Skipping past the carousel of father’s day cards, I reviewed rails of clothing where the designs were like Haribo had done a collab with Monsoon in the 00s. I mentally scrolled through the earrings and necklaces – pearl toadstools, bunches of beaded grapes, slices of watermelon. I stood bewitched in front of glasses painted with citrus fruits, jewellery stands shaped like cherry trees, lamps in disguise as oranges. I paused for a worryingly long time by a mug with two beribboned black kittens on it and a slogan that said, ‘Partners in Crime’. I took an enormous blue and green gingham hair bow and held it in my hand for at least four minutes before I threaded it back onto the hook on the wall I’d taken it from. I’d been contemplating whether I was, in fact, someone who would wear an enormous gingham bow in her hair, and for a moment I felt like the aggressively jolly aesthetic assault of the store had convinced me that I was.

On the way out I took in the flanks of ‘Alphabet’ items – coasters, socks, travel-sized zippered jewellery cases decorated with single letter – a section I think of as ‘fuck I got someone I don’t know very well in the Secret Santa’ and slipped into the brisk utility of the station concourse.

That morning I’d unwittingly got dressed with a Bonas sensibility in mind, a red dress and white cardigan that might conjure a bowl of strawberries and cream (I was joining my brothers on the Arsenal victory parade and it was the closest outfit I had to their kit). I’d taken a mirror selfie in the store and later on as I went to post it on Instagram I realised I didn’t want the neon shop sign for Oliver Bonas to be in the photo. What was that about? I wondered. I was embarrassed to have been in Oliver Bonas, yet I could not stop myself from going into Oliver Bonas. Oliver Bonas was a kind of kink I wanted to deny. In the end I asked a question – is it just me who is in this weird relationship with the store? Why can’t I resist entering it when most often, its over-priced wares give me the ick? Turns out I’m not alone.

Someone replied, ‘it’s not just you’ and then corrected my spelling.

Someone replied, ‘it’s a requirement at the train station and I find it staggering when people claim to shop there in other contexts, like how, why, for what, the last time I was there I bought a stress ball’.

Someone replied, ‘I HAVE THIS’.

Someone replied, ‘I do this too there’s the allure of “ooh I might find someone cute” but then you look closely and it’s all horrible crap that really expensive’.

Someone replied, ‘it has the uncanny quality of being designed by AI where you sort of want it all but it’s also existentially horrifying to perceive’.

Someone replied ‘witness my bronze effect metal coral shaped photo holders’.

Seems like Oliver Bonas has us all in a death grip. We go in there for a more upmarket version of Flying Tiger and leave either disturbed by our own fascination or with a rose gold cheese knife that has a handle shaped like the top of a pineapple. I, for one, need to talk to my therapist about it.

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I had the following day off. I woke up early, as is my habit – no need for an alarm clock these days – made myself some coffee, grabbed my laptop and got back into bed. I’m going to write, I thought. For the first time in a long time I had a sense of ease in my mind, as though I’d been walking a long time on an unmarked, uneven path and now had reached a road to follow. By 11am I had finished a draft of an essay I’d been trying to write for six months. An essay that had been growing by a line or two a week for most of that time, when suddenly I was able to add 3,000 words in one go. I had everything I needed to write. My brain had done it’s behind the scenes work, the work it doesn’t let me in on until I get the thoughts down on the page. I felt awed with gratitude for it. I’d been mentally making compost and now something had grown in the rich soil.

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Here’s what I read:

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My parsley green velvet, 3-seater Made.com ‘Scott’ sofa sat in this prawn mousse of a room for 6 years. A kind of leafy garnish.

Bambam on the old green velvet sofa

I felt an inexplicable, smug adulthood land on me the day it arrived. I was a serious person with an elegant, serious sofa. I could be trusted with the impracticalities of velvet. (As an aside, in 2022 when Sam Johnson-Schlee’s book Living Rooms came out I was skewered on my choice, where he cited a viral tweet that went ‘Girls only want one thing and it’s a living room with hardwood floors a green velvet sofa and a colourful rug’. I don’t recall seeing that tweet but that’s exactly what I had hankered for.)

On Friday evenings I would drink red wine out of long-stemmed, wide-bowled glasses. I’d tuck myself into its embrace. I chose it because it was wide and long as a single bed. If I fell asleep on it, it would be ok.

The sofa saw a lot.

It arrived in November 2019 and in early January 2020 my close friend Roddy died. I spent that day and several afterwards on the sofa, attended to by different friends who made a gentle relay to keep me company.

