Over at the Vela blog, I wrote a review (of sorts) of Rebecca Solnit’s new book The Faraway Nearby, which is out soon and very much worth reading:

For almost two years now, I’ve been making a dress. I bought the pattern and a roll of fabric on holiday in Wales, but I didn’t have a sewing machine (or tailor’s chalk, or pins, or enough time, or enough patience) and I didn’t know how to sew, so what I was really buying was the possibility of becoming the sort of person who could make a dress.

For a long time the paper bag full of potential gathered dust in my wardrobe, until finally, one cold winter weekend, I brought it over to my boyfriend’s mother’s house, she set up her sewing machine, and we began to make the dress together.

To see or to help a garment come into being, to witness the transformation, is affecting. I don’t want to put too much importance on this – it’s just an item of clothing – but still: out of fabric springs form. This particular fabric, though, purchased because it felt warm and heavy on a cold Welsh afternoon, has a very loose weave, and unravels easily – forgiving if you need to unpick stitches, but dangerous, likely to fray: at any moment things might fall apart.

To describe something that’s not quite right, or that’s becoming not quite right, we use this language of un-making. It’s unraveling, we might say. She’s come undone. When I was 16 my mother taught me how to knit and I made half of a fog-purple scarf over winter break before I got restless and gave the hobby up. Around the same time I was listening to a lot of Weezer and the line “If you want to destroy my sweater/Hold this thread as I walk away” got lodged in my head, even after I’d abandoned the project. Sometimes it’s easier to destroy something with a thread than to create something with a thread; sometimes, though, a thread is what the whole world is made of: it’s a lifeline.

Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby is a book about threads, and a book made up of threads: “in the old way of saying it, tales were spun; they were threads that tied things together and from them the fabric of the world was woven.” Solnit spins familiar tales. Her mother gets old, and sick. She herself gets sick, and then well. A child falls down a well and is rescued, but ultimately her rescuer can’t rescue himself. An artist paints an escape route and sets himself free. Scheherazade tells her stories to save her own life and the lives of countless others. People die, or are born, or reborn.

“All stories are really fragments of one story, the metamorphoses,” Solnit tells us, and there’s an undertone of resignation or acceptance of this, of the slow march of time, the inevitability and invisibility of change: the soldier survives his war but is not the same man he was, and the cannons are melted down and reconstituted and eventually become a weapon for another war.

Read the rest here…

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‘Well in our country’, said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’
- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

1. How to have a panic attack

The most important thing is not to panic.

Some people will tell you that panic is essential. Do not believe them. Sure, you could have a panic attack in the fast lane on the 405 freeway and have to pull over onto the hard shoulder, while traffic goes whizzing past and the misty LA light starts to fade. You might stagger into a hospital, gasping and wild-eyed. There might be tears, flailing, falling. These things might happen: but it’s just as likely to be slower, more subtle. Maybe you won’t even notice. Maybe years will go by before you identify the feeling as something significant.

Lie in bed, on your side, facing the wall. Maybe you’ve taken some yoga classes, maybe someone once tried to teach you to meditate, and you think you can trick yourself into feeling calm. Feel dizzy anyway, maybe because all those times you were “meditating”, you were really just napping in the presence of incense. Feel your heart racing. Wonder if this is what dying feels like. Keep wondering this. Tell yourself that you would know if you were dying, in the same way you know if you’re about to vomit or when you’re hungry or tired. But you don’t know. Worry that you don’t know: is it good or bad that you don’t know? Is not knowing the same thing as knowing?

Wake up in the morning pleased and surprised. Go to bed the next evening not knowing if you’ll survive the night. Repeat until something more interesting happens in your life: you get drunk for the first time, you get a C on a calculus exam and have a meeting with a stern teacher who expected more of you, you get into college anyway, you spend two hours after the prom making out with a boy you didn’t even know you liked, you go to Europe for a month, you move across the country.

2. How to talk to doctors

Go running every day. When winter sets in and it’s too cold to run along the river, start spending your evenings at the gym, which is in a humid basement with a sweat-stained carpet and flickering lights. Run fast, but never very far: your usual distance is four miles on the treadmill, and the funny thing about this is that even four miles later you’re still standing in exactly the same spot. Play your music loudly and try not to look at the television screens flashing news at you. Lift weights sometimes, just the lightest ones, in an attempt to tone your arms, which is something you’ve read about in magazines. Lie on a purple mat and do a few sit-ups and wonder when you’ll start to look like someone who goes to the gym.

