(adapted from The Guardian)

The book I am currently reading

I normally have a few books on the go. At the moment one of them is How Not to Be a Boy by Robert Webb. I wish I could write about my family with such wit and grace. It would balance out the bitterness.

The book that changed my life

The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. When I was a teenager, I spent a summer working at the local library. I came across this book and spent the summer reading it. I had been raised a Christian and I was beginning to smell more than a whiff of misogyny about it, especially when it came to women’s sexuality. I was forming my own ideas about sex, which were very far removed from that of my sexually conservative parents. This book introduced me to the concept of the feminine divine and started me on the journey to the slutty atheism I enjoy today.

The book I wish I’d written

The Neverending Story by Michael Ende. At times I identified so closely with Bastian and the world that Ende created I felt as if I had written it.

The book that influenced my writing

Many collections of fairy tales, folk tales, legends, and myths.

The book that is most overrated

Just as something you like isn’t necessarily good, something you dislike isn’t necessarily bad. So I don’t know if it’s overrated or not, but I really hated Spartacus by Howard Fast. I got sick of its gruesome, pointless violence very quickly. I ended up pitching it into the latrine in the back of my hut in Senegal.

The book that changed my mind

Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving by Betty Dodson. Being raised Christian, I grew up with the vague idea that Masturbation is Wrong. There was a lot of hysteria, as it were, surrounding sex education, as if somehow knowing how your body worked and learning about sex and relationships would turn you into a syphilitic crack whore within a matter of weeks. Thank fuck I got over that! This is one of the most sex-positive books in existence. I don’t think I had ever looked at my vulva in a mirror before I read this, which makes me a bit sad when I think about it. It also has very beautiful pencil drawings in it.

The last book that made me cry

Love is Love, a comics anthology published after the shootings at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. It’s a slim book, but I still haven’t finished it because it always makes me cry… Maybe it’s useful to have something like that on hand for those times when the tears won’t come.

The last book that made me laugh

How Not to Be a Boy. I don’t think I would have found it as funny as I do now if I hadn’t spent so many years in England.

The book I’m most ashamed not to have read

Well, I’m not dead yet. But over my life I’ve mostly read stuff by Western white men. I need to address that imbalance.

The books I give as gifts

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris, The Descent of Man by Grayson Perry, and various cookbooks, depending upon their taste. And if they cook.

I do not get along with the months surrounding the summer solstice. The sun reliably gives me a rash on my arms in May, despite my precautions. More people are out and the world becomes noisier, more crowded. These English buildings are fortified against cold and damp, not warmth, and the flat is stuffy. (Why do landlords have a penchant for painting windows shut?) I am agitated and annoyed.

There is also the problem of the British going doolally in warm sunshine. It is not uncommon to see previously white Yorkshiremen transformed into boiled lobsters. I do not know if this is through folly or by design. Bright sunlight becomes a fresh excuse to drink a gallon of booze, with the added novelty of drinking it outside. While drunks enter the Ouse (and die in it) every year, the risk is greater when the weather is warm and the river suddenly looks inviting. Without the cold and the rain to chivvy bar patrons home after kicking out time, that other great British pastime, the drunken brawl, comes to the fore.

So everyone else is all shiny and happy and/or tipsy. “Isn’t this lovely,” they say with beaming faces, while social media fills with photographs of gardens and couples smiling in the sunshine and gardens and children in pools. Meanwhile, I feel the opposite, resting secure in the knowledge that my alienation will never starve.

I know many people who struggle during the dark of the year, a few to a pathological degree, and it is a comfort to me to know that they can put that behind them for the time being. But they have plenty of company when it comes to The Great January Mope. I feel alone, even though I am not: According to the Mayo Clinic (via Wikipedia), “Although each individual case is different, in contrast to winter SAD, people who experience spring and summer depression may be more likely to show symptoms such as insomnia, decreased appetite and weight loss, and agitation or anxiety.”

As those with SAD treat themselves with light, I address my symptoms with dark. I stay in low light conditions. I have a blackout blind in my bedroom. I run at dawn. If I do go out in daylight, I cover up and wear a hat.

I also keep quiet for the most part. I realise I am in the minority, and shitting on another’s parade is not going to make me feel any better. Instead I try to think of what things I actually like about this time of year. So far the list reads:

1. I am glad I get to wear sandals.

It’s a work in progress.

Many people are precious about their hair. I am not one of these people.

When I was 17, I shaved the right side of my head, which was fashionable at the time, and pretty mild compared to other 90s hairstyles. It was cute, and easy to conceal by draping the rest of my hair over it. I was playing in a pit orchestra at the time; I chose the right side so it would face the stage rather than the audience. I really liked it. But my mother was furious when she found out. She treated me harshly because of it, a nasty episode that baffles and needles me to this day. I was nearly 18 and about to graduate and leave home. And it was only hair. (I have shaved my head completely many times since then, and I admit that every time that I do, a part of me thinks “Fuck you, Mom”.)

