The More Things Change ...

Back to SCAdia for the most part ...

As part of our Top Gear fixation, J and I have purchased merchandise. At least it's funny, which is more than can be said for most franchises. One book by Clarkson contains a series of articles written between 1985 and 1993. In one of the pieces he talks about mobile phones, and how a good model can be purchased for the princely sum of £2000, with a £50 connection charge and monthly fee of £25.

I remember those days well! In fact, as a young strumpet I would make a point of dating men who could afford mobile phones because all my money was going on travel, books and black clothes, but I still wanted to be able to call my friends from a dance party. (It gets worse, later I dated geeks so that I could use their computers to write my essays and learn about this Arpanet thingy. Some of them were very cute, though, especially after you pried them out of their cardigans and into some black stovepipes.)

This has all come flooding back to me over the last few days because Deense has gone green and was pointing out that since 1987, we've had a massive increase in consumption. You can read about that here, but I'm going off on a tangent, so don't flee if you fear the eco warrior within. When I thought back to 1987, I remembered that it was a time when we had no iPods, mobiles or PDAs, when very few people had computers (although several people on Deense's LJ piped up to say that everyone they knew had computers, but I suspect they were all 14-year-old boys at the time, which is not the same as people), and most things had an off-switch, rather than a stand-by mode.

I also had a tiny bum and perfect skin, not to mention a short-term memory, but such are the cruelties of time, taxis and the Lindt factories' output.

This led to more reminiscence as I thought about the SCA in the days that I began, and how things had changed. Last night at Stitch and Smack (the fighters have the front of the hall, the A&S crew have the back room) I was reassuring Llewen, an old old-timer, that people were actively doing things about the proposed ban on lights. He then launched into a spiel about the days when he was a big political activist in the SCA, and I realised that I had never known him then (he actually was, just before I joined). By the time I met him, he was concentrating on performance and quite loudly P-ed off with SCA politics.

This got me thinking about the people who were doing things when I joined Lochac. Some of them are still around. Rowan is still Rowan, a dignified voice of reason who can materialise at odd moments and say pertinent things from "Your Majesty, not to worry you, but the High Table is on fire and your Barons are putting it out," to "Quick, go and say hello to that person before she thinks you're snubbing her. Here's her name!"

I remember being introduced to her as The One True Rowan and thinking that must be one hell of a weight to bear, but she is also still cheeky Rowan underneath and useful Rowan all the way through, so she copes admirably, especially with her good group of friends and the ever-supportive Nico. The first time I met properly, her she helped me pattern a frock and gave me sensible advice. The next time I met her she criticised said frock in ways that were constructive and correct, and I had a momentary flash of "Hey, I'm new to making things, be nice!" followed quickly by "Omigod, I'm worthy of Mistress Rowan's criticism! She takes me seriously! I've done a good job and if I listen to her I'll do a better one!" That was a useful insight, and it alerted me to the fact that she was one of the peers who would treat newbies as though they were capable, even if it could come as a shock the first time.

Given that there was a perceived cultural division between the peerage and the rest of the populace when I joined, this was good information. It led to me being able to see that the division was maintained by people who were not peers. So the several long-time non-peer players who snarked at me in my early days and accused me of rampant social climbing were actually defending their own positions, not reporting a reality about how the game was played.

I remember how interesting it was to work all of this out. SCA social mores pretend that they are based on a meritocracy, but to a newbie at that time, it seemed that they were based on who you knew, not what. Talking with newbies these days, that doesn't seem to have changed as much as I would have liked it to.

But as you learned more about the people and the systems, it became obvious that the reason the peers seemed all to be friends was that they had all been playing SCA for years and had all learned to work with each other, many of them finding commonalities that bonded them closely. Some were former teacher-students, some began playing together, some built groups together. Of course they looked like a cohesive mass from a distance!

As you got closer, cracks appeared, especially among the Knights and Laurels. I formed my theory of A-Peers and B-Peers early on, although it took quite a few years for me to realise that there were also C-Peers. More on that later.

