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

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

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.

Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

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

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?

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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.

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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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

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.

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