Life

January 2nd

2nd January 2020 · Leave a Comment

Happy 2nd January.

One thing with social media, I note, is the extrapolation of the ‘me too’ thing. I don’t mean the hashtag movement, I mean the sense of solidarity, you’re not alone. This has become increasingly prevalent, and as such we start, as the the habit forms and strengthens, to look for it. When you are feeling alone, know this: you are not alone. Instagram says so. Celebrities say so. If you are miserable, do not worry! Others are too. Misery can be shared! We have learned to accept that although it looks like everyone is having a great time, they are not. Not always, anyway. Happiness is a moment, not a permanent state. #motivationalquote.

Have you noticed the distinction between the Instagram grid and Instagram stories? The grid is for beauty and curation; a ‘this is me at my best’ truth, for gratitude, contentment and favourable camera angles. Stories, which fleetingly disappear after a day, are more for reality; ‘this is me, for real’. The same applies to teenagers, whose behaviour I am fascinated by. They have their ‘main’ account, and then their ‘private’. The main is the public show. The private – well, the mind boggles. It’s a space they have carved out that is away from prying eyes, and where they can be themselves in all their hormonal glory. Anyway, don’t worry, most of them have graduated over to ‘TikTok’, where we will be in a year’s time, thinking we invented the place. Regardless though, we have become adept at understanding that we are being fed different glimpses, different vistas of the same happy/sad/multitudinous life.

This was never, ever more obvious than at Christmas. During the festive season we present life in all of its false magnitude. Scrolling over the last month has, on the whole, made me feel utterly alone. Christmas, when everything is fine, is fine. When it is not, it is torturous. The truth – that life is not all that much fun all the time – is systematically smothered in a smiley, perfection-laced basting. It is remarkable. On Christmas Day, I saw goodness projected on the grid, to then receive a message from the very same individual, to be told that they were having a downright miserable time. Uncanny. Yet we all press ‘like’ and comment gleefully ‘Happy Christmas’! Santa emoji.

Layered on top is the perception that to call bullshit on Christmas is to resemble Scrooge; thank you Charles Dickens with furnishing us all with a lifelong fear of behaving like Jacob Marley, the miserly nay-sayer. This fear is so rooted in our Western social conscience that there is no escape from the merriment. The world becomes Mr Fezziwig itself; along with a spray of champagne mist, and loving kiss under the mistletoe. And this is counterbalanced with a nod to charity for those less fortunate, and to taking stock as we approach New Year’s Eve, made even more potent for being the end of a decade, yay, a ten year review! It is literal madness.

My personal subscription to madness was to do the same thing but to expect different results. Road to insanity, apparently. In many ways this Christmas was the same as ever; we were at home, there were traditions observed, a set of festive routines and regularities that gave the comforting air of repetition and surety. Yet underneath, it was a seething, emotional mess with a gaping hole in it. My overriding feeling come daybreak on Christmas Day: we should have fled, done something totally different, gone to the Outer Hebrides, another hemisphere, the moon, literally anywhere but here. But there was no escape – even in the Outer Hebrides – one must go through the motions, despite the pain or loss or confusion. The requirement to ‘do’ Christmas is so ensconced in us, in our childhood selves, in our societal constructs, in our obligation to our own children, that we succumb, and participate, even though it is an endurance like no other.

So happy 2nd January. Thank f**k that’s over. For those who loved it and had a social media presence to match, I applaud you. I have been there! It’s fabulous isn’t it? But know that one day the paper crown might slip. It’ll be OK when it does, you will learn new things, you will broaden and welcome its lessons, despite yourself. These milestones, these markers, they are necessary in human life however you come to experience them. Then, you may be like me, welcoming in the new year sat in your dark garden by candlelight, with your surly fourteen year old son and two dogs (one of whom was wearing the cone of shame because he has a warty tail). You’ll be in your pyjamas and a big coat, hood up, cheap Prosecco in hand (because you won’t wanna waste the good stuff on this shit show), and as midnight strikes, you’ll look at the stars, and the fireworks bursting on the horizon and you’ll know (hope?), despite all evidence to the contrary: you are not alone.

