Phone notes: Even on bad days
How not to feel like a #GirlBoss
En route to a flight from Bristol airport, we stop at Gloucester services, as we are wont to do. There are two standard (never understand that, they were enormous) poodles sitting outside with their owner, topiaried into perfect ice cream scoop shapes. I compliment the owner - ‘yes, her dad is about to star in the new Marks and Spencers advert!’ she says, very proudly.
Later, on the flight, a person sitting nearby orders a Twirl chocolate bar with his cup of tea. The member of cabin crew, who I had immediately liked upon entering the plane, delivers it with a full twirl of his body. Everybody smiles.
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Yesterday, feeling the kind of restlessness that only hours in my own tiny kitchen could cure, I began slicing two and a half kilos of cucumbers and a few shiny red onions on a mandolin that my mum gave me because it terrified her. As I got to the thick end of the onion, I sliced the tip of my finger through the cold blade, as though snipping the lid of a perfect boiled egg. Luckily, I like my cucumber pickle fine, so I only took off a sliver of finger, though the scarlet blood in the stainless steel bowl suggested otherwise.
It makes me remember the time I dropped the brand new blade of my Magimix on my ankle and it sliced through as though it was risen pizza dough. I was living alone at the time, and sat down, quite calmly, at my kitchen table, realising with a quiet sense of clarity that I could see the bone. I called C, who told me I should, at the very least, go to the pharmacy. So I went to the pharmacy and was immediately told to go to hospital and have it stitched. I was seen within the hour, and fainted the second I lay down and saw the needle, coming round and being utterly unable to meet the nurse’s eye out of sheer embarrassment. Mum came round that evening and made poached eggs on homemade English muffins. Somehow the glossy slice of my ankle, and the glossy slice of orange yolk became fused in my mind.
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When I lived with C, we would cheer up Sundays, which have long been my least favourite day of the week, by planning a ‘Sunday treat.’ Sometimes this was a big thing - we went (as twenty somethings, full disclosure) to the Harry Potter studios, for example, and we once redeemed a voucher for a boozy brunch. More often though, it was smaller treats, things like a box of walnut whips, or a stupid trendy donut. It was surprisingly effective and something I still think of most Sundays.
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Like many millennials I know, I have a period tracking app, despite knowing the company is selling my data to advertisers who will then sell me things in morally questionable ways. The app invites you to share your feelings on a daily basis, making what it brightly tells you are helpful links between hormones and mental health. It doesn't work though, for two reasons.
Firstly, and this is no exaggeration, I am surprised by my period. Every. Single. Month. Every month, for a handful of days, I am trapped in a kind of bottomless vacancy that causes me to question most of the decisions in my life. The feeling passes, every single time, as soon as my period arrives.
The app is also unhelpful because it says, when you are ovulating, that you *should* feel energised, beautiful, powerful, youthful, sexy, like a #girlboss etc. I have realised that probably the best way to guarantee you don’t feel those things is to tell yourself that you should.
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Someone I love sends me a photo of myself, with a nice comment. I look like I am positively glowing with joy and brightness (was I ovulating? I’d have to check my app), but my first thought upon seeing it was the memory that actually I felt restless in that moment, grasping for something I couldn’t quite reach.
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See dad unfurling a string of fairy lights, which coil neatly into a closed kind of plastic box so they don’t get tangled.
‘Did you get those off an Instagram advert?’ I ask him.
He looks sheepish. ‘How on earth did you know?!’
Good things to click on:
I was lucky enough to design their logo, and will be going to Briar as soon as possible
Hardly an under-the-radar recommendation, but I loved Intermezzo - and listened to how SR became ‘the voice of a generation’
Listened to Million Dollar Lover