inyourbestwriting

[inyourbestwriting]

On the way to school we drive through a valley. On either side of the road are vineyards and in the morning they are misty. One morning last week I drove into a butterfly. It flew towards the car and then through some process of physics I won't pretend to understand, it was swept up along the contour of the bonnet and up against the windscreen. I heard the tiny impact: a faint click like a small wooden bead hitting the floor. I was momentarily stricken.

I recognise that within an ecosystem a butterfly plays many roles throughout its life cycle, but to the layperson it can seem that their sole raison d'être is to exist as thing of pure beauty; a symbol of delicacy; something to be admired and marveled at. The semiotic readings of a butterfly are surely in the direction of things ephemeral and fragile; beauty alongside vulnerability. The Monarch, for example, plays both a symbolic and real role as communicator of the workings of global warming.

I tell the children not to handle them. Don't touch their wings! The scales will come off on your fingers! If they land on you, pay attention to how their feet feel on your skin: so tiny you can only sense them in plurals; so tickly on legs the width of little more than a hair.

The collision between my car - huge, relative to the butterfly; filled with an environmentally-irresponsible number of children - and that lovely insect felt like a mental juxtaposition playing out physically. The size, speed and and unnaturalness of the car meeting something that stands-in for the opposite of all these felt as a consequence both violent and shocking.

I can't quite shake the feeling.

Photo from here.

[inyourbestwriting]

Today we farewelled our beloved Elías, who is moving back to Argentina. He was our shared (br)au pair and one of the sweetest people I ever did meet.

It took me a long time to articulate both to myself and to him what made him so special, but I got there in the end.

Leaving your child in the care of someone other than your co-parent induces guilt. This is a fact universally acknowledged by every mother (and maybe father) I know. To do the job of parenting to the standard we feel absolves us of the mirror-gallery of guilt we feel even when it is us caring for our own children, means giving more of yourself than is feasible, realistic or sustainable long-term. It means giving more than you think you have, hence the need for sharing the load in the first place. The guilt arises from your awareness of the delta that exists between what you know you need to give, and what a not-parent caring for them will be able to give.

It’s rare therefore that a stranger will give as much of themselves as a parent will, and really, nor should they as for them it’s a job, and being able to do that job successfully requires the setting of boundaries to protect both parties. Parenthood (despite whispered and shouted urgings from all sides) is rife with necessary boundary violations, at least at the start when small babies are involved. There’s no downtime; it’s a full-body, full-soul, all-in undertaking.

I realised that handing Aurelia over to Elías did not result in this guilt. Elías gave all he had and some extra at his own expense. Occasionally, I had to step-in and assert boundaries for him, fearful as I was that for him, providing that particular quality of loving care for a child not his own meant that on some level we were taking advantage of him.

He loved Aurelia like family, and for that he became family. It is rare to have met a young guy so sweet and so gentle and I already miss him deeply.

[inyourbestwriting]

I recently read this book about the concept of a congregation in a secular age. The idea that struck me the hardest was Root's framing of our personal motivations as having shifted from objectively determined 'shoulds' to subjectively determined 'coulds'. In the past, when the shape of our lives was based more on religious frameworks, how we lived - from what we ate to the rhythm of our week to how we assessed our own performance - was measured against these expectations.

A good life was made up of meeting the criteria set out by a bunch of shoulds. As religion has fallen away as a morally guiding force in how we structure our lives, coulds have replaced them. Coulds are more numerous as they are subjectively determined, just as our performance against these objectives is. We could do anything with our days, weeks, lives. The possibilities and combinations are as numerous as the people making the choices. They are more anxiety-provoking as a result, being so personal. Everyone is going around inventing their own wheels of value and progress and success. In addition, as Barry Schwartz describes in The Paradox of Choice, having more options doesn't necessarily make us happier; conversely, it can leave us more stressed than we might be with a more limited selection of things to choose from. This is why I love a short menu.

It made me think about how we progress through life. You start off living by a set of shoulds, as dictated by your parents: what you wear, what you eat, where you go. Finally, you graduate to self-determination and worlds of possibility open up, hence the rumspringa-like atmosphere of university. You have access to all the coulds and for a short while we bask in the sun of the countless possibilities. Life is could! Ultimately, with time and increased self-awareness, we return to a set of self-determined shoulds: for me these are - among others - exercising vigorously, drinking what feels like far too much water, trying to stay off my phone. Nothing earth-moving, but nonetheless definitely a set of non-negotiable shoulds. I could stay up all night drinking delicious wine and watching something filthy, but I know tomorrow I will feel like a terrible and slow death so really I should drink this water and go to sleep.

