Tag: personal

August Moon: day 3

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What do you love?

I love my new house. And, since Kat’s prompt for today asks me to think about collections and bookshelves and other things that one might find in a house, I am going to show it to you.

I will hustle you through the front door and the narrow corridor, through to the back of the house, to the kitchen, where it suddenly all opens out. I am enjoying this kitchen. I’ve got room to put things away and room to put things down, and the tap runs hot within a few seconds.

My piano. I love my piano. I swapped a car for it – I can’t drive and I can’t play the piano so it was really a neutral decision. Both were inherited from my godmother Heloise. I love it because it was hers and I love it because it is utterly beautiful, such warm brown wood, such gorgeous art nouveau gilt letters, such a pure clear tone. It stands at the entrance to the sitting room, and visitors come in, and see it, and ask, Can I play your piano? The answer is always yes.

I would show you my current pride and joy, my newly framed pictures. Seven of them: five up on the wall, one propped against a box, one on top of the piano. They’re symbolic, in a way, of everything that I’ve been meaning to do for years and am now doing. The watercolour of lovely watery Annecy and the Montmartre drawing of me and Tony from our honeymoon; the three of my own photographs that say actually, yes, I can take a damn good picture when I put my mind to it; the photograph of Heloise, very beautiful in the late 1970s, smoking on the back of a Paris bus (3380, I think); my mermaid poster, screen-print in mauve and grey, for an exhibition I didn’t go to by an artist I’d never heard of, which none the less was the thing I needed to buy at the time.

The other pictures, yes. Two montages, one of wedding photos and associated ephemera, the other, likewise, of the honeymoon. Photos in cardboard mounts and clip frames, friends and family. Collages, made to set intentions or to lay foundations for castles in the air. A nude by Andrew, the first real piece of art I bought. An odd little trio: the Maxwell equations, done by Anne in blackwork for Tony, a little crucifix, and my compostela. I walked five hundred miles to Santiago de Compostela and all I got was a certificate in Latin… Three yachts in the Old Gaffers race – a nod to the Isle of Wight, that. My year 9 Textiles project, marbled cotton with appliqué and beads: Atlantis with treasure chest and mermaid.

Yes, you would probably notice the mermaids. The mermaids and the ships and the shells. Ignore the photo in the bathroom; that was there when we got here. The shells are cockles, scallops, for pilgrimage. Many paths, leading to the same city. The mermaids are for transition, for breaking the surface. The ships are for trust, and for imperceptible progress.

Bookshelves: just about enough, now, at long last. The ones in the sitting room are ordered. Marching rows of series: Susan Howatch, Sadler’s Wells, Jasper Fforde, Narnia, Hilary McKay, John Buchan, Dorothy L. Sayers. Viragos. Poetry. Theology and LGBT and LGBT theology all skulking on the bottom shelf. Sheet music – mostly Tony’s, but, since we’re both altos, we share it. Tall, wide, hard-backed cookery and craft books, full of colour pictures of beautiful things that I might make, one day, and enjoy looking at in the mean time. In the study, the everything else shelf, to be reordered once I’ve cleared the two boxes that are blocking it.

Collections. Hats! If you look behind the door in my study you will find my greenhouse full of hats: winter hats and summer hats, formal hats and silly hats. Red felt and green, black straw, floppy magenta beret, wide-brimmed and brimless. I love them all. They are magnificent; they are my favourite way of saying, why, no, I don’t give a damn what you think about what I look like or what I’m wearing. In any case, they make me look fantastic. Dozens of packs of cards, each with a different, bright-coloured back: testimony to my huge, loose-knit family and its racing demon parties. Spices, jostling for space, some (cinnamon and ginger and paprika) always running out and needing renewing, but most of them nearly full, a pinch or a teaspoonful gone into some interesting new recipe. Things for making into things: beads, fabric, pens, rubber stamps. This idea about using up what you’ve got before accepting anything else is not helpful. Things have to fester for a bit so that you know what to do with them, and using all-new stuff is too slick and chilly. In the shed: the bikes. At the moment, n=2, a bike and a trike.

On my iTunes: opera grand and petty, the folk song army, rousing hymns, magnificently purple Victorian oratorio and sentimental songs. Things to sing along to. DVDs? Most of mine are Doctor Who: stories of infinite horizons, and basic human, or alien, decency.

