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The World as I Know It

14th March 2019 · 1 Comment

A flurry of new followers arrive, maybe because I was kindly referred to in my friend Amanda’s blog post, or maybe because the book I wrote might have sold a copy or two, or maybe because someone was absent-mindedly scrolling #writersmind or #midlife and found an Instagram musing of mine. It’s mind-blowing to think of the ways that paths might cross. I wonder what it’s like to not have an online presence, to exist only in the real world (or should I say: ‘irl’. That’s ‘in real life’ to the uninitiated). After swearing off Instagram recently – Facebook is pretty much dead to me – I’ve looked closely at my social media use. I am more a silent observer than an active participant. So indoctrinated am I, that I find it natural to voyeuristically scan the Instagram stories of people I don’t know, in their beds and bathrooms, in their pyjamas, in a state of undress. I wouldn’t answer the door to the postman in that! How curious that online we are so embracing and accepting of the sharing mentality. We can’t get enough sharing. Or maybe that’s just me?

In this constant state of human observation, the writer in me gets overloaded. There’s just so much to think about. Whilst out running by the water one morning this week, catching the glorious deep blue, high tide before 8am, I was so full of words that I considered stopping to type them into my phone. This would have messed with my Strava statistics, so I carried on, storing the words in my mind like nuggets. I wish they’d design an app that could automatically capture my thoughts for me, and convert them into text. That would be cool (and terrifying). Instead I give myself mental bullet points and run faster so I don’t forget. Then I forget. Is it possible that the brain fog associated with midlife is conspiring to keep me from getting that key piece of social commentary down on paper? If I were to characterise my writer’s mind it would have two distinct halves. The romantic notion of writing as a whimsical, pleasurable activity (writer’s shed in the garden, anyone?), and the fact that writing can be an up-at-dawn siege on the brain.

Meanwhile, I buy new spectacles, and idly wonder whether that will make sitting in front of a screen for hours easier.

I procrastinate and internet shop. Some of the clothing brands I follow have changed their models; they’re now multi-faceted, multi-racial, multi-everything, and look like model versions of the real women I might see on the street. There are larger models and ones whose bodies don’t resemble the stereotypical clothes-horse versions I am used to seeing. I notice this, and react to it, even. Sometimes, I feel the clothes look less appealing – I am ashamed to admit this – and have to check myself. A fantasy exploded. I am sufficiently ‘woke’, so why do I not embrace this shift? Real women, selling real clothes?

I consider that I was brought up on a 1990’s media diet of supermodels. As a teenager, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford graced my bedroom walls. One of the first things I did when I earned my own money was buy a copy of Vogue, just to see what high fashion was all about. Tatjana Patiitz, swimsuit-clad, on a black-sand beach was the exotic counterpoint to my rural, mud-splattered fourteen year old self. Back then, I bought glossy magazines and pulled out pages to collage my bedroom wall. Surely, it’s no different to what my teenage children do now when they curate their feeds? They scroll Instagram, I worry it’s going to rot their brains, yet I did the same exact thing back then, but without the technological immediacy. The issue with instagram is that it never runs out of wall space.

Models from the past were unobtainable in their beauty, they were as relatable to me, in my suburban British life, as an alien might be, from another planet. Only when Kate Moss was discovered, and it transpired she came from Croydon (a mere fifty miles from where I lived) did I acknowledge that beautiful people might exist in the real world. So what is there to make of ‘real women’ models? It’s good, necessary and about time. But it does make me question the extent to which social conditioning has affected my perceptions. The myriad ways that my generation were raised to think certain things were attractive or unattractive. I can hope that future generations of women can view beauty differently, and won’t have been so conditioned. After all, this is the whole point of change, the paradigm shift that over time takes the abnormal to normal, or back again.

I took my daughter for an offer day at the university of her choice (just the small matter now, of getting the grades to get in) and decided there is nothing more sobering that imagining your first born living on their own for the first time. Recollections of my own university life spiral back at me, Scooby-Do style, and I simply can’t articulate how recently that phase of my life seems. How can it be that I now have a child who will go instead, and I will be the sobbing, greying mother who will have to drive away and reconcile the empty house when I get home. My husband and I might look at each other, full of the knowledge that by then, years will have passed since this happy camper came bombasting into our lives. Our daughter turns eighteen this summer, and the prospect is at once surreal and awe-inspiring. We raised an adult! Look what we did! She remains the most beautiful girl I know, biased as I am. My memories of her flit back to her baby days, when the 2000’s had just started and the 90’s were a recent decade. Meanwhile, March now takes hold. It was my 45th birthday this week. What is it they say? Don’t look back, you’re not going that way.

