# 85 Bomb proof

I am bomb proof. I don't mean that in the literal sense i.e. I will explode if you actually stick a bomb under me. But I am unshockable, understanding, level headed and will deal with pretty much anything you can throw at me. I also have a very high stress tolerance. But eventually things will get to me.

Friendship wise mine have always been reasonably thin on the ground where close friends have been concerned. My very slight issues with trust mean I keep few friends in my confidence and the rest are happy acquaintances I am pleased to have had in my life. Every friendship lost for the wrong reasons is a learning curve and if you abuse my trust or my generosity I will see fit to deal with it. 

But don't get me wrong. I am not hard, insensitive or uncaring. I am indeed quite the opposite. I always consider myself the most trustworthy person anyone will ever know and there are those that will testify to that.

I know there are plenty of people out there just like me. We come to it from different directions though. I have never directly experienced anything particularly bad in my life. I have never been abused, raped, attacked in any shape or form, or had issues with drugs or alcohol (well not as a user anyway) and I have a good background and a stable home life. 

So for me to be so well versed and unshockable is perhaps an unusual response to a normal '2.4 family' upbringing. And for that reason my rationality also has a heart. Which means that although I feel the pain and my heart will get broken (which is goddamn horrible), I will come through because that's what you do. 

Life goes on and you deal with it.  And certainly experiences in the last year have made me much harder when it comes to sexual relationships (always my only weak point where rationality is concerned).

Of  course, I have never experienced a life threatening situation so I can't tell you how I would deal with, say, the discovery that I had a terminal illness. I would like to think I would do something useful with my last days, weeks or months on earth. But maybe I would take all the years of being 'nice' as licence for me to run rough shod over everything and every one. Who can tell? I haven't been there. 

What I do know, is that you should live for the moment, be grateful for every day that you are able to walk freely with good health and be thankful for what income you have and the reliable people around you. I can get insanely annoyed by petty and trivial people who whine and bitch about things they have no right to complain about. Thankfully I generally keep them at arms length. But I guess that's just me. 

Source

# 84 My big mug

This is photograph of my big mug, my over-sized tea cup. It occurred to me this evening as I rediscovered it hiding at the back of the cupboard where it's been for most of the last few years, that this is one of the few objects to have moved with me to most of the places I have lived. And I've moved around quite a lot. I am a rolling stone as my mother tells me.

I remember when I got it - there were two of them. My parents bought them at Christmas - one for me and one for my then boyfriend Andy - my first real boyfriend. I was 19 and living between Harrow and my parents house in Kent.

This mug has moved EVERYWHERE with me since then. I think that's about 8 different houses and a lot of mileage. Wow, that's a lot of water under the bridge. It also means I have now owned this flimsy bit of china just short of 20 years. I shudder at that realisation. Why, I'm not sure.

I've been looking a lot lately, at how fast time has been adding up. What with finishing three years at Uni and the discovery that I've now signed up to my fifth year in Lincoln with the same landlord (that's my only landlord in Lincoln I hasten to add) it's getting a little scary.

And since I first left home this is the second longest place I've lived anywhere (my record is 8 years). That's not bad for me. I don't have any real connections north of the Watford Gap and I'm not a home bird, I don't have many sentimental roots and I don't have any particular desire to live in any particular place. I just go where fate, work and relationships take me. It's always been the way. It's a survival tactic that seems to have served me well up to now.

Who knows where I will end up next or how long Lincoln will continue to hold me. As I said, I have no sentimental roots north of the Watford Gap. I could quite literally end up anywhere. And wherever I go next, that mug will no doubt be carefully packed into one of the many boxes I take with me.

# 83 Creative difference and the educational conundrum

I should, in hindsight, consider myself quite lucky. Being self taught in my chosen field for most of my working life I have never been governed or guided by someone else's creative limitations. But if there is one thing being at University has taught me, it is the difference between learning to be a creative, being taught creativity and being allowed to grow creatively and express myself in my own unique way.

The difficulty with teaching art subjects is that your teacher will instinctively try to push their creative styles or limitations on you. I guess it's inevitable. We all have our own opinions on what art is and how to express ourselves within our chosen medium whether it be painting, writing, sewing, photography or landscape gardening (amongst many others).

Creatives are notoriously temperamental. And rightly so. We have the right to defend our skills regardless of criticism. We are drawing from within, expressing ourselves, being who we are and more fool anyone who tries to tell us how to do our own job. That's not to say I haven't found a return to education a useful experience. I've learned to do the same thing in a new direction - realised a whole new approach and this has been a good thing.

But teaching the skills (in my case how to sew on a button, grade a pattern or the best way to lay a fabric) is one thing. Critiquing and down grading a piece because it does not fit within the hosts creative abilities or to satisfy a curriculum's check list is not in my mind how creativity and design should be taught or developed within students of any age.

It is a problem I have seen in a variety of creative mediums, not just in fashion and it has been a recurring theme in the last few weeks as final third year projects are handed in and assessed and students are not necessarily seeing eye to eye with their mentors on their final outcomes. It has made for a lack lustre ending to the academic year and to be frank, has kind of knocked the wind out of my sails.

I have been advised (and I think there is something in this) that you should just keep your head down, tick the boxes and get the grades. Once your out and on your own there is noone to tell you what to do.  But that isn't how creativity works. You can't cage a lion and expect him to flourish. You can't tell a creative how to be creative within someone else's terms and expect them to produce beautiful or highly individual work.

And this is frustrating because ticking all the right boxes, learning by rote and 'fitting the mould' might be fine for grades but it does not encourage creativity and it is not inspiring those people to go out into the world feeling comfortable in their own style and letting them be who they want to be.