It’s a Sunday afternoon and I am roasting a chicken. I’m also finely chopping some kale and listening to The Archers omnibus. I just need to take my songs off and get pregnant and I will be the epitome of wholesome.

The chicken however is not for me, it’s for the dog.

Before I got a dog I imagined that they ate anything. Belle spent a lot of time researching the best dry puppy food and we went with that, innocently assuming that she would eat that until she moved to the adult version and then the senior version. The end. Everything went well for the first six months, and then she started to turn up her nose at it. She’d have a sniff, then walk away, preferring to go hungry than lower herself to eating the obvious muck that we’d dared to put in her bowl.

‘Call her bluff!’ people said. ‘She’ll eat when she’s hungry!’

She did not.

So we switched foods. And a few weeks later she did it again. We tried mixing in some wet food, topping biscuits with tasty things like a raw egg or bits of chicken, but there just didn’t seem to be a food she’d stick with. I researched the fresh pet food delivery services but when I discovered how much they cost I decided to have a go at making my own homemade dog food.

So here I am, roasting chickens and frying up mince beef every other weekend as though that’s exactly what I had planned for my life. I carefully weigh out the ingredients, researching the proportions she needs of protein, fats and carbs. I sometimes add fresh herbs for flavour, or extra bits like chopped fruits when I think she needs a boost of a particular nutrient. I’ve been doing it for nearly a year now and Mako clears her bowl every single time.

Now, what I don’t quite understand is why I can’t do the same for MYSELF.

While I’m faffing about balancing Mako’s macronutrients, I’m simultaneously eating a bag of Wotsits dipped in soft cheese for my lunch. ‘Is she getting enough protein?’ I’ll think to myself, whilst casually snaffling a Mars ice cream. There I am, steaming brown rice for the dog while I pour boiling water over a pot noodle for myself. View Post

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flea anxiety

Last Friday I had a bit of a day. I don’t know quite what it was exactly, but I was overwhelmed and anxious and couldn’t seem to calm my brain down. On Friday evening I spewed out this post, of all the things that had happened, but I didn’t publish it because I didn’t want to seem moany. I felt much better even the next day, but perhaps it’s still useful to share this as a lot of what I share, especially on Instagram, is sunny pictures of the garden or the dog doing something adorable.

I think too that when I wrote about life not being my own, I meant not just the physical act of doing things for pets or the house or for other people, but also the feeling of your brain not behaving quite how you want it to.

Do you ever feel like this?

Here’s what Friday looked like and what I wrote at the time:

6.30am – Woken by noise of dog whining at the cats trying to tunnel into my bedroom via the carpet.

6.35am – Give up pretending I can’t hear the dog and get up. Feed the cats, take the dog for a walk. She’s in season so she can’t come off the lead for a proper run, so it was a lot of pulling as she tried to ‘make friends’ with some ducks in the park. I make a mental note to avoid the park but know I will forget this in a couple of days, imagine the park will be delightful and go again. View Post

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Yesterday at approximately 7.43am I picked a fight* with a terrifying man on a bicycle. He was one of those stocky types, stubbly, about my age, who looks like they spend their Friday nights in Wetherspoons with a copy of the Daily Mail under one arm, ranting to anyone who will listen about YOUTHS.

I was innocently walking the dog along the pavement next to a busy main road. It was a normal sort of pavement i.e. just the right size for a woman and her golden retriever, and we were doing very nicely thank you very much. About 100 metres away I saw the man, cycling towards me, on the pavement.

I saw him see me, he saw me see him see me. He did not slow down.

There was not going to be room for us to pass without one of use making a move to accommodate the other and I was FUCKED if that someone was going to be me.

(For context, I had had a difficult night sleeping on the sofa whilst holding hands with the dog, who was asleep on the floor, too sad to be alone because she’d been to the vets to have her toenails trimmed. Also I am a 44 year old woman and I am easily fucked off.)

The man on the bike kept coming. I stopped and stood still, staring him down.

At this point he looked frankly surprised, like he had imagined that as soon as I saw he was a MAN, I would understand that meant he had right of way and would immediately throw myself and the dog over the wall and into a bush in deference to his clear superiority. He was even more surprised when, as he drew close to me, I threw up one arm, (I have a frozen shoulder), and shouted, in despair, as though he was the 79th pavement cycler I had met that morning, ‘THIS IS A PAVEMENT!’

He stopped, leaning to put a foot on the ground, ready to launch his defence.

Had I ever tried cycling on this road, he asked me, going on to detail the numerous pot holes, blind corners and the sheer volume of traffic that meant it was impossible for him to do so. ‘You’re allowed to cycle on the pavement if you don’t feel save,’ he said aggressively, waggling a finger.

(I wondered if I was allowed to kick a bike out from underneath someone if *I* didn’t feel safe. I suspect not.)

