Etiquette has been six or seven years in the making, and I've spent the last few weeks up to my eyes in cover art and formatting disasters and endless proofreading. I have therefore spent the last few weeks looking like this: But it's DONE. I can finally hold the fruits of my labours - all three hundred and fifty-four pages' worth - in my hands. Finally, I have a book on my shelf with my name on the spine - and this time, it isn't a five-page book about cats that four-year-old Isabel wrote in crayon and stapled together herself.
On a more personal note, I finally decided to push forward with publishing Etiquette because this year's events have shown me that if you wait for a good time to do something, it will never get done. Examples: I've been looking morosely at my shelf of Really Good Wine that I wanted to save for an undefined special occasion - now, I've lost my sense of smell and can't enjoy wine half as much as I used to. Over winter, I put off visiting much-missed old friends until I had more time - and then lockdown happened. I had all sorts of plans and surprises and even presents in place for people who've drifted out of my life. So, visit your friends and give them their Christmas presents early. Publish that book. Drink the darn wine. Etiquette, the ultimate back-to-school essential, is available in paperback and Ebook formats on Amazon. Praise for Etiquette: "I loved it! It's literary comfort food: intrigue, lashings of scones, and an impressively drawn main character. A fabulous page-turner! Read it in one sitting and wanted more. I wish I'd gone to Multhorpe Hall - such fun!" - Tyne O'Connell, bestselling author of Pulling Princes. "A fast-paced, funny and clever debut" - Paula Byrne, bestselling author. "A delightful young adult novel, with a strong northern female main character: she's fun, rebellious and a fish out of water at her new school" - Sheffield Telegraph.
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Well, we’re fourteen million weeks into lockdown. You’ve got a spare saucepan installed by the front door so you can go and dutifully clang it every Thursday at 8pm. Everyone’s sick to death of sourdough and Duolingo and Zoom. And, never one to defy a national fad: I’ve become some sort of horticultural maniac.
I used to be able to sit in the garden (anywhere, in fact) not doing anything for ages. Weeks, in fact. Sure, I might have plucked a rogue dandelion from the rose garden before settling down on my picnic rug with a big hat and a G&T, like Margot from The Good Life. I planted and watered those free 'Little Garden' seedlings that Marks and Spencer handed out earlier this year, marvelling at how green-fingered I was. Now, though, I am a woman possessed. I can manage five minutes of devoted relaxing before a cheeky little thistle catches my eye and I’m off again, planting and deadheading and sweeping. Weeds be warned. In true Dig For Victory spirit, cabbages, onions, radishes carrots, beetroot, spring onions, and potatoes have been planted. Twenty fruit trees have been weeded and lovingly snipped - and jam jars have been sterilised in readiness. I spent two hours the other morning batch-washing gravel in a bucket. Twenty-nine rose trees have been carefully pruned. All twenty-nine have scratched me. Outdoor furniture has been stained (and so have my wellies). The sound of the delivery van bringing panels of trellis and lobelia plants and grow-bags is music to my ears. I’ve not yet watched Gardeners’ World but I feel it coming. I don’t know why the lockdown gardening madness has gripped me. It’s not like I’ve suddenly been robbed of other things to do - I am (so I’m sometimes reminded) a Masters student and I’m meant to be writing a dissertation on something at some point. German. It’s definitely about something German. And lockdown hasn’t stolen away my favourite hobbies (sitting down, listening to Classic FM, drinking wine, trying to read Thomas Hardy) but I’ve certainly been bitten by the gardening bug. And not the delicate, Miss Marple kind of gardening, ‘ooh, I’ll just pop a petunia in there, then return to the house for Earl Grey and scones’. Oh, no. I’m talking two pairs of gauntlets, twigs in my hair, yanking nettles and brambles out by the root, roaring like a warrior. So maybe it’s a primal thing? What it certainly is, is addictive. It’s the perfect storm: the dopamine hit of forking up a weed that has been taking the mick, looking with pride at your work, and then starting all over again because it. Never. Ever. Ends. It’s like that Greek bloke pushing the boulder up the hill, but with begonias. Big gardens are all well and good but by the time you’ve been round and weeded every inch, the bit you started with has reverted to something like the devil’s snare in Harry Potter. Oh, and apparently gardening counts as exercise which is meant to be good for you but I’ve never done any research of my own to confirm. Will report back. And a brief follow-up to my last post, in case anyone happened to be curious - I still, STILL, cannot smell. However I have decided it is churlish and self-pitying to hold off on all hedonistic pursuits until I'm back to 100% sensory capacity - if you are what you eat, I am currently a tub of ice cream tinged with Malbec. This is going to be a long and bitter post.
