In a recent interview in The Paris Review, Hanif Kureishi talks about Substack as being a great place. But, ‘the only problem is that then you’ve got to keep doing it. If you drop off, then the punters are going to fuck off. They want something to pop into their inbox every Saturday afternoon. If you stop for six weeks, they’re gone’.
I stopped for five months.
I was just in the wrong frame of mind. I was working full-time and I’m not cut out for that kind of multi-tasking or two-track thinking.
I expect there have been studies on how work affects not just the body (catastrophic and irreversible injuries from factory labour or mining... or just ‘minor’ ailments such as RSI or chronic back pain) but also the brain. Not necessarily affecting mental wellbeing, but feeling as if one has lost a few million neurones and is on the brink of early-onset dementia.
On a Sunday evening in early November, I looked at my diary (this is a paper diary - a leather-bound Filofax, to be precise). There was an entry on Saturday 2nd November at 10am which puzzled me deeply. Only once I had done an email search did I figure it out: I had booked an Open City guided walk through Stepney Green, had paid for it, and had completely forgotten about it. I had stood up some urban and architectural pundit, and I felt terrible about it.
The last time I stood someone up was twelve years prior, also because of work addling my memory: I was so overworked that I forgot I had arranged to meet a friend to give her the keys to my flat for when I would be away the following week. Before that, I'd only ever stood someone up because of illness (flu), when I was delirious with fever and had pretty much passed out for 24 hours.
Working full-time is rather like being constantly under the weather, or old, or with too few brain cells. It also seems very dark, even in Summer. You feel as though you are constantly bracketing your day in darkness; your circadian rhythms are all over the shop. The 'hourglass', or 'screensaver', or, if you're a Mac user, 'scary coloured wheel', are twirling away at the back of your mind. You worry that your conversations have a slightly alarming or infuriating (for your interlocutors) time-lag, but they swear that it's not the case (I still don't believe them). I fret that I’m no longer a Good Friend, that I forget to ask friends the right questions, because I know full well that deep friendship needs time to develop and flourish. I've always been forgetful, and have had memory lapses and black-outs caused by alcohol consumption, but the gap between memory lapses when pissed and those when sober is getting increasingly smaller. In short: my brain is fried, though like any other part of the body, I truly hope that it will repair itself to some degree. I'm not a fan of Shakespeare, but this line from Macbeth is a good one, about sleep 'that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care'. It does feel like brain-knitting, or crochet, or, at worst, darning.
A month off did in fact knit up the ravell’d sleave of care. The cat was puzzled to find me still home in daylight, and on occasion, shot me that look of, ‘don’t you have a job to go to?’
I spent a few days in Rome, where no one plans or books anything, so there was no risk of my standing anyone up. I could be spontaneous and just go where my feet took me. The whole city was in chaos owing to the impending Giubileo (which hardly anyone in the UK knows about, but poor old Rome has to go through through this every 25 years). It was very emotional to revisit a city that felt so familiar, from the smell of drains on arrival at Ciampino, to the backlit outline of i pini di Roma in the sunset, to the kindness and generosity of her inhabitants. I did all my favourite things, visited many of my favourite places, and caught up with some lovely people. Shop assistants were the same, but greyer or older. I recognised them; perhaps they recognised me too, and thought the same: ‘cor, she’s getting on a bit’. Rome felt like home, not exotic in the slightest.
I then spent a few days in a completely new part of England to me: the Yorkshire coast. Now that felt exotic! I loved trying new food (such as the Hull Pattie - pictured - or Yorkshire Pudding Wrap) and visiting new towns where everything was fresh and unexpected.
What did strike me in Rome, which did not surprise me even in a university city like Hull, was how deserted the streets were after 8pm. There are tourists always milling around in Centro, but in ‘real neighbourhoods’, there was no one about apart from the odd dog-walker. On a Thursday. Unimaginable in London.
Except now. In central London, almost everyone has left town. It’s just the homeless, the foxes (I spotted two in two days) and the rats. It’s bitterly cold. I’m still working, and cycling to work is a joy: just like during Covid lockdown.
Merry Christmas! Buone feste! And I promise to write more frequently next year.