Yes, I've gone MIA again on the qb front. All is very well, though.
Just too busy livin' my life to document it. #quirksworldproblem Which is a nice problem to have, in many respects!
In the absence of my diatribes, do feel free to follow the (mis)adventures of _thequirkybrunette_ on Insta... or is it the 'gram?
What are the hip kids saying these days?
I've just completed 30 days of April Love photo prompts (with thanks as always to Susannah Conway for setting the prompts and keeping our eyes open).
I thought I might add an extra layer of intrigue and challenge this month by additionally sketching the photo prompts, which has been great fun if a little challenging at times...! Faces and hands, though, amiright?!
What even is this?!
Anyway, so much to say and so little time to sit quiet for a while (to quote my wondrous grandmother back in the day) and relay it all to you. But one day, one day...
Just a quick notette from moi to say, well, obviously trying to find enough to say on a fortnightly basis was a bit of a stretch, even for me with my wild social whirl of a life (chortle, chortle).
I think a Monthly Missive is more than enough to encapsulate All the Shenanigans, so do check in in a couple of weeks' time when I might have something more substantial with which to pad out populate this 'ere bloggo.
I write this sitting, not in the kitchen sink, in the manner of Cassandra in I Capture the Castle... but in an oversized armchair at Costa, looking every inch the pretentious hipster nerd (complete with nerd-emoji glasses) who can only bash out her wisest words in her local coffee emporium.
Which is probably true but I may also be procrastinating the increasingly necessary task of tidying and decluttering my desk.
My thought processes continue to be of huge fascination to all, don’t they.
So. How are we all?
The world remains up in flames on the account of a tiny man's power complex.
That pesky pandemic is still dragging its heels.
Neighbours has been cancelled after almost forty years. (I knew its fate was sealed when they tried bringing back cast members from the Sacred Eighties – Des, Jane, even Clive Gibbons, I heard! – but I didn’t like to say...)
And yet... it sounds glib and self-indulgent to admit, but your QB is on a strangely even keel at the moment. (The good sort.)
I won’t go into specifics, but I feel like my attitude towards everything (except maybe The Patriarchy) has flipped-turned upside down and I feel strangely empowered, not to mention facetiously compelled to use hashtags like #crushingit and making playlists entitled #bossingit (suggestions for suitable songs welcome).
I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, as they say, but so far, my feet remain fully clad.
I went through a prolonged phase of ennui/malaise and other existential crises with French monikers (moniquers?) last year, partly prompted by the pandemic, and partly prompted by the feeling – imposed by society and seeming to be enforced by workplace culture – that for whatever reason I was not enough because I wasn’t: a) married, b) a parent, b-part2) a working parent; c) a homeowner; or d) a CEO of anything. << What even does that mean, consumers of social media, to say ‘CEO of...’? Means nothing unless you’re literally running a business.
Anyway, given I’m none of the above things (a, b, c or d) it occurred to me that I actually had the power and the opportunity, and none of the shackles or obligations, to change the situation, and take control of what I could, starting with my health, branching out to my routines, and panning out to my job.
Now, I feel epic.
Well, OK then.
And I am enough.
In fact, too much, sometimes. *checks self for signs of toxic positivity, realises self is still very cynical, relaxes.*
But the sheer fact of my being able to sit in Costa on a Sunday lunchtime is exactly the sort of privilege I want to be able to own up to and to enjoy.
---
I was going to capture this little update within the ‘This month, I have been mostly...’ segment of this blog post, but it seems prudent to mention it now.
As part-and-parcel of Things I Can Do to Reclaim Autonomy Over My Life, I have been mostly reading Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. Newport is the author of Deep Work, which, along with Atomic Habits by James Clear is one of those books that the YouTube Productivity Gurus push, and cite with almost cultish reverence. (And yes, it bewilders me too that I trusted the Cult of YooChoob with influencing my reading choices; blame the pandemic.)
Both books offered a handful of useful takeaways but ultimately I didn’t think either deserved the attention or adulation they both received from the Choob Community.
