comfort

cleaning, reading, youtube

I drove for 20 minutes through the picturesque lanes of the English countryside. Long gone are the days of living within half a mile of several single origin coffee roasters and artisan bakeries. Luckily for me, even in my rural era, there are a couple of really nice cafes not a totally unreasonable distance from my house. They’re the kind of distance that makes the trip feel like a social occasion. Pleasantly ritualistic. Wake up, dress, pack notepads and books and my laptop, get in the car, drive. I have to really want to go there. To meet a friend or spend time by myself, sipping my flat white while listening to the conversations going on around me.

This cafe doesn’t allow laptops so I’m writing old school. In a notebook that had been abandoned on my shelf for months. I think I write better on a laptop, released by the freedom to get it wrong. I haven’t written in so long. Every time I’ve tried to start I’ve felt sluggish and awkward. The words don’t come in the way I want them to—they don’t express what I’m trying to express. It’s frustrating and exhausting. And ultimately just sends me back to my books—to other people’s words. Perhaps when life is as much as it has been, struggling your way through a sentence is counterproductive.

Just recently though, I’ve started to feel it lifting. Light! So I’m here.

I began writing about how hard I’ve found the last few months. How overwhelmed I’ve felt. But when I started to put it down—the hospital appointments, the broken NHS, how totally my heart was breaking that my precious cat was/is ill and getting worse and it was proving so hard to get to the bottom of—the knot in my stomach got a bit tighter. I always thought writing was supposed to be cathartic, an exorcism of the bad, but I guess I’ve seen enough writers roll their eyes at that assertion that I should have known better.

Instead of forcing my way through a life update no one asked for, I will concentrate on some good things. It got quite bad at times. Inside my head. But there were—are—always things to lean on. Sweet little crutches that offer a veil of calm when the chaos roars.

I love cleaning. Making my house look, smell and feel nice is a therapy I only discovered in adulthood. As a teenager you couldn’t see my bedroom floor, but as a 32-year-old I despair of a stray envelope on the dining table. There is not much more satisfying to me than the ritual of pottering around the house moving things into their rightful places, spraying every surface of the bathroom with my favourite (probably horrifyingly toxic but let’s not go there) products, plumping the cushions on the sofa and loading another pile of laundry into the washing machine, all while listening to a podcast or an audiobook. Currently: The Rest is Entertainment and The New York Times Book Review Podcast. Or, I’m listening to the audiobook of The Bee Sting by Paul Murray and it’s as good as everyone’s been saying. It’s so long, but stick with it. The final 100 pages are mesmerising.

Cleaning makes you feel accomplished when all you have done is restore order. There’s a metaphor in there.

I’ve got back into Youtube! 2014 Claire wrote a whole article about why I was swearing off Youtube (TLDR: it’s a vacuous cesspit of thinly veiled advertisements) so I’m as shocked as anyone by this swerve. She contains multiples though, and it turns out so does Youtube. Cosy hiking vlogs got me back in (huge recommend if you like that stuff: Ramble Family). Wholesome content: steaming cups of tea, breathtaking views of the Cairngorms or the Lakes, cooking over a camp stove and sleeping in a tent so I don’t have to. I got back into a couple of my OGs—Estee Lalonde and Brittany Bathgate—both of whom have skin that glows as though their décolletage is slicked with liquid gold (probably Charlotte Tilbury #gifted #ad). And more recently I’ve found some properly down to earth women who like travelling and eating and filming it all so we can vicariously live through them. My current favourite is WorldWideWu who is the definition of adorable. She lives in New York City, works a 9 to 5 job, and when she goes on holiday (which she does a lot) she eats more than I would have thought her tiny body could take. I could listen to her describe a bowl of noodles as ‘so good’ for hours. And I have.

Books are the ultimate comfort. I remember writing once, I think when my dad was very ill and in hospital, that I will be able to survive this if I have books. Cathy Rentzenbrink wrote something similar in her memoir The Last Act of Love and her book about books Dear Reader (both of which I recommend). However, I haven’t been reading as much as I normally do. Like with writing, the words haven’t flowed off the page. Each word has needed plucking, one by one, painstakingly. The counterpart of finding reading harder though, is that when you do find a book that you can sink into like a freshly made bed, it is all the more blissful. I needed novels, I still do, non-fiction feels far too weighty. Real life… who’s she? So I turned somewhere warm and sweet: Elizabeth Strout. Her new novel Tell Me Everything was very kindly sent to me by her publisher so I got to read an early proof. It was Strout, and I will read anything she writes—her casual profundity is masterful—but it probably wasn’t the best of hers. I think each of her main characters (Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton and Bob Burgess) need the space of their own novels to see them fly.

Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren is the kind of novel that makes me desperate to write a novel of my own and horribly convinced of my inability to do so. Such is the talent on display. It’s galvanising too, to see how good a writer can be on a purely sentence level. To behold the craft of it and wonder if you should… maybe? have a go?

Sandwich by Catherine Newman was the perfect summer read. And when I think of a summer read what I mean is, essentially, a book about a family or couple or group of friends going on holiday and having to cope with each other for a week. There should also be: long descriptions of what they eat and drink, morning coffees by the pool, transporting descriptions of blue skies/seas, the smell of suncream and the dry heat of summer. This had all this and more. The more was some really beautiful, though at times sentimental, reflections on what it is to love so much it is terrifying.

It is the middle of August and though work is still extremely busy I am managing to find better boundaries between its stresses and pressures and my essential non-work time. It’s a work in progress. Jeremy is doing better—he’s on a course of treatment which will hopefully sort him out for good and in the meantime we’re just enjoying his sweet fluffy body wandering around the house, and his penchant for keeping us up all night with his hungry meows. I’m prioritising time with my family which is lovely, and I’m trying to see more of my friends which is imperative for my mental health.

We’re all a WIP. Life is high and it is low. On Monday night at gone 11pm, I sat in the garden and lifted my face to the sky to watch the shooting stars I’d read about on the news. When I took a photo of the black night with my phone, the photo that was captured showed streaks of purple and pink. The aurora was hiding somewhere our eyes couldn’t reach.