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Any Other Business

30th November 2018 · Leave a Comment

WhatsApp chats are to the writer (who is also a housewife), what coffee breaks are to the working woman. The idle musing, the gossip and conjecture, the discussion and dissection of what your boss said, the niggles and the worries. When I first stopped working, the silence of the house was deafening, and I spent a good couple of years wondering how on earth I would ever get used to it. How would I find peace in the silence? The thing I missed was human contact, going to the office, seeing colleagues, being in meetings. The constant sharing of information and opinion that makes working both interesting and bearable. In the good old days, when my employer was still bouyant and super-fun, there was a morning ritual where my friend Natalie (ordained early on as my best-work-friend) and I would take the order for coffee and tea in the mornings, and queue in the canteen to get coffee tokens, to then queue for the machines, to then transfer this caffeine-infused bounty back to our peers. This was about a half mile walk in the IBM UK headquarters, wearing our suits and clip-clopping in our high heels, living the office-based dream. Oh happy days. Of course the more we progressed the career ladder, the less time there was for coffee queuing and the more time there was for fractious conference calls with irate executives, who’d missed their quarterly number.

Now, such pastimes are a distant memory and instead I plot chapters, and immerse myself in social commentary, and fret about the state of the book industry and whether I shall ever get published. I also chat to my friends on WhatsApp. My long-suffering friend Dawn, who is Godmother to our children and lives in the Netherlands, is one of the cleverest women I know. We have wide-ranging discussions on all matters and prior to speaking on the phone, I send her my agenda. This was an extract of yesterday’s:

Tonsillitis has entered the building. My boy is so ill.
Boo is lovely. She’s joined the choir.
I’m growing out my grey. Discuss.
Two jumpsuits; neither any good. I might have to get over this.
It’s so damn cold, my skin is cracking up. Oil oil oil at every application. Is this an age thing? I used to have oily skin. Now I’m like an old leather purse.
Did you watch the BBC thing on menopause? With Mariella Fostrup?
Monty’s been to the dog groomer, and I think he’s embarrassed.

On other days I send other friends random, suggestive agendas, ones which could run on an existential loop as I suspect they’ll never be truly resolved. Another extract…

I periodically lose my shit and it’s for these reasons;

Why must females do all domestic work?
Why can’t I do full time paid work and also be a functioning and lucid parent; discuss.
Teenagers behaving as if they’re ‘super rich kids with nothing but fake friends’. Name the lyrical reference.
When something spills and makes a big old mess.
Routine days where nothing fun happens.
Unkindness in any form.
The destruction of nature, and the world by human consumption.
Over commitment of my time.
The futility of wanting more and more, and it never being enough.
Finding ‘Wanderlust’ really quite disturbing. Questioning whether I have puritanical values.

Incidentally, did anyone watch ‘Wanderlust’? The TV drama with Toni Colette (whose face is mesmerising) and tells of a middle aged couple whose marriage flatlines with familiarity, and decide to pursue other, outside sexual relationships, for kicks? My reaction to it was on a level with my reaction to ‘One Husband, Three Wives’ which is on Netflix and is the kind of dross I watch when I am housebound, as I have been this week. It tells of the Fundamentalist Mormon community in Utah who favour polygamy. It blew my mind. Marriage, and all of its glorious and ugly complexities seems to me to be increasingly incompatible with modern life. I write this even though I am married and have been for nearly nineteen years. It’s a whole book chapter in its own right. Marriage, one of the single biggest constants in my life, is fraught with such frailty, but at the same time such resilience. In all cases, as with all things, it’s just about how you look at it. Which lens you look through. I observe younger women, who are in their twenties, and wonder how on earth they will navigate this realm of marriage? I look at my children who, despite the profound societal change taking place as they grow and mature, still refer to getting married and having children as the thing they will do. Of course it’s where nurture pips nature to the post. Children mimic what they see in their parents, and whilst the fundamentalist mormons may appear to have a disregard for how modern women could live, (why have one wife when you can have three?) they are simply putting into practice the family values they witnessed as children. This family rite of passage is what procreation and marriage is underpinned by, isn’t it? In a keenness to be tolerant, I watch and learn, rather than watch and judge.

See what I mean about the existential loop?

So to conclude the meeting; any other business?

J. Alfred Prufock

28th November 2018 · Leave a Comment

A year to the day since last time, my son has tonsillitis, so I am in enforced quarantine, caring for him. I’m in a conflicted throwback to the baby years, when shit really goes down at night, in those small hours when the house is pin-drop still, and he is suffering a temperature of 104. I’m desperately trying not to spread the contagion, as tonsils were my Achilles heel, and my memories of the same, miserable time as a child and teen are fresh in my mind. He and I bond in that way only mothers of teens do; when they crawl back to you needing the kind of love that only last week they swore was embarrassing and unnecessary. Mother love runs strong.

At this time of year, there is a repetitiveness to each day. The darkness means by late afternoon it feels like night. I wake in the dark, is it morning? Really? I look back on the blog from a year ago and see that I was up to my neck in it then, and I am now. Not ‘Seasonal Affected Disorder’ exactly, but an acute awareness that we are approaching midwinter. Time slips by, and I wonder how it’s nearly Christmas again?