After the credit crunch hit, I shaved my head once a year for about six years. The cost of women’s haircuts are extortionate, and I wasn’t exactly flush. Picking up a packet of Superdrug disposable razors saved a lot of money. Plus I had the pleasure of shaving my head and watching it grow back. I had a new hairstyle every week, effortlessly. My partner Geoboy was particularly fond of the “suedehead” stage. My hair was blue when we first met.

My hair, despite its thickness, grows outwards to a ridiculous length before succumbing to gravity, leaving me looking like a dandelion clock for several weeks. My father called me “puffball” when I was a young child, while my mother gave me terrible bowl cuts at home. There are photographs of me wearing a fringe that describes a bizarre sloping arch. She has an unusual relationship to the horizontal. When I was a little older, she would take my little sister and me to get haircuts at a beauty school. Later we went to a salon in a strip mall where a nice woman named Heather took her scissors to us. “Layer it,” my mother would say. I doubt she knew what that meant. It just sounded good.

In time, Geoboy and I moved to York, our finances improved, and I realised I had reached the point in my life where it was time to commit to a hairdresser. And so I met George.

George took me in at a busy salon a short walk from my flat. She is a petite, elfin woman from Tadcaster. Although she was only in her early twenties when we met, she was confident and skilled.

It had been several years since I had had any professional attention given to my hair, and my first time there I felt like I was in a spaceship or some long-forgotten student film by George Lucas, all white surfaces and staff in black, heat machines dangling from the walls like giant mechanical spiders. When I tilted my head back towards the wash basin, I gazed up at shifting colours over bright pinprick lights like stars on the ceiling.

I only go 3 or 4 times a year, but George always remembers me. I am an introvert, and not naturally chatty, but some people (and/or alcohol) make it easy. I have a lot of hair these days so we’ve had time to speak of many things over the years: food, Harry Potter, perfume… One visit, after I had mentioned my Peace Corps service in Senegal, she asked, “So, do you speak African?”

George left in January to embark upon a months-long adventure in Central and South America with her boyfriend. After all, if not now, when? I used to do that sort of thing, and increasingly think I need to return to that lifestyle.

I have heard tell of female cancer patients who are devestated at the thought of losing their hair to chemotherapy, even temporarily. I would rather lose my breasts than my hair, said one. This sentiment shocks me. It is, after all, only hair.

Christmas is for children, and, despite all the evidence to the contrary, I am in fact an adult, and I have no offspring. I am no Scrooge, but I am far from an enthusiastic participant. Fortunately, I am in a situation where I can celebrate on my own terms (one of the perks of growing up).

I find Christmas overwhelming, especially in the UK, where you don’t get the festive speed bumps of a decent Halloween and a comforting Thanksgiving. (As much as I enjoy the history of it, Bonfire Night is really pretty lame. Does anyone lie awake in bed thinking, “Only ten more sleeps until Bonfire Night!”? No. No, they do not.) The streets are clogged with shoppers, pot-bellied men who try to pass off their shitty sartorial choices as “ironic”, and drunks. So I hide in my warm little room, experiencing Christmas via video games and books at times and in dosages of my choosing.

We do have a nice little tableau in front of the non-functional fireplace (since converted into a non-functional gas fire). There are presents to be opened and a few cards. It’s modestly jolly. A tableau that has just finished its second drink, if you will.

I do have at least one tradition these days, and that is following the Sheriff’s Riding in York on the winter solstice. (You can read a brief history of it here.) Beginning outside Micklegate Bar, the Sheriff, accompanied by the Lord Mayor, proclaims:

Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! We command that the peace of our lady the Queen be well kept by night and day but that all manner of whores, thieves, dice players and other unthrifty folk be welcome to the city, whether they come late or early, at the reverence of the High Feast of Yule till the Twelve Days be past. God save the Queen!

Then, if you are so inclined, you can answer with your own shout of God save the Queen and doff your cap. From there we parade around the streets with musicians in red Tudor dress playing medieval instruments and directing traffic with torches (the fire kind, not the electric kind). The leader of this motley crew bears the York flag, a Saint George’s Cross with lions. The proclamation is repeated at Monk Bar, the Minster, and Bootham Bar. The Riding ends in Saint Helen’s Square in front of Mansion House.

It’s wonderfully pagan and atmospheric and slightly bonkers. So, just my cup of tea. Between the darkness and the mist and the glow of the Christmas lights, it’s just about impossible to take a photograph. I like that; it adds to the mystery, and reminds you of the value of going out and experiencing something in the real world rather than just watching a video of it on YouTube.

As for New Year’s Eve and Day, I don’t do a damn thing. It’s tradition.

Some people think I am crazy for running. Some people think I am crazy for getting up early. I get extra crazy points for getting up early for the purpose of running. Then I take it to expert level crazy by getting up early to run in freezing temperatures during the dark of the year.

I take a torch with me but I rely on moonlight as much as possible. My overly familiar routes are new again as my imagination fills in the shadows. (And there is far more shadow than light before a December’s dawn.) There is a hush over the frosted grass, broken only by pairs of tawny owls trying to find one another.

