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Caroline is Writing

a blog by a writer attempting to live the literary good life on the internet
5 min read Permalink

the process of reading as unconscious as breathing

I have really struggled with reading in the last six months. This week, I finally tidied up the windowsill next to the bed and was confronted with the true depth of this problem. There were over twenty books strewn across it in various stages of unreadness. It’s not a “to be read” pile so much as a “I can’t read it” pile.

Some of the volumes in that stack are titles that I’d made it three quarters of the way into before bailing out, others where I had only flicked through the first few pages one night before falling asleep. Putting them all away again felt a little like admitting defeat. I’m probably not going to finish any of those books any time soon.

It’s not them, it’s me. I’m finding it hard to concentrate on one thing for very long (c.f. the absolute state of the world these days) but I don’t think that’s the problem here. I’ve been a procrastinator for most of my life; I’m used to having to trick myself into doing things I don’t really want to do for sustained periods. This doesn’t feel like that.

I think what makes me put a book down and lose all desire to ever pick it up again is a feeling that I should be doing something more worthwhile with my time. Something that will make things better. I cannot articulate what that other activity is, nor have I, in six months of listlessly turning pages, chanced across it. I just know that reading that book, in that moment, is not it.

And that really upsets me, because I’ve always been able to read anything whenever I felt like it. The concept of not being able to “get into” a book was, until recently, completely alien to me. I would just pick something up and set off, no looking back, the process of reading as unconscious as breathing.

I’m absolutely not alone in this problem — all of the extremely bookish people that I follow on Instagram seem to be suffering with it too. Ruined reading, the weird dreams, extreme screen fatigue: these are the low level side effects of the coronavirus that we will probably be dealing with for years. Like all the other small-big changes that this year has brought, I have begun to reshape myself around my inability to read a whole book whenever I want to.

It happened once before, when I was in an isolation ward in a hospital for six weeks between my first and second years of university. It was a planned stay, not an emergency, so I had days to think about how I would amuse myself in my tiny and extremely well ventilated room high up above south London. I packed all the books I had ever found comforting to read — Jane Austen, the Chalet School, The Swiss Family Robinson — and explained to my parents what extra volumes they should bring to top up my bedside library when they visited.

Of course, I didn’t read a word. Of anything. I don’t remember how I filled all those hours now. My time is wholly unaccounted for, and I didn’t even have a smartphone yet. I have a vague memory of watching the Christopher Eccleston Doctor Who series over and over again, but I might have invented that memory later. I talked to the hospital staff a lot, I think, and I looked out of the window at the sky.

I do remember the combination of listlessness and restlessness that washed over me as I lay there staring, and I recognise it in myself now. It’s the sensation of being unable to settle with any one idea for too long, because there’s one big idea that cannot be allowed to come into focus. Slowly, I recovered, and so did my ability to read. Life began to move quickly again and that part of my brain opened up.

I think it’s starting to happen now, that process of unfurling all of the thoughts I’ve been keeping too tightly coiled. The first book to break through was The Secret Countess by Eva Ibbotson, which I took to bed planning to read for 15 minutes before an early night and was still awake trying to finish six hours later. This impeccably told story of Anna Grazinsky, a young and aristocratic Russian emigré trying to make her way as a maid in post WWI England, just seemed to flow into me like drinking a cool glass of water on a summer’s day. When I got to the end, I cried, and not just because good triumphs over evil.

Ibbotson, I decided, was the answer. She wrote children’s fiction, but also stories like this one for “young adults” at a time when that wasn’t really yet a publishing category, so wasn’t — in my opinion — sufficiently acclaimed for those books before she died in 2010. There’s been something of a reappraisal of late, though, and Pan Macmillan are reissuing some of her novels, which makes them much easier to get hold of.

And oh, how glorious they are. In her introduction to The Morning Gift, Sarra Manning describes Ibbotson’s work as “the missing link between I Capture the Castle and Jilly Cooper’s early romances” and I think that’s a pretty good way of placing her. There are elements of Austen in her dry dialogue, of Wodehouse in her perfectly convoluted plots, of Nancy Mitford in her cheerful, practical heroines, of Barbara Pym in her close interweaving of deep sorrow and utter joy. The writing is smooth, funny and just the right amount of acerbic. She’s a master of the craft.

Ibbotson was born in Vienna and came to Britain in 1933 when her Jewish family realised early on what the rise of Nazism was going to mean. Writing these novels decades later, she gives the problems of displacement and ostracism that she had experienced to her characters as generously as she gives them beautiful wavy hair and a talent for housekeeping. One of my favourite lines of hers I’ve found so far is this:

“Proom told him the story, while Leo made Central European noises of sympathy.”

Proom is an English butler with a madcap plan to save the day, and Leo is a benevolent Jewish financier who is going to help him. They are unlikely allies and, after this, destined to be lifelong friends. Their whole dynamic is, for me, flawlessly encapsulated in those thirteen words.

The balance between grim reality and beautiful fantasy in Ibbotson’s fiction is perfect. The horrors of the coming war are ever present: I wept at the minor subplot in The Morning Gift about the exiled Austrian string quartet who are now practising in a north London cupboard as a trio because their violinist died trying to escape Vienna by jumping from a fourth floor window when the stormtroopers entered his building. It’s a barely there aside, but it is devastating, and there are moments like this on every other page.

Nobody in these stories is miraculously cured of their ailments, nor does everyone you love survive. But good people lead good lives in hard times, and I think that’s why I can finish these books now when I can’t get through many others. By the time I come to the end of an Eva Ibbotson, I’m aching inside from all the feelings, and it’s hard to tell if that’s because I’m happy or sad. But I have made it to the end, and that’s a start.

Twelve things I’m reading, watching and listening to:

This is and always will be a free newsletter, but if you want to contribute to my work another way, consider signing up for a subscription to The Listener, the daily podcast recommendation newsletter that I write. It’s very good.

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: I write weekly podcast industry reports for Hot Pod, I make a fortnightly podcast called Shedunnit and I’m sometimes on Twitter and Instagram.

Until next time,

Caroline

Filed under: Personal Essays, Blog
7 min read Permalink

rummaging through all the paper

I feel like I have been taking notes on what I read since I was about 14, and that for all of that time I have been doing so very badly.

For me, there has always been two reasons to take a note.