I was taken aback. I was fairly sure this was a bullshit rule he had just made up, but he said it so confidently that I hesitated for a split second to get my bearings and he took the opportunity to cycle off, along the pavement naturally, tutting and shaking his head.

I thought of many clever and amusing things I wanted to say back to him as soon as he’d left, such as ‘perhaps you’d feel safer if you wore a HELMET’ and ‘get in the fucking bin you absolute dickweed’, but it was too late. My only consolation was that the man in his early twenties, who had been cycling on the pavement behind him, had at least had the decency to dismount and push his bike past me, head hung low in terror and shame. (I imagine.)

‘Thank you,’ I said to him with as much authority as I could muster. He scurried past in silence.

I Googled the legalities when I got home and of course it is ALWAYS ILLEGAL to cycle on the pavement unless it’s a bike lane. Ha!

I’m not saying I would go as far as to prosecute a child, but a full grown man, riding at speed towards a nice woman and her beloved pet, thinking he has the right to be there, to simply barge his way along the pavement and through life in general just because he’s a man and looks like he might be the sort of kick a dog – I would happily see him serving a life sentence.

 

cycling on the pavement

 

*This may have been a slight exaggeration. 

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Today I’m going to go out on a limb and say something that I’m sure an awful lot of people are going to disagree with. This doesn’t come easily to me as I very much like to be right all the time and I want other people to like me, but I think it’s good sometimes to challenge yourself, so here goes…

I don’t think ghosting is that bad.

*GASP*

There, I said it. I don’t think ghosting is always the absolutely appalling way to behave that a lot of people make it out to be, and I bet that secretly I’m not alone. I have been ghosted and I have ghosted other people and I’m comfortable with both.

I wonder if being self-employed for over a decade has toughened me to it. I’m forever sending pitches or replies to enquiries about my blog and hearing nothing back. Sometimes this is just after one email, but sometimes it’s after a whole string, planning a project, picking dates and then just nothing. I am fine with this. I get it. Sometimes stuff doesn’t work out, people are busy. It’s not a big deal to me.

For anyone who’s not entirely certain what ghosting means, it’s essentially when you just stop communicating with someone, normally someone you’ve been dating or chatting to online as a potential partner. It might be that you’ve just exchanged a few messages with them on Tinder or it might be that you’ve been actively dating for a while.

Now while I don’t condone ghosting if you’ve actually built up a reasonably serious or intimate relationship, I think that at the chatting stage, or after just a date or two, it’s perfectly acceptable to just STOP. Sure it might be annoying if you’re on the receiving end and have felt like there was a connection there, but is it really the end of the world? No.

I’ve had plenty of people do this to me and I’ve done it to other people too and I know that 99% of the time it’s not about the other person. Wasting hours desperate to know ‘what you did wrong’ is pointless because it’s very probably nothing to do with you at all. It’s because the other person got busy or scared or bored or changed their mind or WHATEVER, the fact is that it doesn’t matter. Move on. View Post

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Male menopause

Before Christmas I was sent a press release about the male menopause. At the time I ranted and cursed and decided I would definitely write a blog post about it, but then I ate some Lindor and watched some Poirot instead and nothing happened.

Post-Christmas though, (although not quite post-Lindor – count is three today so far), it’s still on my mind, and so I’m back, still fuming.

I’m going to take you through the press release and pick out some of my favourite lines. Just so you know, I did reply to the original email and ask if, as women, we couldn’t just have this ONE THING, but I received no response. I can only assume that the man who sent it was under the influence of some kind of low-testosterone induced brain fog, otherwise he would have replied immediately.

Let’s start with the title…

‘MALE MENOPAUSE – THE UNSPOKEN TABOO SUBJECT IN MEN’S HEALTH’

I don’t know about you but I am sobbing already at the thought of all these men so underrepresented in all matters medical, their health needs hidden under the vast mountain of knowledge and experience and research that is women’s health. My heart is bleeding. View Post

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I was at a networking event this afternoon and we were all sat down around a big table for a buffet lunch. (I will go anywhere a buffet goes.) I had nearly finished and was dithering over my last mouthful. I looked down at my plate – one small piece each of hard boiled egg, bread roll and butter, new potato, cucumber and tomato.

I looked up at the people sat closest to me and then down again at the plate.

‘I’m trying to create the perfect last mouthful,’ I said.

‘Oh my God yes!’ said at least two of the group.

‘I thought I was the only one who did this!’ said another.

A couple of people looked blank, as though they were surrounded by loons.

‘Um, NO,’ I said, reassuringly, ‘everyone does it surely? No one wants the last mouthful of a meal to be a crappy one do they? God, imagine eating a whole delicious sandwich and finishing with a bit of dry crust!’