By March we were in lockdown and there was nowhere to go. I burrowed into the sofa which by then had already begun to sag in the middle, a fault I reported but did not resolve. I worked long hours at my kitchen table and then killed long hours on the sofa where I watched Garden Rescue, Gardeners’ World, Twin Peaks and The Sopranos. Bewildered by the combination of grief, lack of human touch and the wild stress of my then-job, I fell asleep on it regularly, waking in the early hours and taking myself to bed. I didn’t identify as a sofa-sleeping person, so this was a source of mild shame, and I kept it to myself.

From the sofa I would look out my windows onto the small patio, looking at spring bulbs coming through in the pots I’d bought when I moved in, or watching my neighbour’s cats jump from their shed onto my rickety fence. I made the left-hand side of the sofa mine, leaning on cushions with my legs to the side, leaving a space for my cats to curl up behind my knees. One hand on my phone the other stroking one of them. We settled together and eventually in addition to the mid-point sag of the sofa a depression was made where we nested. Indeed, I felt depressed, so this seemed appropriate.

I spilled wine on it. Water. Soup. Juice. Moisturiser. Dropped my mascara wand, pens, nail files, wall hooks, hair bobbles.

I stitched buttons back onto tops on it, wrapped presents and wrote cards. Sorted through box after box of my own personal ephemera when gripped as I occasionally am, by a biting necessity to sort myself out.

Under the sofa gathered crémant corks, the wire cages of champagne bottles, dust bunnies, cat toys and legions of those cellophane-wrapped rods of cigarette filters, even though I do not smoke. Also many shoe-sized boxes of things I wanted out of sight but did not have the patience to find a home for.

Sometimes I wailed on the sofa and sometimes other people did. It supported personal space as well as proximity.

Once when I had a fever over 40 degrees for several days I took to the sofa because I ran out of clean, dry sheets for my bed. I would wake up drenched in sweat. The poet Matthea Harvey wrote a poem called ‘Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form’, the same could be expressed of the sofa.

My mum slept on it. My sister slept on it. My friends – Bryony, Crispin, Amy – all slept on it at one time or another. And sometimes I’d return home from somewhere to find both my cats asleep on the sofa, bookending it. Most often it was one or the other.

Eventually, after self-imposed exile from sex, I had sex on the sofa. And then kept having sex on the sofa. It was a good size and shape for that.

I was always looking though. Regularly I complained to my pals about the ‘suspension’ being gone and me needing a new one, like it was a clapped-out banger. But I hung in there. I layered up blankets and bedspreads underneath and on top of the cushion seat to keep things comfortable. I became irritated with the profound mid-century vibes (my taste had moved on) of it so got rid of the back and bolster cushions and switched them for ones I had gradually acquired from Liberty and Cressida Bell. I felt bad about my desire to replace it, telling myself I should make it last another couple of years.

But then my cat Minnie started to piss on it. She is an anxious girl and when she’s out of sorts she gets stress incontinence and my sofa gets, well, it. I bought a waterproof fitted sheet for it (the sofa cushion being the size of a single mattress) so I could protect the seat cushion as much as possible, but it stripped the sofa of its dignity, and if I’m honest, mine too. Cosying up with one of my cats or a book the thought would intrude: this is a pissy sofa. I could not unknow it.

In November, in a kind of dissociative fugue, I ordered a new one. It arrived this week.

It’s a sort of old-fashioned, sort of not. It has the kind of tasselled fringing I loved to run my fingers through when I lay on the living room floor as a kid. It has low arm rests and a deep seat. It is a pale, sea-green colour – lichen according to the maker – the upholstery is buttoned and has piped edges. I love it but it is taking some getting used to, the seat firm where I’d grown used to slumping. I arranged my cushions along the backrest, and they look like they belong, much to my relief. It is made of velvet. The old green velvet sofa is dead, long live the new one.

Minnie on the new green velvet sofa

I’ve started seeing a therapist after several years of not having one. In our first session, or maybe it was the second, I said to her ‘I feel like my mouth is full of loose teeth and I’m just spitting them out and they’re all covered in blood’. I couldn’t get what I needed to talk about straight in my mind. One of those teeth was writing. I feel abandoned by it, I said.

I’ve done a lot of teaching and mentoring over the past year and something that students often ask about is how to overcome fear of what we want to say coming out awkwardly or painfully. The fear that what we need to write about might be boring to other people. The fear that what we need to say will make others judge us or create conflict with people we love (or don’t). I have a tight little list of things I say in response to this, quotes from writers that share, anecdotes from my own writing life to encourage them. Yet still I find myself suffering from the same fears and sometimes, like now, I let fear win.

