The Odd Life and the Good Life

I am cat sitting for my parents for a couple of days. My parents are dog sitting for my brother. My brother is elephant sitting. No. He is not. He is on a well deserved holiday after having spent the last six weeks nursing one of his dogs after a particularly awful surgery. He hasn’t slept for weeks due to the fact that the dog in question liked to pick her stitches out in the wee, small hours and consequently had to be guarded from herself round the clock. He has gone to a beautiful seaside resort, which may not matter in the long run as I expect he has spent most of his time comatose.

Cat sitting is considerably less onerous than dog wrangling. I definitely got the better end of the deal, although Anorak woke me at ten to seven this morning with his attempts to passionately kiss my face. When I ducked under the duvet, he crouched on the pillow and spent five minutes jabbing his paw under the sheets with an air of grim determination. ‘YOU WILL BE LOVED. GET UP.’ It reminded me of brutal mornings with effervescent toddlers. ‘CAN WE PLAY AT BEING TRAIN DRIVERS? HERE’S YOUR TICKET. OPEN YOUR EYES. NO. OPEN THEM. ALL ABOARD. WHOOOO!’

Even when I sat up, he insisted on sitting my knee and dabbing at my cheeks. My efforts to avoid dribbly, cat kisses meant that I got a workout of face yoga this morning, despite not being in a luxury hotel resort. At least we did all this silently. Thankfully Anorak doesn’t know how to turn on the radio and I’m not going to be the one to show him.

I was about to write that it has been a bit of an odd week, but when I think about it, it’s been fairly on brand for me. Jason and I were kicking around some plans recently and I said that I wanted to embrace a more left field kind of life. He said: ‘The odd life, not the good life,’ (although I am Margot Ledbetter and I claim my £10). In the end we agreed that we wanted an odd but also good life. This seems to be our general direction of travel anyway, so we might as well go with it. That’s as far as our life plans have got for now, but at least we are thinking about it.

We got back from Helsinki late last Monday night. On Tuesday, Jason spent the day at his woodworking class. He has been building a step stool for the last five weeks under the watchful eye of a man called Len who wears an apron and has a pencil behind his ear. Len does not believe in technology. Len believes in tradition and doing things this way because that’s the way we’ve always done them. Jason loves Len. I am very glad that I didn’t sign up to build a step stool, because although I admire people like Len, if he saw the way I have been making a small raincoat for my lion, it would have broken him. Our working methods would not align.

On step stool day, I collapsed like a souffle after two, solid weeks of holiday making. On Wednesday, Jason drove to Manchester, taking in various appointments and meetings en route. He travels around the country much like Elizabeth I on a royal visit. Eventually there will be blue plaques up and down the country in his honour. On Thursday he drove to Leicester, where he did more stuff and things, shaking hands and dispensing largesse. Then on Friday he set off for a Bank Holiday weekend of live action role play, which involves painting his face purple, donning horns and stabbing people with latex swords in a field in Derbyshire. He has been doing this since before we met and one of the main reasons that we are still together is that he never tries to make me go with him. I detest camping. I detest camping in face paint even more.

In the meantime, I spent a few days beating the bounds of my manor. After I’ve been away, I like to do a few of my best walks, visit my favourite charity shops and generally make sure that I pay homage to the genius loci of Poplar. In Ben Aaronovitch terms, my patch would surely be hotly contested. We have the Thames on one side of us, the river Lea on the other and a whole bunch of tributaries, collectively known as the Bow Back Rivers up at Three Mills Island. That doesn’t include the extensive canal network, which would clearly have some kind of genius loci of their own, hopefully in the guise of some mad, Victorian industrialist in a steam punk style. I don’t feel I have truly come home until I have walked the boundaries. The thing I enjoy most about them is that they are quite porous boundaries. Much like the water that surrounds me, I ebb and flow about the place until I feel sufficient homage has been paid and all local deities have been appeased.

Friday and Saturday were old and new, not borrowed and blue. I have known Keris Fox and Katherine May both of whom write marvellous books and Substacks (here, here and here) for years, but we had never actually met in real life before. On Friday I spent the day with Keris, eating lunch, getting lost (very much my fault), walking for miles and visiting the Fragile Beauty exhibition at the V&A. I left her about to embark on an adventure with Barry Manilow, which seemed entirely fitting.

On Saturday I went to see Katherine in conversation with Leyla Kazim (Substack here) and Angela Clutton (Substack here) at the British Library. The event was focused on seasonality, both of mind and palate, with a fresh and affirmingly wide scope that meant you could enjoy it and not have to apologise that you didn’t spend the entire winter crouched in a ditch, singing the praises of the humble turnip. The talk was part of Food Season 2024. There is one event about farming in the digital age still to come, which I can’t go to as I am going to introduce myself to some bees that day, but I enjoyed Saturday’s event so much, I will definitely go again next year. Obviously, the best thing was meeting Katherine in actual, real life and getting to eat buns with her. As we were catching up, she pointed out that we have known each other for fifteen years. Fifteen. FFS. I think the first time I ever messaged her was to ask her something about vajazzling. Nowadays we sparkle in very different ways.