What do I love? I love colour and flamboyance and adventure; journey and integrity; beauty and truth; love and joy.

August Moon: day 2

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What is it that you do now?

What do I do now?

I have always felt the French expression metro-boulot-dodo sums up a lot, but not all, of my weekday life.

‘Metro’ in my case means a twenty-minute cycle and a fifty-minute train ride each way. Cycling is brilliant. It has to be a very horrible day indeed, knee-deep puddles and obnoxious drivers, for cycling not to cheer me up. I also enjoy the train: it’s very fast and, so long as I get a seat, it’s time to get on with stuff with very few distractions. Metaphorically speaking, I breathe in on the way out and breathe out on the way back. That is, I spend the journey to work reading, or listening to music, and the journey back writing.

My ‘boulot’ is administration for a major trade union. Nine months ago I moved from a regional office to the national office. These days I get to eat in the staff canteen. I also get time to think – largely about how much I like being busy at work. This morning I looked up some email addresses and continued rearranging the electronic filing system: more of a challenge than it sounds, particularly given that I will need to explain what I’ve done and why. I do wonder what on earth I’m going to do with myself when I’ve finished; hence the wish for Another New Opportunity to manifest itself.

I work from 8.20am to 4pm, meaning that I miss most of the crowding on the roads and the trains, and that I get home at about half past five, and so get a decent chunk of evening. If it’s my day to cook, I pick up sundries at the Tesco on the way home. How enthusiastically I go about cooking depends on my mood, my energy, and how much stuff we have to use up. It might take me two hours to make a stir fry. Or I might rustle up two courses and lunch for the next three days. Either way, the mental effort involved has to be deducted from a limited sum available.

Apart from that, my evenings tend to be occupied in writing up whatever I wrote on the train, writing a bit more, making beautiful things (usually with beads, but sometimes sewing) – those still count as boulot – and messing around on the internet (definitely dodo). About twenty minutes of internet time is catching up with friends and reading stuff I genuinely find interesting; the rest is distraction and procrastination.

I would like to reduce my internet time, and exclude mindless meandering around long-dead comments pages that I’m not actually interested in. I’d like to notice when the switch flicks from ‘awake and productive’ to ‘sleepy and unable to disconnect’. And I would like to replace that with actual rest. Lying on the sofa listening to music. Getting an early night. Reading.

Dodo – and so to bed. I feel that any more time I could devote to bed would not be wasted.

Miracle Due

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I used to be terribly cynical about Romeo and Juliet, and adaptations thereof. “But you only met yesterday!” I’d cry. “What did you expect to happen?” I would wonder whether anybody really thought that the state of affairs in Verona would be materially improved. I would side-eye people who held up R. and J. as Most Romantic Couple, etc.

It occurred to me, yesterday, watching West Side Story, that I’d missed the point. Of course people are always falling in love in a wildly inappropriate fashion. Of course it rarely ends well. However, in a well-regulated society, not ending well does not involve people getting killed. Romeo and Juliet (or Tony and Maria, or whoever) are young and hopelessly over-optimistic, yes, but if they weren’t also in the middle of a war zone it would be a farce, not a tragedy.

There were two points to this post:

1. I seem to be getting less cynical as I get older;
2. I had forgotten about this song:

I used to see the irony in it. Now I hear the hope. It’s an interesting contrast to the equivalent speech in Romeo and Juliet, in which Romeo also knows there’s something coming, but is as gloomy as all get-out about it. I prefer Tony’s take on it, going out to meet it head-on, in joyful expectation. I’m not convinced he isn’t right, either. What’s coming to him doesn’t work in the world in which he lives, but it doesn’t stop it being good.

It resonates, too, with the wild feeling of possibility and hope that I associate with Advent. It is probably significant that I was reading back through godblog‘s Destuckification Novena yesterday, before we went out to the theatre, and that I’m feeling increasingly that it is time and more to move on… I don’t know what’s coming. Nor could I stop it, if I did. All I can do is go out and meet it. It’s an attitude I’ve been trying to practice for a year or so, now, and it works so much better for me than hiding and observing.

