I am one of those grumps who absolutely loves winter — dark evenings, black twiggy trees against a watery sky, all the taps and door handles almost too cold to the touch, love it. Keep your summers. If there’s another 40°C heatwave this year I will actually just stop existing. So it follows that I’ve always had a bit of a thing for hygge. And when I got chatting to someone Danish a little while ago, of course I asked her about it, expecting stories of the legendary polar night, scarcely seeing the sun between October and March, going about your day in pitch blackness, the northern lights. (There’s a chance I’ve got my geography a bit skewed here.) “It’s not different from the UK, really?” she said, nonplussed. “I’m not sure why we make such a fuss about it, to be honest.” Well, maybe because “hygge” sounds all sophisticated and lifestyle-blog-ish whereas the English equivalent — sighing contentedly and going “ah, that’ll do” — doesn’t quite have the same ring? But is there a particularly English twist to hygge out there? Should we be making more of a fuss of it? I think we should, and I’ve spent 2024 so far trying to do exactly that. Herewith my findings. January takes a fair old beating from us every year, for the weather, the ubiquitous diet food, the passive righteous pressure to forgo alcohol — for generally, it seems, just not being Christmas. Fair. But an English January comes into its own with regards to TV. Now, Denmark might have its Nordic noir series with all their icy atmospheres and high drama, but can they hold a candle to the overblown-but-nonetheless-excellent duplicity of The Traitors? To the cringe-until-you’re-inside-out spectacle of an entrepreneur singing at a bus full of reluctant tourists or trying to flog an absolutely inedible artisan cheesestring to the head of M&S on The Apprentice? Hardly. Terrestrial January TV is the ultimate in English hygge. The Danes, and I think much of continental Europe in general, do cafes really well. We long since started to copy them, with exposed warm-white light bulbs and wooden banquettes and everything made with cardamom and cinnamon. Now, I love Ole & Steen and the like as much as the next person, but for English hygge purposes? No, we must look closer to home. I present for your consideration: The Understated English Cafe. Unbeatable, solidly predictable. TEUC is normally found at National Trust or English Heritage locations, or garden centres. It will be slightly overheated, and there will be at most one gluten-free option. The trendiest thing on the (probably laminated) menu will be Fentiman’s lemonade, the cutlery will be wrapped in paper napkins, and everything will come with a tiny salad and about five crisps in a little ramekin. There will be a lot of jacket potato options, and if you order a toasted teacake, it will be the best one you’ve ever had in your life. Absolutely NO tiered cake stands or matcha. Banana bread can stay but it’s on thin ice. Similarly -- the Danes have gløgg, of course, mulled wine, and so do we, but only until December. Much as I’d support year-round hot sugary Malbec, I feel the more obvious option open to us is tea. It has to be, doesn’t it? But there’s tea and tea, and I don’t think Darjeeling in bone china has much hygge-ness about it. It’s a fact that tea drunk out of a chunky mug (ideally one that you don’t know the provenance of but appears to have come free with Easter eggs or to be celebrating one of the Queen’s jubilees) tastes 90% better than out of any other vessel. I haven’t done any real scientific research to support this but all tea drinkers know it to be true. It’s also a fact that tea tastes 100% better if it’s Yorkshire tea. No research needed. There are more, unendingly more! Slightly rubbish village fairs in church halls; Classic FM; stepping into a steamy Gregg’s from a cold street and ordering while your pockets are bulging with your gloves; pudding and custard; the Antiques Roadshow credits; library phone boxes spilling over from the post-Christmas clear-out. So many charming, hygge-ish little moments that will brighten our winters, if we let them. Robert Browning didn’t write “Oh to be in England / Now that January’s there” but maybe he should have. To be fair, though, he’d never seen The Traitors.
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Oh. Oh.