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The sea exists

Kissing exists

Lemon trees exist

Gently holding one of your own breasts in your hand exists

Washing lines exist

Resistance exists

The clothes the Medicis were buried in exist and they are on display in the Pitti Palace

Cats exist

Wearing a cute little outfit exists

Opals exist

Getting into bed exists

Logging off from work exists

Botticelli’s paintings exist

Crushes exist

Joni Mitchell’s music exists

Moonstruck exists

New friends exist

Ice cubes exist

Medieval tiles exist

Voice notes from your best friends exist

Palestine exists

Boxes of old photographs exist

Hand-me-downs exist

This comment on a piece I wrote exists

Tap water exists

The pleasure of placing little things on things exists

Chelsey Minnis exists

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The Green Grotto exists

Miniature versions of regular sized things exist

Tapered candles exist

Running your fingers along the silky tassel trim of a sofa exists

Broken-in shoes exist

Driving to the coast exists

New pyjamas exist

Biting down on a cork exists

Future plans exist

Somebody that loves you

Pebbles, shells, lichen

2. The best thing to do with cold spaghetti, or any pasta for that matter, is mix it with beaten egg and fry it like a tortilla.

3. It’s generally always better to be honest about why you don’t want to do something. When you’re not it lays the ground for being asked to do it again and scrabbling for a different reason. Most people are ok with being told no, that includes me.

4. Try to resist switching from an app to WhatsApp when messaging potential dates if you can, otherwise you’ll be like me, i.e. with a graveyard of failed connections in your WhatsApp when they could be tidily stored elsewhere.

5. I struggle to maintain skincare routines and one of the things that gets in the way of me being a classic double-cleanse girlie is how much I hate water running down my wrists and getting onto my PJ sleeves when I’m washing my face. So in the summer I bought a pair of those cheap fluffy cuff things from Superdrug and now I am slightly better at washing my face and my PJ sleeves stay dry.

6. Brands I think are underpriced on Vinted: 90s Donna Karan, Nicole Fahri, and Katherine Hamnet, 80s Escada, 00s Chloe and Marc Jacobs. Brands that are overpriced: Reformation (everything I’ve bought from them has had a quality issue – fraying seams, unravelling hems and when I look at listings for them there are often faults specified so I’m clearly not alone).

7. As I write it’s coming to the end of the year, and the temptation is to place the year into a category of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘unexceptional’. This year has felt bad, it’s been deeply uncomfortable, with painful failures in writing, in relationships and hugely challenging changes to my body. These things crowd out the many joyful experiences of the year, the things I’m proud of and they shouldn’t! So I really want to change that. I’m having to face things I have long resisted and it feels incredibly scary. Difficulty can be transformative and transformation is necessarily difficult.

8. We have a family Christmas pot that we all pay into and then my mum distributes it equally, ordering presents up to the limit which is usually somewhere around £150. My Christmas present list is a long assortment of cheap second-hand things on eBay, Etsy and Vinted. This approach gives opening my presents the thrill of being in a fantasy charity shop where I want to buy – and can afford – everything.

9. Don’t chicken out on painting the walls of your room/s the colour you’re drawn to.

10. Read Helen Garner’s How to End a Story.

11. You don’t really need to wash wool. Hang your jumpers and cardigans outside on a fine day for a few hours instead or whack them in the freezer for a bit.

12. Things I don’t think you can have too many of: cute little dipping / serving bowls (I use mine variously for cat treats, a little snack of haribo or dried mango, my daily pills/supplements), cotton or linen drawstring bags for shoes, storing cables and chargers etc, packing cubes and assorted jars of chilli crisp.

13. My Spotify unwrapped this year did not reflect what I loved the most it reflected how lazy my listening was. I’ve been a bit disconnected from music this year and so I want to get back into making myself playlists instead of simply topping up my ‘Liked songs’ and letting that run. One thing I love about playlists is how they create little time capsules of your life, a sonic diary of your emotional weather.

14. I think my first experience of therapy (on the NHS) was quite damaging. If I could go back in time I would have spoken up that the therapist was not right for me and fought to work with someone else. You’re allowed to do that.

15. I steal this from my friend Rebecca, but lemon will lift any dish.

16. A question to ask yourself is, what are my friends avoiding talking to me about because they worry it will upset me. And then try to summon the courage to talk to them about it yourself.

17. Try to take your own advice – my windows really do need cleaning.

Before we get into it I wanted to share a recent piece I wrote for The Observer magazine on going to Capri to try to rid myself of loneliness and I also want to apologise for being irregular - I’m trying to write something about bodies (my own!) and it’s taking some time to figure out what I want to say, so I hope you can bear with me.