Photo by Unsplash

Millennials and Me

27th February 2019 · Leave a Comment

The hiatus from writing builds up, until I find myself awake in the small hours, furtively typing misspelled notes on my phone, afraid I’ll lose the gist before daylight. Notes which turn out to be jumbled expressions of my half-asleep brain. Not much use for anything, and yet I still dodge writing in the daytime. Last night, I decided I needed a writing shed. In our garden there is a disused shed; I say disused, I mean it’s full of the kind of family detritus that assembles when your children peddle through the stages of toddler to child to teen. Redundant pieces of sports equipment, boogie boards, bike helmets (out-grown), the polystyrene edges nibbled by mice, unused barbecue briquettes from long lost summers. There are pieces of furniture which we’d felt we couldn’t part with, so instead relegated them to the shed and now, years later, they’ve moulded, veneers lifting away with damp. There are vestiges of the failed beauty business I once embarked on. A broken kite.

So this shed, I think, could be the answer. I could renovate it, Scandi-style, and sit out there with the dog and write. What an idea! I look on Pinterest for ‘writer’s shed’ (by this time it is 2.08am; the brain is awake) and note Roald Dahl had one. By 2.10am I am my own version of Virginia Woolf in a room of one’s own. A whimsical notion of old fashioned type writers and battered note books. The romantic, cinematic version of what it is to write a book.

There is some normality to restore now, after a couple of months of upheaval. I revert to where I left off, but have lost my rhythm. The writer’s shed idea is undoubtably a ploy. Like the part in ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ where Liz Gilbert tries to meditate but instead her thoughts turn to what her meditation room might look like should she design one. I listen to podcasts to distract myself and realise I have fallen into a groove of listening to clever, millennial journalists who have, in their cleverness, nailed the podcast medium with alacrity. For example, the eloquence and self-awareness with which Dolly Alderton articulated herself on Emma Gannon‘s ‘Control, Alt, Delete’ was so impressive, it was, quite frankly, disarming. I was not like that at thirty years old. Far from. There’s an openness that is so refreshing. And don’t get me started on the impossibly good commentary of Pandora Sykes. Elizabeth Day is another. Her podcast asks the profound question: how to fail?

I ask myself, were I to answer that question: what would my failures have been?

I flunked my A-levels. I thought I had put this one to bed, but actually it remains the single defining moment of my education and led me down a path that I might not otherwise have taken. It wasn’t catastrophic, but it was sub-par and I wish I’d done better. I wish I’d worked more. The fact was that at 17 years of age, the last thing I wanted to do was revise history. Entirely not interested. I suspect I relied on the possibility that I might be a genius and snag ‘A’ grades regardless, simply from my intellect. Turns out that doesn’t happen (at least not for me) and the only way to get those grades is solid hard work.

I landed a job when I graduated university, in the marketing department of a large publishing house. This was a gift of a job and was exactly what I should have excelled at. I had a three month contract and fully expected to be extended to permanency. But then, when the three months came to an end, they let me go. On reflection, years later, when I was adept at hiring gradates myself, in an other career, I realised I’d been too sure of myself, and it had concerned my superiors. I could not comprehend it at the time, but after I saw that I had breezed in, newly qualified with my degree, and thought I have arrived. Turns out that professional arrival is not about turning up; it’s about time, energy, humility and graft. But most of all, time.

The difference for me and my generation was that there was no constant analysis of these failings. These failings were the natural stepping stones to building a career, to maturing as an adult. There were no ready-made reassurances that I would survive and thrive again, there were no life-affirming quotes on Instagram. I did not, as it happened, look inward to assess whether I was suffering from depression or burnout. I did not cross-reference whether I was exhibiting anxiety symptoms, and I did not reach for a self-help book on managing said anxiety. Life just went on, and not much happened other than I eventually worked it out and continued on my way. Of course the preoccupation we now all have with our own psychological landscape is good; we check our emotional pulse on a daily basis. But I can’t help questioning whether this self-regard might be detrimental. I spend a lot of time level-setting things with my teenage children, helping them to see that the world will keep spinning even in they fail that test or fall out with that friend. It will all be OK. Even during the darkest days, evidence bears out that in time, it will be all OK.

My most potent sense of failure was in early motherhood – when my days were punctuated by the small successes (she sleeps!) and the small failures (she cries!). These moments would linger like a haze as I learned to come to terms with the complete lack of control I had for my own life, and that of this new human we had created.