Digital Minimalism was, however, different; it wasn’t so much a prescription for tossing your phone in the sea and living the Luddite Life with Glee.
It was more of an invitation to reflect upon how the digital media companies make their consumers feel they 'need' certain products, or need to engage with certain products that they deliberately put into the commercial space without any particular demand for them.
Quoth I:
We didn’t ... sign up for the digital world in which we’re currently entrenched; we seem to have stumbled backward into it. – Cal Newport
I won’t bore you with all my ‘takeaways’ from Digital Minimalism, except for these two:
One of Newport’s most useful recommendations, which is also championed by be-bearded YT Productivity Guru (albeit one of the Good Guys), Thomas Frank, is to make it harder for you to fall down an app rabbit hole.
Newport’s simple suggestion is to sign out of your apps. The effort of then having to sign back in again to engage with the app or simply to use it as a distraction tool is often too much for you to bother with, with your truncated attention span.
And even with logins and passwords saved to Google, or Norton, or apps accessible through biometric logins, it's still a bit of a faff.
The second most pivotal
takeaway was this:
Delete the most distracting apps from your phone.
You don’t have to go full cold-turkey on Facebook; you can still engage with the browser version, but you are likely to find that it occupies far less time, because you’re checking in with intention and potentially with a time limit in mind, if you’re checking in during your work lunch break, for example.
I’m still engaging quite heavily with Instagram in lieu of Facebook, and my posts can automatically be shared from IG to FB, but I’ve set a timer on the Instagram app, so I currently get no more than 30 minutes on the app per day before it greys out and locks me out.
Leaving me free to read all the books I've got piling up.
It is, of course, a damning indictment of our modern times that such behaviour is even necessary, but there we go.
Of course, Digital Minimalism is not without its flaws.
it opened my eyes, and wide, to the abundance of data bias.
Digital Minimalism has come under fire (on Goodreads) for its data bias: more than one reader (and aside from me) has flagged up that Newport canvasses a significant disproportion of men over women for the purposes of statistics and anecdotes.
But he's not alone.
Even the book I'm reading that's written by two women seems quite heavily balanced in favour of male opinions and voices.
Perhaps it's down to the imbalance of male to female bodies in, dare I say, influential corporate positions... but I suspect it's more to do with the volume and insistence of certain voices as to who actually gets heard.
In pursuit of shut-eye...
The other thing I’ve been trying to do, and with still-limited success, is to pimp my sleep.
I no longer have digital devices in my bedroom (except the iPod and the smart clock).
I try to keep to a regular bedtime and wake-up time so as not to disturb my cicada circadian rhythm (see article linked below in Link Love for more on that sort o' shenanigans).
I don’t drink caffeine after noon.
In the last 18 months, I've invested in a new pillow and a new mattress. (Both of which, I will admit, have done wonders for my old-lady back and neck.)
And yet.
My sleep is a joke.
I wake at stupid o’clock, and it takes me far too long to get back to sleep again.
Cue, sleep meditations (as played either on the iPod or the smart clock; am I missing some irony here?).
I'll profess that I didn't do a lot of research before I alighted upon Lauren but she seems to work for me.
She has her woo-woo moments, but she also allows you to breathe in and out in your own time: I've tried meditations in the past when an enforced rhythm of breathing actually makes me feel like I'm hyperventilating, which is the absolute opposite of calming.
Plus, she can lull you to sleep just by telling you to 'sit down, or lie down', and 'relaaaaaax', 'it's OK'... and 'you are enough' in her soporific Aussie accent.
Hey, I may be feeling awesome right now but I still need a bit of validation.
As well as sharing her forays back into boxing on Instagram (she's a bit badass); she's also recently started broadcasting 30-minute 'lives' on YouTube, which are surprisingly and pleasingly similar in tone to the Kind Mind Academy's lamentedly now absent weekly check-ins, or Soft Landings, although as Lauren reads people's live comments, her mind and her attention flickers somewhat, and it takes her a while to recentre on what she was saying (I suspect there's a hint of ADHD there), which is a shame for her, as she has a lot of wisdom to impart.