I speak to friends and we talk, talk, talkety-talk about everything, about all things. Last week the lovely Amanda and I in a nuclear-hot, fire lit pub having lunch. Endless loops of WhatsApp chats with my buddies, dissecting life, then me alone and walking in the mud with the dog, listening to podcasts. Think, think, thinkety-think. There’s profundity and there’s mundanity. There’s a sense that everything will be ok if I could just get everything sorted, more sorted than they were last year, or even ever before. Sorted-ness has become the measure by which I judge everything. I helped my sister-in-law to move house and came away feeling that I’d helped her get sorted. Unpack boxes. Restore order. There was a disconcerting feeling of chaos as the removal men kept bringing more and more in, everything to be unpacked and fitted in. I read a lot about minimalism when I was working on a recent writing project and looked at mesmerising Instagram feeds of simplistic lives in which everything appeared to be sorted. It was intoxicating; to live simply, to own less, to mend and make do! Increasingly – and somewhat alarmingly – I want to disassociate myself from everything I own, but then simultaneous to this instinct, I furtively press ‘add to cart’ and buy yet more stuff. It’s madness. Declutter to acquire more.

I’m having a lot of thoughts about ageing, and pointedly, the grey hair rebellion, which I wrote about, has brought with it all sorts of feelings which foolishly I hadn’t expected. A disproportionate amount of time peering at my roots, and believing strongly that everyone else is too. What a curious experiment to revert to one’s natural state. Ageing gracefully, meaningfully, I have decided, is a whole other dimension. As my daughter rocks at being seventeen, I head toward forty-five. I have doubts about the process but comfort myself with an armful of manifestos, and tell myself: own it! But, middle age brings a profound new challenge to accept the way I look. I watch YouTube videos of women who have ‘transitioned’ to grey, notably this lady, who, in amongst a charming French-Canadian accent, makes some searing societal points about why women are kept in this straight-jacket of hair dye. I banish my doubts, which are mere vanity and wonder whether if I had a ‘real’ job, as opposed to the one of ‘writer’, I wouldn’t have the time to think about this shit.

I grow old… I grow old…I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

So talking to friends, sorting stuff out, thinking about the multitudinous issue of ageing, and how to wear one’s trousers, there’s a lot to be getting on with.

In the room the women come and go, Talking of Michelangelo.

I went to a creative gathering last week at Hero, the place where I ran a writing workshop last summer, and brainchild of Laura, who systematically defies the ways in which post-career, provincially-based women should think and work. She is an inspiration, actually. A roomful of women, ‘fellow-creatives’ and I wondered: is this now my tribe? The ubiquitous school mums don’t feature so heavily anymore, as I do pick up and the drop off from the comfort of my car (sometimes in my pyjamas). There’s a change from the last fifteen years, where my time was topped and tailed by a social interaction with the mothers. The creative gathering featured a demographic who were not that different, exactly, but they were not from my local community, I had not met them. When we talked, we found common ground, as women are oft to do. I noticed that some skirted around their answers to the question ‘what do you do?’ Unpractised in stating that they were a designer or an editor, or a curator. A heartbeat skipped and an internal worry when asked that question; should I have answered ‘mother’? A social experiment conducted under lovely conditions which gave me pause to think on the way home. We are all making our way, or in the words of the lyric ‘…every day I’m hustling.’ Hustle on.

Words from the poem ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ by TS Eliot

Photo by Les Anderson on Unsplash

Bet you rue the day you kissed a writer in the dark*

22nd November 2018 · Leave a Comment

I have the creative process on my mind. So often I obsess about it, of how the alchemy of words takes place, as if by knowing what others do, the magic might be captured. This preoccupation applies when I have writer’s block, or feel a weight of guilt associated with not writing. Not writing is how I would characterise the last few months, until the plug was pulled and I accepted a commission with a publisher to work on a small project. Having a deadline, and an editor, and the prospect of payment suddenly made my muse show itself.

I heard the writer Olivia Sudjic interviewed on the ‘High Low‘ podcast, and so read her new essay book ‘Exposure‘, a short, snapshot memoir of her experience of anxiety following the publication of her debut novel. The essay is a stand-alone piece – a pocket-sized powerhouse of writing and social commentary – and anyone who is writing a book, or who wants to, should read it.

Sudjic, amongst other insights, offers a critique of modern publishing and of the actions required of authors, especially debut ones. At one point, she acknowledges the population of unpublished writers, as if to say: don’t be put off. I thought back to when I did my Masters, and to conversations we had about publishing, and how the industry seemed impenetrable and mysterious. ‘Exposure’ makes for a study of old and new, antiquated and progressive, of books and of the internet. Sudjic writes with searing accuracy about how the internet age has shaped our psychologies. Of how utterly watched we are. And how crazy this makes us feel. An Orwellian fog descends.

Yet, book publishing relies on deeply ingrained, old-school truths. Sudjic’s essay could be a guiding light for the unpublished writer and, had it been published at the time, could be have been a source text for my MA. Her dissection of the publishing industry, and the ratifying role it plays, makes for stark reading. Publishers remain the gatekeepers of what thou shalt read and of how books are created, promoted and consumed. To self publish (and therefore to control your own work) is to forsake the establishment. The stereotype goes that self publishing leads to poor book sales, on shitty paper, funnelled through the monolithic presence of Amazon.

Getting a book published is almost as bad, it seems, as not getting a book published.