It would appear that it's been over a year since I posted. And the longer you don't post, the more your hotly-anticipated re-entry to the blogosphere has to be mesmerising, huge, a re-invention, an announcement. (There's a chance that in my head I am Taylor Swift.) See, that's the problem when you spend a lot of time thinking about your blog, and a lot of time actually writing stuff for your thesis. The brain somehow conflates the two and in my mind I've been keeping all (both?) of my loyal readers regularly updated with a string of merry posts about all my doings. And what doings! Due in no small part to Dan's gung-ho-ness when it comes to planning anything, 2023 has been a very full, very busy year. The summer alone took me to Norfolk, Prague, Liechtenstein, Dorset, the Chilterns, the Cotswolds -- a quick look at Google Maps and some slightly shoddy calculations tell me that I actually travelled 4112 miles between June and the start of September, and virtually all of that was on trains. I've not wasted a second; in appropriately writer-y terms, 2023 so far has been an epic, a four-volume novel -- but in hindsight it shrinks down to a pamphlet. This year has just seemed to sneak by without anybody noticing it. (And I'm sure it's an absolutely brand-new, never-before-noticed phenomenon that time seems to speed up as you get older; please, don't rush in the comments to tell me how completely novel and original I'm being.) I'm thinking back to that long, cold winter -- Traitors was on the telly, Christmas decorations were on their way back to the loft, daffodils were right at the front in Tesco where tinsel and Quality Street now bloom. It all seemed set to last until May but it did eventually pass, and seemed more suddenly than usual to give way to floaty dresses and high heels sinking into lawns; suncream feeling slick behind your knees; pressing an icy glass of water to your pulse points; that watery, perfumed smell of strawberries; a sunhat feeling prickly on your forehead and sandals slipping on cobblestones. And now we're back at the two-hands-round-the-mug stage, in the 'I can't believe how dark it is?!' phase; marmaladey light on red bricks in the morning, plastic skeletons stuck on windows; the You've Got Mail bouquets of sharpened pencils; red hawthorn berries that still, even years later, make you think that it's surely soon time for a week off school; standing on a cold kitchen floor and putting the oven clock back an hour. Soon everybody will be posting their Spotify Unwrapped, advent calendar detritus and the leftover Bountys will be cleared away, we'll be doing the BBC News Quiz of 2023 and going 'was that seriously this year? No! Where's the time gone?'. Where indeed? And then guess what? GUESS WHAT. It all starts again. Cold slate roofs, Pancake Day, tiny green buds, then creamy elderflowers and BBQ smoke, garden furniture and seatbelts and train seats all hot to the touch. Then looking round the corner once more to stews and knitwear. It might race past quicker and quicker all the time but there's a real solidity to it. This time always comes again. And you know, if we lived in a world without seasons, a world where the sun set and rose at the same time every day, where time didn't really pass, all this would sound like the most unbelievable fiction. So, if proof were needed that I would be fantastically ill-suited to the showbiz world, this blogging hiatus does not end with a bang; no re-release, no new material From The Vault, no new project imminent.* Just a little potter through a short, roaming year. Buy some Christmas chocolate, throw open your windows to the air that's already freezing and smoky by six o'clock, listen for distant, echoey booms of early fireworks. Soak it all in. *At least... not yet. It’s eight years since I last flew in a plane; probably four years since I decided I won’t fly again, for a variety of reasons; and about three months since I decided I really definitely won’t fly again.
