I've not written about my time in the States enough, apparently. I've guest blogged at Pond Parleys here and my ego thinks that you should go and read it.
An incomplete list of some things I call my 2017 achievements: - saw my first ballet, from the really cheap seats all the way at the back. - cleansed, toned and moisturised every morning, and every night. - bought furniture. - threw a really very good Christmas party. - refused to save the candles for best. - called my mother. - called my father. - interviewed a celebrity. - deleted Facebook. - stopped nannying. - maintained a relationship with the girls I used to nanny - and their mama. - took a month off. - bought £300-worth of sex toys all in one go. - went viral online for falling over. - said out loud that I want a baby. - received a case of wine. - got offered a horse and cart at the entrance to Soho Farmhouse. - went swimming in the ladies pond on the Heath when we had the heatwave. - went home for Easter. - went ginger, and on purpose. - hosted an event about mental health. - did my first lit fest. - took a day trip to Oxford. - saw Titanic at the Royal Albert Hall with a l...
The metre-and-a-half wide frame has hung empty above my bed since July. I paid a man to hang it. I'd harboured, to begin with, reservations about how my feminism and my employment of somebody else to execute the job dovetailed awkwardly, but after I hit myself in the face with a hammer one night, not understanding the difference between a nail at 45 degrees into a diving wall and a drill with a spiral anchor into a brick wall, I decided the most feminist act would be, in fact, to use my hard-earned feminist money to feministly delegate somebody better qualified to help me out - who yes, just so happened to be a man. I have never looked back. The room needed something above the bed - that's why I got the frame and had it hung - but I couldn't rush to fill it. It needed to be right. I didn't want a generic Ikea print: they can satisfy the dead area behind the door in the living room because that is a neutral space. Bedrooms - bedrooms must be ...
I teach creative writing, and often what happens is that my students repeat my words back to me and I don't understand that it was me who said them first and it's a headfuck. I love teaching. I love communicating knowledge and I love using my skill with words to package information in a way that lands with the other person. I sort of took it upon myself, at the end of last year, to help one of the girls I used to nanny with her 11+ because I could so clearly identify where her boldest missteps were and part of me thought maybe I am interfering too much and then her mother cancelled her tutor and asked me to come over instead and you know what? She aced the exam and I know I played a part in that. After, when she called me to tell me how good she felt about what she'd done, I cried. She's working on a novel and she FaceTimed me on Easter Sunday from a walk on the Devon coast to show me some goat poo. That child reminds me to be love. Some people have comme...
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