Jess McCabe

Most people know what a domestic violence refuge is. But probably haven’t heard of independent domestic violence advisors – who help victims who are at high risk of being murdered. So I followed along two for the day, and wrote about it for Inside Housing.

Veterans often come out of the armed services either traumatised or institutionalised. It takes time to get to life on ‘civvy street’ (yes, they do refer to it like that!) One specialist housing project for ex-homeless veterans has launched a bakery, run by their residents. Now they’re launching a line of biscuits.

Thousands of homes are being given planning permission by councils in England, despite flood-risk warnings from the Environment Agency. I did a major investigation using Freedom of Information requests to uncover the scale of the problem.

Wildness is a documentary about a bar in Los Angeles called the Silver Platter. Charmingly, the bar itself narrates the film, in Spanish. I reviewed it for The F-Word.

A list of some of the professional-type things I’ve been doing instead of updating this blog:

• I got a new job. Last October I started at Inside Housing – a magazine about social housing. I’m deputy features editor there, and also edit the sister magazine Sustainable Housing.
• I’m not going to link up all the stories I’ve written since starting there, but I was particularly pleased to be able to do two features on domestic violence – one about how the government’s changes to the welfare system threaten shelters and make life more difficult for victims, and a second, where I sat in on a one-day training programme by landlord Peabody, meant to raise awareness of staff on domestic violence.
• Meeting Wolfgang Feist, the inventor of the super efficient PassivHaus, was also special. I went to Germany to profile him for the most recent issue of Sustainable Housing. Check out that hat.
• A little bit of freelance work. I did a short piece on smart cities for a Times supplement (not linkable), and some other bits and pieces.
• Public speaking. I used to be terrified of public speaking. No more! Just last week I chaired a conference on the green deal, and recently chaired a panel of MPs on the same subject. Okay, that last one was a bit nerve wracking: debating is a profession for them, after all. Not to generalise overmuch, but for us print journalists, it’s only a sideline.

Even though August is officially “silly season” and most people in the environmental markets seem to be on vacation, I’ve still managed to scramble together a couple of stories to be proud of this month. Particularly this exclusive about the attempts by the Ecuadorian government to earn carbon credits from the benighted Coco Coda dam project.

I’ve also been steaming ahead with my series on detectives for Bitch Magazine, ‘Murder, She Blogged’. Here’s a catch-up of the posts so far:

• Murder, She Blogged: Violence on Screen
• Murder, She Blogged: The Tourist Detective, Colonial Legacies
• Murder, She Blogged: Reality Calling
• Murder, She Blogged: The Thin Man
• Murder, She Blogged: Surfing Mystery Writers and the Cop-Criminal Buddy Relationship
• Murder, She Blogged: Why Detectives?
• Murder, She Blogged: The First Female Detectives?
• Murder, She Blogged: Class and Fashion in Miss Marple
• Murder, She Blogged: Retrosexism in Life on Mars and LA Noire
• Murder, She Blogged: Let’s Celebrate the Spinster Detective
• Murder, She Blogged: About the US Killing
• Murder, She Blogged: Lund
• Murder, She Blogged: Castle
• Murder, She Blogged: Detectives in Distress
• Murder, She Blogged: Prime Suspect
• Murder, She Blogged: Mrs. Columbo

This summer I’m going to be writing a series for Bitch Magazine’s blog called Murder, She Blogged, about representations of detectives, police work and crime in popular culture.

My first post is about Mrs Columbo, who had her own TV show. Lots of people hate it!

Columbo was the late, great Peter Falk’s most well-known role. We knew him by his rumpled coat, his preternatural ability to hone in on the killer within seconds, and his catchphrase, “Just one more thing…” And, of course, the references to one of the most enduring, if offscreen characters: the mysterious figure of Mrs. Columbo.

Rather than watch the Royal Wedding, I wrote this list of my top 10 female detectives for The Guardian. Nancy Drew is at the top of the list, of course.

