Searching for Utopia

I have just finished reading Sheila Rowbotham's memoir of the Sixties. I actually bought it, um, several years ago, and have only just got to it, I do not read as much as I used too, other things have taken the place of reading, although it is still essential for me to pick up a book every single day. But the newspaper, the internet (email, and particularly blogs) use some of the time previously allocated to reading, as does, massively, crafts and the preparation for/teaching thereof. Given that I tend to concentrate on, shall we say, not-too-heavy fiction, this one easily got sidelined.

I am not recommending "Promise of a Dream" particularly, I found it long on sexual encounter, short on analysis. But it concentrated my mind. (As an aside, before I go further, it was quite startling to read that one of her longish term relationships was with someone I actually knew, his then partner rather better, but still - I may only have been on the trailing fringes, but I suppose that says something.)

I was born a year or three after her, which in the history of those times did make some difference. Compounded by the fact that at the crucial moments of 1967 -1969, I was getting engaged, married and through the first year of same, not to mention finding, getting and enduring my second job, which I loathed. (The marriage I liked.) So although some of the events of those years did have a deep effect on me, I was not directly involved. That came a few years later and in the outer reaches of the universe, ie Cumbria, rather than London or Oxbridge. Actually, I sort of managed to both drop out and in at one and the same time, which is no doubt why neither really "took". I'm not going through all that story now, I'll keep that for some time when I really want to punish people. Suffice it to say that I stepped on to a - no, what it was more like was a not-too-devastating tsunami, that carried me along for what, twenty years, a constantly shifting ride through various movements and attempts to change the world and myself. It was only when I took myself off to Bradford and did the Peace Studies post-grad course that the wave finally ground up on to the beach and left me...somewhere. (I enjoyed my time and the course at Bradford very much and learnt a very great deal, but principally that, to continue the marine metaphor beyond its reasonable span, Canute was right.)

But, I am left (hah! still) with the remnants of a notion of Utopia, but not knowing what it might be and sensing it is an impossibility. I don't find that a very comfortable place to be, of course. The world was bad enough in those earlier times, but infinitely worse now. That same tide that Canute paddled in has grown higher, and rougher (effects of climate change, no doubt). And because of that earlier activism, I can't quite successfully create that small but delicately formed private inner utopia that could be an alternative. Ah me, there is simply no pleasing some people.......

I am going to go away and think about it some more. These are merely the first ramblings, prompted by the reading and by switching on the wrong oven to cook, or not, the meal last night (don't ask).

To those with encouraging tales of successful crochet and iPod use - thank you! I am continuing, and the (Lion Brand) pattern I am using as a basis for my jacket seems promising. I also have music to crochet by. And - I have finished the beaded bracelet to go with the necklace, and am moving on to a new watch band. These are all good things.

And most of all, because of the pleasure and utility of it in the present, the thread it makes going through time and worldly space, spinning will figure large. I am sure of it.