Things I'm doing to distract me from the world

I started writing this post, got half way through it and realised that it was all about using tarot and my relationship between what is going in in my mind, what is going on in life and what the Moon card has to say about it. That got lifted wholesale and now lives over on my other Substack. You can read and subscribe to it here. You can also book a reading with me here.

After all that I was still faced with a blank page, only this time I had absolutely no idea how to fill it. This led to a nap from which I rather hoped I would wake up fully inspired, but instead woke up looking like I’d brushed my hair with a fork and with no coherent thoughts whatsoever.

I have used up all my wisdomosity for today. Let’s see what I’ve been doing with myself to keep body and soul together while I attempt to buy a house, shepherd my children through dissertations and auditions and try not to think about what the point of it all is in the face of ongoing global, political fuckwittery.

I am absolutely using social media as a giant pacifier and I make no apologies for that. I have a tightly curated Instagram feed in which I immediately block any and all of the horrors in favour of following anything that makes my heart feel lighter. I am obsessed with a man called Dan Crooks who you can find if you search for mystacrooks. He’s a Jamaican who posts videos of Irish dancing, which he calls whimsical skedaddling. The Irish dancing community love him as much as he loves them and it’s complete joy. My favourite video so far is where he shows a clip of Georgian folk dancing which he describes as 90% whimsy, 5% karate and 5% skedaddling. He is the best.

I am also in love with the work of a Belfast based artist called Sue Cathcart. The account is called mrhoracepapers. Horace Papers is a rabbit like personage who has a rich and interesting life. He recently recommended going to his carefully curated Spoon Museum where he will give talks on spoons as long as you DON’T TOUCH THE SPOONS. He works in a factory where all sorts of shenanigans go on.

I love him and I want this poster so much I feel it is only a matter of time before I succumb and buy it.

I have been reading things. I loved

Keris Fox

new book, The Harry Styles Effect. It’s published on March 30th. I confess that I am at best lukewarm about Harry Styles. Some of his tunes are bangers. Some of his outfits are elite but I am in no way a fan. You don’t need to be a Harry fan to enjoy Keris’ exploration of fandom and the way we understand and behave around the things that women are and aren’t allowed to be enthusiastic about. I came away from it thinking that fandoms are revolutionary things to belong to. I may start a Horace Papers fandom.

I also read and enjoyed Charlie Porter’s Nova Scotia House. This will be published on the 20th March. It’s a kind of dystopian elegy of the AIDS crisis with a hopeful twist. I was interested in the Mrs. Dallowayish rhythms of the writing, albeit pared down and the interrogation of creating queer spaces as a revolutionary act. That’s the second time I’ve mentioned revolution in this newsletter. It’s clear where my thoughts are turning.

I’ve nearly finished reading Bill Cunningham’s Fashion Climbing, which is the memoir of a Boston boy from a good family who scandalised all his relations by running away to New York to make giant hats in the shape of birds and tomatoes and oyster shells. If it was a big idea he made it bigger. I love him and his absolute refusal to behave himself and do anything sensible.

I went to see the Leigh Bowery exhibition at Tate Modern. It was wonderful and I will go again, because it was a big exhibition with so much to see and I was pushed for time when I went. I love this peg headdress. He looks like a cross between a cut price Lion King and a villain in a film my children once made called Peg Ninjas. I am also enjoying the idea of what madness could have happened if Leigh Bowery and Bill Cunningham had ever met and collaborated on a project together. Bill; ‘I had this idea for a manticore headdress using live lobsters.’ Leigh: ‘Hold my beer.’

Televisually we are eking out the last few episodes of Shrinking, which as you all predicted, we fell head over heels in love with. I also watched Pauline Boty: I Am the Sixties on iPlayer. I loved it but it made me furious all over again that such a great and important artist was ignored because she was a woman. Her family kept her paintings in a barn where the children were allowed to play, running through them and making dens. When the curator got the surviving works, they were covered in bits of straw. It’s a miracle that any survived. I read a book about her last year and even then, the guy who wrote it managed to be quite passively aggressive and sneery about her work and whether she was properly dedicated to it because she dared to look like she was having fun and did other things as well. Imagine some ranting about revolution finishing off this paragraph too.

I went and spent the day with my friend Claire. We met through a shared enthusiasm for pottery and even though our love of Emma Bridgewater has long fallen by the wayside, our love for each other has stayed the course. We had a wonderful time poking around East Grinstead in the hope of being lured into the clutches of Scientologists and meeting Tom Cruise. That didn’t happen but we did eat some delicious Thai food, which in the long run was probably the healthier option.

We have planned our Canadian EXTRAVAGANNNNZA of a holiday. It took a whole day of us moaning at each other as if we were planning to go to the gulag and weren’t sure whether to start or finish with the salt mines. We were pathetic in our pursuit of joy. 0 out of 10 for us as travel agents. But at last it is done.

We fly into Vancouver where we will pick up a car and ferry across to Vancouver Island. We are going to revisit some of the places we used to take the kids when they were little, for nostalgia’s sake. Then we have a list of places we never got round to because of small children, time and lack of money. From there we are going back to the mainland where we are driving through the Rockies via Whistler and ending in Banff. At this point we think we might have seen enough delightful vistas, so we are off to Calgary for a few days to recover from the wonders of nature. An internal flight will then whisk us to Toronto where we spend our last three days before coming home.

I need recommendations for lovely things to see and do along this route. We hate hiking, bike riding and any healthy outdoor activities you would usually associate with Canadians and this type of terrain. We like great food, strong art, terrific book stores and weird stuff like the museum of the haunted eyeball (I hope this exists). I also hope one day that I might get to hang out with a raccoon. Hit me up if you’re brimming with ideas for my holiday shenanigans and also recommendations for other, lovely things that will allow me to pretend that the world isn’t simultaneously imploding and exploding.