Well this has been difficult. And the few short paragraphs below might not look like anything long enough to be called a chapter, even though they’ve taken me all of a difficult week to write. A week where I’d mostly thought my problem was coming from the aftershock of learning about my heart. And there is aftershock from that, obviously. But my direct problem in trying to write this week has turned out to be the chapter’s central subject, Liverpool Housing Trust.
Forcing this reconsideration, which I’ll explain.
In the place my story had got up to before that recent interruption I'm all grown up, have had various starter jobs, will soon be ending an unfulfilling time at university and then arriving at what I’ve long thought were some of the central moments of my younger life. Moments at Liverpool Housing Trust that I’d since thought had set the course of my life for the following 20 years. So they mattered to me. Except I wasn’t at all sure how much they’d still matter once I’d thought back about them from all these years later. So I decided to write the story of LHT slowly, while I thought about what time and life might have done to the story I've previously and habitually always told. Which was that the first ten years of working at LHT were perfect. And the second ten, by when I was becoming a senior manager, were less so.
But do you know what? In trying to write, and even from mistakenly publishing and sending out an earlier version of this chapter, I’ve found I’m not enjoying writing about LHT at all. That even though, in its early days, I admired and valued what the place did, and was glad to meet so many of my friends there1, from all these decades later going to LHT feels like it was a mistake. A job in an organisation where I never really found my place, and then took far too long to leave. Depressingly, just a job in the end.
Dreams would have to wait.
For now I’ll leave the film of them below as a kind of footnote. An LHT story Sarah and I made when we’d become A Sense of Place. Objective outsiders who’d never been fully inside?
“The Story of LHT." Their official 40th Birthday film from 2005. By A Sense of Place.
And here are some of those friends. Celebrated in a blog post I wrote in 2014 about LHT as it was, in the years between 1975 and the uprising of 1981.
Just came on to say I'm still enjoying these posts. I was so sorry to hear about your health problems - let yourself be looked after, and look after yourself. When you're used to being active and independent, it can be harder than you think. Sending best wishes.
Thank you Heather. And I’m glad you’re enjoying the story. The heart thing is hard, especially as I feel so well and yet the doctor and the monitoring data say otherwise. I’m guessing it will take time for me to adjust to the new reality. And if surgery does turn out to be necessary, then that’s not ideal, but I’d rather have it planned and thought about like that than done as an emergency afterwards. So thank you for your care and concern. It’s much appreciated.