I went on to expand on examples of how to create the perfect last mouthful – eating around a Big Mac until you’re left with the ultimate central bite, working your way through a roast dinner to make sure you leave yourself with one piece of potato, some stuffing, half a sprout and a good lashing of gravy, that sort of thing.

It was a bonding moment.

Some people it seemed had gone their whole lives thinking they were alone in their weirdness and the group sharing felt almost like therapy.

‘You should write a blog post about it,’ someone said.

So here it is.

I’d love to know what lengths you go to to create that perfect last mouthful. Do you always eat your pizza crusts first? Is there a magic roast dinner combination? Leave a comment and let me know.

The perfect last mouthful

Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

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Sometimes I think about how my life would look as a pie chart.

I’m pretty sure everyone does this, just like I imagine most people enjoy Venn diagrams as much as I do. Everyone loves a Venn diagram right? Right.

The pie chart fantasy is a visual representation of a long held fascination with the idea that when I die I’ll be presented with some sort of searchable database, where I can access information about anything and everything I have done in my life. I don’t believe in God, but if I did, God would basically be a gigantic spreadsheet.

‘God,’ I’d ask, ‘exactly how many times in my life did I walk into the kitchen to make a cup of tea and get distracted and leave again, never having made a drink?’

‘27,429 times,’ God would say, in a robot voice.

‘God,’ I’d ask, ‘exactly how many people did I sleep with in that dubious 18 months around the time I turned 20?’

God would whirr and click for a while, smoke might come out. You get the idea.

I imagine a not insignificant slice of the pie would be taken up with time spent thinking ‘I really should do some work I suppose’ and sighing a bit, and continuing to watch Golden Girls. I swear that some days I spend more time ALMOST working than I do actually DOING the work. It’s probably the part of being self-employed that I find the hardest, the letting go of the guilt around work when you’re not doing it. I started a part-time job, still on a self-employed basis, back in November and in that whole time I’ve only had four days completely off. I was even doing Instagram stories on Christmas Day.

There is something about being self-employed that makes it hard to switch off. The pandemic has made it worse because I’ve been working at home a lot more and the boundaries have become blurred. Even after 13 years of freelancing, I still struggle to completely let myself off the hook – I’m always thinking of other things I COULD be doing, or SHOULD be doing. It’s a seemingly never ending loop of procrastination – perhaps my brain thinks that a general sense of obligation counts for something, even if I’m not actually getting stuff done?

The thing of course that’s so frustrating is that thinking about it never actually equates to DOING it – I don’t spend 14 hours a day tied to my desk or anything, I just waste a lot of time feeling like I should be. I wonder though if without the constant internal nagging, I’d ever get anything done at all?

Can you actually get things done without discipline?

In Oliver Burkeman’s latest newsletter he talks about this and references an article, written around the time I first became freelance, that is about getting stuff done by not being mean to yourself.

In it the author talks about my exact problem, that idea of spending a huge part of your life setting yourself goals, writing schedules, tormenting yourself into getting stuff done and being miserable. Half way through and I was on board. ‘This women gets it,’ I thought, ‘any minute now she’s going to reveal the secret to my eternal happiness.’

(This is another thing I tend to do – imagine that one thing is going to change everything for the better, if only I could find out what the one thing was.)

Her secret it turned out, was kind of bullshit if I’m honest. It was pleasure – doing stuff just because you want to. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for pleasure, I just don’t think it’s necessarily a valid approach to work. View Post

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I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago, I can’t remember what it was or who was talking, but there was a bit in it that really stuck with me. They were talking about boundaries, and how we go about creating them for ourselves, and the guest posed a question:

What time do you really want to go to bed?

She explained that bedtimes are a great starting point for thinking about boundaries, because we rarely go to bed at the time we want to. I thought about it a lot and it feels so true to me.

Consider the question for a minute. If you lived alone, felt no judgement when you were out in the evenings, just listened to your body and prioritised yourself – if you were basically a cat – what time would you go to bed? How different is that from when you actually go to bed?

What time do you want to go to bed View Post

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Slummy single mummy

Remember this photoshoot we did years ago for a newspaper article I’d written? I had to bribe Bee with cash and a pair of Converse. One of the best things about being a single parent is that you can bribe them as much as you like without being judged.

 

Being a single parent is hard work, there’s no getting away from it.

It can feel relentless, both in a practical ‘seriously, I have to make dinner AGAIN? But I already did it 27,928 times?’ kind of way and emotionally too. Having to be responsible for all of the family decision making, without someone to compare notes with, can feel like a huge amount of pressure, and let’s not even start on the fact that you always have to be the one to take out the bins.

Like most situations in life though, being a single parent is essentially what you make it. Yes it can be lonely sometimes, and a bit sad when you get home and literally no one, apart from the cats*, cares about how your day went, but if you pack all that away at the back of your head, there are actually quite a lot of benefits to being the sole parent.

