The evening that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down, I went for a long walk in the torrential rain. The two things weren’t really connected — I am not yet that addicted to my phone — but all my days are the same at the moment so it’s a useful marker. I had been waiting for the downpour to let up all day so that my dog could have a proper outing. By 9pm it had become clear that the magical walk-length window of dry weather was not going to materialise.

This happened several times last autumn too; when you live on a small peninsula that juts out into the Irish Sea a certain level of dampness is inevitable. Last year, though, I was not prepared. I would go out in my usual dog walking outfit of whatever I’m wearing anyway with plimsolls and a coat added and return soaked to the skin and shivering. Morris the dog loves to be soaking wet but I despise everything about it. And yet do nothing to prevent it.

But now I own that most miraculous of things: a matching set of waterproof trousers and jacket that both fit me comfortably and keep water out. I found them in the men’s sale bin at an outdoor shop in the Scottish Highlands this summer and I like them so much that sometimes I wear them when it’s only lightly drizzling because I now love being out in the wet and yet still dry.

On this particular walk, the waterproofs were more than earning their keep, as were my boots and hat. My father, a madman who enjoys doing things like sailing alone across the Atlantic, is fond of that saying “there is no bad weather, only bad clothing” and this sprung to mind as I trudged around the village in the damp dark. Now that I had the right clothing for possibly the first time in my life, I could finally appreciate how wrong what I had been doing before was.

This phenomenon of only noticing how bad or wrong something is once you have experienced the reverse has been on my mind recently. I’ve been reading and savouring Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman this week (I also recommend his newsletter, The Imperfectionist) and was struck by a point he made midway through about attention and distraction.

Beyond the now well-rehearsed point about how social media platforms are explicitly designed to attract your attention and expert in keeping it, he explains that we often aren’t even really aware of the extent to which this is happening. “The only faculty you can use to see what’s happening to your attention is your attention, the very thing that’s already been commandeered.”

It’s very hard to monitor yourself objectively, especially when distraction feels good because it’s helping you avoid something difficult. In a sense, I am my own unreliable narrator. I’ve written here before about the uncomfortableness of regularly examining your phone usage data, and I think this is why. The gap between my perception of how much my attention wanders and the actual amount of time I waste is large enough that I’m surprised every time I am confronted with it.

What does this have to do with finally owning good rain wear? I was halfway through enjoying my night time walk in the rain, using my boot heel to scrape leaf mould away from the grates so that the huge puddles suddenly boiled and then were sucked down into the drain below, before I realised that I could have had this a long time ago if I had just acted to correct what was making it unpleasant before.

It’s not enough just to notice there’s something wrong, although that is a necessary and often difficult stage of finding a solution to a problem. You have to then do something. I’ve been returning semi-hypothermic from wet walks for years without seeing this as a cue to purchase better clothing, and equally I’ve been wringing my hands while looking at my screen time graphs without altering my behaviour at all. I’m not yet sure what the equivalent of a good waterproof jacket for the internet is, but at least I’m finally looking for one.

What I’ve been up to

It’s been a while since I wrote to you; there’s been some stuff going on in life offline that has been hard and kept me from doing the newsletter. I’m also in a phase with work where there are several things I’m excited about on the boil in the background, but none of them are actually ready to serve up for public consumption yet. When they are, this is where I’ll tell you about them.

I did, however, publish a book review recently that I spent a lot of time on, so that’s available here if you’d like to read it. Find out a bit more about why I got so worked up about how to write about this particular book on my Instagram here. And in a fun development the magazine also asked me to read the piece aloud on their podcast, so if you prefer to listen instead you can hear me doing that from 13:20 in this episode.

My podcast about detective fiction, Shedunnit, continues — this week with an episode where I am the interviewee, rather than the interviewer, so if you’d like to hear my husband ask me questions about why I haven’t written a detective novel yet, this is where to go.

What I’m listening to, reading, watching

I’ve found this new podcast series about emotions hosted by Arthur C. Brooks interesting so far. The Irish Passport on Lady Lavery was good. There’s new Everything Is Alive and like Vinny the vending machine, I too have been through a lot. A good explanation of how the Sally Rooney book marketing campaign worked. An interview with a senior Instagram staffer who likes deactivating her Instagram.

I’ve naturally been glued to the Kidney Person discourse, and this is a good summation of the issues it raises. NB: All the other good articles I read these days go in The Browser. Battle Royal by Lucy Parker is a lighthearted book that got me through a tough time. Ditto The Hating Game by Sally Thorne. I am now on a serious historical fiction/mystery kick, and have piled up The Summer Queen by Elizabeth Chadwick, Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell and The Lady Agnes Mystery by Andrea Japp by my bed to enjoy as the nights draw in.

I am watching two shows at the moment: Only Murders in the Building on Disney+ because I am writing a column about it, and the 2020 series of The Great British Sewing Bee. I am also intrigued by, but have not yet started, Murder Island.

Until next time,

Caroline

Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links, I donate any and all money this ever generates to the Chester branch of Women’s Aid.

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: get my article and podcast recommendations in The Browser, listen to my murder mystery podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter (although I’m not really there anymore) and Instagram (where I am, arguably, too much).

I read a lot of articles every day. My job at The Browser means that I’m generally sifting for the five most original and interesting pieces I can find that would still be as good if you read them a year from now to include in the newsletter. This criteria automatically excludes anything too topical or embedded in the current moment; my most common reaction when reading is “I love this, but it will make no sense to me in a week’s time”.

Very occasionally, I find an article that prompts the opposite response, such as this one. I could read these short first person accounts from people who track down missing pets tomorrow or in forty years’ time and I would love them just as much. The combination of altruism and expertise is intoxicating to me. For instance:

“They say the golden window for tracking down a missing person is within the first 72 hours; with cats moving quickly, a similar approach will also lead to the best results. But if they’re not found immediately, don’t give up: hiding cats can stay hidden for weeks on end before needing to venture out, desperate for food and water. Knowing a cat’s personality will determine nearly everything I do.”

Sharon from New Hampshire takes a psychological approach to finding missing cats and birds, interviewing the owners about their pets’ traits and then using that data to find likely places to look. I’m imagining Jonny Lee Miller in Elementary, except it’s a retired school administrator hunting for runaway animals. Would absolutely read a 6,000 word New Yorker style profile about this.

Like a lot of people, I listened to Taylor Swift’s first quarantine album folklore obsessively last year when it first came out, and then it dropped out of my rotation as 2020 drew to a close. This song, “The Lakes”, was the bonus track on the deluxe edition, though, and it’s the only one that has stuck — albeit in this live version. As much as I appreciate the swooping strings of the album track, there’s an openness to this performance that I really enjoy. As well as the fact that TSwift managed to do an (almost) non corny Wordsworth / word’s worth pun in the lyrics.