Firstly, to pick one idea out of the many on the page and put it down in my own way is to make a decision about the information I prioritise. The very act of selecting and transcribing the thought I had when I encountered that element of the book helps me to understand and categorise what I’m reading. In theory.

Secondly, the notes should act as a record that I can return to later, once the short term memories of that particular book have faded. Scanning through them, I would like to think, will revivify the experience of encountering that text for the first time and allow easy access to the information I selected for future work.

The studying and note taking I did at school and university all took place on paper. As a teenager, I loved stationary and hauled around a heavy backpack with many folders, notebooks and coloured pens. I recently helped my mother clear out some of the notes I produced during this time from her attic, and was startled to see how incredibly elaborate and comprehensive this stuff was. In many cases I was reproducing the textbook in full, complete with multi-coloured headings and carefully drawn diagrams. Perhaps the act of writing it all out again had some memory function for me (more on this in a moment) but there was no sense of distillation or selection. These weren’t notes so much as copies, the work of a scribe with too much time on her hands. The “aesthetic notes” movement, so ubiquitous today online, feels like it’s still stuck at this point.

I got a laptop when I went to university and wrote my weekly essays on this computer, using my handwritten notes to do so. Wifi wasn’t widespread and although portable the laptop mostly lived on my desk in my student room, plugged into an ethernet cable. Only my ruled A4 pad and my pen travelled with me to libraries and lectures. Thus, for every book I read, there was a sheaf of paper full of page numbers and quotations that I had copied out. I wasn’t doing the colourful headings – I was a serious undergraduate now — but the instinct to transcribe everything was still very strong. I remember being frustrated when trying to write up my assignments late at night, rummaging through all the paper I had used in the library that week and failing to find anything that I could slot into my argument because it was unclear why I had copied out these quotations rather than any others.

Handwriting my notes was a habit further reinforced by my journalism training, where we were taught shorthand and how to lay out a notebook so that it would be admissible as evidence in court. It wasn’t until I began work on my first book that I contemplated switching from noting by hand to using a computer, in an attempt to circumvent the need to flick through so much paper. That book is in part a history of the river Thames, a subject about which a vast amount of information has been published in the last 500 years. My process was one of extreme distillation, trying to sample as much as I could in the time that I had and then discarding what didn’t resonate with me as I built my own narrative.

I used Scrivener, a piece of software often recommended for authors, which has an interface that allows lots of different text documents to sit alongside each other as if in a ring binder and be combined or separated at will. Each book I read had a different entry, and the global search function was helpful — when I reached a point in my manuscript where I wanted a fact about Hilaire Belloc’s walks from Oxford to London as a student in the 1890s, for instance, I could just hit Control + Option + F and see if I had any notes to repurpose. I didn’t write the book in Scrivener, though, which is what that software is in part designed for. I did that in Microsoft Word. I don’t remember why, really.

Although having all of the information that I had amassed searchable like this was a vast improvement on a mass of paper filled with contextless quotations, it still didn’t feel like a useful repository of notes. Often when I did turn up a search result for something I was writing about the information I had recorded wasn’t sufficient or even comprehensible. I would still have to go back to the original source or do more research. It felt like I was doing the same work twice.

Typing notes directly into the computer like this also seemed to sever an important link I hadn’t even realised was there. Handwriting made me slow down enough to think more fully about what I was recording and why. It also seemed to give me some spatial awareness about the book I was reading, to the extent that I could often remember where on the page and how far through a book a particular moment came. When taking notes digitally, I had no such memory. Plus, computers are too full of distraction. It’s too easy to check email or social media instead of taking notes when it all happens in the same place.

When I embarked on my current book project, then, I was determined to find a better way. Unlike the Thames, hypochondria is a topic that has relatively rarely been addressed head on (which is in part why I’m doing it now). There aren’t many books or articles, relatively speaking, with that word in the title. The research process is more intuitive and requires me to hop between disciplines and types of sources, collecting what is relevant from fields as disparate as folklore and neurology. I hope this is what will make the eventual book worth reading, but as an information gathering and storage exercise, it’s complicated. I don’t know what the structure is in advance or where it will take me, so I can’t design an approach ahead of time.

So I did what I probably should have done years ago and did some research into the practice of note taking itself. I found that there is indeed a detectable link between handwriting and the formation of complex memory. I encountered the work of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who maintained a prodigious scholarly output in his lifetime and even after his death because of the way he noted each individual idea he had on a separate card in a Zettelkasten or slipbox and used a sequence of numbers to link them. I fell headfirst into this world of “smart note taking” and would recommend two of the books I read to anyone who is also interested in this: How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens and Digital Zettelkasten by David Kadavy. I also found a phD student with a helpful YouTube channel that demonstrates these principles, and began to build a new system for myself.

This is what my notes look like now.

This is the visual view from a programme called Obsidian. It’s a skin that sits on top of a folder of markdown documents and allows you to manipulate and link them. Each of the nodes that you see above is a separate note file, and you can see in this timelapse that as I’ve added more and found connections between the ideas that various hubs have developed, showing me where the key texts and concepts are. Following Luhmann’s example, I’m not producing long lists of quotations from each book I read, but rather writing out each idea that I encounter in my own words, adding any necessary references, and then saving that as a note in its entirety, the better for linking together with others. I really love this process — it’s almost like I can feel the synapses firing in my brain – and it’s already helping me structure sections of the book that require me to pull together disparate ideas into a seamless narrative.

As for how I’m reading books now, this is an area where I feel like I’m waiting for the technology to catch up with me. I want the tactile, memory-forming habit of taking notes by hand but the convenient searchability of a digital repository. Something like Apple’s “Scribble” handwriting recognition feature on the iPad would seem to offer this, but so far it’s been too clunky and inaccurate for me. Instead, I have a Supernote A5X, which is an e-ink tablet designed entirely for reading and writing, and I read and annotate all my journal articles and ebooks on that before exporting them and adding them to Obsidian. I really like the simplicity of this device and the fact that it really doesn’t do anything other than that use case I’ve just described. You couldn’t check Twitter on it even if you wanted to.

If I’m working from a physical book, I still like to read with a pencil in my hand. I do write in the margins of books that I own and use sticky notes to mark the pages where I’ve made comments that I’ll want to put into Obsidian later. If it’s a library book or one I don’t want to scribble for some reason, I use transparent sticky notes to write next to the text I’m referencing and then I remove them when I’m done.