People sometimes ask if I think I’m missing out. Sure, it would be lovely to think that Tuscany is no more difficult to get to than Reading. It would be very convenient to know that I’ll be able to attend my friends’ destination weddings, and very good indeed for my CV to attend international conferences. It would be great to think that I could be in New York by the weekend, eating bagels and being told to “get outta the freakin’ way, lady”. Folks who fly, what a life you lead! It’s all jolly fun to think about, but it was the summer heatwaves that really clinched it for me. I knew that I couldn’t, with a clear conscience, sit in those worryingly record-smashing temperatures and think that I was about to tear through the sky to a holiday destination using the very same means of transport that has (partly) got us into this climate mess in the first place. There are some arguments in favour of flying that I get, sure. There are also many arguments in favour of just doing whatever you darn well please and hang the consequences, so, fair enough. Nobody is saying you HAVE to care about the environment, your emissions. Live and let fly. But when we’re all becoming a little more climate conscious, choosing plant-based milks and turning down thermostats, jetting off on three long-haul flights a year doesn’t sit right. (Especially because although “being vegan can save around 1.5 tonnes CO2 per year, you could use that up in a single flight.”) Someone, when they told me their extensive summer travel plans in the same breath as saying how poignant a new Attenborough documentary was, once said something along these lines to me — “The way I see it, the plane is going anyway whether I’m on it or not — so I may as well be on it. We need big-scale action to stop climate change. I’m not helping the climate by staying home, haha!” I feel like the concept of individual action is really lost on people who say this. Shall I, then, stop recycling, and turn my kitchen into a swimming pool the next time there’s a hosepipe ban? Should I also eat swans and sit on a throne of unsustainably-mined gold and blood diamonds? I would LOVE to know how people who say this behaved during the Covid lockdowns. Presumably they just went around sneezing on everyone, since “the virus is going to spread anyway and we need bigger-scale action to stop it, so”? No, fair enough, I myself am not making any impact on emissions at all by refusing to fly. Planes are taking off all the time, lots of them, all chugging out these huge amounts of CO2, and it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference if I hopped on one or not. But it’s simply not a contribution I’m happy to make, in the same way that I buy free-range eggs or say thank you to harried-looking bus drivers. I might not be making a huge positive impact, but is that an excuse for piling on when the rest of the world is making a negative one? And nor is it a huge sacrifice to me — I’m really not martyring myself to any cause, here. Maybe not flying has shrunk my horizons a bit, but honestly, I’d be happy enough just bundling a few cases into the car, filling a bag with my Ultimate Travel Snacks (those M&S cake tubs, if you were wondering — the chocolate roll ones and the mini flapjacks) and seeing where I get. And I certainly don’t need to go away for the sun — I’m only in Oxford and just a few weeks ago I needed to lie down in front of the fan after going to get the post. And before anyone says I wouldn’t drive if I really cared about the climate and should instead travel by carbon-neutral yacht or walk everywhere with magic shoes that suck pollution out of the atmosphere, hold on — A return flight from London to San Francisco emits around 5.5 tonnes of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) per person – more than twice the emissions produced by a family car in a year. Even a return flight from London to Berlin emits around 0.6 tonnes CO2e – three times the emissions saved from a year of recycling. So if I went without a car for two years and recycled religiously for three, that would be more than cancelled out by just a couple of flights. This isn’t meant to be preachy because I think the only thing worse than being preached at is knowing that you’re the one doing the preaching. It’s just that I think there’s so much joy to be had on our own doorstep. Rediscover the childish joy of the British seaside holiday and eat doughnuts on a windy pier. Get your chest a bit sunburnt and go for dinner in a country pub, wearing a floaty dress and smelling of aftersun and salt. Soak up the views. Have you SEEN the North Devon coastline?! Go to Bath, and blow all the money that would have gone on a flight in the famous Mrs Pott’s Chocolate Shop. Get up to Scotland, go right up to the highest point around and look at that view; one of those views that’s so huge you can’t take it all in at once. Hell, pick a random tiny place on Google maps, somewhere with a B&B and a Londis and almost nothing else, and make the best possible holiday out of it you can — buy rosé and drink it in a field at sunset. And this is where, I hope, you’ll allow me a tiny bit of preaching. Gently let go of the notion that just because somewhere is on this same little island as you, it’s boring and familiar. Please don’t fall into the trap of thinking that whole of Britain is as mundane and familiar as your own backyard. There’s a whole wide world out there — but a very beautiful proportion of it is just a train ride away. 28/09: I am back in Oxford for my second year as a DPhil student! I didn't want to share the below piece about my Transfer in July in case it became the ultimate in tempting fate and I was thrown outside the city walls the second I tried to return this September, but all is well -- I'm back, I'm still apparently a student, and some undergrads are expecting me to teach them something in two weeks' time.
