The Sort Yourself Out 2024 Advent Calendar: The Cupboard Special (II)
Dec 5th: hot and steamy action at bedtime. Dec 6th: urban walk of dreams. Dec 7th: say Christ yes, to Christmas but be circumspect about seasonal knitwear. Dec 8th, soup and charcoal.
Welcome to the second 2024 advent calendar posts coming at you live and direct from The Cupboard with the sole aim of entertaining you and inappropriate overshares.
Dec 5th
Hot and steamy at bedtime
There was a tiny kerfuffle a few days ago on the WhatsApp writers group I am, was, a member of. Some of the other writers were saying that only annoying childless women got burnout because burnout is a luxury. Mothers don’t have time for burnout. It’s rankled me. If stress and tiredness is a competition, then we’re in some minuscule meaningless division here in the UK while people in Sudan and Gaza are the Man Utd and Liverpool of the game. I got what they were saying. But it sounded cunty and it pissed me off. I’ve got enough cunty going on around me. So I just left the group.
So single women are whiney spoilt babies who have no idea how hard mothers have it, for they are the toughest most self-sacrificing people on the planet. Righty ho ho ho. I’ve heard that one before. And fair enough. It’s just the message came through as I was listening to a meltdown in which a couple of our lovely Jars Ceramics’ bowls were broken in anger, which is about £80 worth of pissed off. Breaking nice things. Breaking nice things I gave to our life. I suppose it’s better than denying I brought anything at all.
No hard feelings but I couldn’t take it any more. I am on the brink and brinky people do silly dinky little brinky things - like leave WhatsApp groups. There’s other things I do, like leave the bed unmade, leave piles of paper about, leave a pile of unread newspapers waiting to be gone through, leave shoes on the floor, leave the bread out and other sundry leaving of things about the place, all of which is a serious crime in our household, like cooking chicken stock and not earning half a million quid a year.
Bitter? Moi? Welcome to my Substack__since my relationship ended in August it has become the pillow I scream into at night.
QUICK RECAP for those at the back. When he terminated our troubled love affair back at the soggy arse end of summer, he was very practical and said there was no need to do anything drastic just yet and that we could co-exist in the flat we both own until it was convenient for us both to leave. For him this would be December. For me, never. But what I wanted wasn’t too important because I had no financial aces up my sleeve. I could not buy him out. I could not take over the entire mortgage and running costs.
He said we would both leave and rent the flat out. He described some fair financial terms upon which this would happen. He had clearly thought about it. When he isn’t in a fucking bad mood, he is a practical and effective person.
He did not seem to think it was problematic that I was going to lose my home, my place of work, a dog-friendly set up and the neighbourhood I have lived in for 35 years. That I was unlikely to be able to buy another home given the few fucking dreadful financial years I had just endured. The thought of paying a vast rent to someone else for a shit flat in Cricklewood when I had a perfectly good home of my own near Latimer Road turned my stomach.
After a few weeks, I asked him if he wanted to stay in the flat and he said no. I said that I would like to stay in the flat and he said, “You can’t afford it.” We came to an agreement, a price, it is going to require me to significantly shift my earning capacity. This is both a concern and a cause to rally behind. It gave me a light at the end of a tunnel.
No matter how brinky I felt, there was something worth waiting, enduring, working and fighting for. My home. And staying in it. If I didn’t have two dogs, perhaps I’d have walked away off into the sunset and conveniently disappeared off somewhere foreign or something for an adventure. But I do have dogs. So I didn’t. I need a home.
He bitched constantly about my inability to do anything right but I just shut up and got my head down. He seemed paranoid I would burn the flat down the minute he moved out. It was depressing, having shit like this doled out.
When the hairdryer treatment came out, I left the flat and found somewhere else for a few days if I could. This was going to be my life until December when he would move out. I’d handle it. I could be a brinky dinky goblin hobo who lived in a Cupboard.
I tried to keep body, soul, the dogs and work together until December. By day I worked at home, at night I slept all over the place. He was unkind, cold, it made me sad, but there is no way I can financially or practically afford to fall apart. Of course, nothing like a mother because we know mothers are better/stronger/more long suffering. I mean what is Jesus’ birthday if it isn’t a time to think about how wonderful God, Jesus, Ferrero Roche and wombs are? Poor Mums, they do all the work. Not like us single women who just turn up and eat all the good crisps and complain about the wine.
The period of the ex and me being, as the IRA say, “together alone” was supposed to end on 1 December, brinky days would soon be over, except now we were a few days in to advent and the plate breaking is happening, we are still here.
No sign of movement.
So be it. Crack, there goes another beautiful Jar Ceramics bowl.
