my hero and role model – had a big pierrot doll. Satin suit and a big painted on tear. Why on earth was this clown, this beautiful colourful man, as otherworldly as a fairy or an angel, so sad? Of course I didn’t know the history of clowns, or that Pierrot was a character from Commedia Dell’Arte, theatrical stock characters that encapsulated the trials and tribulations and aching messy comedy of being human. I just saw someone that lived for giving pleasure, who was tortured by a sadness he would not speak of. It seemed so unjust to my child’s mind.

Perhaps our regard for clowns is one of the earliest empathies we form as children – these strange creatures in make-up and costume – showmen for the world who want nothing but to raise a smile, while emitting to some degree, in many cases, their own deep inner sadness. Perhaps we pick up on some of the innate tendrils of loneliness, and though we have not experienced those things yet, somehow bookmark them as some of Life’s Big Things. Even the jolliest of clowns still carry around that potential for sadness. We know, at some point, alone, they take off their make-up, and are just the human underneath.

From that Pierrot onwards, I began collecting clowns. Porcelain ones from gift shops, dolls, stickers, whatever I could get my magpie hands on. I even had one that roller-skated along. I remember the smell of its plastic face, the brittleness of its bright curly hair, and the whirring of its mechanics as it stiffly crawled the floor.

Then I saw IT. A sucker for Stephen King books and all the horror films I could get sneak into sleepovers, I thrilled to be scared. But that film cured me of my hobby. The child-murdering paranormal freak who dwelled in drains was absolutely terrifying; a work of iconic genius from actor Tim Curry. So I no longer collected clowns. Perhaps I just grew out of them, or perhaps it’s because nothing sticks in your head quite like a homicidal children’s entertainer with fangs and drippy eyes, but from then on clowns were never the same.

This weekend I stumbled on a beautifully shot film about a clown and it reminded me of everything I used to feel about them as a kid. Most of us Southenders will know of Salvo – one of the regular characters about town, often seen in the high street, fashioning balloon shapes for passing children.

The film is by a Film student called Natalie Hazelden from Thundersley. She has known of Salvo for years and decided she wanted to make a film about him. The film she created lasts 7 minutes, had me crying for ten, watery eyed for another hour, and thoughtful for the rest of the day and beyond, and here I am now writing my column about it. What an art to capture someone’s life in seven minutes. It’s not my place to pass on the story. But it reminded me of the hidden pain of a clown. How too easily we choose not to see people while we’re in the bustle of our own lives, how seldom we consider the man behind the make-up.

It’s a valuable beautiful film. I hope you watch it. Next time I see Salvo I am going to go up to him and say hullo. I can’t believe I never have.

WATCH ‘SALVO’ – BY NATALIE HAZELDEN

Keep the Momentum

Posted on June 13, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

So we’re still in a bit of a pickle, perhaps even more of a pickle than we feared for a bit, but hopefully it won’t be a pickle for long.

That seems to be the boiled down upshot of the election. The Tories tried to smear Corbyn with their hysterical “He’s mates with the IRA! Lock him up, he’ll bomb your Nan!” schtick mere days before the election and now, denied the terrifying landslide that was being hinted at and the majority they were hoping for, they are desperately dragging the DUP into bed for a lacklustre gang bang, where everyone gets stuck with the wet patch.

I can’t lie. I had to google them. The DUP. They sound like a lovely bunch don’t they. I’ve been keeping abreast of the articles pinging around about them and what it means for them to be a part of our government in however small a way. Insidious parliamentary polyfilla. The hypocrisy involved in their baffling hoik to co-power is galling, disgusting, and a bit hilarious (if you’re feeling more chipper). To have had past diplomatic dealings with the IRA is tantamount to witchcraft when it comes to a peace-loving Labour leader driven by working for the many not the few (how despotic of him), but when days later you need to be propped up by anti-abortion anti-same sex marriage parties with a shady past, it’s fine. Fine. Cue hysterical laughter and grab your Tena pads. It looks like we’re set for a period of needing our undies to be well-lined to deal with our array of reactions concerning our country and what the blazes is going to happen to it.

I would not normally write a political column. It’s not my place to do it here in a paper that should be unbiased and I doubt I could do it well, but in the confusion that abounds post election, were it not a big enough head-scratcher before, I feel I can’t write a column about cats or shoes. Not today.

I have differing views about the Frankenstein’s monsterfreakchild of the Tory-DUP bunk-up. Part of me thinks that the Conservatives allying with the DUP is tantamount to sanctioning their blinkered mediaeval creationist cruel and woeful approach to humans in a modern liberal world. To saying it’s ok. To saying they agree. And that it must be rallied against, now, because Fuck That Shit. And part of me thinks “let the cunts fucking hang themselves’. Shining a light on laughable, insidious, out-dated, self-serving cretins can only serve to start showing up their wrinkles and their pock-marks. Their bigotry, ineptitude, and lies. And there is no brighter light than power. We saw the power-lit panic-twitch behind the cold death stare of Theresa May in the days preceding the election and we all pictured the skids when she got home to take her cacky keks off. Anyway. Perhaps – perhaps – the Tories aren’t likely to get away with half as much hell as before. Give the DUP their little taster of pseudo power for a bit. See what they do with it. And let’s see how far down they drag the Tories PR rating before we vote again. Being ultra optimistic, the election result might bear far more fruit for Labour supporters than an immediate win would have yielded. Thinking of the long game, if shit really hits the fan and the Tories, with the DUP acting as their sagging squirty-boil covered testicles, start bleeding colour until they are nothing more than Punch sketches of themselves, caricatures begging to be scrubbed out, then maybe the next General Election will really get interesting and Labour will get to instigate real lasting change. For the many, not the few.