I remember nervously asking my supervisor about the Transfer of Status in my very first meeting with her, armed with my new purple Pukka pad and neat set of fineliners (I have started each new academic term in the exact same way since about Year Five). “Oh, that’s not until the summer,” she said, “don’t panic about it yet.” Despite the undeniable ominous clang of the “yet” I had rather put the Transfer out of my mind. For those fortunate enough not to know, the Transfer involves a lengthy written submission followed by an interview with two experts in your field who decide whether you’re allowed to advance to second year or not. It’s a nasty blend of fairly impossible to prepare for, yet simultaneously so all-consuming that it feels impossible to do anything else while it looms on the horizon, with the result that I’ve spent a week at my desk, bleary-eyed and faintly panicky but without much work to show for it. I write this at my desk on The Morning Of, having just seen off half a packet of hot buttered Welsh cakes for breakfast (“it’s only like toast,” I said in response to the equal-parts worried and confused look from my boyfriend) and read the newspaper in an attempt to distract myself. At least however my Transfer goes, I reassured myself, everyone in Westminster will surely be having a worse day than me. (My transfer was on 6th July). On paper it’s a useful review exercise, a chance to hear feedback from two leading scholars in your field, an opportunity for a valuable fresh perspective. In reality it’s two experts who might tell me that everything I’ve done over the past year is wrong and that everything I’d planned to do over the next two years is more wrong still. It’s a straightforward(ish) pass-fail thing, the transfer. With “ish” I mean the third possible outcome, which is a tentative pass pending a resubmission and a serious rethink (which would mean Auf Wiedersehen summer holiday, and Hallo heatwave spent hunched over my laptop in a library). *** Reader, I passed! I now write this from Christ Church meadow with a bottle of champagne in the other fist, occasionally shrieking with sudden glee and scaring tourists. I tried desperately to read the room and twig whether things were going my way, but my assessors — while friendly and insightful and all the good things I’d been told they would be — were inscrutable. It gave the whole thing an air of the driving test, where you’re convinced that every minuscule mistake you make has just tipped the scales from “minor fault” to “major fault, dear God, get her off the roads immediately”. I got a couple of dates slightly wrong, and my mouth, apparently unbidden by my brain, made a few completely unjustifiable points, and each time I grimaced and thought “oh Lord, that’s it, that’s the nail in the coffin”. At the very end, in very real danger of leaving the room without any inkling of how I’d done, I managed to ask in a nicely professional way “when I might hear the outcome, please” rather than sobbing out a pathetic, craven “did I do okay?!” plea. And lo! A pass! Some new points to bear in mind going forward, of course, yet nothing that gets hugely in the way of writing my next 20,000-word chapter (or eating double caramel Magnums in the garden with a Mhairi McFarlane book, however I end up spending my summer). 28/09: This is exactly how I ended up spending my summer. My supervisor probably won’t believe me when I tell her this is why I did no work on Friday.
