Dear FOQ
...if indeed any of you are still out there in the ether, poised with bated (and possibly expiring) breath for my words of wisdom...
Yes, it is me.
How are you doing? Fair? Middling? Muddling along?
There's a scene in one of my favourite seminal teen-angst films, Pump Up the Volume (hey, no judgment, growing up a teen in the nineties was hard, y'all) when the main character, Mark, under his alias of Happy Harry, pirate radio DJ, comes back onto the air after stopping his broadcasts under duress, and his followers are immediately rapt.
I'm under no illusion that me posting after almost a year of this:
will have the same effect.
But I couldn't have let the last eleven months pass by without offering some sort of commentary... some sort of insight, borne of contemplation, consideration and extensive navel-gazing.
So here it comes:
WTAF?
2020 has been the year that just keeps taking.
So much has been lost.
So many have been lost.
It says something about the state of affairs when the best thing to have happened this year was one (comparatively compos mentis) septuagenarian beating out another (deluded, nonsensical) septuagenarian to run the most influential country in the Western world.
Thank heavens for small mercies. And women like:
oh and:
...We had such high hopes for the year, as well.
Ahhhh, 2020: synonymous with clarity of vision, all positive things.
Ha!
No.
It appears the universe had other ideas.
So many times over the last few months I've wanted to commit pen keyboard to paper screen and in essence brain-dump even just a piddlin' few of the thoughts that have passed through my warped lil' walnut... but the irony was, I couldn't find the words. There are no adequate words. OK, WTAF has come close but... it's not exactly original, is it.
Blogger's block was nothing. This was much bigger.
This was a veritable fatberg
clogging up the subterranean tunnels of my mind (there's a lot of mixed metaphor and imagery going on there: I'll just let you untangle that for a moment).
I felt that anything I wrote would either be too steeped in sobriety (the emotional kind, obviously... hurrah for wine); or much too glittery and much too glib.
In writing this post when we've not even crossed over to the Other Side of this absolute Sh*t Show of a Year, I still risk swaying into either of these camps.
And, perhaps too frequently after thirty years, I think back to the criticism levelled at me by my Year 8 English teacher that I could, and can, sometimes be flippant.
No, Mrs Hay. What you're gleaning from my stunning works of literature is not flippancy but a finely-tuned, Chandler-Bing-like tendency to turn to humour whenever sh*t gets a bit too real.
Like now.
There comes a point when the elusive blogger (once a blogger, always a blogger, let's be honest) must raise her head above the proverbial parapet and say a long, drawn-out...
Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
and embrace the fact that political commentaries, and state-of-the-nation-type responses to, er, well, the state of the nation are not my bag, and just say what I probably would have said anyway, in my own inimitable, quirky way.
Because hasn't one of this year's key messages been:
Quirk from home, if you can...
?
See, you missed me, didn't you? Me and my terrible puns and my proliferation of gifs and my derailed trains of thought...
I'll be honest. I've missed it too.
So.
*Pause as qb rolls up her sleeves, clears her throat and says the word 'Right' decisively about seven times just to prove she means business*
Here it is. In case you were wondering how I've fared over the last few months.
qb's guide to surviving 2020
1. Embrace your introvert self...
One of the absolute benefits of the pro-level of introversion that I've attained in 42 years is the ability to subsist, survive and essentially thrive on my own.
And here's the thing that few may believe: I'm really, really OK with this.
I'm not even 'settling' any more. I am revelling in the fact that when I get home, my time is my own, and how I choose to spend it (or waste it) is, more or less, mine alone.
Being told on a loop to stay at home, limit exposure to other people, stay two metres apart has actually tapped into a part of me that I never before realised needed to be acknowledged. For a good while, I had that space that I'd been craving for quite some time. And I was, and still am, at liberty to shoot eye-daggers of fire at anyone who dares step into my bubble.
2. But not too much, you crazy hermit crab.
Towards the end of first lockdown Paranoia came to visit and brought its little bedfellow, Anxiety, with it. (In spite of social distancing. Rude.)
Admittedly much of the anxiety was later attributed to a hormone imbalance (too much thyroxine) but... at the time it felt like the World versus Quirky; like everything needed to be taken out of my hands because I was too incompetent to handle it.
Hormones, eh?!
Anyway. This time round I'm far more emotionally equipped. I'm on a stable dosage now. I'm structuring my days in the manner of many, many earnest productivity gurus (gurii?) on YouTube (more on that later).