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I’m reading the third book in Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume right now and have reached a bit where Tara Selter, the narrator who is stuck in time on the 18 November, is straining to hear new sounds. She’s looking for ‘not just the remnants of what has been lost…nor…a promise of something to come. They are a promise of something happening right now’. I felt emotionally winded by this section because I know I encounter seasonal change at this part of the year as a grief to sit with Ahh, summer is lost to you. Grit your teeth for the next six months and spring will come. The now of life is mentally abandoned.

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This year, after a solid two decades of always wearing dresses or a skirt, I’ve got really into wearing jeans. I bought second-hand Sézane ones in the Le Crop style from Vinted. They are wide legged, high waisted and stop at the ankle. I know the trend is for jeans to puddle on the floor, but having spent my teens wearing flares that got soaked to the knee and hemmed with grime every time it rained I just can’t do that. I’ve been wearing my jeans with a rotation of t-shirts I previously wore to sleep in (I don’t agree that sleeping in something removes it from public circulation), including the only band t-shirt that remains from my teenage band t-shirt era – for the jangle-pop band Heavenly, which incidentally someone messaged me about when I wore it in a photo and asked if they could buy for £200 – and my badly drawn celebs Emily Dickinson t-shirt. But the one I’ve probably worn most is my PAY YOUR POETS t-shirt from Salted Books in Lisbon, which I bought when I was teaching for them in the Spring. PAY YOUR POETS is a statement I fully endorse. I was recently approached by a fashion brand to write a poem for them, when I raised the fee they ghosted. I want to be dressed, and I also want to be paid. Bread and roses, baby.

The other sartorial development for me is that I began to pine for a suit. I think it’s in part because I’ve started a new job and I want to have something I can wear for in-person meetings, but I also like the idea of wearing a suit when I chair book events as though I’m a serious person. My inspo for the suit was Chuck Bass in Gossip Girl, who I had a really quite intense crush on back in 2010. Now I reflect on it, it occurs that this fascination was probably a symptom of the mental break I was heading for at that time, I have a memory of thinking about Chuck and Blair almost every day as though we were in a love triangle. Anyway, I found the suit in the John Lewis sale, from Max Mara’s Weekend brand. I had to have the trousers taken up, so I’ve not worn it yet, but I’m excited to, if a little nervous about such an aesthetic change in direction. My friend Charlotte, who often wears a suit in ‘non suit’ settings and looks cool as fuck, said I just have to break the seal. Please wish me luck. After having a Rodarte silk dress in my wardrobe for three years (it was an unhinged pandemic sale buy) and it never fitted properly I took it to The Workshop in Brockley (who also did my suit trousers!) to be altered and they did a great job. I have a party to go to next weekend and I may wear it there and it will be a relief to know I won’t trample on the hem or flash a boob without intending to.

When, around this time of year, the first brown leaves fall into my garden I feel physical and psychic discomfort. I’m never ready for summer to end and I dread winter. The only silver lining for me is the different clothes I’ll get to wear. I love putting on brand new opaque tights, buttoning up a coat, moving from a pale palette to a richer one. So I’ve been getting little bits from Vinted in anticipation: if I sell something, I can buy something. I spent £100 and got all of these things: a knee-length A.P.C. black denim skirt. A vintage Donna Karan black leather pencil skirt. A Chloé blue denim mini skirt. A vintage Chloé silk and lace blouse. I also broke my rule to buy a vintage Marc Jacobs halterneck sundress in a red and white seersucker fabric for £35, which I’ll wear when I go to Italy in September. I don’t have alerts set up on Vinted because I am way too suggestible and bad with spending to resist that kind of encouragement, but FWIW I also often search for vintage Nicole Farhi knitwear which is really beautifully made, Sonia Rykiel, which is fun and Issey Miyake which is never cheap but sometimes you can strike gold – I managed to get a skirt I’d wanted for a quarter of the retail price. Marc by Marc Jacobs stuff is mad cheap on Vinted and eBay so if you want to dress like Alexa Chung in the 00s then go off on searching that imo.

Moving into a new season brings with it the possibility of things being different, of me being different, as though clothes might influence the direction I take. I’ve noticed I want a less high femme, more preppy look – a real back-to-school sensibility. I want to feel put together because I am trying to put myself back together after 10 months of quite choppy emotional life. I’m not sure I’m ending this year with all of the people who I thought were part of my life at the beginning of it, and much of this summer has been trying to transform the pain of that into something more useful – an understanding I can grow from. My grandma Eva would say to me ‘look after your clothes and they will look after you’. I know clothes can’t remake me into someone I like more or that other people will like more, but I’ll take all the help I can get.

Clockwise left-to-right, then centre.