Dan and I were on our way home from M&S, looking forward to an afternoon of world-saving research (him) and making an elderflower gin posset and some cucumber sandwiches to have with the first night of the Proms (me). (One of us has got our priorities sorted and I do rather think it’s not him.) Just outside Worcester College (the one with the lake) we walked into a female duck and two ducklings on the road. They were bustling around quite anxiously and I reasoned that they’d accidentally got locked out of college. We stood for a moment, looking hopelessly through the gate into college that I, as a non-Worcester student, couldn’t open. And so I rang the porter who, when I explained there were two ducklings and a duck trying to get into college and could they please open the gate remotely for them, said, and I kid you not, “sorry, but if anyone wants to come into college they’ll have to come up to the Lodge and ask permission.” I blinked, silently, for a solid ten seconds, really not sure what was being asked of me, before I elaborated, “It’s a duck.” Assured that someone was on the way to deal with the situation but absolutely certain I’d been fobbed off, I collared a student on the other side of the gate and breathlessly explained the predicament. I used my enormous sunhat to shepherd the three little wanderers into college and shut the gate behind them, certain that they would find the lake in their own time, and happy that they were at least safely away from the traffic. Congratulating myself on a good turn, and profusely thanking the student who held the door open while I flapped frantically after these ducks, I made for home. Never normally one to be kept from animals or general helpfulness, Dan had already dashed off ahead for an urgent work call with a journalist, and therefore missed the crescendo of the anecdote. Because — Peep-peep-peep-peep-peep. Oh God. More ducklings, I realised, looking around wildly, having a quick glance under a parked car. Oh, worse than that. It was coming from a grate. Yes, sure enough, the Worcester student whose day I had derailed spotted three tiny ducklings swimming around beneath a metal grate, some fifty centimetres below street level. We were standing staring at these ducklings, horror-struck by this tragedy playing out in front of us, when two locals joined us. We mused that if we could just lift the grate up — but it looked very sturdy and a few experimental pokes and tugs revealed that it wasn’t budging without some serious encouragement. “Oh, not to worry,” said one of the locals, “I’ve got a crowbar.” Who’d have thought? Off he went, and in the meantime college porters and several more concerned onlookers had gathered, with three separate people on hold to, respectively, the RSPB, the RSPCA, and the council, about to apologise in advance for the untold damage we might be about to do to their drain. And so, the crowbar gentleman returns with all the tools for the job — he has very thoughtfully brought a ladle to fish the ducklings out, and a washing up bowl for them to sit in — and eventually the massive workforce that has gathered by now manages to lift the grate. The ducklings were none too grateful for our efforts and resisted every hopeful scoop of the ladle, ducking under the water and hiding in corners. As the person with the closest house, I helpfully dispatched myself in search of a better tool for the job. And so, gentle reader, I ran — not my thing in the best / coolest of times — to our house, barrelled through the door only able to gasp out “DUCK IN A DRAIN” and after a frantic scrabble in the dishwasher, I returned to the scene with a colander, a sieve, and a spätzle strainer. The ducklings have inconsiderately decided to play along in my very brief absence, meaning that not only have I missed the grand rescue, but I’m also needlessly sweating and foolishly clutching a now-superfluous set of utensils. No good deed, etc etc. I loitered for a quick chat, still holding my sieve, and established that all ducklings were safe and well and reunited with their mum, none the worse for their experience. Unlike their rescuers, as I returned home a panting mess, buoyed by the success but nonetheless faintly traumatised, accompanied by our neighbours who were looking rather woefully at the sorry state of their washing up bowl and ladle. Still, all’s well that ends well. Going to put my feet up, revel in feeling marvellously James Herriot-ish, and wait for Worcester to call me, covered in gratitude, and announce that they’re naming a building after me. It strikes me that if I only write one blog post per term, I’ll be finishing my DPhil after blog post number nine. Now, three years reading impenetrable German books and scowling at undergrads in libraries and trying to look busy seems rather a long time, but nine blog posts does not.
