columnist | Sadie Hasler

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.

Lucky Shampoo

Posted on March 28, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

Finding the right shampoo is like finding the right man. You hope its scent will make you stop cross-eyed and swoon, you want it to bring out the best in you like some kind of magical transformation, and occasionally you get it in the eye and wish you hadn’t.

I’m not a superstitious person, usually, I don’t think, (though I do still say hullo to lone magpies and never tread on three drains; the learnt behaviour of childhood) – but whenever I find a nice new shampoo I sometimes attribute any good luck I have to its sudsy powers until the bottle is finished. I know this is ridiculous, like some kind of new age dickhead witch seeking magic in potions, but the possibility still pops into my head nonetheless. The things we allow to course through our noggins while we’re trying to find sense and reason and patterns in life are quite often completely uninvited, unfounded, or just plain bonkers. Our imagination pitches itself against the science of the world we have been taught and think we know.

I remember my first feeling of wondering if shampoo had some kind of glutinous destiny when I was about fourteen. My first love, a boy named Joel whom I had loved from afar for months, with whom I then went on to have a steamy on-off smoochy love affair that peppered my teens like summer christmases. He liked the smell of Revlon Flex, and by golly if I wasn’t using Flex I thought our union would crumble like a cake with no butter. Then for a brief while I started doing well in science at school and put it down to the discount brand I was using at the time that made my hair softer than ice-cream and smell like blueberries. I never found the shampoo again; we only went to Kwiksave that once. Good science & I were clearly not meant to be. (This could in fact explain my formulating hotchpotch ideas about shampoo. No hard facts; just lunacy.) Perhaps this strange linking is purely down to the evocative power of scent; the nose blindsides your other senses with that power that can call to you toddler memories unbidden at the age of 36 when you smell milk formula or the perfect trinity of twiglets and orange squash and the warm plastic of a wendy house.

I suppose I still occasionally do this baffling fusing of shampoo and luck in my head, but last week I found myself thinking of it even more. I’d just cracked open a bottle of caramel and cocoa-smelling goodness that left my hair feeling like fresh combed straw, too stripped clean to be soft, and then in a succession of an intense 3 days I had heart-stopping sad news, got burgled, and then had some possibly life-changing good news that left me dizzy. Given the fact the new shampoo had brought with it two bad days and one day of giddy smilebursts, in my head I had to label the bottle ‘intense experiences’ rather than ‘good luck’. And now I’m halfway through the bottle and wondering if the bit of possible good luck will die once it’s empty. What will happen next?

Maybe thinking small things like shampoo affects anything is easier than believing in god or some other greater steering power or giving yourself up to the utter randomness of life. It comes in a bottle, contained and potent and fresh and clean, and pushes you out into your day with a lingering scent, the feel of your hair on your head, the air than moves between the strands, a constant tangible feeling.

Do you go out and buy exactly the same shampoo in the hope that it will be similarly charged with serendipitous particles, or do you seek a different better luck in a new bottle, a different smell or brand promise? Or do you accept that you’re mental and shampoo has got bog all to do with anything and you make your own luck? I know the truth in my head, but my imagination is boss. And my hair smells really dreamy.

The Trouble with being Burgled

Posted on March 24, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

The trouble with being burgled is that it makes you question how good your stuff is when they decide not to take any of it. That, and the safety of your abode. But mostly your stuff. I got called home from work last Thursday saying there had been a break in. My neighbour had disturbed them and they’d been into both flats. I legged it home assuming that the only thing I own of any value – my mac – would definitely have gone. And surely the reprobates would have had the good sense to spot that the 1980s brown glass perfume bottle in the shape of a bassett hound was a fine collectable that might not fetch much on the Cash Converter circuit, but would provide hours of whimsical inner mirth. Neither were touched. And when they’ve flung your clothes out of the drawers onto the floor of course you’re going to judge yourself. As you fold it back up and place it back in the drawer, you’re thinking “fine, ok, so these sequins weren’t the best decision I’ve ever made, but I’d had some darn good times holding my stomach in in this skirt and if you can’t see that then it’s your loss”. Burglary makes you take things very personally.