Don’t laugh at me, but I’ve only just realised that you can click “reject all” on the cookie warnings that pop up everywhere online now and still access the websites. I hadn’t ever given it a great deal of thought, but my people pleasing instinct had — I must click “accept”, I unconsciously theorised, because I don’t want a collection of inanimate pixels to be cross with me.

However, I now know better thanks to Terms and Conditions, a little in-browser game that satirises the ridiculous lengths that publishers will go to trick you into consenting to being tracked. Your mission as the reader is to make it through 29 increasingly surreal pop ups without accepting or opting in to anything. There’s even a “review” mode at the end where it will show you all the times you unknowingly said “yes” when you thought you were saying “no”.

In my ever present quest for romcoms that are not distractingly problematic, I recently watched the 2019 film Plus One (on Netflix in the UK, your mileage may vary according to territory). Two friends from college, played by Jack Quaid and Maya Erskine, decide to be each other’s “plus one” for the ludicrous number of weddings they have to attend in a single summer since they have hit that age when everyone they know is getting married. It’s a classic friends-to-lovers scenario that avid readers of fanfiction will be very familiar with.

And I enjoyed it greatly, not least because it includes possibly my favourite comic cemetery scene, and it does indeed fit my rubric. The plot doesn’t rely on a woman’s questionable consent or assume that all men are automatically irresistible. But when it was over I still had a lot of questions.

What jobs do these characters have that they can fly to Hawaii for one wedding and still afford to stay in hotels for about six more? Do they have any non-marrying friends? Where do they even live? Maybe these kind of gaps are just inherent to the romcom genre and nobody except me cares. But if you’ve seen it and you wondered too, then let me know.

No Complaints and my Writing Hour will be taking a summer break now. I’ll be back in a few weeks.

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: get my article and podcast recommendations in The Browser, listen to my murder mystery podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

If you have any of those “on this day” features enabled on your social media accounts, you have like me probably started receiving reminders of how one year ago, you were doing a lot of things you took for granted for the last time without knowing it. I’ve already had the last time I hugged my parents (23rd February), the last time I went to London (24th February), the last time I went to a chamber choir rehearsal (26th February), and I’m now morbidly anticipating the pictures of final cinema trips, restaurant meals, and coffees with friends.

In the past decade I’ve oscillated back and forth between wanting to post a lot on Twitter and Instagram and wanting nothing to do with them. If anyone has ever wondered why I have a different handle on each (and nobody has, I can guarantee it) it’s because I got spooked by some creepy messages on the latter a few years ago and deleted my account, only to discover when I tried to revivify it years later that the app wouldn’t let me have my old name back, even though nobody else is using it. I similarly deleted the Facebook account that I’d had since university and then started a new one that I now don’t use. I’m still unsure how much of myself I want to be on the internet, and I don’t know if I’ll ever find the answer to that question.

I found this piece about how the pandemic has shifted the writer’s attitude to photographs interesting in light of all of these visual reminders of our past lives. She is surprised to find that she misses the old fashioned activity of having photos printed and slotting them into physical albums, because when there is no curation or limit on what we can snap with our phones, it’s much harder to assemble a meaningful parade of memories to peruse when times get tough. I likewise have no desire to flip through the many blurry photos of my dog or screenshots of memes I like that live on my phone, but I do want to be reminded of what I enjoyed doing last week, last month or last year.

I’ve made a couple of changes to accommodate this shift. I started posting on Instagram much more, because for better or worse that’s the way I look at other people’s photos, and my own. We also bought an actual camera, a little pocket digital one of the kind my mum had in 2007, and have been taking photographs with that instead of our phones. It’s nice to be able to snap away while on an outing without also feeling the pull to check email because your phone is out anyway, and I have grand plans about sifting through the photos once a quarter and making them into an album. Who knows if I will actually do it, but just the idea is comforting enough, for now.

Call for contributions! I’m finding myself oddly fascinated by other people’s posts about what their “last real life day” was, as the first anniversary rolls around. I’ll write about mine next week, and I’d love to include snippets from readers around the world about theirs too as well — reply to this email with a couple of sentences describing what the last “normal” thing you did before going into quarantine/lockdown last year was, and I’ll publish a smorgasbord of them in the next newsletter.

How often do you clean your glasses? I’ve realised that I do it only very occasionally, when I notice that the world has acquired a certain soft focus that it does not actually possess. Even then, I don’t spend much time on this task, and am probably just smearing the same dirt around into a new pattern and then putting them back on.

I mention this terrible habit of mine for two reasons. Firstly, I recently watched this video, where after not cleaning their glasses for a week the maker then looks at them under a microscope. You should really watch it to appreciate the full horror of it, but I’ll just say: it is extremely greasy on there.

Secondly, I thought about my non glasses cleaning for more than half a second and realised how silly it is that I’m washing my hands a lot but not the object that lives on my face that I touch regularly. Since I was doing a Lakeland order anyway (yes, there must still be some joy in life, and buying a special brush that lets me clean behind the radiators was it this week) I bought some glasses wipes to take care of any microscopic wriggly things that might be living on my lenses. Shudder.

It’s such a simple thing, but it made such a difference. When I was a teenager my eyesight would be worse every year when I went to get it tested, and I would walk out of the opticians with a new prescription, suddenly able to see individual leaves on the trees for the first time in months. Cleaning my glasses was a lot like that, and I shall be doing it often from now on.

I’ve been really enjoying listening to poetry podcasts recently — the kind where someone with a lovely voice reads a piece to you, and maybe shares a few thoughts about it afterwards. Here are three of my favourite shows / poems that I’ve heard lately.

“All That Life” by Dawn Garisch on Badilisha Poetry

“WHEREAS my eyes land on the shoreline” by Layli Long Soldier on Poetry Unbound

“What The Tide Brings In” by John O’Donnell on Words Lightly Spoken

I watched the Billie Eilish documentary The World’s A Little Blurry this week and I do not recommend it unless you want to feel like you’re viewing an Instagram Story that lasts two hours and twenty minutes.

To my mind, the most interesting thing about Eilish is her voice and her music, but the film spends relatively little time dwelling on the path she trod from self publishing songs on SoundCloud to a major deal and billions of streams.

Instead, it is made up of endlessly meandering shots of her walking onto the stage for performances, texting a boyfriend who never bothers to show up for her, and getting (understandably!) stressed when she is injured or her shows have technical difficulties.

If this were to be your first contact with Billie Eilish, you could be forgiven for thinking that she had been groomed for pop stardom from babyhood, rather than coming sideways at the music industry with a sound that was completely different to what was making megahits at the time.

There is so much about the film that I generally like that I was surprised to feel so negatively about it. I enjoy documentaries that are stitched together entirely from unplanned footage with no narration or sit down interviews, and I also think it’s illuminating to see a very public person in their private mode.