Peninsula Press, who brought us Sudjic’s ‘Exposure’ is a kickstarter-funded publisher, and in them I wonder if there is a fresh industry model? To have published this essay in small book format strikes me as a subversion of the status quo, and one which will enable dissenting voices to be heard. Sudjic wrote her essay to give space to the anxiety she felt about writing her much-anticipated second novel. Those of us plugging away in the no man’s land of the unpublished long to be propelled forwards into the public domain. Sudjic alarmingly describes the panic of this propulsion and the stomach-churning sense that by signing with a publisher, a writer is signing a Faustian pact to participate in absolutely whatever comes. The stress-laden aftermath of debut publishing; a social media onslaught, public panels and readings, and the dissemination of your innermost thoughts for mass consumption is something of dreams and of nightmares. The need to promote one’s book is a necessary evil, but a pay-off with a hefty price. Writers are grateful for the chance to be published, but, it appears, we must swallow it down whole.

Sudjic dissects why women write, as she challenges the way women’s creative work is described as self-indulgent and inward-facing. The sentiment can be applied to almost any creative endeavour a woman might participate in. Why write this blog? Why write anything at all? She describes writers who are stunned into silence after they’ve been published, especially those who’ve shared too much. No one likes an over-sharer. Blogging is a form of self publishing but it poses no threat. I’ve heard blogging described as silly, insignificant fodder. It’s made so by the comparative enormity of the internet, and the fact that, let’s face it, hardly anyone reads this.

At the end of my Masters, I wanted to get back to my blog, to the kind of writing what I wanted to do, when I wanted to do it. To be amongst the women who curated Instagram squares in cool, Scandi monochrome hues, and who wrote about fashion or lifestyle. After the pressure of academia, I wanted the dime store quality of a blog post that was neither fiction, nor essay, nor article. A stand alone set of thoughts sent out into the world. One which exists only as part of the internet, a beacon for those who want to seek it out. But there is also a wariness to the decision to write here, one which I often reference. I fear there being an old blueprint lurking, one which would, if I were to be published, be plundered as fair game. Everything I have ever written here a reflection of the ‘self’ which I might, through a book deal, agree was open for criticism to any reader.

As with all commentary of this type, I am left thinking, well, we must play the game. We might not have designed the game, but we must play it! What’s the alternative? To be silent? To not write? To not create? No, thank you.

*Lyric by Lorde, ‘Writer in the Dark’.

Ziggy Played Guitar

16th November 2018 · 1 Comment

Of all daily preoccupations, wearing clothes is an obvious and persistent one. I have whittled down my dissatisfaction with the British winter to include the following issues: mud, rain, darkness and the inability to wear most of one’s wardrobe due to the limitations of all of the above. I have a theory that city-dwellers escape these limitations as they have asphalt and heated buildings. The dash from road to pavement (possibly slick with rain, but not mud-strewn), to office (heated and suitably cosmopolitan) to hip restaurant or bar, and home again. Sex and the City but with coats on. Admittedly, I’m imagining a girl-about-town agenda but the fact remains that rural life in Sussex does not lend itself to interesting clothes. Summer provides a brief respite, as it did this year, and we were relieved from the confines of jeans and jumpers to wear prints, floaty fabrics, sandals (exposed toes!), our shoulders out, our skin tanned, oh the heady recollection of maxi dresses and the whoosh of linen or cotton. Now, it’s the relegation to wool. This smacks to me, every year, of a sad state of affairs.

My equivalent commute from house to car to various errands to house again does not call for sartorial variety and this is what saddens me the most. I revert to my previous career, which necessitated meetings dressed in suits and heels, and whilst I don’t miss it, I lament it. I am not even sure that the ‘office dress’ of the 2000’s exists anymore? Is dress down Friday still a thing? I recall its advent in my workplace; it provoked a subtle shift from heels to flats and that was about it. So indoctrinated were we in the need to look businesslike. What is businesslike now?

Meanwhile, I went to Marrakesh last week, with friends, and experienced the sensory onslaught of a new culture. So incongruous after the buttoned-up reality of my home country. I was fascinated to see how others interpreted the requirement to be respectful of the culture there and so cover shoulders, knees, ankles and hair. We found a middle ground, but in the same breath witnessed Brits (because they could only have been) in buttock-skimming miniskirts and cropped tops. Wtf? It was in the same vein as my trip to the races, documented here, I felt a flush of shame for what some chose to wear. Then I admonished myself as after all, tolerance is key. Wear what you want, right?

I get preoccupied with jumpsuits – as they somehow have come to represent something to me – and waste hours looking at pictures from the 1970’s. There’s a nostalgic calling buried deep, a recollection of my Mum I think, in tan Jordache velvet cords which have now taken on legendary status in my imagination, and are lost to the mists of time. No photo exists; where are they now? But back to jumpsuits; I mean the ones that are like fitted overalls, possibly worn by Farrah Fawcett in Charlie’s Angels, or by grid girls at a Grand Prix, where someone like James Hunt raced. I scour the web. I run across Bianca Jagger, marrying Mick. I secretly wish I had been married in the seventies or eighties and had one of those milk-maid dresses with puffed sleeves and broderie-anglaise detailing. I was married in 1999, and my dress, which I thought was classic, was not. Despite every intention and even stating in the bridal shop ‘it will never date!’, it was a ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ meringue. Fashion is a fickle friend.