I'm not sad about this process of constriction. It's comforting and nourishing in a way a night in front of Forensic Files (I don't know what you were imagining) never could be.

Connected but tenuously but on my mind nevertheless this week, my friend Lisa is the lady in the photo above. Exercise, as mentioned is one of my shoulds. I met Lisa when I started attending her classes at her Pilates studio, Burn, in San Francisco. When we left, Burn was one of the things I missed the most. Through a series of personal and professional pivots, she can now be found online here and in real life here, and whilst I recognise that her journey to that place has not been easy, I am very happy she's to be found there.

I set myself a goal of working through all her prerecorded Burn sessions from the day I started backwards. It's turned into a pretty trippy project. As Lisa moves forwards through time recording new stuff, I move backwards through her catalogue, spiraling away from her. I follow her progress in reverse, charting it through her hairstyles, the videos' backgrounds of a succession of apartments, houses and studios, and both her daughters and her dog, Chuck, getting younger and younger like Benjamin Buttons.

To end where we began, what I do in her classes has come to me to feel a little like I imagine church does to those who go. I do as she commands, wholly obedient in my observation of the ritual-like sequences, and I emerge transformed: saved for a while in body if not in soul. Or maybe...

Photo from here.

[inyourbestwriting]

The kids have a song that they learned in kindergarten that they start singing around now:

"Spring is here, said the bumblebee, How do you know? said the old oak tree, I just saw some daffodils Dancing with the fairies on a windy hill"

It is here, darting in and out between rainstorms. It's been almost a year since Aurelia was born on a sunny day, which was followed by a night so black and rainy it was hard to imagine that the car that brought us home would make it through. Our first non-hospital night was spent in a cabin so freezing and so loud, the rain hammering the roof. We made a fire to try to warm ourselves, but I remember feeling reluctant to change her, not wanting to expose her tiny newborn nakedness to such inhospitable conditions.

I write this today listening to the sound of hail tick-tocking on the kitchen skylight, but this week I have felt the warm of the outgoing winter sun ('apricity' - did you know that word? I didn't), my bones seeming to defrost inside my body. At school there is a place on my route to dropping Zephy off where two paths meet and open out. Something about that point - the physics of it magic - funnels the scent of the narcissus that grown all over campus to meet me.

Spring is here.

Photo from here.

[inyourbestwriting]

I was right: I cannot create with my body and my mind at the same time. In the time since I last sat in front of this blog, two babies have been added to the collection. I believe that's it. I've noticed a shift in my energy towards a desire to wanting to create with my brain again, and here we are, old friends.

I had grand plans for a while to move to a new website. A shiny, fancy one with more excitement. With time I realised I've grown quite attached to the simplicity of this format so again, here we are.

Alongside my desire to write has come another one, which is just to hang out. I suspect there is a connection between the two; a harmony between a creative, productive urge and one that has no goal at all other than just being. As I found my way to identifying the second urge, this article about the demise of adult hangs was published and some dots started to join for me. There is a sadness to the realisation that we don't just hang out and I wondered to what extent it's down to the way in which we've internalised capitalism's productivity mindset - we feel with a sense urgency that our leisure hours should have something concrete to show for themselves. Hard proof. We have come, perhaps, to undervalue hangs, the undefined aim of which is simply connection; the marinading and slow-cooking emotional investment in the friends and family with whom you do it.

Hanging is a luxury and a privilege with four small children. Today I will attempt it on a beach. My expectations are low, as experience has shown me that unless my hangtimes are child-free, my primary role is to switch between entertaining and containing, neither of which are conducive to much relaxation or slow anything. But like a laser, I identify the gaps between these things, and I squeeze the juice so hard out of a half-conversation, an overheard joke, a smile that lands on the face of a fellow adult over the heads of our offspring. I have become ruthlessly efficient within an activity defined by its inefficiency.