Based on what, I don't necessarily know, I've not exactly checked all her credentials, but I enjoy it.
So, with that digression and a half done and done, let's get back on track, shall we?
---
This month, I have been mostly...
Reading π
All the things.
I know, after What I Call a Literary Hiatus of sorts, I am back on that book horse and cantering away. Much like Pa QB, I currently have several books On the Go, and I've even managed to finish a couple, including:
A Theatre for Dreamers
I have a lot of feelings about this book, not all of them positive.
I think I mentioned before, but I really loved Polly Samson's Out of the Picture, the story of a naΓ―ve 19 year old, Lizzie, who's absented herself to London to erase a family scandal from her memory but also search for her estranged father, only to hook up with her charismatic-yet-manipulative man-child of a boss... against the backdrop of a photography agency (hence the title). Lizzie was so well-drawn, and her motives clear.
Compare, then, OOTP with A Theatre for Dreamers, about a (mildly) naΓ―ve 18 year old, Erica, who's absented herself to the Greek island of Hydra to process her grief in the wake of her mother's death, and to escape an abusive father... but also search for answers about her mother from her one-time close friend, who transpired to be (actual factual, fated Australian author/poet) Charmian Clift.
Clift, her husband George Johnston, and several drifters play host to Erica, as well as a very young Leonard Cohen, and numerous actual factual musicians, poets and 'bohemians'... blah blah blah.
The descriptions of Hydra are luxurious (even the rough parts); the traditions detailed and revelled in... and this, I did enjoy about the novel, especially the descriptions of all the stray cats, who are such an integral feature of any Greek island – Andros was one such case-in-point and I'm not even a cat person but these kittehs were beguiling, I'll give them that.
But.
You know I like big buts (...and I cannot lie); there's a hugely infuriating lack of characterisation in this book, with the exception of Samson's sometimes gushing, sometimes damning, portrayal of Clift. She is clearly the true heroine of the novel, and perhaps her (equally tragic) daughter Shane, who's depicted as a moribund tween before tweens were a thing, and her (yes, again tragic) son, Martin, a prodigy.
A quick rootle through the wilds of The Internet tell a hugely upsetting series of stories of the fate of the whole family, except the youngest son, who is still alive, and somehow agreed to consult on this absolute teardown of his family, and his infancy.
Despite being pitched as the protagonist, Erica is no more than a vehicle, a medium, through which to justify turning Clift into a work of fiction, albeit one to be adulated, or revolted by, depending on how drunk Erica or any of the other characters are in any one scene.
And as for Leonard Cohen... I wasn't expecting him to have been translated into some sort of caricature but aside from a name, and the anecdotal accounts of his loyalty to Marianne [Ihlen, his actual partner in actual real life, to whom the following song is dedicated...], he could have been anyone, when he clearly wasn't.
In 1999 I wrote my dissertation on the perks and pitfalls of combining fact with fiction in literature; and I am now in the throes of hunting down that document since I seem to have no physical record of it. I'm intrigued to reconcile myself with 20-year-old academic QB's take on the whole thing; I may have scored myself a modest 2:1 for my degree overall, but I seem to remember scoring a first on my dissertation.
I suspect I, and 20-year-old QB, still hold firm to the belief that while incorporating factual characters into a novel can lend it a certain gravitas and historical context, you tread a fine line into libel if you depict a historical figure without honouring how they were widely perceived by the people who really knew them, or, on the flipside, if you remain entirely impartial, you risk imbuing them with zero personality.
Best just to create a universe of fully-rounded fictional characters so you circumvent that issue, IMHO...
Also reading...
Walden | Henry David Thoreau
No Hard Feelings | Liz Fosslien & Mollie West Duffy [of Liz & Mollie fame]
Cautiously trying to redress the bias balance one woman author at a time. (Or, two if you count Liz and Mollie.)