Then, at some point, late one evening, begin to feel a pain.

“What sort of pain?” the nurse in the campus clinic will ask you, when you arrive for your appointment and tell her you think you’re going to die.

Tell her you don’t know what sort of pain. Pain, in your chest. That can’t be good, can it? She’ll take your blood pressure, say it’s good. She’ll say you’re a healthy young woman. She’ll want to know if you do any other exercises at the gym. Any weight-lifting? she’ll say.

Tell her: a bit. Not very much though, can’t you tell? You’ll think this is funny, because you’re still pretty scrawny, or at least your arms are. But she won’t laugh; she’ll just say, without missing a beat: well, you’ve probably just pulled something.

Tell her you don’t think you’ve pulled something.

She’ll ask if you have any other symptoms. You’ll say, restlessness, inability to sleep, palpitations – only you won’t know the word for palpitations, so you’ll just say, my heart feels funny. You’ll tell her about that time you went to the ER for something that turned out to be nothing and the attending doctor said he thought you had some sort of heart murmur, and that you should ask your family doctor about it, but you didn’t have a family doctor because you were not from around here and your insurance didn’t cover things like that, so you were asking her about it, now, months later.

She’ll absorb all of this. She’s in her fifties. Maybe she has daughters of her own, college-aged girls. Maybe she thinks you’re crazy. Start to wonder if you’re going to be late for your 3 o’clock class after all. Is this the sort of thing you can get a doctor’s note for? Imagine visiting your professor during office hours, saying, I’m sorry I wasn’t there to discuss Discipline and Punish, I was keeping an appointment to announce my impending death.

Finally the nurse will say, alright, fine, I can refer you to a cardiac specialist. He’ll probably do an EKG, she’ll say. But I still think you’ve probably just pulled something, she’ll add. You have no idea what an EKG is but you’re happy to be taken seriously.

Go home. Look up “EKG”. Start to worry.

Tell your boyfriend that they’re going to hook you up to a machine. A machine! But he’ll be asleep, so you’ll mostly be talking to yourself. A machine!

Arrive at the clinic wary but fully intending to go through with this thing, to find out once and for all what’s wrong, or not wrong, with you. Sit in the grim waiting room. Take stock: note the 70s brown carpet, the dirty yellow walls, the hazy late winter light trying to push its way through greenish-tinted windows. Note that nothing seems very clean, even though nothing is obviously dirty. Keep thinking: oh my God, I need to get home and have a shower. Wonder if heart disease is contagious. Reach for your hand sanitizer; rub the gel between your palms. Wonder if the people working here really work here at all, if the other people in the waiting room – quiet, like shadows – really exist outside of this space. Wonder if you’ll emerge as the same person, or if you’ll emerge at all. When the doctor calls you in, don’t tell him about the heart murmur or the palpitations (you still don’t know the word, and you can’t tell a doctor – a cardiac specialist, no less – that your heart feels funny), just that you’d had a bit of pain in the chest area. Play it down: say, my chest, maybe my shoulder. The nurse thinks it’s just a pulled muscle. The doctor will do some poking and prodding and ask a few questions and in the end he’ll say exactly what you want him to say: that he thinks the nurse is right, you probably pulled a muscle lifting weights at the gym. And because a doctor has said it – even a doctor with an incomplete picture of an incomplete problem, in a dubious clinic populated by ghosts and shadows – it’s okay. Buy a new pair of running shoes on the way home to celebrate.

A few years later, realize that you can Google all your symptoms. Learn the word “palpitations”. Feel immediately better: as soon as you find a word for something, some evidence of it existing, being a thing, it becomes easier to deal with. Visit your doctor. Try to tell him what you think is wrong without actually describing anything: say that you want to do something about the physical manifestations of your anxiety. He’ll think you mean diarrhea, so it will come as a big relief to both of you when you can laugh and say, no, no, heart palpitations, things like that. Things like what? he’ll say. Do you have any other symptoms? You’ll say, Not really. Well, dizziness at night. Sometimes nausea. Shivering, uncontrollable shivering.

Any shortness of breath? he’ll say.

No, you’ll lie.

