I’ve had Long Covid on and off for two years now and I am still getting to grips with it. I developed it, I think, for two reasons. First of all, because the first time I had Covid I worked my way through it instead of resting. And secondly, because I have a history of Glandular Fever (aka mono, for those in the US) which has been lurking in my system for decades, ready for a reboot like a film franchise from the 1980s. My Long Covid is not as severe as some, but it is persistent, probably because I keep getting Covid over and over long after it has outstayed its welcome, also like a film franchise from the 1980s. (I have had Covid five or six times.) I know of people who need to use wheelchairs, people who are in constant pain, people who have developed heart disease or epilepsy. I have none of these things. I only have fatigue, weakness, dizziness, heart arrhythmia, kidney issues, arthritis, hypotension, eye problems and difficulty swallowing. It could be worse. But boy could it be better.

Over time I am learning more and more about managing my condition. I’ve spent much of the last two years in a boom-and-bust activity cycle where I did too much when I felt up to it and then crashed and burned in a spectacular fashion. That was unsustainable, so I followed it up with what I called the “life exclusion diet” which involved doing nothing at all and thinking that once I had recovered my energy I could layer stuff back in without getting those post-activity crashes. But that didn’t work either. Partly because by doing nothing you start to atrophy, and so when you do then take activity again it takes much less of it to tire you out; and partly because there is no no-crash option. There will always be fatigue after you do things; the key is to figure out a workable (for you) cycle of moderate (for you) activity followed by tolerable (for you) fatigue.

I’m saying “for you” because the key is to figure out what your own window of optimum activity is, without comparison to anyone else. There was one woman in the seminar today who was proud of having been able to sit up for ten minutes in her wheelchair watching the birds in her garden. There was the man who had tired himself out from doing a nine mile walk in the Peak District. She shouldn’t be doing what he is doing, obviously, but neither should he go from that to thinking he should only be trying to sit up for ten minutes. You need to work within your parameters. I’m still figuring mine out, but I’m relieved that I don’t need to aim to not feel unwell after doing things. Because that was impossible, and every time I did feel bad it made me worry that I shouldn’t do anything at all. It’s still frustrating, but it’s a happier prospect to figure out what matters to me and what to prioritise, rather than thinking that I’m doing myself harm by wanting have a life that I enjoy.

It seems to me that we are pretending to live in a post-Covid society now, that it’s no big deal and not much worse than a bad cold. But Covid is still killing people, and it is still leaving people with reduced capacity, from mild to incredibly severe. I know I’ll sound like something out of a bad horror movie (maybe a 1980s franchise?) when I say you could be next, but you really could be next. So please, if you feel unwell, take a Covid test, and if you have Covid, stay home if you can to avoid passing it on, and rest. Rest more than you think you need to. While you are ill, and for a couple of weeks afterwards, even if you think that you are fully recovered. It may seem excessive but believe me you’d rather have a few weeks of reduced activity than a few years.

Oh, and seeing as you have read this far:

Finally, a few words about Substack. You may not be aware of the Substack controversy of recent months, but essentially it is becoming increasingly clear that their business model is to host newsletters from people who would be banned elsewhere - newsletters filled with disinformation and worse, including actual self-identified Nazis - let these newsletters charge their readership, and take a cut. All in the name of “free speech”. Find out a bit more about it here. So basically I’ve discovered that my free newsletter is being subsidised by anti-vaxxers and white supremacists. Cool cool cool. So this means that I really want to move my newsletter elsewhere, but I haven’t yet, partly because I’m not sure which other newsletter hosting sites do or don’t also accept Nazis. Please bear with me on this one.

It was apt that the book he always asked for was The Hero With A Thousand Faces because the thesis of the book, a non-fiction classic from 1949, is that myths from all cultures follow the same universal structure, the “monomyth”, of the Hero’s Journey along a number of archetypical steps: the call to adventure, the road of trials, the ordeal and so on, until he finally achieves his goal and returns home. (The Hero With A Thousand Faces was famously the inspiration for Star Wars and any number of Hollywood films since then.) The monomyth is the way that all cultures make sense of the chaos of life through the order of storytelling. Our Bennett-like customer was the hero, following the same path over and over, unknowing of all the other versions of himself who trod it before or since.

I thought of him for the first time in years a few days ago, watching the 60th anniversary episode of Doctor Who, in which the Doctor has regenerated as David Tennant for the second time, and is wondering why the universe has returned him to an old face. (The obvious answer - to make Marie Phillips happy - doesn’t occur to him. Long-term subscribers know all about my love for David Tennant and may even be curious if there have been any further instalments in my now eighteen-year sequential dream cycle about him. There has! And guess what? WE FINALLY HAD SEX!!!!!!!!! The sex was terrible, we have no chemistry, and it’s probably ruined our friendship, but at least it laid to rest some of my concerns about his prostate, raised a few dreams ago. But I digress.) It was a fun episode, reuniting the Doctor with one of his most enjoyable, caustic companions (Donna / Catherine Tate) on an adventure that was more comical than menacing, as London came under threat from The Meep, a cutesy fluffball with hidden sharp teeth and the voice of Miriam Margolyes. Part of the pleasure of Doctor Who is that the thrills and surprises come within a format that we are completely familiar with, not only from the years of episodes watched in childhood, but also from the monomyth. It is exciting but it is safe. We know exactly what to expect, even when the Doctor turns up with a completely new (or second hand) face.

Doctor Who is a perfect, endless example of the Hero’s Journey, going around and around the same loop, just like our customer from long ago. I’ve long thought how Doctor Who structurally resembles The Odyssey, in which a battle-weary man tries to return to his home land but keeps getting lost and distracted by goddesses and monsters. In The Odyssey, Odysseus is accompanied by his sailors, but gradually they are all killed or bewitched until he finally reaches Ithaca completely alone and unrecognisable as the man who set out. The characters of the Doctor and Odysseus resemble one another too, relying more on their considerable wits than brute force to survive and defeat their enemies. I find both stories compellingly sad, allegories for the relentless loneliness of life and the yearning for the feeling of home as much as home itself. Both The Doctor and Odysseus have temporary stretches of finding a home-like place or person (the Earth, the companions, Ogygia, Calypso) but they are never fully comfortable, knowing that one day they will have to leave them behind. We are born alone, and we die alone; but in between, as Campbell’s book tells us, we have our mentors and our allies; our friends. Friendship is intrinsic to the Hero’s journey, more even than love.

