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Caroline is Writing

a blog by a writer attempting to live the literary good life on the internet
5 min read Permalink

how do you have a minor illness during a pandemic?

I didn’t write to you last Friday as I had planned. I was busy reenacting this scene:

I had my first really bad migraine in several years. For me, it starts with sparkles at the edge of my vision, like a column of dancing dust motes is hovering just out of sight. Gradually, the sparkles spread all the way around until I can only see clearly out of a small circle in the middle. That area gets smaller and smaller until I can’t see anything at all that isn’t bright, fizzy light.

This phenomenon is called “aura” and I understand that around of 20 per cent of migraine sufferers experience it. Last Friday morning, I caught my first glimpse of it while I was busy writing something that was due by 5pm, a deadline that couldn’t be postponed without annoying some other people. Instead of stopping, drawing the curtains, texting an apology and then turning my phone off, I started typing faster. I started racing the sparkles in my vision, trying to finish the piece before they closed in entirely.

I made it, but only just. It was like Indiana Jones just grabbing his hat in time, except not at all fun or silly. I paid for that extra half an hour that I ignored the aura and kept staring at a screen in defiance of the rising feelings of nausea and pain, too. Instead of waking up the next morning feeling drained but better, the migraine’s aftermath lingered all weekend. I spent a lot of time lying down in the dark with the window open.

With hindsight, I can see that this was not a good exchange: thirty minutes of work is not worth two extra days of stabbing pains to the head. I’ve never been very good at assessing these equations in the moment, even when I had a job that provided sick pay. Now that I’m freelance, I’m even worse at knowing when to stop.

While I was keeping my eyes closed, a memory floated to the surface of another time when I had a migraine like this. It was the day of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, 17 April 2013, and the blinding pains started very early in the morning. I worked at a political magazine at the time; the death of Thatcher was an event we had, necessarily, been preparing for for quite some time. I was supposed to run the day’s coverage on the website, co-ordinating dispatches from writers out in the crowds and editing reactions by commentators. That time, I sent the text and went back to bed.

I’m not an opinion writer or columnist, so I didn’t miss out on the chance to have my One Big Take about the Iron Lady’s legacy. I did feel horribly guilty about leaving my colleagues one short on such a day, though. Especially since we had already been through several “Thatcher death” hoaxes in recent months, including one when a plausible-seeming anonymous Twitter account had managed to hoodwink several high profile journalists with an unsourced report of her death.

I remember that one particularly because of how absurdly inconsequential it seems in these days of QAnon and Pizzagate and all the rest. This account racked up about 50,000 followers in two hours as politicos boosted it with their “huge if true” retweets before it suddenly pivoted to pushing protein powder or mushroom supplements or something like that. By accident or design, the whole thing played out in the late afternoon period when the top hacks are just settling down to write whatever will actually run in the next day’s paper. This timing lent the whole incident added drama.

One of my friends spent her day out in the crowds, following the funeral procession to St Paul’s Cathedral and texting me updates that I squinted at quickly in the darkness of my sickroom. She told me about how people stood in silence and turned their backs as the cortège passed them. About how the airwaves were full of talking heads shouting about an era ending, or beginning. How angry and defensive everyone was, even those who were mourning a friend.

That day, I eventually fell asleep and had one of those feverish, waking nightmares where life continues in your head, subtly altered for horror. In the dream I kept getting texts from my friend about what was happening out in the streets. People were becoming violent, and through the open window of my bedroom I could hear them rioting three miles away in Parliament Square. I heard the roar of the crowd when the coffin vanished behind the doors of St Paul’s and the thud as the wave of people broke upon the cathedral’s walls.

When I woke up, it was dark outside and there had been no civilisation-endangering guerrilla war on the streets of London. The funeral of a controversial but undoubtedly influential politician had passed off in relative peace and my absence from work had been only a minor inconvenience. But the guilt that I had let people down on a big day lingered; last Friday, years later, I still let that feeling take priority over what was sensible or healthy.

It’s not hard to work out why, either. How do you have a minor illness during a pandemic? Taking to my bed with a splitting headache and sparkly eyes seemed absurd while the news is full of reports of rising infection rates and new lockdowns. It doesn’t matter how many times I try and disconnect my migraine from the societal-level trends of illness and health. The sickness and the anxiety about the sickness will not be separated.

Twelve things I’m reading, watching and listening to:

If you read this far, I would very much appreciate it if you listened to my latest murder mystery podcast episode, which is all about locked rooms. If you like it, follow the show in your app so you get the next one automatically.

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: I do daily podcast recommendations at The Listener, I write weekly podcast industry reports for Hot Pod, I make a fortnightly podcast called Shedunnit and I’m sometimes on Twitter and Instagram. My book is now out in paperback, find the links to purchase a copy here.

Until next time,

Caroline

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7 min read Permalink

rummaging through all the paper

I feel like I have been taking notes on what I read since I was about 14, and that for all of that time I have been doing so very badly.

For me, there has always been two reasons to take a note.

Firstly, to pick one idea out of the many on the page and put it down in my own way is to make a decision about the information I prioritise. The very act of selecting and transcribing the thought I had when I encountered that element of the book helps me to understand and categorise what I’m reading. In theory.

Secondly, the notes should act as a record that I can return to later, once the short term memories of that particular book have faded. Scanning through them, I would like to think, will revivify the experience of encountering that text for the first time and allow easy access to the information I selected for future work.

The studying and note taking I did at school and university all took place on paper. As a teenager, I loved stationary and hauled around a heavy backpack with many folders, notebooks and coloured pens. I recently helped my mother clear out some of the notes I produced during this time from her attic, and was startled to see how incredibly elaborate and comprehensive this stuff was. In many cases I was reproducing the textbook in full, complete with multi-coloured headings and carefully drawn diagrams. Perhaps the act of writing it all out again had some memory function for me (more on this in a moment) but there was no sense of distillation or selection. These weren’t notes so much as copies, the work of a scribe with too much time on her hands. The “aesthetic notes” movement, so ubiquitous today online, feels like it’s still stuck at this point.