I don’t know. But I know I don’t feel hopeless.

It’s massively inspiring that masses of people were rallied to vote when they ordinarily might not. It’s eye-wateringly brilliant that young people were whipped up enough by bold campaigns to think and to turn up and mark their cross. In a flawed first-past-the-post system, the voice of young people willing to be engaged had something of the sound of a cavalry charge to it. Labour supporters might have a temporary situation that does not reflect their hopes as they voted, but there is a feeling of higher engagement in the air, and the very real feeling that it might eventually bring change in its wake.

So, while there is activism to be kept up, while there are demos and dithering and about-turns from lots of quarters, (and of course goatskin parchment drying *eye roll*), while we still owe ourselves and others a responsibility of staying informed, staying conscious, of not just letting the flags flop while we get on with real life, we also have to be patient.

I am writing this in a town represented by two constantly re-elected Tories. Southend has remained a Tory stronghold, with votes for Conservatives going up a tad overall, but it’s certainly less safe a seat than before, with votes for Labour in Rochford and Southend East (following an impressive campaign from Ashley Dalton) going up significantly, presumably cleaning up the votes that have fallen away from UKIP (hoo-ruddy-ray) and Lib Dems. I’m greatly intrigued to see the next vote after – sorry to be callous – more old people have died and more young people have reached voting age and have had their sense and their social conscience appealed to.

I’m sure this leftie column will mostly be met with ire by the readership of the paper it is printed in. But it’s not a knock – it’s a camaraderie column, if you will. Labour supporters might not be feeling as savaged or as scared as we were before the election, but we are feeling a similar uncertainty as millions of others, both left and right leaning, who are waiting to see what happens next. And that’s why we have to stay focused, stay on it, and stay together. Don’t make Labour have to start from scratch again in their next campaign. Keep the momentum.

The Good, The Bad, & The Poolside

Posted on June 7, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

It felt like the best time & the worst time to get away. Leaving for Spain a week before the election, with the Labour campaign stepping up, with people really starting to think that no matter what they thought of Corbyn they were still prepared to invest their vote in a strategic stand against the laughable leadership of May. I felt selfish and irresponsible, & grossly hypocritical flying away to switch my brain off while truly hoping others were switching theirs on. It felt as I left like the pro left campaign was gathering steam, clawing traction, as far as you can tell such things. But then I felt confident that we wouldn’t vote Leave & that Trump would not get even one cloven hoof anywhere near the White House. My political indicators are obviously flawed by natural and increasingly unhelpful naivety. “It’s all going to be ok.”

No, Sadie. It really might not be.

Sitting by the side of a pool reading news of post Manchester strength and then of the London attacks – terror in my old London Bridge & Borough Market stomping ground, pubs & streets I drank & walked in every day in my early 20s, right next to the market-side Southwark Tavern where I still take a yearly pilgrimage to have a pint for my old friend Barry, lost too young – I felt trapped.

The country didn’t need me, there was nothing useful I could do, but my heart was at home. A Brit abroad, proud of her country, despite its tendency to do dickish things and danger-dance on a sticky slope. I still felt pride in our togetherness despite the things that want to tear us apart; horrific acts by people who live amongst us with hatred in their hearts; the right-led social fractures that seemingly seek to reinstate old shameful class divisions based on money and lack. The bad and the good; the fury and the violence and the tolerance and the peace. The haves and have nots. The protected and strong very much apart from the unprotected and vulnerable. The crack-splitters & the cement.

Left with nothing to do but lie in the sun, listening to the music piped around the pool, contemporary trendy music by people I’ve never heard of that I would normally bat away as mundane and brainless, lyrics started drifting into my ears. Toes unconsciously tapping to the beat, but mind trying to fathom the psychology needed to burst amongst a crowd, relentlessly stabbing, close enough to see the whites of their terrified eyes, somehow a different evil than that needed for a more distant sacrificial-style suicide bombing. I resented the jaunty music playing while I caught up on the news. I felt cut off. Massive holiday guilt.

But I had Facebook waving defiant spirit like an ‘up yours’ flag to a savage world. I had friends doing good things. I had the news showing people saying we won’t be bowed by evil; the picture of one man running through London chaos still holding on to his pint, a perfect encapsulation of English steel and humour, whether he intended it or not. Then there was Ariana Grande being a class act. Liam Gallagher joining Chris Martin on stage in Mancunian unity. Music was using its strength and talking loudly. Music has always been one of the biggest strongest advocates we’ve got.