One thing that I’ve been very conscious of through all of this is my habit for productive procrastination; of finding “worthwhile” activities that fill up my time so that I never get started on what I’m supposed to be doing. Fortunately I found this new note taking style so addictive that I immediately wanted to try it on real material and made progress that way, but it’s always something I’m alert for. This kind of “digital gardening” could absorb a lot of time without much benefit if you’re not careful. The lack of rigidity in this system is a useful guard against this tendency too, because the structure emerges as you work rather than being something you have to create and then tweak as circumstances change. If something isn’t working in my Obsidian, I just do it differently without redoing everything that has gone before.

Given that, I am always refining and improving this process — it’s not static — and I would love to hear from you about how you read books and take notes.
Filed under: Personal Essays, Blog
5 min read Permalink

because of all the words I deleted

This is how many words I wrote last week:

During the working week 24 — 28 August, I wrote 13,671 words. Which is a lot, far more than I had expected. I also didn’t anticipate that fully a quarter of all the words I wrote that week would be in emails to other people, nor that writing scripts for my podcast Shedunnit would be the biggest subtotal.

Why, I can hear you wondering, did you keep this record? Why, when you could have been writing, or sleeping, or doing literally anything else, did you choose to keep pasting text into wordcounter.net and then enter the total into a spreadsheet at the end of each day? Is this some advanced form of procrastination?

The answer to the last question, in my case, is almost always yes, no matter what I’m doing. But I hope that it was purposeful procrastination, if that’s not a ludicrous oxymoron. I’m cautiously tiptoeing towards another book project at the moment, always looking at it sideways or out of the corner of my eye because if I look straight at it the idea might evaporate completely.

I’m not making very fast progress into turning it into something more solid. I’ve been finding it really hard to carve out the time to work on the proposal because I always seem to get to the end of each day and be completely written out. It never used to be the case, but nowadays there’s a limit to how much I can write in a single day until there are no more words left in me.

Maybe it’s the pandemic, maybe it’s because I’m not in my twenties anymore, but the days of me being able to keep going all night if the inspiration is there seem to be over, at least for now. I have to spend my daily quota of words wisely, and therefore I thought I’d see if there was any slack in the system, anywhere I could pinch back a few hundred here or there and give them to the book instead.

I got the idea from something my mother told me about when I was about five years old. She is a computer scientist, and at that point she worked at a big corporate research laboratory. For a few months, she was part of a team conducting a study on how work was done at the facility so they could determine whether any new equipment was needed, or a new structure, or more people, and so on.

Every day she was at a different area of the campus, drawing plans of offices and labs and marking where all the computers were and recording who used them to do what. She built some software to handle all of this information and, at the end of the study, to spit out some conclusions. Because it was the 1990s, the programme was housed on dozens of floppy discs, enough to fill an entire cardboard box.

I loved hearing about her job every night when she came home. I also loved computers, especially the discarded broken ones that she brought home from work to fix in her spare time. The orange screen and blinking cursor that would appear after hours of patient soldering and fiddling around was very exciting.

Somehow I absorbed this idea of examining your work habits, of gathering data about how you’re operating, from this period of her career. I think in business speak it’s called doing a “time and motion” study, although that might be a very outdated term. Yet even though I’m just one person sitting still in a cupboard writing newsletters and making podcasts, I decided it was worth doing such a study on myself.

Some notes on methodology. I tried to count all the words I wrote for work purposes, i.e. where there is some remuneration involved. Messages to friends or family were obviously excluded. I didn’t include Slack or WhatsApp messages in my count, even though I do use them to communicate about work for some projects, just because it was a faff to paste my text accurately out of those interfaces. I also didn’t include the posts I wrote on the private forum attached to my podcast’s supporters’ club; although technically part of work, I suppose, it just feels too much like fun.

I was perfectly satisfied with my totals for my three regular writing jobs — my podcast, the audio industry newsletter I write for, and the podcast recommendation newsletter I do. If anything, I was pleased with how much scripting I got done this week. But I was shocked when I realised that I’d written nearly 2,000 words in emails just on Monday. For context, one podcast episode is usually about 3,500-4,000 words. I’d written the equivalent of half an episode in one day’s emails.

I think the fact that I was totalling up at the end of each day started to affect my behaviour. I started trying to rein it in for the rest of the week — you can see how my emails total dropped to 105 for the next day. Partly that’s because I got through such a backlog on the first day, but it’s also because I started thinking harder about how long I was spending on my responses.

Could I write “yes, thanks” instead of “Yes, absolutely, really looking forward to it, can’t wait!”? Yes, I could, without being rude or dismissive or negligent or really making any difference at all to the recipient. This 2017 article — Do You Want to Be Known For Your Writing, or For Your Swift Email Responses? — was very much in my mind while I tried to be more purposeful and concise, as was something I saw the writer Sinéad Gleeson post on her Instagram: do art, not admin.

Even while I was still doing it, the study made me reflect on my own behaviour a good deal. In some ways, this count is inaccurate because of all the words I deleted, ridding my draft emails of my needless adjectives and pointless flourishes. I find it too easy to slip into the habit of being overly obliging. Nobody is expecting instant replies to emails, or indeed replies at all in some cases, yet I still provide them. And that means I have less unimpeded mental space to give to the writing work I’m lucky enough to be paid to do, and to experiment with other projects around the edges.

I need to be more French, it seems, according to this piece from 2016: “In France, a personal life is not a passive entity, the leftover bits of one’s existence that haven’t been gobbled up by the office, but a separate entity, the sovereignty of which is worth defending, even if that means that someone’s spreadsheet doesn’t get finished on time.”

I didn’t include my word count for the book proposal in the spreadsheet. I’m nervous about anybody even seeing that much of it at this stage. But I did make progress this week, more than I have for ages. Uncounted, the words are finally flowing.

Twelve things I’m reading, watching and listening to:

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: I do daily podcast recommendations at The Listener, I write weekly podcast industry reports for Hot Pod, I make a fortnightly podcast called Shedunnit and I’m sometimes on Twitter and Instagram. My book is now out in paperback, find the links to purchase a copy here.