It’s already racing by. When I came back to Oxford in September, in the first couple of weeks of my DPhil, I met a few assorted second years. “Oh, wow,” I said appreciatively when they introduced themselves. “Second year. So you guys pretty much know what you’re doing, then?” “Oh, no, no,” was the slightly mournful reply. “Not at all.” Given I’m now in the weird first-year-second-year transitionary no man’s land, and only three months from being an undoubted second year — yeah, I get it. Don’t get me wrong, I am doing work, despite what my Instagram suggests (“you realise you’re holding a drink in ALL your photos,” a friend said as she scrolled through my feed, “and how do you eat so much food?”) and I’m presenting at conferences, and I have a proper profile on the faculty website. There are authentic thrills to be had in research — it’s like being the first detective at a crime scene. And yet. And yet. I am still at heart the very same as the undergrads who I will soon be teaching. Imparting wisdom when I myself am still convinced that hitting “skip intro” on Netflix is somehow the very peak of efficiency and means I’m taking less break time. “Gaming the system,” I’ll murmur wisely, as I watch my fifth episode. But, as a man once said, time’s wingèd chariot hurries nearer, and adulthood is getting harder to ignore. I now have a house. A house! Not a flat! And not a house share, either, but a proper grown-up just-the-two-of-us house. Gone are the days of communal laundry rooms and fire drills, the charmingly chaotic Dolly Alderton-ness of keeping a bottle of sourz on the kitchen table like a port decanter, of balancing a laptop on a kitchen chair to have movie nights, of sellotaping pretty wallpaper over damp in the corners. (True anecdotes from the two years of my undergrad I spent living with girls, all of whom are now far-flung and similarly grown-up but who are still very dear to me.) Just a couple of months ago we came for a viewing, pointing, in silent, open-mouthed reverence, at the skylights, the roses in the garden, the sash windows, the open-plan kitchen. It’s all very smart with lots of stone and stainless steel and glass which is terrific for my Instagram, but bad when you’re sleep-deprived from midnight DIY and still getting your bearings among stacks of boxes and an unfamiliar floor plan. “That’s a lot of bruises,” my DPhil friend remarked mildly when I hitched my skirt up over bright purple shins at a picnic. Time does have a funny way of moving on, doesn’t it? I have my transfer of status in a week (oh Lord, a week!?) an oral exam to allow me to go into my second year — and yet it seems like yesterday when I sat in my first supervision meeting and matter-of-factly told my supervisor that I’d really rather not do it, thanks, it sounds terribly unpleasant. This Big Thing that’s been on the horizon since September will soon be forgotten, and my DPhil — and life in general — will take me to places I’d not even given a second’s thought to. Assuming, of course, that I’m not thrown out of the University in disgrace. Will report back! I didn’t expect to be writing this post so soon, but it was only a matter of time, after two years in rural Yorkshire, before I became addicted to really good takeaways. During the four million lockdowns of the last two years, I’ve listened enviously to the ranks of those bemoaning their Deliveroo addiction, and optimistically checked my postcode every fortnight or so, hoping that I too could have the luxury of bankrupting myself with sushi and burgers.
“We’re not there yet,” Deliveroo apologised every time I checked, “but we’re working on it!” Ah, come off it. You’ll NEVER be there. And what would be the point? Every delivery driver I’ve ever had has got woefully lost. It’s like the Bermuda Triangle. I end up jumping up and down frantically at the end of the driveway, desperately semaphoring to a van a quarter of a mile away, phone clamped to my ear. “Yeah, no, if you keep going up that road for a bit longer, four minutes or so, then we’re on the left… yeah, if you look through the trees - right, can you see a church? Okay, you’ve gone past us… yeah, I’m waving, I think I can see you?” So now I’ve got a fancy Oxford postcode, the fact that I could, if I so wished, have a nutella and strawberry crêpe, a Chelsea bun, truffle chips, a barbacoa burrito, and eighteen bottles of Malbec delivered to my door, all at the same time, no questions asked and no real human contact necessary, blows my tiny provincial mind. Within about ten days I ordered a Parma ham and fennel seed sourdough pizza, a ruby chocolate and raspberry croffle with stracciatella gelato; a brisket burger with tobacco crispy onions; and nduja macaroni cheese. I think the real low point arrived when I ordered a single ham and Emmental baguette for lunch. Twelve pounds, and it came from two and a half miles away. Financially and environmentally the most expensive sandwich ever. Another low point arrived later that week when I placed two Deliveroo orders in a single evening. Despite my ferocious Deliveroo-ing I have found time to leave my flat occasionally. Reader, I went to London. LONDON! See my Instagram for proof. Ate steak tartare for breakfast, ordered lobster rolls at midnight, and had a terrific time bumping into people on the Underground and not apologising, like a real local. And actual real DPhil work continues to move along at a quite breathtaking pace (about fifteen thousand words a fortnight, at the moment - if all of those words were good my entire thesis would be done in mere months). All being well I’ll be speaking at my first conference in just under two weeks. Two weeks!? Blimey. Think I’d better order another croffle. Well, it's official - I’ve moved back to Oxford after two years as a correctly-placed Northerner, and set up base in my new flat. A flat! For the first time ever I'm not in a teeny-tiny single-occupancy uni room, and I've got more square-footage to fill with fun furniture that I've accumulated, magpie-like, over the years. I've also got more square footage to hoover and dust than ever before, but hey, one thing at a time. It is, I think, an appropriate blend of properly grown-up (embroidered ochre-coloured pheasant cushions on dusky blue velvet sofa, coordinated copper barware, antique tantalus, vacuum-seal containers to make veggies last longer and therefore reduce food waste) and charmingly studenty: Kilner jar that I merrily painted with nail polish to repurpose as a piggy bank, pink magnetic menu planning board for the fridge, chocolate müsli in the pantry. Grown-up practicality jostling for space with fluffy fun stuff; a symbol of early-twenties-hood (yes, 24 is still early twenties, thank you).