I got a laptop when I went to university and wrote my weekly essays on this computer, using my handwritten notes to do so. Wifi wasn’t widespread and although portable the laptop mostly lived on my desk in my student room, plugged into an ethernet cable. Only my ruled A4 pad and my pen travelled with me to libraries and lectures. Thus, for every book I read, there was a sheaf of paper full of page numbers and quotations that I had copied out. I wasn’t doing the colourful headings – I was a serious undergraduate now — but the instinct to transcribe everything was still very strong. I remember being frustrated when trying to write up my assignments late at night, rummaging through all the paper I had used in the library that week and failing to find anything that I could slot into my argument because it was unclear why I had copied out these quotations rather than any others.

Handwriting my notes was a habit further reinforced by my journalism training, where we were taught shorthand and how to lay out a notebook so that it would be admissible as evidence in court. It wasn’t until I began work on my first book that I contemplated switching from noting by hand to using a computer, in an attempt to circumvent the need to flick through so much paper. That book is in part a history of the river Thames, a subject about which a vast amount of information has been published in the last 500 years. My process was one of extreme distillation, trying to sample as much as I could in the time that I had and then discarding what didn’t resonate with me as I built my own narrative.

I used Scrivener, a piece of software often recommended for authors, which has an interface that allows lots of different text documents to sit alongside each other as if in a ring binder and be combined or separated at will. Each book I read had a different entry, and the global search function was helpful — when I reached a point in my manuscript where I wanted a fact about Hilaire Belloc’s walks from Oxford to London as a student in the 1890s, for instance, I could just hit Control + Option + F and see if I had any notes to repurpose. I didn’t write the book in Scrivener, though, which is what that software is in part designed for. I did that in Microsoft Word. I don’t remember why, really.

Although having all of the information that I had amassed searchable like this was a vast improvement on a mass of paper filled with contextless quotations, it still didn’t feel like a useful repository of notes. Often when I did turn up a search result for something I was writing about the information I had recorded wasn’t sufficient or even comprehensible. I would still have to go back to the original source or do more research. It felt like I was doing the same work twice.

Typing notes directly into the computer like this also seemed to sever an important link I hadn’t even realised was there. Handwriting made me slow down enough to think more fully about what I was recording and why. It also seemed to give me some spatial awareness about the book I was reading, to the extent that I could often remember where on the page and how far through a book a particular moment came. When taking notes digitally, I had no such memory. Plus, computers are too full of distraction. It’s too easy to check email or social media instead of taking notes when it all happens in the same place.

When I embarked on my current book project, then, I was determined to find a better way. Unlike the Thames, hypochondria is a topic that has relatively rarely been addressed head on (which is in part why I’m doing it now). There aren’t many books or articles, relatively speaking, with that word in the title. The research process is more intuitive and requires me to hop between disciplines and types of sources, collecting what is relevant from fields as disparate as folklore and neurology. I hope this is what will make the eventual book worth reading, but as an information gathering and storage exercise, it’s complicated. I don’t know what the structure is in advance or where it will take me, so I can’t design an approach ahead of time.

So I did what I probably should have done years ago and did some research into the practice of note taking itself. I found that there is indeed a detectable link between handwriting and the formation of complex memory. I encountered the work of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who maintained a prodigious scholarly output in his lifetime and even after his death because of the way he noted each individual idea he had on a separate card in a Zettelkasten or slipbox and used a sequence of numbers to link them. I fell headfirst into this world of “smart note taking” and would recommend two of the books I read to anyone who is also interested in this: How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens and Digital Zettelkasten by David Kadavy. I also found a phD student with a helpful YouTube channel that demonstrates these principles, and began to build a new system for myself.

This is what my notes look like now.

This is the visual view from a programme called Obsidian. It’s a skin that sits on top of a folder of markdown documents and allows you to manipulate and link them. Each of the nodes that you see above is a separate note file, and you can see in this timelapse that as I’ve added more and found connections between the ideas that various hubs have developed, showing me where the key texts and concepts are. Following Luhmann’s example, I’m not producing long lists of quotations from each book I read, but rather writing out each idea that I encounter in my own words, adding any necessary references, and then saving that as a note in its entirety, the better for linking together with others. I really love this process — it’s almost like I can feel the synapses firing in my brain – and it’s already helping me structure sections of the book that require me to pull together disparate ideas into a seamless narrative.

As for how I’m reading books now, this is an area where I feel like I’m waiting for the technology to catch up with me. I want the tactile, memory-forming habit of taking notes by hand but the convenient searchability of a digital repository. Something like Apple’s “Scribble” handwriting recognition feature on the iPad would seem to offer this, but so far it’s been too clunky and inaccurate for me. Instead, I have a Supernote A5X, which is an e-ink tablet designed entirely for reading and writing, and I read and annotate all my journal articles and ebooks on that before exporting them and adding them to Obsidian. I really like the simplicity of this device and the fact that it really doesn’t do anything other than that use case I’ve just described. You couldn’t check Twitter on it even if you wanted to.

If I’m working from a physical book, I still like to read with a pencil in my hand. I do write in the margins of books that I own and use sticky notes to mark the pages where I’ve made comments that I’ll want to put into Obsidian later. If it’s a library book or one I don’t want to scribble for some reason, I use transparent sticky notes to write next to the text I’m referencing and then I remove them when I’m done.