Come on, something, come on in, don’t be shy, meet a guy, pull up a chair…

Faith, belief, doubt, and pedantry

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I think, for me, there are two main elements to this: the way faith works for me in the context of my history of depression, and my religious background.

First, thought, it’s worth mentioning that I draw a distinction between faith and belief, and that I am acutely aware of the difference between knowledge and knowledge (why doesn’t English translate savoir and connaître properly?) – knowing intellectually, in the head, if you like, and knowing in the heart – the difference between knowing facts and knowing people.

Faith, for me, is not the same as belief. (This, I know, is not something that all Christians would agree on, but I am only talking, here and throughout, about one Christian.) I can remember a real lightbulb moment a few years ago, at one of my parish’s Lent Courses Where One Is Not Told The Answer, where somebody linked faith to trust rather than to belief, and I suddenly stopped feeling guilty about not believing hard enough. These days I think I would describe it as ‘relationship with the Divine’ and leave it at that.

I’m very Anglican. I am both catholic and protestant, and neither Catholic nor Protestant. My non-conformist streak is Quaker, and Quakers don’t conform with anything, particularly non-conformists. And I say all this because the thing about the very Protestant Churches that I was most glad to leave behind was their insistence on belief, the idea that one has to believe the right thing to be saved. It always felt all wrong to me.

I am finding increasingly as I get older (she says, from the ripe old age of 28) that what I believe is becoming less and less important. I don’t worry at all about whether other people are believing the right thing, whatever that is. My own belief has become less certain, and less defensive. I don’t know what I believe about all sorts of things, and that no longer seems to be a problem, except to other people. At the same time, my faith has become much surer. I can’t really describe it, except by saying that it’s a sense of being loved, in a very calm, sustaining kind of way.

Which is all very well, when my brain is working. Quite often it isn’t. I’ve had depression on and off for the past twelve years, I would guess. There are two things about this that are particularly relevant to this post. Firstly: when I am depressed I cannot remember how it feels to not be depressed. (Conversely, when I’m not depressed, I find it difficult to remember how awful being depressed is, but, because my brain is working better all round, I can – if I choose, which I usually don’t – describe it via imagination.) Secondly: when I am depressed I cannot feel love, either giving it or receiving it. I can have my best friend hugging me and feel about as much emotional response as a dustpan.

This is where savoir and connaître come into it. In my head I know that my family love me, that my husband loves me, that my friends love me. Sometimes they tell me this using actual words. They mean those words. And in my head I know all that, and it means absolutely nothing. It doesn’t get any further. When my brain is working, on the other hand, it’s fine. It all gets through and I feel it deeply. I can quite often be in love with the entire universe for whole seconds at a time. (An interesting side-effect of this is that I now cry at pretty much anything. Tinny call-centre Vivaldi, for example. Also discovering that I have more and better friends than I thought I had, which has happened quite a lot over the past few months because of my brain not being so broken as usual.)

What I am driving at here is probably obvious: that a faith that manifests itself predominantly in a sense of love cannot make itself felt all the time, particularly when I can’t feel love all the time anyway. And I suppose the spaces between might well be called doubt. The thing is, though, that I know that the ones who love me don’t stop loving me just because I don’t have the capacity to experience it, any more than the sun stops burning when it’s behind a cloud. The same feels true of the Divine. Apart from anything else, that’s always the first thing to come back.

So: that’s me, and faith, and doubt. I hope… I don’t know what I hope. But there it is. Be gentle.

I start here: Advent

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I have been looking forward to Advent. This feels vaguely heretical, given that Advent itself is meant to be about looking forward. Looking forward to looking forward. Oh well, why not?

Advent starts tomorrow – tidily, this year, on the first of December, so everyone’s Advent calendar is right, for once. I find this pleasing, because this Advent is a particularly important one. For me, at least.

I moved to Surrey in the late autumn of 2007. The first service I ever attended at Holy Trinity, Guildford, was the Advent Carol Service: the beginning of six years growing in love, faith, confidence and vocal skill. This was the church, and Church, I needed, and I found it on Advent Sunday because I’d lost my sense of direction and couldn’t work out how to get to the cathedral. In fact, I count my time in Guildford from that Advent Sunday; I can’t remember now what the date was that I actually moved, but Advent Sunday is where it began.