My first SCA contacts aside from the much-loved Coco were with people like Mouse, who was living with a Knight, Mendoza, who was good friends with two Knights and several Laurels, plus Angie the rarely seen but ever-present in conversation Pelican, and then Fabes, Elfinn, Bran and Cornelius at Festival, all Knights, all bad, bad men (but they'd make worse women). This was very helpful in that it both debunked the stupid parts of the peer/populace divide and reinforced the useful parts.

The Knights all could kill most people on the field. Mendoza's friends Mistresses Gabrielle and Marguerite did look more spectacular than most other people. Fabes, who was both a Knight and a Laurel, had made his pretty, shiny helm. The mysterious Angie was pulling half the strings behind the scenes in the Kingdom. Each had earned their dangly through skill or hard work, and each was happy to share some aspect of their knowledge. Above all, they all reinforced the idea that you could achieve any goal within the SCA that you put your mind to, and that to want to achieve was not a negative.

The sheer pragmatism of these people was quite a good influence on a newbie in those days. And their casual thoughtfulness, too. At my first Festival I was wearing my first frock, which was not spectacular, though not utter crap. Marguerite (looking wonderful) was coming up a path as I was going down, and she smiled at me and declared, "Don't you look pretty!" Instantly I decided that I was going to sew and sew until I had nice clothes like hers.

I remember well how she and Gabrielle caught my eye at that event, and how there seemed to be a gap between what they wore and what some of the people I knew better such as Tina and Mouse were wearing. A month or so later at a workshop where I couldn't do anything at due to broken bonage, Gabrielle explained that the difference came down to thinking and doing and redoing. And, of course, developing certain technical skills. It was the first glimpse of the library of knowledge these women carried about inside their heads.

Over the next few years I watched my friend Mouse go from good embroiderer to great embroiderer, and the process was exactly as they had described. At first she gathered a set of technical skills, then she immersed herself in period examples and yet more technique, and then she synthesised her knowledge and ability to the point where she could produce works that were simply exquisite.

We reigned as P&P during the period when she was being discussed for the Laurel Council, and it was interesting to see the process of how elevation happened. There were two broad directions of thinking, the peer focussed and the process focussed. Peer focussed thinking starts with does the candidate meet Corpora's criteria for peerage, and then moves to whether their work is comparable with other members of the order and whether they fulfil the technical requirements. Process focussed starts with the work and then looks at the peerage aspects.

Both ways of working have things to recommend them, and I think that they are usually a personal choice. Although I do worry when someone who is very strong on the process side gets through regardless of the peerage side. Sometimes this happens because we all get fooled into believing that individuals have put their days of deep craziness behind them. Usually there are one or two peers on the council who say "I think they're still a nutter!" and get out-voted. And in the rare case when the loony within re-emerges in full and freaky flight after dangly grantage, those peers are allowed to be rather smug forevermore, and the rest of us comfort ourselves with the knowledge we acted in good faith and that it is generally a good thing to believe that people can change for the better.

Other times it happens because the talent is so extraordinary that we allow ourselves to be swept away and forget to make sure that they have the involvement and deportment that makes up the other part of a peer. If we're lucky, the individual goes "Eep!" and leaps up to make the grade. More often it does terrible things to them and they often stop playing at a high level, or at all. Anyway, that's for more detail another time, too.

At about the same time, Mouse and Tops became B&B of Rowany. They were the third since I joined, and I have to confess that I was concerned when they took it on because they were so heavily identified as Lemmings and because Rowany had become very factionalised at that time. I needn't have been. They went out of their way to be inclusive and judged people, for the most part, wholly on merit rather than on affiliation. I say for the most part because it's not really possible to do it entirely. I know from my own experience that some people who are close to us got awards as soon as they were recommended, because we knew very well how good they were, whereas others would need recommendations from several disinterested parties before you could convince us. Mouse and Tops are not as narky as we are, but a little bit of this goes on with everyone who reigns as B&B, P&P or K&Q, even Arnfinr, who is otherwise perfect in every way (that'll be $5.75, Your Excellency. Happy now?)