(It’s worth drawing attention here to the way in which the “hero” of Campbell’s monomyth is resolutely male. There is much debate over whether the archetypal hero is structurally male, or if the cataloguing of male stories to the exclusion of female is an oversight (deliberate or otherwise) by a blinkered Campbell. Some argue that when a woman is cast in the traditional hero role she merely takes on a male mantle, and that this denies the specificity of the female journey. Maria Tatar, an expert in fairytale, has taken this on in her book, The Heroine With A Thousand And One Faces, where she argues that the heroine’s story is intrinsically countercultural and counter-patriarchal, and therefore cannot be the same as the traditional hero’s. For others, a journey is a journey no matter the gender of the person undertaking it. For me? I still find exploring the question too interesting to answer it just yet.)

One of the reasons that Doctor Who works so well as a format is that although there is a vaguely implied ending to the Doctor’s story - the Doctor stops travelling and returns to Gallifrey - there is no sense that the show itself is actually headed there. (In fact recent series have repeatedly destroyed and revived the Doctor’s home planet to push this resolution even further away. Which doesn’t matter, since it is really a metaphor for death, and dying is the one thing that endlessly-regenerating Doctor cannot do.) In Doctor Who, we are within the Hero’s Journey, but we are on the road of trials and we are staying on the road of trials. As long as we don’t expect to see an ending, the show can carry on indefinitely without outstaying its welcome, something that any number of soap operas and case-of-the-week procedurals have also understood. Within such an open-ended format, films and TV programmes set up as a series are free to tell self-standing stories, whether episode by episode (Columbo, say), season by season (Slow Horses) or film by film (James Bond). They end but they don’t end; the hero continues his journey. Alternatively, a single story, novel or film can tell a complete hero’s cycle, from departure to return, end satisfyingly, and allow us to move on to a new tale.

Where modern streaming models of television frustrates is where it appears to be set up to tell us one story, one hero, one journey, but strung out sequentially over an unknown number of seasons designed to keep us watching, none of which come to any kind of satisfying conclusion, until the show is suddenly cancelled, meaning that it either has to rush to tell all its remaining story in a handful of episodes or, worse, is never given the chance to end at all. Not knowing how many seasons they have to stretch the story into, the storyteller sends the hero on a journey not knowing where he is headed, but all the while reassuring the viewer that he is definitely going to get there soon. The result is something like Westworld: a shaggy-dog-story pretending to have meaning, ultimately collapsing in a confusing muddle. Without structure, the monomyth will not stand. Ironically, the first season of Westworld was beautifully structured, and only when it tried to continue along an unclear path did it fall in on itself. Form gives meaning. It is what separates music from noise.

What does any of this have to do with our bookshop’s erstwhile customer? Looking back, his story seemed tragic from the outside: so much loss of self, and a future holding only more deterioration. But he himself never seemed distressed. He was just walking his path, a small path perhaps, but one that he had chosen long ago - the bookshop, the beloved books and authors, the conversations with the staff. Are we, in our own stories, so different? We may have more agency, more awareness, but we all make choices within the randomness of life to give ourselves a sense of coherence, of joy and of purpose. We are all the hero, with different faces, on the only journey that any of us will ever take.

It’s a perfect storm, because the most common side effects (anxiety, nausea, loss of appetite) are identical to my symptoms. My GP prescribed the drug and then went on holiday, leaving me with the following instructions: if it isn’t working, increase the dose. But if you have side effects, decrease the dose.

Right.

…and then I forgot to update you. Oops.

So before we go any further, let me just say: the side effects wore off, the SSRIs are fantastic, I feel immeasurably better and immeasurably grateful, and I would recommend trying them to anyone who is struggling; but be aware that the first few weeks or even couple of months might make you feel worse before you feel better. Apologies to anybody who doesn’t know me in person and who may have been worried about me. I’m doing great.

Onwards. Earlier today I was having my lunch listening to This American Life, the fantastic podcast to which I am fortunate to be an occasional contributor, a repeat episode called ‘The Show of Delights’. Originally broadcast in 2020, the theme of the show was inspired by a poet called Ross Gay, who spent a year chronicling everything that brought him delight, for a book called - yes - ‘The Book of Delights’. Accordingly, everything in the show is delightful, from the story of a five-year-old child catching the school bus for the first time to a night in the life of the night zookeeper at Denver Zoo. You can listen to this lovely episode, guest hosted by the irrepressible Bim Adewumni, here. Anyway it brought me so much pleasure listening to all that joy that I thought: I’m nicking that. I’m sure they won’t mind. So, for the forthcoming time, all my newsletters are going to be about things that bring me delight.

I’m going to begin with SLEEPING WITH PETS. One of the things that I have been doing since I last wrote is falling in love with and moving in with a wonderful man and his three pets - two cats and a dog. These pets bring me delight in innumerable ways (as does this man, but I may write about him less, because unlike the animals, he can read), but possibly the most surprising to me is how much I love sharing a bedroom with them.

This was not the case the first time I stayed over. I can admit now that I was horrified that my boyfriend sleeps with the bedroom door open. There are, by my count, at least five designated pet beds in the rest of the house (one of which is a cat tree with multiple baskets), not to mention various comfy sofas, armchairs, and a whole spare room - plenty of space for three animals to bed down for the night. But no: all five of us piled into my boyfriend’s standard-sized double bed. Did I mention that the dog is a golden retriever? That is not a small breed. Even so, maybe - MAYBE - I might have been able to get a bit of kip had those pets not been so excited by having a new bedmate, this excitement to be expressed by climbing all over me, sniffing me, trying out places to sit on me (my face, for example) - the kinds of things that one might more commonly associate with interactions with the new boyfriend, who alas was trapped on the far side of the animal Rubicon, and eventually had to resort to feeding them at 3am in the hope that they might briefly leave us alone. I don’t want to go into too much detail about what happened next - my parents subscribe to this newsletter - suffice to say that an enjoyable interlude came to an abrupt end when I noticed that my foot was resting on what seemed to be a soft, furry pillow, and I looked down to see that one of the cats had finished his breakfast and climbed back into bed with us.

It’s all right, I thought in the queasy light of the following day. I will have a chat with him about closing the bedroom door and getting the pets to sleep elsewhere.