Maybe it’s because we become used to looking at a regurgitated past in current fashions, maybe that is why I now covet pieces that are from another era. This retrospection is going hand in hand with the fact that I am halfway through my forties come Spring. That’s one to think about; see previous post on greying hair.

There’s a particular challenge to wearing clothes in your forties, which I attribute to the yawning hinterland between young and old. Middle-aged by both name and nature. Prior to forty there was an ironic insouciance to clothes. Young enough not to care. I imagine, by sixty, there will be – for me at least – a ‘don’t care’ mentality which will probably herald me wearing lurid pattens (palm tree kaftan anyone?) and oversized glasses. Iris Apfel is my idol. But right now, it’s neither here nor there. An unspoken manifesto has been embroidered into the consciousness of middle-aged women that they should look appropriate. Isn’t appropriate dressing just the worse thing?

No wonder I am despondent!

So I order the jumpsuit. I’m fairly sure it will not be fitting my rural sensibilities; it’s being sent to me from America and features David Bowie styling. Heaven help my kids.

Grey Rebellion

4th November 2018 · Leave a Comment

One thing I notice about being a writer is that ideas which cross my mind no longer just drift through, they stay, mulch in like compost, and in time become a blog post or an essay or a concept in my book. This is good, in essence, because I’ve always been a thinker, I consider it an extrapolation. The concepts vary from lofty and high brow, to everyday and banal, and this one falls somewhere between the two.

Recently, my friend Amanda said she was going to stop colouring her hair in favour of natural grey. She ‘said’ this; what I really mean is she posted it on I nstagram stories and as I scrolled through one day, in amongst a million other things, I initially didn’t think too much of it. Then my mum – who also follows Amanda – mentioned it to me. I went back over the story again, and thought: yes, going grey, there’s actually a thing called ‘Gronde’ (grey-blonde), and who knew? I googled ‘going grey’ and found out this is a huge preoccupation with women my age, and older.

I have been dying my hair since my twenties, owing to it being a mid-brown, mousy colour. I longed for those Rachel-esque streaks in the nineties. I once went a vivid, plum red, a colour that would never occur naturally. My hair was bleached platinum blonde right after university, at a hairdresser appointment where I didn’t pay attention to what the stylist was proposing. In more recent times, I’ve inadvertently succumbed to the mucky, khaki hair that happens when you over do it, and try to edge your way back to something more befitting your skin tone.

Not long after I was thirty, I started noticing grey hairs. One or two; four or five, no more than fifteen, thirty maybe? One hundred. A whole crop. Hair colouring turned from an idle dalliance to something I did to simply preserve the status quo. This continued until now, where I adhere to a regular five-weekly trip to the salon for a root cover up, and then endure a couple of days of itching scalp, two to three delightful weeks of no roots, before needing the process to start again. There is an inconsistency in the results, after all, I am pursuing what is a chemical treatment. Maybe the colour is too light or too dark, or afterwards has lightened in the sun, until I become an unenviable brassy blonde. It’s never a static, reliable outcome. I look around; everyone looks the same. All of my contemporaries have coloured hair, bar a rare few who are true brunettes, and who seemed not be greying at the rate I am. In conversation with a friend, we tried to think of one peer amongst the school mothers who had never dyed her grey hair, who was ‘naturally’ grey. We could find none. I accept these may be the circles I mix in. Women of a certain type (my type?) do not take to the signifiers of ageing readily. They cavort with artificial enhancers, hair dye being the least of it.

But the fact remains, could I be so bold as to state that no one seems to want to be grey haired? Grey hair meant old, and old meant a whole raft of other stereotypes that I couldn’t begin to unpick, they are so ingrained in our collective consciousness. It was as if to me, naturally grey hair was the flag denoting having reached a point of no return. The point after which everything important, current and vital about me would leach away. Of course I can see that this is irrational. But nevertheless…the feeling persisted.

Men go grey – my husband is going grey – and I don’t think he and I have ever even acknowledged it. The distinguished salt and pepper at the temples is accepted with an entirely different judgement to when a woman has not coloured her roots. Grey roots on a woman – especially against dark, contrasting hair – can be considered shocking, and not in an outlandish, cool way, but in a deep-seated ‘she’s let herself go’ way. It is a crowning manifestation of age (literally) that can’t be downplayed or ignored.

Is this another unspoken principle which women are required to observe, but never agreed to? An example of inequality to endure?

I start to look for positive grey hair stories, and find they abound. There are whole rafts of women who have abandoned the grey #greyhairdontcare, and the liberation they gain from a dyeing regime that is punishing, expensive and if I am honest, fairly soul-destroying heartens me. What used to be your natural state, your take-it-for-granted-hair, is something that can only be obtained with diligence, time, effort and money. That is how Cindy Crawford, aged 52 still has her infamous, lustrous chestnut mane. I no longer have a chestnut mane. Who are we kidding? The women who live in the squares of my Instagram feed are well in to their fifties, they are women I grew up with. I think we can safely assume they see a colourist most weeks.