The political situation in Germany got more complicated last week. Nuclear has always been more politically difficult in Germany, and the country decided to shut down its plants early. When Angela Merkel’s government struck a deal to extend the operating life of these plants, in return the utilities promised to pay hundreds of millions of euros into a fund to support renewables and energy efficiency.

Last week, that deal fell apart: what the implications will be for the renewables sector remain unclear, as the government hadn’t spelt out what it planned to do with that money – which represented a portion of the extra profits the utilities expected to generate from keeping those nuclear power stations going. The renewables lobby in Germany seemed fairly blase, however.

Efforts to drive up click rates for Environmental Finance’s email newsletter continued apace. In my continued fight to include cute animals in each and every week’s edition of the online news, this time sheep, posing politely in front of some wind turbines. The story is about offshore wind, but finding a photo of a sheep in a boat in the North Sea was stretching even my Google-fu. Some experimentation with personalisation produced a small but satisfying percentage increase in the click-rate.

Over at The F-Word, the task of finding the review editor team got serious. I’ll try and put together a proper post about going through this process, but I think it will have to wait until after the official announcement of the new team: which we are almost, but not quite, ready to do.

Quite a lot of political happenings last week in the UK will have some serious implications for women, so I trotted out a number of posts. One of these things is the defunding of the Poppy Project, a wonderful organisation which provides housing, counselling and support of all types to women who have escaped from traffickers.

I visited the Poppy Project and interviewed one of their staff many years ago, for the Feminist Library’s newsletter – way back when I was a trustee of the collection (go and see them if you have a chance – they live in Elephant & Castle).

And abortion rights are under threat again in the UK. Get ready for a long fight on that one.

Photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

Tattooed people get used to telling the stories of our ink. Why did you pay an artist to inject pinpricks of ink into your epidermis? Aren’t you afraid you’ll get bored of it? What happens when you get old? Do you have any more, perhaps in locations concealed by your clothing?

And the hardest question to answer: What does your tattoo mean? It’s not surprising people want to know; as much as people gripe about hipster ink, in our temporary, fashionista culture, tattoos are surprisingly permanent. Something has to be damn significant to live with your entire life. (Yes, tattoo removal exists, but no-one goes into a studio planning to get their ink painfully erased a few years down the line.)

My elephant is the tattoo which draws the most remarks and questions. Sometimes I’ll feel like explaining, sometimes I won’t: it’s not a secret, but each of my tattoos are part of the story of my life and I won’t necessarily feel like sharing that at a particular time. Or it may depend on the person asking.

There are two explanations: one simple, one difficult.

Simply speaking, it is a tattoo of the mechanical, time-travelling elephant brought to London by a French theatre company, to my permanent delight. Saw it, loved it, got it drawn on my arm.

The longer story is that the Sultan’s Elephant walked into my life at an incredibly difficult and depressing time for me. My grandfather died a few months before, and my aunt Carol – who brought me up after my mum died – had also passed away fairly recently.

A 60 foot mechanical elephant was just what I needed to see at that time. It helped me tap into a childish joy at a horrible time. I got the tattoo to keep a handle on that moment of happiness.

I’m writing about this because on Friday I’m going to the Family Business tattoo shop in Angel and I’m getting my elephant recoloured; I’ve been meaning to do this since Tomas at the now-defunct Tusk studio (yes really) did the original. Because it is quite complex, some of the colours and detail never really took. It has taken me a while to work up to the experience again.

Tomas toughened my elephant up, and I think she is also a sort of protector who came into my life when I was feeling particularly vulnerable and unhappy (despite the many things that were still good and solid, particularly Mike, also my friends.)

I’ll be posting a photo again when it is (re)done, but I thought now is as good a time as any to tell this story.

Reeling them in... (Photo credit: Frank Wouters)

Two of the stories I worked on last week were about the Fukushima disaster, and I’ve got another one underway.