There are even a few tantalising moments that made me think the film would go deeper on the music, such as when her brother (who is her producer and songwriting partner) tells their mother out of Billie’s earshot that the record label has asked him to steer her towards making a more “mainstream” song, or when it shows the duo recording vocal tracks in his bedroom and her hating every single note of her own voice. But neither theme is followed up, and all that’s left is a kind of unstructured tour diary that is deeply unsatisfying. Recommendations for better music documentaries will be gratefully received.

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: read me weekly in The Browser, listen to my fortnightly podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

I cannot remember ever watching for the advent of spring so avidly as I have this year. Every dry day, every flash of colour as a crocus pokes out from the sodden grass, every extra minute of daylight past 4pm has detonated a small, juicy bloom of serotonin in my dehydrated brain. On Monday, when I woke up to a perfectly blue sky traversed by small, fluffy white clouds I wanted to cry with joy.

I’m usually someone who revels in autumn and winter, in windy wet days when I can legitimately curl up by the fire with a book. But of course there is a difference between not wanting to go out in bad weather and not being allowed to really go anywhere – the removal of the choice is what chafes.

Having become so intensely local, the incremental changes of the seasons are that much more noticeable too. In the absence of any other events to discuss, my husband and I have taken to updating each other in detail on the antics of the fox family who live in the park and the never-ending repair work on a nearby municipal fountain. On the day that the village gardeners clipped the hedges, I rushed home from an otherwise extremely dull walk to share my topiary gossip.

Even though the pandemic restrictions aren’t going to change where I live for another month, at least, it feels like the warmer weather gives me back some of my old life. With no need to pile on layers and laboriously lace up outdoor shoes, I can more easily pop out for a quick stroll when I need some fresh air. There is no longer a narrow window of about six hours when it is light enough to make being outside feel beneficial. And of course, if the weather is better it means that time is actually passing, no matter what my brain might think.

I’m so annoyed to discover that the morning people of this world have been right all along. After weeks of sleeping badly and failing to do any meaningful work before midday, I finally summoned the willpower from somewhere to charge my phone at night in another room and try going to sleep before 2am. Having internally sneered at the concept of “sleep hygiene” for ages, I expected nothing to change.

Imagine my frustrated chagrin, then, when I slept deeply for eight hours at a time several nights in a row and started waking naturally at 7am. I even went running before 8am on two separate occasions! I don’t mind admitting that I was wrong about blue light being a real thing, but I am reluctant to acknowledge that my mother — who has never, as far as I’m aware, stayed in bed past 7.30am in her life — was right about the knock on effect of my lying-in habits.

I was supposed to publish a new episode of my podcast, Shedunnit, on Wednesday, but a few days ahead of my deadline to send the final script and recordings to my editor I had to face the realisation that there just weren’t enough waking hours left to get it done properly. I spent an afternoon agonising over what I could do about this before finally accepting that I needed to take a pause. My capacity for pulling allnighters while still working full days is limited at the moment, and since this was an episode with multiple interviewees who don’t all speak English as their first language, it required more time than I could give it if I was going to both do it well and stick to the original schedule.

Believe it or not, making this decision to skip an episode — I reran a classic from the archive instead like I’m This American Life or something — represents serious progress from me. I can’t count the number of times I’ve worked all night to keep putting out this show every other Wednesday, and accepting that this isn’t sustainable is a new kind of self awareness.

I’ve always been a big advocate of consistency for regularly-publishing podcasts. People sometimes ask me for advice on what the best day of the week is to put out new episodes, and my answer is always “the same day you did it last week/fortnight/month”. Even in the age of binge listening and full series drops, I still think there’s value in building up the trust with your audience that will hear from you when you said you’d be there. I’ve certainly found that there is a marked dip in listenership if I publish 24 hours later than usual without announcing the delay ahead of time.

But consistency isn’t everything. Faced with the choice between putting out a mediocre episode on time or a good one a fortnight later, in this instance I chose the latter. I hope listeners eventually think it was worth the wait.

I got several delightful messages from people who took my advice in last week’s newsletter and made the Claudia Roden cake that requires you to boil and then blend entire oranges. I enjoyed seeing pictures of your bakes enormously, so I think we’ll have a recipe corner for the second edition in a row.

This time, I want to suggest that you try making Sohla El-Waylly’s Pizza Party Strata. I’m afraid I don’t have a photograph of mine to share because we scoffed it too quickly (full disclosure, this wasn’t my first time making it this week; I like it so much that it’s already entered our weeknight rotation) but you can watch a video of her making it here.

“Strata” is a word that El-Waylly coined by combining “frittata” and “stuffing”, and that is pretty much what this dish is: a mash up of a frittata and that American-style stuffing that is made by pouring an egg mixture over bread croutons and baking it. You can really make it with any combination of flavours that you like, but this one is designed to mimic pizza.

I don’t think there’s anything revelatory about the flavours here — cheese, tomato, bread, egg, what’s not to like — nor is it an exciting technique like the blend-an-orange-to-make-cake situation. It’s really a dump and bake recipe. The thrill here is in the texture. Even though it is full of bread and cheese and egg, there is something oddly light and fluffy about this dish, especially if you follow her instructions and use properly stale or dehydrated bread to make it. It’s almost like a soufflé. Unlike real pizza, you can eat a lot of this and not need to lie down in a carb coma afterwards. Ideal.

There was a great edition of Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter The Imperfectionist this week about the so called “provisional life”. This section sums it up nicely:

Allow yourself to imagine what it might feel like to know you’d never fully get on top of your work, never become a really disciplined exerciser or healthy eater, never resolve the personal issue you feel defines your life’s troubles. What if I’ll always feel behind with my email? What if listening attentively to other people will always take the weird amount of effort it seems to take now? What if that annoying thing my partner does annoys me to the end of my days?

I still feel the pull of this thought pattern occasionally, the idea that there is an ideal state of me just out of reach that if I work hard enough I will attain. I’m not nearly so prone to this as I used to be, though, because I was mostly cured of expecting things to magically change for me by a series of coincidental political events that happened roughly bewteen 2013 and 2017. I was an editor at a British current affairs magazine during this time, and one year after another things beyond my control happened that just kept ratcheting up my workload and stress level.

First Scotland had a bitter independent campaign and referendum in 2013/4, then we had a UK general election, then there was the Brexit referendum, and then another general election. Every time, I felt sure that the degradation in my enjoyment of work was temporary, that things would revert to some kind of manageable “normal” once the short term stress abated. But it never did: each time, the heightened level of work became the new expectation even after the election results were in, and when the next incident came along, everything just stepped up again.

Eventually, I had to confront the fact that there was no rewind button and my job had changed into something else even while I was doing it. If it wasn’t suiting me anymore, then I had to do something about that myself, rather than forlornly and passively waiting for that idealised state of… 2011? 2012? to return. I’m not sure what point exactly I wanted to go back go, but I think Barack Obama was president and tweets were still mostly appearing in my timeline chronologically. Halcyon days.