Watching πΊ π₯ π»
The Bold Type
(Again.)
Aw, I wish I liked all of you girls more.
In my defence this repetition of an entire series is not necessarily indicative of any sort of Quirk, shall we say, and not that there's anything wrong with that... but the first time I binged this series, I was for the most part laid up with the 'Rona so there's a good chance I dozed, Covidly, through some of the nuances (if indeed there were any).
But the principle motivation behind the fairly immediate repeat viewing is that Girl Boss Jacqueline Carlyle is an absolute breath of fresh, feminism-forward air (apart from the way she makes her robo-sons introduce themselves but that's a story for another day).
Jacqueline is goals.
And speaking of feminism...
Misbehaviour
This happened to be on the telly-o-vision last weekend while I was loafing a chez Ma and Pa QB for the latter's Birthday Shenanigans. It did manage to incite some actual Quirk Rage at the point whereby Keira Knightley's Sally Alexander is told by her university tutor that her proposal for a dissertation on women workers in the industrial revolution is "a bit niche" and that she should "broaden the scope" to give her subject "genuine relevance".
I'll 'broaden your scope', mate. With a backslap. With a kipper.
But aside from that, it was a jolly enjoyable watch although parts do make uncomfortable viewing, even today, for a myriad reasons.
Link Love ππ
If you're still reading by now, I thank you for your time and attention.
Summary Shenanigans will commence again, hopefully, in a fortnight! I'm momentarily hitting pause on a couple of self-enforced rituals/routines to make a little space for new ones.
Also, Nothing Strange nor Startling, really, to report this week; it's been quite full-on in some ways, but in good ways!
Keep being your sparkly unicorn selves, and I'll re-emerge before long with more wisdom, wit and wordiness.
As any of you will know if you follow me on more
traditional, personal social media platforms (notably Farcebook and once upon a
keypad, Twitter) little sends me into a Nerd Rage more effervescently than
TRAIN FAILS.
It’s a historical thing.
Oi. Not that historical; how old do you think I
am?!
Back when I was commuting into the darkest crevice of
civilisation (that’ll be London then), the service would sometimes be so dire
I’d fire off a rant on the Face Book equivalent to emitting a screaming puff of
steam from both ears.
I left the Capital City (aka the Stinkhole of Society) in
the vain (and, as it transpires, laughable) hope that a daily shuttle down a
sedate little branch line would be a wild and welcome departure (and not from a
platform it took a mildly asthmatic sprint to reach).
Oh, my sweet summer child…
That was not to be either.
Union disputes.
Sinkholes.
Scruffy little schoolchildren with their stoopid little scooters.
Pandemic.
All of these little things have, over six years, conspired
to make the commute as much of a bane of my life as any journey through Clapham
Junction aka Crapham MalFunction might have been.
And after let’s say fifteen years of this
omnishambles, I think I’ve finally pinpointed why a Rail Fail irks me so.
Well, there is that…
Fundamentally, though, it’s because any Rail Fail just
messes with my Routine.
And a girl’s gotta have a Routine.
…OK, this girl does.
Anecdotal insert here: sometimes I can be a bit too… me at
work. And by that I mean:
I get excited by the oddest things – systems, calendar
set-ups, schedules in Excel… And when that happens, when I geek out, there’s a
good chance my workmate will shake her head and say, “You’re such a weirdo!”
(Well, duh.)
But Routines, and Habits, have become how I get through the
week/month/day.
And never has this need for structure been as pronounced as
during, and since, Ye Olde Pandemicke; it’s also never been as crucial as when
I took it upon myself to give my health the ol’ glow-up, and managed to apply
two previous years of barely-applied research into habit-building to getting
myself less sedentary, and eating less processed tosh.
As I've mentioned in previous posts, the earliest, uncertain
days of lockdown in spring 2020 had me trying to make my home as liveable as I
could, and my days as structured as I could, given that that was where I was
spending exorbitant amounts of time.
