Sunday Night Dread, navigating 'intensities', contemplating the Dennis Leary line, "The filter's the best part. That's where they put the heroin" + Top tips for 2023 & Byeeeee '22.
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As we come to the end of Arsemass (more politely known as Twixtmas, or the dead bit between Christmas and New Year) I suffer from exquisite and miserable pangs of Sunday Night Dread.
It’s always been a terrible affliction because Sunday nights for me as a child were t rushing homework and dreading Monday, they were also, latterly, about having to go back to boarding school, and before that, about leaving one parent to go back to another one’s house. Sundays could be really deeply shite.
And aren’t Sunday late afternoon’s bad enough, with their familiar accumulating misery as you cycled through the theme tunes for Ski Sunday, Antiques Roadshow, Songs of Praise and finally, around 7pm, possibly the worst of them all, Last of the Summer Wine, which was about three blokes in the late Autumn of their years, doddering about a Yorkshire village and which I might possibly find faintly amusing now but at the age of ten heralded not just the sound of the weekend dying but also the most boring television on earth.
I actually loved Ski Sunday as by my teens my experiences of that activity had been 93% thrilling and all the other percents hot chocolate for breakfast and being chatted up by attractive young Italian lorry drivers, which is to say, TOTALLY EXCELLENT, which is rather worrying for a such a young girl but the arse end of 2022 is not the place to contemplate being mildy paedofiddleised on school trips. The sound of the Ski Sunday music gave rise to a powerful state of lust, excitement and hideous envy as I wasn’t one of those OK Yah kids who systematically went to Verbier/Courcheval/Val d’Isere/Cortina/Chamonix/etc at Easter and the February half term. I dug out the music, the very old fashioned Radio 2 sounding “Pop Looks Bach” that just wouldn’t be written now - it’d probably have some drum and bass beats - it’s just the ticket for Smashy and Nicey. When I played it I had a visceral reaction in my gut, and had to blink back the tears as the music transported me to my Grandmother’s house in the early eighties.
Bugger me! Where did all the life go. When did memories of my childhood reduce me to such a quivering lipped melancholy. Why is death hovering on my shoulder whispering that he/she/they will soon be taking everyone I love. Fuck off death. Go and haunt someone else’s New Year’s Eve.
So the end of Arsemass is like the end of the weekend’s Sunday Night blues but times 52, it’s Sunday Night Dread on steroids. In later life, now, I am with a man whose love of work is so fierce that quite often Sunday is dedicated to an entire day’s preparation so that he hits the ground with his little hardworking legs running away on nuclear fuel of preparedness. Watching this sure does tickle in a horrible way my mopey inner nine year old saying, “But I don’t want to go back to Daddy’s house. I want to stay with you Mummy.”
If you’ve got this far you may be thinking, lighten up babe, it’s only the end of Christmas. But you see I am having the end of year intensities. I’m gazing at my dog asleep next to the fire and the fragrant tree and longing for it never to end.
There’s an added intense painful feeling this year because we’ve been keeping the heating low as is mandated by Putin and all the other energy grinches. It’s actually been great for my skin not having the central heating on, and the tree has survived really well, I can smell it’s oily piney Christmassyness. Smell is even more powerful than sound when it comes to memories and nostalgic melancholy. If the Ski Sunday music nearly made me cry then the Christmas tree scent triggered a full on Proustian moment. Proust describes these moments as, "What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders".
What that sap aroma dressed in twinkly lights dredged up were flickering snatches of ancient Christmasses buried deep in the Seventies and spun back to me the simple infant feelings I had then, unmuddled excitement, the fearlessness of living cradled as only a small child can in family love and a total absence of world-wearyness. Oof. What was that. It was the pure joy of not knowing how hard life can be, the sensation of not having spent three days prior to Christmas slogging out work, or off my head on a number of ecstasy tablets, or up multiple nights sniffing gear, it’s a brief ecstatic memory of life before the armour started to harden round your human spirit.
I sniff the tree again. Oof, there it is.
That magical forgotten feeling. Except this time I am aware of all the things in life that have sucked those pure childish feelings from my soul.
Proustian moments are a sort of purge, a cleanse, an unlocking of an abstract feeling long buried, therapeutic, poignant but are also, disturbing - no, a better word is disquieting. I know you lot are all clever and know about the French author Marcel Proust, even if, like me, you’ve never read more than a few bits of his seven volume 1913 novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, Remembrance of Things Past. In Remembrance it’s the smell of the soupçon of shell shaped petite madeleine cake dunked in tea that sends a surprised Proust into paroxysms of involuntary remembering. “A real state in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and vanished.”
So, that’s where I am this eve of the end of ‘22. Dennis Leary, the American comedian, in his live stage act, as he sucked the life from the end of a cigarette, said, “The filter's the best part. That's where they put the heroin.”
We are down to the filter of the year, sucking at its butt, and maybe I need to put a gamer face on it. Because that’s where they put the heroin. I’ve given up NY resolutions. I think the better thing for me to do is give myself a bit of stillness to feel whatever it is I am feeling and then a few moments to think about what I want to be, not as in, I want to be a ballet dancer, more as in what I hope to unfold. The end of year intensities are a pining, yearning, feeling thing, and hey, let’s just go with it. Let’s allow ourselves to FEEL.
The filter's the best part. That's where they put the heroin.
Bye bye y’all. See you on the other side
Here are my three top health tips for 2023
When you get up in the morning go outside and spent 15 minutes in the actual daylight, do the same mid afternoon
If you are full after eating go for a walk, in fact, if you are struggling with anything, go for a walk
Eat a savoury breakfast, or first meal of the day, with vegetables included in it
Here are my three top health tips for 2023 if you are a complete c*** with more money than sense
Have regular NAD+ infusions at £350 a pop
Buy a £70 caviar and sheep placenta face mask
Have O shot therapy. You can enjoy telling everyone about it and being all Goopy and smug. But here’s a hot tip girls, it doesn’t work.
And now some after the jumpy stuff for my beloved subscribers
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