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: receive my daily podcast recommendations from The Listener, read me weekly in The Browser, listen to my fortnightly podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

Everyone has lived through their own pandemic, but one entirely common experience is that memory of the last time we inhabited the world without fear or restriction. Depending on where you are in the world or what you do, this will have happened at a different point in the first three months of 2020. For many in Europe and America, where we were late to catch on to the severity of the virus and the necessity of isolation, the one year anniversary of that final excursion into what is now The Before is passing around now.

My own last day was 9 March 2020. It was a Monday, the first day of the week that would end with Tom Hanks testing positive for Covid-19 and America cancelling all major sports fixtures. The work I did was entirely unmemorable, so I went back through my email to check up on myself — I did revisions on this piece for Granta, it turns out, and I filed an article about the rise of multi-language podcasting that would publish the next day. I also sent some pictures from our weekend dog walk to my mother in law, and I was interested to see now that this one could have been taken at any point since then. This is pretty much all I have done when going outside in the last year. Things have changed a lot, and also not really at all.

It was the evening of that last day that lingers in my memory. My husband is an academic and he had arranged to take a group of students to see a screening of Brief Encounter at the Philharmonic in Liverpool. Mid afternoon, he messaged me to say there had been a drop out, so I tucked the dog up with his favourite treats for the evening and took the train into the city just as it was getting dark. We sat in a coffee shop and shared some food, and then waited in the lobby of the concert hall to give the students their tickets as they arrived.

Nobody was wearing masks. There was no hand sanitiser, or marks on the floor for social distancing purposes. The usual pre-event bustle was all around us, with people rushing in to pick up tickets, find their friends, and get to their seats. This seems absurd to me now, given that we had already been reading the terrible news from China and Italy for weeks, and the fact that my own father was only just recovering from a mysteriously terrible flu he seemed to have caught from a fellow charity volunteer who had just returned from visiting family in Wuhan. And yet.

I love Brief Encounter. I love the music, I love the accents, the trains, the clothes, the food, the flimsiness of the doomed romance. I even love the “thank you for coming back to me” bit at the end, and anticipate it eagerly throughout like it’s a big showstopping finale. I have been multiple times to Carnforth station, where much of it was filmed in 1945, to visit the little museum on the platform. Eating cake in the refreshment room there again is quite high up my list of post vaccination priorities.

On that last evening, I enjoyed the film all over again — seeing it on a big screen in the acoustics of a hall built for orchestral performance is a pleasure that far surpasses squinting at a small laptop screen. It was a sold out show, with an audience mostly of elderly people. I try not to dwell on that too much, given what we know now about mortality rates.

After the film, we lingered by the door again to make sure that the students found their transport back to campus safely. While we waited, I chatted to one of my husband’s colleagues who had also been in the audience. That conversation is where I now draw the line of before and after, because after my blissfully unaware evening the virus did intrude then, as it has every day since.

The person I spoke to then was supposed to be attending a conference in America the coming weekend, and was feeling unsure about whether it was safe to fly: the news was concerning, but if they didn’t go the funding for a larger project they were running would be withdrawn. I agreed that they probably shouldn’t travel, and then thought little more about it as events overtook us in the following days. About a fortnight later, my husband mentioned that this colleague had gone to New Orleans for the weekend after all, and upon their return had immediately gone off sick with Covid. They are only now coming back to full time work after a year of illness.

At the end of that evening, though, I didn’t know that that would be the last face to face conversation I would have without thinking about whether I was two metres away from the other speaker or not. We walked back to the car in the freezing March wind and drove home, not knowing that over a year later we still wouldn’t have driven back into the city yet. I haven’t watched Brief Encounter since then either, and I don’t know when I will again.

I asked in last week’s newsletter and on my Instagram what you did on your last day. This is what you sent me.

Greeting the return of my daughter from her London job. She’s still here!
— Anonymous

I work in STEM education, so we celebrate Pi(e) Day every year. Last year, we held our Pi(e) Day on 16th March, which unbeknownst to us was the final day that we would end up working from the office. That afternoon we were told that we would all be working from home for the next little while, and we haven’t been back since. It wasn’t quite normal since we had modified Pi(e) Day with Covid precautions, which included serving the pies while wearing gloves, instead of our usual serve-yourself method, and making everyone take the pie back to their desks instead of chatting while we ate. But it still sticks in my brain as the final “normal” thing that I got to do before everything really changed.
— Mallory

Last normal trip out — a Pizza Express and the Harlem Globetrotters at the Leeds Arena on 4th March.
— Adam

Immediately prior to the quarantine, I lost two aunts within a week of each other. So my last real day was a Monday. I was off work for my aunt’s funeral and I remember going into the funeral home with hand sanitiser everywhere. We went to my aunt’s church where they fed us and we spent time reminiscing. I remember riding back with my parents to Ohio (we were in Indiana) and getting messages from coworkers that we were being sent home to work from home the next day. Our governor announced the quarantine and I had to rush into work to get my computer and supplies to work from home. I felt so surreal because I had been barely paying attention to the Covid news — one aunt was in the hospital for several weeks before she passed and my other passed right before her funeral.
It was a small consolation that we managed to have both of their funerals and grieve together before the shutdown. Many people didn’t get that opportunity.
— Tiffany

Finished work early, got the bus home, met an old friend in our local pub for some drinks.
— Anonymous

Met my new boyfriend’s sister, cuddled a dog in the pub, and had my first Morley’s.
— Katie

I think it was the Saturday before NYC shut down and my partner and I went into Manhattan to get glasses which was just an evolving failure (wrong locations, Warby Parker’s flagship store in SoHo when they had a HUGE anniversary party) but we wound up wandering around and getting snacks and drinks at different cafés because it was one of those early spring warm days that happen in New York in March, and it was great. The next day I went to a women’s soccer game with friends in New Jersey which was fun but also I remember a lot of announcements about being careful because of Covid and I remember wondering if going was a mistake but also there was so little information and so much confusion I dunno what I could’ve done differently with the information that I had.
— Alicia

Went on a date getting burritos and watching Little Women in the movie theatre.
— Anonymous

In the pub playing pool with old uni friends before stumbling home eating chips, glorious.
— Abbi

I was on spring break from law school and knew I had boatloads of studying to do, but I blew it off to join my dad for a day of jeeping in Moab (a couple hours’ drive). I’m so glad that I did. We hiked to Corona Arch (partially as a joke and partially because I’d never been), and then spent the day enjoying the beautiful scenery and each other’s company. He’s a doctor and leads a youth group in his church congregation. On our way home, he got a series of emails postponing and then canceling the youth camp planned for the next month. That’s when we knew that things would be quite different, but I’m so glad we spent that time together because I haven’t seen him in months.
— Jackie

