There you go - new book title and cover pic sorted - ‘Wilted: the malaise of the modern midlife woman.’ Could it even get more alliterative? I mean, real state of the nation stuff. There’s a hint of warped Vermeer about the rotting flowers which alludes to Dutch interiors, the domestic and into our interior mental landscapes. Note how the dead flowers echo the tiled flowers that never fade. Permanence and transience. Let’s all get a bit Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn (you can forget the plot of the book you read a week ago, but English Lit A-level leaves an indelible stamp).
The problem with being a freelance journalist/writer is that you’re constantly thinking of things in terms of a snappy title and standfirst. It gets a bit tedious for the rest of the family, like when the dog had Jackson Pollocked the kitchen floor with shit (thank goodness the Roomba didn’t activate itself in the middle of the night) and I announced, ‘Chester: the dog who puts the poo in Cockapoo.’ So, when I was musing on titles for my first newsletter of 2024 in the shower (where all the good ideas come), this popped up, along with the accompanying photo. By the end of the shower, it was a book pyramid in Waterstones and the source of endless commissions of insightful pieces where I’m power posing in an edgy outfit with flaccid tulips. By the time I was out of the shower and sitting on my bed staring into the middle distance, it became a sigh followed by a dismissive snort.
This is because I’ve finally learned set the bar low for January. So low, that you can step over it without breaking your stride whilst balancing a tray of drinks. For years I’ve crashed into January like an enthusiastic puppy who’s accidentally been fed twice by its owners, only to fall at the first hurdle. You may be massaging your kale, but I’m still caressing a leftover Ferrero Rocher.
By the time it comes to January, I feel like I’ve been dug up, having spent the previous few month planning, thinking about, wrapping and delivering Christmas not to mention finding new places to stuff clutter (and then being unable to find it again). I can be found staring vacantly in a supermarket trying to adjust to buying a single block of cheddar as opposed to fifty different varieties of cheese. I’ll gingerly check the oven just in case there’s a spare dish of stuffing and sausagemeat totally forgotten from Christmas Day, as happened one year. When my daughter tells me she’s had Cheerios and Nutella on toast for lunch, my eye twitches rather than launching into a not-so-gentle parenting lecture about food groups, diabetes and brain nurturing. I’m just grateful someone’s fed themselves by this point.
In the midst of this post-seasonal exhaustion is my birthday, which basically serves as one fat guilt trip for everyone else. It’s the 3rd of January, so the New Year’s glasses are still waiting to be washed up and everyone is verging on the catatonic. Yet, the family makes a valiant effort to make it into something and we all convince ourselves that we fancy going out for a meal to mark the occasion even though we could just eat Pringles and a stale mince pie and watch The World’s Strongest Man. This year, I almost wept when I was presented with a complimentary slice of birthday baklava in the restaurant, not from gratitude (although I was deeply touched), but because I was starting to come down with something and was also already three parts baba ganoush and humous, so I gave it to the vulture kids.
For my birthday last year, dinner at a gorgeous country pub was booked. On the way there, I felt a bit out of it. By the time we arrived and sat down I felt distinctly nauseous and couldn’t even glance at the menu. After a spell trying to ‘normalise’ under a spectacular curtain of fairy lights outside in the pub garden, the decision was made to bail, with effusive apologies to the staff. Everyone had a takeaway pizza back at home and I took to my bed sleeping off whatever lurgy I’d acquired. We did return to the pub a week later.
This year, again, I didn’t feel entirely myself at my birthday dinner and felt a creeping exhaustion. The next day, I’d carved out time for a piece I needed to write with a deadline the following day. It was as though I had been struck my narcolepsy. I kept falling asleep at my screen. I dragged my laptop upstairs in the evening determined to get the all important first paragraph nailed. Again, exhaustion, with the first few lines forming in my head. I decided to start afresh and power on early in the morning.
Power on was not what I did. I laboured. Even though I really enjoyed what I was writing, the process was painfully slow. It took me about three times as long as what it should have done, but I filed on time. By the evening, everything was aching and the internal shivers started that I remembered from a couple of years ago. I did a test. I had Covid.
So, far from bouncing into the New Year like Tigger on acid, smashing those goals and setting those intentions, I spent the first weekend of January in the spare room staring in solidarity at those now-dead flowers that I’d put in there over Christmas when my Mum stayed. I drifted in and out of consciousness beset by weird Covid dreams such as the one where Michael Parkinson made me tuna ceviche with a salsa verde and we wondered around a mash-up to San Francisco and Tokyo eating it and chatting. I read Trespasses by Louise Kennedy causing my Google search history to become a series of questions and acronyms related to Irish history. Reading and sleeping was all I could do. During the very first wave of the pandemic I have a very vivid memory of reading Piranesi by Susanna Clarke which was a bit like a fever dream itself.
I’ve basically been shuffling around the house in my dressing gown this week reading about perky people telling me how to be uber perky this year. I should have been a pitching machine, but instead, taking a shower has taken on the status of a major achievement. Go me! Knocking it out of the park.
Even without the surprise new year gift of Covid, I’ve finally realised that I tend to stumble and crawl into January as the previous months of intense ‘doing’ take their toll. I have a Christmas hangover that is nothing to do with alcohol. Yes, I have goals and ambitions, things I’d love to achieve, but they’re not going to happen in the first weeks of January. This is a time for slowly unfurling, for dreaming a little. So, for those of you who, like me, enter January as a husk of your former self, embrace the wilt for a while.
Reed’s Reccos
As part of my Christmas book haul, I’ve read Richard E Grant’s ‘A Pocketful of Happiness’ and Monica Heisey’s ‘Really Good, Actually.’ Although I read one after the other by chance, I enjoyed the juxtaposition of one covering a long marriage and the other a very short one.
The Calvin Klein campaign featuring Jeremy Allen White. This proved to be the best medicine this week.
Earworm - Sophie Ellis Bextor’s Murder on the Dance Floor. Remember it the first time around and loved it then. Now Saltburn has done a ‘Running Up that Hill/Stranger Things’ thing.