Sometimes you have to dive into it, and trust that everything else will somehow fall into place. I say that as someone who's hair has assumed a structural element on account of going unwashed for well over a week.

Today we will enjoy the beach with out friends Karl and Suhee. I have a vague plan to take Bella out of ballet for the morning and go in search of Sonoma Mountain Bread's Saturday morning pastries, which I will take to share with friends and the sand.

It's lovely to be back.

Photo from here.

[inyourbestwriting]

My aunt Bella removes all the stickers from her fruit before it goes in the fruit bowl. She says it looks more like a still life that way. 

[inyourbestwriting]

We’ve all been a little tired the past two weeks. Zair just started school, Sami’s travelling and we’ve had assorted guests. At the moment, with all the changes taking place to our daily routine, I feel as though I’ve thrown many balls into the air and I’m standing back, waiting to see where they all land so that we can regroup and make peace with the new rhythm of our days. 

Whereas before both babies were in nursery just around the corner, Zair’s new school is across the city in Pacific Heights, necessitating a school run which is totally new to me and not without its teething problems. Small thing, and given that I’m thirty seven it should really be no big deal. We practise and practise and it gets easier. Also, his days are significantly shorter than they were. A full four hours shorter, which means that as soon as I’ve dropped him off to start his day, I just about get home and do one small thing before I’m back on the road.

We’re all fine, but it’s perhaps not surprising how significant the impact of small changes are when life is a precisely organised choreograph of daily tasks with little children. In the face of the various social obligations for which we’ve lined ourselves up over the coming months, I find myself feeling very tired and rather flat, keen to snatch back any moment of peace and quiet as I can throughout the day. 

I’ll be back to normal soon, and probably wondering what all the fuss was about.

[inyourbestwriting]

I recently discovered the joys of an ice-cream sandwich. For goodness’ sake don’t tell my mother; I can’t face her barrage of urgent texts about my rearview. I never thought I’d like them; they just sounded too much; all that’s wrong with America in the eyes of other parts of the world with smaller appetites and snobbier, more discerning palates. Ice-cream sandwiched between two cookies seemed a lot. Well, for this prejudice and misjudgement I repent, as I seem to have found the perfect one: the It’s-It. The Huffington Post, who - in flagrant defiance of all things sourdough-based - call it “the real San Francisco treat.” Why? The cookies are not huge, not too fat, and perfectly chewy. The ice-cream centre is not too sweet or rich, but cold and creamy enough to complement the cookies. Finally, the flavours! As a newly self-identified ice-cream sandwich purist, my number one is the vanilla, but there is also strawberry (Zair’s), mint and cappuccino. Occasionally they bring out seasonal flavours such as green tea, or - most recently - pumpkin, which just about breaks the SF internet because there are a LOT of white women living here. Finally, they are dipped in chocolate, which - I grant you - sounds like overkill, but it’s a very thin layer and it works. I learned that Google ordered a load of branded sandwiches, and as trans fats are banned on its campus, this prompted It’s-It to remove trans fat from their recipe for everyone. Thank you for this, Google. They’ve been made right here in the Bay Area since 1928, invented by a man called George Whitney, owner of a long-gone seaside amusement park called Playland-At-the-Beach, down on Ocean Beach. The park was like the San Francisco equivalent of Coney Island and I’ve very sad it no longer exists. Its halcyon days were the war years, during which time off-duty servicemen passing through the city on their way back from the Pacific would visit. That these ice-cream sandwiches should be a legacy of this time of happy-go-lucky celebration seems fitting: cheap, delicious and endlessly up-cheering. 

Photo from here.

[inyourbestwriting]

Graham, a friend of ours from university, was brought up with three biological siblings and countless foster siblings, spanning the length of his and child- and early-adulthood. In order for the foster kids not to feel different from the biological family, his parents insisted that all children use their first names - Tom and Shirley - rather than mum and dad.

Graham recently told me that as mother to so many, he noticed that Shirley would find herself at the end of the line in food choices, always getting the wonky, bruised fruit that no-one else would want. She did this without thinking, as mothers do. 

After so many years of this, and despite the fact that Tom and Shirley’s nest is now resoundingly empty, Tom automatically defaults to giving Shirley the worst fruit in the bag when it arrives.