It’ll be OK. Welcome 2020, I’ve got high hopes for you.

Photo by Stanislav Kondratiev on Unsplash

Inertia

18th December 2019 · Leave a Comment

Last minute decisions are a good idea. It seems, with seismic life change, that things which used to be insurmountable, are less so. I now look back on what I’ll call ‘The Years of Inertia’. I’d trace this from the point I left my corporate job/turned forty/had teenagers, and spent the best part of five years trying to figure my shit out. There are subtleties to each of those elements; not working gave ample time for reflection, and ceased a monthly salary which had, until then, defined me. Turning forty was a blizzard of feelings about life, myself and what it all meant. Do you know what it all means? Having teenagers is a profound shift to the all-consuming role of mother; children start to emerge as fledging adults, they are their own people, part of your work is done.

These three preoccupations, along with a long, long term marriage, conspired to form a mucky, opaque entanglement which led to inertia. Literally speaking, I could not move quickly in any direction for fear. I was sloth-like, hanging on, willing the world to stop changing around me. I now recognise this affliction in many others I observe, I see it all over, especially in my cohort of educated women. There is a sense that we have everything we always wanted, don’t we? Why mess with it? Yet, with inertia comes stagnation and frustration. Inertia is, by definition, not good long term. Meanwhile fear, which had dressed up in all sorts of guises, was a guest persistently lurking in the corner. An external force needs to come along to challenge the existing state.

Then, I can report, all bets are off.

I used to read and reread a book called ‘Feel Your Fear but Do it Anyway‘ (I did love a self help book or two – or fifty – when I was living ‘The Years of Inertia’). Self help books provided the kind of theoretical forward motion that inaction hides in its folds. The premise of the book was, as described in the title, to do it anyway and to keep doing it. That, the author said, was the answer.

But when the fear is a lurking presence, and not an obvious trigger (like spiders, or heights), it’s hard to know whether you’re facing it. It’s too easy to turn your back on it, or pretend it’s not there. I have a blonde-haired friend who is a no-nonsense kind of person. One could describe her as fearless as she doesn’t manifest the usual kind of trepidation that is common in women. In a way she behaves more like a man. She doesn’t question her occupancy in the world and is a proponent of ‘getting on with it’. She also doesn’t ‘do’ guilt, considers it as a bit pointless and even self-indulgent. Don’t feel guilty; do something more useful. I have huge admiration for this friend for that very reason. She is one of the most attractive women I have ever met. Fear is not an attractive trait. Whilst it can lead to better decisions in a long, drawn-out sense, it is unsexy in its application. If there is a crisis, we want a leader, someone who inspires. Maybe this is why the ubiquitous ‘mid life crisis’ is lauded as an existential mess, it’s rooted in fear and there can be no leader to take you out of it, other than yourself.

I think a lot about this.

Here are some good things to do when you feel fear or intertia, or both.

Go for a run. Book a trip to a place where nothing is the same as where you are from. I have had the good fortune to do this repeatedly and it works. Sell stuff on Ebay, even the good stuff that you are attached to. Sell more. Completely alter your routine. Inertia loves sameness. Make your sleep a priority; all sleep is good sleep. But the kind of sleep which guides you through change is restorative, purifying, worth every second. Watch those around you. Identify inertia in the faces of others. Question and challenge them. Stop giving a f*ck what people think. What people think is one of the biggest prohibiting factors in everyone’s minds. Why does it matter so very much? I smell a conspiracy. Clash leopard print with florals. Smile at every person who serves you in public; and ask them how they are. They will be shocked to have been asked and then they will ask you back and you will have a conversation and be reminded that the world is big. There is more. It does not begin and end with the narrative you are telling yourself, on repeat, in your head. Identify those friends who don’t do fear and guilt and watch what happens. How do they live? Get good wifi, speed is of the essence. Practice kindness – throw that stuff around like confetti, as the saying goes – give even to those who really, truly don’t deserve it. Listen more, speak less. Have a place, be it a journal you write in, or if you’re me, a Patreon page where you publish, and speak your own truth. Savour the liberation. Watch Beyoncé’s ‘Homecoming‘ on Netflix because seriously, it’s like liquid gold, mercurial, the opposite of inertia. Make a last minute decision. Go on.