Cut to present: the pets do not sleep elsewhere.

(Or at least not at night. As far as I can tell from living with them, the main business of the pets’ lives is to find a perfect spot for a snooze, sleep there for a bit, wake up, request some food, then find a new spot and resume their mission to squeeze as much shut-eye as possible into one short life. I often wonder whether animals live wild dream lives, and if so, if they know that they are dreams, or if the fantastical inner world of baroque meals and impossible walks blends seamlessly with the outer world of a bowlful of kibble and a circuit round the Rec. It might explain why being awake holds relatively few attractions.)

I can’t recreate how my feelings about the pets sleeping with us went from horror to tolerance to outright delight, but I do know that it happened fast. One night I was wondering whether a lifetime addiction to sleeping pills was in my future, and seemingly the next I was consumed with distress because one of the cats chose to sleep on the living room sofa. I think the truly transformative experience was discovering how much one of the cats - a burly rescue cat, six years a stray, resembling in personality Thomas Cromwell as characterised by Hilary Mantel - loves story time. I hope it’s not too sickly to mention that every night before we go to sleep, my boyfriend and I read to one another a chapter of The Three Musketeers - and the rescue cat, who by day generally eschews such over-the-top public displays of affection as curling up on a lap or allowing himself to be stroked, cannot get enough of it. As soon as he hears the word “D’Artagnan” he leaps up onto the bed and snuggles down on my chest - not ideal when it’s my turn to read - hanging on every word and only retreating to the foot of the bed once the bookmark has been replaced and the volume set on the floor. Some nights when I am brushing my teeth he waits impatiently by the bathroom door for me to come to bed so that he can hear the next instalment. How can I possibly resist this? I am not made of stone.

Ultimately it comes down to the question of why have pets at all. Why invite these inscrutable little creatures into your home? There are many, many reasons - some of which I may detail in future musings on delight - but at base, surely it is because they make you happy, and because you want to make them happy. There is no greater joy than a satisfied pet. I often reflect on the fact that our former stray, who spends much of his time in the garden and who is quite capable of living alone, still chooses to come home to us, not only for meals but for companionship (and Dumas). The garden door is open and he is free to leave. The bedroom door is open too. The pets choose to sleep with us. They are at their most content when we are all curled up together. They love it, and so I love it too.

I’d like to say that the animals, having grown accustomed to my presence, now let me sleep in peace. Mostly they do. After the initial heady nights of getting to know me the dog generally sleeps on her couch in the corner of the bedroom, and, latterly, the strategic purchase of a cat cushion for beside the bed often tempts one of the felines to curl up alone, leaving me to revel in possibly my favourite of all sounds: tiny little cat snores (you can keep your birdsong and your Beethoven, those rhythmic miniature snuffles cannot be beat.) But animals are animals. Sometimes the dog gets lonely and wants a midnight cuddle. Sometimes the cats get fractious and decide to have a fight, right in the middle of the bed. Or one of the cats feels cold, and seeks out the warmest spot in the house: under the duvet, between my legs. (Pyjama bottoms are essential wear.) Or an inexplicable fancy takes him to sleep on my shoulder, or on top of my head. One morning, when my boyfriend was away in Devon, I was awoken at 5am by one cat having wrapped itself around my throat like a boa constrictor while the other stared into my face from a distance of two inches. Reader, I fed them.

I used to think that what I needed for a good night’s sleep was total darkness, silence, and either solitude or a bed partner - ONE bed partner - who makes no movement or sound. That’s probably still true. But it turns out that what I need has been trumped by what I want, what brings me delight: multiple happy bedmates of different species, snores both micro and macro, a little bit of chaos, and a lot of love.

*****

If you would like to see me performing live, I will be telling a spooky tale accompanied by improvised music from Joris Beets, Tom Fox and Tim Yates at the Hackoustic All Day Festival, taking place at Iklektic, Old Paradise Yard, London SE1 on June 17th. My performance is at 7.30pm, but there will be live music, workshops and interactive installations all day, indoors and out. More details and tickets from hackoustic.org.

Or rather the dream.

For those following the seventeen-year soap opera of my dreams about David Tennant, I can report that, while as recently as my penultimate dream, David Tennant was unmarried (despite having two girlfriends, neither of whom was me), as of my last dream, he and his real-life wife Georgia are now happily hitched and raising their five children - time flies - while I pop round for Sunday lunch, help out with the kids (“Aunt Marie”), and mock David Tennant’s indescribably stupid hat.

Meanwhile, in my actual life, I’m approaching the end of my third month of fun with Covid.

As I started this newsletter as a Covid blog it feels like something that I should share with you, but at the same time, I’m well aware that I’m late to the Covid party and you probably already know everything about it that you need to or want to or really wish you didn’t. So I will only take this opportunity to impart the advice you need to hear: if you haven’t had Covid yet, and you are unfortunate enough to catch it, or catch it again, do not do a storytelling show in Belgium.

Sadly an accident of timing meant that when I caught Covid at the beginning of March, I was in Antwerp preparing a storytelling show, Lalaei, with a band of Belgian musicians. I didn’t test positive for the first four days I was sick, so I kept dragging myself into the studio, despite sounding like, as one of my bandmates put it, Tom Waits’ little sister. By the time I got that second lateral flow line it was the weekend, so I had those days off, and then I stayed in bed on the Monday, and then on Tuesday it was legal for me to leave isolation so I went back into work for another intensive week of rehearsals and then a week-long tour of Belgium, and, look: do not do this. I don’t know how to make that more clear.

(As an aside, and given the perfect timing of the whole debacle, this was perhaps inevitable: the hotel where I was staying chose that Monday to cut off the water supply because they were doing works. Now, at this stage of my Covid journey, as some of you may also have been, I was afflicted with an unbearable and unquenchable thirst, so on the Sunday night I had to fill and line up every bottle and glass I could find next to my bed so that I didn’t parch to death. Alas, that much drinking has consequences. These consequences are predictable, so I also filled the bathtub so that I could flush the loo, but the bathroom was on the mezzanine floor next to where my bed was, but the loo was on the ground floor next to the front door - because nobody ever needs to pee in the middle of the night, but lots of people suddenly require a midnight bath - well, anyway, every time I needed to flush the loo I had to fill a bucket from the bathtub and carry it down the stairs, and I’m just going to remind you that I had Covid at the time, and now we go back to the stuff about not doing a storytelling show in Belgium.)