Until next time,

Caroline

Filed under: Blog, Personal Essays
4 min read Permalink

I feel a warm little glow of satisfaction

I read that piece in the Observer last weekend about how fear of a miserable, long, dark winter is mostly in the mind — I’m paraphrasing, but that was roughly it — so of course I have started watching Borgen again from the beginning.

I saw this Danish political drama when it first started airing on the BBC in 2012, so I’m not really in it for the coalition-forming drama this time. Rather, I’m looking for clues on how to be good at being inside when it’s cold and dark all the time.

This scene from the first episode struck me as an atmosphere I’d like to have. Philip Christensen, husband of politician Birgitte Nyborg, has been at home on his own with the kids while she’s out campaigning. When she comes home, we see him from her perspective as she comes through the front door. He’s working on the sofa, shoes off, books next to him, a beer half drunk on the table in front of him. The curtains behind him are open, showing the darkness outside, because he’s not bothered about it and his house is well insulated. He looks cosy, busy, and just a little bit pissed off that she’s now going to interrupt him with a long story about how all the other politicians are bad apart from her.

In the UK, Borgen was part of the inspiration for a larger trend towards more Nordic cool in interiors, publishing and fashion. People went wild for the lampshades and for a while you couldn’t turn round in a bookshop without knocking over a “how to hygge” book. The mania has abated somewhat, but if Instagram is anything to go by, people are still very into mustard L-shaped couches.

Now, I should emphasise, this is very much not my personal aesthetic. That low-backed sofa Philip is sitting on looks extremely uncomfortable and I bet the hairy rug is a devil to clean. Plus, I like my light fittings to look like something other than flying saucers. My house is from the 1890s and I’m much more interested in making it look like a National Trust property on a budget.

But I do like how happily Philip is coexisting with the darkness outside, leaving his curtains open and keeping the light minimal. The day after we watched this episode, I looked around the tottering piles of stuff in our living room and had a think about how I could make the space feel less frustrating, given that all the signs are I’m not going to be leaving it any time soon.

I decided on two courses of action that in my head I called “clearing sightlines” and “minor mendings”. I can’t Marie Kondo away all of the stuff, because a) although it does not spark joy a lot of it is paperwork and course materials my husband needs for work that would normally be at his office and b) it feels redundant, even unfair to dump donatable things on charity shops nobody is shopping in at the moment. But I can organise it in such away that it isn’t always in my eye line, and make the vista as you enter a room a pleasant one.

“Minor mendings” is a phrase that came unbidden into my head, borrowed from the 2014 conclusion to Lev Grossman Magicians trilogy. A character discovers that he has no grand, impressive magical gift, but rather a talent for fixing things, for making good after a disaster. Those books are not without their problems, but they would make for a nice wintery reading session if you haven’t tried them yet.

My own version of this involved standing in the middle of each room with a notebook for a few minutes, thinking about the things that are inconvenient or broken but in such a familiar way now that I don’t notice them. It was very gratifying every time I spotted another one, like doing one of those “spot the difference” puzzles, and soon I had quite a list of handles to glue back on, wobbly hooks to screw in properly, and light bulbs to replace. I’m by no means a competent or well equipped handyman, but even I had enough epoxy and the right screwdriver to make these small adjustments.

It probably took less than an hour to tidy up and to fix everything. Now, every time I reach up and successfully open a kitchen cupboard that used to have a handle that pinged off one in three times that you touched it, I feel a warm little glow of satisfaction. The same happens when I come through the front door and see a nice clear table in front of me, or reach out to put a mug down easily and safely while drinking tea in an armchair. It might sound simple, but the lethargy towards these small household chores I felt after six months of being in the house all the time was immense.

I’m not sure that I will ever obtain the positive attitude towards the winter confinement that a resident of Copenhagen or Tromsø might have, but I have at least made my space a little more inviting for the coming months. If you’re also in the northern hemisphere, I recommend doing the same now, before the clocks go back and the pre-4pm darkness envelopes us.

Twelve things I’m reading, watching and listening to:

If you enjoy the podcasts I recommend in this newsletter, consider taking out a subscription to The Listener, the daily podcast recommendation newsletter I write. I promise, it’s really good, and it’s a great way to show your support of my work.

Apart from that, there are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: I write weekly podcast industry reports for Hot Pod, I make a fortnightly podcast called Shedunnit and I’m sometimes on Twitter and Instagram. My book is now out in paperback, find the links to purchase a copy here.

Until next time,

Caroline

Filed under: Personal Essays, Blog
3 min read Permalink

when will we cry in public again?

I haven’t been on a train since early March, so naturally I’ve been daydreaming about public transport a lot recently.

I’m lucky not to need to use it at the moment, of course, and I’m well aware that for every time I’ve spent a journey staring out of the window at a gorgeous view, there’s one where I sat in some vomit. Similarly, I’ve had some deeply unpleasant interactions with strangers while travelling — the roving packs of men going to stag parties on the Friday night train to Liverpool, for instance —  but it’s the unexpectedly amiable ones that have come to mind again now.

A case in point: it was the morning after the night before I had told someone I liked them, really liked them. Absurdly, I don’t actually remember what it was that they said in response, the precise words they used, but it was definitely along the lines of “thanks, but no thanks”. I had been keying myself up to make this declaration for months. Every aspect of how I should do it, every possible permutation, had already been considered and taken into account by my febrile, overactive brain. Except this one: how do I keep going afterwards if it doesn’t go well?

That’s how I ended up on the Tube, taking my usual train to work but feeling as if the connection between my body and my mind had come unstuck. I was sitting in my seat but also floating somewhere around in the curved roof of the carriage, watching myself fall apart without a plan. It was still on the early side for a morning commute, but there were enough people milling about in the stations to make this dislocation even more acutely unpleasant.

My journey was only a short one, two stations north on one line and then four east on another one, but I couldn’t make it. Just before the doors closed at Embankment I dived out and collapsed on one of the recessed benches in the wall in tears. Nobody could really see me, because there were people bustling in both directions along the narrow platform between me and the trains, and anyway one of the glorious and awful things about having a public breakdown in central London is that everyone ignores you.

When will we cry in public again? It’s an unimaginable activity now, in the time of face masks and the constant awareness of bodily fluids and air circulation. Part of what made it cathartic was that intensity of being alone in a crowd, the press of uncaring bodies all around emphasising the absolute solitude of the emotion. It was an especially effective release on trains or in stations — places that contain their own sense of momentum and can impart some of that to someone who pauses there to weep.