What I’ve found, though, is that living outside the city centre does rather put the kibosh on undergraduate-style socialising. No more “meet at the bar in five?” or drifting along to your pal’s room to annoy them. Spontaneous meet-ups now take time, thought, and a bus pass. Nonetheless, I know that hermit-ing myself away in my flat might force me into a position of actually having to do work, which just isn’t acceptable. So I’ve tried to become what I always hoped I was but knew I wasn’t: sociable. And thus, in the last fortnight, I have: accidentally ordered a several-litre jug of Pimms to share with one other person - at three in the afternoon; eaten brownies and sliders in the pouring rain with a table full of STEM students; had pastel de nata for breakfast on Christ Church Meadow; met a chunky college cat called Flapjack, and accidentally disturbed a conference by talking loudly to chunky Flapjack next to an open window; shared canapés and Prosecco under a T-Rex skeleton, and ordered late-night raucous rounds of mulled wine in Turf Tavern afterwards. The challenge will be trying to keep this up; shifting my default response to an invitation from “hmm, fun, but pyjamas and cups of tea at home” to “YES, I’ll meet you there and let’s even go somewhere else afterwards”, even in the face of encroaching wintry evenings. But! But! Apparently I’m not here in Oxford just to eat lots of different foods in various locations. It would seem that I have work to do. Still, having a bulging to-do list is probably the most sure-fire way to keep me updating my blog regularly..! Stay tuned for DPhilibustering Chapter 2. I’m still here! And I know, I can’t exactly say that I haven’t had time to blog, can I, since time is exactly what we’ve all had for the last eighteen million months.
I could have been churning out one blog post per day, but. Maybe it’s because we seem to be a little bit saturated with comments on the world right now. Daily Covid figures, blog posts about de-lockdowning, opinion pieces about WFH. It’s been nice to look inwards, inwards at myself and my home and my family without thinking about the world out there, and how I could comment on it in a way that’s interesting and funny to all three of my regular readers. So I’ve thrown myself into summer without thinking how to document it. Thoughtlessly acquiring very stark and wonky tan lines and trying to prolong them with five kinds of lotion; dozens of “just one more” glasses of cold rosé; snorting with laughter over cream teas; sharing boxes of godly kouignettes in Bath; spending a whole day idly bullet journalling and watching films, just because; eating tacos in a restaurant-cum-shed and watching the servers do shots to noughties Avril Lavigne. I reread all of Malory Towers in three days. I found that my post-covid-smell-loss senses had left me with a real love for hummus, and spent a week eating it for every meal. I used surplus HelloFresh avocados to make detoxing face masks, then tried to stop them sliding off my face while I watched four episodes of Modern Family. A summer - a year! - of some sad endings, and some new beginnings. And WHAT a new beginning is just round the corner - it’s just over a month until I move to Oxford (again!) and start my DPhil in German. Armed with a new, almost-entirely pink flat and a vague knowledge of my subject matter, I’m ready to get back into the heart of the city and grab it by the horns (or, because it’s Oxford, by the sustainable sourdough and overpriced sushi). That a blog post is appearing now, when I’ve got some DPhil reading I kind of, maybe, technically could be doing, is no coincidence. I always suspected I hadn’t moved on from the first year undergrad who would go on endless procrastination Tesco trips for Sensations mini poppadoms, but there’s something disheartening in having it confirmed. So expect a record number of blog posts over the next three years as this northerner is once again misplaced. For now, though, I’m soaking up the rest of the summer (and the rain) and buying millennial-pink cookware online. Living the dream! (Check out the Let’s Be Friends page for links to social media pages on which I’m a little more active..!) Stuff it. 2021 is the first year I’m not making any resolutions.