And I can also spend valuable, structured time in the office for that sweet, sweet hit of human contact, banter, and the slow painful death of any (OK, most of my) paranoid delusions.
3. You are a creature of routine...
There are things you learn about yourself when you have to make significant changes to your way of life. When you have to stop thinking of Mondays as the day you go to trampolining; Tuesday as choir day, and the last Thursday of the month as the day you spend two hours throwing back curly fries and expensive wine in your favourite pub, because all of these things have been taken away from you.
These markers may have been the only things by which you have distinguished one week from the next. Now time is fluid. Meaningless. Elastic. And many other clichés besides.
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| Preach, Mariah. |
But, you know, it's OK.
It's hard to admit that actually you don't miss all of the markers. That perhaps filling your week with All the Things was actually slowly killing you a tiny bit, and that in taking those things away you need to find new markers of time.
Or maybe – and more importantly – you don't need to do All the Things all the time.
I'm not saying I wouldn't go back to these things if they came back in the forms in which I knew them.
But virtual trampolining isn't a thing (well, not a safe thing anyway), and virtual singing, sadly, means spending more time in front of a screen, in the same room in which you may have just spent nine or so hours grappling with somebody's comedy syntax in a book on ancient embroidery practices.
And you no longer have the commute, for better or worse, every day, to separate work-day from personal-day. Oh, sure, you can take yourself off for a ten-minute walk to Costa to remove your brain from the work realm, but you will just be coming back to the same place, geographically. So you need to build in your own separations. Build new routines.
I wish I could say I got more into cooking during lockdown. I got a little bit more into cooking.
I wish I could say I channelled my spare time into new hobbies.
I played the uke again a couple of times but given I could often hear my neighbours downstairs having their daily domestic, I could only imagine what my other neighbours would make of me playing 'My Dog Has Fleas' until I mastered more complex fingering.
I've since taken to using and spinning on a balance board for ten minutes daily. It may make noise, it may not. I no longer care. That's my ten-minute separation. Done.
Shortly before first lockdown I became a victim of the Google Marketing Gambit.
Yes. I am Google's Fool. Google's B*tch.
I bought a Mini Hub Nest thing... one of these little round dudes.
And I love my Assistant unapologetically. Even when he says, rather abruptly:
Sorry. I don't understand.
Or
Sorry. I don't know how to do that yet.
Or when it gives me sass when I ask it to start off my Housework routine (more on that shortly).
Or when it sets a 15-minute timer when I clearly asked for 50 minutes.
The thing about Google's routines is that they help you to bookmark your day without you having to clock-watch. All the best YouTube gurus (again... gurii?!) recommend that twenty minutes is a long-enough time to do a spot of housework. So I now say the word "Housework" and Google both sets me a twenty-minute timer and plays my Spotify Housework mix playlist. Genius.
Except when Google backchats me and tells me there's nothing he'd rather do.
OK, who pays the bills in this household, mister?
But in all honesty, sad though it may seem, chatting to an AI device kept me company.
And now he tells me when it's five minutes before Only Connect (my new Monday marker) or five minutes before my Mindful Self-Compassion session (Wednesday's marker); he wakes me up with nature sounds, and sends me to sleep with ocean sounds.
I'm also abusing the heck out of the digital wellbeing functions on my devices in a laughable attempt to curb the amount of time I spend scrolling through photos of felt pigs on Facebook (all oink!), or watching people lipsync impeccably to old episodes of The Office on Tiktok.
Cole Anderson-James: I mean you, you absolute freakin' genius.
Because, let's face it, who hasn't fallen down a TikTok rabbit hole at some point this year?
4. ... and you can break those routines at any time.
Why yes, a woman of a certain age living alone may well find herself aligning with Sheldon Cooper and his many, extreme, idiosyncratic tendencies. So while setting those routines helps give structure to an otherwise fluid and nebulous days, the fluidity works both ways: you can change up your routines at any time.
The crucial thing to remember is that none of us knows what we're doing.
So we've followed the regulations and restrictions as best we can to avoid becoming what Miranda Priestly would term an incubus of viral plague and as a result have had to make snap decisions about our daily lives with next to no notice. This does not always sit well with creatures of habit but even we can learn to adapt. We're organised, in our way, but we're not robots and as such we can of course evolve.