One of the best things about meeting people you have known in the virtual world, particularly through their writing, is that they rarely end up shocking or disappointing you, or possibly more importantly, murdering you. Writing is such a generous, inclusive thing and the community that grows up around virtual writing tends to mirror that, in my experience. I’ve never met up with a blogger/substacker that I didn’t like and/or immediately feel comfortable with. At one point, Keris said: ‘It’s like we’re the same person,’ which delighted me and hopefully didn’t distress her too much.

Sunday largely involved me failing to get dressed and eating the contents of a particularly bountiful deli visit. As I ate ripe tomatoes and anchovies, juice and oil dribbling down my chin and mopped myself up with some delightfully chewy sourdough, I felt replete in every way that mattered.

On Monday, Jason drove back to Poplar, threw me the car keys and a kiss, whereupon I leapt into the hot seat, grinding back up the M1 to my cat sitting duties. It was a particularly stressful drive due to bank holiday nonsense. A lot of drivers seemed to feel that the motorway was theirs to play dodgems on, which meant that by the time I arrived at my parent’s, I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Luckily, my friend Matt arrived shortly afterwards and whisked me off for a chilly picnic.

I am very particular about picnics. I tend to eschew them with a firm hand, unless I have made them. I feel the same way about barbecues. It is something to do with British people and al fresco eating. It doesn’t come naturally to us as a race. Probably due to the fact that we live on a rain swept hunk of rock. We are all about the hearty stews, consumed with three vests on inside a cottage with five inch thick walls. We fear the elements. When we are forced outside, eating often becomes quite neanderthal. Hunks of scorched meat that manage to be the texture of shoe leather and yet dangerously undercooked at the same time. Great, indigestible chunks of seared sweetcorn. Pasty, floury buns that dissolve like wet paper on the tongue. These are a few of my not favourite things.

When it comes to picnics, it’s all plastic punnets of three for two ‘picnic’ food from the deli aisle in Morrisons, litres of fruit twist Fanta in bulging bottles and a multipack of crisps that make me want to weep. I haven’t got time for this, I rage internally, as we clamber up another godforsaken hill to look at an indifferent view. On the days when it isn’t blowing a gale, forcing you to anchor your pickled onion Monster Munch under a boulder while you make jokes about the bracing nature of outdoor life, you are usually sweating into your arse crack whilst trying to stop a battalion of wasps attacking your Ribena. It’s all hideous.

Having said all that, Matt is the exception to my no picnics rule. Matt and I met many years ago when he did some brand photography for me. We clicked instantly and haven’t stopped egging each other on to greater heights of daftness since. While Matt is always up for coming out to play, he is also a serious foodie. He is so serious a foodie that he has written a cookery book, which I will be writing about when it’s published. I know that when Matt asks me to go on a picnic with him, the food will be worth all the discomfort and adverse weather conditions. As we sat on a bench, shivering and dodging the occasional downpour, we managed to eat a beautiful tomato salad, dripping with good olive oil and lemon juice. Flecks of basil leaves and pops of peppercorn gave it that extra hit of the Mediterranean. We mopped up the juices with good bread before embarking on a roast squash and feta salad, made more piquant with a scattering of pomegranate seeds. It made the frostbite worth it.

Tuesday was a trip down memory lane with lunch at one of my old haunts, with an old friend. St. Martin’s Coffee Shop is well worth a visit if you’re ever in Leicester and desperate for decent food. My friend and I caught up over a great heaping plate of roast mushroom hash and it was just the ticket on a day when we spent the majority of our time reminiscing over all the places we used to visit that are now closed and eating ice cream in the rain.

I’m back in London today, but only for a few days. Chesil Beach and beekeeping beckon and it would be rude to say no.

I was thinking about how, over the last few years, my life had become smaller and smaller thanks to Covid and trauma, mentalness, grief and fear. I wondered where I had gone. I wondered if all that plus the menopause had finally done for me. I thought a lot about Shirley Valentine. I always do, to be honest. The words that haunt me the most though, and which I have written about before are these:

I have allowed myself to lead this little life, when inside me there was so much more. And it's all gone unused. And now it never will be. Why do we get all this life if we don't ever use it? Why do we get all these feelings and dreams and hopes if we don't ever use them?

Shirley runs away to a Greek island to find herself again. I tried that but got too irritated by holiday makers. Last year made me realise that running away won’t do. Where do we run to? It all ends in the same place anyway. The thing I needed to learn to do was to stop running. I needed to stay anchored for a while, letting life surge around me while I figured things out for myself. That work made me realise that the little life that I was living wasn’t even mine in the first place. That was a life made my circumstance and other people. Once I started shedding what didn’t belong to me, it made room for expansion, and dreams that I might just be able to make real. Then I had to learn how to handle those dreams and realisations, which were quite fragile, and turn them into something sturdy which would survive in the real world. I think that’s where I’m at now, and it’s pretty good, all things considered. Odd, but good.