I thought I was invisible, tucked into the wall like that. But someone had seen me. A woman dressed in that irreproachable City armour of tailored grey sheath dress, matching jacket and uncomfortable black court shoes suddenly loomed into my little nook. She was holding a packet of tissues out to me. I took them. I probably did an ugly snort where I meant to say “thank you” in response. She didn’t linger, just melting straight back into the crowd. Of course, that just made me cry harder, but at least now I had a way of blowing my nose.

The kindness of strangers. I miss it.

Twelve things I’m reading, watching and listening to:

If you enjoy the podcasts I recommend in this newsletter, consider taking out a subscription to The Listener, the daily podcast recommendation newsletter I write. I promise, it’s really good, and it’s a great way to show your support of my work.

Apart from that, there are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: I write weekly podcast industry reports for Hot Pod, I make a fortnightly podcast called Shedunnit and I’m sometimes on Twitter and Instagram. My book is now out in paperback, find the links to purchase a copy here.

Until next time,

Caroline

Filed under: Personal Essays, Blog
5 min read Permalink

the five podcasts I actually listen to

If you had told me back in 2007, when approximately 30 per cent of all my waking hours were spent trying to sync new episodes of The Bugle to my iPod Classic, that listening to podcasts would be a substantial part of my job I would not have believed you. Making a podcast was barely a job then; just listening to them could surely not result in an income.

Yet here I am, someone who is professionally obligated to listen to 6+ hours of podcasts a week. Most of that is done for the podcast recommendation newsletter The Listener, in which I write about three different episodes a day. The aim is to choose stuff that readers will not encounter otherwise — i.e. shows that aren’t hosted by celebrities or Ira Glass — so I sift through an endless stream of random audio to filter out the undiscovered gems. Recent picks that I’m proud of include this Australian show about escalators, this interview about how much fishing is too much fishing, and this fifteen minute dog-based romantic comedy.

But like anyone who has successfully monetised a beloved hobby, I occasionally still yearn for the old days of doing it for nothing. When I could just listen to eighteen episodes of the same badly made podcast in a row because it was making me laugh and not worry about the impact that choice would have on my ability to get through enough new shows before my next deadline.

After over a year of listening intensely like this (Lifehacker interviewed me about my system and tech setup last year, by the way, if you’re interested), I’m still constantly impressed by the seemingly infinite variety and creativity to be found in the podcasting medium. I mean, this same format and means of publication encompasses both Describing A Rock and Joe Rogan.

However, I have recently come to realise that doing what I do prizes mostly what is novel, whereas the way most people listen is by loyally tuning in again and again to the few shows that they enjoy. I’m constantly flitting between feeds, looking for the next thing that I can recommend. That means that I spend far less time doing what it was that drew me to podcasts in the first place: the habit of listening consistently to conversational shows where the hosts’ particular brand of humour or world view happens to align with mine.

Since noticing that I was neglecting this quintessential aspect of podcast listening, I’ve been making more of an effort to carve out time for the handful of shows that currently meet the above criteria for me.

These are the podcasts that I keep up with, no matter what else is in my queue. I’m not going to include them in The Listener any time soon; perhaps they already had an episode recommended, or perhaps their appeal is just too personal for me to articulate why anyone else should try them. But I did want to share them here, in case they resonate with any of you too.

I did actually write about Election Profit Makers at the end of its first series in 2016. The three hosts — David Rees, Jon Kimball and Starlee Kine (of Mystery Show fame) — had spent all summer cheerily using a political betting site to make money from the US presidential election.

And then Donald Trump won, and their entire worldview collapsed in on them. I found it very cathartic to hear them process the result together, live. The podcast had become more and more eccentric as the campaign went on, dropping mixtapes and banning specific people from listening to the show, but in a way that just… worked for me.

It has returned for a second season for the 2020 campaign, more wary and more zany than ever. These days, it’s the only American political commentary I can cope with.

I should reassure any friends or family members reading this: I am not pregnant, trying to get pregnant, or in any other way personally engaged with the content of Matt and Doree’s Eggcellent Adventure, a podcast that is ostensibly just about one couple’s efforts to have a child with IVF.

So why am I listening to it every week? I’m not really sure. I think it just comes down to the personalities of the hosts — I like spending time with them no matter what they’re talking about. They both do other podcasts that are ostensibly more aligned with my interests, too, but it’s this one that I stay up to date with.

This one isn’t conversational — Hot Pipes! is just one man introducing recordings of music played on old fashioned theatre pipe organs. And I love it so much. I don’t feel like I need to say any more about this one: if you know, you know.

I can’t actually remember how I first came across The Receipts, but I’ve been listening since about episode ten and they’re now somewhere over a hundred. There are a lot of shows that purport to do this kind unfiltered, unscripted talk about relationships and sex, but this is the one that works for me. It went exclusive on Spotify around episode seventy, so if you get addicted you’ll have to switch over to that here.

There is explicit language in this one, just fyi for anyone who might press play with young children around.

This is the newest edition to my private podcast rotation — the show only started at the beginning of the pandemic. The hosts are a couple: Finneas O’Connell is a musician (he’s Billie Eilish’s brother) and Claudia Sulewski is a YouTuber. Their weekly conversations about what they’ve been up to and their takes on current affairs feel to me a lot like the erstwhile perception of all podcasting, because they really do just set up a microphone in their basement and talk into it for an hour and then upload.

Occasionally some aspects of their Los Angeles celebrity-adjacent lifestyle irritates me, but mostly I find them soothing to have on in the background, talking about what TV shows they have enjoyed and what their dog has done recently. I treat it like background chatter in a coffee shop and for that purpose, it is perfect.

That’s it from me this week — other recommendations will return next time when I might have had more time to read stuff.

If you read this far and thought ‘I want more of her’, then you can get that in a few different places: the aforementioned daily podcast recommendations at The Listener, weekly podcast industry reports for Hot Pod, my own fortnightly podcast called Shedunnit and sometimes Twitter and Instagram. My book is now out in paperback, find the links to purchase a copy here.

Until next time,

Caroline

Filed under: Personal Essays, Blog
4 min read Permalink

to go any distance across rough terrain

I want to talk about these boots.