One thing that I’ve been very conscious of through all of this is my habit for productive procrastination; of finding “worthwhile” activities that fill up my time so that I never get started on what I’m supposed to be doing. Fortunately I found this new note taking style so addictive that I immediately wanted to try it on real material and made progress that way, but it’s always something I’m alert for. This kind of “digital gardening” could absorb a lot of time without much benefit if you’re not careful. The lack of rigidity in this system is a useful guard against this tendency too, because the structure emerges as you work rather than being something you have to create and then tweak as circumstances change. If something isn’t working in my Obsidian, I just do it differently without redoing everything that has gone before.

Given that, I am always refining and improving this process — it’s not static — and I would love to hear from you about how you read books and take notes.
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4 min read Permalink

a list of small, inconsequential pleasures

For no particular reason, yesterday I was thinking about the really quite terrible 2007 film Evan Almighty. You don’t need to know anything about it other than that Steve Carell plays a new congressman who finds himself imbued with the powers of God (who is portrayed by Morgan Freeman in a crisply tailored white suit, of course). A lot of stuff happens, including Carrell growing a humorous beard of Biblical proportions and a giant flood, but at the very end God reveals that “ark” doesn’t just mean “boat that is 300 cubits long” but is also an abbreviation for “Act of Random Kindness”. Wow.

I don’t even remember when or why I watched this film, but this mindblowingly banal conclusion stuck firmly in my brain. It surfaced again yesterday when I was trying to find a way of describing the new way I’ve been eking out my capacity for enjoyment with small, inconsequential pleasures since being confined to the house. I hadn’t noticed, but I used to rely a lot on the enjoyable expectation of future trips, social occasions and treats to keep my spirits up. I would wake up on a Wednesday morning and think “Oh, this weekend we’re going to the theatre! That’s something to look forward to as I do this laundry and answer these emails.”

Of course, the obliteration of expectation caused by this pandemic means, essentially, that we can have no trips to look forward to or certainty about when we might leave the house again regularly. So as a replacement, I’ve been very consciously trying to offer myself acts of random kindness and enjoy these smaller things that are obtainable right now. I thought I’d share some of them with you.

Things to Watch

Not to get all “I liked them before they were famous”, but I have been obsessed with the YouTube channel run by the American food magazine Bon Appetit since my favourite chef Claire made gourmet Cheetos and have watched every video she appears in within 24 hours of release since March 2018. Bobby Finger explained much better than I ever could what the incredible appeal of the Bon Appetit Cinematic Universe is, so read his piece then watch this video and feel better about the world:

We have also been watching a lot of 30 Rock. Now, I have been a Liz Lemon superfan since 2007, but my husband had never seen it before so I bought the DVD boxset and we’re powering through about 6 episodes a night (I mean, they’re 22 minutes long and there’s nothing else to do). For a show that had a lot of topical references in it, it stands up extremely well — in fact, those gags now seem like they come from a surreal alternate universe and make the whole thing even better. Please enjoy this early scene with my favourite character, Dr Leo Spaceman:

In addition, we’ve been devouring the 1970s BBC sitcom The Good Life. Partly I like watching it because we might actually need to start growing vegetables in our back yard, but partly because the clothes and hair are just out of this world weird:

Oh, and this also made me laugh/feel old. Remember when 2020 seemed a long time away!

Things to listen to

This interview with a 12 year old Joe Biden fan made me laugh so hard that I almost knocked my phone into the sink while washing up:

This podcast that features only music from early twentieth century cinema organs makes me extremely happy:

And this daily podcast about self care manages to be helpful without making me feel like a failure:

Things to read

Apart from Wolf Hall, I have mostly been reading comforting books from childhood or detective novels. Of the former, I recommend:

—The Wool Pack by Cynthia Harnett—the Chalet School series, because there are 62 of them! I am also selling some duplicates I have on eBay, if you’d like to try them cheaply—I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (not strictly a children’s book but I first read it when I was 13 so it counts)

For detective novels, try:

—Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, obviously—Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles—A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey

Things to cook

—We’ve been on holiday to Orkney a few times in the last couple of years, and last summer I bought some beremeal flour and a recipe book called The Book of Bere. This special form of barley dates back to Viking times and is only really grown on the islands, but you can buy it online from the mill there and I’ve been really heavily relying on it when I’ve found other flour hard to come by. I’ve made beremeal sourdough, beremeal pancakes, beremeal shortbread, and they all came out delicious with an extra nutty taste from the special flour.

—A boiled egg. This might sound stupid, but eggs have been scarce where I live so I’ve been treasuring and savouring each one. On Easter Sunday we had four minute eggs with buttered beremeal toast and it might be the best meal I’ve eaten in a month.

—This red pesto. If you like cooking, chances are you will already have all the things required for this (basically anchovies, garlic, tomato paste, chilis, and a nut like walnuts but I’ve used others and it works). It seems obvious once you’ve done it once, but I don’t think I would have put this combination together myself. Once made glossy with butter and extra pasta water, it’s truly divine.

That’s everything for now — do send me your ark things if you have them.

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4 min read Permalink

a brain fizzing combination of accomplishment and virtue

In the twelve days between 26 December 2019 and 6 January 2020, I went to the tip four times. The tip is what I call it because that’s the phrase my mother uses, although the sign by the gate reads “Household Recycling Centre”. Once inside, you drive around a horseshoe-shaped road configuration before ending up where you started, on a minor road by a motorway junction. What you choose to shed along the way is your own concern.

In the curved space between the two sides of the horseshoe about a dozen shipping containers are lined up. Some are open on the top and have steps up the side for access, others have the double doors at one end folded back and a crushing apparatus appended, so that anything placed in the gap by the door will be thrust deep into the container and impacted.

There are parking spots marked out but people tend to pull their cars up anyhow, meaning that traffic quickly backs up. On our first visit on Boxing Day, I sat for 10 minutes while I watched a man pull several entire artificial Christmas trees — still decorated — out of a van that was blocking the way. He dragged them one by one over to the “garden waste” bin, mounted the steps and threw them down into the container. I wondered idly if he thought they were real, or if he just couldn’t be bothered to find the correct disposal place.