My last 101 in 1001 list (now abandoned, but helpful in various ways beyond the scope of the project) began on Advent Sunday 2010. To be fair, this was deliberate, but I think it’s interesting that even back then I was already thinking in terms of Advent being a beginning.

On Monday I begin a new job in a new office. This is a huge step: after nearly four years finding my confidence, my motivation, my feet, I’m moving on, and – well, I’ll almost certainly address this at some point over the next few weeks, but I seem to have a career now. And so, by pure chance, the first working day of Advent sees me starting a whole new adventure.

An entirely frivolous reason to like Advent: purple is my favourite colour (except for when I prefer red). Also, I’m an alto, and for an alto things don’t get much better than This is the Record of John.

And so I’ve come to the conclusion that my year runs Advent to – well, the Saturday after Stir Up Sunday, or Christ the King, or whatever you like to call this. I have decided to go with this. New Year’s Eve is always a write-off in my family, because of our devotion to the cult of historical public transport meaning that we all go to bed early. New Year’s Day is spent riding around Winchester on a succession of incredibly chilly buses. Advent Sunday, by contrast, is candles and purple and Gibbons and Mendelssohn and expecting. Advent means more to me than changing the year on the calendar ever has.

This does not really make any difference to anything outside my own head. I’m not going to start wishing people a Happy New Year tomorrow, or anything like that, but I want to say this, now: my new year starts tomorrow.

I’m not ready for it to be the new year. I have three things that terrify me: the Record solo, the new job, and turning right off the AA roundabout when I cycle back from the station on Monday night. I’m not sure I’m ready for any of this.

That is rather the point. I am never ready for anything until I start doing it. Starting my year in December (or, next year, November) gives me a whole extra month to get ready.

My first month of the year is also the last month of the year and I am going to use it as a time of very gentle transition.

In previous years (mostly last year, but to a certain extent before that) I have devoted the week between Christmas and New Year to fairly serious introspection, reflecting on the year gone, and looking forward to the year ahead. Last year I also took part in the Reverb project through most of December. This has worked very well. This year has been unnumbered blessings and I have made enormous progress in all sorts of things. Some of this is no doubt due to other factors, but having set the compass eleven months ago, being able to look back at what I wrote last year, has been very helpful.

This year I’m going to do it again, but I’m going to move the timescale a bit. I will devote the first four weeks of December (in other words, Advent) to this reflection. Reverb 13 prompts have already started appearing. I’m not going to beat myself up if I start slipping: I know already that this is going to be a peculiarly hectic Advent, because: new job, longer commute, long-distance relationship, three works Christmas parties (two of mine, one of his) and all sorts.

On the other hand, this does leave the week after Christmas completely free. At the moment I’m not sure what to do with it. I might use it to catch up with things I fall behind on. I might not. I don’t know. At the moment, that’s as it should be.

Other things for Advent: Haphazard by Starlight. Advent candle. As of yesterday, chocolate Advent calendar from one of my lovely colleagues. The O Antiphons (one of my plans for an unspecified date in the future, When I Have Time, is to make a sort of wall-hanging that will have the O Antiphons unfold over the week before Christmas to gradually spell out ERO CRAS). Freedom for this all to crash and burn and for me not to do any of it if it doesn’t seem right.

But at the moment, I am looking forward to all of it. Alleluia.

 

#justaboutclingingon

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The hashtag is cribbed from @davewalker. My reaction to that was, ‘oh, thank goodness, it’s not just me!’

It’s been a long Lent. A cold Lent, a hard Lent, a Lent that didn’t stop for Sundays, that ground me down, that wore on and on.

The first two weeks were OK and I had good intentions. Things like doing a lectio divina – not every day, because I am realistic, but twice a week at least, let’s say, and not buying things in supermarkets, and not buying things I didn’t need at all, and I was doing reasonably well…

Then there were all the people: two weeks where I had to see people every day, to be interesting and polite and to talk, and then have to do it all over again in the evening, because it was a PCC meeting, or my mother was staying the night, or there was something else that meant I had to talk to people, and I never had an evening, let alone a day, to just crash; and then my brain broke and I cried at work and I know I shouldn’t have gone in in the first place.