As a result of the need to change and adapt, and to review the routines to which I was once so closely bound, I've finally found myself doing the things I should have been making time for before a devastating pandemic took over our lives.
I'm reading again. This was kickstarted back in the summer when Ma, Pa and I spent five blissful days – post-first-lockdown – by the sea, during which it rained a bit, ergo, reading happened.
I'm writing again. Again, this was kickstarted during that same week in the summer. I started dribbling the words of the novel into Word on my tablet, and novelling recommenced.
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| I've really missed having cause to use this gif... |
And I'm cleaning and tidying my flat with more, alarming, regularity these days. I blame The Home Edit. I mean, I watched the series with the sound on low (the shrieking is intolerable: you have been warned), but still ended up decanting my food into nice, neat, pristinely labelled, tessellating containers of which I am very proud; then for some balance started watching Hoarders and Hoarder SOS, which both had the effect of pushing me into even more decluttering, and discovering ClutterBug on YouTube. Followed by many, many other such guru (...ii...?), the details of which I really shall divulge shortly.
Yes, the rabbit holes are vast and endless. But I now own a spray mop and a bottle of fruity Method spray, and of course I have a Housework routine set up on Google Home, so... read into that what you will.
And I have missed people. I've missed hugging people and if you know me you'll know that my poor hugging form in the past ("bloody hell, mind my shoulder!") has made me quite a reluctant hugger. So to miss that was quite a revelation.
So... that's sort of a summary (albeit a lengthy one) of the last few months.
I could have edited and included photographs, but... y'know what, I CBA. (Sorry.) You got gifs instead.
Now onto the features that I know you've missed (well, perhaps not but I'm throwing them in here anyway for the sake of continuity).
Incidentally in the months I've been away from the blogosphere Blogger has changed somewhat so I've spent a lot of the last couple of days of drafting hunting for features (like the gif embedding function that happily made itself known to me quite soon). I dunno, you turn your back for eleven months... I've all but forgotten how to do this.
How I used to do it on the weekly is a mystery to me.
Perhaps that's why I stopped...
---
So, this year I have been mostly
Reading 📚
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| The Salt Path | Raynor Winn |
An autobiographical account of a couple who, having lost everything and begun to deal with the husband's degenerative illness, decide to tackle the South West Coast Path. As yer do.
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| Real Life Organizing | Cassandra Aarssen aka ClutterBug |
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| Forever and Olé | Georgina Carter Pickard |
An absolute favourite this year, bias or no bias: my little buddy Georgiepants has done an absolutely epic job with this, her account of her life in Spain.
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| Do/Pause | Robert Poynton |
Word of warning: don't read this after having read the following book on my list. Cue barely suppressed frustration over the disproportion of female–male opinions sought and cited...
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| Invisible Women | Caroline Criado Perez |
Let the bile of injustice rise readily in your throat, women.
(Ew. Lovely imagery, there, qb...)
No but seriously. This is a must-read and I don't say that lightly.
 |
| Indistractable | Nir Eyal |
Yeah, I'm still working quite hard to put all of Eyal's teachings into practice but it's a lovely idea in theory... Just try working in an open plan office.
Watching 📺💻
Oh lawdy, brace yourselves..
All the things.
I've been watching all the things.
I'll start with the absolute highlight of this year.
Schitts Creek
In summary: Very rich-and-famous family becomes very poor very fast and has to hole up in comically-monikered backwater town, where they try to fit in and rebuild their lives, with mixed results. It's been done before... but not like this.
A slow burner for much of the first season, it started to get really good around season two.
By season six, it was absolutely heckin' epic and I was making marriage proposals to more or less all of the characters.
Except maybe Roland.
Sorry, Roland.
Oh and it's fair to say that none of us will ever hear 'Simply the Best' again without a tiny tear coming to our eyes.
If you know, you know...
All hail the Levy family eyebrows, I say.
The Queen's Gambit
... Which I've only just got into but I am intrigued. It's so so weird.
But Anya Taylor-Joy is just such a... well, Joy to watch. She was also superb in Emma which is very possibly the last film I went to see, with Charlie and chums, before the first lockdown: she was brutal and nuanced.
You Me Her
The last-ever season of this underrated series 'dropped' (as the youff say) this month and I will be genuinely sad to see it go. Set in Portland, it revolves around the quirky relationship between struggling couple Emma and Jack, and graduate Izzy, who become in essence a throuple. There's a lot of quipping, a lot of self-consciousness and a lot of heart.
