Monday
Today I begin three days of being locked in a tiny, soundproofed, windowless room, alone except for a book. In so many ways, it is the dream. The only flaw is that the book is one I wrote and I have to read it aloud into a microphone so that it may be recorded and turned into an audiobook. So really, it’s three days of continuous talking and of periodically hearing your voice played back to you so that you can hear where you went wrong. In other words, the nightmare.
And that’s before you get to all the typos and other more profound infelicities you notice in your prose only once you read it aloud. Dear God, you think. Who wrote this drivel? And then the crushing realisation: it was you. It took you ages and you really tried your best and now – this. You are a disgrace to the profession. And to typing.
Anyway, it’s called Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives. It’s the sequel to Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading, and it’s out next year, in case you’re interested in making my pain worth it.
Tuesday
Oh, to be young again! For once, I really mean it. According to David McDowall, the chief executive of Stonegate Group which runs more than 4,000 bars, the era of the big night out – Friday, Saturday, Friday into Saturday – is well and truly over. The busiest hour at the Slug and Lettuce chain, for example, is now 3-4pm on a Saturday instead of 9-10pm. On Friday nights, they host bingo events, so sparse is attendance otherwise.
A mere 30 years too late, the world is being remade to suit me. Young people are finally admitting that going out is awful and that home and bed by nine is the time and place to be. I’m so proud of them, and relieved. I feel like a mother hen counting her chicks back into the coop for the night and tucking them safely under her till morning.
Of course, there are some who say this is a sign of the parlous state of youngsters’ finances, mental health and that their energy is being sapped by the precarity of their jobs and the demands of the side-hustles needed to keep the business of life afloat. I choose to ignore such possibilities and imagine instead that this is a sign of progress, a sign that people are no longer allowing themselves to be pressed by their extrovert peers into nights of loud, pointless misery but heading home to wrap themselves in the inestimable pleasures of the duvet and Brooklyn Nine-Nine repeats instead, as they always wanted. Proud, I am. Proud.
Wednesday
Rumours abound that Gwyneth Paltrow’s vaginal maintenance empire Goop is about to fall. There have been three rounds of redundancies this year and a restructuring of the business that at one point was valued at £199m.
This cannot be allowed to happen. Not just because of all the ladyparts dependent on Paltrow’s steamers, but because there is nothing else out there that gives us mere mortals such a laugh.
And never more so, I found, than when our labial queen launched a Netflix documentary series about her wellness mission, The Goop Lab, in which it was revealed that Paltrow didn’t actually know what a vagina was. The late, great old-school feminist and female masturbation workshopper Betty Dodson pointed out that that was just the birth canal. “Ya wanna talk about the vulva – that’s the clitoris, the inner lips and all that good shit around it.” The high priestess of the pudenda was shook. “I thought the vagina was the whole thing?” Perhaps this is the moment Goop’s fortunes began to turn. Let us hope they turn back. There is little enough humour in the world right now.
Thursday
Wine is over, stinky plebs! It’s all about olive oil now. God, the middle classes are awful.
Apparently we are raising liquid fat to high art now. Booze was evidently getting too easy. Everyone knew roughly what they liked to drink and what to bring to what kind of do, so of course some numbnuts have moved the goalposts so that everyone wishes they were dead again.
Now, to mix my metaphors because I’ve just spent three days expunging them from the stupid book I wrote and they’ve got to go somewhere, there is a new minefield to pick your way through and a new set of properties to pretend you can discern. Pepperiness. Virginity (sudden temptation to ask Gwyneth what she thinks this is). Free acidity. Cold-pressedness. First-pressedness. The fact that there is no second pressing of an olive crop so this in fact refers to the method of extraction only and not some measure of specialness, and you are allowed to kill the first person who turns to you and says this with an entirely spurious air of authority.
Jesus, I can’t bear it. Let’s all take a leaf out of the youngsters’ book and stay in.
Friday
I get worse and worse every year – as we all do, about everything, I hope and trust – but this one really marks a new low. This time I started crying at the mere receipt of an invitation to a carol service. I’ve always been susceptible – I think it’s because I don’t have any emotions the rest of the year and then they all have to come out at Christmas. My eyes used to prick dangerously even when I was at school and we were yowling about baby Jesus in a manger. Then when I got older and started listening to the words of the older, better carols and hearing them sung by proper choirs, I got worse. And then as a grownup and you sit in a church surrounded by history and aware of the constant, virtually unrelieved human suffering all around, and even more so when in the fullness of time you find yourself taking a child along with you too who will inherit this world of infinite pain flecked with brief moments of evanescent beauty – well, it’s messy sobs long before the Once in Royal David’s City solo even begins.
But crying at the invitation? Because it said it was going to be carols by candlelight, a guaranteed shortcut to high emotion? Unless the rest of the congregation are such forgiving Christians that they do not mind being covered in snot and their celebrations drowned out by howling, I must regretfully decline.
