Clover Stroud: On The Way Life Feels

Something I liked best about being on holiday for the last two weeks of July, was that I ate absolutely everything I wanted. On the very first day, while my family were tearing into buttery croissants and slathering quince jam onto baguettes, I thought, for a very few moments, that I’d just have some scrambled eggs and sliced cucumbers, or even skip breakfast all together, which is what I normally do at home now.

My mind has been running up and down the number of days left on holiday, counting them up and down, up and down, like fingers over piano keys. I started with an incredibly luxurious 15, so that my hands could stretch out over two whole scales. 15 whole days of holiday ahead of me! That felt like forever.

It’s 5.02am and I’ve been awake for not quite an hour. I’m relieved that 5am has arrived, as actually getting up at an hour associated with 4am is too early. I was awake at 4.23am, but I lay in bed and listened to the crickets and watched the blueness of dawn through the thin curtains, shutters flung open. I’ve made a cup of tea in the rental house where we are in Brittany, using tea I brought with me.

I don’t know what to do about Instagram. This morning at 6.02am I spent many minutes watching two reels of a woman in Surrey talking about why she doesn’t like her newly fitted £100,000 kitchen. There was a part one, and a part two.

Hot damn, rural British bakeries have upped their game, haven’t they? As I drive through pockets of England, it seems to me that every second village (ok, perhaps fourth or fifth, but you get the picture) now has an outstanding bakery, which is honestly quite life changing. It means that even in relatively remote rural life, pistachio and rose cookies and silken oatmeal lattes can be to me what a Penguin biscuit and a cup of milky Nescafe were to my mom in the eighties.

Yesterday I lay on the lawn at a friend’s house, pressing my face whole body into the short, sweet grass, and tried to imagine myself melting into the earth. The earth smelt of sunshine and high summer, as bumblebees droned in the lavender and roses tangled around the garden. For about three months I have been moving very fast, my life a tangle of both packing boxes, and stacks of printed out pages, both of which have needed my constant attention.

I said that I would stop and do nothing, but then it was the hottest day of the year, and I felt compelled to pull 42 boxes of books and other paraphernalia out of the long cupboard that runs all the way down the edge of my bedroom. This is partly because all the bookshelves in my house have been empty, and walking past them was like seeing jaws with all their teeth missing: it was unsettling and even disturbing.

I am so grateful of this incredible community I have built up here on Substack, where I can truly express myself. I can share things that might not be glossy or on-trend, but that are real. I love talking to you about what’s going on, and I love hearing from you all, too. IThank you so much for being here.

I think I have burn out. I’m pretty sure I do. I’m not going to the Substack summer party tonight, which I had been so looking forward to, but it all feels too much. The idea of putting on good clothes and getting to London is definitely beyond me. I’ve never totally understood what the true definition of burn out is, and how it differs from exhaustion and overwhelm, which we are all familiar with, but when someone asks me something simple - What time is drop off? Do you know where my sneakers are?

There’s a gas station, sorry garage, quite close to my home, with a Greggs inside it, which is just one of the exciting new things in my children’s lives since we moved back to England. Greggs means they can eat a steaming hot sausage roll almost every time we pass that GARAGE. Three weeks in, we are still in a kind of strange other-wordly space, in which our new (old and beautifully familiar) real life in England still feels like a dream we have slumbered back awake to. Confusing?