At least, unlike Friends from College, it was allowed to come to an acceptable conclusion.
Oh, FfC, I'll miss you most of all... you had such potential. You had Keegan-Michael Key.
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| ... as seen also in Pitch Perfect 2, for context... |
You had Fred Savage tap-dancing.
What's not to love?!
New Girl
...up to a point. Then I'll admit I just got bored, especially when Jess and Nick was allowed to happen after all that tension. That ol' trope.
Rebecca
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| No, not this one. This one, incidentally, is fab on TikTok. |
This one:
I know, the Hitchcock version was a classic. Hammy, but a classic.
But give the 2020 reboot its due... it isn't all bad.
Lily James is less simpering as the Second Mrs de Winter.
Kristin Scott Thomas is barbaric as Danvers though perhaps not quite as creepy as the original.
And while we're on a KST tip...
Military Wives
I'm pretty sure you all know my fairly effusive, fangirlin' feelings towards Gareth Malone by now...
I'll admit that upon seeing a trailer for this film I was a little
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| Catherine O'Hara gives epic gif face. Always. |
I mean, a film based on the series he anchored – The Choir: Military Wives – and they wiped him out of the entire narrative?!
Rude.
Then I discovered (on his social media, I think) that the good man wanted it that way, that he wanted the story to be about the wives, not about him. And that's how it should be, of course (not that the film wouldn't have been a little more dazzling with him in it...).
Gawd love 'im.
So, with that in mind...
I actually really rather enjoyed the film. I mean, KST versus Sharon Horgan as the grande dames of the Military Wives choir?
That was a winner.
The obvious but still charming 'discovery of the girl with the beautiful voice who doesn't realise she's got a beautiful voice' trope.
An absolutely heart-ripping moment when one wife becomes a widow.
Definitely more surprising than I expected.
Surprisingly.
The Home Edit
Setting aside the aforementioned shrieking, and the unnecessary pandering to celebrities who, if they took ten minutes out of their lives to stop buying multiple toy cars for their toddlers (ugh), could actually spend time tidying and maybe even decluttering their excess of Things... this is a visual treat.
I have mixed feelings about whether or not I even like the presenters (in contrast with the Fab Five of Queer Eye who have empathy pouring out of every orifice): saying, in essence, "hi, your life offends my OCD" is possibly not the way to get a client on board...
We'll gloss over the Hoarders and Hoarder SOS days. Those were some dark times, but they brought me to the delights of YouTubers evangelising on everything from decluttering and keeping a pristine home to how to construct a successful morning routine (coffee, meditation, gratitude journalling... I think I'll just keep to coffee, cornflakes and TikTok for the foreseeable).
So, the hot hits of YouTube for me, for numerous reasons, have been:
Wonderful Canadian Cas makes housework and organising seem... well, fun; she also ends her excerpts with an anecdote that reminds you how brilliantly human and like the rest of us she truly is;
This old soul has a lot of insight and advice on living a more minimalistic, decluttered life. I might not have the time or the inclination to go full minimalist but there's something about her delivery that is instantly calming and encouraging;
Matt D'Avella and Thomas Frank
Two quite similar young men who both seem to have their heads screwed on, and who deliver short but palatable and entertaining insights into productivity, time management, organisation, all the things that please my pedantic little brain.
Another old soul with a calming, almost soporific delivery that will make you question everything about your busy 9–5 life and make you want to fully commit to bullet-journalling in multicoloured pens.
A recent discovery but another one with a calming delivery and a heck of a lot of plants. I mean, a lot. I turned amateur plant mama in lockdown (with some success: not everything has withered yet), but this girl is next level.
There are more, of course (courtesy of the YT rabbit hole) but that's quite enough to pique one's curiosity. Or, y'know, not.
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Well, I think I've beffled long enough for one surprise 'hurrah I'm back for an extended special...' but before I go, I must of course share with you a little bit of
Link Love 🔗
- Jos, an avid FOQ as well as FOMine, has taken up the considerably weighty mantle of bloggery, and is now publishing very prosaically under the handle yes, ridiculous
Check it out.
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Well, until the next time the muse bashes down my door and demands that I spend my time doing something other than binge-watching YooChoobaz...
Stay safe. Hands. Face. Space and all that.
qb xx
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