1. Solstice again. Creeping from the still house into cool air, then a run to smooth waters where even the dogs and their walkers haven’t yet rambled. We swim in almost-silence for a while, like steady kayaks, with a chiffchaff serenading us and the last of the willow fluff dusting the surface of the water, fish occasionally glopping upwards to grab a passing insect.

Home to pick a posy for the table. I must not fall asleep as soon as I sit down. I fall asleep instantly.

2. This spring has been wonderful. Besides the puffs from the willows along the river, the chestnut trees drip sap onto the pavements so our shoes click with every pace, and the ducklings, goslings and cygnets gather around their beady-eyed parents. Dragonflies and damselflies drone over the river. Huge poppies have grown in the chaos of the garden, I assume where I threw the seeds from pavement poppies last summer, and bees roll around among the stamens like playing puppies. I drive past the supermarket and see several people tending to a horse in the neighbouring scrubland.  

3. Have you finished Succession yet? This final series has been my favourite yet, for possibly obvious reasons — my stress levels were lower than my enjoyment levels for the very first time, so I could fully savour exactly how brilliant every single aspect is. Cast, crew, production, script — everything is perfect, and yet how hard to communicate why a programme about the world’s worst people is not just watchable but probably the best TV this year. This Vanity Fair clip with the director of the scene on Connor’s wedding boat is excellent and describes so well how TV like this is a kind of alchemy.

4. A brief sojourn to a foreign city, where the cathedral left me chilled but a record store was so exactly like the ones from my teens that I welled up and had to be pulled away. How do smells cut through all barriers and transform us so completely to our previous selves? I wanted to stay for hours and flick through every single album, and end up buying four, two I’d love immediately and two I’d hate, but would stick with because albums are never cheap, and the two that were harder work would become my favourites and stick deep in my brain forever. I thought myself too cool to be a Feeder fan at the time, but watching this video now I want to weep at how normal we all looked then, how clunky and average and awkward, how anyone who grew up in the 90s would recognise those bedrooms, that wallpaper, those lampshades, and how humans are so dumb to grieve things we didn’t even want at the time. 

But sometimes, for brief moments, like when you are standing at the stove making lemon and courgette risotto and listening to Head Like a Hole at full volume, your teen self and the adult self you thought you might be meld perfectly and all is well with the world. 

5. We read this book in bookclub recently, and I was struck at how we all struggled to verbalise our feelings about it. Was it good? Bad? Confusing? Funny? Unsettling? It was all and none, the live example of imagining a colour you’d never seen before. I was reminded of these two videos the algorithms had fed me, on Outsider Music and how audiences misunderstood the film of American Psycho when it first came out. Weirdness is so challenging, so aching and unsettling and new to brains which generally thrive on conformity and predictability. In the latter video, the film’s director Mary Herron says, ‘I have to always remind myself, sometimes I don’t get it, you know, when I first see something… particularly if it’s unfamiliar, it can be quite… there’s something uncomfortable or disturbing or it seems boring or like it does’t work, and it’s also because you’re just not attuned to it yet and it’s just sometimes you take time.’ Like those albums as a teen, the best, weirdest, most brain-engaging stuff often takes much longer to chew, but it’s almost always worth it.

6. (We also watched Mustang, which I recommend to literally everyone, although it does nothing to disprove my theory that all good woman- and girl-based films are secretly also horror films. But it’s brilliant, so please watch it if you haven’t already.)

7. I intend to make this tonight for the Solstice feast’s dessert. Happy summer, pals.

Winter Solstice, and we run to the river with whispered greetings, a cluster, making greater effort always for the riverbank’s high days and holidays. Home for a bath, midwinter candles, apple porridge, and Britten’s Ceremony of Carols, of which I was reminded by a transporting episode of Soul Music which captures well the weirdness and magic of the pieces. Thin indeed the veil between this world and others right now, knitted with tradition and ritual; I find myself seeing my father often, in the old, stooped men in our neighbourhood, and while I don’t grieve his absence — unhappy, unhappy presence that he became — I feel sad that he doesn’t get to be alive any more. For all the horrors this world may contain, he has also escaped every one of its pleasures.