1. Sea anemone shell

In 2018 I went on holiday to Vietnam, and I found a small sea anemone shell on the beach. I brought it home and for a couple of years it lived in the garden on an arrangement of pebbles and shells I have out there. Sometimes during the pandemic I had some friends over to sit in the garden. One of them picked up the shell and it came apart in two pieces. It was a bit too fragile to weather the elements. But I missed it a lot. A year or so later I was in Somerset cat-sitting for my friend Bryony, and I found this large shell at a car boot sale for £2. It felt a little wrong not finding one in nature, as though it breaks the rules of collecting such things, but I bought it anyway.

2. Two terracotta tiles with cat design

I am really into tiles. When I indulge in Dream House reveries, almost all the rooms, floors, patios etc have tiles of some sort. I have harboured a little fantasy for a while that I might be good at making tiles – I even painted a design for a delft tile featuring my pals’ cats a few years back in anticipation of making it real. I recently discovered this is not quite the case when Rebecca and I did a medieval tile making workshop together. But I loved the workshop and the results just the same. I tried to capture the likeness of my cats Minnie and Bambam here. Minnie (on the right) is somewhat recognisable. Poor Bambam however (left) looks like a dejected owl. I want to try again – I feel they deserve better – but these tiles are already treasured and will be until I die.

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Many friends are participating in a rolling hunger strike to protest, if you follow @eligoldstone on Instagram you can find out more. That type of action will not be right for everyone – after a lot of thought I’ve decided it’s not sensible for me – but you can support it by amplifying those participating, donating to groups on the ground in Gaza doing the vital work to get food and supplies to people and by donating directly to families in Gaza. Please also write to your MP to demand the UK government acts and stops enabling this genocide.

So Little Information

In her memoir The Odd Woman and the City, Vivian Gornick is talking to her friend Leonard, and he bemoans all the things he’s yet to learn about himself, ‘It’s disgusting’ he says, ‘to be this old and have so little information’. I wince when I read it.

Sometimes I’m comforted by the knowledge that there’s a lot more to learn about the world and myself. It opens the future up. Other times I’m disgusted, like Leonard. How did I get here, at this point in my life, without seeing myself clearly? I know I still hold onto older age as a magical place where your wisdom, at last, outruns your ego.

The past 9 months have been a painful reckoning with a lot of things I simply did not have the time to unmask while I was working fulltime. Not getting up for work every day exposed things about me and my state of mind that I found confronting. Some of these things I’m still trying to figure out and possibly I’ll always be in process of figuring, never resolved. I’m caught between sympathy for the Jemima Kirke meme ‘you guys are thinking about yourself too much’ and the desire to interrogate myself as closely as I dare, because I want to be better – be a better friend, colleague, writer, daughter, sister, acquaintance and stranger. But I know some kinds of thinking and noticing are better than others and maybe I’ve been working with the wrong kind. I’ve found myself obsessing over friendships or social faux pas as though they are magic eye images I’ve been looking at wrong and if focus in the right way the lesson will be revealed to me. Yes, I’m thinking about myself too much. It’s easy for an unsettled heart to grab at the anxieties that are close by, the small abrasions of daily life, rather than thinking about what that impulse might tell you about the larger engine at work, what the accumulation of these things – thoughts, behaviours, events – might be trying to screech at you.

In Yiyun Li’s extraordinary memoir things in nature merely grow, a book for her son James, who died from suicide a few years after his brother also died from suicide, she writes ‘in the past few months I’ve developed a habit of scrutinizing my mind: is this thought a pebble of a thought, is this worry a pebble of a worry, is this question, seemingly unanswerable, only a pebble of a question?’ and her gratitude for her clear-minded friend who ‘do not indulge’ her in ‘pebble-mongering’. I know my friends can help me understand which thoughts are pebbles and which are boulders, but it does mean being prepared to share them.

As things stand, I – mentally speaking – have an upturned jewellery box of entangled chains that I need the patience to unknot. Perhaps that will teach me how to tell a pebble from a boulder.

The pebbles on the beach in Deal, which is the pebble beach of my imagination.

A couple of other things

I wrote a feature for Stylist’s July print issue on planning for older age. It was really interesting and inspiring to talk to people who are creating intentional communities. The headline for this piece is quite bait-y, so please read without prejudice! (It is also online but paywalled).

I’m running the National Centre for Writing’s Next Steps in Memoir course from September onwards. If you’re working on a memoir project it could be for you. It’s online, so super flexible and you’ll get lots of individual feedback on your writing.

Last month my pal and I went to a Medieval tile making workshop and it was so fun. We bought the class for each other for our birthdays which are close together and it made a really cute date. I’d highly recommend it.

Thanks for reading. And free Palestine.

