The other day, I was trying to explain to two incredibly brilliant, but thoroughly pessimistic people, why the world isn’t actually shit. I think they suffer, like many well meaning, middle-class people, from a saturation of mainstream and social media; it weighs them down with a profound, dystopian hopelessness. As I have said before, I stopped using social media when Facebook rolled out it’s ‘timeline’ function, which, going by some googling, was about nine years ago now. I used Instagram for a while during the pandemic, but have since deactivated it in disgust. I also recently tried Twitter for a couple of months, as I have been thinking about how to share the writing I put on here. It will not be via Twitter, of that much I am sure.
I have written previously about my dietary changes in response to a borderline insulin resistance test result, so I thought I would post an update on where I am on this journey. As you can see from that graph, my weight kept dropping until I hit 52.5kg, at which point I got scared. That put me in the underweight category in terms of my BMI; more importantly, my sleep became affected and I was definitely losing muscle mass in my quads. The theory of low carb diets (by which I mean eradicating cereals, grains, sugars, and starches from your diet), is that by replacing them with nutritionally dense foods we will eat less. The reason being that we get more bang for our buck with every egg, steak, and chicken drumstick we eat. Our bodies need less food because everything we put in it has a lot of what it needs,
Last week, I wrote about re-establishing a practice of morning pages. Another essential practice from that period of my life which I have now resurrected is that of ‘artist dates‘. I always thought of artist dates as simply being nice to myself and eventually they morphed into the concept of ‘small joys’, partly because I have pretty much always had a low income, but also because small joys are something nice you do for yourself every day. For me that means always wearing a cool pair of socks and eating nice food. That said, I have decided to do slightly grander gestures for myself on a monthly basis. I suspect this will mainly involve either going to the seaside or going into the woods, both of which I have done recently, hence the pretty pictures in this post. I suppose the point of this post is simply: why do we not
When I first started freelancing, profoundly uninspired, I called my business TG Services. Last year I changed the name of it to 10,000 Services for two reasons. Firstly, because I do many things, and I wanted to underscore that in the name. Secondly, I settled on 10,000 as a number for a particular reason. It is a cute story, so I thought I would briefly share it. Last year, I was working as a mentor to excluded young people with SEN or mental health needs. One day, as one of the young people and I went about our session, he told me that he was special, one in a million. He then swiftly corrected himself and said: no, my mum said I’m one in ten thousand. What his mum will have been referring to is one of the conditions he has, but what I loved about his correction was that to
On Monday 11th April, I started writing morning pages again. This is something I first began in my 20s and kept as a habit for many years. I no longer remember why I stopped but going back to them has led to a more general experiment in trying to remember who I was then. I have been re-reading books from both my childhood and my early twenties to try to remember and recover a self I think I abandoned at some point in my early 30s: the moment when I ‘quit writing’ and almost deleted this website entirely. (Although, I realise now that I never actually quit writing, I just traded more creative writing for academic writing.) I hope I never stop writing morning pages again because there is something profoundly grounding about waking up, making coffee, feeding the cats, and then curling up on my couch with an A4 notebook