It soon became clear that I had chosen the worst book we’ve read this year for our December bookclub, but it has been cancelled out by the memory of the excellent Lolly Willowes from the month prior; I think Sylvia Townsend Warner’s brief, odd, beautiful little work may be my own book of the year. Lolly’s flavour of ageing pragmatism and insistent solitude has made me think of it every day since, and recently a friend and I discovered in hushed but warmed tones how tired we each were of hearing the voices of twenty-somethings, like Lolly. Idealistic and fresh-eyed at best, mostly they seem crazy-paved with cynicism, marketed to since birth, with no concept of ‘selling out’ and only of being a strong personal brand, sure of everything, experienced of nothing; or maybe it’s the social media paradox: if one’s opinion seems worth broadcasting, statistically it probably isn’t. Memes, quips, irony: none of it is a diet to live on. (God, what a tiresome old hypocrite I’ve become.) And of course that’s a sweeping generalisation, of course there will be barrels of humble, hungry-to-learn, helpful and open-minded twenty year olds just like we weren’t, but when one starts to feel old — not old old, but lingering now in the doorway of old and peeping in with hope and dread — perhaps one pleasure at this brief transitory moment is recognising that these young voices haven’t yet become refreshing and rejuvenating, but are currently simply not what the doctor has ordered. Would my younger counterpart despair now at my growing love of long country walks, old churches and high church C of E pomp, drying fruit, raw broccoli, slippers, bird-spotting, gardening, naps? I suppose the greater point is whether I would care about her reaction. (I would not.)

After finishing the terrible book, I started The Dark is Rising again, and was beyond delighted as I sat beneath a dog in the twilight of Midwinter’s Eve, to discover that this classic children’s novel opens at that very moment, decades before. Is the Rider Welsh? I’m sure later his accent is more Danish, but for some reason he has Michael Sheen’s face in my mind this time around.

Right. The Yule log (black cherry for the Solstice, to distinguish it from the Christmas Day Yule log) needs to be finished, and the Solstice wreath lies in green pieces on the kitchen table, holly and fir, bramble and dried oak, waiting to be wired together by helpful housemates. There’s plenty on the radio at this time of year, but for humans being inspiring in various ways, might I recommend this episode of Criminal, this episode of Seth Rogen’s podcast, this episode of Hidden Brain, this episode of 60 Songs that Explain the 90s (or maybe festively this excellent one?), this episode of This is Love, this episode of The Untold, and/or any of these excellent Adam Buxton episodes. Listen to the wonderful Orla Gartland, watch this great and devastating bit by Cecily Strong, give any spare cash that might have gone on a Christmas night out to other clowns here or here. The days are getting longer now! Light returns. I hope you have some hope to light your way in these bananas times.

1. Happy Mabon! Every autumn, I forget that the darkness comes clanging down in a great rush in the mornings. One day, I am greeted by a pinking sunrise. 48 hours later, it’s so dark on my run to the river that I have to stop a passing runner and check the time, in case my disturbed sleep sent me dressing and leaving the house at 2am. This summer may not have given us those mornings where it’s so hot I can barely get out of the water, where those early hours feel like full silent days carved out just for me to sit in the light and wait for everyone else to wake up, where the only extra thing I put on to run home is my trainers — I look at my waiting winter gear, neoprene socks and gloves, head torch, two more thickening jumpers, hat, thermal mittens — but every season, every day, is beautiful.

Today we go early for celebrations, and the water is silky, and Orion hangs over us with his phallic sword dangling and Betelgeuse winking on one shoulder. The near-full moon spotlights us and I feel almost ready for the shortening days.

2. Hilary Mantel continues to be a literary god. How does she write with that clarity? How can I ever speak with her calm good sense and wit? 

3. We have two main problems at the moment, as far as I can see. a) What we’re doing (“curating” our lives; twitter spats; purity spirals; division and isolation; wanting ‘debates’ that can only be won or lost; encouraging people to buy more things; trying to buy our happiness; letting marketers tell us how we feel about the world rather than encouraging major moral lessons from throughout the ages to challenge us on our weaknesses; refusing to accept that life is suffering; asking self-care to be a plaster for everything we don’t have) and b) what we’re not doing (joining together to stand against those with more money and power; protecting the people who have even less power and voice than we do as a matter of course; learning from history; protecting nature above all else; prioritising going for walks; learning to repair things and campaigning to make things repairable; having a basic belief in human dignity for all, not just those with whom we agree; accepting that truly, we are all different and no amount of shaming or disgust will change that; working to shape our societies, culture, economies, production, food supplies and communications around improving — not just sustaining — the air, water and land, and fighting to ensure all of those new shapes protect women and children).

Individualism has morphed into something so completely self-destructive that we’ve forgotten we need nature more than anything — literally, more than anything — and we need to unionise and unite and put aside differences and work together even with people we don’t like. 