The tip we frequented when I was a child had no separations or categories. Everything was dumped in one communal area and then bulldozed into great mountains of rubbish, eventually destined for landfill. Parts of rusty cars formed layers in between decaying sofas with a sprinkling of disturbing, broken toys sprinkled around. As interesting as the rubbish itself were the people who went there to acquire rather than discard things. I would see them sometimes, dragging perfectly good bits of timber from the morass and loading them onto car roofracks.

I saw and heard some alarming things at the tip this time. I felt like I was witnessing the end of several short stories at once, without being able to turn back the pages and read how they began. There was a woman crying while she slowly piled what looked like an entire flat’s worth of furniture into the “wood” container. An elderly couple were having a vicious and personal argument about whether broken deckchairs were “metal” or “fabric”. A man clutching a bulging sack politely asked one of the high vis jacketed tip employees which bin he needed for disposing children’s teddy bears.

But most people were there for the same reason we were: to slough off the accumulated detritus of the old year. We had empty boxes too big for the wheelie bin to get rid of, as well as old light fittings and other miscellaneous junk that I can’t really picture now that it’s gone. Sorting it all into the right sections and climbing the teetering steeps to throw it away was quite enjoyable. Driving back out onto the road afterwards I felt a bit intoxicated with the thrill of it all. Never doubt that widespread narratives have power: I felt physically lighter in that “new year, new me” way, just because we had emptied the car boot of some cardboard.

In fact, I liked this feeling so much that I scoured the house for more things to discard and went back to the tip by myself over the next few days. I’ve never experienced the fabled “runner’s high”, but this felt like I imagine that does, a brain fizzing combination of accomplishment and virtue.

This was new to me: I lived in London (where junk left on the pavement will disappear within hours) for eight years after I finished university and although we’ve been on this faraway peninsula for several years now we only got a car recently; until the last few months, the tip was inaccessible to us. When we had a sizeable piece of rubbish to dispose of — an old sofa, say – I sent the council £16 via bank transfer and we left it on the doorstep before going out for the day. It was gone when we got home and the transaction felt magical. I don’t know who really took it or where it went, just that my small payment vanished it as thoroughly as any spell.

Perhaps the novelty of the tip wears off. I hope not, though — as well as that addictive sense of a load being lifted upon departure, the people-watching opportunities there are outstanding. The employees giggle almost constantly, watching people filing cardboard in the metal container and wood with plastic and despairing to each other of our collective inability to read clear signage.

And unlike with the disappearing sofa, there is a cathartic sense at the tip that we all have to confront the consequences of our own actions eventually. I bought too many things that came in unwieldy cardboard boxes, and now I have to manhandle them into a giant hopper while it’s raining. That woman over there clearly regrets purchasing the toys her children have barely used yet somehow also broken. I don’t know what chain of events lead to that man having a sack full of unwanted teddy bears, but I bet he had plenty of time to dwell upon cause and effect while he contemplated whether they should go in “fabric” or “mixed plastics”.

The sceptic in me doubts how much “recycling” actually results from this whole process (we should be reducing our waste, I know, rather than indulging in costly ways of disposing of it). But six weeks on from my last trip to the tip, I’m still thinking about it enough to write this and send it to you. It feels like a glimpse of the dark underbelly to the shiny promise of the new year.

Things to read, watch and listen to:

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: I do daily podcast recommendations at The Listener, I write weekly podcast industry reports for Hot Pod, I make a fortnightly podcast called Shedunnit and I’m sometimes on Twitter. My book is out in paperback on 5 March. Pre-order a copy here.

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5 min read Permalink

a thimbleful of cherry brandy for three shillings

I was recording a podcast interview for a corporate client a while ago — we all have to pay the bills, lest you thought that this kind of scribbling alone magically sustains me — when somebody said something that intrigued and amazed me.

When the pandemic first made itself felt to us in the UK in March 2020, she said, she had started reading a little of Samuel Pepys’ diary every night before going to sleep. Immersing herself for a few minutes every day in the seventeenth century and hearing how he had coped with the waves of pestilence that broke over London during his lifetime was a welcome escape from the daily news reports of our own death tolls and public health failures. Two years and more in, she had finished seven volumes of the unabridged diaries and had two more to go.

Admirable, to be sure. I wish I had done something so edifying with my time. But I long ago came to the conclusion that the road forked when this major life change came upon us, and we all took one of two ways onward. Some, like this podcast guest, chose the path of virtue and productivity. These are the people who wrote novels, ran marathons, learned languages and otherwise made use of all that extra time at home.

Then there are those of us who took the second route, that of paralysis and wallowing. Required work barely got done, let alone housework and optional new projects or tasks. Of course, many were automatically shoved in this direction by the circumstances of parenting, caring, disability, chronic illness and so on, but I have no such explanation. I entered goblin mode of my own free will and have only just begun to drag myself out of it.

With my rebirth as a vaguely functioning person has come a renewed interest in chance literary encounters. I struggled to read for pleasure at all in 2020 and most of 2021, picking up books and then discarding them a few pages in when they failed to provide the exact balance of escapism and intellectual stimulation I was craving. I re-read a lot of books that I already knew, because cracking the spine on an unfamiliar story felt like too much of a risk. And I completely stopped picking up interesting-looking tomes just on the offchance that they might amuse or inspire me. The world became narrower and smaller as a result.

Then, a few months ago, I was in a cavernous and confusingly vast bookshop in Llangollen when I came across an anthology of diary entries that I had once owned but long ago lent to someone and lost. The first time I had The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diaries on my shelf I was always meaning to read it. It felt like the kind of thing I ought to be doing but never quite got round to, just like I probably ought to have used lockdown to write one of the half dozen novel ideas that are always revolving, uncaptured, in my head. Flipping through its pages, I reacquainted myself with its daily layout of extracts from different writers across the centuries and thought: why can’t I.