Photo by Sylvie Tittel on Unsplash

Reading, listening, thinking…

1st December 2019 · Leave a Comment

I listen to audiobooks now more than I read in the static, sit with a book kind of way, purely because it can be done during parts of the day when I am otherwise engaged. This means I have to concentrate really hard on the language when I am driving, or ironing, or walking. On certain routes of my morning run, come pivotal parts of stories, and now when I revisit those places, the words of those writers still ring in my ears.

I listened to the audiobook of ‘Three Women’ by Lisa Taddeo, a complex work written after the author spent eight years immersed in the stories of three women in America, exploring the complexities of their sexual desires, and their relationships. It’s not aways what it seems, the myriad factors of female sexual desire are presented in an almost-too-much manner, mirroring that exact moment when something feels almost too much. The way in which this book saunters between the tales of the women works particularly well for audio, notably because Mena Suvuri reads one part so evocatively. The idea that women are open about what they want is a fallacy; it exposes a hidden inner life to the one women present to the world, because so many female sensibilities have been suggested, through decades, generations, centuries of societal behaviour. By the way, I have written more in depth about this on my Patreon page, for those readers who wish to subscribe.

The flip side of this is that I am also reading ‘The Descent of Man’ by Grayson Perry, which I am doing in old fashioned form. This is short, densely clever polemic on the concept of masculinity. Grayson Perry, who is known for being an artist, for cross-dressing and I suppose, for being married to Philippa Perry the psychologist. So rarely are men known for the woman they are married to – more often the other way around. This book is something I dip into, usually when I am killing time on the train or in a coffee shop, and it houses concepts which again, are almost too much to take. He unpicks with deft and clarity the ways in which we accept gender principles in society that have been passed down for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Blew my mind.

My writing has been split into weighty (gender politics and memoir), and light (the book with ‘fuck’ in the title) and I love the contrast. After oh-so-many-years of procrastinating about what to write, it’s becoming more clear, and I see it’s true what every motivational Instagram site says in quotes: some shit has to go down in your life before you sort yourself out. Get forward propulsion. Learn. Open yourself up. Trust the cosmic universe. Whatever the hell it is. I note that for me, it’s coming together in words, as I suppose I always suspected, or hoped it might.

I also note that the influence of podcasts is becoming pervasive. People now talk, referring to what they have heard in podcasts, or at least I find that amongst conversations I overhear. The candour with which podcast guests speak when in conversation is the key; it’s not the same as being interviewed for TV or radio. It is a medium entirely different and as such, it gives a perspective which feels shared, and willing, rather than forced or monitored. Favourites for revelation are How to Fail, The High Low, Happy Place, Esther Perel, So Lucky by Dawn O’Porter (newly launched).

I guess with podcasts you need never be entirely alone, there is always someone to listen to and be ‘with’. But for me it’s about the openness. When writing, it is that route into consciousness that matters. For reader (or listeners) to either learn something new, or to recognise something known.

Otherwise life is spent in a series of days working it out, and gently avoiding the prospect of Christmas which looms large every year, but this year in particular. I already have a slight longing to be half way through January, or in next June, or even next December, when maybe life might have regulated. But then, with that regulation may come the procrastination again, so I should make the best of the decisiveness that exists now.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Changes

28th October 2019 · Leave a Comment

There’s a lot of talk about change and growth. It goes like this: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. This is what informs a gazillion Instagram quotes. They say if times are hard, it will pass, and you will survive. In this form of self-realisation, which I suspect comes mainly in mid-life, you will be broken down first, and remade. This is the sort of thing people say to me. Oh and also – did you know? Time heals. Thank you very much. My favourite platitude in this regard is one which describes the life cycle of the butterfly; from caterpillar to chrysalis and onwards. A series of weird elemental processes which turn the grub into a pod, containing only itself. Let’s sit with that for a moment. A chrysalis full of oneself. There’s an emergence afterwards, a reformation to a beautiful butterfly. A trippy concept, I grant you. We like this idea, it’s an enduring touchstone to anyone who grew up reading ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ which can, I now see, be considered a guidebook to life. The caterpillar didn’t chose its transformation, it was subject to a greater force of change, determined by nature. Spoiler alert: it all turned out ok.