Mouse and Tops's term as B&B is the time that J and I really started to identify ourselves as Rowanites. Prior to that there hadn't been that much of a Rowany to identify with during our time here. There had instead been several powerful households and two large colleges. I came in through one of the colleges and J still had ties to Mordenvale. And when I was too old to be an Ursie anymore, I identified as a Lochacian, since I wasn't an Attican, Celli, Lemming nor Lyon.

But Maeve, Aeron, Bethan, Hrothgar, Gui, Gawyne and several others at that time all decided that there should be a general Rowany, too. Maeve and Aeron trailblazed somewhat by making sure there was a Rowany campsite at Festival, which Nikki was also a part of if memory serves. I was by then a Viscountess (my peerage advice? Find a promising squire and train him up. Got me a Viscounty, County and Duchy) and they reminded me that it was important to work with the local groups as much as with the Principality as a whole. Since the Kingdom process had moved over into the useful hands of Del and Baron Stephen, and I needed something much more cheerful than the OziBoD for day-to-day SCA enjoyment, I listened. So I started to make a point of attending more baronial things, and they were right, it was fun!

Over the successive years my younger friends all took on leadership roles. Little Hrothgar who was still at school when I joined and who Gabrielle had described as permanently 11 in her head turned into this amazing adult (no longer 11 in anyone's head) and was the next to run the Barony with his beautiful and brilliant wife. It was less startling to see Helene go from newbie to Baroness and Laurel, because I had picked her early on as a woman of intelligence, taste and ability (when she turned down Uther in favour of Hrothgar, even though Hrothers was a nutter and had failed to make the trip north for the Coronet at which she planned to woo him).

Of the people who were leading things when I started, they're mostly still about albeit in different ways. Torg and Lindoret moved to Stowe. Mistresses G&M have bambinos yet are still spectacular (curse their genius). Rowan is still Rowan, Mouse is still Mouse, albeit with more titles and with a mini-Tops on the way, and Tops is as unchanging as the hills (except that he keeps learning more bits to add to his underwater city plans).

Around them a new generation of leaders has grown up, of which I was privileged to be a part. We were very lucky in many ways because we came through at a time when those who were in power were largely about education and not a whole lot about mystification. So we always knew that things were open to debate and that change was possible, even desirable when it was for the good.

I remember when J and I announced the Kingdom Poll we were told by several people that it was the worst idea at the worst time imaginable, but both the leaders that I admired, such as Gabrielle, Marguerite, Rowan and Mouse, and the leaders that I had joined with, such as Bethan, Gui, Maeve and Gawyne, all thought it was a great idea, so we knew that it would work. And it did.

Looking back, the last 11 years in Lochac have been a time when we have been very lucky to have had a long series of peers who have worked to build skills in the populace and to encourage participation. We have had B&Bs and P&Ps and K&Qs who have led with dignity and vision, but who have also been inclusive and encouraging for the most part. Those who were not have still been useful, because they bonded others together in a what-not-to-do way.

That same Llewen told me about a year after I joined that he saw me burning out quickly and becoming as P-ed off with the process as he was. While I definitely get cranky with individuals and groups when they are unecessarily thick, I've never felt despair. When I thought last night about what made the difference, I realised that it was the strength of the leaders around me that had allowed me to exercise my own leadership skills, and the bright future of leadership in Lochac that exists now, from the huge corps of Kiwi talent (Adele, Therese, BB and KK, Ulf and Alys, Angel, Benedict, Eleyne, Fina, Inigo and Cecilia, I'm barely skimming the bowl here), to the strong pool of B&Bs, to local people such as Tyg, Molly, Hunnydd, Paddy and Willem.

And that's why I'm not too fussed when things go a bit wrong. Because on the whole, things are going very right indeed. And earlier in the year, I watched Helene talk someone through how to improve her frock and I found myself saying "You look just lovely!" to a young woman. We were taught well.