Turns out they hadn’t taken anything except for some Royal Horticultural Society vouchers my neighbour had got for his birthday. That’s quite niche isn’t it. I imagined the robbers stalking around the walled gardens of a stately home, guiltily opining the peonies. I comforted myself that they had only blatantly disregarded everything I own because they had been rumbled by my neighbour before they could bag up the loot. Of course they would ordinarily have taken the knot of sterling silver necklaces I have amassed since my teens that would take seventeen hours of picking apart with patient fingers and possibly a pin to make any of them wearable again. If only they hadn’t been cut short by the vigilance of Stephen downstairs they would have been right in the money.

When the attending cop came round he introduced himself as Christian and I thought it was a bit inappropriate, changing established police protocol in such a friendly manner. If I was going to be questioned, I wanted to feel sufficiently ill at ease to call him Officer. My burglary, my rules. Officer Christian was satisfyingly big and burly. I found myself wondering if he could lift me with one hand while batting back hardened crims with the other. I decided I bet he could if he wasn’t feeling tired and I had only had a light breakfast.

I felt bad that Officer Christian had to come round to mine for a rather lacklustre tale of a basic bungled burglary where nothing was taken. I wanted to pep it up for him so he had better stuff to jot down in his neat tilted handwriting. Then he mentioned he’d just come from a double-stabbing and of course I felt inferior. I couldn’t compete with murder. My knives couldn’t hack the seeds out of a tomato anymore let alone disembowel someone.

It’s a funny feeling knowing someone’s been in your home without asking. I’ve been burgled before and the last time left me feeling vulnerable for months; it felt like the windows and doors were permanently left open for all and sundry to come bursting through, and in the darkness at night I was jumpy at every sound. It’s not about the stuff. I don’t have much and what I do have is not going to support anyone with a £200 a day heroin habit, not even long enough for a five minute high. It’s about feeling safe. So while I stared around at the mess and the broken glass and the worthless things I own and felt that familiar unsettled feeling of my private space having been violated, I mostly felt relieved that I have never had to feel the desperation that one day turns ordinary people into thieves. That can’t be fun. Especially if Officer Christian catches you and pins you by the balls to the wall, which I’d kind of like to see if I’m honest. That’d teach the tykes for thinking my stuff is shit.

Women’s Snickers

Posted on March 24, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

I had a lovely International Women’s Day last week. I’d been feeling a bit grumpy on account of lady problems – my bits ached, I was emotional, and I had a savage craving for Snickers like you wouldn’t believe, so I wasn’t massively in the mood to celebrate being a woman. Everything was narking me off and I was very cross at the disruption that hormones can cause. I didn’t want to play the worldwide sport of owning our femininity, I wanted to watch Meryl Streep films in the dark and throw things. Maybe have a little cry over nothing in particular into the dog’s tummy and then eat another Snickers.

But I cracked on because it would have been frowned on if I’d skulked around wincing at my boobs and muttering that I wanted to be a man. That’s not the kind of thing that’s expected of you on International Women’s day. You’re supposed to be at your best, showing anyone who will notice that you are part of a franchise of Gender Awesomeness, not just today, but every day. You are an ambassador of all that is Woman; you certainly can’t grumble about your fallopian tubes.

Somehow I got through the day without weeping, throwing anything, killing anyone or performing a self-hysterectomy with a spoon, and set up for the International Women’s Day event I was doing in the evening, which was a talk on the theme of The Invisible Woman. “I WISH I WAS RUDDY INVISIBLE AND THEN NO ONE WOULD NOTICE ME SITTING IN THE CORNER, PICKING SNICKERS NUTS OUT OF MY TEETH”, I wanted to bellow as I laid out the seats. But that wasn’t the point of the evening.

The point of the evening was to welcome a small number of women to talk openly about whether we feel seen; whether we have to struggle to be seen as young women, get seen for a few years, and then slowly get forgotten again. To discuss whether we want to be seen at all, and if we are seen in the way we want to be seen. I was expecting maybe a handful of people to turn up for an hour’s chat before attending the next events; a talk on domestic violence and a talk on the Essex Girl and her stereotyping. The talk got going and slowly the room filled up until there were no more seats. More women turned up and eventually there were people sitting on the floor, standing by the back wall, and filling the pockets of space at the side. I was pleasantly surprised and settled in to the talk with a warm feeling growing in my tummy. Not unlike when you clutch a hot water bottle to your abdomen because Eve ruined it for all of us when she mucked God about all those years ago or whatever.

