👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼 Hi! If you’re new to these parts, the short version is this: I’ve worked for myself for a long time, writing 15 (!) books, largely done from home. It sent me a bit doolally, being alone that much and also working within an industry that hasn’t always treated me kindly. That’s why I started writing How to Build a Life, now delivered to thousands of readers in over 80 countries. I’d been desperate to unpick why I seemingly had a dream career but life in general felt so underwhelming. I figured out that my brain likes writing but my soul needs something else, so at the start of this year - in addition to still writing my novels - I took a job in a high school mixing teaching and pastoral work. In one million ways this makes no sense at all, apart from the fact that working out of the house with teenagers is making me really very happy. I’m almost 40, a solo parent by choice, and knowing all this means you’re all caught up. WELCOME.
It started with a hose. I couldn’t do anything to the garden - a rectangle of grass with acres of depressingly bare builder-grade fencing - until I got a hose. I knew this because last spring my dad and kid planted a clematis as a way to mark the achievement of having bought the house, the place I can finally call my own.
This clematis has died. I did not water it. I did not water it because I do not have a hose.
In my mind, acquiring a hosepipe was an extraordinarily big deal. I cancelled my Amazon Prime at the beginning of the year because 1) everyone is right; I should be spending my money in my local community instead of lining Jeff’s pockets, and 2) I’d frequently buy “whatever!” solutions to my problems just to have the job ticked off the list via next day delivery. Candles accidentally purchased in miniature, supplements that turned out to be incorrect doses, stuff I’d “make do” with which if I’d have seen in a store, in person, I would never have bought in the first place. So I couldn’t just ~get online~ and order something. I didn’t trust myself. I’ve got previous. Even if I went to a proper hosepipe website, perfect hosepipes dot com, say, I knew I’d get the wrong thing, and it would come, and I’d be stuck with it because the returns process seems so laborious when you have to go to the shitty corner shop five towns over to return it, or else have access to a printer in order to print off your own returns label and look, that’s a whole other thing, I can’t get into why my printer has suddenly broken up with my wifi and so won’t do as I ask, just: I don’t have a working printer right now either. It’s on the list. The “to do” list. Every week I write a new “to do” list and every week jot down “printer” alongside “cancel Times subscription” because GODDAMMIT THEY GOT ME. I did the £3-for-3-months thing and now am locked in to a proper subscription because I just feel so overwhelmed, all the time, so incapable of sitting down calmly and rationally and doing all of these annoying jobs that build and build and BUILD.