So whilst the millennial fixation with self-care, self-analysis and self-knowledge makes for great podcasts, articles, essay and novels, the pressure must be immense. Like so many comparisons of past and present, was my being unaware an explanation for my experience? I am a member of Generation X. I came of age in the late 1980’s, was at university in the early 1990’s. I am the slacker generation. I didn’t know to douse myself in self-regard, so instead forged into adulthood feeling untethered. This led to years of stumbling with the lights out. I couldn’t have been less self-aware. But the result is that now, when self-awareness has arrived at the door, it is a revelation. This is why women in their forties these days exude an aura of zero fucks given. We’ve worked it out and I sense that will only continue. Millennials speak of having it all and I am struck by the consideration they give to life choices – but are almost paralysed by choice. Whether to get married and have a family. Or not get married. Their liberal sensibilities untested as life lays ahead of them, rather than behind. ‘Quarterlife’ and the early milestones of a passing decade denotes the transition of youth, but crucially, not the loss of it. They talk of having babies, but they haven’t decided yet. Career jostles with fertility. Can we have it all?

I have yet to read millennial-favourite Sally Rooney‘s second novel ‘Normal People’. My mum did and remarked ‘…there’s a lot of not much happening; they get together, they break up. It’s not really my thing.’ Her generation need substance in their fiction; the minutaea is not enough. After all, they grew up post-war. They really knew about people losing their shit.

What would I have been like as a millennial? I am a full generation ahead of them; I am pre-internet for crissake. I have written before about the gulf between my generation and my daughter’s here, and this preoccupation endures. The canyon of life experience between thirty and forty five – the milestone I will reach next month – is vast. Motherhood a raging river. Career a river bank. Marriage a raft. It is these things that I muse over now, in readiness for my mid-forties.

Photo by Arno Smit on Unsplash

A Love Letter to the Planet

13th February 2019 · Leave a Comment

A few months ago, I got the opportunity to take a commission from a publisher, to write a non-fiction book about the environment. It was apt and timely, as I’d chartered further and further into the territory of eco-awareness, plastic-free shopping, and plant-based eating, and I found myself immersed in all things ecological for this project. I’d dabbled in ‘green’ living, and lamented plastic use, but I found it difficult to change my practices to create a new everyday reality. Conceptually, I knew what to do – reduce, reuse, recycle – but I was weighed down with the enormity of it all. Making changes seemed to require a disproportionate effort, which in turn led to my feeling ineffective and guilty, so I’d end up doing nothing instead.

I’d developed an interest in those who were able to make the changes, and followed Instagram accounts of delicious vegan food and minimal living. I would covet the lifestyle, but still struggled to emulate it. Somehow my home did not resemble the serene, less-is-more surroundings of those I saw online. But what I realised – consistent with so many things in modern life – is that what it looks like is not what counts! I found that instigating a few simple changes made a big difference to my resolve. I started composting, just by siphoning off waste that would biodegrade. I bought reusable cloths instead of kitchen roll. I got rid of aluminium foil and cling film, and started using beeswax covers. I became more interested in vintage clothes, and in the fabrics my clothes were made of. Cotton, linen and wool were in; polyester and viscose were out. But even then, there were myths to debunk. Cotton has a huge impact in chemical and water use. I started watching documentaries which enlightened me to this fact. Suddenly, things like Christmas wrapping paper and heavily packaged gift packs became undesirable. I bulk-bought food staples and decanted in to Mason jars. I became quite the larder enthusiast!The more I focused on habits, the more committed I became.

I am not saying it’s easy; sometimes it feels like there’s a conspiracy underway to ensure that every item I want to buy is swathed in plastic, but I guess the point is, I started trying, and it made me feel better. And as for how much meat we eat, it’s significantly less. My children are now used to bean chillis and lentil bologanise. I am at the point where I feel as if eating meat every day will become as non-sensical and socially unacceptable as smoking in restaurants or on aeroplanes once was.

In my research for this book, I found that minimal living goes hand in hand with thoughtful practices, and it’s good if there is a general impetus to slow the pace of daily habits, so that our care for the environment increases. After writing this book, my choices became more deliberate, as I simply grew more aware. So many of my decisions were made without thought; where my clothes originated from, how my food was packaged, how many miles an item had to travel to be delivered at my door. I didn’t consider how so many components of the modern, Westernised world have an unseen environmental impact. I wrote without manifesto – albeit this is a potent political issue – but as a lesson to myself, really. It was also a lesson in being open to writing projects that offer scope and breadth, rather than specialising in one thing, or accepting just one way of reaching the goal of being published.

I wanted to pare everything down, make it manageable, and real. The book is light and concise; part advice, part awareness, and in it, I cycle through a large array of every day considerations, many of which are presented in easy and practical ways.

The book is called ‘Save The World: There is No Planet B‘ (great title, hey!?) and is published by Summersdale Publishing. The book is published tomorrow, on Valentines Day, and is available to order/buy on Amazon here!