As such, it's when I started to subscribe to all manner of
productivity/organisation channels on YouTube as motivation, if you can call it
that.
Disclaimer: I’m fully aware that taking advice from
randoms on the internet should always be accompanied by a hefty pinch of salt.
I’ve taken the advice I can get my teeth into, and discarded the rest, like
rind.
Two or so years later, and several pandemic permutations
later, I'm only now starting to weed out the ones that, as the precocious brats
of the Choobs say, no longer serve me. Like a redundant butler.
Why, just the other day I found myself watching one of the
tribe of ‘Bright Young Productive Things’ describing the process of
decluttering her junk drawer with the cloyingly earnest self-assurance and
borderline arrogance of a surgeon describing their dissection of an artery –
right before a hastily-made nick causes a geyser of house red to splatter the
masks of the assembled team. (Yes, I’ve watched too many medical dramas. No,
I’m not sorry.)
She's the Cristina Yang of the productivity-choob. I bet she was intolerable at school.
Anyhoo, at one point, she described finding a pile of
"Legos" (srsly, aren’t they just “Lego”, collective plural,
like sheep, or fish...?) and after vocal consternation over how these could
have wound up in her junk drawer, she proclaimed that, "[My husband] and I
don't play with Legos, because we're adults." (They're both 25 if a day.)
Well, excuuuuuuuuuse me, Miss Judgy Pants.
That's tantamount to an unfollow/unsubscribe from me.
Nobody needs that negativity in their lives.
I'm off to play with my felt pigs in protest.
But that's not quite the point I'm trying to make here.
What even was the point?
Did I have a point?
Oh yes.
Back in the room.
Routine might have been what I turned to most dramatically
during ‘Rona times as a coping mechanism, but a lot of my routines and habits
are still a work in progress (and are, to be fair, probably due a reset).
And some are honed.
Those are the ones I probably should worry about most as
they’re the ones to which I have stuck with alarming rigidity, with limited
provision made for flexibility and variables.
They’re the favours that Today QB does to Tomorrow QB – to
elaborate, Tomorrow QB knows she’s got a photoshoot at work, so will have limited,
depleted energy to make lunch and dinner, so Today QB makes them for her. How
nice of her.
Tomorrow QB is getting up at stupid o’clock to go to the gym
before work (to appropriate pretentious YT parlance... to ‘go work out’. Ew,
just stop). Today QB puts out her clothes in readiness, right down to lining up
sports vest, leggings, then top and jeans to go over the top in that order
so there’s no faffing around in drawers and wardrobes at the crack of dawn.
All of these little habits have evolved over time through (perceived)
necessity.
Habit-building and routine construction does take time. This
is both a good thing and a not so good thing.
The good thing is that you have to be patient to see the
results; you can’t give it just a few hours or a few days and decide that,
nope, it’s not working out for you. Which is, as I think I mentioned before as
well, why I still fail to understand the culture of constant, all-too-frequent ‘resetting’.
Perhaps evaluating your routines and habits on a quarterly, or six-monthly
basis might, as the Youth say, serve you better, and perhaps after that time
you’ll be able to see with more clarity that your habits, of leaving out the
day’s clothes the night before, perhaps, or making the week’s lunches on a
Sunday afternoon are, or aren’t, ‘serving’ you because you’ll have a good few
months of evidence to substantiate that perhaps it wasn’t one of your better
ideas.
And sure, making five salmon salads and seeing them
neatly lined up in glorious cliplock boxes on the bottom shelf of one’s fridge
is pleasing in a Home-Edit sort of way, and it sure alleviates that
daily decision fatigue but honestly, by Thursday, if you’re already growing
bored of salmon salads, you’re bvggered, really. Believe me, I know.
The not-so-good thing is that if you have been
patient, and cultivated routines over a certain period of time, and you’re in
your groove, then an external influence intervenes – say, the train times
change again; grr, damn you all the way to Hades, Southern... – and throws your
mechanical, pristine weekday routines out the window, it’s up to you to
readjust, yes, and reset (with painful inevitability) and start again.