Because when there are wicked people in power, when it’s genuinely exhausting to think about all the corrupt, venal, toxic, divisive, false, and cruel things they have done since coming to power, those people love to watch everyone below pointing their fingers at one another, saying, You, You’re The Enemy, You’re The Problem, while corrupt populist leaders rub their bellies and chuckle at another promise broken, another mass death on their hands, another building site on a protected forest. Do you understand the stakes here? Do you understand that it’s actual survival? It’s not about being right any more, it’s not about besting someone in the argument. It’s about having decision makers who can not only ensure there is still food to eat and air to breathe, but that relations both within a country and between countries are built on care, and support, and compassion, and believing in human dignity. And while it sounds wishy-washy and hands-clappy it’s the schmaltzy, sentimental truth. It’s the only one, really. 

If we instead continue to believe every single day that my feelings are the most important, that my beliefs are the right ones, that I’ve got to prove those baddies there are evil and awful and wrong, then honestly, what the fuck? If we’re happy to live in a country where hostile architecture is the starting point for all public builds, where we send refugee boats away from our shores, where affiliate links are a career goal, where we haven’t stormed the Daily Mail offices with accounts of all our lovely immigrant friends and family and had a huge feast together and compared our long and tangled family trees, then come on. It’s only a race to the bottom if we all keep running. 

Because, pressingly, whatever the spark of a major global conflict — assassination, fuel shortages, hyperinflation, invasion — the kindling is almost always a populace fed pure hatred for months, for years, until they can’t even taste it anymore but are ready to spew it out again, and are ready to use another populace as the receptacle. And hatred is brewed up in silence and isolation, and in the ashes of bridges burned between disparate groups. 

And on that note, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, mainly because I don’t believe governments are generally competent enough to manage Grand Plans, but it’s annoying that technology and social trends and culture have developed in such a way that no one knocks on anyone’s door for a chat as a matter of course now, that it’s a given that a ringing phone triggers anxiety, that it’s not the norm for cups of tea with your neighbours, that we don’t know each other’s neighbourhoods, that we don’t even talk on the phone, with live words and intonation and synchronised laughter, but in text, in WhatsApp chats, in tapped out words and symbols that we know can be screen-grabbed and misinterpreted, that we know are kept, filtered and sold by the tech companies. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just a reality that every single one of us can choose to do differently. 

Sometimes exactly the right thing comes along at the right time. All of us here watched About a Boy at the weekend, a film which is so wonkily weighted and oddly rhythmed, but a perfect depiction of everything I’m banging on about here. Hugh Grant’s character likes being alone. He’s happy that way. It suits him. It’s his choice. Then, between one thing and another, he finds himself drawn into a world of a suicidal single mother, a duck-murdering young boy, more single mothers, more tricky teens, plus exes and mothers-in-law and awkward support groups. And it turns out that actually, being with people is better. Being uncomfortable often develops you as a person. Constantly prioritising only yourself produces a waxen, pointless baby. Making shared sacrifices might just be the point of being alive. Remember that to be human is to be flawed. That no one is ever completely right, and no one is ever completely wrong. That the boring stuff makes us feel good, and the glossy stuff, if all we strive for is gloss, doesn’t. 

If you want anything practical, here are the things that have really helped me over the last few years:

• Writing a letter or email regularly to my MP, to CEOs of organisations, to anyone I want to communicate my strong feelings and how I’d like things to be done better. Tweeting eats your soul. It’s a horrible myth the media pretends is important. It really, really isn’t.
• Inviting people to go in front of me in queues, in traffic, getting on to buses and trains. It lowers my stress levels right down.
• Learning the names of my neighbours and people I meet regularly on walks and letting them learn mine. (I definitely haven’t just decided I loathe a neighbour because they cut a bird-hatching tree down in their garden on the last day of the year it was legal to do so. It’s fine.)
• Joining a few political parties, and the closest thing I have to a union
• Making something, anything — everything can be done with love, and learning to not get sucked into the capitalist conceit of having to make it perfect, sellable, exhibitable is a genuine gift to yourself; making a cake or a film or a coaster and not putting it on social media, letting it be ugly or serviceless and loving it anyway. I felt extremely overwhelmed the other evening, but instead of doom-scrolling I knitted a… I don’t know, something flat and woollen, and it helped to have my hands and eyes working on directionless introspective creation. 
• Trying to stop hating. Every time I want to tell a negative story in my head about someone, I attempt to turn it into something positive: how unhappy that person must be, what they must be missing out on. It’s so nauseatingly Pollyanna-ish, and of course it isn’t always successful, and of course every single day brings a hundred thousand examples of cruelty and injustice and wickedness, but the alternative only makes my life feel worse, so why would I indulge that? 
• Teaching myself the names of birds, trees, flowers, clouds and constellations. I’m still at the most basic levels on all of these, but the difference one feels in the world when you can name things  — let alone use them and know their stories — is a very real sort of magic. (For that reason I hope to read this book very soon.) This episode of The Cut is also good on the wonder and power of learning the names of the weeds that grow in your nearest pavement crack. 