Matching red gingham mini skirts

Black leather skirt

White mini dress, white cowboy boots, veil

Red heart-shaped sunglasses

A vintage 1940s white sailor boy outfit with little white hat, the back of the top said ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell’

Floor length white lace dress, with ruffles and side slit

Low slung leather belts in white, black and brown

Coin belts

DMs

Hair worn half up, half down, with large bows at the back

Daisies threaded into hair

White lace neckerchiefs

Vivienne Westwood chokers

White lace headscarves

Pearls

Lana Turner-waved hair

Short white socks

McQueen skull scarves

Protect the dolls t-shirt

Lana tour t-shirts

Double denim

Daisy dukes with cotton milkmaid tops

Babydoll dresses

I wore a Granny Smith-green taffeta dress with a vintage cropped blouse with lace inserts

Amy wore wide legged blue jeans and a ruffled broderie blouse

Addison Rae wore a black and white bikini and then a black and white dress which looked v Rodarte

Lana wore a champagne-gold lace 1950s style dress, with a satin belt at her waist and did an outfit change into a frothy lemon chiffon dress halfway through

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I arrived feeling sleep deprived, hungover and troubled. It was mid-afternoon and dinner was planned for 8pm. I took a shower and drank a lot of water.

We met for a ‘welcome circle’ before dinner, where everyone on the retreat shared a bit about why they were there. There was a bowl of fat green olives, easily the best olives I’ve ever eaten. The staff handed out plates of strawberry cream cake which I could not eat being allergic to strawberries and in my preventing-of-my-gallbladder-freaking-out diet.

At dinner the first thing we were served was a piece of deep-fried bread topped with sweet tomato sauce and really pokey basil. I was frightened of the fried bread, but I was ravenous, and I ate a portion of it in a mad, cautious way, half cutting, half tearing at it as though I did not know how to use my knife and fork.

I then ate orecchiette in a sauce that seemed the same as the tomato sauce on the scary fried bread and I lined up the little ears, nesting them on my fork with a gentle push. This was followed by a neat, shallow square of parmigiana, which definitely had cheese in it, and I tried to wrestle the aubergine away from the cheese, but I ate some cheese anyhow and I hoped it wouldn’t haunt me in the night. I took a supplement that is supposed to help people with gallstones to digest food without it causing them problems and its possible it worked as I didn’t have any issues during the night.

orecchiette

Monday

Breakfast was a flotilla of cakes – fruit, cream, chocolate, pistachio, vanilla! I felt so depressed that I couldn’t eat any, but I mean also that I felt depressed. I’d been to the yoga and breathwork session and sobbed silently all the way through. My body and brain often refuse to align, and yoga always reveals that. Fiza, who led the movement sessions said several times as we stretched and breathed you are sovereign in your body, you are safe and confronting how far away from that I felt was revelatory but painful. I had to wipe my tears away from my yoga mat with the edge of my tote bag. I made a mental note to do more yoga. I had the desire to cut little slices of different cake anyhow, just to feel the knife sinking through the various textures of crumb. I ate some pineapple, kiwi fruit, cherry tomatoes with salt and pepper and a couple of pieces of bread. There was fresh peach juice, and I drank half a glass of it in two large gulps. I then ate two marmite-flavoured rice cakes in my room. I lamented not being able to eat several slices of cake for breakfast. Or the large, noble, church-like mound of ricotta, bright white like the sun was bouncing off it in the centre of the breakfast table.

cake flotilla and Matilda the dog

For lunch there was a lovely salad with chickpeas, potato and beetroot, followed by trofie in a courgette and mint sauce. The pasta had the most wonderful texture, soft but chewy in a way that slowed down my eating of it.

trofie with courgette and mint

In the afternoon, Jade, who runs the retreat business offered to take me to the local beach. I had a swim and a float and felt a little more in my body, held by the buoyancy of salty water, it was safe to let go. The sea was so clear. The ocean is a church that makes me understand what it means to worship.

At dinner we were served a little bruschetta followed by pasta. The bruschetta was courgette and ricotta and so I was given a variant on the gluten-free option, which was a half roll, toasted, topped with avocado and courgette. The roll was very brittle and when I bit into it, it shattered, sending half onto the floor, a quarter into my lap and the remainder on my plate. I ate the lap piece and the plate piece and the cats under the table enjoyed the rest. For the pasta course I was given an option because it was cheesy, so I ordered prawn spaghetti. The pasta was in a rich coral pink sauce topped with a single raw prawn, that was so sweet and fresh I almost cried again. Lemon zest beautiful against the pink. I asked for more bread and left green bowl as clean as a hungry cat might. We were then served a small plate of smoked salmon topped with finely sliced apple. It was rich and fresh. It was late when this last course arrived and as soon as I finished eating it I went back to my room, sleepy and wired in equal measure.

magical prawn spaghetti

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1. If you’re still in your 20s and 30s don’t wear shoes without support as your main shoes, I mean like H&M ballet shoes, where there’s a thin layer of plastic, cardboard and fabric between your feet and the street. You won’t find out for quite some years but you’re fucking up your joints.