These are the Scarpa Women’s Terra GTX hiking boots. They are what my dreams are made of. Even though I like walking and do a lot of it, I’ve never had boots that made me happy. Boots have always been a process, a case of grinning and bearing it through the blisters while I wait for the mythical moment when they will be properly ‘worn in’, when they will stop working against me and start working with me.

These boots were perfect from the first time I put them on. Soft and yielding beneath the foot but stiff enough to protect from awkward surfaces and to keep my dodgy ankles from turning every other step. The women in my family all seem to lack some crucial ligament tension in the lower leg; it’s a very dominant trait, as it is possible to see if we’re all wearing sandals at a family reunion. The connection between our feet and our legs is just. . . dangerously loose.

My resilient, no nonsense mother — who once drove herself safely to the hospital while she was fully in labour — has been known to pass out from the intense pain if she turns her ankle. As a result, my extremely athletic sister used to spend hours balancing one legged on a physical therapy cushion while watching television to strengthen her lower leg muscles. I, needless to say, have never bothered to put in this work. Therefore, to go any distance across rough terrain, I require my hiking boots to act as a rigid corset about the foot that can hold in all of the moving parts that don’t stay in place by themselves.

Somehow, despite fulfilling this function perfectly, these are boots that I can put on and take off very quickly. Foot in, laces crossed and tightened, knots tied, done. Part of the unpleasant process involved in previous bad versions has been the grit and determination required just to get them on, which meant that I would rarely wear them, which in turn meant that the wearing in thing never got very far.

I bought these boots in April, when we were still in the “only leave your house if you absolutely have to” stage of Covid-19 lockdown. I think we all developed our own unexpected displacement activities: one of mine was reading hundreds of boot reviews online and measuring my feet with a tape measure. I learned things about Gore-Tex. I reread Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. I fell down a YouTube spiral of raw vegans vlogging while thru-hiking the Appalachian trail. It was all entirely unnecessary and beautifully distracting.

Along with paying attention to the physical properties one generally requires from a pair of boots, I shied away from any that looked too high tech. I’m fond of walking, but I’m not fast. For me, wearing anything with neon colours or reflective panels or ostentatiously breathable fabric makes promises that I’m not going to be able to fulfil. Ideally, I want to look like a lady hillwalker from about 1935, which is unfortunately not an aesthetic that is easy to filter for on today’s outdoors apparel sites.

Buying the boots at all was a promise to myself that I would one day be able to use them for more than just a walk on the pavements around my village. And, as you probably gathered from that photograph at the top, I did manage to do this: at the end of July, my husband, dog and I drove to the very north of Scotland for a couple of weeks of camping and walking.

This is when we had planned to be on holiday anyway, and we were very fortunate to still be able to go to the area we had intended to visit, even though the cottage we had rented wasn’t available and the constant need to clean everything changed our plans a good deal. Our car became a mobile storage unit for masks, disinfectant wipes and hand sanitiser, and I spent more time thinking about which surfaces I had touched and in what order than I generally prefer to do while travelling for pleasure. The reminders of our changed world were everywhere. Tracking down somewhere to buy a hot evening meal could take up a good deal of the afternoon, and having a camping stove so that we could eat on the beach was very useful.

I’m not very good at adapting when things don’t go to plan. Finding places unexpectedly closed or getting caught with a tent half up in a torrential downpour that wasn’t forecast doesn’t see me at my best. I think that’s why I was so floored by the fact that these boots just worked, immediately. I even walked in them across some of what they call The Flow Country, a huge area of peatland bog that covers part of Caithness and Sutherland. My dog was wet and muddy up to the ears, but my feet were perfectly dry.

I think I’ve been hunched over in anticipation of disappointment and disaster for months now without fully realising it; this felt like a reminder to relax my shoulders, a little.

Twelve things I’m reading, watching and listening to:

I’ve been interviewed a few times recently, so you can read about what hardware/software I use to work on Uses This, about how I consume media on Why Is This Interesting?, about how I write and podcast on A Bit Lit (video), and about my book reading habits at the Stromness Books & Prints website.

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: I do daily podcast recommendations at The Listener, I write weekly podcast industry reports for Hot Pod, I make a fortnightly podcast called Shedunnit and I’m sometimes on Twitter and Instagram. The latter is where I will eventually get round to posting more pictures from our socially distant trip to northern Scotland and Orkney.

Until next time,

Caroline

Filed under: Personal Essays, Blog
4 min read Permalink

a list of small, inconsequential pleasures

For no particular reason, yesterday I was thinking about the really quite terrible 2007 film Evan Almighty. You don’t need to know anything about it other than that Steve Carell plays a new congressman who finds himself imbued with the powers of God (who is portrayed by Morgan Freeman in a crisply tailored white suit, of course). A lot of stuff happens, including Carrell growing a humorous beard of Biblical proportions and a giant flood, but at the very end God reveals that “ark” doesn’t just mean “boat that is 300 cubits long” but is also an abbreviation for “Act of Random Kindness”. Wow.

I don’t even remember when or why I watched this film, but this mindblowingly banal conclusion stuck firmly in my brain. It surfaced again yesterday when I was trying to find a way of describing the new way I’ve been eking out my capacity for enjoyment with small, inconsequential pleasures since being confined to the house. I hadn’t noticed, but I used to rely a lot on the enjoyable expectation of future trips, social occasions and treats to keep my spirits up. I would wake up on a Wednesday morning and think “Oh, this weekend we’re going to the theatre! That’s something to look forward to as I do this laundry and answer these emails.”

Of course, the obliteration of expectation caused by this pandemic means, essentially, that we can have no trips to look forward to or certainty about when we might leave the house again regularly. So as a replacement, I’ve been very consciously trying to offer myself acts of random kindness and enjoy these smaller things that are obtainable right now. I thought I’d share some of them with you.

Things to Watch

Not to get all “I liked them before they were famous”, but I have been obsessed with the YouTube channel run by the American food magazine Bon Appetit since my favourite chef Claire made gourmet Cheetos and have watched every video she appears in within 24 hours of release since March 2018. Bobby Finger explained much better than I ever could what the incredible appeal of the Bon Appetit Cinematic Universe is, so read his piece then watch this video and feel better about the world:

We have also been watching a lot of 30 Rock. Now, I have been a Liz Lemon superfan since 2007, but my husband had never seen it before so I bought the DVD boxset and we’re powering through about 6 episodes a night (I mean, they’re 22 minutes long and there’s nothing else to do). For a show that had a lot of topical references in it, it stands up extremely well — in fact, those gags now seem like they come from a surreal alternate universe and make the whole thing even better. Please enjoy this early scene with my favourite character, Dr Leo Spaceman:

In addition, we’ve been devouring the 1970s BBC sitcom The Good Life. Partly I like watching it because we might actually need to start growing vegetables in our back yard, but partly because the clothes and hair are just out of this world weird:

Oh, and this also made me laugh/feel old. Remember when 2020 seemed a long time away!

