What's It About?

(And hello.)

So anyway . . .

I have chosen this photograph so that I can’t see your expression as you look at it. Other photographs are available, with eyes, here.

. . . I feel as if I should really take my time over this post, what with it marking not only my long overdue return to Substack but also to what might reasonably be called my ‘public writing life’ and it therefore being probably quite Important or Significant or Something in some way on which I should have a more professional or serious grasp, but as it is I will just scribble whichever words fall out of my little head while sitting here (‘here’ being on a slightly wobbly wooden bench outside an independent café situated in a narrow, College-lined side street in Oxford, where I was born and raised and then moved back to five years ago, in overbearingly dazzling, strong sunshine - thus I am getting sunburn AS I TYPE and that’s possibly influencing my aforementioned lack of taking proper time over this Important Post, compounded by not being able to see the screen very well on account of the whole dazzling thing) and then upload it without spell cghekyvglg it and then get to the gym and think Oh crap, I should probably have done that better.

But hey ho, such is the way I work, or don’t, and despite my best efforts to change and self-improve and learn how to Do Things Better, sitting here at 50 with a mind as scattered and varied as it’s been since I was about five years old, I honestly can’t see my basic modus operandum changing a whole lot before I’m too old to be able to string a sentence - ? - so let’s just accept it and crack on.

(I’m going to put some lines in bold, as if you are too TikTok-brained to be able to follow a few pages of text without requiring some visual Zimmer frame to helpfully divide ALL THOSE WORDS into bite-size and digestible chunks, and also so I feel a bit more as if I’m writing a feature for a magazine that might actually pay me, as used to be the case back in the Days Before All Of That Changed, aka 2008. More on which, in another post.)

So. HELLO.

I’ve missed you. I actually have. If I hadn't I wouldn’t have bothered writing it. Actually, that’s something we should probably get straight right at the start: I don’t write to please, appease or make it easy for you. I don’t write what I think you want to read, or in a way that I think makes me look like I know what I’m doing.

I write because I love writing. I write because I can't not write, because writing is the way in which I understand and breathe and process and walk about on the page to orientate myself in this confusing world, and if I don’t then I Stop.

I write honestly, unashamedly, often quite fast, as if I’m just talking to anyone who’s listening, and without trying to make it anything more interesting or meaningful than it is.

I write because I love words and how they sit next to each other and play together and make new sounds and ideas and sentences, and while I don’t generally stick to any particular form or genre, write very little of any literary or intellectual merit and am unlikely ever to win a Pulitzer or Nobel or BAFTA or raffle ticket,

I write for the sheer mouth-watering, heart-pounding, brain-teasing, sensual and sexual pleasure of the act of writing (bear with me, reader, it might just be the sun-stroke setting in) and the quiet, comforting knowledge that whatever I write I will leave behind me, and maybe one day someone will find it and think, “Ooh, I like that. I am glad she wrote it, and I am glad I read it.” That would be lovely. Except that I’ll be dead by then so I won’t appreciate its loveliness.

So really, my writing is an entirely selfish endeavour, though I would like say that I’m very glad you are here too. Not only for my writing company, but also because without a reader to prove the existence of any words, I might start to wonder if I have actually written anything, and that way one can stray dangerously into the wobbly territory of observer-dependence and quantum mechanics and NOBODY needs that shit on a Tuesday afternoon.

A few words about the title of this blog (which I shall call a blog because I am firmly part of the large and now largely perimenopausal cohort of the Happy Blogging Era Of The Early Noughties, and I still love the simplicity, freedom and fun of good old blogging) is not really all that important or clever, but I had to come up with something and this feels natural to me.

One can spend more time trying to come up with the best title for something than producing the actual Thing, and in the end nobody really cares all the much what it’s called because you get used to any word after a while (See Google, Pringles and the name Jeremy) and ‘So Anyway . . . ‘ is not as bad as many of the other options I thought were brilliant at 3am on an oestrogen high, so it’s sticking.

I have capitalised the A of ‘Anyway’ purely to annoy those whom it will annoy. Annoyingly, one of those people is me, or rather I, but one must suffer for one’s Art.

I could have left it as ‘Flying Solo’ and just ploughed on throwing words at it, but here’s the Thing with titles: they pigeonhole you and your words. And if there’s one place I want NEVER to be, it’s in a pigeon hole. (Or a French public toilet.)

I stopped writing Flying Solo for two reasons: first, I became completely trapped, restricted and suffocated (none of these things is good for a writer; you can have that tip for free) by its title. I’d find I wanted to write a nice little piece about an old lady I saw at a tram stop in Prague, but try as I might I couldn’t shoe-horn it into anything Flying Solo-ish. The whole thing would become so contrived, awkward and ghastly to read I couldn't bear the sight of it, so it would remain in a notebook or document, rotting away.

The same goes for the countless other titles and headings and projects and sub-headings of headings and projects I’ve started in the last five years, such that I’ve ended up writing either nothing at all or, worse, writing hundreds of thousands of words which all remain hidden away in various sub-folders of folders under titles and headings, never to see the light of day because WHERE DO I PUT THEM??!

