The heights, the depths

[dolorosa_12]

After my month of posting every day about books, I seem to have completely vanished from the internet, and Dreamwidth in particular. This was mainly due to illness, brought on by intense stress about the political crisis in the UK and the impending Brexit catastrophe. More about that below.

But first, I'll talk about nice things.

I spent last weekend in Germany for the wedding of one of Matthias's cousins. The cousin (and indeed that whole part of the family) live in Iserlohn, and the wedding and reception were all in that part of the world. Matthias and I flew in to Dortmund on Friday afternoon and were collected by his parents, who drove us to the hotel where we were all staying (and which would also be the reception venue). We all had dinner on the Friday night in the hotel with another aunt and uncle. The wedding itself was on midday on the Saturday, in a castle on the top of a hill, and sadly I didn't get any photos of the ceremony itself, but trust me when I say the setting was very picturesque. We then returned back to the reception for what ended up being an entire day of being fed. The reception meal at German weddings (at least in my experience) is always dinner, but as it was about 2pm at that point and no one had had lunch, we were given open bread roll sandwiches as canapes with our sparkling wine. This was then followed by coffee and a variety of cakes at 3pm, and finally the huge buffet dinner in the evening. There was also apparently a midnight snack of cheeses and fruit, but I was certainly not hungry enough by that point to investigate!

There was a DJ playing (as always) the cheesiest collection of both German and English-language music, and I danced for hours. We finally staggered up to bed around 1am. Now normally I would be able to sleep fine, even with the DJ still going several floors below, but because my body's been in panic mode pretty much for the past three weeks, my sleeping abilities are wrecked, and I ended up not being able to sleep at all that night, even though the DJ finished up around 2.30 and then it was deathly quiet. Luckily I didn't need to do anything on the Sunday beyond being driven to the airport (with a detour to a nearby lake which we walked around in the sunsine).

On Monday I went down to London after work to go to a panel discussion at the Piccadilly Waterstones between Samantha Shannon, Zen Cho, Tasha Suri, and Zoe Marriott, moderated by their fellow author Katherine Webber. It was a fun talk — all, with the exception of Marriott (who was a bit rambly) were great speakers, and although it didn't really tell me anything new about their books, it was great to see them in conversation, bouncing ideas off each other and gushing over one another's books.

From the heights to the depths: the ghastly, stressful political, economic, social and psychological catastrophe that is Brexit. For several weeks, I was feverishly following every moment: Twitter open with various commentators live-tweeting sessions in the House of Commons, the Guardian's frenzied politics livefeed open in the next tab over. This did serious damage to both my mental and physical health (I couldn't sleep, I had panic attacks that lasted all night, I had nightmares, the lack of sleep gave me a cold, at one point I literally vomited from stress at work), and in the end I had to stop. I had been following every moment because I was afraid something terrible would happen and I would miss trying to stop it. On Wednesday last week, after a particularly bad night of panic attacks, I realised that I had to just completely switch off everything. So no Twitter, no news — I can't even go to news websites to look up articles on something else, in case I see anything Brexit-related. I've been living in a sort of cone of silence for over a week now, and it's helping, mostly.

I do know that the EU allowed Britain a longer extension, because Matthias told me this morning, meaning that the country will still be in the EU tomorrow, and I will still be an EU citizen for now. I'm assuming we'll have to hold EU parliamentary elections now, although even that was unclear (but surely the EU would be mad to offer an extension to October without making the EU parliamentary elections a condition?). But the panicked uncertainty was too much for me, so I think I'll have to maintain my distance.

I see also that Scott Morrison has finally called an election, so that will be another thing to vote for in May. I'm hoping desperately that all the polls are right and we're going to get a change of government (although the prospect of Bill Shorten being rewarded for essentially not being Scott Morrison is pretty depressing; I met Shorten at a dinner party before he was an MP and I was not impressed). I'm imagining that the campaign will be dismal and ugly.

So that's been my life for the past couple of weeks. I've been listening to a lot of M83. Carry on, carry on/ and after us the flood indeed.

Comments

[corvidology]

You have my complete sympathies over Brexit stress. ♥

I've grown up reading/watching/listening to the news everyday because that's what you do to be a well-rounded and informed person but I've had to cut way back on it myself. Between Brexit and Trump news... Ack!

I'm glad the wedding at least was an enjoyable break.

[dolorosa_12]

Both my parents are journalists (and in fact my father was a political journalist for almost his entire career), so as you can imagine I was also raised with a similar expectation that keeping up with the news was necessary to be an informed and engaged person, but it was just too much.

I think it's the frenzied, minute-by-minute live speculation that is the problem. It just creates an atmosphere of panic and urgency (which, to be clear, is accurate when it comes to describing the political climate in the UK for the past three months), and isn't helpful if you're essentially powerless to prevent anything from happening.

The wedding was indeed a nice break from the chaos.

[elperian]

I'm sorry there's so much turmoil and that's it's making it harder for your day to day life. You're definitely making the right move by not letting it have space in your day; if it's important enough to impact your life directly/quickly, a loved one will tell you (as he did!).

It sounds like you had a nice Germany trip though :)

[dolorosa_12]

To be honest, things have been a bit better since Friday. Friday was the date on which we were due to leave the EU (to simplify what was actually much more complicated than that), but we've now had another long extension, and I (along with most commentators) can see that there might be a way out of this mess that doesn't involve leaving at all. So I've started, cautiously, to hope.

The Germany trip was a lot of fun, although not exactly relaxing.

[wheatear]

Sorry to hear about your Brexit stress, that sounds awful. It's insane to think that so much grief and strife has already been caused over something that hasn't even happened yet. At least there has been a longer delay now. Fingers crossed.

[dolorosa_12]

One of these days I'll have to sit down and just vomit out all my feelings about Brexit (and what it's been like, as an immigrant, to just listen to yourself and your friends and husband being constantly described as essentially thieves and parasites whose presence in the country is illegitimate and whose sense of feeling at home in a country not of your birth is outrageous, for years and years and years). I'm so relieved about the long delay, and I just hope that sense prevails and we find a way out of this catastrophe.