Fill the prescription. Forget, for years, that you even have this problem. Let it become something that’s past: and forget about that Faulkner quote you once read, the one that says, “the past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” Forget what any of it feels like, so that it can seem new each time it resurfaces.

3. How to fool yourself into thinking you look like a grown up

Get a job, preferably one that you hate, though you could settle for one that you just find boring. Commute. Start to become one of those people who shouts at pedestrians when they walk in front of your bike and realize you’re not angry because someone could get hurt: you’re angry because you’re in a hurry, and you were going at a good clip, and they’ve fucked with your momentum.

Make photocopies and send emails. Become one of those people who distributes agendas before pointless meetings and uses the word “pipeline” regularly. On your lunch break, take a walk and wonder why everyone else looks so much happier than you feel. Catch a glimpse of yourself in the darkened window of a recently-shut shop. Think that you look pretty happy, actually, and that your expensive new haircut certainly looks expensive, or at least it looks expensive if you know how much it cost, which you do, because you paid for it.

Pay your rent. Pay your phone bill. Pay your other phone bill, even though you haven’t used a landline in about ten years. Pay your gas bill. Pay your electricity bill. Pay your credit card bill. Pay for your gym membership. Pay for your groceries to be delivered to your house in the evenings because you just don’t have the time during the day anymore. Go to the bank on a Saturday because you just don’t have the time during the week anymore. Discover that you’re not going to have enough money to pay your rent and your phone bill and your other phone bill and your gas bill and your electricity bill and your credit card bill next month, even though you have a job that you hate (or at least a job that you find boring). Start to dream about work: compose emails in your sleep, look for solutions under your wilted pillow. Wonder if you’re doing it right. See: 1. How to Have a Panic Attack.

4. How to actually be a grown up

Don’t.

5. How to not feel jealous of people who are fitter, happier, funnier, prettier, smarter, more accomplished, and more interesting than you

You could try telling yourself that they’re not fitter, happier, funnier, prettier, smarter, more accomplished or more interesting than you, but you probably won’t believe it, even if it comes from your own trustworthy mouth. Start to resent yourself for trying to deceive you: you don’t deserve to be deceived, even if everyone else is fitter, happier, funnier, prettier, smarter, more accomplished, and more interesting than you. How dare you do this to you! How dare you!

Go to the pub. Sit in the corner. Have a drink and scowl at everyone. Feel marginally better, in an “I feel worse” sort of way. Go home. Go to sleep. Dream about something boring, like buying groceries. Wake up. Think about how everyone else probably has better dreams than you do. Slide into what’s commonly known as a funk, but know there’s nothing common about it: you’re the Queen of Funks, and this is the Funk to End all Funks, and if nothing else – if nothing else! – you can be a superlative failure.

6. How to get out of bed in the morning, even when you don’t want to

Find someone you love who loves you back and will make you a bacon sandwich but refuse to bring it upstairs, even when you say that there is no point in getting out of bed and you’d rather starve because frankly starving would be more interesting than not starving at this point. Wait a few minutes for the smell of bacon to climb the staircase and enter the bedroom. Decide that you’re still not happy with things, that you’re resolutely unhappy, in fact, but that you may as well go downstairs and have the bacon sandwich, as it’s there, because no one else is going to eat it, and it would be a shame to waste a bacon sandwich.

7. How to feel more productive

Stop reading things you don’t want to read. Even that. And yes, if it helps, even this. Also, add things you’ve already done to your to-do list. I know it’s cheating but it still feels good and it will always feel good, no matter what they say.

8. How to feel smug

Don’t own a television. Don’t own a car. Don’t tell people that it’s mostly because you can’t afford these things.

9. How to avoid awkward conversations

Don’t talk to anyone. Ever.

10. How to avoid feeling lonely

Talk to people. Often.

n.b. This originally appeared in GENE 01 last year. Some of it’s fiction. Some of it isn’t. Its alternative title, in my head, is, “It Would be a Shame to Waste a Bacon Sandwich”.

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I have an essay up over at Vela called “The Purest Form of Play”, on swimming, time, practice, play, artistic/athletic discipline, and other things. There’s also an interview with me on their blog, where I talk about my book, what I’m reading, and the eternal pre-tweet question: “am I doing this as an academic or a writer or just a girl sitting in the pub with her boyfriend, Instagramming her burger?”