And so, the great bulk of The Assassin’s Cloak came home with me and I have been reading my way through the year ever since, a day at a time. I like to fill in my own one line a day diary first — endless exciting entries about how many squirrels my dog has almost caught — and then dive into everybody else’s. Of course the big hitters who wrote capital-D diaries are all there: Pepys, Vera Brittain, John Evelyn, Queen Victoria, Alan Bennett, E.M. Delafield, and more. And they can be fun, on occasion.

But the best evenings are the ones when I meet someone I barely know, like the dancer Liane de Pougy, who uses her entries to gossip about who just got false teeth or to vent her feelings about what Jean Cocteau has done now. Or when Alice James, invalid sister of Henry, reaches out from the page to commiserate with me about being ill and having to pretend that you aren’t: “It is an immense loss to have all robust and sustaining expletives refined away from one!”. Then there’s Franz Kafka, master of casual juxtaposition; on 2nd August 1914 he writes: “Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon.”

I enjoy skimming through all these lives so much that I often have to speak sternly to myself so that I don’t read ahead. The pleasure is in the consistency, of recognising certain names that recur across the weeks and months, and of seeing new ones crop up. There are a few that now make my stomach do a swoop of excitement when I see them, and chief among them is Denton Welch. I had never encountered this Chinese-born British writer and painter before I started reading The Assassin’s Cloak every day, but I learned from the biographical appendix that after a serious car accident at the age of 20 in 1935 he became a prolific diarist. He wrote over 200,000 words in his journals between 1942 and 1948, chronicling the art he could not make and the life he could not live because of his pain.

On 17th September 1944 he recorded this:
“Shall I write about the war ending? Or about my breakfast of porridge, toast, marmalade and coffee? Or just about autumn. Waking up cold in the morning; coming back cold through the low blanket of mist by the waterfall last night — from the pub on Shipbourne Common, where Eric bought me a thimbleful of cherry brandy for three shillings, and we heard the loudmouthed woman holding forth on cubbing before breakfast.

In this house now — in the big part which Eric and I are sleeping in because Mrs Sloman is away, I have an eighteenth century wooden mantel in my room, taken from an old house. Then there is a china green basin and brass locks with drop handles to the doors. The furniture is ‘limed oak’, ugly, and a chinchilla Persian cat is sleeping and grunting and dribbling on my bed. Outside the window a tractor is humming. Eric is having a cold bath, so that the water pipes sing.”
I have never read such a perfect evocation of autumn. It’s not overwritten or self consciously literary, but the description is vivid and precise: we can follow him on that dark misty walk back from the pub, brandy warming our insides, and know how the door handles in the chilly old house with singing pipes would feel in the hand.

I am glad to have met Denton Welch. My world is expanding again.

What I’ve been doing and reading since I last wrote to you
— Very little that I can show you! Writing a book is this long boring process where you’re left alone in a room for years to produce something while lots of other people wait for it to appear so they can do their bits. It bends your mind somewhat. I might write more about this another time.

— Using supercook.com to make better dinners. Fill out all the ingredients you currently have available and it suggests recipes from across the internet that you can make. You can also filter by cooking time and dietary requirements. I filter for <30 minutes and then just make the top recommendation every time; it hasn’t steered me wrong.

— Launched the annual pledge drive for my detective fiction podcast. I am not good at asking for money to make things so I only really do it in a concerted way once a year and I have to delete a lot of apologies from the relevant scripts. The equation is simple really, though: the show is free to listen to; it costs money to make; costs are going up. There are perks available if you help out.
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5 min read Permalink

this will take a minute

I was browsing the selection of books in my local charity shop recently when I encountered something wonderful: a microwave cookbook from the early 1980s. It included all the greatest hits you might expect from such a text. There were “recipes” that involve decanting a tin of soup into a bowl and heating it for three minutes, several cheery injunctions to microwave fish, and the hair-raising suggestion that putting an entire leg of lamb in to “roast” will somehow not result in something poisonously raw. I enjoyed flicking through the book, putting it back on the shelf and then immediately forgetting about it.

Except I didn’t really forget about it. One aspect of it stuck with me, and it was this: the author truly seemed to believe that this one device — the microwave — was the answer to every culinary conundrum. Everything in that book was predicated on that underlying principle. Never mind if most kitchens already contain at least one device that is better suited for toasting bread than a microwave. You technically can dry out bread in a microwave, and so you should. And then poach a whole salmon in it too. The versatility of the device is its entire attraction. It isn’t truly good at any of these actions, but it can sort of do them all.

This idea lingered with me because it gave me an explanation for some recent purchases I’ve made and habits I’ve been cultivating. I didn’t realise it until I read the microwave cookbook, but all of these actions were aimed at taking functions away from my phone — another apparently endlessly multifunctional device that I am beginning to suspect is best used mostly as… a phone. A tool for communicating with other people, in all the various forms that takes.

The first step wasn’t even taken by me. My husband takes a lot of photographs of documents when he visits archives and was constantly running out of space on his phone as a result. So he bought a digital camera, the kind that my mother had in the 2000s. It’s small enough to fit in a pocket but uses external storage cards you can swap out so you never run out of space. The resolution or zoom is nothing to write home about, but it is decent enough for very amateur purposes. It just takes photos, nothing else.

Soon he was bringing it with him on walks and to family events. I’ve come to really enjoy opening up his emails with the link to download the best photos from whatever we’ve done recently. I certainly like that we can experience things and have pictures to keep without having to go through everything with our phones glued to our hands. Of course, it’s still handy to be able to snap and send a quick picture when I want to, but I can now do so with no expectation that this is the only way I have to record an experience.