I went to a second run theatre by myself to see Little Women. A man sobbed when Beth died.
— Stef

Visited my godson who had just been born. Didn’t even think to wear a mask on the train!
— Amanda

I went to Florida for vacation with my mom and sisters on 7th March. Things were normal when we got to our condo on the beach, though we were reading the news with various levels of alarm throughout the week. By the end of the week, we saw people selling toilet paper for $5 a roll on the side of the road as we drove to the airport. I didn’t have a mask so on the plane ride home I wore my jacket backwards and pulled the hood up over my face every time I was near people. I got home on a Saturday. On Sunday 15th March, my fiancé and I went over to our friend’s house so that she could marry us. I needed to get on my fiancé’s health insurance sooner than we were actually planning to get married (September 2020, now postponed) so we were having my coworker/friend sign our marriage license. We stood 6 feet apart in her living room while she signed the document and then we left and that was the last time I saw her. So I guess the last normal thing I did was get married?
— Anonymous

I flew back from Hong Kong without telling my parents, who were at the time stranded on a cruise off Cape Horn, and waited in the house for them to get back.
— Anonymous

Cancelled our wedding, which was not fun.
— Georgia

My office declared work from home on 13th March when they heard news of the situation worsening. The second week of the month is generally busy on account of three birthday celebrations. Last year — maybe as a last hurrah or an almost farewell — I spent time with most of my friends. (I stay with my family, so there was no fear of missing them.) On the day before I started quarantining, we went to a lovely café with not-so-good food. The birthday girl gifted us roses, which was a pleasant and weird surprise. We played with a couple of dogs who happened to visit at the same time. We left with smiles on our faces. And as the days went on, the flowers wilted.
— Kriti

Headed to London for a conference, went for dinner after, stayed in a hotel where, amazingly, they gave us free wheatgrass shots to help protect against Covid, and then went for my last brunch the next morning. I miss brunch.
— Emma

Went to see King Creosote at the Barbican.
— Annabelle

I was working from home on 17th March while I wait for the car to be repaired. My parents were visiting to play with their granddaughter. An emergency work meeting was called to say they were closing the site. I sheepishly headed downstairs to ask my dad to drive me to the office to get my chair, monitor and peripherals home. He spent the journey teasing me for fussing. I was expecting a few weeks of this though and wanted to be comfortable.
— Paul

I went minigolfing with ten (!) friends. We were laughing. Corona felt too far fetched a concept to be real.
— Noemi

I found it really moving to read through all of that and imagine you all doing your last things. I’ll be back with a regular newsletter next week, and in the meantime, don’t forget that if you ever want to talk to me about something you read here, you can just hit reply on the email and it come straight to my inbox.

Until next time,

Caroline

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: get my article and podcast recommendations in The Browser, listen to my murder mystery podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

I don’t know if I should admit this in a public space on the internet, but I’m not a very good writer. By that I mean I’m not good at doing writing on a reliable or predictable schedule; whatever the quality of the work that gets published in the end, I’m terrible at the literal action of sitting and writing. If I had treated the job I used to have in a shop the way I do this job of putting words on a screen I would have been sacked on day two when I didn’t show up for my shift, refused to answer the boss’s calls and set fire to my uniform.

Yet in different ways, writing has been my job for over a decade now. I have published many articles and a book — you’re reading this now, in all likelihood, because you once came across something I wrote and enjoyed it. How is this compatible with my bad employee approach to doing the work, you might wonder. The answer comes in two parts: the writing I do happens in squeezed pockets of time usually when I can no longer postpone the obligation, and for a long time my primary job was as an editor of other people’s words rather than as a writer of my own.

I’ll let you in on the awful secret of how I wrote my first book. I had a year to do it and 85,000 words to write. I treated it like a giant article, by which I mean I spent 75 per cent of the time researching and interviewing and then arrived at the last three months with precisely zero publishable words on the page. I do not recommend this: the psychological impact of being so close to the deadline and having to stare at a blank screen where your book should be is extremely denting to one’s confidence.

I hadn’t written up any of my notes from the research period into recognisable sentences, and all of my interviews had been transcribed but not digested. I had the outline that I’d used to sell the book, but no idea if this was going to work in practice. With no better plan, I just started at the beginning. I wrote the book through in the order you can now read it, starting at page one and ending exactly 85,001 words later. This is also how I write articles — I have to write them as if I’m the reader, for some reason I can’t fathom.

I had a spreadsheet titled “Book ARGH” into which I entered each day’s word count next to the date. It then calculated the running total for the manuscript, divided it by the number of days left until the deadline, and thus told me how many words I needed to write on each remaining day to make it to the finish. I found the terror this inspired very motivating. After a bad day when I only put 250 new words into the document, the required daily word rate would shoot up over 2,000; a good day could push it down below 1,000.

I will discreetly draw a veil over how much of a complete mess I was during the 84 days in which I wrote like this. Suffice to say, when I mentioned to my husband that I was starting work on a new book idea, his main feedback was “maybe you could cry less this time”. That gave me a jolt and got me thinking: why do I do it like this? I like this profession, I’ve made it work for me, yet I’m so very terrible at putting in the hours. There has to be a better way to write.

There’s that quote, often misattributed to Dorothy Parker, that goes “I hate to write, but I love having written”. I’ve believed in that for a long time — that the process has to be awful so that I can arrive at the blissful feeling of a deadline met. And I’ve never had cause to question this, because I always get there somehow. I didn’t exactly love the all nighters and the stressful crunch periods, but I thought that was just how I worked. I needed the adrenaline to flush out the inspiration.

That is, until the last few months. Around the first anniversary of going into lockdown last March, I suddenly lost two skills at the same time: the ability to get a full night’s sleep, and my much-honed capacity to pull the words out of the bag at the last minute. It was not dissimilar to the disbelieving feeling you get when convalescing from an illness. I used to be able to walk up this hill without getting out of breath, so why am I having to sit down every ten steps? The environment looks the same but the way you inhabit it is utterly changed.

I’ve been quiet on this newsletter since this March while I’ve been grappling with this inability to write as I always have done in the past. I’ve never been much of a consumer of “writing advice” content, but I’ve been devouring the stuff recently as I’ve been trying to rebuild my process and learn to view the act of writing as worthwhile rather than just prizing the results. A few selected highlights:

This interview with William Boyd, in which he tells the story of how very early in his career he pitched a “completed” novel to a publisher that he had not actually written, and then wrote it in three months after they accepted it while telling his editor that he was “retyping it”. I feel like this is a lie that worked better in the 1980s, but it does still sound like something I would do. He now writes every day and plans out his time and plots extensively, which he finds to be a more sustainable and less anxiety inducing habit.This interview with John Swartzwelder, which has been widely shared already but contains such a gem of a paragraph that I’m going to repeat it again here:Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue—“Homer, I don’t want you to do that.” “Then I won’t do it.” Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it.This article by Amitava Kumar about why ticking off 150 words a day helped him correct a problem with how he felt he was spending his time:Too often I spent my days wanting to write and not writing. Again and again, I would note in my journal, “I did not write today.” The idea that this was how I was going to spend my life filled me with despair.This interview with Caroline O’Donoghue, in which she eloquently explains how to write a novel instead of just talking about writing a novel. Unfortunately, it involves getting up early.