I’ve thought back over my actual years and years as a single parent and pulled out some of the best bits about being a single parent to give lone mums and dads with younger children some encouragement. What’s great is that a lot of these get even better as your kids get older –  they generally don’t want to get in your bed as much, you can go out and leave them in the house alone and they get their own bowls of cereal.

(*The cats only care if you do voices for them, which may or may not be okay.) View Post

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Over the last few weeks, two buckets have appeared, separately, in my front garden.

The first was a rather fancy Avengers bucket. The second, a couple of weeks later, was more of a traditional seaside style – a castle shape in a jaunty blue, set off with a contrasting yellow handle. Neither belonged to me and neither have been claimed.

lost bucket

What I really want to understand is the HOW and the WHY of this bucket situation.

I’m a good 20 miles away from the nearest beach, and I don’t live near a park or sandpit, so what is a bucket doing near my front garden in the first place? How does a bucket arrive in a quiet, residential cul-de-sac unless it is brought there by a specific person for a specific purpose?

With this in mind, at what point do you LOSE your bucket in said quiet residential cul-de-sac and NOT NOTICE? Would you be walking along, carrying a bucket, drop it on the floor and not realise? Or perhaps you DO realise, but you can’t be bothered to pick it up?

‘Ah well,’ you think to yourself, sighing heavily, ‘that was a nice bucket while it lasted, but it’s not worth bending down for.’ View Post

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Advertisement feature

I’m still going through massive emotional lockdown ups and downs. Occasionally I do something really annoyingly motivated, like when I signed up recently to start that interior design degree*, but most of the time, as you can see from the frequency of my blog posts, I’m just sort of semi-reclined, reading Poirot books and eating bags of Maryland mini cookies.

(Only 99 calories a bag you know. What do you mean ‘but you ate four bags’? How rude.)

If you DO want something to do during lockdown though, then I’ve pulled together a few ideas for you based on what it feels like a solid half of Instagram is doing right now. (Which probably means no one is actually doing it in real life.)

These are JUST IDEAS though. It’s totally okay if you prefer the Poirot/cookie scenario, or just want to kick back with a puzzle. No one is judging you. It’s a weird time for sure.

Take the couch to 5k challenge

I’m delighted to report that so far no one has tagged me in anything suggesting I run 5k for the NHS. Either these means I have no friends, or that all of my friends know me better than to suggest I run ANYWHERE. Even regular readers should know that running is definitely not my thing, as evidenced here by my own couch to 5k photo collage.

I know everyone says that after a while you start to get a buzz from running, but after completing the whole programme and I can say with absolutely certainty that at no point did I enjoy it at all in any way. The entire time I was ‘running’ my internal monologue was basically ‘this is hell, make it stop, why are you doing this, it’s awful, surely I’ve been going for 20 minutes by now, let’s check the app because surely it should have beeped by now and maybe it’s broken, oh no it’s only been four minutes, this is awful, please save me, help.’

But sure, have a go if that’s your thing. View Post

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During the last couple of weeks, while I’ve swung between a melancholic questioning of the meaning of life, looking nervously each way before getting out of the car at Tesco incase there are zombies lurking in the trolley park and, at my best, feeling a mild sense of calm as I sit quietly in a chair reading murder mysteries, there is one thing in which I have found solace – the words of Gwyneth Paltrow.

Ha!

Have I buggery.

The woman is an absolute nightmare. Not content with trying to have us all believe that what we definitely need in our bathroom cabinets is some of her psychic vampire repellent protection mist or pubic hair fur oil, (both actual things), now she’s offering up her wisdom when it comes to dealing with coronavirus and social isolation. According to Gwyneth we’re just looking at this whole global pandemic all wrong. Rather than worrying about the potential deaths of millions of the people, the pressure on the NHS, the safety of our loved ones, or generally our own sanity, we should be seeing this time as an opportunity.

Of course! An opportunity! Why didn’t I see that? Perhaps it was hidden behind the mass grief, who knows.

Gwyneth reckons we should be using our time to ‘write a book, learn an instrument or a language or learn to code online, draw or paint.’

Okay, fine, I get that it’s a good thing if you can perhaps distract yourself a little from the myriad unknowns and crippling loneliness, but personally I’m finding that the easiest way to do this right now is by listening to old episodes of Just a Minute at a discreet volume, whilst eating Wotsits and staring out of the window. I’m working up to a jigsaw, but I’m not quite there yet.

This may change of course, I’m sure I’ll adjust to living under lockdown, but right now if I felt like I was expected to casually pick up a French horn for an hour or so every day then it might just to me over the edge.

coronavirus Gwyneth Paltrow View Post

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