After that I got a digital reading device, a Supernote A5X. I much prefer to read physical books, but when ebooks were unavoidable I used to read them on my phone and feel irritated the entire time. Like the camera, the Supernote really only allows you to perform one category of action — it displays digital text and lets you annotate it. You can’t check WhatsApp or reply to emails because it just doesn’t have that capability. It’s a well designed, single purpose device.

The same could be said of the cheap MP3 player that I now keep on me most of the time. It’s tiny, barely bigger than a USB drive, but it connects easily to my bluetooth headphones and stores many days of music, podcasts and audiobooks. When I was browsing reviews before making my choice, I found one in which the purchaser had complained that this particular device had an annoying animation of a padlock closing that displayed whenever it was locked, and that this took up valuable seconds. I remembered a line from one of my favourite podcast episodes, in which Jack Antonoff sings the praises of a vintage emulator he has that, when you switch programme, pauses for about 45 seconds and displays the message “this will take a minute”. I bought the MP3 player that likewise takes its time and it is serving me well.

I should be clear: I’m not at all suggesting that phones are inherently terrible or that we should all head for the woods and write articles about it. I do, however, think that the companies that make phones and the software that runs on them have a vested financial interest in monetising our attention, and that a big part of that is convincing me that my phone is the answer to every question I ask. And once I open it to perform one task, their every effort goes into keeping me there… to do what? Scroll material with ads served in between.

There has to be a space in between cutting myself off from technology entirely and the opposite extreme of “my phone is currently both filing my taxes and testing my blood for vitamin deficiencies”, I think. So far, for me, that has taken the form of returning my phone to its core purpose as a device for communication, and seeking better solutions for its other functions.

I’m essentially recreating my personal technology situation from about 2007, when I had a phone that could make calls, receive texts and take blurry pictures and little else. I checked my email when I was at my computer and never thought about it when I wasn’t. Perhaps this is just nostalgia, but the way I remember it, it felt like the devices served me rather than the other way around. That’s what I’m trying to get back to.

For the most part. If they invent a microwave app for my phone, I can’t promise that I won’t be tempted to use it to make toast.

What I’ve been doing and reading since I last wrote to you

— I’m deep into the “zero draft” of my new book, and it’s taken me to some strange places in the last couple of weeks. These include watching an entire performance of a Molière play in French (a language I do not speak at all well) and falling down a deep rabbit hole of academic papers about Paracelsus. I could not have guessed when I first came up with the idea of writing a history of hypochondria that I would have to become an expert in 16th alchemy but here we are.

— There is very little that I miss about Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, but I did used to like the occasional “view from your window” photographs he posted from readers. I’ve now found the artistic equivalent of this in the “View from the Easel” series at Hyperallergic and I highly recommend it.

— I made a podcast about queer theory and detective fiction.

— I reviewed the books I read in September in detail over on my Instagram; among other things, I returned to Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird and found it very helpful with the above book-writing process.

— I recently discovered the spy novels of Sarah Gainham and am about to start her non-fiction collection Habsburg Twilight: Tales from Vienna. If anyone with any power in publishing is reading this, please consider reissuing her — the price of secondhand Gainhams is getting ridiculous.

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4 min read Permalink

having a summer; I recommend it

It wasn’t until midway through August that I realised what was happening: unlike the past fifteen years, I was having a summer. The days were long, the sea was warm, and I had unconsciously moulded myself around it all, making the most of it because it wouldn’t last forever. Work was still getting done, of course — perhaps one day I will be able to “summer” in the rich person sense, I certainly can’t now — but it had to fit around everything else. Like swimming or gardening or eating cake under the linden tree with old friends.

This state of affairs was partly created by two lengthy relocations. Taking advantage of the fact that my academic husband gets a long vacation away from his campus and that I can write anywhere, we agreed to do two stints of housesitting many hours’ drive away from where we live. The process of packing up two humans, their books, a dog and all of his accessories for a month or more felt momentous, as if when we eventually returned nothing would be quite the same again. I kept thinking about the various staff magazine jobs I have had over the past decade. As a person without children, taking leave during the school summer break was nigh-on impossible. Now, I am grateful that I no longer have to jostle for space on the leave calendar and limit myself to time away in May and November only.

There are disadvantages to working the way I do, to be sure. When friends in conventional salaried employment suggest doing something fun on a public holiday, my initial reaction is not pleasure but a stab of guilt that if I don’t work, I won’t be paid. Or when I try to work through a migraine because for the self-employed, there is no such thing as sick leave. Covid and a general terror of being destitute have prevented me from appreciating the other side of this coin, though. The one where I can work only early in the morning and late at night if I so choose, leaving a great stretch of the day free for whatever activity best suits weather and mood.

I didn’t spend two and a half months lying on a sun lounger; far from it. I’m not sure I could. Part of the reason for the housesitting was to be close to the various archives I need to consult for the book I’m working on, and I spent long afternoons in non-air conditioned libraries poring over some tedious texts. I found the various heat waves stressful and frightening, in part because trying to keep my dog’s sleeping-towel at the correct level of cool dampness required constant monitoring. A family member needed emergency surgery. Our car’s handbrake stopped working, and we had to walk several miles across Cornish fields to get it mended. I fell off a wall along the way, hit some barbed wire on the way down and bled all over my shoes.

Life continued to be as it is, in other words, but it also had space for glorious things that are only possible when it stays light past 9pm. Quite by accident, I stopped using social media completely. I was too busy doing to be documenting. (“Holidays, if you enjoy them, have no history,” Rosamond Lehmann once wrote.)

It was that line from Lorde’s “Writer in the Dark” that helped me untangle these feelings about my summer. “I let the seasons change my mind,” she sings, and I realised that that’s what I had done too. The pandemic held us in a never-changing state of anxiety and inactivity, unable to adjust to the world outside because of our fear of sickness and our fear of having our hopes dashed. Planning to be different during an upcoming season felt too much like tempting fate. Even before 2020, I largely ignored the year’s shifts, scared of losing my job, of trying something else, of what might happen if I altered the rhythm for a while.

