Working...
I feel that these posts may be a little more repetitive than originally intended. Work has been better this month, I've been finding it more manageable now that I've had some open conversations with my line manager and team. PhD work is plodding along... I find that by the time I reach the second half of the week, my energy is down so I'm a little more distractible. I've been transcribing interviews lately, and found that the best way to do it is to play them at half speed so I can type as I listen - but oh goodness, it's just so damn funny! I sound so disinterested and sarcastic, my poor participants!



Writing...
So far this year, I have submitted short stories to seven different content calls/competitions! My goal of writing a piece per month is clearly paying off. Some of these are ideas I've been sitting on forever, and it's so nice to bring them to life, even if they're not successful this time. One of them has been accepted for publication in Dear Damsels though! My first published piece of fiction! My 10 year old self would be so proud. (Actually, she'd be pretty disappointed in me for leaving it this long, but hey!) Also, on the topic of creativity, I bought some lavender and tried to keep it alive but I failed. The advice online was CONFUSING though. Water it - but not too often! In fact, lavender prefers to be dry - but don't let it dry out! And give it fertiliser - every other time you water it. Or maybe twice a year! And make sure it doesn't have too much nitrate. WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME.



Exploring...
...London of course! Have finally started going on more bike rides. Central London is so unbelievably empty! We cycled down Oxford St on a Sunday lunchtime and it was a ghost town. I don't know whether to be impressed at how well London is locking down, or whether this is just due to the fact that nobody lives that central so there's nobody to be out and about...





Socialising...
...While we haven't been able to see my family at all (they all have cars and gardens... we have neither. So while they can come to us, there's nowhere for us to go that also has a toilet), we've been hanging out with friends on Zoom lately, including taking part in a cocktail class for a friend's birthday - and there were celebrities on the call too! Heidi from the Sugababes! Kate Thornton! It wouldn't happen in real life... I also spent a glorious afternoon in Brockwell Park with my dear friend Anna to commemorate her Dad's birthday after he sadly died earlier this year. We lay beneath a tree and talked about him, and she brought him back to life through sharing stories for a little while. It was so good to see her.



 Listening to...
...the music of my childhood. It's the only way to help me get my head down and pretend that everything is ok. The Spotify Easy 90s playlist is working wonders. I've also made a playlist of songs that sound like Sunday mornings in my childhood home - Gabrielle, Lighthouse Family, Simply Red, Billie Holliday...





 Getting Sucked Into...
...the Caroline Calloway saga. Argh. I know. But there's a fascination that comes from recognising parts of Caroline and Natalie in various characters from your own life (some more than others). And the entire polarisation of the internet readers is just so fascinating because haven't we learned by now that we have all been a Natalie, we have all been a Caroline, at some point in our life? God I love female friendship. I am on the hunt for more of it in literature.
I Was Caroline Calloway - The Cut
I Am Caroline Calloway
Caroline Calloway Isn't a Scammer - The Atlantic
Caroline Calloway Wants To Talk About Why You Love To Hate Her - Buzzfeed
'I love fame': how Caroline Calloway survived being cancelled - The Guardian



Reading...

 ...Ducks Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann - very much enjoying it, even if it isn't the most relaxing thing to escape into at the moment.

 ...Susan Cheever's Of Mice and Women, in the Creative Nonfiction Sunday newsletter: "There’s a wildness to most kinds of love, to that moment of recognition when you know that a relative stranger is going to be important in the story of your life. Over time, though, that wildness dissipates. Is that when true love begins, or is that when it ends?"

 ...Towards True Parity of Sick Leave "Even before the pandemic, the conversation around workplace mental health, whether for employees in the office or at home, required both more urgency and more honesty."

 ...The Black Plague "The old African-American aphorism “When white America catches a cold, black America gets pneumonia” has a new, morbid twist: when white America catches the novel coronavirus, black Americans die."

 ...An extract from Exciting Times "When he said that, I wanted to go to his potentially matrimonial wine rack, choose his jammiest Cabernet Sauvignon, open it tenderly, and empty it over his MacBook. I didn’t. He’d buy a new laptop tomorrow, be pleased with the improved touch bar, and deny to my face that I had done that thing with the wine until a point in some future argument where he suddenly needed evidence I was crazy. None of this would address why his comment had upset me."

 ...The Last Train Trip Before Everything Changed "Forced slowness is useful to me because my relationship to time is generally an adversarial one: time as something to conquer, some kind of foe to tame and break."

 ...Revisiting My Grandfather's Garden "I remember the days I impatiently waited for the young, white flowers to ripen and change color, becoming golden yellow, in my grandfather’s garden. He had revealed their secret to me. If I pinched the yellow flower and pulled out the thin, inner string, a pearl-drop of honey nectar awaited me at the end. I thought I was the only girl in the world who knew the secret of the honeysuckle flowers."

 ... The Final Five Percent "After placing the brain on a metal table, I ran my gloved hand across the rounded corrugations and traced their grooves, feeling a slight pressure as the clefts parted to allow my finger to pass. I found the precentral sulcus, a deep fissure roughly dividing the prefrontal cortex from the rest of the brain, and followed it forward to the inferior frontal sulcus, a lesser cleft demarcating the prefrontal cortex’s outermost third. I paused on this region. It seemed familiar. It was the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. I had my finger on one of the brain regions damaged when Conway’s skull collided with the pavement."

 ...The True Story of the White Island Eruption "That was the whole idea of visiting White Island. It was about the thrill of feeling a little more alive by feeling a little closer to death, all the while knowing that, really, you were in no more danger than you would be crossing a road."

 ...History is a Music Box "This summer afternoon outside the parliament building, this pathetic attempt at justice. I can be part of this protest on my own terms: join in for a while and then go for dinner with my pappa. Knowing I can do that because my pappa was once a boy and fled across a flaming continent. Knowing he was allowed to stay."

 ...Quarantining With a Ghost? It's Scary "If you were to accept the premise that ghosts are real, it stands to reason that some tension would naturally result once their flesh-and-blood roommates start spending much, much more time at home together."