It’s been a week. To be fair, all my weeks are weeks. I am a person who is almost constantly having a week that turns life into some overblown soap opera. I should have called this Substack ‘It’s been a week - in perpetuity’.
I have many things to tell you about. It was
book launch. It was my seventeenth wedding anniversary. It was the week I discovered the Libby App and the fact that I could get free audio books piped directly into my ears. I like the fact that for me, the discovery of the App is on a par with wedded bliss and one of my best friend’s triumphs. Proportion is important.There have been less lovely things, as there always are. My shoulder blades have been permanently rearranged into some kind of corrugated fan shape I have so much stress in my body. I have a twitchy eye and I have had a headache for two weeks straight. In order to right myself I would need to physically eat Yoga with Adrienne in some kind of shamanistic ritual. Let’s not dwell. It’s beginning to tighten my jaw.
In the spirit of sweeping all the negative things under the rug and claiming it’s a feature I saw in World of Interiors, I am allowing myself to be inspired by
post requesting vital informations on the small joys that summer offered. When I started to think about it, there were a lot of good things going on this summer. Here are a few highlights.I finally got to meet and hang out with
and who I have been friends with for three hundred and fifty years on social media. Turns out that they are as delicious in real life as they are virtually and hanging out with them was a tonne of fun. I also managed to squeeze in a few dates with some old friends who I had rather missed and very much loved hugging until their pips rattled.
Jason bought me these Adidas trainers a month ago and I have barely taken them off. If I could get away with sleeping in them, I probably would. I love the fact that they are called ‘Bold’ shoes. I confess that they do make me feel rather bold, dare I say Brazen with a capital B. It’s like wearing old fashioned rhubarb and custard sweets on your actual, real life feet. They also come in seventeen frankly delicious colour ways and if I was Bill Gates wealthy, I would buy every colour for everyone I love, including the cats.
I was so fucking disappointed when that shitweasel Rishi Sunak declared his love for Adidas trainers earlier in the year. I went into a small but steep depression where I thought I might have to switch my long standing devotion to the brand forever, but I decided to double down on it instead and hope that his feet wither on the vine and drop off so he has to wear unwieldy, prosthetic clown feet forever. Not that I’m bitter.
This was the summer I fell head over heels in love with Sophie Willan the comedian and star of Alma’s Not Normal. I’d already seen her on Taskmaster and loved her and then that love deepened into a not inconsiderable swoon when I watched Alma’s Not Normal and then immediately watched it again, and again and then made my entire family watch it with me. It is a work of genius. Willan, who wrote, starred in and directed Alma is perfection. She has that knack of making you howl with laughter one moment and cry the next. Her ear for dialogue is exquisite and I don’t know why she isn’t being carried on a throne through the streets while people throw flowers and disco balls in her general direction. I do think some of it has to do with the fact that I related very hard with certain situations she writes about. Alma’s granny reminded me viscerally of my own more than once.
I had an absolutely perfect day with my daughter and her girlfriend earlier in the summer, which I wrote about here. The sun shone, we ate delicious food, ice cream was abundant, we swam and sunbathed and did all the good summer things. It was like having an entire holiday in a day. This, it turns out was much more important than I thought at the time because I came down with Covid two days after that and then spent much of the rest of the summer going into too much detail about my dad’s exploded knee.
I had another perfect day when I took my son and his girlfriend to see Cabaret. We saw the version with Layton Williams as the Emcee and Rhea Norwood as Sally Bowles. We went for dim sum in China Town beforehand, ate delicious desserts from Mamasons Dirty Ice Cream Parlour and had an absolute ball. Afterwards, Oscar, who has had a tricky couple of years (to say the least) said: ‘That was one of the best days of my life,’ and my heart exploded into a million pieces.
I was also the proudest woman in the universe when Oscar got the lead role in the end of year play at his drama school and aced it. Jason, who hates theatre, turned to me half way through his performance and whispered: ‘He’s got ‘it’ hasn’t he?’ He has.
I did some new things artistically speaking that made me very happy indeed. I went on a great summer school course at the Slade, discovering what makes art good or bad. I saw
interview my hero, Tracey Emin. I went to some brilliant exhibitions that made me think differently about the world. Also, I finally finished making my lion doll, which is really a spell about me and my thoughts about my gender. It is some powerful juju. I was particularly proud of the pet bee.
I went on a pottery course to scratch another lion related itch. It wasn’t a course on how to specifically make a lion. It was a course on hand building with ceramics. Everyone else made huge, impressive pots and I made a series of animals, of which the lion is my favourite and my best.
And even when things got dark and there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing with my dad and hospitals and helping my parents organise their lives around illness related roadblocks, there was the fact that I could spend time with my parents and I could be of help to them, which not everyone gets to do. Also, even though they drive me round the bend (and vice versa) they are still pretty excellent human beings who it is properly nice to spend time with and who make me laugh a lot, especially when they don’t actually mean to.
I’m a lucky woman.
"It was the week I discovered the Libby App and the fact that I could get free audio book piped directly into my ears."
Yes, it's a great discovery, right? Love an audio book.
i feel so honored to be on this journey with you. yes, these posts are on substack, a public forum, but still, the way you write makes me feel invited in....a gift. so thank you for sharing the ups and downs, ins and outs. reminders that we are all just human.
at one year in posting on substack i am still trying to get a feel for how vulnerable to be in my posts, i look to you as one stellar example. :-)