Things to listen to

This interview with a 12 year old Joe Biden fan made me laugh so hard that I almost knocked my phone into the sink while washing up:

This podcast that features only music from early twentieth century cinema organs makes me extremely happy:

And this daily podcast about self care manages to be helpful without making me feel like a failure:

Things to read

Apart from Wolf Hall, I have mostly been reading comforting books from childhood or detective novels. Of the former, I recommend:

—The Wool Pack by Cynthia Harnett—the Chalet School series, because there are 62 of them! I am also selling some duplicates I have on eBay, if you’d like to try them cheaply—I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (not strictly a children’s book but I first read it when I was 13 so it counts)

For detective novels, try:

—Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, obviously—Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles—A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey

Things to cook

—We’ve been on holiday to Orkney a few times in the last couple of years, and last summer I bought some beremeal flour and a recipe book called The Book of Bere. This special form of barley dates back to Viking times and is only really grown on the islands, but you can buy it online from the mill there and I’ve been really heavily relying on it when I’ve found other flour hard to come by. I’ve made beremeal sourdough, beremeal pancakes, beremeal shortbread, and they all came out delicious with an extra nutty taste from the special flour.

—A boiled egg. This might sound stupid, but eggs have been scarce where I live so I’ve been treasuring and savouring each one. On Easter Sunday we had four minute eggs with buttered beremeal toast and it might be the best meal I’ve eaten in a month.

—This red pesto. If you like cooking, chances are you will already have all the things required for this (basically anchovies, garlic, tomato paste, chilis, and a nut like walnuts but I’ve used others and it works). It seems obvious once you’ve done it once, but I don’t think I would have put this combination together myself. Once made glossy with butter and extra pasta water, it’s truly divine.

That’s everything for now — do send me your ark things if you have them.

Filed under: Personal Essays, Blog
4 min read Permalink

working from home is great until it isn’t

When I first moved out of London — and don’t worry, this isn’t one of those “why I left London” diatribes, although I might write one of those one day, who knows — I was absolutely convinced that I didn’t want to work from home. I was excited to be freelance, yes, but I was also completely sure that if I worked from our house I would never get anything done. I am a creature of completely contradictory motivation levels: I did write the entire first draft of my 85,000-word book in seven weeks, yes, but I also regularly record podcast episodes at 3am on the day they’re supposed to be published. I needed a properly separate “work” environment, I decided, in order to trick myself into doing more of the former and less of the latter.

So I hired a small studio space in the trendy artsy district of Liverpool and filled it with random books, boxes of papers that wouldn’t fit in the house, and a grimy Ikea desk. My husband and I would leave together in the morning to take the train to our places of work, even though only one of us actually had to exit the house in order to get paid.

I never liked working at the studio, for lots of very obvious reasons including: it’s a 30 minute walk from the train station and it rains a lot here; the place is incredibly dusty and it makes me sneeze constantly; and the people I share the space with do things like sculpture and textile art that can get pretty noisy. But, I kept going because it was where I worked. Also, I didn’t want to have to move the miscellaneous boxes of papers again.

Then, about six months into this arrangement, we got a dog. Initially, I thought I’d just be at home for the first month or so while he adjusted to life with us, and then dog and I would together go to the studio every day so I could work. Except, we haven’t been once. It turns out that doing that hour-ish journey to the studio by train and on foot was one thing alone, but when loaded up with all my work stuff as well as the things Morris the dog would need to stay entertained during the day, it seems like such an expedition. There always seemed to be something that I needed to be filing urgently that made setting off on this voyage impossible; therefore, we just stayed at home.

It was always a temporary situation, though. I was still someone who didn’t work from home, even when another six months had passed and I’d only made occasional trips to the studio to check on my books. I bought a desk and turned the walk in closet off our bedroom into tiny office, but it still wasn’t my “place of work”. Even today, more than two years after I moved here, I still tell people about the studio as if that’s a significant part of my working routine rather than a ridiculous book storage situation I need to sort out.

Even while I was internally travelling to work every day yet actually only journeying as far as my desk-in-a-cupboard, I was getting very used to all the perks that come with working from home. I can walk my dog whenever I want, cook whatever I fancy for lunch, get chores done when I need to avoid a task I don’t want to do, receive parcels on the first delivery try (I never have to go to the sorting office anymore, it’s such a gift). I eat better, sleep better, and exercise more now that I don’t have to commute. I’m really lucky.

I’ve been focusing very hard on remembering that last part this week, though. A falling-domino series of household problems including a broken boiler and a leaking shower meant that we needed to get workmen in. And suddenly, I’m “working” from home in name only. There’s bashing and crashing and things being hoisted through windows that are clearly too small to take them. Constant decisions must be made about plasterboard and picture rails and thermostats. The water supply had to be off for an entire day, and so I spent ages walking to the station (with my dog) to use the toilet there, and then to the drinking fountain at the other end of the village to fill up a variety of containers for cooking and washing. Some of them leaked in my bag on the way back, but let’s pretend I didn’t get upset about that.

Earlier today, someone took a chisel to a wall and accidentally punched a hole in a pipe though which a huge slapstick squirt of water erupted, instantly soaking the entire room and causing the ceiling below to gently descend onto the kitchen floor.

I essentially live, and work, on the set of Home Alone. I have never wanted more to be at a desk in a noisy, windowless open plan office with too-low ceilings. I crave thin grey carpet. I miss being constantly interrupted by people who want to show me their tweets.

And yet, and yet. Getting to work where I want is an immense privilege, I know. For all of the times I’ve whipped up Alison Roman’s #TheStew for my lunch and thought smugly about the sad overpriced salads I used to eat to break up the work day, there will be weeks where chunks of the wall mysteriously fall into the neighbours’ garden for no apparent reason. I used to hide in the toilet on a different floor at the office so that nobody I knew would see me coming out with red eyes. Mopping the ceiling off the floor seems quite fun by comparison.