This sort of cosmic, mumbo-jumbo bullshit is what makes my days go quicker, and I spend time observing my reaction to change by telling myself, without blinking, that the universe sent me a shit-bomb just so that I could become the chrysalis. It’s all part of the wider plan. Surely? I will reach the butterfly stage, one day. Although, I’ve got to say, I was fairly happy being the caterpillar. I thought that was just fine. Little did I know that caterpillars don’t stay caterpillars.

There are so many nuances and swings of emotion right now, it’s impossible to keep hold of any feeling for any amount of time. Feelings peddle through (‘you are not your thoughts!’), as if there is a Tour de France of emotion cycling through my mind. Who is wearing the infamous ‘yellow jersey’? Presently taking the lead, is my husband, from whom I am now separated, followed by our children. What is the term in cycling; slip-streaming?

When everything you knew to be solid ground is quaking (see previous post on tectonic plates for an extension of this concept), it can be hard to stay upright. I’m told that this is also OK. Do not worry. The tremors will lessen and eventually, everything will settle. Look at San Francisco, which has stood on the San Andreas fault for millennia. All OK. Golden Gate still up. Alcatraz still spooky. Pier 39 still laden with seals basking in the afternoon sunshine. Incidentally, I’ve been to San Francisco a few times with my husband. I’ve been – with him – to pretty much every holiday/city break destination in the Northern Hemisphere.

Mental note: explore the Southern Hemisphere in future. See what I did there? Switch it up. ‘Embrace the new! Alter your habits!’

There are many, many words, some of which I write down, some of which will form my next book. I go to London, to a writing course and learn about myself and others, about their versions of a chrysalis, and we try to ascertain whether the world is ready for a written expression of our experience.

It’s all a bit high brow, but there is also, as ever with me, the frippery. Too much googling for clothes. Eyelash extensions. Puppy school. Roast dinners. Ikea on stormy nights with my daughter, just for the meatballs. Frothy films featuring Nancy Myers interiors. Dinner parties frequented by married friends. Improving my running times. Far too much googling. Falling asleep more slowly than I used to.

In the midst, my house started to inexplicably stink. The kind of acrid stench that makes your eyes water. I searched everywhere for the source, turning out cupboards, disinfecting floors, but nothing. I smelled a mouse or a rat. I thought it might be stuck in my drainpipes, which are, in an old farmhouse, a law unto themselves. The prospect of dealing with this unseen odour seemed to me to be unfair. Why the smell? Why my pipes? Who must I call to sort this problem? Then I reminded myself that sometimes in life there’s an unseen contributor, one you might fear but, in the end turns out to be insignificant and basic. It went on for a week. My children and I looked at each other crossly; why must we live with this? Whose idea was this? To live in the country, with rodents. This shit doesn’t happen in the city.

Then, when my husband had come to the house to drop off our son, the new puppy (a bundle of sweet-smelling fur, all puppy-dog eyes, love and tussle) bounded out with something dangling from her mouth. It looked like a skinny, grey rag. We cornered her, my husband and I, and did a strange dance to catch her with her prize. A dance which might have been normal and funny when he lived here, but now seems bizarre. An estranged couple in a shared, domestic pursuit. The puppy had a decomposed rat! The smell is lessening now, the air clearing, the rat a memory, still sharp but also discarded. I scroll through my Insta feed, I call my buddy, I have coffee with a friend, I text someone I used to know, and in future those I don’t, and the days go by in this chrysalis of mine.