There’s all kinds of reasons that doing a storytelling show in Belgium is incompatible with having Covid, but I would say that the main one is that doing a storytelling show in Belgium involves breathing, and Covid - the way that I had it, anyway - does not. Though actually the show, when I did manage to get enough air through my lungs to tell the story out loud, was really good - I can say that because 50pc of it was songs that I had nothing to do with, performed by the excellent group Zwerm, singer Sarah Akbari and percussionist Karen Willems. And the other 50pc of it, the part that I wrote and performed, I am incredibly proud of: it is a reworking of the story of Procne, Philomela and Tereus, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a #metoo story from ancient times that goes to some very dark places and connects to some very painful moments in my own life. But it was a privilege to share it and I was particularly moved by the stories that many of the women in the audience came to tell me after the show. We got some lovely reviews, which you can read if you are fluent in Dutch or have access to Google Translate.

Still, it was emotionally demanding as well as physically demanding, so after all that it’s no surprise that my Covid lingered for several weeks, and then, just when I thought that I had finally emerged from the listlessness and fatigue and started living my life again, I got a cold - just a boring, average, not even particularly bad cold - and got busted right back down to zero. But I have learned from my mistake and I am not going to do a storytelling show in Belgium.

I am going to do a storytelling show in Holland.

Yes yes I know, but it’s not the same, partly because the show is in July and I will be better by then - the very fact that I’m writing this proves to me that I am on the mend - and partly because I have enlisted no fewer than six additional fellow storytellers to share the speaking out loud and breathing that is required for such an event.

The show is based on The Odyssey and will be staged in the grounds of de Ceuvel, which is a compound of eco-buildings, start ups and cultural space in the north of Amsterdam. Back when I lived in Amsterdam I was a regular at the cafe on the site, but it wasn't until I ran a storytelling workshop there in 2019 that I fully explored the grounds and discovered the "boats" area: a wonderland of repurposed houseboats linked by a curving wooden walkway, overlooking the water.

I'd been looking for somewhere to stage a site-specific storytelling show for a while, and the moment I walked down that path I knew it was the perfect place for to tell a version of The Odyssey. The walkway bends and curves amongst the boats, which the audience will follow along in small groups. At each turn they will meet a storyteller who'll share with them her part of Homer's tale. Yes - her part: the cast is all-female, and we’ll be telling the story from the point of view of the goddesses, sorceresses, she-monsters and queens that Odysseus meets on his journey.

If this sounds of interest to you, you can find out more and buy tickets here. The show runs from July 15th to 17th, with timed entry from 7.30pm every evening, plus a matinee with a 2.30pm start on the Saturday.

Meanwhile we’ll be back with Lalaei in 2023, when I probably almost definitely will possibly maybe not have Covid again.

As longer-term readers might know, I have a bit of a thing about David Tennant. I have previously summarised the current situation of my love for him here. I don’t wang on about him quite the way that I used to, because I think that his getting married and having five children might have been his way of telling me that he’s not interested, but I still enjoy watching him on TV (the entire pandemic might have been worth it just because it inspired the show Staged*) (*no it wasn’t) and I still dream about him. I don’t mean daydream. I mean I actually dream about him. A lot.

Now, I know that it’s generally egregious to tell people about your dreams, but there’s something unusual about my David Tennant dreams, and it’s that they seem to be forming a coherent narrative over time. Whereas my other recurring dreams (having to take my A Levels again, being behind the wheel of an uncontrollable vehicle, having to pee somewhere unusual and unsuitable for peeing) are just variations on a theme happening over and over again, my David Tennant dreams have been telling me a linear story of our evolving relationship over the course of the last 17 years.

In the first dream that I remember about David Tennant, all that happened was that I was in a car, and he was in a car, and we drove past each other.

The next few dreams were similar. I’d catch a glimpse of him in a railway station, or going up an escalator. Sometimes he saw me, sometimes he didn’t.

Eventually I met him at a party and we exchanged a few words. It was exciting for me. Less so for him, because in a subsequent dream, at a subsequent party, he forgot that we’d ever met and I had to remind him.

Gradually, over time, from dream to dream, David Tennant and got to know each other better. We spent more and more time talking, actually arranging to meet and hang out, and our conversations became deeper and more intimate. I can’t remember the content of any of these conversations because I am not a shaman and I don’t remember my dreams that precisely, but I do remember waking up one morning and thinking, huh. In my dream life, David Tennant and I are really good friends now. I did not anticipate this development.

The other thing I can tell you, though, is that through all this, I still fancied the arse off him, but he didn’t - or refused to - notice. It was frustrating.

And yet! Two years ago we finally kissed! This, after a dream courtship lasting approximately fifteen years. And guess what? The kiss was TERRIBLE. No chemistry at all. I woke up furious with myself. I yelled at my subconscious: Subconscious! You had my entire imagination to play with and that was the best you could come up with? You’re not a prude! You’ve dreamt about sex before! You are more than happy to make me have sex with people I don’t actually want to have sex with in real life! You once made me have sex with John Craven! What the FUCK was THAT?

Subconscious didn’t reply. Subconscious went into a sulk and refused to give me any more dreams about David Tennant, presumably because the kiss was so awkward and awful that even in a dream, David Tennant was too embarrassed to see me again.

Until last night. And I feel like I’ve been watching this show for years and then accidentally missed an entire season, because would you believe it? David Tennant and I are now living together! David Tennant and I sleep in the same bed, snuggled together like one of those adorable pictures people post of their pets.

And it’s platonic. He STILL doesn’t want to bang me. In fact last night he introduced me to two of his girlfriends - dream David Tennant is not married with five kids - and they were kind of surprised to see me there in his bed but they didn’t really mind because it was so obvious to them that nothing was going on between us.

Why am I telling you this? I don’t really know, except, seriously, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WITH MY SUBCONSCIOUS? Why doesn’t my mind want me to be happy?! In my real life, when I’m awake, I’m 45 years old and single, so obviously I spend my life fancying married people and keeping an appropriate distance. I should at least be able to enjoy them IN MY OWN IMAGINATION.

Jeez.

But I have a plan.