4. Creating anything is always a gamble, isn’t it, but writing a book you actually like for once and seeing it slowly and beautifully sink to the bottom of a river never to be seen again is ever so slightly crushing. However, it turns out even Thom Yorke feels that way, so I am comforted. 

5. I’m sure I’ve mentioned plenty of these before, but if you want some suggestions of where to find joy, here are my favourites from the last year or so:

I was given Lucy Easthope’s book, When the Dust Settles, for work recently, and I was surprised and delighted to discover the most uplifting, hopeful, human and rightfully angry book I’ve read in a long time. Do yourself a favour and preorder it. I bought this other book for my own birthday, gave it to a housemate to give to me, forgot about it, and was delighted to later unwrap He Used Thought As A Wife. Laughed a lot, cried twice. Marvellous. 

Now even the youngest housemate here can recite John Finnemore sketches and sing the songs. Has also taught them various composers, gods, logical fallacies and gothic story tropes. Also v funny. Oh, Kate Beaton! Her two books (Hark! A Vagrant and Step Aside Pops) are a bit like a comic-book version of Finnemore, but swearier and sexier and utterly unsuitable for all the housemates who have read it and been educated about the Brontes, Katherine Sui Fun Cheung, Tom Longboat, Nancy Drew, Ida B. Wells, Sacagawea, and the Borgias. 

Had to give Inside a restraining order against me for the sake of us all, but Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade is a masterpiece of writing, acting, sound design and optimism. Spy is dumb action comedy polished to perfection, and Yasujirō Ozu’s Good Morning seems like the inspiration for almost all US arthouse films since 1990, and is also beautiful, funny, thoughtful, and good. 

Taylor Swift’s Evermore, like all brilliant albums, isn’t completely perfect. But most of the songs are. And Hole’s classic Live Through This is still just ideal for turning up very, very loud after a tricky day, for the enjoyment of any neighbours who may have hacked down a bird-friendly tree on the last day of February. 

Watched both series of Liam Williams’ Ladhood when I had a week off this summer, and really relished the location, the intention, and the writing. More please. 

Miles Jupp and Justin Edwards continue to be my comforting bedtime listening in In and Out of the Kitchen. Has it ruined Nigel Slater for me? Well, a bit, but no more than any of us deserved. 

I thought this would be a book I’d mumble through the first chapter of, then let get buried in my To Read pile, never to re-open. Instead, I found Whatever Happened to Margo? laugh-out-loud funny, drily written, and full of humanity. Excellent Women has made me want to read everything written by Barbara Pym, a goal I am slowly but surely working towards. 

6. I’ve spent the last few years trying to find hazelnut trees, and finally found a copse between a car park and a play area, full of nuts the squirrels hadn’t noticed. Now I’ve found them, the spell has been cast and I see hazel trees everywhere, on walks and on pavements and running along motorway slip roads. A tray of green and brown frilled hazelnuts now dries with the laundry. They are so beautiful. 

1. On bank holiday Monday I woke two of the housemates at 4.15am, and we made a pan of hot chocolate and opened the door to hear the dawn chorus. One of them sensibly remained on a chair in the garden, insulated against the early May morning with a duvet and blanket and thick onesie; the other walked out with me, into the dark, and we tramped the streets together, along the silent pavements, towards the river and fields.

We discovered that a large ivy-covered tree is home to a bat colony, members of which flapped silently about our heads in their haste to return before full dawn. A cuckoo was audible across the water. A starling clicked its beak and jittered up and down the branch. The housemate called me a boomer.

Of all the odd things I miss from last year, it’s the silence of the roads that is the greatest loss. At 6 o’clock in the morning there would be almost no traffic at all; now the birds are almost drowned out by the constant roar, even some distance away. Whether it’s hormones or poor emotional processing or a rational reaction to a damaged world, I feel angry at the traffic. I’m not saying it would necessarily be a 100% smooth process, but I do wish the world could be run by peri-menopausal, menopausal and post-menopausal women for a year or two. Just to see.