Here’s an excerpt from the essay!

I’m fascinated by the act of swimming. I use that word act deliberately, in the hope that it connotes the theatrical; I’m interested in the performance, the pool as setting, the costume, the rituals, superstitions, repetitions. Swimming laps, maybe, is like learning lines. Sometimes, when I’m swimming, I slide out of the role of participant and into the role of spectator. If I’m resting at the wall I’ll rest too long, just watching. When the dogged university swimmers are doing their laps, jaded but youthfully energetic, or when there’s someone in the next lane over who’s just really good, who wears years of hard practice particularly well: I admire the fluidity and fluency of their bodies in water. I strive for this fluency myself, even though I suspect I’m past the point of ever being able to attain it.

I like the mask, too. It’s odd to feel that wearing practically nothing–a tight black suit, cut high at the leg, a silicone cap that hugs the head close, goggles that press rings around the eyes–is a protection, a way of preserving anonymity, but it’s true: no one can see me when I swim, at least not the way they can see me elsewhere. I think some people are self-conscious about squeezing into swimwear, flattening their hair and ears, showing skin usually reserved only for lovers or doctors. But I like it. I like the way I look in costume: which is to say, not entirely like myself, or rather not entirely like the myself I’m accustomed to seeing every day, the myself I’m constantly, vainly giving sideways glances to in mirrors and darkened windows on half-empty streets. I look like–someone. Just someone, someone who might be anything at all: renowned or habitually ignored, rich or poor or whatever. There are no particular clues to identity. The face, washed clean, is left to speak for itself; you don’t know the color of my hair or that I only ever wear lipstick if it’s red and expensive (Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent), even though I can barely afford to buy groceries most weeks. You don’t know what I do or don’t do for a living or a not-quite-living, who I’m with or not with, where I spend weeknights drinking after I’ve been swimming, where I come from, what my visa status is. You might intuit certain things from the fact of my being here at all, but you can’t see those things, or any evidence of them on my person. And I can’t see you.

You stand shoulder-to-shoulder with people that you may see in other contexts every day, but how would you know? I wouldn’t recognize anybody that I see regularly at the pool outside of the pool–I only know them from the color of their caps, their distinctive or admirable strokes. Out of water the stroke means nothing–it’s like a tattoo that disappears when exposed to air. But this is how I know these people, this is how we know each other.

Read the full piece here…

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The air is thick with a weird mixture of smugness and insecurity: it’s the evening of the last day of 2012, and everyone’s busy telling everyone else what they did this year and what they learned and what they’re going to do differently next year.

This year I almost didn’t go totally broke, which for a freelance writer/whatever is pretty good going, or so I’m told. I spent a month having a long-overdue love affair with the place I grew up. I swam. I went to weddings. I started a PhD. And so on. But for some reason the thing I think of, immediately and exclusively, when I think of what I did this year, is ‘write a book’, I guess because this is a thing I’ve wanted to do for awhile (well, forever, really). And then I did it and people kept looking at me funny when we spoke, like, why aren’t you more excited about this?. And I looked back blankly, because I didn’t know what the appropriate facial expression for “I don’t know why I’m not more outwardly excited about this; but also I’m more excited than it’s possible to convey” was.

Anyway, it’ll be in bookshops sometime next year and in the meantime you can order it directly from the publisher, if you’re so inclined. And here’s what I think after having written my first book:

1.
It takes longer than you think it should to write a book of publishable (debatable word, I know, I know) standard. Even if you once half-jokingly wrote 50,000 words in one month. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it just takes me longer than I think it should to write a book of publishable(ish) standard. I don’t know how long it should take: I have literally no idea. Like, a year? A decade? A week? But this is a lesson I’m always learning and forgetting and learning again: that things, all things, take more time than I want them to take. So it’s important that I point it out, because by next week I’ll have forgotten again and I’ll be disappointed in myself again.

2.
Maybe don’t do a crowdfunded book (or even album/film/whatever) unless you’ve already written the book. Or at least written most of the book. Or at least have a very very strong sense of what the book is going to ‘look like’. Otherwise you’ll be nibbled on by guilt for a year as you sit at your laptop late at night frantically not writing, and you’ll worry that the thing you produced won’t match up exactly with the thing you promised because let’s face it, things never turn out exactly as we envision, and people will forget completely about the project, and you won’t know if it’ll be a pleasant reminder when a book arrives on their doorstep or if the book will just be a sour artifact of a wasted £20, and you’ll be completely broke for a long time, etc etc.