[Photo from here]

[inyourbestwriting]

San Francisco September is upon us, and with it blue skies and warm days. July and August are Not-Summer here. You may have heard Mark Twain’s lament that the coldest winter he “ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”, which seems rather an overreaction to me, but the fog is REAL. I heard August referred to as ‘Fogust’ (you have to imagine it with an American accent) and that is true, for sure. It even has a name here, Karl, and an Instagram account of his own, as not even he is immune to the lure of personal branding. 

I like the fog and I like that for everyone else’s summer I’m wearing a jumper. I like that we visit our farmers’ market on cold Sunday mornings wearing those jumpers and find ourselves presented with summer’s bounty from Elsewhere: those peaches, corn, figs, tomatoes. It makes summer feel like another country. 

The combination of the fog and the syncopated summer contribute to San Francisco’s other-worldliness. We wake up every morning under Karl’s blanket, and in a few hours, find the city revealed to us anew. We pause to appreciate views which have appeared on his departure. Then, he drifts in again in the evening as if to put the day to bed. There’s something both cosy and transcendent about the weather encroaching so notably upon our days. It’s a reminder that the city isn’t ours, and to appreciate it while we can see it. 

I’ve often wondered whether this unwrapped gift of a shiny new city every day isn’t partly what gives rise to the optimism in the air in these parts. It’s not hard to see why the area has retained its pioneer spirit if you feel that every day it’s returned to us. We begin again. 

[Photo from here.]

[inyourbestwriting]

We saw the film The Last Black Man in San Francisco last week. It’s wonderful-sad-beautiful. Given that you may want more than three words on it, I defer to the experts from here:

“The astonishing “Last Black Man in San Francisco” is about having little in a grab-what-you-can world. It’s the haunting, elegiac story of Jimmie Fails — playing a version of himself — a young man trying to hold onto a sense of home in San Francisco.”

And here, if you need more plot.

Sami and I found ourselves struck dumb by the beauty and pathos of it, as well as our recognition that we are precisely the reason San Francisco is going through that which is displacing people like Jimmie. 

The story centres around a stately Victorian house in the Fillmore District of the city that was lost over a generation by a black family, to be “whooshed up the vertiginous shaft of the real-estate market, out of reach”. It wasn’t lost on me that the scenes showing the interior of the house when staged for sale looked almost exactly as our old Victorian house does inside.

Watching it, I felt like such a cliché. It brought to a head a lot of thoughts that have been gathering in my mind, quietly and without articulation.

My understanding is that gentrification is - if we’re honest - a polite word for white settlement. It’s not just about colour though, it’s power and privilege that displace those who made the place we, as the newcomers, want to be. We’re attracted by the character that came about by others having made their lives here under very different, often more challenging circumstances. We’re discerning cuckoos.

The role we play in the process of displacement of people less wealthy than us - living as relatively young, white, middle-class people in a city infamous for the exodus of those less fortunate than ourselves - is something that’s come up again and again for me in the past few months. Last week I was sent these cartoons illustrating the differences between San Francisco, and whilst they are accurate and in many cases funny, I felt deeply uncomfortable to realise that the impulse behind comparisons between quality of life in the respective cities is inherently self-serving: what has this city got for me? How will it improve my life? It’s selfish, exploitative and acquisitorial.

The conversation I’ve had over these months is essentially about how we can live in San Francisco without feeling like arseholes. Without being arseholes. It seems that for many in a position of wealth, the knee-jerk reaction is to attempt to redress economic imbalance by throwing money at the problem by donating (I see you, Mark Zuckerberg) or indeed volunteering, both of which undeniably have their merits, but which at the same time can be read as tokenistic and superficial: still selfish, salving as they do our consciences and absolving us of some of our guilt. At worst these are both forms of virtue-signalling, which often feels hollow and disingenuous. 

It seems it can’t just be about money. Rather than the question on arrival being what this city has to offer us, it should be more along the lines of what do I have to give to it. A lot of people arrive as economic migrants (hello, Silicon Valley), believing that by generating wealth for the area they are doing what they can. What we take goes deeper than that for which we exchange our money; as the film showed, we as arrivistes are sucking the life and soul out of a city we choose for its life and soul. 

We tell ourselves that because we’re newcomers, or because we might not be here forever, that we’re still skating the surface of this city. We haven’t made this our forever home to the extent that we must bear responsibility for what came before and what comes after. 