Sitting in Spain, heart on a long anchor chain leading back home, the music playing in the bars was by artists probably young enough to be my kids, genres that pass me by, lyrics I’d normally tut at. But some of the words came from the right place and stilled my twitch while I tapped my feet in the sun.

Like “We’re in this together. Hear our hearts beat together. We stand strong together. We’re in this forever.” That was David Guetta. Very rousing. He sounds like a nice lad.

And “The world can be a nasty place. You know it, I know it, yeah. We don’t have to fall from grace; put down the weapons you fight with and kill ’em with kindness.” That was Selena Gomez. Go Selena. That’s prime UN-worthy shit right there.

“Life is a game & love is the name.” By Sophia…someone. Ok, it’s not Aristotle but it’s pithy and kind of true. Then there was lots of stuff about doing things in ‘the club’ which made me semi-retch. And lots of Adele which made me raise my arms to the sun like a burning crabstick diva.

It was the only music I had, and it wasn’t what I would choose, but it would do until I got home. So I raised a stiff drink or ten in the direction of Blighty. And drank it all down with hope and trepidation, thinking of the election the day after I arrive home. Willing home to stand up and do the best it can for the masses. For the many not the few. Cheers.

Men of the Sea

Posted on May 16, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

I’ve always been comfortable on boats. Mum told me at a young age that I was made on a boat in Nice. Dad, a lifetime sailor, had dragged her screaming across the English channel to the South of France, and there – presumably while he comforted her WHICH I CAN’T BEAR TO THINK ABOUT OBVIOUSLY – was I conceived. Apart of the all-out vom-inducing grossness of considering one’s parents frolicking about in the act of conjoining their essence, I’ve always found it a romantic tale. I like to imagine “Made in France” like an invisible label on me, like I’m a jaunty summer cardigan. Probably striped. That’s French isn’t it.

Dad joined the Merchant Navy when he was a lad; I suspect to escape boarding school. He sailed around many seas of the world having top larks with lads named Pancho, Ratty, and Edmeades. He loved boats ever after and took great care to instigate the same passion in his choiceless children. My childhood holidays would usually involve being pulled onto some sort of vessel on some sort of water. Yachts, dinghies, rowboats, pedaloes. Oceans, lakes, rivers, ponds. Paper plates on puddles if we really got stuck.

One of my favourite memories of Dad is when we nearly died. We were in Turkey, as good a place to die as any. In the sun, happy. I had just turned 16, he had just turned 50. We went out alone on a tiny two-man bit of scrap and lurched without life jackets out into the Aegean, bound for open seas and adventure. Twenty minutes later I thought my bum was going to fall clean off. Dad had taken us out too far, the feeble boat was only vaguely seaworthy in the shallows, and we were smacking hard against the deep waves, writhing like concrete serpents. I felt a strange mix of terror and elation as we kept on going, still blindly trusting that my Dad, Man of the Sea, would save us before it got really dangerous. Dad could control the waves, couldn’t he? (How magical is that time when you think adults are invincible).

It was the most alive I had ever seen him. I can still see him turning round to me with his hair whipping around his neck, eyes wild and happy, his mouth broad and laughing. I laughed too. Even though I probably already suspected I wouldn’t be able to sit down for quite a while. If we didn’t die.

We didn’t die.

Years later, in an attempt to create quality time while I was at Uni he bought a small four man dinghy called the Sammy Jod. It was four leaf clover green with caramel wood inside. I loved it. But it came too late; I was at Uni in London and didn’t have time for the sea jaunts he thought we’d have. Dad sold the Sammy Jod about a year later admitting it had been bad timing. I always felt like I’d let him down by growing up.

This weekend I went to a boat race held yearly for the last twenty or so years in the honour of the father of one of my best friends, Jack. ‘Welcome Back, You Didn’t Die’ drinks were being held on the big boat HQ of the Essex Yacht Club in Leigh, just a few meters from where the Sammy Jod was moored for its brief year in our family. I wanted to be there for Jack, who lost his father when he was a baby, knowing what that race means to him, and I wanted to go with all my love of boats and dads and water and Jack that I hold in my heart as though that is somehow a transferrable thing that can be of some use. Hearts are sometimes at their stupidest when they’re at their fullest.

But the wind was hard that day and the estuary waters churned around in choppy fashion and the race was called off.

So we had a beer instead and raised glasses of ale to Jack’s father while the wind carried on its amiable tyranny outside. Even though the fleet of pretty boats were not put to full use, it was as though the elements that make them move, the power of the wind and waves were talking and saying hello, like two fathers shaking hands.

Lads on a boat, being lads. That’s Dad at the back with the ears. He got those pinned in the 70s. Lad.

Mum & Dad by some boat or other, maybe in Nice. Ugh. Maybe I’m in there.

After we’d come back, just about alive. Turkey 1996.

Jack teaching me to play ukulele that one time when I thought being able to play Somewhere Over The Rainbow might make me a better person. I’m sorry, Jack.