Multiple anxieties

About a year ago I deleted TikTok after I began to imagine looking down on myself from above like some kind of judgmental angel, watching as I flicked dumbly at my phone every ten seconds. Boring! Next! More content! Satiate that jittery feeling below my chest! I could see my jaw slackened and my unfocused eyes and I felt profoundly depressed about this undignified picture.

Here’s a day in my life, except it’s book launch day for Claws Out! and I’m a ludicrously capacious bag full of nerves! I wake up before my alarm because my body must have been readying for the day ahead. With this extra time, I apply HRT to every limb available, then make breakfast to take with me to my appearance on Woman’s Hour. The night before, I’d called it Women’s Hour and my husband took great pleasure in correcting me.

We’ve been on holiday for two weeks, only our dog died the week before we left and this holiday was supposed to be a special highland road trip with him. It wouldn’t have worked anyway because I called the hotel shortly before said dog died to ask about check-in times and they didn’t have a record of our booking so I guess that was some kind of ominous foreshadowing right?

I spent the morning listening to the news which mainly consisted of a lot of talk about WILDFIRES destroying vast swathes of Europe and much discussion about an AI programme hacking into another AI programme and even Sam Altman having to admit that AI probably needs regulating as a result.

What do terrible people, several suspicious deaths and a herd of angry cows have in common? They’re all integral to the plot of my upcoming novel Claws Out. It was only after finishing it that I realised there’s one main character who’s never given their dues - and that’s North London.

It’s funny trying to write something this week, when all anybody wants me to talk about is the wedding I went to last Friday. Thee wedding. And yet I cannot talk about it, and nor do I much want to given it wasn’t my wedding and therefore not really my business to tell anyone about. But the pressure is immense.

This was the week I realised that climate change is real. While you roll your eyes at my unbelievable stupidity up until now, obviously I understood that it was real before. I knew the world was heating up, I remembered colder winters and cooler summers. I hid inside when we had those 40 degree days back in 2022. I darkly wondered if my nephew would ever see snow in real life. But it all felt like the really bad stuff would happen down the line. This week I really understood it was now.

I’m late writing this week because I spent five days in Scotland with my family, wrestling two kids under four and persuading my mother that I’d be safe walking from one end of a village to the other via what she described as a ‘rape alley’ - in reality a lovely wooded path where I witnessed several rabbits frolicking. We discussed the probability of a local (or even big city) fiend waiting by this path every evening hoping for a hit but she wasn’t persuaded by my assessment of the likelihood.

It usually goes down like a bucket of cold sick at a christening when I say that I think a majority of men dislike women. NOT ALL MEN*, I gasp as I take my dying breath, I know you Kevin love working with women and have a t-shirt which says “this is what a feminist looks like” which you haven’t actually worn out of the house since 2016 when everything went a bit wrong (though you still wear it to sleep in and feel a little tingle of righteousness) but other, much worse men.

Last week’s final SNL episode of the season showed a sketch about Margaret Thatcher closing the mines after workers discovered millions of murderous Mr Blobbys living underground. It was so absurd and brilliant that I’ve been laughing about it to myself all week. As a result, I’ve been thinking about Thatcher a lot more than I’d like. She even invaded my dreams which I really resent because normally I enjoy that break from reality.