2. I am still obsessed with Orlando Wood’s short book Lemon (I was banging on about it back in February), and am so grateful to have so many people in my life who care about those same ideas. We’re in a left-brain cycle of culture at the moment, he explains: the left brain has a tendency to “isolate parts from the whole and to see them in the abstract… It likes to break things up into smaller parts, to categorise, and therefore favours the familiar, consistency, repeatability and predictability”. It also “prefers to see things in terms of simple and linear cause and effect. It prizes utility, power and control, and its ability to abstract and isolate things from their context enables it to manipulate the world”. What’s that you say? Wider cultural discourse and rights of individual groups, inability to have dialogues about, you say? Mmm. 

My favourite part of the book is when Wood breaks down two adverts: Heineken’s ‘Water in Majorca’ from 1985, and GoDaddy’s 2018 ‘Make Your Own Way’ ad. Remember that? No, me neither. ‘Make Your Own Way’ is full of colourful images, isolated people, or tiled with images of themselves to make a ‘conveyer belt’ effect, and clean-face words which could be applied to almost any product or company (watch it to cure your insomnia/trigger a panic attack); everything is buzzword-y, inspirational, keynote, statement, unilateral, and utterly, utterly devoid of humour, humanity, or engagement. 

One of the most striking things about Wood’s ad breakdown is that, once you’ve read it, you can’t stop noticing how in, say, three ad breaks within an hour-long programme, there might be one advert at most which doesn’t fit this left-brain pattern. Adverts for products as diverse as cars, period reusables, white goods, clothing catalogues, insurance, snack food, and supermarkets all, to some extent or another, fit the mould: bright images, little human connection, bland Instagram visuals, large slogans, spoken-wordlessness (better for the global market), a vague puff of do-gooding, and absolutely no wit at all. The only one I’ve seen recently attempting anything different is Maltesers, about a breastfeeding mother and her mother-in-law, which I admired for the milk-leak and loathed for the Hahahaha, aren’t women awful to each other?.

It’s draining to imagine the flat meetings and endless audience segmentation that enabled this ad trend: this sector engages on social media in the evenings and this demographic prefers a friendly looking home and our audience here is more about food as a pleasure. I’m loathe to break it to them, but for all that laser-focused research you are all making the same ads. And as Wood exposes so brilliantly, those ad campaigns are costing more and more to receive less and less engagement. Congrats, lads. 

3. Speaking of left- and right-brain world views, as so often happens this episode of Hidden Brain popped up serendipitously, with the wonderful host Shankar Vedantam interviewing Iain McGilchrist about his 2010 book The Master and His Emissary. It’s just over 45 minutes and is worth every second — McGilchrist is so clear and insightful about how to tell what type of brain is leading at any given time, what we lose in a left-brain society, and what we need to do about it. (I went back and checked and only then saw the book is in Lemon’s bibliography. Bliss.) 

4. For various reasons, a small toilet room here has been stuffed with balloons for the last week. It’s absolutely staggering both how not one of us thought to remove the balloons, instead bobbling through them to reach the facilities at any given hour of night or day, and also how immensely relaxing it is to go in there since they’ve been removed and humanely destroyed (I assume). It’s A Squash and a Squeeze in action, a life philosophy I cling to pretty robustly and find pays dividends. A housemate pointed out recently that whenever they are travelling in my car, they play a game to see if they can ever see another car in worse condition, and they say they never, ever can. It’s the Squash and a Squeeze philosophy that, in part, enables me to drive the dented, rusting, bubbled, scratched, lichen-furred, beloved piece of garbage I do, having previously had no driving license for almost two years after my seizure. It’s such a delight to drive any car at all. 

5. We’re rewatching Ghosts, which of course I recommend, and I suddenly realised that the Captain (Ben Willbond) is the speaker of possibly my favourite newspaper-based gag in the entire run of The Thick of It. Please watch all of Ghosts and all of The Thick of It, then perhaps The Death of Stalin? All thoroughly excellent, and the latter two contain my favourite kind of Muriel’s Wedding-type comedy, where I am tearfully wheezing with laughter one moment, then gaping with discomfited horror the next. 

6. I made Nigel Slater’s cardamom-spiced rice pudding this weekend, (although I times everything by 1.5 except the rice, which I up to 200g) and it was as good as always, if I say so myself. Cardamom, like capers, coriander, and pistachios, is an ingredient I’ve only come to love as an adult — I often long to make cardamom buns but am in such an emotionally entangled relationship with my sourdough starter that I never have yeast in the house, so have to rely on my favourite local coffee shop for a hit every now and again. If someone wedges themselves against the fridge door this weekend, I might attempt these.