With all of this churning away in my mind, I went to the hairdresser and in an act that I can only describe as insurgency, I told her not to colour my roots. We chose a different approach, one which might – let’s see – mean I can have less dye and more me. I endured all over ash blonde highlights, and in the moment of reveal in front of the mirror I was virtually palpitating. Seeing my grey blonde hair with exposed roots (!) caused a physical panic, a moment of fear and exposure I hadn’t anticipated. Closely followed by relief. I messaged Amanda. Solidarity sister!

It’s hardly a true revolutionary act, and I might find in a few months I revert to my old ways. But in the meantime, it’s a subtle grey-toned experiment in rebellion.

Image of the late Mimi Weddell (aged 90 in this photo).

Rage

26th October 2018 · Leave a Comment

During a discussion (although he called it a debate) about Brexit, my Dad and I skirted around the edges of rage. I felt it well up in me and tried to swallow it down, as if it were gristle, unable to spit it out and leave it on the side of my plate. The gap of generational divide exposed. My family have never been particularly argumentative but instead specialise in a kind of quiet respect that could, at a push, be described as passive.

I wondered afterwards if I am too outspoken. I wonder how it comes across when I write here, how I feature here in these posts, and whether it is a supplicated version, mindful of the tremors that can be caused by placing one’s opinions on the internet. The compulsion to write is balanced with a fear of sharing too much, or of misjudging what is appropriate. I am ‘woke’, in the urban dictionary definition of the word, a new concept which I explained to a mother friend recently. But meanwhile, I don’t like to disagree with people, I don’t want to be a person who forces their views on others. I’d rather state my views and see if anyone agrees. Live and let live.

I finished Deborah Levy’s book ‘Things I Did Not Want to Know‘. It’s a book which captures the inner monologue of your forties. A backward glance to childhood and teenage hood, to growing up in the 1970’s, at a time when mothers and fathers aren’t like they are now. She describes the strange hinterland of midlife; of crying (or wanting to) on escalators, not knowing why. From that post-book void, I ploughed in with another, and listened to Lily Allen’s ‘My Thoughts Exactly‘ which lays her childhood bare and tells of the heartbreaking lack of attention she experienced. It seemed sacrilegious for her to expose her parents in this way, when assessing them by today’s standards, but as she alludes to in the narrative, she presents the facts. Whatever my feelings, the book is exceptional. The judgement is ours, as readers. Her honesty blew my mind. I think to myself; her parents did not see it as their role to form and nurture the humans they made.

Levy notes in her book that women mustn’t write in rage, because rage will discolour meaning. We must write in calm, or else we won’t be taken seriously. But what do we do with the rage in the meantime? I get a flashback to passing a country house retreat in Devon where ‘Women’s Screaming Therapy’ was advertised on an innocuous roadside sign. Screaming seems futile and more often than not, any rage I feel dampens down eventually and I continue on without it. Women are intrepid. Acceptance is key; rage is not. Rage comes from a place that does not move forward, but is stuck in an unending cycle of red.

The generational divide remains a fascination to me, though, and I excuse all manner of behaviours from the past because that’s just how society was then. I find myself referring to this in conversations with my husband, my Mum, my friends, to those who can see that society has lumbered along since, lets say, Y2K, and there has been a seismic shift. Do you reminder Y2K?! The end of the world. Binary code and computers without instructions. It didn’t amount to much. Instead, there have been a series of lesser known quakes taking place under my feet. The tectonic plates of family, work, marriage and parenthood have all formed new continents.

My husband calls. The dog sits at my feet. Waiting.

I think of the rage of other women. Ones I know and ones I am only acquaintances with. Rage about failed marriages, divorce and having children who rebel. Rage at promises broken. Rage at not having enough money or not having the lifestyle she might have envisaged for herself. Rage at the deal she might have made with herself to accept that which is unacceptable. Is this rage about loss? I think of those times when I’ve seen women lose their shit on Facebook, late at night, after they’ve had their wine. It’s that witching hour, when women email unsuspecting recipients and spill their vitriol; at the teacher, the volunteer sport coach, the retail outlet where she bought something that wasn’t to her expectations, and lambast the page, as unfair and unnecessary as a hurricane. I do it myself when everything gets too much, like this week, in the supermarket, where the plastic that everything was wrapped in tipped my balance and I became one of those awful huffy, shouty women whose children look at the ground and are embarrassed by. This particular kind of rage – the middle aged kind- seems to come from a deep source which is more often than not covered up. No one likes an angry middle aged woman. Younger women might have more leniency in this regard, but beyond the age of forty, forget it!

This is what Levy alludes to in her book. The secret inside which stokes the flames. So the irony is that we read about mindfulness, meditation, self care, taking a nightly bath and eating vegetables and trying so damn hard to quell the feelings. As if calm is the panacea to everything that life throws, from plastic, to politics, to wrinkles, to parenthood and onwards. Take a deep breath. But is it?

Quit your job. You’ll be fine.*

10th October 2018 · Leave a Comment

I have a cold. This means a self-imposed quarantine of long, quiet days, spent waiting for recovery. The kind of sick day that used to be alluring, when I was working, or before I had children. Now, it means solitude, until the collection of my children after school, then the normalcy of weekday life reverts in the evening hours, but with congestion, a headache, aches and sniffles.