Which is markedly easier for some folk than for others.
There is of course always the option to say, ‘ha, phooey’ to
routine and habit altogether, and live a bit more spontaneously... (Gah, that
word makes me shudder, reminding me of a peculiar university acquaintance of
mine whose answer to almost everything was ‘be spontaneous, yeah?’ He didn’t
wash his hair for nigh on a good few months so I’ve never been hasty to take
his advice.)
But therein lies the temptation to fall back into old ways.
I built so many of my current routines to get out of bad habits.
Planning and making
a week’s lunches so I didn’t feel tempted just to say, ‘s0d it, I’ll get a
sandwich from M&S’.
Going to the gym first thing before work so I didn’t get tempted to
think, ‘nah, I’ll just go home after work; I’m too tired’.
Setting aside a
‘power hour’ of cleaning and sorting at the weekends and a fifteen-minute tidy
daily, because otherwise I’d be living in a den of filth and slack that would
be prime fodder for Kim and Aggie.
Of course, these scenarios do seem quite extreme, but not beyond the realms of possibility.
All that said, while, with the best will in the world I’ve not cultivated a habit of drying up all my washing-up and putting it away
before bed, at least I’m not leaving last night’s cutlery and crockery to wash up the
morning after. I literally and physically cannot.
And it’ll just freak Tomorrow
QB out too much. She just wants to filter her coffee, pack her lunch and get
outta there.
No fuss, no muss.
Actual footage of me on a morning...(!)
Perhaps wanting to retain one’s painstakingly-cultivated
self-discipline may be a little (or a lot) weird. And exercising a little
flexibility from time to time is OK (as long as I... er, I mean, one knows
about it with sufficient notice to be able to prepare oneself for a change to
the routine...).
Yeah, there’s a lot more to unpack here than I’ve got time
or space to write about at this point. And I’ve not even used the c-word
(control)...
But I like to think that on the whole, this culture of
routine- and habit-building has been more of a benefit than a hindrance. It’s also a
way of parenting oneself, or rather being one’s own partner, in the absence of a
tangible real one.
And perhaps if I’m feeling particularly open to being, well,
open I’ll share with you a few of my little quirky habits.
Because, who knows? They might work for you, or for someone
else. They’re all appropriated from the interwebs anyway. π
Right, that’s quite enough Beffling.
You’ve been a wonderful audience.
---
This fortnight, I have been mostly...
Reading π
and newly:
Watching πΊπ₯π»
Toast of Tinseltown
...I'll admit the surrealism lost me at some points!
Rewatching
The September Issue
followed almost immediately by
The Devil Wears Prada
and chased up some days later by
27 Dresses
I am unapologetic in my love for all of these films.
The latter two are unspoken advocates of the Filofax Life, and I am all on board with that.
(Of course, it's taken me probably 27 views of the fillum, and also having binged The Office US and The Bold Type to spot the marvellous Melora "Jan Levinson/Jacqueline Carlyle" Hardin as James Marsden's boss, Maureen, in 27 Dresses... Too distracted by how brilliant Katherine Heigl in this film, is despite all the bad press she's had in the past.)
Also, been watching a lorra-lorra YouTube videos, mostly on decluttering, but this one was arguably the one with the most useful takeaways:
Kallie's adorable. She doesn't over-egg the "I'm such a busy mom (sic)" ethos (well, not too much) and her video editing and inserts are often very quick, clever and entertaining.
And she's not about to diss Lego, that's a given.
Plus, who doesn't love a gal whose channel is But First, Coffee? Speaking my language there, kid.
A friend shared this on her FB feed this week and it definitely deserves a post. Patti Smith in 1978 (a vintage year), performing Because the Night on the Old Grey Whistle Test.
And now I want a brown bowler hat.
(Thanks, Toni!)
Jusqu'a la prochaine...*
qb xx
* Do you ever get random French phrases present themselves to you out of nowhere...? Non? Pretentious, moi?!