Among many other things I have researched and written part(s) of, we have:

A book about grand cafés of Europe, a novel about a psychopathic killer (part of a trilogy that starts with a road trip across Europe - I AM going to finish that one day), a 3-day court drama about domestic abuse, a book about writing books, a novel about a woman who writes erotic fiction, for which I had to write the erotic fiction (which I planned to publish under my pseudonym ), and then my next big commercial big-fiction book about.....actually I'm keeping that one for now. It's a best-seller and I need my powder nun-dry.

I have CUPBOARDS FULL of notebooks with titles including: Travel Writing. Short Stories. Essays. Flying Solo. The Venice Diaries. The Running Diaries. The Diary Diaries. Another Life. Novels. Screenplays. Non-fic books. Comedy sketches. More Travel Writing Part 3 version 7 draft 12.

Scraps of paper and tissues (See Exhibit A, below) with illegible notes about things I absolutely MUST WRITE but…where?

Exhibit A. (Posting this largely because it’s on Groucho Club notepaper, circa 2010, and to illustrate the usual state of my nails.)

(I was going to go into more detail about these projects here, but I’ve decided to do this in a subsequent post, largely to a) have a subsequent post to write and b) to tempt you to subscribe and COME BACK FOR MORE. I have put this in italics to emphasise both a) and b).)

Frankly, it’s been an Eton Mess of intense creativity and utter despair, with more projects excitedly started and then abandoned than the contents of a Pick-n-Mix bag in Woolworths circa 1987, and it would make me weep to realise how much work has occurred but how little has made it beyond my brain or keyboard, were I not to have perfected the art of complete denial.

That said . . . much as I might like to sound jolly about this, in that way that I generally manage to sound jolly about most painful things, it has actually been hugely depressing, distressing, exhausting, embarrassing, enraging, frustrating, ageing, saddening, shaming and ultimately not very good for my Zing.

Zing is a fickle thing, and it can’t be forced back into life. It has to surface when it's ready, usually at the exact moment your laptop dies because you forgot to charge it, and now you’ve missed the moment and your Zing is vanished again.

In some cases this Un-zinging can last weeks, or months - and even years. Life circumstances have a huge impact on Zing, and it’s fair to say that in the last decade my Life Circumstances have been almost unwaveringly rather less than optimal - or ‘Unmanageably Shite’, for short - and my writing Zing was effectively thrown under twelve buses, flattened by a steam roller and then set alight by local oiks.

I don’t know what it is that’s finally prompted my Zing to return, but perhaps it’s a heady combination of turning 50 last year, becoming acutely aware of my own mortality and having children ranging in age from 27 to 7 who might never know that their mother WROTE SOMETHING HALF DECENT in her life, plus some allergic reaction to the Orange Madman and the catastrophic and depressing state of the world right now or becoming fed up of people asking me what I write and having no response other than eating my own shoe until they leave me alone, or meeting Jeremy, whose shared love of words has inspired me to ENJOY writing again, or consuming too much collagen in a bid to PLUMP EVERYTHING, I don’t know, but here I am on a wobbly bench in Oxford getting sunstroke, and I am back to a place I once enjoyed hugely:

writing Stuff for the sheer joy of it, and not caring about where it goes or who reads it or which title it comes under. And “So Anyway . . .” it shall be.

Let’s put some basics in place. A sort of ‘agreement between writer and reader’, so we both know what to expect, what not to expect (this, I would argue, were I not getting 3rd degree sunburn and being aware of not boring you TOO much more than I already have, is the same thing) and how to deal with things when they get boring or predictable or nasty or in some other way like marriage, or my perimenopausal hormone rages become unmanageable or I start talking about perimenopause at all, which is one of many things that makes me rage.

There will be typos. This doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is domestic violence, genocide, oat milk and people who ask if there’s someone sitting there, when ‘there’ is an obviously empty seat and then they knock the table as they sit down and spill my coffee. THAT bothers me. Not typos. But please feel free to be bothered by them should you so wish.

I will always stick to my writing plan, by never making one. You will get whatever I decide to write next, in whatever order. (Welcome to my brain.)

I will not post regularly. Or rather, I will post with regularly erratic irregularity.

There won’t be a ‘theme’ or ‘subject’ or much coherence between posts, except that they were all written by me. I suppose if one HAD TO categorise them then they would fall under ‘Life Writing’, and that’s a subject umbrella so wide you’d be bone dry in an especially un-umbrella-friendly storm, so I feel I have it all neatly covered.

I overuse parentheses. (Like, a lot.) And hyphens - to denote a side thought - and the word ‘and’. And ellipses . . . (See title.)

I sometimes think I’m funnier than I am. I sometimes even laugh at my own hilarious brilliance AS I AM TYPING. This is embarrassing, but I have four children so I’m embarrass-Tefloned.

I sometimes think I’m cleverer than I am too, but when this happens I soon remember that I am actually extremely funny and clever, and immediately revert to confidently being my funny, clever self.