I don’t have the answers here, but I do have a feeling that restoring this balance involves things that will encroach upon our comfortable, disconnected, segregated lives. The ease and convenience and conscience-freedom we enjoy will be curtailed, and perhaps that’s a fair price for enjoying this city. 

I listened to the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones describe the same process in New York recently. What stood out for me was the fact that she has chosen to send her children to a school she knows not to be the best school she could have gone for, but instead a school that she knows will be improved by having her and her children investing in it: socially, emotionally, financially. 

I fear that we ring-fence precisely the areas of life we should be opening up: our children’s education, our homes, our perceived safety and our wealth. But if equality, diversity and inclusivity are the values that made San Francisco what it is, and if they are values with which we claim to align ourselves, surely we should be following Hannah-Jones’ lead. 

What I do know is that it’s not the job of those we have displaced to educate us here. We bear responsibility for working that out. To ask them to help us fix the problem - which is in many instances our problem of conscience - will only add insult to injury. 

[Picture from here.]

[inyourbestwriting]

These days when I travel my carry-on bag consists mainly of snacks I can mete out to grabby-snatchy little hands. It used to be heavy with books, but ain’t nobody got time for that anymore. Now it’s all bribes to keep small bodies still and quiet for just enough time to catch our breath. Maybe think about those books I left out of the bag. In there are cheesy rabbit-shaped crackers, apples from which will be taken one fairy bite and discarded (blessed am I, for I shall inherit these), sweaty Babybels, body temperature grapes, raisins, and small bags of “donut seeds”. 

For our recent flight to Oregon I made Bill Granger’s coconut bread. I love it so much. I first had it sitting in the sunshine in Sydney’s Surry Hills with my mum, on our first trip to Bill’s. I ordered the (life-changing-thanks-to-gallons-of-double-cream) scrambled eggs on toast AND the coconut bread, and I could feel the weight of my mother’s judgment. Vindication tasted almost as sweet as the bread.

I see his restaurants everywhere now, but I’m scared to go for the coconut bread again in case it doesn’t compete. Instead we make it. This time I made a loaf, carried-on enough slices for the family and kept it in the fridge where it maintained its magic so that we could have it again, toasted with butter, on the day of the flight home a week later.

Here’s Deb from Smitten Kitchen’s recipe for it:

2 large eggs 1 1/4 cups (295 ml) milk 1 teaspoon (5 ml) vanilla extract 2 1/2 cups (315 grams) all-purpose flour 1/4 teaspoon table salt (see Note) 2 teaspoons (10 grams) baking powder 1 to 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon (Bill calls for 2 but I preferred 1, so that it didn’t dominate) 1 cup (200 grams) granulated sugar 5 ounces (140 grams) sweetened flaked coconut (about 1 1/2 cups) (I use unsweetened and it’s still delicious) 6 tablespoons (85 grams) unsalted butter, melted or melted and browned, if desired Vegetable oil or nonstick cooking spray for baking pan

Heat oven to 350 degrees. In a small bowl, whisk together eggs, milk and vanilla.

In a medium bowl, sift together flour, salt, baking powder and cinnamon. Add sugar and coconut, and stir to mix. Make a well in the center, and pour in egg mixture, then stir wet and dry ingredients together until just combined. Add butter, and stir until just smooth — be careful not to overmix.

Butter and flour a 9×5-inch loaf pan, or coat it with a nonstick spray. Spread batter in pan and bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, anywhere from 1 to 1 1/4 hours. Cool in pan five minutes, before turning out onto a cooling rack.

Serve in thick slices, toasted, with butter.

[Photo from here.]

[inyourbestwriting]

We’ve been back a week today, but I thought I’d share some highlights from our family trip to Oregon.

It’s the most wonderful state, so beautiful, laid-back and friendly. I’d totally forgotten our recent obsession with Wild Wild County, (an armchair trip of many sorts in itself which I would highly recommend) which added a whole new dimension to my appreciation for being there. No Rajneeshees remain, but Oregon delivers in many other ways. 