I made some last year and met them all. I’m a published writer now, I bought myself a very sweet little car and proudly crammed the glovebox full of snack bars and “car makeup” that I’d set aside some six months before even passing my test, and I learned some Spanish. I may not have remembered much (any) of it but that wasn’t stipulated, your Honour. So it’s time for a year off. I’ve had a look at the most popular resolutions just to see what I’m rejecting. Don’t bother looking them up, they’re terrifically predictable. There’s the perennially popular “spend more time with family and friends.” Impossible for me. As a typical millennial boomerang child, I live at home and generally get under everyone’s feet anyway. There’s the vague “get more organised” which I’ve attempted in various guises. Trying to alphabetise the 347 books in my bedroom will inevitably get derailed by stumbling across an old favourite, wavy-edged from where I’ve dropped it in the bath, that I just have to sit down and read right there and then. Or, I get distracted and count them instead, as evidenced. I often start the year by trying to “streamline” my beauty routine, too. I will generally throw products at my face with a decent regard for the cleanse-tone-moisturise sequence but allow myself some creative flexibility outside of that. So come January I usually decide to revamp the whole thing and “actually stick to it this time, Isabel, honestly.” I’ve forked out for LED at-home treatments that are basically just red torches, some pink gel allegedly with dragon’s blood in it (nope, no idea on that one), and was so seduced by makeup artist Alan Pan inspecting my skin and telling me I’d age well that I left my appointment with two foaming cleansers and four kinds of serum. And then after a few frantic weeks of swapping between products, I can be found in the kitchen making some disgusting mask out of oats and spirulina powder, nodding wisely and confidently saying to myself “natural is best, you know”. Ho hum. And as for losing weight, well. Hard pass. It’s the most popular resolution and, yes, I get it. After those post-Christmas days where you only leave the house to take wine bottles to the bin in your onesie and a pair of clogs (this is not poetic licence, this was my Sunday), you do feel the need for a bit of a kick up the somewhere. I think the way to this, though, is not pounding freezing cold January streets with the Couch to 5K app and eating quinoa, but simply getting over yourself. Don’t get me wrong, live and let live. If that suits you, then smashing, enjoy. You can have my share of quinoa. But I refuse to spend any month of the year, let alone the coldest and darkest, in miserable self-denial, looking wistfully at my smart new macaron baking tray and an eight-strong stack of chocolate boxes. Exercise, inner glow, endorphins, yeah, okay. I’ve personally found that nothing beats the self-satisfied endorphin-charged glow of having seen off a full wheel of camembert rather than the hungry mongrel look I know I get after a mere hour or two of “dieting”. If the events of 2020 have shown me anything, it’s that there’s not much point planning rigorously for the future. Losing weight (ugh in itself) for a holiday that will probably get cancelled anyway; trying to solve imaginary problems ten years down the line and then having Covid shake up the very thing that might have caused you those problems; fretting about optimising your commute and then having to WFH for the foreseeable future, pffft. No, I shall spend 2021 pottering around in all my gluttonous, haphazard, homemaking, joie de vivre glory. Why improve on perfection? |
The official website of Yorkshire-made, Oxford-based writer Isabel Parkinson. Want fewer words and more pics? Follow me on Instagram!
(Header Photo: Radcliffe Camera, Oxford - Isabel Parkinson 2016)
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