Years ago, I used to have a recurring dream that I was going to New York, but I never actually made it there. I would see New York on the horizon, I would be just about to arrive, I would be so happy and so excited, and then I would wake up. Then, in real life, I went and lived in New York for three months, and I stopped having the dream.

It’s pretty obvious what needs to happen for the David Tennant dream to go away.

Your move, David.

One of the things I’ve recently discovered that I really enjoy is listening to a podcast while doing a jigsaw puzzle. OK, on the excitement scale, it’s not exactly snorting cocaine off Channing Tatum’s abs, but everyone needs a hobby and Channing probably gets fed up of that eventually. Historically I’ve not been very good at listening to things (all my former teachers do a shot) because I feel weird just sort of staring into space, but if I try to listen while doing something else (cooking, driving) I either get so absorbed in the cooking that I’m not listening any more, or I get so absorbed in the listening that I drive into a wall. It’s not ideal. A jigsaw puzzle, however, is the perfect podcast-mate: it keeps my eyes busy and my attention focused, but it is using a totally different part of my brain, which means that I have plenty of mental space left for listening and thinking, plus I am not likely to accidentally run someone over.

With that in mind, I invite you to break open a puzzle and kick back with one of the podcasts that I have been fortunate enough to participate in recently. Yes! It’s a promotional email! Didn’t see that coming, did you? I don’t do them very often, but from time to time I do remember that I’m not just talking to myself and I actually have something to promote. My agent would be proud.

First of all, The Curious About Creativity podcast - I was a guest on this terrific and useful podcast, in which every week a person in a different creative industry talks about the lessons they’ve learned from doing what they do. Listening back to our conversation, I’m surprised to discover that I’m actually full of terrific advice about the creative process in general and writing specifically, which I wish was more available to me when I am within the creative process and writing specifically, rather than just when I am talking about it. Friends of mine who have had to nurse me through the worst of my creative miseries get a shout-out halfway through. Listen here.

And a few weeks ago I had a story on This American Life. Yes, This American Life. The This American Life. It’s really quite hard to understand why I didn’t write and tell you about it the moment that it happened, but I suppose that is why I get invited to participate in podcasts called ‘Curious About Creativity’ and not ‘Curious About Marketing’. I’m really proud of this story, which is one of TAL’s relatively infrequent forays into fiction - a recently deceased woman (Mrs Ruth Langley of Basingstoke, Great Britain) finds herself chatting with, or rather to, the god Charon as he ferries her across the Styx. The episode can be found here or, if you only want to listen to my bit, you can go directly to it here, though personally I would listen to the whole thing - it’s a great episode. (Incidentally, when I tell people I had a story on This American Life, they either have no idea what it is or their minds explode with the excitement - there has been literally no other reaction - so if you are in the former category, that gives you some idea of how amazing a show it is.)

Finally, back in May - and I think I did mention this at the time, but I’ve gained some readers since then, so I’ll repeat myself - I was a guest on Backlisted, which is one of my very favourite literary podcasts, and took part in a fascinating discussion about the Dutch author Gerard Reve and his masterpiece, The Evenings - a book that is mainly about a young man getting irritated with his parents for chewing too loud, and is every bit as good as the sounds. (If you don’t think that sounds good then there is no hope for you.) You can listen to that one here.

That’s all! I probably shouldn’t be so apologetic about promoting what I’m doing, after all you signed up to this email by choice, but it still feels strange, like I’m shouting through your letterbox. Next time things should be back to normal I think.

(Also, if you have read this far I think I should probably confess that I can very easily drive into walls when I am not listening to anything at all. I’m just not very good at driving.)

It certainly doesn’t help that I have transposed my outdoor swimming habit into the Amsterdam canals. This is something I started doing fairly seriously only this year. I have always loved swimming outside. I’ve tried to persuade myself that I enjoy swimming indoors too, but the stench of chlorine, cramped lanes, and close-up encounters with strangers’ veruca feet crush all the joy out of it for me. What I haven’t historically embraced is cold water, but I began swimming more regularly during the semi-locked-down months of the swim and summer, and as the seasons started to turn towards autumn I realised that I didn’t want to stop. And it turns out that I love cold water - I really do. Nothing invigorates like it. If you are a habitual swimmer you don’t get that awful full-body cringe as you get in, and the cold water tingles, then burns, and then - and really this is where I am doing myself no favours, Amsterdam-wise - your core body temperature lowers and you become one with the water, bobbing along like a penguin or an ice cube and trying to time it just right so that you remember to get out again before you get hypothermia. I can tell I am really selling this.

Despite what non-swimmers might imagine, getting out is actually worse than getting in. Somehow in the water the cold is delicious. Maybe it’s because it all blends together with the pleasure of gliding along, the sun (if you’re lucky) glinting on the surface, watching the aquatic birds and taking in the peace and the beauty of the surroundings. My canal of choice here is lined by houseboats along one side, with a row of tall red brick warehouses peering over the top, while on the other side, exotically, is the zoo. The other day my swim was accompanied by the sound of trumpeting elephants, though they were both sensible and enclosed enough not to join me. Once you get out, though, with that core body temperature that only minutes ago it felt like a great idea to lower, you’re just skin and bone and inadequate layers of fat (compared to, say, a walrus), a stupid bare human by the side of the road in your knickers and bra, icy wind whistling past you, trying to get dressed as quickly as possible with numb fingers that simply will not cooperate. And when I say stupid, I do mean stupid. I think all the blood leaves my brain in order to keep my body warm (or “warm”), and simple things like remembering which items of clothing go on first become beyond me. All I can think is hot shower hot shower hot shower, and the seven-minute cycle ride home may as well be a marathon.

The bathroom where I am staying has underfloor heating, an invention that is up there with the wheel, and it’s tempting just to lie on the ground and refuse to move for the rest of the day. Suddenly I understand why every Finnish home has a sauna. Sadly my bedroom, where my desk is also located, is converted from one of the storage rooms found at the top of every Amsterdam building and is not as well insulated as the flat downstairs, where the thermostat is located. I am staying with a kind but ascetic yoga enthusiast who works in sustainability, has plastic wrap over his windows (but not, alas, over mine) and habitually keeps the temperature at 18 degrees - in his warmer part of the apartment. I don’t have my own thermostat so after a day or two I had to have a gentle word, and he has nudged it up a little, though with every degree I can see his heart breaking as the planet burns. This is why, while I would love to write more, I need to go now, and add a third pair of socks instead.