The few people who are out are morning people. They are running, or going to work, or walking their dogs, or maybe on their way home after a long debauched night. The morning people are quiet year-round, whatever their reasons, caught up in their own morning thoughts. In winter they seem farther away than ever, sunk deep into the black depths of their minds.

The dogs, however, are lit up like Christmas trees. They sport blinking LED collars and prance along the pavement as if they’ve just left the best rave of their lives. I don’t know if they’ll ever come down.

On a recent run I glimpsed a shooting star arcing over Skeldergate Bridge and made a wish. I can’t tell you what it was, of course, because that would go against the Rules of Wishing, and it wouldn’t come true. In the meantime, I will keep putting one foot in front of the other, and meet my morning thoughts in the shadows.

If I told my young self about where I live now, she would be glad to know that I have my own room and lots of nice My Little Ponies. She might find it vaguely distasteful that I am married, but then, so do I. “He’s a nice boy,” I would reassure her.

She would be impressed that I live in York. She has an intense imagination, and the romance of old things appeals to her. My flat is between the city wall and the River Ouse. She would like the medieval church and the crumbling graveyards, and the fact that I pass the site of a motte and bailey castle built by William the Conqueror on my way to buy onions. I take my kitchen scraps out to a compost heap in a community garden where a Roman villa once stood. And that’s just in my neighbourhood.

One of the most magnificent cathedrals in Europe is about a 15 minute walk away, depending upon how many tourists I have to weave around. I look at the minster and I tell myself how wonderful it is, but I no longer feel it. It is grey to me now, and not because of the North Yorkshire weather. I don’t see it with fresh eyes. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few,” said Shunryu Suzuki.

Yet as much as long to look up and experience this soaring Gothic stone for the first time again, these things can’t be forced. I would do well to take my young self with me when I go out, so I don’t get too complacent, or forget to be grateful, or stop wondering what I will find around the next corner. After the sun goes down we can tell stories about all the things we’ve seen and make up stories about the things we haven’t. The ponies will be thrilled.

Unless the weather meant certain death, recess meant we were released out into the playground.

There were many metal things sprouting out of the sand and crabgrass of the playground of Keith Elementary school when I was growing up. A giraffe, a rocket, a climbing frame, monkey bars, slides (one big, one small) – scorching in the sun, frosted in the winter. Woe betide any fool who stuck her tongue on these structures in the Michigan winter. Of course, a double dog dare can never be refused, unless one cares nothing for honor, so these things will happen.

There was also a boring thing, three bars of varying heights, I don’t know what it was for – pull ups? A sadistic gift from a disgruntled alumnus, perhaps. Also a set of gymnast rings that weren’t much fun for even the most creative and athletic among us. A couple of giant half-buried tractor tires that smelled of pee. And big swings for twisting in mid air, or for making the playground monitors (“safeties”) gasp by doing the spider with a friend of the opposite sex, or for jumping off at the highest you could go hoping to escape gravity and fly away… or at least land on your feet.

There was a kickball pitch rutted into the dirt. Empty fields for snap-the-whip.

There was a patch of asphalt spray-painted with grids for playing games, where boring girls milled around talking about boring things like hair and boys. Unless they wanted to trade stickers, I avoided them. I liked to climb on top of the monkey bars, grab the rungs from underneath, and flip myself over. My party trick.

Another trick of mine, performed only once, involved me going down the small slide standing up. Bystanders were impressed. Then I reached the patch of thick ice at the bottom, my moon boots went out from under me and I fell back, cracking my arm on the edge of the slide. The crowd exploded with laughter. Dazed, I went to sit on a swing for a while.

My arm didn’t feel so good. Well, if it still hurts in a couple days, I thought, I’ll tell Mom and Dad.

The recess bell rang. We shuffled inside and began to shed our coats. Queasy, I shifted my timeline. If it still hurts when I get home, I thought, I’ll tell Mom and Dad.

We had a substitute teacher that day. I really wasn’t feeling very well. I rested my arm on my desk. Eventually I raised the working one. “My arm hurts,” I said. A collective gasp sucked the air out of the room as everyone stared at the half of my arm laying out of alignment with the rest.

Later, they would all sign my plaster cast.

A mustard yellow tornado warning siren towered in the corner of the playground. There were no fences but wild fields full of knapweed and marsh, abandoned agricultural land where we were NOT SUPPOSED TO GO. If you got caught breaking the rules, you had to stand against the wall for the remainder of recess. There were fields across the road, too. There were a lot of fields around there when I was growing up.

The school is still there, and its playground. But the fields are gone along with their ruderals and fairytale oaks and mint-scented swamps, along with the hopes of running through them. They have been replaced by neighbourhoods of identically bland houses I would never live in even if I could afford to.

What kind of person would I have become if I grew up there now instead of when I did? Maybe that person would not be so different, a nomad in search of wild places she never knew, rather than a nomad in search of wild places to replace those that have been lost. Even if I ever do find a place where I belong, maybe I will only belong there for a little while. Then the recess bell will ring, and it will be time to move on. Ever lostward.