This decided me, I would leave, I would surrender all hope of staying in my home and I would leave. He could stay. I am worthless and appropriately cash poor “useless” , I must go. I will go. Internally I screamed at myself JUST FUCKING GO AND STOP CLINGING ON TO THE HOPELESS HOPE OF STAYING AT HOME.
This decision was ominous but it was strangely relaxing too. My life here was over. I would make a clean break and stop living with a man who is 100% clear that I am useless. I would stop believing the modest returns of a writer’s work could finance my existence in this little flat. I’d just find a stable or a pigsty somewhere to rent and quietly put my life back together in whatever shape I could, like a pot mishapen by mending. I’d do kintsugi on my life. It’d be OK. It’d have to be.
I gave two days over to finding somewhere to live temporarily. Meantime, though, my friend Sigrid offered me her daughter’s room in her lovely house to sleep in while I worked all this out. The ex and I could not share a space any more. It was too much. Too wretched.
[In case you have never stopped by here before, lately my Substack is given over to exercising and exorcising the twee demons of my middle-class, middle-aged, break-up plight. See passim, here, here and here.] I needed to sleep. I needed my wits about me. Sleep fends off that feeling of being on the brinkiness, bad grammar and typos.
Reasons my sleep’s been so bad? I’ve doom-scrolled instead of reading at night, I’ve been physically uncomfortable. Psychically uncomfortable. I have been permanently ill. I have a drink. I can’t be arsed to eat. I’m fretful about the future. All of these things are causes of elevated heart rate, which isn’t how you get deep sleep. Your sleep only gets deep and restorative once your heart rate has dropped and mine takes ages to come out of its panic response.
I acquired an Ultrahuman ring earler this year, I’m told they’re not as good as Oura. In the morning it gives me a sleep score, which since August has just kept getting worse. I went from an average of late 70s, 80 and early 90s to low 70s, 60s, 50s, the odd 40, even a mid 30. And I felt it.
Having a bed in a good friend’s place, a short bike ride from home, gave me a chance to see if I could create better “sleep hygiene” as the sleep pros call it. This, meine liebingen, is what lies behind the advent window on December 5th. Giving yourself the space to have a good night’s sleep.
Crucial to sleep is forgoing a short term soothing but long term sleep disturbing alcoholic beverage. That night at S’s I took a book upstairs but left my phone downstairs in my coat pocket. I drank some magnesium glycinate powder dissolved in water.I had a hot bath in magnesium salts, god knows if the numerous trace elements of Mg help or not, but perhaps the placebo is powerful.
A 2023 review in Biological Trace Element Research found randomised clinical trials showed an uncertain association between magnesium supplementation and sleep disorders but the observational studies suggested it was association with improved sleep. So, strictly the jury’s out on this one kids, even if the wellness crew go, “have you tried magne…” Aaaaaaargh, shut up.
Cleaned my teeth. Switched off the radiator. Optimum sleep is in a room around 18°C. Opened the window. My friend popped in for a friendly chat, which was relaxing. The bedside light was warm, soft, glowy and not harsh with cold daylight replicating light. And I read a while, got lost in a book, before I closed my eyes cocooned in real blackout blinds darkness.
Lo, reader. I slept properly through the night. I did not wake up til morning. And I woke up feeling capable instead of like a jittery wreck.
Dec 6th.
Walk The Line
Part of good sleep is viewing daylight, crucially in the morning and before dusk, but if you are outside and active all day, it’s going to stand your sleep in far better stead than being sat inside under strip lighting.
I’m not into resolutions in January. But any time is a good time to spend more time outside, unless there is a typhoon or something. Dogs are a pain the bum, a ball and chain, but if you walk them yourself, they get you outside. And outside is good.
If you work, live in London, walk your own dogs and aren’t replete with abundance there is only one way to own a dog and that is to DO things with them. There is no way you can keep them sufficiently stimulated, exercised and socialised otherwise.
Some basic professional dog walking and day care probably comes in at (my crap guesstimate) around nine grand, two dogs, probably £15K. My first dog, Wolfy, was an ace pub dog, he just lay down next to me and occasionally lazily enjoyed a little crumb from the table. My current dogs can be arseholes, they aren’t pub dogs, or not yet they aren’t. The big one really is getting there after four years. But if I want to go for a glass of wine after working a long day the dogs have to come with me. We walk to the pub, and back. If I don’t want to do that then I don’t go to the pub. Not vice versa.
I make calls while we walk on the lead to the park but once we’re in the park, I need to focus on them or they go miles and forget I exist.