Photo by Nick Tiemeyer on Unsplash

Dispatches

5th September 2019 · Leave a Comment

Those waking moments, half in and out of sleep, seem like they have a tone-setting influence to my day. I reach for my phone (who doesn’t?) and review overnight messages. Instagram plays too-important a role, but accounts like this one help. I saw a deceptively clever art installation at Glastonbury by Notes to Strangers. Something about it; the rawness, the humour and the honesty made me smile, to nod in appreciation. I tell anyone I meet about it. I ordered a print (you can pick from any that he publishes on his feed). Mine says ‘there’s a whole lot of muddling through’, which pretty much sums it up right now.

I started watching ‘Euphoria‘, which to a parent of teens is a bit like riding a terrifying amusement park ride; slick, heart-bumping, grinding and will unsettle you to your core, until you get off, and then it’s all great. When the adrenaline seeps away, you feel kinda dirty, but in a good way. Like when you eat Kentucky Fried Chicken.

So many things seems to refer to the Maldives at the moment; a place I went when I was a different person, just eight months ago. It crops up in all places, what I read and what I see. Or maybe I just notice because it was a screen saver to my dreams, in another life.

We collect a new puppy this weekend, a fact that I struggle to believe, but nonetheless the breeder diligently sends me photos of the gorgeous growing fur ball that will become ours. Our existing dog regards me with curiosity. My daughter messages me constantly in a state of abject excitement.

A crop of new books are delivered; a reading list for an endeavour I start in October. Nothing quite like that feeling of possibility; of pristine unread books.

The shells from Thailand still grace my dressing table, one in particular, a small stingray-shaped creamy arc, which I found on a deserted, untouched white island, somewhere in the waters beyond Koh Pha-Ngan. The shell reminds me of the place, bathing in the lukewarm waters off the shore, sifting the sand through our fingers, incredulous at the beauty. Still incredulous that such a place exists, right now. The world is large.

The kindness of strangers and friends floors me at this time of need, and I take deep, cleansing breaths of it, when I can. I roll the words grace and humility around in my mind, like you would a hold a sweet on your tongue. Feeling the weight of them and then they dissolve.

Building flat pack furniture, I slice my finger. My son says ‘are you going to faint, mummy?’ reminiscent of the time I sliced my hand delving in the dish washer and span out. I shake my head, and we go night time skateboarding down by the water, a wad of kitchen roll wrapped around my index finger. Children store up what they’ve experienced before, and it forms their expectations. Maybe it’s a good thing that this time, I remain conscious.

Photo by Julia Joppien on Unsplash

Fine

28th August 2019 · Leave a Comment

If you saw me and asked, I’d say I was fine. For as long as I remember, writing here was a normal, somewhat quiet pursuit for me. People would enquire if I wrote and re-wrote, or heavily edited what I published, and the answer was usually ‘no’. I wrote about my life, and later, about my studies, and writing books. My personal circumstances were in the foreground; no one writes on the internet and maintains absolute secrecy, it comes with the territory to be open. I realise now that writing in this way was all fine, as long as I was fine. If the ebb and flow of my life made me introspective, there was always something to write about to bridge the gap. As such, lots of people read along for years, and many of them have become my good and precious friends.

Of late though, I’d say that some shit has gone down in my life, and it’s caused everything to tilt on its axis. I realise how opaque that sentence sounds, and how irritating it is when those of us who curate an online presence clam up, and won’t share. The unspoken contract in social media is that honesty should prevail. But I have come to see that when life deals you a blow, you abruptly become aware that there’s a big audience watching. Something in human nature provokes us to lean in to the lives of others, and watch closely, especially when something bad has happened. I’ve done it before, for sure. But then I was part of the audience, whereas now I am an unwitting actress, in the main act.

Therefore, I might not write here so much, for a while. Let’s not be overdramatic, this revelation is hardly going to break the internet, but for those who wondered or who are interested, I am still here, still writing. The novel I previously wrote, in conjunction with the concept I’ve been carrying around in my head, has now been pumped full of oxygen, and I see that I have a book to write by Christmas. This feels as if it has been building, and my hesitation and inaction is turning to an urgent need to get what’s happened down on paper (or on screen at least). It was Hemingway who said; ‘write hard and clear about what hurts.’