The autumn equinox takes place tomorrow in the northern hemisphere. The sun crosses the equator, heading south, marking the end of summer and anticipating the colder days ahead. We sat down with our diaries the other night, checking our various upcoming commitments and making logistical plans for the autumn. It felt like a different season of life was taking over, which would have its pleasures and pitfalls too, the contrast only possible and indeed noticeable because of what had gone before.

Having a summer; I recommend it.

What I’ve been up to since I last wrote to you

— The American publisher for my next book was announced— I’m working with Ecco Books at Harpercollins US

— Two editions of my quarterly column in the New Humanist magazine were published, one about apocalyptic TV dramas and the other assessing recent attempts to parse the MeToo movement on screen

— I was on the Media Podcast, the Standard Issue podcast and the All About Agatha podcast (and my own podcast, Shedunnit, which is also now available through the BBC Sounds app in the UK)

— Five Books interviewed me about my favourite summer mysteries

What I’ve been reading

Too many books to list here, but a lot of Cadfael and Pride and Prejudice sequels for holiday enjoyment. Non-holiday highlights have included Emilie Pine’s Note to Self and Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite.

I’ve been slowly catching up on everything I’ve read on my Instagram. Visit the “What I’m Reading” highlight on my profile to page through it all and see my thoughts on each title.

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3 min read Permalink

call the coastguard, I suppose

Recently, I made a trip back in time. I returned to a place that I have some very ​mixed feelings about. I braced myself to encounter the version of myself that existed there and to realise once more that she is not me and also still me. In other words: I visited the place where I went to university.

Everyone has a place like this, I think. Somewhere that they lived through formative years and now can’t bear to think too hard about. I made mine more fraught by writing about it in a book, so that when I go back there I’m not only in company with my 18 year old self having those experiences for the first time, but also the 30 year old self who painstakingly moulded them into prose for strangers to read.

The intensity of the time travel was compounded this time because of why I was there. Oxford is, it turns out, a convenient geographic mid point for various members of my immediate family — it’s about three hours’ drive from home for all of us. And so, when my parents set a date for their departure on a months-long sailing voyage, this was where we met to bid them farewell.

It was a delightful occasion. We ate, we laughed, we walked around the meadow making fun of my dog who kept jumping in the river and alarming the punters. I enjoyed myself enormously. I also couldn’t turn off the part of my brain that kept looking for differences in the way familiar gates opened or how bus routes worked. I kept seeing shadows at the edge of my vision: this is where I once jumped in the river; this is where a friend fell in while punting and lost his glasses to the muddy bottom; I think I once cried in this bathroom. It was unnerving, to be so happy in the present while past sadnesses brushed past me.

The purpose of the gathering had this same tug of pleasure-pain about it. My parents are very competent sailors — the aforementioned book will fill in more details about this if you are curious — but the idea of them crossing the Atlantic in a small sailing boat at their age does still make me anxious.

With the post-lunch coffee, my father proudly explained to my sister and I that he had invested in fancy new personal emergency beacons that, if they end up in the water, will automatically call our mobile numbers to let us know. His excitement at the cleverness of this technology temporarily obscured my understanding that in this scenario, the beacon would be attached to a parent who would be in the water as well, thousands of miles out to sea. That revelation trickled in much later when I was trying to sleep. Quite what I am supposed to do upon receiving this phone call eludes me. Call the coastguard, I suppose.

My first book is dedicated to my parents. Their lifelong habit of slipping over the horizon under sail at every chance they get is in part the reason that I write the way I do: by setting out to cover new territory that I am afraid of but try to traverse anyway.

I recently completed a grant application for the new book that I’m currently working on and it required a statement about the potential pitfalls of the project. The biggest one I could come up with was that I have no published track record in the subject matter, and thus no built-in audience for the book. It’s a risk, a much greater one than writing about something I am already known for would be. This didn’t occur to me while pitching the idea. It seemed like the obvious and only thing to do, just as my father has always been politely baffled that more people don’t sail alone across oceans for recreation.

I remembered this as I watched him demonstrate with his hands how the beacon comes to life upon contact with the water and I thought: of course I will write about this.

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3 min read Permalink

what if not everything had to be maximised for profit?

Although I graduated into the aftermath of the 2008 recession, I kept hold of what felt like an unobtainable dream about what work should be. I categorised everything I could do into two sets: things I enjoyed and things I was good enough at to do professionally. At the intersection of these two sets resided my dream job, I thought. Aged 21, I thought all my preferences and skills had attained their final form, you see. How wrong I was.

A decade and a half later, that vision of the overlap between what I like and what I can do has been on my mind again. I have made a version of it come true: I love to read, to over-analyse books, articles and TV shows, and to write about them. These are the things that I now get paid to do. I’m extremely lucky that this is the case. The consequence of this, though — unforeseen by baby graduate me — is that by professionalising the things you love, you change your relationship to them, sometimes for the worse.

I spend a large proportion of my work days now reading: about illness for my hypochondria book, longform journalism for The Browser newsletter, and murder mysteries for my podcast Shedunnit. Reading is what I used to sneak away from my parents to do as a child, to sink into deliciously as a teenager knowing that there was nothing else I had to do but turn pages. Now it happens on a schedule, in exchange for money. Sometimes I reach the end of the day and my “reading for fun” time and just… don’t want to do it. It feels like work. And even when you love your work, you can’t fill every waking minute with it.

It feels highly spoiled to even admit this, when so many people have to do things they don’t like or that actively harm them in order to make ends meet. I don’t think this is a real problem in the grand scheme of things. But I do think it’s worth demystifying the idea that turning your most treasured recreation into your job is the ideal end point of every career. Phrases like “side hustle” and “passion project” obscure this truth. They suggest that if you can only work out how turn your “side” hustle into your “main” hustle, you will achieve happiness and success.