We started in Portland. Things I had heard about Portland before we left: coffee, rain, donuts, hipsters. We had no rain but plenty of the other three. The Willamette River runs through the centre of the city which itself is actually very industrial. Countless steel bridges criss-cross the Willamette joining east and west. It went through a growth explosion in the 1840s, to the extent that tree stumps were left in situ until manpower could be spared to remove them. Hence the name Stumptown, which I learned thanks to the coffee roasters who use the same one.

If I could use three words to describe Portland, it would be industrial but human. Despite its brick-and-steel landscape, it’s super duper friendly and with a very strong sense of itself. It doesn’t seem to shout about it, and just gets on with its Portland business happily unto itself. We loved it. 

Zair and Bella’s highlights would be 1. The bike ride we took along the river (with the two of them sharing a little wagon pulled along by Sami). 2. Our trip to Voodoo Donuts which is a dream come true whether you’re one year old or Homer Simpson. Bella chose to eat hers by taking her face to the donut, and not vice versa. Finally, 3. Exploring the many floors of Powell’s City of Books, where we each got to choose one book (and sit on the floor reading a hundred more). It’s enormous, and if you can’t find what you’re looking for, one of the sales assistants writes down the section and row on a slip of purple paper and sends you off on a treasure hunt.

Mei, our lovely friend and sometimes-babysitter joined us as she has friends there. Her highlights would be the coffee, of which she returned with her bodyweight, the pie, and the bikes. 

Sami and I loved how friendly it was. Thanks to Mei, he and I got to go out for dinner one night to a place called Ava Gene’s, where we ate as many wonderful things that tasted of summer as we could. Corn! Peaches! Tomatoes! I’m so glad we did because all I’ve heard this week are the end-of-summer doom-mongers telling me it’s nearly over. 

Following Portland, we drove down to Bend. It’s a little town in an area of the state called the High Desert, and it also has a river running through it, this time the Deschutes. It’s very green and also very, very friendly. We stayed in a little house next to which lived a couple called Ben and Maeve, who - as well as deer (“reindeerd”) - in their garden, had a treehouse, a chicken named Pepper and the most incredibly preserved 70′s Apollo camper van, complete with shagpile carpet, integrated bar cabinet and full pop-up, light-up vanity unit for getting ready on those special camping nights. 

One afternoon we floated slowly down the river on huge rings. Zair lay peacefully on top of Sami while Bella tried everything she could think of to get into the water. We (I) drank more coffee and ate more Ocean Rolls than were good for me from the Sparrow Bakery. Sami and I managed a morning hike along the creek near the Tomalo Falls. (Next time - and I’m sure they will be one - we’ll go to Crater Lake and Cannon Beach, for a Goonies fix. Also, I’d love to see it all in winter). Mei spent an afternoon on a bike she’d hired and came back happy and very hungry.  

We visited some of their twenty two (!) breweries, which were all super easy-breezy and child-friendly, especially the Crux Fermentation Project, which has a great big outside space for food trucks and playing, where Zair made more friends in an hour and a half than I think I have in my life.

Finally, we took the kids for the inaugural family trip to IHOP one morning, where Zair chose the birthday cake pancakes for the sprinkles, and as I already mentioned, visited Blockbuster. Baby Bella got sick and had to see a doctor, who I’m pleased to report are even friendlier than your other average Bend residents. 

Ten out of ten for Oregon!

[inyourbestwriting]

Sometimes I wonder how long we would live for if our parents had been allowed to press pause occasionally while we were children. How many additional years would this add on to our lives? If our mothers could have hit that button every now and then for the pleasure of a shower taken in peace; our fathers to read the newspaper we faithfully subscribe to but of which we read only that one section. Minor things, for sure, but I suspect we’d wear that button away. 

Would it be another reason for judging each other and ourselves - that I am still alive aged one hundred and twenty six, when my friends die smugly at ninety three knowing that their parents had been less trigger-happy than mine? Or - following in the wake of our own experiences of parenthood- would an unnaturally long life be seen a reason to be proud of those who took the occasional break to tend to things important to them? I suspect it would be a secretive thing, although I’m sure we’d all be doing it. 

How would we fill that time, apart from with showers and newspapers? Hangovers, morning snoozes, uninterrupted restaurant meals, hot coffee?

[inyourbestwriting]

In Bend we visited the last remaining Blockbuster in the world. I still have my dad’s card somewhere, but we have a neither a VHS nor DVD player, so it’s pure nostalgia for me. 