Then I caught a cold, which put me in bed for two days (not consecutive) and has put me on limited spoons (to the extent that my reasoning goes like this: “I would like to go out for a cycle. But my front tyre needs pumping up. But pumping my tyre up will be so much effort that by the time I’ve done it I will be too tired to go out cycling. Also I have evensong tonight oh God oh God there is so much stuff to do I just can’t…”)

And they put the clocks forward an hour and I’m not sure I’m ready for Easter. Because it’s already here and I’m still tired and cold and grumpy and coughing like a blocked drain, and not feeling spiritual in the least. #everythingchanges, says the Church of England, and I am here going, really?

But new life doesn’t always come with a boom as the stone crashes down. Mostly it creeps out in tender little green shoots, or tiny sticky leaves. It is not spectacular, but it is hope, of a sort.

I went to church this morning. The last hymn was Thine be the glory and our organist played little twiddly bits between the verses, because it’s Easter. The one between the second and last verses was particularly reminiscent of another famous Handel piece. Hallelujah! it went. Hallelujah!. Then, diddly diddly diddly pom pom pom NO MORE WE DOUBT THEE…

It would not have had me on my feet (had I not been already, I mean…) But I did feel a tear prickling at the corner of an eye, and thought, oh.

I am alive, after all. Hallelujah.

Adventures on Two Wheels

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Today I took my bike to the park.

This was something of an achievement. I am a reasonably keen cyclist – but the cycle in question is a tricycle. I learned to ride a bike when I was eleven or so, but I have never had very good balance, and always had problems with the whole ‘signalling right’ issue when on a bicycle – which meant that bicycling on roads was contraindicated. When we moved to the Isle of Wight, that was about the only place to ride a bike – so I stopped.

Last year I bought a tricycle and got reasonably good at cycling. At the beginning of this year I asked my brother to bring my bike (actually one I’d inherited from my aunt, and had never ridden myself) up from the Island. He and Tony have had a whale of a time taking it to bits, cleaning it, and going, ‘ooh, we have a sandblaster at work…’

Today I took my bike to the park.

It is not true that one never forgets how to ride a bicycle. One does remember fairly quickly, but one has to endure a certain period of blind terror, wild flailing, and falling off into puddles and leylandii hedges first. Then one finds that one foot follows the other, and one is half way across the park and hasn’t yet fallen off and OH HELP THERE IS A LADY WITH A DOG, so one brakes, and slithers forward, and discovers with extreme gratitude that one’s foot is on the ground and the bike hasn’t fallen over, and the lady is still fifty yards away, and the dog has disappeared completely.

So then one turns around to go back the other way and OH HELP THERE IS A CHILD ON A SCOOTER. But one is feeling quite brave (at least compared to when one started) and gingerly wades forward and starts pedalling, and is fine, and so is the child on a scooter. And then THERE IS A TREE AND THERE IS ALSO A LAMPPOST and one has to go between them oh my goodness (let us wuss out and stop and walk this bit) and then one decides to go between the public lavatories and the cricket pavilion and there are PUDDLES AND A HEAD WIND.

And after about half an hour of this one’s nerves are in shreds and one’s thighs are feeling likely to come up in magnificent bruises – and that’s quite enough for one day.

I am really quite proud of myself.

But I don’t think it’s going to space today, or even to Billingshurst in July.

Reverb 29: love

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Day 29: have you heard your word?

What word did you select to be your travelling companion in 2012? What gifts did this word bring?

What word will you choose to guide you through 2013? What do you hope it will bring into your life?

Last year, I decided that this year’s word was going to be balance. There was a point this summer when I decided that actually I should have said integrity. I didn’t just want to have balanced the various weightings of my life; I wanted to have got to the point where I could see them as all being part of the whole. I haven’t managed this as much as I’d like to have done (does anybody, ever?) but I think that getting to the point where the goal revealed itself as integrity was an achievement in itself. I will continue to work towards it.

Next year’s word has to be love – and I will have to remind myself of this thirteen times every day. I want this to be the year when I uncoil myself and reach out – and this is as much about loving myself (ugh) as it is about loving others. (This calls back to integrity, and looking at myself, and all sorts of other things I’ve been writing about this month.) I want to love more, to be more loving, and I want that to express itself in actions.