Know that meanwhile, there are the dog days of summer, travel and reflections, teenagers and exam results (she smashed it). Bare feet, a fading tan from Thailand, white-washing my house. Amsterdam nights. A new puppy, arriving soon. There’s a crumpled linen feel, good and true but not perfect, as my children and I forge towards September; an impending sense of there being a new season ahead.

Photograph by Yoann Siloine on Unsplash

Portfolio Career

27th March 2019 · 1 Comment

If I were to characterise my occupation right now, I’d say I was striving to make a ‘portfolio career’ work. By that I mean I do a bit of everything. I write, I clean the house. I write, I have coffee with my friends. I write, I manage the smallness and the greatness of family, both up close and extended. This is the part that sucks time like nothing else. My writing is invariably interrupted, and so as payback, it interrupts me, forming paragraphs as I try to drift off to sleep, or as I am doing a yoga class. I tell myself there will be time to properly focus, at some point in the future, when things ‘calm down’. I think of my Masters degree, and of the high hopes I had for after graduation, and as I type this, graduation was nearly two years ago. Insert shocked emoji face. Owing to my deliberate efforts not to beat myself up, I skip over this, as after all, who said the measure of success was world domination? Slow and steady? The eco book was a start…

There used to be a need to write a round-up of the week here, as a breezy, chatty bulletin. As if providing a public service. Blog being short for ‘web log’; the diarist in me would count the days between posts. Feed the appetite of your readers. But times have changed, and now we have insta stories for that. I shy away, as the need for privacy wraps around me. A highly curated front feels false, and I note that my contemporaries either post all the time, or not at all.

I am working on a project that is taking me through a creative process ranging from excitement, to fear, and back again. I muse whether it is good enough, whether I am good enough. My daughter earnestly looks back at me, and says ‘you must do your best’, and I feel like I have might have taught her well. There’s the slightest hint of spring and when I run in the mornings, the chill is gone, in favour of a tepid breeze, and there are green buds on trees. This makes me happy. I point this out to my son as we drive, and he looks up from his phone.

Meanwhile, I receive a terse, unsolicited email from a reader. The intimation being that I am narrow-minded. It strikes me that writing any sort of social commentary now is fraught with the accusation of not having a wide enough point of reference. Should I caveat every possible opinion, and state every possible viewpoint? Quite dull to do so. A bit like taking broad-spectrum antibiotics. You smother the good bugs and the bad bugs too. And maybe you never needed the meds in the first place. I can’t extrapolate the metaphor any further.

I buy a leopard print dress online, because, y’know, that’s what (narrow-minded) women like me do.

My daughter’s friends, the teenage girls, come round and sit at my table. I serve them vegetables (always) and they battle through plates of butternut squash, broccoli and avocado with a lime and tahini dressing. They silently wonder where the fish fingers have gone? We talk about society, and life, university, and whether they should cut their lustrous long hair short. I find myself cautioning against doing so, as all haircutting is, generally speaking – not wanting to derail the objectors here – a way to combat boredom. I’d apply the same logic to getting tattoos, which I become obsessed with, periodically. We discuss stress, and exams, and whether the line up at Glastonbury is going to be any good. I imagine myself this June, jumping, my middle-aged hands in the air, wellies sticking in the Somerset mud, screaming ‘Mr Brightside’ like it’s 2003.

When I speak to other women my age, they talk a lot about what they want and how they can’t have it, and I wonder if this is just the stage we are at? Experience tells me nothing comes easy, and right now, there isn’t time to get important stuff done. Everything feels like an effort, and I can think of a million reasons not to try. But there’s an ambition and a tenacity and we all soldier on with the perpetual list of things that need doing (‘I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier’). There’s a steeliness to this ambition, and I see as I get older, the less I need to say it out loud. Is this the midlife wisdom that they speak of? When you know, you know. It’s an inner knowledge; a confidence I suppose, that we are all playing a long game and if not now, then later. I write, I wait.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

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

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?