I am left with my thoughts. When unwell, it’s hard to imagine being well again, which sounds ridiculous but is true. My body under viral attack, I trace back to when I last felt this way as if I can identify the rogue bug and eradicate the possibility of repeat. It was last winter; skiing, a dormant French hotel room. My efforts to stay healthy border on obsessive, I have little patience for this. My life is predicated on my being well; the cogs don’t turn unless the engine is running. My children look at me reproachfully when there’s no bread in the house.

I watch too much Netflix – end to end ‘Killing Eve’, that pink dress! – and documentaries about the environment. I feel so fretful about the environment I have to check myself. I am being brainwashed by the scaremongers. But the more knowledge I have, the worse it gets. It seems, in this instance, that the scare mongers might be right. I’ll tell you what. When global temperatures rise by 2 degrees, and the ice caps melt, and the planet is too hot to even go outside, I’ll see you on that last piece of remaining, un-flooded land, and we can watch the plastic containers float by, and wonder whether it was worth it. It’s a dog’s dinner, or, as my friend messaged me last week: ‘we are fucked’.

In a flurry of luck, in my sickened state, I got Glastonbury tickets on Sunday. I’m almost ashamed to admit this because they are so desirable, and so hard to come by, especially this year, that I remain incredulous. Early morning; multiple devices, an incentivised teenage son sitting next to me, rapid refresh, mouse clicking, abject frustration as the connection drops, we get booted out. The registration page, the payment page, the confirmation page, all flash up in a striptease, pressing forward, click, click, click. A bizarre technological dance which abruptly ends with ‘BOOKING COMPLETE’ and I feel adrenalin like I’ve scaled a mountain. Surfed a wave. Done something other than sat in my pyjamas. I wonder if I want them so much simply because they’re hard to get? Then I remember how much I love Glastonbury and how utterly freeing it is to stand in a field and experience music so loud it makes your organs vibrate, and to do it with hundreds of thousands of other humans.

I start listening to the audiobook of Deborah Levy’s ‘Things I Don’t Want to Know’ and find it cripplingly, awe-inspiringly good. It’s the kind of book I want to write. This has a dual effect. Half inspiring, half terrifying. Deborah’s written it already. Deborah can write the innards of my mind, as if un-spinning a knot of wool. I’m only a smidgen in, and I know I will love it already. And hate that its been done. This is how it goes with writing. No longer do I have thoughts and allow them to pass through. Now my thoughts have become a thing I must capture, I must write down, I must turn into something that is work. Quit your job. You’ll be fine.

I observe the shit show of American politics playing out on the news and feel the bile of conflict. Everything feels off. Theres’s conflict with the process, conflict with society, conflict with the commentary. I read a lot, and liberalism seems to pervade my newsfeed as I realise I have concocted a partisan following in support of feminism and an egalitarian sensibility. I read a lot of women writers who suggest in their language that all men who are accused of sexual misbehaviour are guilty, because, well, because…men. This troubles me, and I wonder whether any of those women have teenage sons who are about to navigate the treacherous water of gender politics in coming years.

I watch old family videos, trying to locate one of my daughter, aged one, laughing, giggling uncontrollably, the baby girl she was. The DVD is no longer compatible with our machine, and I wonder how I can regather those images. Later DVDs obligingly play, leaving me questioning why the one from 2002 is considered defunct? What happened in 2002? In 2003 I look young, and brown-haired, and really, really slim, despite doing zero exercise at that time.

I feel viral, weighed down, and shuffle around my house wearing a weird, old, dowdy Alpaca cardigan that reaches my knees. The postman comes. I discard the junk mail envisaging land fill; rotting catalogues for things I never wanted. I make mushrooms on toast (I went shopping) as a comfort food, like my mum used to make me, sautéed in butter, with garlic, and scattered with chopped parsley.

I message my writing group and they put me straight; ‘just write’ they say. We console each other. The virus is making me jaded. I turn to the blog because it’s the least demanding way to write. Type. Preview. Publish! Oh so easy! So here it is.

*Craig Ward typographer.

‘People who love to eat are always the best people’*

5th October 2018 · 1 Comment

I was infamous amongst my university housemates because I resolutely did not cook. I arrived with a bag of tangerines and some cheese, and proceeded to live off that until my friend Emma took pity on me and shared her sweet and sour stir fry. This continued throughout my student years, until I lived with my future husband, who then took over the mantle of cooking. He was – and is – a gifted cook, and won his way to my heart with, amongst other things, food. We married and he cooked, whilst my own repertoire was limited to pasta. This worked fine for the years we cohabited in early marriage, and until we had children, at which point (coincidentally?!) his job meant he had to work away some of the time, and my job (mother) meant I had to prepare food for my babies. Even then, I didn’t really cook, and was reluctant to do so. This seemed entirely reasonable to me and was a product of my generation, right? Just because I was the woman, why should I be the one to prepare our food? I was proud of my inability, because deep down I thought cooking represented some vestige of the past. I didn’t cook because dammit, I didn’t have to. I’d married a man who did it for me. It seemed the ultimate in gender progression. Cooking was the same category as tidy cupboards or keeping orderly admin. Dull. Dated.

What I failed to appreciate was that my own lack of skill rendered me disadvantaged as our family grew. I could not feed my children home cooked food. I could not cater a dinner party. When I maintained my career, I made cooking out to be one of life’s pastimes that I was way too busy to participate in. But in time, as my career dwindled, and my children grew up, them having a mother who couldn’t cook became somewhat unhelpful. Plus…I love food.

