Welcome to the ELS journal.

Over the coming weeks, months and lets hope years, I will be posting all my more long form contents, the photos that Instagram will have. Listicles, Infographics and all the other stuff that I want up on my site, so that perhaps I can refer back to it at a later date.

I’m going to try my damnedest to be fairly systematic about writing this, as getting into good habits is kinda one of my pet subjects.

Today I’d like to ponder the question of ‘the status quo‘, which the dictionary defines as ‘the existing state of affairs’.

All my life I have have been in a state of tussle with this phrase, even before I knew it I was already butting up against it. I simply didn’t have the capacity to conform to the ‘status quo’ I  can see that now. Of course now it is mostly a badge of honour, to be different is heralded ( mostly, if you’re lucky ) but when you are 5 years old and in the play grounds, or 13 years old and trying desperately to fit in, this inability to suck up the norm is a nightmare.

So as I went to and from with being kinda kooky and cool, or a complete social pariah, I began wondering about this thing called ‘normal’

Now I see it in predominantly socio economic terms, that the Status Quo got to be that way because it was benefiting someone. Normally someone who was making money.

For example the ‘status quo’ of schooling your children in the conventional way is mostly about Industrial western culture needing to produce basically educated people to join it’s work force. It needed them to be numerate, literate, and MOST important, compliant.

And gym membership, and television and all the other things that fit into the status quo, they too are benefiting someone, and if that someone doesn’t happen to be you or your loved one, I would recommend that the status quo can feck off.

It seems that not toeing the line, not staying in your lane, square peg, round hole type narrative could quite literally be the thing that saves me after all.

And who the hell wanted to be in the stupid netball team anyway.