Finally, ‘The Independent’ have reviewed it here:

‘“The Plastic Problem”, as Louise Bradford dubs it, is just one chapter in a title that covers all the major issues our planet is currently facing. From water conservation to shopping more ethically, there are practical bullet point suggestions for ultimately living a more minimal life, and limiting your impact on the world as a result. In it she argues that we can’t wait for big corporations to clean up their acts. Instead, we all have a duty to do our bit to save the planet. If that sounds a little preachy, rest assured the book is clear that any effort is better than none, and that we can only do our best.’

Image via unsplash

Are you human?

8th February 2019 · Leave a Comment

When you haven’t logged on for a while, the software wants to check: are you human?

Tick the box. Yes. Not an interloper, but the same old me. However slightly changed, as I haven’t written a single word for months, nor visited this place. The thing with writing a blog is that you have to be willing to share; that forms the basic premise. Some things happened in December and I was no longer willing to share, in so much as I went inwards, as humans do, I suppose, when they perceive threat. The threat I encountered was ordinary and everyday, but at the same time profound. I was scared and worried, and that made me vulnerable. My little life precarious; the people in it somehow at risk. It’s not right to explain here, but suffice to say some shit went down, of the personal variety, and it challenged everything I knew to be true, for a while. Christmas was ugly, but with a glittery, fake-smile wrapping to it, and new year passed in much the same way. January brought some respite, in its dark days and blustery corners, and then I welcomed February from far away, from the other side of the world, in the middle of the Indian Ocean. If you think that sounds like a cryptic explantation of the last couple of months, you’d be right.

There’s a curious contract I have made with myself when it comes to writing. And here on this blog, it’s a contract with my invisible, unknown audience. I write, you read. I share, you absorb. There’s usually a healthy tension to it – or at least there always has been for me – I share what I am comfortable with sharing, and I protect certain truths fiercely, so as not to expose my family or my friends. But as I think back to the nine years I have written this blog, of the myriad insights I have shared, I find it odd that I am compelled to do this. Taking time away from it was like enforcing a separation between two childhood friends; I only lasted so long, and I knew I’d come back.

Meanwhile, amongst my contemporaries, the debate rages on about whether Instagram has replaced blogging, or whether ‘stories’ have replaced curated photos. The term ‘influencer’ is now tinged with a toxicity, and I see fellow bloggers grapple with dull but necessary explanations of whether they have been #gifted or whether it’s an #ad. Yawn. It feels like when I used to work for the corporate, and we would get audited, and everyone had to have detailed process flows on their desks about self-explanatory things like how to switch on your computer. Are you human? The need for safeguards, for privacy, for honesty, for integrity, has rightly come to the forefront. Someone decided that there’s been an abuse, that we might have been duped, so we must now all be brutally honest about every little thing so as not to mislead anyone who happens to read what we write or post. It’s exhausting and complex, and I am not sure where it will lead. It takes away the shine, and rubs the face of things so hard, that it scours the sheen of what blogging and instagram are all about. There’s always the interplay between the truth and the veneer. It’s the construct we all create every time we have any interaction with anyone else. No one is ever quite what they seem, and that is part of how humans function. But it does pose the wider question; if everything everyone shares is vanilla and overstated, then what?

I said I’ve been away, after the tumult of the last couple of months, my husband and I booked a last minute trip to the Maldives. Place of honeymooners, rose-petal-scattered-pillows, and stilted water bungalow accommodation. White sand coral islands, which rear up out of the ocean like something in a cartoon. Impossibly – implausibly – beautiful. An Instagrammable dream. We had never, ever seen anything like it. The water so clear and perfectly, pristinely turquoise that I spent the entire week photographing it, swimming in it, wading in it, marvelling at it like the true Piscean I am. The perfect salt-water salve to everything that life had thrown at us. The privilege of being able to see a place like that weighed heavy though, and I was reluctant to share, because, well, because it just seemed self–indulgent. A self-consciousness has coloured my instincts to share online, and each word and image seems weighty.

But this self-consciousness serves little purpose, as we are bound to consume the experience of others, isn’t that what writing is all about?

Incidentally, I read ‘The Woman in The Window’ whilst I was away. A tetchy thriller that lacked plausibility. The kind of book publishers love. Cinematic from the first page; they’ll make a film of it starring a Hollywood actress who is willing to look dowdy. Lugged the hardback of Michelle Obama’s ‘Becoming’ all the way there and back again, so far untouched. Listened to the podcast ‘Love Stories’ with Dolly Alderton; the one with Emma Freud, when she describes her relationship with Richard Curtis (writer of screenplays to my twenties). It made me choke back tears and can I say: it’s hard to cry and run on a treadmill at the same time, whilst on a coral island in the Indian Ocean.

So I face the next item on the agenda now. I have a deadline for a submission competition at the end of March, giving me some time to write the essay that’s been building in my head for months.

Live. Write. Live. Write. When you know, you know.

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?