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

I didn’t write to you last Friday as I had planned. I was busy reenacting this scene:

I had my first really bad migraine in several years. For me, it starts with sparkles at the edge of my vision, like a column of dancing dust motes is hovering just out of sight. Gradually, the sparkles spread all the way around until I can only see clearly out of a small circle in the middle. That area gets smaller and smaller until I can’t see anything at all that isn’t bright, fizzy light.

This phenomenon is called “aura” and I understand that around of 20 per cent of migraine sufferers experience it. Last Friday morning, I caught my first glimpse of it while I was busy writing something that was due by 5pm, a deadline that couldn’t be postponed without annoying some other people. Instead of stopping, drawing the curtains, texting an apology and then turning my phone off, I started typing faster. I started racing the sparkles in my vision, trying to finish the piece before they closed in entirely.

I made it, but only just. It was like Indiana Jones just grabbing his hat in time, except not at all fun or silly. I paid for that extra half an hour that I ignored the aura and kept staring at a screen in defiance of the rising feelings of nausea and pain, too. Instead of waking up the next morning feeling drained but better, the migraine’s aftermath lingered all weekend. I spent a lot of time lying down in the dark with the window open.

With hindsight, I can see that this was not a good exchange: thirty minutes of work is not worth two extra days of stabbing pains to the head. I’ve never been very good at assessing these equations in the moment, even when I had a job that provided sick pay. Now that I’m freelance, I’m even worse at knowing when to stop.

While I was keeping my eyes closed, a memory floated to the surface of another time when I had a migraine like this. It was the day of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, 17 April 2013, and the blinding pains started very early in the morning. I worked at a political magazine at the time; the death of Thatcher was an event we had, necessarily, been preparing for for quite some time. I was supposed to run the day’s coverage on the website, co-ordinating dispatches from writers out in the crowds and editing reactions by commentators. That time, I sent the text and went back to bed.

I’m not an opinion writer or columnist, so I didn’t miss out on the chance to have my One Big Take about the Iron Lady’s legacy. I did feel horribly guilty about leaving my colleagues one short on such a day, though. Especially since we had already been through several “Thatcher death” hoaxes in recent months, including one when a plausible-seeming anonymous Twitter account had managed to hoodwink several high profile journalists with an unsourced report of her death.

I remember that one particularly because of how absurdly inconsequential it seems in these days of QAnon and Pizzagate and all the rest. This account racked up about 50,000 followers in two hours as politicos boosted it with their “huge if true” retweets before it suddenly pivoted to pushing protein powder or mushroom supplements or something like that. By accident or design, the whole thing played out in the late afternoon period when the top hacks are just settling down to write whatever will actually run in the next day’s paper. This timing lent the whole incident added drama.

One of my friends spent her day out in the crowds, following the funeral procession to St Paul’s Cathedral and texting me updates that I squinted at quickly in the darkness of my sickroom. She told me about how people stood in silence and turned their backs as the cortège passed them. About how the airwaves were full of talking heads shouting about an era ending, or beginning. How angry and defensive everyone was, even those who were mourning a friend.

That day, I eventually fell asleep and had one of those feverish, waking nightmares where life continues in your head, subtly altered for horror. In the dream I kept getting texts from my friend about what was happening out in the streets. People were becoming violent, and through the open window of my bedroom I could hear them rioting three miles away in Parliament Square. I heard the roar of the crowd when the coffin vanished behind the doors of St Paul’s and the thud as the wave of people broke upon the cathedral’s walls.

When I woke up, it was dark outside and there had been no civilisation-endangering guerrilla war on the streets of London. The funeral of a controversial but undoubtedly influential politician had passed off in relative peace and my absence from work had been only a minor inconvenience. But the guilt that I had let people down on a big day lingered; last Friday, years later, I still let that feeling take priority over what was sensible or healthy.

It’s not hard to work out why, either. How do you have a minor illness during a pandemic? Taking to my bed with a splitting headache and sparkly eyes seemed absurd while the news is full of reports of rising infection rates and new lockdowns. It doesn’t matter how many times I try and disconnect my migraine from the societal-level trends of illness and health. The sickness and the anxiety about the sickness will not be separated.

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

• The Magical Art of Selling Soap
• An appreciation of Verne Edquist, “Glenn Gould’s Piano Man”
• A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive
• “It was intoxicating to see what he’d done with this part of me he’d stolen.”
• A wedding dress video I really enjoyed
• So into this era of Miley Cyrus
• Be better at YouTube
• Liszt vlogging > all other kinds of vlogging
• Extremely into knowing more about African history
• Switched on Pop is doing Beethoven!
• The Singing Mountain is back!
• Taking a train

If you read this far, I would very much appreciate it if you listened to my latest murder mystery podcast episode, which is all about locked rooms. If you like it, follow the show in your app so you get the next one automatically.

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

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:

• The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Interesting
• As devastating as everyone says
• Not sure why, but this one hit me hard
• Thirteen years later, what happened at Gawker isn’t going away
• I disagree with this so much yet would still eat it all
• Just such good editing
• Binged all of these
• Such a weird idea, but it works
• Audio romcoms! About dogs!
• I feel so much smarter after listening to this show
• Always weird, always compelling
• All the films I will never watch, helpfully spoiled

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

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:

• Cheese resurrection
• When people say,“we have made it through worse before”
• A Hapsburg reviews a new 1,000-page history of his family
• How to make peace with your phone while reading
• I am addicted to this song from Will Ferrell’s silly Eurovision film and I cannot quit it
• The Four Horsemeals of the Eggporkalypse
• A YouTuber from the Wirral I like now
• Good fridge organisation is very soothing
• Hot Pipes Half Hour is now my #1 podcast, I especially recommend any episodes related to pizza restaurants
• Phoebe reading mysteries has kept me going on some tough walks
• Five Questions for philosophers
• The new Pitchfork podcast is good for making me feel like I am still up with the popular music

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

In the twelve days between 26 December 2019 and 6 January 2020, I went to the tip four times. The tip is what I call it because that’s the phrase my mother uses, although the sign by the gate reads “Household Recycling Centre”. Once inside, you drive around a horseshoe-shaped road configuration before ending up where you started, on a minor road by a motorway junction. What you choose to shed along the way is your own concern.