2. A butter knife will make it so much easier to spread butter without ripping into your bread.

3. The best way to cut your pizza into slices is with a large pair of scissors.

4. Changing your bedsheets helps your mental wellbeing.

5. Ditto cleaning the windows. Sometimes I think I’m depressed but it’s just that the windows are so dirty the light can’t get in. (I’m still depressed but it helps!)

6. When something significant happens in your life mark it with an object. It doesn’t need to be expensive! Over time you’ll come to be surrounded with things that are deeply significant to you, and they will remind of you where you’ve come from and where you want to go next. I’ve bought things like an opal ring, a painting from a friend, a handmade vase and seeing them every day makes me happier.

7. Bars of soap are underrated imo. I think a nice chunky bar of soap is very elegant and you don’t have to dust them like you do bottled hand soap.

8. Practice being alone in public if the thought of it makes you anxious. Turn up to meet people early, order a drink and read your book. Slowly your comfort in being visibly alone will develop.

9. Follow fat babes on Instagram. It is really possible, and actually it is vital, that we widen our idea of beauty.

10. More for writers but I think this can apply in other areas of life – when you feel like you’re failing, you’re stuck and frustrated, it can be because you’re in the process of becoming something else. Like you’re fighting the big boss at the end level of an arcade game, and you’re about to progress to the next level. You might have to fight the big boss a hundred times before you break through, but it’s coming. Stuckness and dissatisfaction are part of the deal, trust that you’ll move through it eventually. Maybe even welcome it as a sign of growth.

11. Expressing an anxiety is like a bit of magic, it can make the anxiety evaporate. Conversely, trying to bury one can create an anxiety Frankenmonster that picks up more worries like an ever-increasing dust bunny.

12. Adopt a pet.

13. If you store your Haribo in the fridge they will be (even) more fun to chew.

14. You’ll never regret a swim. (Unless you’re allergic to duck mites, like I am, and the lake you’re swimming in is full of them).

15. At home pedicure, in salon manicure.

16. Get things framed and put them on your walls.

17. If you want to sell stuff on Vinted, price it sensibly. No one is going to pay £150 for your second-hand £200 retail price dress.

18. I planted two peonies five years ago and it’s only now they started to bloom. It was worth the wait.

19. This is from my book Arrangements in Blue, but I think it’s worth returning to, if only just to remind myself:

One of the cruelties of femme presentation in the world is how you can never catch your own beauty in the moment. Like the way I can now see, really see, without it being something I might have said in the hope the saying could make it so, how all young women are beautiful, how the youth in young women is so impossibly lovely. When you're in your twenties and a woman in her forties says, you don't know how lovely you are, you shake your head. Then you're thirty and a woman in her fifties says it, then you're forty and a woman in her sixties says it. And so it goes on. You're so young! is a refrain you will hear in every decade of your life. But each time you will shake your head and think, no, even though it's you who now finds yourself saying this to younger women. At every interval you'll deny your own loveliness. You'll be seventy years old with chic silver hair cut into a bob, a face full of interest like the weave of an extraordinary silk, and a young woman will say I hope I look like you when I'm older. No, you'll think. No.

I now try to look at photos of myself with the eyes of someone who loves me, to be a friend to myself. Because who among our friends do we not love to look at? I try to friends ‘post whichever photo you like’ more than I say, ‘please delete that one’. I can't manage to look at myself and think, you are beautiful, but I have begun to be able to think more compassionately: this is your body. This is your one body. And sometimes, you look happy, you are laughing.

My relationship to a long weekend is different at the moment because I’m not in full time work. I don’t get to see them coming in the way I used to. I’d just got back from a month teaching in Lisbon when Easter weekend rolled up and I’d forgotten to make any plans. Happily some pals were free on Good Friday, and they came over and we had a cute evening having some food and drinks together. But I was also craving the kind of easy togetherness that being in company of a partner or family can provide: I wanted to watch TV with someone. On the Saturday afternoon my friend Sheena came over for a few hours. We ate Haribo, had cups of tea and watched several episodes of Love on the Spectrum. We spent no money. We had no pressure to swap catch-up stories. We just got the benefit of low-key companionship. It was cosy, it was ideal, and it made the rest of the long weekend feel much less lonely.