I have a nasty habit of straying into ‘worthy’ and ‘interesting’. Whenever this unpleasant earnestness occurs please slap me - in email or comment form - and tell me I’m being an insufferably self-absorbed, pompous prick. I will be grateful, though I also might block you because seriously, fuck you for making me feel bad.

I will publish quite a lot of old material, some already published and much of it not, and extracts from my diaries going back 45 years. These won’t be nearly as gripping or entertaining to you as they seemed to me at the time but it’s a type of creative laziness I can dress up as historically useful, and anyway I’m a nostalgia whore so Old Diaries make my cut.

I will sometimes write about people who exist in real life, and who have come into/are currently in mine. Some of them might be you but I promise to at least try to conceal your identity by not describing in minute detail something that literally ONLY YOU ever do and is in fact the primary way that most people think of and describe you, and also by cleverly naming you all Jeremy, so you won’t know which Fake Jeremy you are. (This won’t work for actual Jeremy, but he and I are over the ‘not giving back the really expensive Bose headphones you lent me’ thing, and he won’t take action. I’ve seen his orgasm face and I would totally use that to defame and shame him if I had to.)

So what kind of thing will you find here?

Well, most likely a sort of omnivorous, poorly arranged but delicious Smorgasbord-come-rich tapestry (the last time I will mention rich tapestries) of thoughts and observations, words and photographs, stories and moments, travel essays and unapologetic nostalgia for boredom and pencils, collected throughout the Journey (not the last time I will mention the J-word, though please know that I loathe myself every time I do it) through the life, and the writing life, I have so far lived.

At the time of writing, that life spans 50 years and has contained within it various things including (but not confined to and in no particular order of significance) some, all or none of the following, which I shall or shan’t write about:

Growing up in the Rewinding Cassettes Using A Biro era, sleeping with the wrong people for the wrong reasons and in the wrong ways, marriage, divorce, raising four children spanning 20 years, writing books, working on telly, lamenting the change in both the publishing and media industries and how I have spectacularly failed to adjust to either, notes on mental health things I’ve had/still have and what I have/haven’t learned about any of it; dating in midlife, not dating in midlife, travelling, drinking a fuckofalot of coffee since 1997 while trying not to become a coffee wanker, learning how to give no fucks at all, except all the things I still seem to give lots of fucks about but I have decided that I should embrace and celebrate this stubborn fuck-giving as an integral part of who I am and see this as part of self growth and ACCEPTING MY FAILINGS (this has been harder than it reads, because I have a great many failings), learning to live as a solo and then single mum in my late 40s and discovering that it’s actually the absolute tits, and someone really needs to big it up as a positive life choice, trying to locate the Meme library, not sending random unicorn stickers to people I might want to work or sleep with or both, entering perimenopause yet managing to get from morning until evening without EVERYTHING BEING UNBEARABLE and sinking into #whymen territory and loving my body and feeling really very hot and sexy actually and thus making many women hate me; having the audacity not to have much audacity or need for PUBLIC ANGER about things but instead being quite content to quietly get on with not being enraged all the time; trolling, and then for added fun I’ll probably throw in some trauma, domestic abuse, PTSD, ADHD, PMT, HRT, ABC, 123 from time to time, no you’re welcome.

I will write about Oxford and Venice quite a lot, as that’s where I spend most of my time, about many foreign places to which I have travelled, and I will probably post random and numerous photos of my face and my body in various states of undress, largely to enrage my trolls, but also because I’m excessively vain and I like photographing my self, and it might serve as click-bait, which we all love.

My hope is that by starting “So Anyway . . .” I will get back into my erstwhile writing groove, a friendly community of readers and writers will spring up like herpes at a ‘70s car key party, and that you will either love or hate it.

I hope that some of it amuses, lifts, inspires or stimulates something positive in you, maybe makes you change something in your life that needed changing, like the dodgy bulb in the bathroom spotlight or your husband, or perhaps encourages you to realise that you don’t need that £350 age-defying-lifting-plumping-smoothing-regenerating-glowing-wanking-serum after all because you already have fifteen in a drawer.

Most of my posts will be free to read, but some - or parts of some- will hide behind a paywall. This is because I like some of you to feel EXTRA SPECIAL.

My final hope, scraped from the sticky bottom of the barrel of self belief, is that an agent somewhere will see my scribbles and thinks, “HOLD ON, THIS IS INCREDIBLY FUNNY AND INTELLIGENT (probably more so than Liz Fraser herself even knows) AND SO TOTALLY RELEVANT AND NOW AND EXTRA THAT I NEED TO SIGN HER UP IMMEDIATELY SO WE CAN DO A 6-FIGURE BOOK DEAL BEFORE LIZ’S SUNBURN GETS SO BAD SHE CAN’T ATTEND THE PREMIERE.'“

In the mean time let’s just get on with it.

It’s nice to be back. I fucking LOVE YOU all. (Except you, you and Jeremy.)

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Xx