Owning dogs, and especially podenco flavoured ones, has been a massive cramp on my freedom and my style (muddy jeans and boots, or running shorts and fugly bad trainers every damn frikkin day). That’s OK. That’s dogs for you.
I’ve got friends that find the pods pretty tiresome compared to Wolfy the lurcher, who could lie in a basket with a cat. The pods just want to murder the cat and bay and scream at the top of their voices in that “come on team let’s get murdering” way that pack hunting dogs do. We visit people less. Especially people with cats. Only my brother’s is safe, where his cats have a sixth sense for when the pods are en route, and take off for the duration of the visit. Their neighbour’s cats are less savvy. It’s a relief that hole in the garden fence has been patched up and none of the kittens lost their lives.
I need to widen out the walks though, the pavements are worn thin round my way, the pod friendly parks are as familiar as the back of my hand. Next year I will be working a lot. The only way I won’t be is if I die, or I am so ill I have to be hospitalised. Seeing as they own my damn life, I need to find more cool things to do with the dogs than pub and park.
Did you know there is an East London’s public art trail of around eight kms/five miles that connects Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and The O2. Called The Line, it is ten years old now, it weaves along waterways the Thames and the canals and on the Lea Valley, and ancient and historic line of the Greenwich meridian, the prime meridian. There’s about 20,000kms of prime meridian, walking 0.04% of it in an afternoon with the dogs suits me.
This is an art trail that gives a helluva lot. Its an outdoor exhibition programme with about 25 serious, highly regarded contemporary artists work that rotates about every two years. It’s not just large scale physical sculpture, there’s also sound sculpture, performance art and a huge text piece on a bridge across the River Lea by Helen Cammock, which says “we fold ourselves across the tides” on one side, and on the other, “from silt to land sometimes we live as wind blown sand”.
As well as the art, the route map between Stratford and Greenwich, highlights point of natural, historic and caffeine interest. It’s an area with a rapidly changing community. Contemporary art, nature, history, all for free, takeaway coffee and buns not.. Wait, there’s more.
It’s a multi-dimensional walk of wonder. Kids in local schools use The Line as an outdoor classroom for nature, history, geography, art, all sorts while out in the open, moving about. GP’s and care workers can “prescribe” The Line for health and fitness and mental wellbeing too, from people living with early-stage dementia to downloadable guided meditations to download and listen to on an app as you walk (part of Bloomberg Connects). On Thursdays there is a mindfulness and wellbeing walk that starts at the Jim & Tonic at The Print House, 133 High Street, E15 2RB and ends with a free kwaffee at the The House Mill an hour or so later.
The art is contemporary, antithetic to the dead white men that clutter our squares and public buildings. The artists are established, including Tracey Emin. And some of the pieces are whopper monuments. Take the double helix built of shopping trolleys by wonderful and witty Abigail Fallis; “DNA DL90” was first commissioned by a supermarket chain to support their work for Muscular Dystrophy charity.
That’s what’s behind the window of December 6. A double helix of shopping trolleys 30 feet high over the steadily gentrifying post-industrial landscape of Bow Creek, and multiple other good things on that 5 mile stretch. The Line’s website is informative. But in January when everyone’s broke and chubbly, this is something purposeful and wholesome to do with dogs.
Dec 7th
Say yes to EVERYTHING but be careful with seasonal knitwear
How do I know about this? Well. I’ll cut a long story short (which I rarely do), my friend who kindly put me up in her daughter’s bedroom as an extremely welcome alternative The Cupboard, took me to one of her fancy art world Christmas parties. My gut told me to say yes to as much as feasibly possible. To keep me busy, distracted, to stop me sinking into regret or working til three am. And there I met Megan Piper who started the The Line.
I might not have spoken to Megan had I not followed the invitation’s dress code which was crap Christmas sweater. I did not own one of those and I hate them and I did not care to buy one from Amazon for this event I don’t care what the society art ladies do. The closest I had was a really nice cosy hygge style Scandi jumper from the Chanel of homely looking knitwear, Herd.
I arrived to a flat full of jaw dropping contemporary art and everyone else in sequins, including multiple people wearing £2500+ Dolce trousers. But very few in jumpers, let alone seasonal ones.
Oh. I frantically scanned the room and considered dashing out and back to walk the dogs and then cycle up the hill to bed. But that wasn’t the spirit of the thing, and anyway, there were negronis racked up on a little bar and who doesn’t love a little negroni, and ooh, what was that, a really nice Bordeaux. I’d stay for two drinks, and then go. Standing beside a piece of taxidermy by Polly Morgan was another woman with short hair, no make up and a hygge jumper on. I made a beeline. She turned out to Megan, with this wonderful non-profit, giving not taking project, Line I describe above.
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