In the curved space between the two sides of the horseshoe about a dozen shipping containers are lined up. Some are open on the top and have steps up the side for access, others have the double doors at one end folded back and a crushing apparatus appended, so that anything placed in the gap by the door will be thrust deep into the container and impacted.

There are parking spots marked out but people tend to pull their cars up anyhow, meaning that traffic quickly backs up. On our first visit on Boxing Day, I sat for 10 minutes while I watched a man pull several entire artificial Christmas trees — still decorated — out of a van that was blocking the way. He dragged them one by one over to the “garden waste” bin, mounted the steps and threw them down into the container. I wondered idly if he thought they were real, or if he just couldn’t be bothered to find the correct disposal place.

The tip we frequented when I was a child had no separations or categories. Everything was dumped in one communal area and then bulldozed into great mountains of rubbish, eventually destined for landfill. Parts of rusty cars formed layers in between decaying sofas with a sprinkling of disturbing, broken toys sprinkled around. As interesting as the rubbish itself were the people who went there to acquire rather than discard things. I would see them sometimes, dragging perfectly good bits of timber from the morass and loading them onto car roofracks.

I saw and heard some alarming things at the tip this time. I felt like I was witnessing the end of several short stories at once, without being able to turn back the pages and read how they began. There was a woman crying while she slowly piled what looked like an entire flat’s worth of furniture into the “wood” container. An elderly couple were having a vicious and personal argument about whether broken deckchairs were “metal” or “fabric”. A man clutching a bulging sack politely asked one of the high vis jacketed tip employees which bin he needed for disposing children’s teddy bears.

But most people were there for the same reason we were: to slough off the accumulated detritus of the old year. We had empty boxes too big for the wheelie bin to get rid of, as well as old light fittings and other miscellaneous junk that I can’t really picture now that it’s gone. Sorting it all into the right sections and climbing the teetering steeps to throw it away was quite enjoyable. Driving back out onto the road afterwards I felt a bit intoxicated with the thrill of it all. Never doubt that widespread narratives have power: I felt physically lighter in that “new year, new me” way, just because we had emptied the car boot of some cardboard.

In fact, I liked this feeling so much that I scoured the house for more things to discard and went back to the tip by myself over the next few days. I’ve never experienced the fabled “runner’s high”, but this felt like I imagine that does, a brain fizzing combination of accomplishment and virtue.

This was new to me: I lived in London (where junk left on the pavement will disappear within hours) for eight years after I finished university and although we’ve been on this faraway peninsula for several years now we only got a car recently; until the last few months, the tip was inaccessible to us. When we had a sizeable piece of rubbish to dispose of — an old sofa, say – I sent the council £16 via bank transfer and we left it on the doorstep before going out for the day. It was gone when we got home and the transaction felt magical. I don’t know who really took it or where it went, just that my small payment vanished it as thoroughly as any spell.

Perhaps the novelty of the tip wears off. I hope not, though — as well as that addictive sense of a load being lifted upon departure, the people-watching opportunities there are outstanding. The employees giggle almost constantly, watching people filing cardboard in the metal container and wood with plastic and despairing to each other of our collective inability to read clear signage.

And unlike with the disappearing sofa, there is a cathartic sense at the tip that we all have to confront the consequences of our own actions eventually. I bought too many things that came in unwieldy cardboard boxes, and now I have to manhandle them into a giant hopper while it’s raining. That woman over there clearly regrets purchasing the toys her children have barely used yet somehow also broken. I don’t know what chain of events lead to that man having a sack full of unwanted teddy bears, but I bet he had plenty of time to dwell upon cause and effect while he contemplated whether they should go in “fabric” or “mixed plastics”.

The sceptic in me doubts how much “recycling” actually results from this whole process (we should be reducing our waste, I know, rather than indulging in costly ways of disposing of it). But six weeks on from my last trip to the tip, I’m still thinking about it enough to write this and send it to you. It feels like a glimpse of the dark underbelly to the shiny promise of the new year.

Things to read, watch and listen to:

• We all die immediately of a Brazilian butt lift.
• “The screen went blank. Green put his head down on his arms and cried.”
• I’ll tell you a secret: I refuse to ever update my OS if it will kill iTunes.
• There are two kinds of people in this world: older siblings and everyone else.
• The Difference Between Being Broke and Being Poor.
• You can’t untoast toast.
• 332 words on pain.
• Your Book Might Not Sell, and You Have to Live With That.

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. My book is out in paperback on 5 March. Pre-order a copy here.

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:

• Can a Woman Who Is an Artist Ever Just Be an Artist?
• Sometimes it’s better to keep secrets.
• “Stop telling me which good books are actually bad.”
• This interview about fandom and the internet.
• A family history of eye surgery.
• This Is How a Woman Is Erased From Her Job.
• Michael Sheen being chaotic on The Great British Bake Off.
• How Reading Became a Lifestyle Brand.

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.