Things to read, watch and listen to:

Thank you very much for all the kind responses to last week’s letter, I really appreciated them all.

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: I do daily podcast recommendations at The Listener, I write weekly podcast industry reports for Hot Pod, I make a fortnightly podcast called Shedunnit and I’m sometimes on Twitter.

Filed under: Personal Essays, Blog
5 min read Permalink

a thimbleful of cherry brandy for three shillings

I was recording a podcast interview for a corporate client a while ago — we all have to pay the bills, lest you thought that this kind of scribbling alone magically sustains me — when somebody said something that intrigued and amazed me.

When the pandemic first made itself felt to us in the UK in March 2020, she said, she had started reading a little of Samuel Pepys’ diary every night before going to sleep. Immersing herself for a few minutes every day in the seventeenth century and hearing how he had coped with the waves of pestilence that broke over London during his lifetime was a welcome escape from the daily news reports of our own death tolls and public health failures. Two years and more in, she had finished seven volumes of the unabridged diaries and had two more to go.

Admirable, to be sure. I wish I had done something so edifying with my time. But I long ago came to the conclusion that the road forked when this major life change came upon us, and we all took one of two ways onward. Some, like this podcast guest, chose the path of virtue and productivity. These are the people who wrote novels, ran marathons, learned languages and otherwise made use of all that extra time at home.

Then there are those of us who took the second route, that of paralysis and wallowing. Required work barely got done, let alone housework and optional new projects or tasks. Of course, many were automatically shoved in this direction by the circumstances of parenting, caring, disability, chronic illness and so on, but I have no such explanation. I entered goblin mode of my own free will and have only just begun to drag myself out of it.

With my rebirth as a vaguely functioning person has come a renewed interest in chance literary encounters. I struggled to read for pleasure at all in 2020 and most of 2021, picking up books and then discarding them a few pages in when they failed to provide the exact balance of escapism and intellectual stimulation I was craving. I re-read a lot of books that I already knew, because cracking the spine on an unfamiliar story felt like too much of a risk. And I completely stopped picking up interesting-looking tomes just on the offchance that they might amuse or inspire me. The world became narrower and smaller as a result.

Then, a few months ago, I was in a cavernous and confusingly vast bookshop in Llangollen when I came across an anthology of diary entries that I had once owned but long ago lent to someone and lost. The first time I had The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diaries on my shelf I was always meaning to read it. It felt like the kind of thing I ought to be doing but never quite got round to, just like I probably ought to have used lockdown to write one of the half dozen novel ideas that are always revolving, uncaptured, in my head. Flipping through its pages, I reacquainted myself with its daily layout of extracts from different writers across the centuries and thought: why can’t I.

And so, the great bulk of The Assassin’s Cloak came home with me and I have been reading my way through the year ever since, a day at a time. I like to fill in my own one line a day diary first — endless exciting entries about how many squirrels my dog has almost caught — and then dive into everybody else’s. Of course the big hitters who wrote capital-D diaries are all there: Pepys, Vera Brittain, John Evelyn, Queen Victoria, Alan Bennett, E.M. Delafield, and more. And they can be fun, on occasion.

But the best evenings are the ones when I meet someone I barely know, like the dancer Liane de Pougy, who uses her entries to gossip about who just got false teeth or to vent her feelings about what Jean Cocteau has done now. Or when Alice James, invalid sister of Henry, reaches out from the page to commiserate with me about being ill and having to pretend that you aren’t: “It is an immense loss to have all robust and sustaining expletives refined away from one!”. Then there’s Franz Kafka, master of casual juxtaposition; on 2nd August 1914 he writes: “Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon.”

I enjoy skimming through all these lives so much that I often have to speak sternly to myself so that I don’t read ahead. The pleasure is in the consistency, of recognising certain names that recur across the weeks and months, and of seeing new ones crop up. There are a few that now make my stomach do a swoop of excitement when I see them, and chief among them is Denton Welch. I had never encountered this Chinese-born British writer and painter before I started reading The Assassin’s Cloak every day, but I learned from the biographical appendix that after a serious car accident at the age of 20 in 1935 he became a prolific diarist. He wrote over 200,000 words in his journals between 1942 and 1948, chronicling the art he could not make and the life he could not live because of his pain.

On 17th September 1944 he recorded this:
“Shall I write about the war ending? Or about my breakfast of porridge, toast, marmalade and coffee? Or just about autumn. Waking up cold in the morning; coming back cold through the low blanket of mist by the waterfall last night — from the pub on Shipbourne Common, where Eric bought me a thimbleful of cherry brandy for three shillings, and we heard the loudmouthed woman holding forth on cubbing before breakfast.

In this house now — in the big part which Eric and I are sleeping in because Mrs Sloman is away, I have an eighteenth century wooden mantel in my room, taken from an old house. Then there is a china green basin and brass locks with drop handles to the doors. The furniture is ‘limed oak’, ugly, and a chinchilla Persian cat is sleeping and grunting and dribbling on my bed. Outside the window a tractor is humming. Eric is having a cold bath, so that the water pipes sing.”
I have never read such a perfect evocation of autumn. It’s not overwritten or self consciously literary, but the description is vivid and precise: we can follow him on that dark misty walk back from the pub, brandy warming our insides, and know how the door handles in the chilly old house with singing pipes would feel in the hand.

I am glad to have met Denton Welch. My world is expanding again.

What I’ve been doing and reading since I last wrote to you
— Very little that I can show you! Writing a book is this long boring process where you’re left alone in a room for years to produce something while lots of other people wait for it to appear so they can do their bits. It bends your mind somewhat. I might write more about this another time.

— Using supercook.com to make better dinners. Fill out all the ingredients you currently have available and it suggests recipes from across the internet that you can make. You can also filter by cooking time and dietary requirements. I filter for <30 minutes and then just make the top recommendation every time; it hasn’t steered me wrong.

— Launched the annual pledge drive for my detective fiction podcast. I am not good at asking for money to make things so I only really do it in a concerted way once a year and I have to delete a lot of apologies from the relevant scripts. The equation is simple really, though: the show is free to listen to; it costs money to make; costs are going up. There are perks available if you help out.
Filed under: Blog, Personal Essays