Obviously this is a bit of a catch-22: isn’t the whole point of crowdfunding to allow people to contribute to the process as well as the product – to give, for instance, an author the opportunity to take the necessary time to write the book? And yes, maybe in theory it is. I’ve written about this before, and I still believe it’s fundamentally a good thing. But there’s a flaw, and I can’t quite put my finger on it it, and I don’t necessarily think it’s a fatal flaw, but it’s big, and it goes something like: the world doesn’t move at quite the right pace for crowdfunding to be practical for large-scale projects, unless maybe you’re Amanda Palmer and you have a million fans in the palm of your hand already. So yeah, if I had written half the book already, or if it was an extended essay or something, that works. But everything’s moved on in a year. We need to slow the pace of consuming down if this is going to work for someone who says, I’m starting from scratch on this project which requires me to do quite a lot of background reading and research and fieldwork before I can even tell you exactly what shape it’s going to take, and then, after I’ve read a lot and transcribed all my interviews and had a hundred conversations about the subject matter with the people I’m working with, then I’m going to sit down and write, which is something which in itself takes time, and then I’m going to edit and rewrite because I’m not going to do something that I’m not happy with or proud of. And then the actual publication process starts: the copyedit, the proofreading, the typesetting, the cover design, the printing: all the other stuff that takes time too. Which is basically what I did.

3.
There’s no big “hooray!” moment. One day you’ll be sitting there thinking, how is this ever going to be a Thing? And then one day you’ll be emailing the manuscript to the copyeditor and then one day you’ll be reading proofs, and then one day you’ll be opening a box full of your own books. But there’s never a moment where you say, ‘let’s go get champagne and celebrate the fact that I’ve finished!’ Because you’ve never quite finished, quite. When you send the manuscript off, when you receive the proofs, when you hold the physical thing: people will say, isn’t it great, aren’t you so excited? You must be so excited! And you’ll say yes, it is great, and yes, I am so excited!, but you’ll also be thinking, but how did this happen? and what happens next?

4.
Writing a book is really thankless work. I don’t know why anyone would do it if they didn’t take pleasure from the act itself, or if they had any expectations at all of external encouragement or gratification. Does that sound negative? I don’t mean it to: I love sitting at my desk and looking out my window and reading things and typing things and feeling a little at sea sometimes, and going for walks and swimming for a very long time when things are going badly and not having time to go to the pool at all when things are going well. I love all that, that’s all I ever really want to do. But listen: no one else really gives a crap if you’ve written a book or are writing one (except for your family, of course. They’ll tell everyone they know, with embarrassing abandon, about how you’re writing a book). You won’t be paid well to do it if you’re paid at all. There’s no guarantee that it’ll be worth it in the end. When people you meet at the pub ask what you do and you tell them you’re writing a book, they’ll ask you what the book is about, and for the first ten months or so you’ll dread the question because you don’t quite know the answer yet, or you do know the answer, fundamentally, but you haven’t figured out a good way to articulate it yet. And then for the last two or three or four months or whatever, you’ll really want them to ask, because you have the perfect answer, and you have so much to say about it, and it’s so exciting! – except that their eyes will glaze over immediately no matter how garbled or practiced your answer, and they’ll smile and nod and be polite and ignore everything you say and that’ll be that. Sometimes they’ll ask if you have a publisher. You’ll say yes, and they’ll want to know how you managed that, in this cut-throat competitive world (“and at your age!” someone will say, which is both a compliment and a challenge), and you’ll have to shamefacedly admit that you don’t have some story about Being Discovered, you don’t have any literary accolades, you’re not a fresh-faced, Brooklyn-dwelling, New Yorker-worthy young talent that everyone will have heard of this time next year, you’re not Lena Dunham, you’re not special. You were just in the right place at the right time. You know some people at a small startup publishing house. You’re lucky.