With Neudorff's Sluggo Slug & Snail Killer all slugs (Garden Slug, Iberian Slug, Red Slug, Grey field Slug...) can be effectively controlled.

How many types of slug are there? How much heavy lifting is that ellipsis doing? How did the Iberian slug even get here? Did it swim round the Bay of Biscay? I wouldn’t put it past the fuckers.

(Incidentally, I just googled “how many types of slug are there?” There are 40 in the UK, and I wouldn't suggest googling them yourself and especially not before lunch because Google puts pictures of them all in a row across the top of the results and the very first one is called the Leopard Slug, which are two animals I never wanted to imagine mating let alone having offspring but here we are.)

If for some reason you don’t want to kill your slugs, other options are available. I was recommended copper tape by someone who falls into the [possibly slightly larger than I realised] category of regular reader of this newsletter and fan of Gardeners’ World, and so spent a surprisingly fiddly and uncomfortable afternoon wrapping tape around all my pots, tangling up with tape, accidentally tearing tape, slicing my fingers open on tape, realising that tape does not stick to brick walls or anything damp (such as my entire garden) and finally standing at my kitchen sink washing blood and slime off my hands only to look out and see, in my freshly-wrapped lavender pot, a giant slug sitting merrily in the middle of the leaves, chomping on what little remains of the plant. Meanwhile, in by far the most outlandish response to my original mail, another friend told me about someone he’d sat next to at dinner who designs and makes 3D-printed miniature electric anti-slug fences. (I recommended the copper tape to him instead - I hadn’t wrestled with it by then - and he says he’s had great success protecting his sage, which either means that he is more skilful with the tape or his slugs are less determined than mine. I know what I believe.) Alas, throwing them over the wall is less effective than I had hoped - apparently if you paint nail varnish on snail shells and deposit the snails miles away, the exact same snails will reemerge in your garden with surprising alacrity. (I don’t think the nail varnish is the causal factor no matter what the structure of that sentence would have you believe.)

Things began to get desperate the other night when I was having dinner in the garden with my housemate and a guest, and as darkness fell, slugs began to emerge from under the decking all around us. We were surrounded. It was like a scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds, except that it wasn’t birds it was slugs, they move slower, have no beaks, and our guest used a bamboo pole to flick them to the sides of the garden and we carried on having dinner.

As ever in a crisis, I turned to my mother for help, and as ever in a crisis, she turned to Waitrose. And while in the slug aisle of Waitrose (yes, obviously Waitrose has a slug aisle) she got chatting to a young woman who told her that it has been a particular bad year for slugs, because of how cold the spring and early summer was. Apparently everyone’s plants came up so late that the slugs are all starving and desperate and willing to go to extreme lengths to eat. So extreme that in the case of this particular woman, the slugs had destroyed all of her hydrangeas… and she lives on the top floor of a tower block. (OMG, said my friend with the mini electric fence when I told him, it’s like when the Daleks learned to fly. This is surely the end of days.) Anyway my mother came over with a big bottle of bird-friendly slug pellets and a big bottle of goo that you put in rings around your plants and supposedly the slugs can’t get past. And so far so good. Or so it would seem. The thing is, by now the slugs have eaten everything they could possibly eat, so it’s not a good experimental environment. This weekend I go to the garden centre to replenish my destroyed flora, and only then will we know for sure.

No matter what your physical insecurity - your waist, your belly, your bum, your thighs, the length of your legs - there is a style of jeans that will flatter you, and three hundred that will look terrible, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that you will try those ones on first. I’ve had a breeze this last decade because I look good in low slung skinny jeans, and they have been everywhere. Unfortunately, I am now completely fucked because I only look good in low slung skinny jeans, and they no longer exist. I don’t mean that they are no longer on trend. I mean they no longer exist.

Because I ride a bicycle, my jeans wear out at the crotch (crotch is such an elegant and sexy word - which is great, because I use it a LOT in this piece). While I do try to make do and mend, there is only so much patching and repair that you can undertake in that area before feeling like you are wearing a denim nappy. So I am now down to my final pair of jeans: a perfect Nudie Jeans charcoal grey hipster skinny that I bought in Amsterdam two years ago. (Quick unpaid advertorial: Nudie Jeans are great because they are made from organic cotton, and they repair your jeans for free. You can also trade your old jeans in when you buy new ones for a partial discount. Please send me some free jeans, Nudie. Unpaid advertorial ends.) I love these jeans to distraction. So much so that to shore up against disaster I recently tried to buy another pair, only to discover that Nudie have replaced them. The new skinny style is high waisted. In fact, all Nudie’s styles are currently high waisted.

Now, I am slim, but I am not curvaceous. The usual term for my body shape is “boyish” but I tend to think of it as “Pepperami.”

A high-waisted jean is designed to climb up over your hips and then go in to where it fastens at the waist. My waist does not go in. When I try to fasten things at the waist, one of two things happen. Either, nothing - there is a clear two to three inches between the sides of the trouser and I have to give up. Or I squuuueeeeeeze and end up with the excess flesh bulging over into an almighty muffin top. So almighty that once I posted a picture of myself on Facebook with my muffin top revealed and the Facebook algorithm mistook it for a face, placed a tag on it and asked me “who is this?”

Obviously I can take some corrective action by going up a size, but then we run into problem number two. I am tall. The average British woman is 5 ft 4 and I am 5 ft 8. So the average distance between crotch and waist, for which jeans are designed, is significantly shorter than the distance between my crotch and my waist, meaning that even if I can do the waist up, I end up with the kind of camel toe wedgie that threatens to split a person in half. (This is also why I can’t wear one piece swimsuits and end up crying in changing rooms in tankinis.) In a hipster jean the crotch to waist ratio doesn’t matter because you can just wear them low slung and belt them for dear life, but you can’t do up a high waisted jean on your hips without going up about five sizes and wearing the legs like sails.

Even this wouldn’t be a problem if it was only Nudie Jeans who had decided to go high waisted this season, but no. It is all jeans. ALL JEANS. I have been to all of the shops, I have been to all of the internet, I have tried on all of the jeans. There are no jeans that fit me now. My body shape is no longer in fashion.