I’ve always been of the opinion that devoting time to reading about how to write is just a form of procrastination from writing itself, but I was wrong – all of these perspectives and more have really helped me get back on the metaphorical horse after my fall. I’ve realised that I can’t just wait for inspiration to strike when I’m under pressure, nor can I rely on writing anything good while staying up all night any longer. I have to be my own crappy little elf, turning up each day to put down the bad words so that the next day I can make them better.

Here are a few things I’m doing now that have really helped me with this. Since I’ve started these practices, I’ve filed some long overdue essays, am no longer so behind on podcast scripts, and actually completed the book proposal I’ve been working on for over a year. It’s very irritating to find that the “get up early and get on with it” people were right all along, but life is full of such disappointments.

I did the two-week #1000wordsofsummer challenge run by writer Jami Attenberg. I wrote 1,000 words each day before moving on to any of my other work, and the impact was quite astonishing — no matter what other frustrations and failures occurred during the day, I had already made measurable progress towards finishing something.I’ve been posting more on my Instagram about the difficulties I’ve had with writing and people have been very kind, which has made me feel like less of a secret failure. I am historically terrible at all forms of self promotion, but am trying to get over this.I started a morning accountability writing Zoom. It’s nothing fancy — after a very quick hello, we all keep our videos off and mute ourselves before checking back in an hour later, but I’ve found having made the appointment with other people to show up for an hour and get some writing done is really effective. If you’d like to join me to do this at 9am BST on weekdays, fill out this form and I’ll send you periodic updates about when it’s happening and what link you’ll need. If my schedule doesn’t work for you then you might want to look for an existing session in your timezone — writers’ workshops and groups tend to run them — or start your own.I do calendar blocking now. After encountering this term a lot I finally learned what it is properly from this video by Hannah Witton. I’ve found that the process of allocating time each day in my calendar in advance for all the different tasks I want to do has been very helpful in reducing my anxiety about having too much to do and not enough time to do it in. The writing Zoom is a fixed and recurring appointment, for instance, and I’ve also been making space properly for other writing work like Shedunnit scripts rather than just expecting it to magically happen in between all my admin.

I don’t feel like I’m in any position to offer advice about writing — this is just what has helped me out of a major slump and I’m mostly writing it out now because putting it down like this helps me to clarify what I’m trying to do. I’m still very much working on becoming a better writer who can show up for her job properly.

If any of what I’ve listed above prompts any useful ideas or techniques for you, I’m glad, and if you’re afflicted with any or all of the problems I’ve described I hope to see you at a writing Zoom sometime soon. Your advice and experiences will be very welcome; just hit reply on this email to tell me about something, ask me a question or make a suggestion about a future topic you’d like me to write about.

I hope to be more regular with this newsletter now — this is another horse that I’m getting back on. I’ve been doing it on and off for nearly seven years, and the format and content has changed a lot in that time, so I won’t be offended if you unsubscribe because this iteration isn’t for you.

Until next time,

Caroline

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: get my article and podcast recommendations in The Browser, listen to my murder mystery podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

I was having a conversation the other day about what I’m working on at the moment and how I constantly feel like I’ve almost finished everything but never quite arriving at that point. This came up because my husband and I were planning out the next few months, during which time we want to take some time off to spend with friends and family.

I was being unhelpful: because I’m a freelancer, I don’t have holiday days that I can book like a regular employee, and thus I’ve made working all the time my default. I fear that if I stop for a while the people I write and edit for will make other arrangements and I won’t have any work to come back to. I’d just made this point for the third time when G said something that stopped me in my tracks:

“What if you did less work?”

What if I did less work. It shouldn’t be such a revolutionary thought, but somehow it is. And I’m not the only one to be considering it — after over a year of awful pandemic working conditions, people are quitting jobs in record numbers and demanding the right to continue working flexibly from home. My job has been mercifully unaffected by the numerous lockdowns, but that doesn’t mean I can’t redesign it now that the world has changed.

There are, of course, practical considerations. Financial ones, mainly, but also childcare plus questions of insurance and benefits if you live somewhere where that comes linked to a job. But regardless of your situation, as a prompt for thinking harder about how you spend your time I recommend this question.

I’m too prone to only dabbling around the edges of this issue. I can take a week off, I think, if I do all the work I would have done then beforehand and schedule it all so nobody knows I’m gone. I accept the fact that I will have to work twice as hard when I come back, instead of tackling the root cause of this unpleasant transaction I do with my past and future self. What if… I just didn’t do that work, ever?

In that Amitava Kumar piece about writing I linked to last week, he includes that famous Annie Dillard line: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” I spent most of yesterday worrying about how much work I still have to do before the end of the month. I’m not sure I want a lifetime of that.

My morning accountability Zoom for getting writing done continues. If you’d like to join me to do this at 9am BST on weekdays, fill out this form and I’ll send you periodic updates about when it’s happening and what link you’ll need.

The algorithm sent me to this video from ten years ago the other day, an acoustic version of the smash pop hit “We Are Young” by the band Fun. and Janelle Monáe.

It’s been watched over 92 million times since it was first posted in 2011, so I’m certainly not the first person to connect with it. I think it’s so interesting musically, though, which is why I’m pointing you to it now.

Nate Ruess and Janelle Monáe are both solo singers, used to being the only vocalist on a stage, and yet in this arrangement they are doing the unusual thing of working very hard to make their voices sound indistinguishable. Not every vocalist can do this — in choral music, we talk about “the blend” constantly and those with more soloistic tendencies have to work on joining the corporate voice instead of standing out above it. I am weirdly good at blending, even though I’m nothing special as a singer on my own, and I’ve always considered this to be because my personality inclines this way anyway.

(I really miss choir, which is still prohibited under the UK’s current rules. This is probably why I’m doing unsolicited musical analysis of random YouTube videos.)

You can tell that Nate and Janelle are loving their togetherness in this version, though, because they keep looking at each other and smiling every time they execute a perfectly synchronised run or vocal tic. When Janelle finally takes a verse on her own, and then sings a later chorus in canon instead of unison, it’s really shocking, because we’ve become so used to hearing her as part of that joint voice. For a song like this that is more about that one anthemic melody rather than complex harmony, this presentation really, really works.