People never judge you as strongly as you think they should for this, though. Usually they’ll just say something like, “but God, isn’t the whole 50 Shades of Grey thing so depressing?”, or, “ooh, my cousin’s a copywriter, she has a really great website, you should get a website!” or whatever, and then you’ll say “what do you do?” and they’ll tell you all about their job as an administrative assistant or how they just finished a doctorate in neuroscience or how they’re about to head off to spend a year translating poetry in Kyrgyzstan (it’s Oxford, that sort of thing is de rigueur).

And then for no good reason at all you’ll feel a bit like an asshole, because you know it looks like you just sit around all day looking out the window and reading things and typing things and feeling a little at sea sometimes, and that’s precisely how you spend your time, and even though you have no money and no guarantee of ever having money again you feel spoiled, or like you know a secret that other people don’t know, like you’re getting away with something.

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I am sitting at my desk, like I do nearly every day, with a cup of coffee in an orange-striped Penguin classics mug (The Pursuit of Love). I am watching the rain fall on the rainforest garden, now so overgrown, so wild, that I generally avoid it, because to spend time there gives me anxiety: I think instantly and obsessively of all the things I could be doing, and am not doing, with that space. My old retired Dutch bicycle, chained to the garden shed by ivy (and, secondarily, an actual bike lock), rests where it has been resting for a year and a half now. I’m unable to give it up, although it’s not in very good shape, and it’s unusual enough that even the most ambitious repairmen seem to think that sourcing parts for it would be all but impossible. I keep thinking that someday, somehow, I’ll be the one to fix it up, but it was already well-used when I got it, and I don’t really know anything about bikes, even though I probably should (my father was recently inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame, after all).

Anyhow, pretty much every day for the last year I have spent at least a few hours sitting here, doing this. Sometimes all I manage to accomplish is to stare out at the greenery (or, in winter, the bare branches, the cold ground). Since nobody pays me to do any of this, I don’t have to feel guilty if that’s all I’ve accomplished at the end of a day. When people do pay me to do things (not very often, to be honest, but it does occasionally happen), I do those things instead.

Writers are always talking about, or writing about, or reading about, how they work, or so it seems to me. Maybe it’s an avoidance tactic: because it’s related to the act of working, it’s almost the same thing as actually working. It’s tangentially useful. Maybe. But who was the writer who said you have to sit there at your desk no matter what, put the hours in even if you’re not working at all? That’s the other problem with all these writers talking and writing and reading about how they work: sooner or later they all blend together, become this one figure, The Writer At Work, who has all the traits and habits of all writers, even when they contradict each other. So I don’t know who said that, about having to just sit there. I do know that it was Hemingway who said the thing about always stopping before you’ve exhausted your supply of ideas and words – stop so that you’ll know how you need to begin the next day. I guess like how some food critic or chef said that the perfect meal leaves you wanting one more bite. Except that in addition to Hemingway saying this, someone else also said it, or agreed with Hemingway, anyway. Murakami, I think, though it could have been anyone. Other people will say the opposite. It strikes me that we read these little bits of advice and observation not because we actually care what circumstances led to the birth of our favourite books, say, or what kind of discipline our favourite writers have, but because we are seeking to affirm that we’re not alone. We’re always searching for reassurance that we’re not doing it wrong. We keep reading until we find someone whose methods or outlook match, more or less, our own, and then we breathe a sigh of relief, and stop searching quite so frantically, because our own particular habits have been validated. We’re doing it right after all!

Anyway, the writer who said you had to sit there at your desk no matter what would, I think, approve of the way I structure my days.

Anyway, what I’m thinking, as I’m sitting here today, on a Sunday, clocking in, putting in my hours, is that I want to start increasing the distance I swim each day. I don’t need to spend more time at the pool, I think; I just need to spend my time more efficiently. Often I take long rests so that I can watch the other, better, faster swimmers, to really think about things before I push off again. I think this kind of observation has helped me improve fairly drastically over the last few years, but probably it’s time to think a little less and do a little more.

I’m also thinking about how next week I’m going back to school for the first time in a long time, and up until quite recently all I felt was unbridled excitement, but now, all week, I’ve had this terrible sense of inadequacy: I’m sure I’m going to be found out, deemed unqualified even to begin.

Sometimes I interrupt my own thoughts to read someone else’s thoughts – an article I’ve been meaning to read all week, for instance, still open in a tab. I like to get all my tabs closed on Sunday, in preparation for a fresh week full of frantic clicking and saving-for-later and not-reading. Sometimes I discover that something I’d been putting off reading is not something I want to read at all, or is only a paragraph long. There’s a certain satisfaction when that happens, though I’m annoyed with myself for not taking the time to find out sooner. It’s like a certain amount of energy was reserved for that particular tab, that particular article, and now I have that energy spare, to play with.