How can a body shape go in and out of fashion? You cannot do anything about your shape. You can’t get taller. You can’t get shorter. You can be a wider version of you, you can be a narrower version of you, but you will always go in where you go in and out where you go out. You cannot suddenly go from Jamie Lee Curtis to Kim Kardashian. (Admittedly you can get surgery. But a friend of mine had liposuction out of her thighs and into her bum, and it cost a small fortune and she said the pain was worse than childbirth, so much as I love jeans, it’s a no from me.) While I understand that in order to make money out of us the fashion industry has to suddenly decree that tight jeans are for losers and baggy jeans are the best, no wait baggy jeans are hideous and bell bottoms are the only jean, I don’t understand why the new jean shape, whatever it is, can’t do up in a variety of ways to cater for a variety of people. (Seasoned jeans wearers might at this stage remember when Levis addressed this problem by styling their jeans for different body shapes and yes that was great but they don’t do it any more so let’s just mourn that and move on.) I’m happy to be unfashionable but comfortable, I can tolerate being fashionable and looking like shit, all I ask is to be able to do my trousers up. I don’t want to be literally nudie from the waist down.

But it is not to be. So congratulations curvy women, enjoy your day in the sun. I bear you no ill will, you have waited long enough. Meanwhile, if you need me I will be over here, wearing tracksuit bottoms for the foreseeable future.

I particularly dislike flying and I think this is because it’s the mode of transport where you get reminded most often of the likelihood of your impending death. It used to be mainly that you were reminded of it while taxiing, during take off, and when landing (do not switch your phone back on while the plane heads to the gate or the plane might explode), over the last twenty years you were increasingly reminded of it while queueing up to go through security, placing all your tiny liquids in a plastic bag, removing your shoes etc, and now the reminders begin days before and last for weeks after as you get giant Q-tips shoved up your nose and down your throat just in case you have a deadly virus.

I have just been in Belgium for five days and by the time this is over I will likely have had seven Covid tests. There was an extra one at the beginning because my flight to Brussels was cancelled (because the plane was leaking - tell me again that I am wrong about flying) and I was rescheduled to the following day, by which time my pre-departure test had expired. Upon arrival in Belgium I immediately had to have another test even though I had one less than 24 hours previously, and then three days later I had to have another one to prepare me for departure. (If I’d stayed for seven days I would have had to have yet another one.) I was in quarantine the entire time I was staying in Belgium, but someone very wise in the Belgian government decreed that there is only one test centre in the whole country that will test foreigners and that’s the one at Brussels Airport, so in order to get my test I had to leave quarantine, travel from Antwerp to Brussels, and queue up with every single other foreigner for an hour and a half - easily the highest risk activity I undertook during the whole of my trip. Incidentally, the tests in Belgium are up the nose only, and they really go for it. Any further up there and I’d have been ready for mummification. Anyway, of course now I am back I need to take tests on day two and day eight, and I can opt to have one on day five in case I am missing retching and nose bleeds, or feel like going outside.

Add to that the endless form filling of where you are and what you are doing - one for each flight and one for every test - plus the phone calls from contact tracers that seem to only ever come when you are downstairs and your phone is upstairs - and like I said: no fun. I haven’t missed it at all.

Being in another country, though: that I have missed. I went to Belgium under a ‘cultural necessity’ exemption - yes, this is an actual thing - to work with Zwerm, a Belgian-Dutch guitar / electronica quartet, alongside percussionist Karen Willems and Iranian singer Sarah Akbari, to work on a music and storytelling show called Lalaei (lullaby) which we’ll be performing in Belgium and Holland, and hopefully the UK and Iran, next year. I hope Zwerm won’t mind me describing them as charming music nerds who delight in surrounding themselves with multiple effects pedals and boxes that beep and drone and who say things like ‘what if we stick knitting needles under the guitar strings?’ and ‘can you do the whale noise as an arpeggio’, while Karen turned up not only with her drum kit but a seemingly endless supply of strange instruments and noise-making toys, including a sort of wooden tray covered in coils and springs that she scraped, plucked at and bashed. Sarah has a voice which is like multiple instruments in itself, and then there was me, fiercely battling my imposter syndrome, weaving my stories in between it all and utterly thrilled on the day that the band concocted a ‘pedal organ’ from the beeping boxes and I was given my very own buttons to press. I was like a little kid on the bus who has just discovered the button that you ring for the next stop. Here we are playing a Kurdish lullaby on the pedal organ:

And here’s a little taste of the music we were making (this does not feature me but surprisingly it is worth listening to all the same):

Because of quarantine regulations I wasn’t allowed to leave the theatre so I had to sleep in one of the rehearsal studios upstairs, which was big enough that one day, with excess energy and nowhere I could go, I was able to take a satisfying run in it. I’d have liked to have been able to go out and explore the area, but even staying in one building, being surrounded by Belgians brought back the strange and magical pleasure of being somewhere where everything is different and feeling a little bit like an alien hiding in plain sight, half understanding and half mystified and learning happy new things that are habitual for them but not for you (I think my favourite discovery on this trip was learning a local expression which roughly translates as: ‘if we were all the same, we’d all be crammed on the number twelve tram at midnight’.)

I’m a novelist, so I am used to being and working alone, but I find that after all these months of lockdown I have close to zero interest in the solo contents of my one brain, and crave working with other people. I’ve been working with a group on some short films (if you are a more recent subscriber you might have missed the one I shared here) but a lot of that has been done remotely, and this was even more special because we were together, actually together, in a room. Repeatedly I just stood back and marvelled at the way that the songs seemed to grow organically from the mingling of all these minds, and I felt so overwhelmingly fortunate to be there, so ridiculously lucky that this is my actual life and I get to do these things, that I felt close to tears.

It’s worth it all - the two flights and the seven tests and the nine forms and the fifteen days of quarantine. Because even more than missing travel (though not travelling), I’ve missed other people, and their wonderful difference from me, how we are not all the same, not all crammed on the number twelve tram at midnight, and sometimes we can come together and create something that is greater than all of us put together.

I don’t have a very big garden where I live. It’s a patch of decking with a built in bed in the shadiest corner (long story as to why) and a few pots which I have lovingly planted with beautiful flowers to make my housemates and me happy. (There are also two window boxes at the front which I have lovingly planted with beautiful flowers to stop cats from shitting on our windowsills but that’s another story.) I also have one large pot and a couple of smaller ones which I filled with fresh herbs because for SOME REASON I have been doing a lot of cooking at home recently.