I also just really like the story of “We Are Young”, which was a huge hit for Fun. that topped charts and won awards. Not that long after this big success, rather than trying to ride the wave into selling more singles and playing that one song at every gig for the rest of their lives, the band went on indefinite hiatus. Jack Antonoff is now a bigtime producer of other people’s music, and all the members have put out their own stuff. It’s interesting, I think, to examine the reasons why people don’t choose to capitalise at times when the market system tells them they should.

Related: I enjoyed this episode of the Switched On Pop podcast about the battle currently going on over how songwriters are paid for their work.

I’m on this week’s episode of The Media Podcast, talking about media news from the latest big podcast acquisition to the neverending privatisation of Channel 4. You can listen to that here or your favourite podcast app.

I was also on the BBC’s Podcast Radio Hour recently, talking about my favourite detective podcasts and interviewing a couple of the people who make them. That’s available here or in the BBC Sounds app (which I believe is finally available to download outside the UK, and is worth it mainly to have easy access at all times to Peter Wimsey radio adaptations).

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: get my article and podcast recommendations in The Browser, listen to my murder mystery podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

I’m in an awkward limbo phase and I don’t like it at all. My Next Big Writing Project™ is temporarily out of my hands in a way that I find very uncomfortable and I don’t quite know what to do with myself. The last few months have been a blur of routine: get up, hammer away at the draft until I hit a thousand new words, then close it and try not to feel too overwhelmed with guilt while I do all the other work I ignored in the meantime. Now there’s a blank space in my morning where all that effort used to be, and it’s making me do strange things like create new documents titled MY BRILLIANT NOVEL and fill the page with bullet points for scenes I have no idea how to write.

It’s hard not to draw parallels between this enforced yet temporary cessation of activity and the wider situation in the world, of course. Where I live in the UK, cases are going up at an alarming rate yet we’re told that all the summer reopening plans are still on. It’s like the few moments in the dark on stage before the curtain goes up. Nobody really knows what’s going to happen and we’re all just breathing in the dusty backstage air together, hoping that we can put on a good show.

After months of not really sleeping, I’m being put through a strict regimen aimed at minimising nighttime anxiety by a cheery-yet-strict “wellbeing coach” at my doctor’s surgery. I may only sleep between midnight and 6.30am; I may not take naps; and I’m not allowed to work after 6pm. The principles underlying this plan are, I was told, quite similar to those for sleep training a toddler, which I find both reassuring and a little humbling. Anyway, the upshot of this is that every evening I have six hours to fill when I feel incredibly tired but may not go to sleep — yet another awkward moment of limbo in the day. I need to learn how to do nothing again.

I know that the Olympics is coming up soon because I am in the grip of a sudden enthusiasm for a sport I have previously never cared about. In 2016 it was men’s long distance running. In 2012 it was dressage (which is clearly just “horse dancing”, let’s call it what it is). And this year, it’s the uneven bars event in women’s gymnastics. If you’re interested, I recommend this half hour documentary about how difficult it is, and how much doing it right feels like flying.

It is a little alarming how ready the mechanisms of the internet are to assist in nurturing this interest. A week ago, I was idly watching a “look at how amazing Simone Biles is” compilation video during a pomodoro break. The algorithm clocked that I watched this video all the way through and initially started serving me more of the same, and then transitioned into highlighting individual gymnasts’ YouTube channels.

Seven days in, I’m a diehard fan not only of Biles but of MyKayla Skinner too, a US gymnast (and Mormon) who caught Covid last year, developed pneumonia, and had to take months off her training because she couldn’t do a single somersault without wheezing, let alone the doubles and triples international competition requires. This past Sunday, she made the US Olympic team in spite of these setbacks and I must admit, I welled up a little bit.

A writing project that I worked on in the first half of this year has finally been announced and is available for pre-order: Agatha Christie’s England, a map and guide to the Queen of Crime’s literary locations.

I was asked to do this because of my podcast, Shedunnit, on which I talk about the so-called golden age of detective fiction that ran roughly 1920 to 1939. I might write another week about how I put together the scripts for that — if it’s of interest, let me know — and I agreed thinking that putting together the guide would be just like writing an extra long episode.

How wrong I was! Christie was both very specific about the locations in her fiction and, at times, maddeningly vague about how they mapped onto the real landscape. She defines where Miss Marple’s home village of St Mary Mead is in relation to a host of other imaginary places, but never according to, say, London. After a few days of fiddling around the edges of the project I finally just started reading her books again from the very beginning, making note of any helpful detail about distance or setting. I don’t recommend skimming 60+ books in a few weeks; your eyes go a bit funny.

I think it came out well in the end, though, and I hope the guide strikes a good balance between being actually useful if you are travelling to Devon and Cornwall this summer and want to do some sightseeing, and also interesting enough to read without leaving your house. If you want one, they’re available to pre order directly from the publisher here and will ship out mid July.

That’s all from me today; I’m still getting back into the habit of sending this thing. You can always hit reply if you’ve got anything you’d like to recommend to me – I am very interested in what niche sports you are suddenly keen on — or if there are things you’d like me to write about in the future.

Until next time,

Caroline

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: get my article and podcast recommendations in The Browser, listen to my murder mystery podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

My phone’s usage timer is my harshest critic. When I open the “digital wellness” app where it resides, I see a pie chart breaking down how I have spent my time on the device so far today. More often than not, the slice representing Instagram is more than half of the whole; even on days when I am fairly content with the amount of work I have done, I see that and think “that’s 90 minutes you could have spent with your dog, or reading a book for fun, or talking to a friend, or staring out the window”. I’m making only very slow progress on my ability to do nothing (as discussed in last week’s newsletter) and my screen time data feels like a rebuke every time I look at it.

I’ve written about phone addiction before. For that article I went through the 30-day process laid out in Catherine Price’s How To Breakup With Your Phone. I deleted all the apps that I was using to waste time thoughtlessly, I thought about why I was twitching towards my phone every time I was bored or alone with my thoughts for a second, and I even turned it off and put it in a drawer for extended periods of time. But none of these practices — sensible as they seem — stuck with me because ultimately I was doing it all for work, not because I had really come to a crisis point with my phone usage. Once I had filed the article, I immediately went back to sleeping with my phone within touching distance.

But then, a few weeks ago, I had to read out my phone usage data to a sleep therapist who was (rightly!) concerned that my screen time was playing a part in my chronic insomnia. “That’s quite high,” she said gently, as I tried to justify the day where the overall total was north of three hours by explaining that “being online” is part of my job. “Do you get paid for doing this?” she asked, as I rambled vaguely about trying to sell a book during a pandemic.

This stopped me in my tracks. Whenever I experience guilt about the phone usage pie chart, I quell those feelings with the argument that I need to spend all that time scrolling and being served adverts for improbable cottagecore dresses because I have to be on social media for work. How will anyone know that my work exists, otherwise? The fraught question of how the onus and cost of publicity work has shifted onto individuals in creative fields in the last few years is a larger topic for another day, but suffice to say that I am moderately resentful that if I was, say, 15 years older, this would be far less of an issue for me.