We’re
in a strange flux state at the moment, I think (what? Another one? I hear you
wail; haven’t we been in a strange ol’ state for the last two years?). We’re
being told in one ear that we can be a little more fast and loose with masks...
we can go out, we can claw back what little’s left of our lives BC... all the
while the latest variant lingers.
Or can we really emerge, blinking
from the Covid Cave, safe in the knowledge that those making the rules think
we’re safe to be let out into the wild?
I’m both elated and cautious.
I’m enjoying the freedom of being
able to make plans without as much of a proviso any more, but I’m also somewhat
timid about letting the walls down too soon. Imagine my relief when our
vicar this morning encouraged us all to respect one another’s space, even now.
For the most part I live for people respecting my space, in case that weren’t evident from the
last 43 and a half years of my existence...! I’m still going to be wearing my
‘I was social distancing before it was cool’ tee-shirts regardless of where we
are on the curve (and is the curve even a thing now?).
On Friday night, I went to a
workmate’s fortieth (which had been postponed by the ‘Vids twice in 2021, so
technically the birthday girl was preparing for her 40¼th by the time the long-awaited event took
place).
Dressed up, all out.
And it was both epic and strange;
an epic-strange-epic sandwich.
Epic because we could be without
masks for long enough to hold conversations... or at least try to because we’d
all forgotten how hard it is to be heard over music...
Strange because we’d all
forgotten how to ‘social' in the last two years. (OK, perhaps that’s just me;
I’ve never been one for small talk so if I reach a point whereby I know there’s
no point in initiating conversation because of the aforementioned music volume,
I will just sit there and smile beatifically, or mime the need for another
cheeky prosecco, or look longingly at the dance floor, summoning courage to
unleash the flailing beast within.)
Juan, trying to educate me in the ways of salsa when I clearly never inherited the dance genes in my fam. Props for trying, though...
But then epic again when the dancing stripped us of a good few inhibitions, which we felt compelled to cling to because we’ve just spent two years avoiding other people and that mindset isn’t going away overnight.
In short, though, this rather marvellous party turned out to be the best possible reintegration into society, and into something approximating Normality. Thanks, again, Lyndsey! ♥️
Plus I got to wear my new flapper dress
Nothing says class like a hurriedly-taken toilet selfie, baby.
and reawaken the long-dormant Louise Brooks–QB-hybrid within, the one who’d been buried under middle-aged spread and lockdown lbs.
So that was nice.
This fortnight, I have been mostly...
Reading π
Digital Minimalism | Cal Newport
A Theatre for Dreamers | Polly Samson
and finishing...
The Confessions of Frannie Langton | Sara Collins
I'll admit, I read this in about an eighth of the time it took me to come around to reading it (blame lockdown; that's what it's there for).
***Here, possibly, be spoilers...***
And I did enjoy it, up to a point. Critics on Goodreads thought the relationship between Frannie and her mistress was predictable and maybe it was but it seemed to evolve organically. And Frannie's perspective was one rarely seen in literature, of a black, gay woman who had used having been taken advantage of... to her advantage, learning to read (against expectations) but then exacting her revenge on the men seeking to control her.
But the ending was a little meh. There was certainly predictability in the way, or state, in which Frannie found her mistress once she returned after having been evicted, and there was the usual frustrating cryptic reveal of who Frannie's mother actually was (I'm still not sure but I think I know who it was...).
Watching πΊ π₯ π»
Sort your Life Out with Stacey Solomon
Not to be confused with Nick Knowles' Big House Clearout on Channel 5. One's Stacey, one's Nick. Got that? Don't, whatever you do, muddle them up...
Right, now that's all covered off, I'd very much like a week's access to a warehouse and somebody to organise my worldly goods by category so I can declutter the lot in one go. Anyone fancy volunteering?
The books and stationery alone would raise eyebrows.
Toast of Tinseltown
Mostly for Matt Berry's vocal gymnastics routine but also for a hefty dose of surrealism.