2. Self Esteem…

I’m listening to Self Esteem’s new album A Complicated Woman a lot. What Rebecca Lucy Taylor gets into on this record, I think, is an ambivalent relationship to the ideal of an empowered woman. Her music and lyrics have been embraced for their reclamation of an imperfect version of femme-ness, one that is sex positive, direct, wry, tender. But this new record has a more interesting vulnerability to it, I think; it wrestles with doubtfulness, bothness, a reckoning with the veneer of an empowered subjectivity that in reality feels flimsy and inauthentic. The album is bookended by songs called ‘I Do and I Don’t Care’ and ‘The Deep Blue Okay’ and this valorisation of the state of simply being okay (and the state of being okay being given anthemic qualities!) felt more cathartic to me than I’d known that I needed.

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I dutifully collected my form, went and had blood tests and a couple of days later was called up to say they were concerned, and they wanted me to have a scan. The following week I went for the scan and the clinician pressed the imaging probe onto my side and I said that hurts and she said yes that’s because you’ve got gallstones. She turned the screen to show me the hazy white blobs in my gallbladder. Naively I thought they would just refer me for surgery to take my gallbladder out, but instead I was told to manage it through diet. The thing I’ve found that works – and by works I mean almost manages my symptoms – is eliminating all the things I find most delicious to eat: butter, cheese, red meat. Goodbye croquettes! Farewell eggs fried in butter! Adios pork belly! Au revoir roast potatoes! I think I’d completely eradicate my symptoms if I didn’t drink any alcohol too, but I can’t face that yet. I’m glad not to be in excruciating pain but it is – culinarily speaking – very depressing.

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Jack Underwood wrote a beautiful essay on this for Poetry Review:

‘With poems you have to risk all kinds of small, hopeful, doomed leaps; uncertainty is central to your business. You not only have to acknowledge the innate inaccuracy of language as a system that cannot catch or hold onto anything securely, but also that it’s precisely this characteristic of inaccuracy that a poetic, empathetic transaction rests on.’

Asking people to accept, and to invite even, a sense of uncertainty is tough. We want to be sure! We want rules! We want to know we’ve got things right! But there’s so much to be gained when we surrender to not knowing. Not knowing means we’re open to being surprised.

A quote I often use in teaching is from Vivian Gornick, who talks about writing essays as an ‘act of arriving at what we know’. I share it because that is why I write – to get at what I know. To convert the messy diversions of what I feel into the more disquieting, liberating release of what I think. Writing has the power to turn my raw, unmediated experience into insight. And that necessarily requires me to accept what I don’t yet know, what I should be more curious about, what ‘small, hopeful, doomed leaps’ I need to take next.

Nostalgia plays a part. There’s a few photos of me as a kid where I think I look really fucking cool:

But it’s also the playfulness of kids clothing I love, a playfulness which seems to fall a bit flat (for me) when people try to transfer the sentiment to adult-sized clothes, a self-consciousness somehow gets in the way. The strange wistfulness that can be provoked by a particular outfit evaporates. So instead I admire them from a distance, protected by the pleasurable pangs of longing that in this context at least deter me from seeking out dupes.

Because I’m a cool gal who loves music

https://www.minirodini.com/gb/note-satin-baseball-jacket-green

For when you’re posing on some rocks in the calanques

https://www.minirodini.com/gb/vertical-stripes-skirt-swimsuit-red

For bobbing about a city at the weekend

https://en.jellymallow.com/product/glasses-tomato-check-shirtmint/11232/category/60/display/1/

For a cosy time in front of the fire

https://www.zara.com/uk/en/knit-cardigan-with-tulips-p03153501.html?v1=415086179&v2=2422053

For a hike

https://www.johnlewis.com/little-green-radicals-kids-colour-block-anorak-multi/p113053726

For wearing with wool tights between seasons

https://www.johnlewis.com/monsoon-kids-embroidered-tulip-denim-skirt-cream/p113266690

For a trip to a city farm

https://www.mytheresa.com/gb/en/kids/stella-mccartney-kids-printed-denim-jacket-blue-p01010280

For a BODE-coded spring evening

For a summer picnic

https://www.mytheresa.com/gb/en/kids/fabula-sanfoninha-printed-cotton-dress-multicoloured-p01003246

For a day at the beach or having a tennis lesson

https://www.mytheresa.com/gb/en/kids/zimmermann-kids-everley-cotton-blend-terry-dress-green-p00993747

For a summer rave

https://tutudumonde.me.uk/products/smiley-tutu-dress-pastel-yellow?_pos=3&_sid=27bc0d2f4&_ss=r