***

Yesterday I spent a few hours in the front garden. Gardening is thankless work. I always enjoy it very much up to the point at which I straighten my sore back, wipe my muddied hands on my ripped jeans, and assess the results of my labour, and realise that nothing looks much changed or much improved. Sure, there are fewer weeds, the rose bush is no longer drooping over the wall and into the path of pedestrians, but essentially, everything looks the same, just a little bit tidier, almost imperceptibly tidier. If you didn’t know what I’d been doing and you walked up to our house, you wouldn’t notice anything at all, though at least you wouldn’t necessarily think, gosh, what a mess!

I know that’s kind of the point: gardening is an investment of time, like writing, for instance. But while I don’t have a problem with the way writing a book is – you’re always thinking, I’ve worked all day and I’ve made no progress at all! until suddenly, one day, you find yourself with a finished manuscript – I do have a problem with the way gardening is. I guess I want instant gratification sometimes. Which is probably why we’ve never managed to tame our garden, why we’ve never managed to really grow anything, in an organised sense (we’ve certainly been very good at letting the wretched ground elder take over, and the cherry trees have gotten substantially taller in the years that we’ve lived here).

But I do like doing something physically difficult, and I like getting dirt under my fingernails. The other day I painted my fingernails, for the first time in about two years, with some nail polish I found lurking on my desk under some papers. It’s a funny purple colour, and it chipped almost instantly, for which I was relieved: I’d like to be somebody who wears nail polish, but the reality is that it made me feel a little too much like not-myself. Maybe someday, I think, and idly chip some more away as I sit on the couch reading.

***

Sometimes whole days go by when I don’t talk to anyone. It’s quite easy to do: if the Man is in London and the postman doesn’t need me to sign for anything and I don’t need to go to the shop around the corner for milk or bread or butter, and I don’t have plans for the evening or money to go to the pub, who would I speak to? Sometimes people will come by trying to sell us things, or at least trying to sell us ideas. One day a man came to the door, wanting to tell me about how he could insulate our loft for free.

“I’m not trying to sell you anything,” he said.

“I don’t think you are,” I said, although it was obvious that I did think he was, and moreover obvious that I was not prepared to be persuaded to think anything else. I looked at the card in my hand: FREE!, it said. It had a URL printed across the front, too, but I knew I would not look at the website, even though our house probably could do with some more, or better, insulation. I leaned against the doorframe, as if to take up more space, to assert my place, and told him I’d have to ask my landlady. He promised he’d come back later, but he never did, I guess because he knew I wasn’t going to ask my landlady.

***

We have lunch and listen to The Archers. I return to my desk. It’s still raining. I haven’t been outside yet. I was planning to mop the kitchen floor today, but I think maybe the rain gives me an excuse not to, though I would no doubt have found an excuse anyway. I don’t think we’ll ever be tidy people, really. We’ll never have pristine white carpets or the kind of house where everything has its place and then resides, meekly, obediently in that place. Here everything is always spilling out, spilling over. I’ve spilled red wine on my yellow slippers from Fez. The sauce has bubbled up and stained the stovetop red. The books spill off the shelves, slip off the mantlepiece. When it hails, the hailstones come down through the chimneys, invading, transgressing. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed by the neediness of a house, all the things that need doing, maintaining, but today, and most days, this effort seems like a small price to pay for shelter and warmth, for being able to sit and watch the rain.

When I was growing up, I used to like climbing the hill beside our house. From halfway up you could look down and see the human face of the house, the jagged staircase-nose and the uneven window-eyes.

Rilke, as quoted in Bachelard:

(House, patch of meadow, oh evening light
Suddenly you acquire an almost human face
You are very near us, embracing and embraced.)

Akiko Busch, in Geography of Home:

When one of my sons first started to color pictures, the house he drew as an imprecise shape, between a circle and a square, with two windows hovering near the top and a door floating somewhere between them. The resemblance of this outline of a simple house to the human face was unmistakable. […] And it occurs to me that this primitive rendering captures the way we imprint ourselves on the places we live.

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