The aftershocks of the earthquake, and in particular the nuclear incident, look set to dominate the news in the clean energy industry for some time to come. My feature for Environmental Finance about the nuclear policy implications – and how this has affected the share price of renewables companies – is posted, but only available to subscribers. Our whole newsroom pitched in for another story, which I co-ordinated, about whether this means the planet will miss our climate targets.

More positively, Norway made its first payment to protect Guyana’s rainforests. As the story will reveal, measuring that deforestation is in fact disincentivised under the deal is a complex affair – which has garnered plenty of criticism. However, it was an excellent opportunity to post a photo of an indigenous saki monkey (which I’ve pinched for use myself here as well). Such are the discussions which go on in a modern newsroom. Each week, I argue for a special ‘cute animals’ section, on the basis that the power of cute holds sway even over bankers and investors, and each week I’m shot down. But I am still working them into the online news where I can…

A leaked report from the World Bank shows the institution is to make more loans to renewables – at the expense of coal. But plenty of green groups are not satisfied, because the draft policy leaves room for loans to some projects – under special circumstances.

Over at The F-Word, it was a particularly busy week. Every evening saw me glued to Skype, interviewing candidates to fill a series of review editor positions. Narrowing down the right women for the job from the final list of candidates is my extremely tough task for this week.

We did manage to post a couple of features this week, regardless: Jane Fae’s will provoke sympathy from anyone who has gone through the long-winded process of changing their name, while horror films may be provoked and/or piqued by Mathilda’s report back from the Bloody Women strand of this year’s Birds Eye View film festival.

I’m not planning a career change just yet, but last week F-Word contributor zohra and I also had very small parts in this short film, conceived, written, scored, filmed and edited in only 48 hours:

PRECISION from Andrew James Sykes on Vimeo.

Only a few weeks until UK Feminista’s Summer School. Alas, the weekend of training for activists is fully booked.

But if you are already signed up, I’ll be on the ‘Women and Media’ panel with Hannah Pool and Kira Cochrane.

Image by Shirin K. A. Winiger and shared under a Creative Commons license on Flickr

Most of us are well-trained in working in a hierarchy - particularly in our workplaces. When we get involved in groups or organisations structured in other ways, it can be a challenge.

Being part of a consensus-led group, The F-Word bloggers’ collective, could not be more different to the newsroom environment of my workplace. Hungry for more help on how to contribute more effectively, I have been soaking up information as and where I can find it: much of the experience of feminist and womanist collectives is hard to access.

Joan Braderman, director of The Heretics documentary, has posted the entire archive of feminist art magazine Heresies online. Fascinating to dig through in its own right. However, one of the most precious roles of this documentary as far as I’m concerned is the interviews with former collective members about all-night meetings in artists lofts, the testy creative process of putting the magazine together – the drawbacks and benefits. Just for example, swapping roles each issue gives everyone a chance to experiment with the different aspects of magazine production, but some lessons are lost as learning is not transferred. (Look out for my interview with Joan and review of this film on The F-Word, later this month). Of course, these meetings were not recorded – and many of the insights on how to publish a magazine (or a blog!) as a collective are in danger of being lost. And we end up becoming experts in wheel reinvention.

Jo Freeman’s Tyranny of Structurelessness will leave you with no illusions that it is possible to simply launch into a collective or consensus-decision-making group with no guidance or thought:

“This means that to strive for a ‘structureless’ group is as useful and as deceptive, as to aim at an ‘objective’ news story, ‘value-free’ social science or a ‘free’ economy. A ‘laissez-faire’ group is about as realistic as a ‘laissez-faire’ society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others.”

To hone my skills at ‘doing collectives’ more successfully, I attended a very useful workshop this weekend, put on by Seeds for Change. Sparing you the thorough debrief I have  already emailed to The F-Word collective email list, nonetheless I have to link up this fantastic set of online, copyright-free resources.