The context: I’m a foodie. A total foodie. Take a look at my Instagram: it’s a monument to gluttony. Cold champagne, boxes of chocolates. Toasted teacakes absolutely gleaming with melted butter. Baked Camembert speared with rosemary and chunks of garlic. Cups of Darjeeling with cucumber sandwiches (no finer sandwich in the world). Macaroni cheese with garlicky breadcrumbs. And the cooking of it all! There are few things I enjoy more than putting on my loungewear, pouring a glass of wine, and preparing a glorious meal for everyone. Fresh pasta, and risottos with heaps of Parmesan. Fluffy, faintly lemony madeleines. The smell of lime zest heralding a Thai green curry. Steamed sponge puddings and custard. Golden pear bourdaloue. Melty cubes of butternut squash sizzling on a roasting tray and giving out wafts of sage. Huge farmhouse cakes with soft chunks of apple and fat sultanas. The rarest steak, pink duck breast, salmon roasted with lemon wedges. Plump plaits of German milk bread. I’ve been on cookery courses, I won my school’s Home Ec. prize, I can see four or five food writing anthologies from where I’m sitting in the living room. I own around seventy recipe books. I honed my wine-nose while au-pairing for a family in the German vineyards, and I was in the blind tasting society at Oxford. (This is when you identify wine without knowing what it is. It is not where you taste wine until you go blind.) And now I’ve got COVID-19 and have lost my sense of taste and smell! NOT. IMPRESSED. An extremely, EXTREMELY disappointing final instalment.
Day 27, Friday - RIGHT, how on earth have I caught a COLD? I have done NOTHING but wash my hands for a month now. Everything between my teeth and eyebrows hurts. Was not awake for long enough to walk any distance at all. Day 28, Saturday - yes, Health app, I know PERFECTLY WELL that my step average is lower than last week. I KNOW. Stop rubbing it in. Days 29-31 - I have done fewer steps this entire week than on any other DAY this month. Jolly disappointing but entirely unavoidable. Could as readily go for a quick fly as for a walk at the moment. Update - what seemed to be a cold is now in all likelihood our friend COVID! Look at me, being part of a global trend. First time ever. Will be blogging about it in due course. So, despite everything, it's somehow still March. Instalment four of the 10,000 steps-a-day challenge and there's still one instalment to go.
Day 18, Wednesday - getting into the end-of-the-world wartime spirit by foraging wild garlic from neighbouring woodland to put in assorted soups and pies. Stockpiling toilet rolls is out. A kilogram of wild garlic in the freezer is IN. Added a nice hunter-gatherer dimension to the daily walk. 11,100 steps. Day 19, Thursday - the great thing about working from home is not having to walk for forty minutes from the train station to my classes. The rubbish thing about working from home is not having to walk for forty minutes from the train station to my classes. Had done about eight steps by 4pm and had to do a frantic walk before dinner. 10,031. Day 20, Friday - nailed it. Played my online lecture through the speaker and did laps of the kitchen while listening. 10,006 steps. Day 21, Saturday - considering strapping my phone to my dog’s leg to see if I can trick it into counting four times the number of steps, and getting away with a short 2500-step walk. Nonetheless: 10,097 steps. Day 22, Sunday - selflessly decided that the best Mother’s Day present to my mum was me staying home all day rather than disappearing off round the fields for two hours. I’ll catch up on 1st April. Number of steps today, hmm. Can I record number of violet creams eaten instead? ‘Cause I think that’s a bigger number. Day 23, Monday - okay, okay, today I wussed out. I felt oddly tired all day (NO DRY COUGH I PROMISE!) and managed 6000 steps. I’ll catch up in April!! There’s not exactly a great deal of other activities on offer, after all... #stayhome Day 24, Tuesday - still tired but was determined to make good use of my one state-sanctioned daily walk. Crawled my way to 10,000 steps (BANG ON). Day 25, Wednesday - thought that ridiculously warm and sunny weather would make me more inclined to head off into the hills for a long walk but all I want to do is bask in the garden with a Sidecar. 10,007 steps Day 26, Thursday - social distancing is in full force; anyone I came across while walking round the village crossed the road when they saw me coming. 10,016 steps - spent most of them feeling slightly like a leper. Still plodding along (metaphorically and physically) while everything else is all a-whirl!
Day 11, Wednesday - interesting. Decided to try and get my steps as close to bang on 10,000 as possible: made it to 9,996 and did four huge, careful steps across my bedroom. Still 9,996. Did it again. Still 9,996. It took a good seven or eight attempts before my phone finally caught on and rocketed up to 10,002. So if my phone is only counting six out of every twenty-odd steps, then I’ve been way underestimating my daily totals, right? Right? Please don’t take this away from me. Officially 10,002 steps but am conservatively estimating about fifty thousand in reality. Day 12, Thursday - SMASHED it. Got to eleven thousand by midday. Shattered, windswept, kind of hoping I can get steps-off in lieu tomorrow but know I can’t really. 12,312 steps. Day 13, Friday - “I WANT TO BE SEDENTARY,” I was wailing at 3pm as the rain lashed on the windows and I’d done about 3000 steps. “I don’t want to stick to my goals, I want to give up on them, it feels GREAT.” 10,651 steps, most of them extremely reluctant. Day 14, Saturday - I am now only measuring things in steps; miles and minutes have lost all meaning. 10,112 steps. Day 15, Sunday - went for a walk with Mum in which we picked our route by flipping a coin at every junction. Ended up a million miles from home and called Dad to come get us in the car. 11,871. Day 16, Monday - have realised I can do virtually all my steps in an hour and a half or so if I really knuckle down and don’t amble. 10,021. Day 17, Tuesday - I’m very lucky to live in the middle of nowhere and that most of my walks are either done around the garden or on paths where I barely see another living soul, much less come within six feet of them. 10,087 self-isolation-friendly steps. As promised in my previous post, I have indeed been walking 10,000 steps every day so far in March! Here's how I've been getting on... Day 3, Tuesday, looked a lot like this 11,454 steps, virtually all done in the rain.