But what if not everything had to be maximised for profit? I have had to learn to recognise and check the capitalist impulses I’ve imbibed from the world around me. There’s no need for my every idea and hobby to become part of some fundamental transaction. I don’t need an Etsy store to sell what I knit, or an ad- supported podcast dedicated to the obscure facts about saints that I collect. Some of what I do can go undocumented, without a price attached.

Long time readers will know that social media usage is a topic I return to often. It impinges on this too, as a more subtle intrusion of the market on our days. Perhaps I reject the obvious hustle and don’t put my craft projects up for sale on Etsy, but if I post about them on Instagram for friends and acquaintances to see, am I monetising them? A company is running ads against that content, even if I don’t see a cut of it. A financial value is still being assigned to what I’ve made.

I’m yet to work out what this means for what I read. I don’t know how to throw up that wall in my head between the murder mysteries I read because writing about them is my job, and the murder mysteries I read because I love the genre. I think that love is what makes me good at writing about them, but it’s also what keeps pulling me in these two contradictory directions. Sometimes it can feel like work has stolen all my hobbies. This is the best I’ve come up with: do what you love, but be aware that it might be painful one day.

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4 min read Permalink

how to start writing a book

In the last few months of 2021, I sold a book. This was the culmination of, no exaggeration, years of work. Mostly on myself, rather than the book.

To give you the timeline: I sent a page long summary of the idea to my agent in November 2018. She was enthusiastic. I slowly started researching the subject matter to put together a proper proposal that could be pitched to publishers. Over the next two and a half years I worked on this document sporadically, adding material in great bursts of energy and then ignoring it for long stretches. One day I wrote 6,000 words in a huge rush fuelled by the Muse album Black Holes and Revelations and then didn’t look at what I had written for three months. Every time I saw a new book or essay with related subject matter the knot in my stomach would twist tighter.

The pandemic didn’t help, but why would it? Lucky people like me who were physically and financially comfortable were writing entire novels and giving birth to babies despite being in quarantine, but I found it near impossible to finish my chapter outlines. I am an expert at what might be termed “productive procrastination” — that is, filling up my time with other work so that I sadly don’t have any time for riskier, more challenging writing. And that is what I did. The last two years have been my best as a freelance writer, in large part because I was not-writing my book proposal.

I’m not sure when the switch flipped, but early last summer I had the blindingly obvious realisation that if I wanted to be someone who had published books, plural, then I would have to be the one to write them. It was a true epiphany, in the sense that I felt that my future had been revealed to me and I didn’t like it much. I remember having to get into bed mid afternoon with a cup of tea and let the idea slowly drip through my mind and body. The main difference between the writers I admired and me was that they were doing The Work — that tedious grind of showing up for a project that doesn’t exist yet — while I was merely gesturing towards it.

I had been signed up to the writer Jami Attenberg’s newsletter for years and it was there that I found my next step. I have been a fan of her work since she published The Middlesteins: A Novel in 2012 and I was aware that she periodically runs an accountability challenge called 1000 Words Of Summer. Writing 1000 words a day for two weeks would finish the book proposal off. I mentally committed myself to doing it. Crucially, I made this decision public and posted my word counts on my Instagram story each day. It worked: after fourteen days, I had a rough but complete account of my book idea that I could begin licking into shape.

A few weeks later, I was on holiday in Scotland when Granta, the publisher of my first book, made their offer and I knew that this new book would one day exist. I walked around Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye in a daze, the pace of it all giving me a feeling like whiplash. After two years of barely anything, it had taken two weeks to turn out something that a company was willing to pledge money for. I tried to salvage an iota of satisfaction from the sea of self recrimination. If I had tried harder, sooner, would the book have happened more quickly?

The answer is no. It has taken me over a decade of being a professional writer to learn this, but there is a difference between writing and typing. Writing has many stages and almost none of them happen while I am sitting in front of a computer. The flashes of insight when reading someone else’s work, the sentences that float unbidden through my mind when trying to sleep, the realisations that come while walking — this is writing. What I did during those two weeks of intense work on the book proposal was typing up the thoughts that had been coalescing for the previous two years.

Selling a book is a rush, I can’t pretend otherwise. After a long time alone with the idea, suddenly the writer is in meetings where everyone wants to tell them how wonderful their proposal is. It is undeniably validating to find out that experts believe the concept you love is one that other people will love too. There is a pleasing flurry of conversations, negotiations and signings.

Then you are left alone to write it.

And that is where you find me now, once again sitting at my computer, alone, not-writing my book. Now that we are in the last stretch of this year’s January days, my intentions from the first week of 2022 seem laughable. I declared this “The Year of the Book” and vowed not to repeat the mistakes of the past. I would reduce not increase the amount of other work I had to do. I would make progress every day, no matter how small. I would not get into that familiar paralysing funk. Above all, I would be honest about what had to be done for the book to exist even if that was terrifying. Except I haven’t started yet.

It helps to think about it in the past tense, I have found. In a year’s time, I will have written a book about hypochondria. It will happen slowly and gradually. I won’t enjoy every minute of it, but there will be times when nothing has ever felt as good as transcribing my thoughts about imaginary illnesses. I will cry about the events I have to document and I will swear about how hard it is to get hold of seventeenth century medical textbooks.

I won’t do it alone. You are subscribed to this list because at some point you were interested enough in my work to put your email in a box and click ‘OK’. What I send you has taken a variety of forms over the years, and I have always felt guilty about my lack of consistency in format or publishing schedule. No longer, though: No Complaints is whatever I need it to be, and for the next year it is a diary for The Year of the Book. It is my accountability partner and my space to think aloud. I’ll ask myself questions and you can ask me some too. This time, it’s where I’m starting.

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