The Substacker Came Down Like A Sloth Upon The Ground

We are now in the sixty-seventh week of January and I have managed to mostly stop being furious with myself and everyone else. I have swapped this out for a slow puncture of anxiety that farts and whistles in my ear as I stagger about feeling oppressed by completely normal day to day activities that I have no business feeling bothered by, and yet here I am, being bothered.

Things are not terrible. Some things are even good. Blood oranges are being eaten and the supply line is robust. I am heavily into soups and broths, which I believe are as efficacious as a hot bath for making a person feel well. I have yet to eat soup in the bath but I am fairly sure that doing so would make a person feel so shiny that it might actually be illegal. Pho and ramen are my broths of choice, but I did make a strong leek and potato soup last week that even my soup denying son had two helpings of.

My social life has been surprisingly busy for a January. I went on a date with Jason to the Houses of Parliament. He had never been, and the last time I went I was in primary school and was more interested in eating sandwiches on the bus than the throbbing heartland of British democracy (such as it is). If you like Pugin and banquette seating it’s a lot of fun. I enjoyed disobeying the ‘please be respectful of all parliamentary loyalties’ request and hissing at the statue of Margaret Thatcher as we went past.

I met up with my lovely friend Alex for lunch and a debrief about the next book we are discussing at the queer bookclub he runs at Beckenham Bookshop. If you’re in the area and you fancy it, it’s on Thursday 13th February at 6.30 p.m. We will be discussing Jon Ransom’s The Gallopers. If you get the book from the actual Beckenham Bookshop you get £2 off. (Click on the link for the bookshop to pull up the order form).

I am glad that the bookclub has survived into a new year. Alex put me in charge of December’s meeting after he got the flu and lost his voice, and I was slightly worried that I might have broken it in his absence.

Tilly finally submitted her dissertation with a whole eight minutes to spare before the deadline. She celebrated by coming to spend the weekend with us, which was lovely because we saw her for approximately three hours on Boxing Day and it’s been too long.

She and I went to the Hew Locke exhibition at the British Museum. She introduced me to Locke’s work which I love, and I was so excited to see What Have We Here? As a concept it seemed rich and interesting and I really loved the collaboration that Grayson Perry did with the British Museum for Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, so I had high hopes. Sadly, I wasn’t wildly keen on this one. It was quite badly lit, which meant a lot of peering into vitrines, and what tied the art to the artefacts was the text, which was a lot of small, fiddly writing. There was a lot of squinting and queueing while people attempted to read all the labels. The show is on until February 9th if I haven’t put you off completely.

We had a mooch round afterwards, calculating how big the British Museum would actually be if they were obliged to give back everything they had acquired by looting or sticking a flag in it. You might fit it on the footprint of our boat I expect.

I did enjoy wandering around the Assyrian carvings. They were very strong on beards, eye watering calf muscles and fifty exciting ways to kill a lion. It’s all very well saying that the Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, but I didn’t see a single carving of a wolf in all the miles of stonework I marched past.

I have three bits of big news which I have been reticent about because they are so big I’m not quite prepared for them, even though they appear to be happening anyway.

Firstly, Oscar has applied for all his university/conservatoire places for October and the initial tranche of auditions are happening. Drama schools are complicated because not only are there reams of forms to fill out and interviews to do, there are also several rounds of auditions for each place. His first choice is Glasgow and the audition, unlike a lot of the first rounds for other places, is in person. He has asked me to go with him for support. Next Thursday we get up at sparrow fart to catch the early train to Glasgow Central. All appendages crossed please.

Secondly, Jason and I are in the throes of buying a house. I’m saying no more about it because what was a fairly straightforward situation has, as is the way of buying and selling houses everywhere, become something of a nightmare and could fall apart at any moment. I have been on a pretty intense emotional roller coaster with it all in the last couple of months but am now at the dead behind the eyes, don’t actually give a fuck what happens stage of things. That might sound bad, but compared to what preceded it, I welcome the fuckit.

Thirdly, I am going back to work. Due to all the moving parts of my life I am not even attempting to hold down anything as bourgeois as a 9-5 gig. I am going to work for myself. I know what to do and I know that I can do it. What I needed to figure out was how to do it in a way that is both sustainable and helpful. I had coffee with my brilliant friend Emma yesterday, who is calm, organised and successful. When I laid out the jumble of my thoughts in front of her, she helped me create order from chaos and talked me down from some of my more fearful imaginings. I still have some work to do before I talk about it here, but I will talk about it soon.

In not unrelated news, I have already read twenty-one books this month. I watched an Instagram reel last week which described intense reading as a dissociated state, and like many other lightbulb moments I’ve had in recent months about my neurology, this made my whole head light up in recognition. It’s absolutely the case that when I sit down and start reading, I can feel the moment that my brain locks into the altered state that allows me to inhale words like sweets. When I’m there, I am very, very far away from news about mining searches or air source heat pumps and that is a good thing.

I’ll do a round up of my January reads next week.

The rest of this week is all about getting ready to celebrate Jason’s fiftieth, which is on Thursday. The children are all coming for the weekend. They are giving him the gift of going to see War of the Worlds. They are inadvertently giving me the gift of not having to go and see War of the Worlds, which I am delighted about, and it’s not even my birthday. There will be Chinese food, arguments about the Traitors and pavlova with Maltesers. He will be grumpy because he eschews fuss with a firm hand, but he will be secretly delighted and talk about it for weeks after the event, which is as it should be.