The shop interior - with its yellow and blue colour scheme - hasn’t changed since it opened. In fact, when Zair asked where we were going, we said we were going back to the nineties, which - like any good three year-old - he accepted without question.

I found my trip there bittersweet, as walking through the door did indeed take me back nearly twenty years. My kids will never have the experience of the video shop. I have memories of the first one we ever used, back in Swakopmund in Namibia, in which you had to take one of two small leather tags hanging on a nail beneath the video you’d chosen to indicate to the sales clerk whether you wanted VHS or Betamax. That far back.

The whole experience was so analogue, and so rich in elements that our current instant-gratification culture lacks.

My children will never know the anticipation of the video shop: the thinking of what you want and negotiating that choice with all family members; driving to the shop; finding your film and desperately hoping there would be a copy (the devastation at beholding a row of empty boxes); negotiating the fall-back option by browsing the shop if necessary (with no recourse to algorithms); having your requests for sweets and popcorn instantaneously shot-down by wary parents; getting the video home; the inevitable pre-rewind; the watching of the film; the post-rewind (we were kind); and finally, the onerous task of returning it to the shop and the way this hung over the heads of the entire family who reminded each other several times a day that the-video-must-go-back for we all lived in fear of late penalties. 

These days, a film will occur to my children and in seconds - thanks to Netflix and pals - we will be sitting on the sofa watching it. Not even a thought of leaving the house. In hindsight I see that although it didn’t feel like it at the time, the rigmarole of the video shop was a ritual; part of the treat. 

“To play is human, to rewind is divine”.

[inyourbestwriting]

Today is my thirty seventh birthday. 

Things other people have done aged thirty seven:

Michelangelo finished that ceiling.  Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield. Earl Vickers became the first person to translate the entire Bible into Pig Latin. Michael Lusher slept through a gunshot to the head. ~

My sweet friend-in-Boston, Kristen, sent me this. I’m not one for horoscopes but the poem feels as though it fits. i am her — virgo.

ruled by the element earth and her structured creative messiness,  her story is one of detail and bewilderment. always observing, absorbing, greeting each feeling as though she were meeting it for the very first time.

she is a seeker of goodness, in both herself and the world around her. always inviting others to rise into the gifts they have to offer. bare feet. palo santo. weathered books. the smell of cedar. she is tender heart. written words. and dirty paintbrush water. as she gets older, the stronger the call echoes for her to be outdoors. to have the sun kiss her face. her naked limbs, skin on soil, to remind her of the powerful connection she shares with the earth she stands on. her heart craves stillness, and grounding. so she offers her dreams to be held amongst the trees, inhaling the sky’s possibility + wonder. it’s here. in this space. she can breathe. deeply breathe. and give her creativity the safe space to grow alongside her.

~ Danielle Doby

[Photo from here.]

[inyourbestwriting]

I’ve been thinking a lot about getting stuff done in the past few weeks. Perhaps it was the less-than-satisfactory London trip that’s made me think about ways I can maintain a sense of momentum even when it feels like the wheels are coming off.

As part of my information-gathering/shoring-up of my foundations, I read this wonderful article about procrastination. My favourite part: “on a neural level, we perceive our “future selves” more like strangers than as parts of ourselves. When we procrastinate, parts of our brains actually think that the tasks we’re putting off — and the accompanying negative feelings that await us on the other side — are somebody else’s problem.”

It made me realise that in my case this future self stranger is the repository for all sorts of onerous tasks, both big and small: existential transformations and emptying the box in Sami’s office that has been sitting there since Zair’s birthday. 

This was not the best part of what I realised about Future Olivia. The more I thought about what I’ve been palming-off to the future, the clearer it was to me that I have a very strong sense of her, and she bears no relation to me whatsoever. 

For a start, she looks like a hybrid of Jenna Lyons and Bobbi Brown. We could stop here and have a really long chat about this but I’ll continue. Future Olivia wears neatly-pressed white shirts and has a severe centre parting. I don’t know she came about but clearly she’s been incubating for a while.

I even know what trousers and shoes she’ll be wearing. Does she know she’ll be on her knees organising our bathroom cupboard and baking these? Does she know she’ll spend half her morning blowdrying her hair and executing perfect catflicks? 

Someone should probably tell her to take off that white shirt.