So I learned to cook, as chronicled here and I now do so religiously, stopping in the past few weeks to photograph the daily offering (I’ll share the results on instagram). This is, in part, as a testimony of my own cooking capability (I am proud of how far I’ve come; I make no bones), but also in readiness to teach my daughter to cook, for a time in future when she will not have me doing it for her. The empty nest over the horizon makes mothers do all sorts of odd things; photographing food for recipes, walking through her empty bedroom when she is at school, and feeling heavy-hearted about it, being incredulous on the prospect that soon she will be driving.

I realised, like so many realisations since I turned forty, that cooking is one of life’s pleasures, and being able to cook is a gift. Cooking for friends or family is like giving yourself, your time, your goodness, to a process that nurtures. The same applies to baking, which I have entirely not mastered, but which I see has the same profound effect. I read the book ‘Heartburn’ by Nora Ephron recently, a story peppered with recipes, as it tells a tale of a cook whose marriage falls apart. The meaning she instils in food, and its significance to events in our lives, is not lost on me. My best memories are from around tables. My mother’s food is the route to all solace and contentment. My recollection of my Danish Mormor’s gooseberry tart, or her ‘frikadelle’ and gravy remains the sweetest reverie. Her gravy, its unlikely components passed down like folklore in our family (milk, and tomato ketchup) sums up how the women in my family behave. There’s a degree of nonchalance, hopefully some style, and old-fashioned, understated know-how. I see now that for years I didn’t understand the relevance of these distinctions.

In short, knowing how to cook has made me wise, not just about how food behaves when its prepared and heated, but also about feeding my own moods. Of knowing my own mind. And, I suppose, crucially, of escaping my thoughts at the end of a day. Cooking enables an emptying out of the mind. I’m an advocate of vegetables because they don’t misbehave, they rarely poison people – when they’ve gone off, you can tell, – they’re healthier and cause less waste. This is why most meals in our house are based on vegetables with meat (sometimes) and not the other way around. Again, an example of the ideological u-turn provoked by age. As with most things that I now think, but didn’t used to, I wonder if its simply because I have time? I can almost feel the trolls saying ‘yes, but, we’d all cook if we had your privilege of time,’ and maybe that’s true.

Meanwhile – and I’ll be quiet, and finish with my evangelical tone just as soon as I point this out – I discover companies like this, who are proponents of real produce, homegrown, to be cooked from scratch and without being wrapped in plastic. Bananas in plastic? Courgettes in plastic? Avocados in plastic? Everything swathed in it. Frankly, it’s freaking me out. I suppose this is what they mean by wisdom; just because we’ve always done something a certain way just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. I receive a text from my daughter; ‘what’s for dinner?’

*Julia Childs

Retrospection

28th September 2018 · Leave a Comment

I had such high hopes for September. The summer holidays over, and a stretch of uninterrupted time weaving ahead of me, a lovely long road, with all the possibility of the words I would write, and the things I’d get sorted. Getting sorted is a key preoccupation, getting ahead of every little thing. If I am ahead, then there will be time to write. If there is time to write, maybe I will make some headway with the book. During my Masters degree, when I had submission deadlines, I would take myself off to work and of course it all got done, because it had to. One of the hardest parts of post-academic life is that the deadline is one I have set myself, and it is my self-discipline which dictates the word count. All the best intentions…

My daughter and I are doing university tours. We visit on open days, speak to undergrads and talk about course structures and her suite of worries are entirely different to my suite of worries. The prospect of packing her off to university seems far-off and implausible, but of course, I know it will come. The excitement is counter-balanced with a sense of…not regret…but a bittersweet awareness that her childhood is drawing to a close. Conversely, as my son enters his teens (like a marauding rhino), I recognise the same feelings I used to have about her. The parental readjustment required to at once allow growth, but to also provide boundaries. The conversation on boundaries revisits with alarming regularity, and I find myself thinking: didn’t I explain this last week?

Last week my son was injured playing rugby. All my years of being poker-faced on the sideline came to an unceremonious end as I stood, striken and peering through the rain, waiting to see if he was going to get up from the mangled pile he had been at the bottom of. It’s a curious thing to see your child injured and to see others administer to him, and after some time, when he did get up and was clapped off by the opposition – keen to get on with the game – I felt grateful he was OK. Later, sitting in ‘Accident and Emergency’ in hospital waiting for X-ray results, the feeling persisted. Acute worry, and the love, and the incredulity of how danger and threat can come for you, unannounced. And always in the knowledge that there are other families, other mothers, whose children are more injured or more sick, and a swathe of gratefulness floods over me again, rendering me quiet and vacant. A few days later and we see a surgeon, after the swelling subsided. He’s fractured his cheek bone in three places, and I find myself wondering whether it was my fault that he was raised to love a game that is so fraught with injury. We are a rugby family and I married a rugby player, and I’ve never known any different. To us; the merits of the game far outweigh the risk.

There’s a reluctant medicalisation. Ironically, I had been reading ‘This is Going to Hurt‘ by Adam Kay, the memoir of a junior doctor, which describes the ailing NHS and what it’s like to work within it. I sit opposite medics, on the receiving end, and wonder how long they’ve been on their shift. I have an urge to be kind and polite to them, as we sit and read posters on the wall that say: ‘physical abuse against our staff will not be tolerated’ and I wonder who on earth resorts to physically abusing staff, those whose job it is to help? We observe the other punters and how everyone tries, surreptitiously, to deduce everyone else’s symptoms. It’s not always obvious.