The assembled women had brilliant things to say about their experiences; how our lives are shaped by our gender, how often things get brought back to our sexuality when they shouldn’t, and how sometimes it feels very much like some men forget to address things to our faces instead of our boobs. “If anyone talked to my boobs right now I could ruddy bash their face off with one slight jerk” I muttered inwardly, still a bit peeved at the enlargening effects of the monthly tribulation.

It was an inspiring hour of a diverse collection of brilliant women of all ages meandering off and on subject as we achieved what was essentially the point of the day; be with each other, share our stuff, listen to each other, and support each other. We ended the session saying we should do it again soon. On the whole I was glad I’d turned up. Especially as it was my event.

It was so nice I even stopped thinking about Snickers. For, like, an hour.

Spring is Always a Surprise

Posted on March 24, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

The sun’s come out. No matter how old you get Spring always feels like a bit of a surprise. Like bumping into an old friend in the street who’s been living abroad for a while. Familiar and lovely but somehow not expected. You turn a corner into March, the sky gets brighter, the days get a fraction longer, and the real new year starts. January feels like a month of pretending. We know we’ve ticked into another calendar year but it doesn’t really feel real until the sun unfurls itself from its February chrysalis and colours everything differently. Fresh.

It’s amazing how everything changes. The birds pipe up, the clouds look freshly scrubbed, the streets get greener, the trees look less sad, the first flowers of the season pop up shyly, the blue above us looks crisp as a dry-cleaned suit. Our lungs feel lighter; our steps have a different energy. Something in us changes. Even the winter lovers among us are rejuvenated by the vitamin D, you can’t fight the science, and for those whose soul feels a bit bedraggled from months of gloom it really is a new start. We are reunited with something in ourselves; something that we quite like. We’ve not been our best, and now we feel like we can be.

It feels easier to tackle things with this strange new energy that nature gives us. More realistic resolutions for the year come into play. After months of spreading myself too thin, feeling frazzled and too brain-weary to do anything particularly well I feel like I’m shaking things off, mixing things up. I have promised myself I am going to manage my time more strictly so I can allow myself time to switch off. I am going to keep work within certain parameters so I get to keep my evenings and weekends for remembering that I am human. Or that’s the idea anyway. I lay in bed quite late on Sunday listening to the spring birds and it felt strange. I felt like a lazy slug but then realised that that is what people do on Sundays. It is a day of rest. I can’t remember the last time I really did that. I had myself a proper weekend. It felt sort of dirty but I loved it.

I’d spent the afternoon in the pub on the Saturday after getting my hair cut and my new fringe that I suspect makes me look like a simpleton was making my eyes a bit blinky. I sat in the pub garden in the spring sunshine with a friend and we played each other new songs we’d discovered on our phones. One of his contributions was a French band named Pamplemousse who I loved mainly because the French word for grapefruit is about as good a word as you can get. You can’t get a fresher word than pamplemousse. Use it in a sentence today. It will make you feel like you’ve just licked a tart bit of pink citrus. French music always gives me a little flood of imaginary memories. You can fancy yourself a bit French when you were conceived in Nice harbour. You owe it to yourself to be a bit French when your mum and dad banged you into being on a boat after nearly dying crossing the channel. Sometimes these appended selves from little tributaries of our lives can make us feel new and fresh when we imagine ourselves in different stories. Our imagination makes us know that change is ok. Spring is the time for imagination and for changes. I am a tiny weeny bit French and have a new fringe like Amelie’s idiot older cousin and I like it.

As I write this, eyes squinting at the sun as my eyes grow accustomed to the brightness, there’s a fat fly jittering against the window – like a bulb that grew wings that can’t quite carry him far enough. He looks like he’s been locked inside all winter and has just noticed that’s it’s sunny. He wants to get outside. I know how he feels. It’s nice to reemerge.