Until recently, this notion of excessive social media use as “work” wasn’t an aspect of the discussion around phone usage and addiction that I had seen addressed in public much. Good as Price’s book on this topic is, it’s mostly aimed at people who overuse their phones accessing work emails and their social media friends. Internet civilians, in other words, not those of us who toil professionally in the online content mines. There isn’t much leeway in her system for not being able to log off Twitter because it’s your job to be there.

Now, it is debatable how much I, or indeed anyone in my situation, actually needs to be on the apps that are dominating my pie chart. I’m not a social media manager, but I do still experience the pressure to post more often so that people can discover my podcast, for instance, and worry that in weeks where I don’t do it I’m failing or missing opportunities. In previous jobs, it has been my responsibility to run a magazine’s social media presence, and I think I’m still a little bit braced for the impact of the texts at 8am on a Saturday morning about what has or hasn’t been tweeted.

That said, I have slowly been collecting resources about the push-pull of social media usage when you work in an adjacent field. This episode of the Nobody Panic podcast does a good job of offering no nonsense advice and emphasising that you get to choose how much or little time you dedicate to it. This episode of Reply All has fewer solutions to offer but does articulate the genuine dilemma of wanting to be offline but being forced back on by work — world’s tiniest violin, I know, but I did feel for the host who had no choice but to reactivate his Twitter account so that he could get someone to appear as a guest on the show. The whole of Rachel Karten’s newsletter Link in Bio is very smart on this topic, but this post where her readers share their worries about logging off and this interview with someone who works at Instagram are relevant to what I’m discussing here.

The other day, I saw a Dutch sewing YouTuber I follow post about this on her Instagram story. She, too, justifies her constant presence online because of her work, but had recently audited what she actually does with her screen time and found that 90 per cent of it was spent scrolling rather than posting. Of course, being aware of what your peers are doing on a platform is part of the process of making content for it, but I thought her underlying point was right: she’s mostly there as a consumer, while telling herself she’s a creator.

I don’t have a neat solution to offer here; this is more of a “name the problem” exercise. However, if you find yourself in a similar situation, I can recommend a modified version of an exercise in Price’s book — every time you feel your fingers twitch towards your phone, ask yourself why you are picking it up. If the answer to that question is “because I have to post about X for work” or “I want to look at those nice pictures of Y’s new puppy”, go right ahead and feel no guilt about it. If there is no answer, though, you might find that there’s something better you can do with your time instead.

Until next time,

‌Caroline

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: get my article and podcast recommendations in The Browser, listen to my murder mystery podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

I think I have found my ideal pen. It is the Pilot G-Tec C4 and its extremely fine nib and smooth ink flow suits my tiny scratchy handwriting perfectly. I first bought one because it is the pen that Francis Spufford uses and I am not above imitating everything that one of my favourite writers does in the hope that it will work on me like a spell.

I already can’t imagine using another pen by choice. I don’t think I’ll ever completely abandon my two preferred fountain pens — a Lamy and a Cross — but even they can’t give me, good as they are, that frictionless feeling of there being nothing between my thoughts and the page that the Pilot G-Tec C4 provides.

Francis Spufford spoke about his pen choice on an episode of an excellent podcast called Better Known, which itself deserves to be better known. He talked about the satisfaction of having a growing shelf of filled notebooks, even if all they contain is shopping lists and random phrases, and the joy of finding that this best of pens comes in multiple exciting colours. “I’m partial to the black-black and the sepia brown, but if you want you can write in turquoise with them,” he says. “I’ve never had any turquoise ideas so far, but I’m open to persuasion.” I, too, dream of one day having turquoise ideas.

Related: my top three Spufford books, in descending order, are: Unapologetic, I May Be Some Time and Golden Hill. If you haven’t read any of his work yet, you have a treat ahead of you.

And what am I using the ideal pen for? Mostly writing lists of everything that I need to do, but also drafting sections of articles and chapters. I don’t normally write longhand like this, but I’ve found that when I’m struggling to make myself sit down to something using pen and paper instead of computer can somehow feel less pressured. Like it doesn’t really count if it’s just scribbled down on a random page; I can put the notebook away and pretend it never happened. Naturally, feeling the weight of expectations lift conversely makes me write better, and then I have to type up the scribbles because they’re worth saving. Being my own typist is a chore I quite enjoy.

The handwritten lists are also back because I’ve finally ditched the app I used to use for organising myself. Nothing against Todoist, which was just doing the job it was built for, but as the undone recurring tasks built up inside it I started feeling like I was receiving a nuclear nagging every time I innocently tried to check when my next deadline was. Also, I realised that it had done a good job of training me in the manner of Pavlov’s dog and that scared me; the little popping noise it made when I marked a task complete had begun to sound to me like the sweetest sound on Earth.

The notebook and pen feel much more like a tool that I am making use of, rather than a semi-sentient consciousness that is manipulating me and always telling me off. As an added bonus, the notebook really just has the one purpose, which is to be written in by me, and I can’t wander off and look at Instagram while thinking about my to do list like I can with an app.

If I don’t get to the end of the list by the evening — and when does anyone, let’s be honest — a quick stroke of the pen crosses the rest out and I start again in the morning. Hardly revolutionary, I know, but if you are like me and prone to being seduced by the lure of productivity systems peddling false promises perhaps you need to hear this too: a pen and paper is always as good, if not better.

What I’ve been up to

I haven’t published any new work this week, but I have been frantically beavering away on two exciting podcast projects that I hope are going to be very good. One of them will be available for you to put in your ears much sooner than the other; subscribe here to get it as soon as its published.

Other than that, I’m gearing up for a season of home renovation and the associated chaos. I have looked at so many near-identical kitchen worktop samples that I have lost the ability to tell the difference between shades of brown, but as long as the supply chain gods smile on us, the current crumbling laminate’s days are numbered.

What I’m listening to, reading, watching

Under the Influence did a good episode about bookstagram. How to write an email. How to start getting stronger. Malcolm Gladwell on… laundry? Why not.

I consumed Ruby Tandoh’s new book Cook As You Are very rapidly and then made the tomato and fennel risotto. Delicious. I also gobbled down Laura Wood’s A Single Thread of Moonlight with similar rapidity, which is a YA historical romance in the style of Eva Ibbotson.

The thing I am watching is under embargo so I can’t talk about it. What I am not watching: Squid Game.

Until next time,

Caroline

Links to bookshop.org and Blackwell’s are affiliate links, I donate any and all money this ever generates to the Chester branch of Women’s Aid.

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: get my article and podcast recommendations in The Browser, listen to my murder mystery podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter (although I’m not really there anymore) and Instagram (where I am, arguably, too much).