Reverb 28: facing fears

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Day 28: how will you overcome *those* fears?

Think of three things that daunted you in 2012: how are you going to work towards overcoming them in 2013?

I continue to suspect that all my fears come out of the one super-fear: that of being thought to be an idiot. This certainly accounts for fears one and two:

1. Talking to people;
2. Sharing my work;

Interestingly, this phases in and out depending on context. Work – actual assigned job work, I mean – gets most of my best brain time, so I tend to be pretty good at talking to people – strangers and colleagues, as appropriate – and have no qualms about saying “look at this newsletter I have written! is it not glorious?” And this is because work is a case where not doing all this would make me look like an idiot, so I have to.

It also phases in and out depending on my overall mood. As with all these things, I think the answer to becoming less scared is to practise more. I used to have a rule that I’d make myself talk to at least one person every week after church, rather than dashing straight for the door. Now I’m on collection duty this is less easy to manage. I must find other people to talk to.

Fear the third comes from somewhere completely different.

3. Looking at myself.

Not physically (though it’s sometimes difficult as we have no helpful mirrors), but, I don’t know, mentally or emotionally. Not wanting to prod myself too hard in case I find that I don’t like the person under the mask, in case she isn’t the person I want to be.

The way I’ve found to deal with this one is time to myself, and a blank notebook. This year, at the retreat I went on with church, I had this huge thing that was squatting on my mind. I spent a lot of the Greater Silence sitting up late and writing the whole lot down. And then I looked at it and went, ‘Is that it?’

Reverb 26: claiming time

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Day 26: how will you make time?

How do you intend to carve out more time for the things that are the most important to you in 2013?

What did I decide on? Writing, cycling, people, prayer. I should also include sleep. I am not going to cut into my sleep time for any of this, because it will have a negative impact on everything.

So. Seven hours of work. (Lunchtime at the moment is either reading or wandering around town.) Eight hours of sleep. Nine hours to divide between everything else. That’s weekdays. As far as weekends are concerned, I get about five hours on a Sunday between the two sets of church, and so Saturday is the only day that’s completely free.

How to get the rest of it in? Yes, well, this is always the problem, isn’t it? And, much as I rave about cycling, and, indeed, need to keep cycling because it’s the only serious exercise I get, it does deprive me of an hour per work day (ten minutes train journey, plus ~ten minutes messing around at either end) that I was previously devoting to reading or writing.

Work time is, of course, work time. I have in the past tried doing the Angels of the Hours at work, but usually end up thinking, ‘well, I have a browser window open now, let me look at the internet’, so that doesn’t really work.

My Thursday evenings usually turn out to be the most productive: in the two hours between work and choir practice I sit in Caffe Nero, get my head down, and write. Either that or I go to Evensong at the cathedral. Both good. I will keep Thursdays going in this manner. (And I have dropped off the chorister minding list, hurrah! I know I am going for the love and the outreach this year, but really, watching fifteen small boys attempting to kill each other did nothing for my feelings for humanity in general.)

The obvious answer, to some of it at least, is to switch off the internet more. That’s the plan, then, from when work starts again. Computer goes off at 10pm. That gives time for prayer and reading and things like that. I really don’t tend to do much of use beyond 10pm; it’s usually TVtropes or obsessively re-reading comments I’ve seen before.

The writing is going to have to get squeezed in at odd moments. As it happens, this works pretty well, so long as I have a notebook handy. I think the trick here is not to dedicate a particular chunk of time to it, but to aim for the old thousand words per day.

As for people – friends, family – I think that’s what Saturdays are for. And so I shall aim to either meet up with somebody, or do something interesting with Tony, every Saturday. I’m quite good at joining in with social things at work, but terrible at planning things from scratch. Also, as this year, I want to talk to Anne on the phone a lot. (Mondays, or Wednesdays.)

I’m now looking at all of the above with deep suspicion, because I have a horrible feeling that I’m never going to be able to keep to it. I do think there is an element of truth in that, and that I do need to leave myself some wiggle room, give myself permission to fail at it. So there. This will not necessarily work all the time. It is worth working towards, though. And so I shall try to make those two big changes, and stick to them, and not beat myself up when I don’t, but not give up on trying. 10pm switch-off, and Saturdays.