Here is my herb pot BS (before slugs):

And here it is ABS (after bastard slugs):

Look at it. LOOK AT IT. The basil was the first to go - overnight, from verdant lushness to a miserable line of stalks. Next up they went for the camomile. That took a little bit longer - long enough that I was able to put parsley on my daily salad maybe two or three times before they ate all of that as well. After that, they moved on to the mint in the next door pot, then the lavender a bit further down, all three hydrangeas in the long bed, and this morning I noticed a few tell-tale holes in the daisies and the geraniums. The only things that they are refusing to eat (for now) are the thyme and the rosemary, and while I am grateful for whatever is spared this slug-ocalypse, I don’t think I can make an entire garden just from rosemary and thyme. (Rosemary & Thyme, as it happens, is also the name of a cosy crime drama about two gardener detectives played by Pam Ferris and Felicity Kendall, which is so bad that even my TV-detective-addicted housemate won’t watch it, and she watches Wycliffe. In my wilder moments I wonder whether the slugs are communicating their disdain for this television programme by their refusal to eat those herbs, but that’s obviously ridiculous. Slugs are such repellant little shits, they are probably communicating that they are fans of it.)

I can’t lay the blame entirely on slugs - the garden is also overrun with snails, but the big difference is that snails have shells, which means that I can pick them up and toss them over the fence, to next door which is just a scrubby verge next to a car park where they can munch their way through the grass and weeds and await their destiny of being eaten by birds or French people. (I’m half French myself, though not the snail-eating half. Still, I consider it notable that while the French proudly eat snails, they don’t eat slugs, or if they do, they are not proud about it. I just googled “do people eat slugs” to be sure - never let it be said that I don’t fact check these newsletters assiduously - and the articles that came up included such headlines as “man dies eight years after swallowing a live slug that left him paralysed” as well as contextually not entirely reassuring articles that say sure you can eat them, just cook them properly first. Rather you than me.) Anyway, the point is that while I am willing to pick up snails by the shell, I am NOT touching slugs with my hands. NO. SLUGS ARE DISGUSTING. I AM ONLY HUMAN AND I HAVE LIMITS.

I have had many conversations about slugs with my neighbours of late. For slow-moving creatures they sure get around. Everyone has a theory of what to do about them. One neighbour stamps on them. I identify with the urge but I can’t stomach the way they squish underfoot. Another surrounds her plants with coffee grounds and egg shells, but I don’t drink coffee and only eat about two eggs a month. Another swears by slug pellets, which she says make them implode in a satisfying manner, but she added that she’s slightly concerned that the slug poison will get into the birds that eat them, and that put me off. (Though I have to say that I don’t think that the birds are really pulling their weight in the slug eating department, otherwise I wouldn’t be in this position, so they only have themselves to blame.) Which leaves me with salt. Yesterday, I went outside and discovered two huge slugs approaching what remains of my busy lizzies, and I poured kitchen salt onto both of them and watched them shrivel and die and I felt NOTHING. This is a sign of psychopathy and it is certainly a bar on my ever becoming a vegan, but I don’t care. Just a little sprinkling of salt and the slugs disappear, leaving my garden to live on and bloom another day.

In any case, here are a few of the things that I have been doing, with which you may entertain yourselves while it pours.

I was recently a guest on the Backlisted podcast, one of the most interesting and entertaining podcasts I know, to talk about the classic Dutch novel The Evenings (De Avonden) by Gerard Reve. I’ve been hoping to be invited onto Backlisted for years and I was thrilled to be given the opportunity to discuss The Evenings with fellow author Joe Dunthorne and hosts Andy Miller and John Mitchinson. The Evenings, which was published in 1947, is perfect pandemic reading, concerned as it is with the tedium of spending all your time either at home with your parents getting infuriated by the way they slurp their soup, or repeating the same anecdotes to the same group of friends while tracking who is losing their hair the fastest. I really enjoyed taking a deeper dive into the world of Reve, discovering more of his hilarious and bizarre writing, even making an attempt to translate some from Dutch myself, and finding out more about this brilliant, provocative writer. Our conversation covered the difficulties (or not) of translating Dutch, the art of the author photograph, boredom, blasphemy, surprise Sharon Stone revelations, warts, the Dutch winter horn and more, as well as the most enjoyable David Bowie impersonation you're likely to have heard in a while. You can listen to the podcast here.

Meanwhile, weather permitting (big ask), on Wednesday I will be appearing in person to tell a story at the Natural Born Storytellers secret garden event, A Breath of Fresh Air. It’s already sold out, but if you want to join in you can follow the live stream at their YouTube channel here. We kick off at 7pm UK time. I haven’t told a story in front of an audience since last October and have barely had a conversation with anybody who is not my housemate or the hosts of the Backlisted podcast in the intervening months, so if I remember to face in the right direction while speaking I think I will have done pretty well.

Finally my book Create Your Own Midlife Crisis - a choose your own adventure book about having a midlife crisis, written pre-pandemic when having an office affair, picking up an inappropriately young man at a nightclub, or running away to Brazil was still an option - is coming out in various international editions. The German translation has recently hit bookshops (are bookshops open in Germany?), and the US edition - liberally illustrated with drawings of a woman who (not coincidentally) looks exactly like me doing all kinds of ill-advised things - is released June 1st. There is a fun interactive preview here where you can make your first few disastrous decisions.

What would I give to be wearing a slinky backless dress, with a great haircut and cool sunglasses, setting fire to my life right now. Though the rain would probably put it out.

Anyway given all of this, when I was approached by a friend to write a short film for him to direct, it was perhaps no surprise that I chose the subject of how different people cope with sex under lockdown. The film was an experiment, zero budget, and written, rehearsed, shot and edited in four weeks. Working under lockdown conditions, the entire project was realised over Zoom. The results surpassed all my expectations - I’m incredibly proud of it, and thrilled to have had the chance to work with such a great team. Big love to director Dominic Morgan, actors Laurie Delaney, Simon Haines, Angela Harvey, Samantha Sherratt and Loclann O’Grady, who also wrote and performed the outro music, and our editor Reuben Williams.

Given the subject matter, the film is unsuitable for children, and as for my parents and other relatives……………… you have been warned!