Day 4, Wednesday - inexplicably woke an hour before my alarm so righteously got half my steps in before breakfast. Madness. 10,553 steps. Day 5, Thursday - deeply annoying because phone didn’t record anything above 6,144 steps. Borrowed a Fitbit and did frantic laps of the garden to get up to a roughly estimated 10,000. Day 6, Friday - I realise now I was expecting to find myself sleeping like a log, dropping ten dress sizes, blinding people with my glowing skin, sprouting angel wings, and experiencing all the other frequently-touted benefits of walking 10K steps a day. Huh. 10,420 steps. Day 7, Saturday - you’d think having a dog would be a sure-fire way to boost your steps, and it might well be if your dog isn’t a hundred and five years old. My Border Collie is starting to get thoroughly tired of being woken up for walks. 10,066 steps. Day 8, Sunday - I didn’t have much reason to leave the house today but I found that as if I kept my shoes on all the time and deprived myself of the “oh, but I’m wearing comfy slippers” excuse, I was onto a winner. 10,634 steps. Day 9, Monday - starting to see recurring faces of people on the same mission, all glaring at their Fitbits while marching up and down the same stretch of footpath. 10,636 steps. Day 10, Tuesday - I don’t usually think of myself as a bare minimum person, but... Bridget Jones said it best (as she often does) when she wrote in her world-famous diary:
Sometimes you have to sink to a nadir of toxic fat envelopment in order to emerge, phoenix-like, from the chemical wasteland. Now, I don’t think I’m particularly enveloped by fat (and luckily we now know better than to link ‘fat’ and ‘toxic’) and my chemical wasteland is a far cry from Bridget’s Silk Cut addiction but a wasteland nonetheless; a wasteland of too little activity and too many Digestives. I know what the problem is. The early January self-improvement self-deprivation fever passed me by, as I was tucked away in the Yorkshire Dales, and then there were deadlines and exams to focus on and then it was February and we’d all given up on New Year’s resolutions and now it’s March and I’m still in Christmas-hibernation mode. And it’s just far too easy, in this weather, to forget about things like salads and exercise and fresh air, and instead to focus on staying warm and eating toast and drinking red wine from fishbowl-sized glasses. So I’m going to try and walk 10,000 steps EVERY DAY in March (excluding days of genuine emergencies and illnesses, of which “laziness” is not one). “Why not start today?” my dad suggested on February 29th. I emerged from under the hood of my onesie long enough to offer “leap day” by way of an excuse. Who ever heard of starting a new healthy habit at the end of a month, or in the middle of the week? All wrong. So: Day 1, Sunday - breezed my way to 10,000 steps and even smugly went a few hundred over. Simply keeping my phone in my pocket at all times has, I think, added on a few hundred more steps without any special effort - just recording trips to the kettle or to the front door. 10,676 steps. Day 2, Monday - a volunteering shift at the library, trotting around to source Lee Child and John Grisham, followed by a few laps of the big Tesco hunting for lemongrass boosted my steps quite nicely, and after 5pm I could comfortably be entirely sedentary. 10,605 steps. Days 3-10 will follow... "Why the heck not?”
It’s a good attitude, I think. It’s the attitude that led me to write my first novel, to learn flamenco dancing, calligraphy, and natural history, and was the reason why I spent twelve near-consecutive hours at the end of September in a huge silent library with some of the world’s most brilliant minds, being stared at by marble statues. It was during final year when I resolved to take the All Souls Fellowship exam, and it was in the heady days of summer, still on the First high, when I officially signed up. It’ll be a bit Matthew Clairmont-esque, I thought (any Discovery of Witches fans out there?). I spent the evening before the first exam in the Eagle and Child hoping I’d soak up some cognitive power from the ghosts of old Inklings, happily eating sticky toffee pudding by the fire and re-visiting my finals notes. This, despite having packed them away in July, deliriously happy that I’d never have to see them again. Hmm. Last Monday, I spent my afternoon at home talking fixedly to a lamp in the corner of my living room, while a friendly journalist perched on the settee next to me with a camera hovering a few inches from my face.
Why? Well, technically it all started in 1769. But this bit of the story starts in August. |
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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