It struck me as we waited (another waiting room, another part of the hospital) that it’s these sorts of events that inform my writing. Writing itself doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but instead is – for me at least – an after-affect of life. It was Anaïs Nin who noted: ‘we write to taste life twice.’ My children, and my observation of them has always been a source; there’s an event, a feeling, the witnessing of a moment. Then there’s my musing afterwards.

Meanwhile, there are breezy, brisk Autumn days. Crane flies cling to the outside of the windows, their spooky legs stretched wide, in contorted squats. Everything seems to be drawing inwards, homewards, ready for the winter months. Maybe I am a winter writer? Maybe the introspection of cold and darkness is what is needed? Or maybe, life just gets in the way of my words? Maybe I make too many excuses? Whichever way, I am good only for dog walks and quietness this week.

A Book in a Book

13th September 2018 · Leave a Comment

I reluctantly enjoy this time of year, despite the fact it heralds a slide into the interminable British winter. The short days and short tempers of my compatriots don’t stop it feeling like a fresh start; out with summer, in with autumn. There are still hints at lushness; green grass, ripe blackberries, crops ready to be harvested. I walk with the dog around my familiar fields, and note the soft crust of the mud, which in a few short months will be frozen. Or worse; dank, sodden and rain-soaked. It was at this time of year that I started my Masters degree three years ago, and I sat amongst other wannabe writers, wearing writerly clothes and clutching writerly notebooks, in which we intended to pen our masterpieces. I felt I blagged my way onto the course, my evidential body of work was this blog, and a stilted short story about a school girl called Cressida, who wanted to rebel against her parents. My tutor, during a Skype application interview, asked me what I did when I got really stuck with my writing. I floundered over my answer to that question, she might have seen through me, she might have known I was a novice, and ‘my writing’ consisted of blog posts that were haphazard at times, and focused too much on clothes shopping rather than searing life commentary. I’d never been really stuck with my writing, because I only ever wrote when I felt like it, about frippery. I knew more about brand development and search engine optimisation than about how to unstick a stuck paragraph.

So when I got the place, we sat, day one, in our studio and went round the table in a sweat-inducing introductory session where we were asked to outline the plot for our novels. There was some invisible peddling, resulting in various iterations of ‘I might focus on…’ and ‘I’ve always wanted to write about…’ and such like. I said I was going to write about a school setting, mothers specifically, in the privileged environment of private education. Prep school. They nodded. Moving on. I had no more a clue of what my plot was then, than I did after a year of the degree! A plot stubbornly alluded me, and any measures I took to secure it, despite intensive workshopping with my peers, left me with a flimsy structure, a plot with the strength of a wet biscuit. I knew it. My tutor knew it. But my writing was good. Thank God, my writing was good. I chased ghosts of plots, and developed questionable preoccupations with themes; women, teenagers, competitive mothers, wealth, marriage, disillusionment, until I felt I could cobble a novel together. And so I did. I wove in concepts like a houseboat location, and set the novel by the water so that when I took daily walks by the shore, I could note tree types and tidal nuances, and that felt like book research. I asked my teenage daughter’s unsuspecting new boyfriend, on his first visit to our house, how he might behave if he were attacked by a swan, all in the name of reasearch. I contacted a swan sanctuary, and became an expert of the monogamy of the birds. And although this lent depth to my work, it did not give me a plot.

I remember it fondly now, with a wry smile, and see that the Masters was the ultimate learning exercise; of course it was. The academics twinned with the realisation that although I’d written a book, there were issues with it. I spent a lot of time then (and now) pondering whether I was good enough. Why couldn’t I find a plot? Who knew plots were so damn elusive? I came to the conclusion I needed a brain the size of a planet to manage one; I had enough trouble keeping track of my real life, let alone the fictional one I might create. Thankfully, I graduated, the first draft of my novel nestled safely and mutely in a folder entitled ‘book’ on my laptop, and thought; ‘well that was that’ all the while weathering the probes of friends and enemies alike. ‘Have you finished your book yet?’ To a writer, that’s the equivalent of a mother asking at a coffee morning why your toddler isn’t walking yet.

My writer friends and I used to talk about when we would become writers. Would it be when we finished a draft? When someone else read it? When we got an agent? When we got published? When a box full of pre-sale proofs arrived? When we saw our book on the shelf in a bookshop, or on Amazon in the best seller list? When we won a literary prize? Oh, the mind boggles. When we overheard two people discussing our book? When our book was the subject of a book club evening? When we started the second book (you’re surely a keeper at this wretched pursuit if you can do it twice)? All of the above? None of the above? The ribbon unspools. I guess the point is there is no defined or accepted time. You learn how to do it, then you reflect, then you write a bit more, then you stop. Then you start. Now, I see that it was all part of the process. Or at least part of my process. There are a million writers following a million different paths, like any creative in any profession, there are highs and lows; you move forward, you move back. It’s a game of snakes and ladders with more snakes than ladders, for sure. But that’s OK. There is time. It’s the season of fresh starts, and mine will be finding the book in the book.