Sunday lie-in? Who knows what my natural cycles of sleep would be if I didn’t have a wheezy, semi-obese Staffordshire bull terrier on my bed? At first light, Tiggy is in my face saying, ‘I do believe it’s breakfast time.’
First thing you do? Tiggy is fed and then comes another hour of sleep until she kicks me in the kidneys to say, ‘I’ve not had breakfast yet,’ and I’ll think, ‘Don’t mug me off, you were fed at 5am.’ Then she wins and has a second breakfast.
Sunday morning? Tiggy suffers abandonment issues, so whatever I do she’s coming with me. We’ll walk to see my mum or sister or, if I’m home, I’ll time myself to scramble eggs. My brain needs to be set challenges or it goes into mischief. Sometimes I think: ‘I’ve got weird salt, a tin of beans and kohlrabi, what if I was on Ready Steady Cook?’
Are you handy in the kitchen? Most of Sunday is spent on planning the evening meal. I randomly assign a region or nationality to the meal. I’ll think, ‘I’ve never made Eritrean’, deep dive on the internet and buy obscure ingredients that only get used once.
Sunday sounds? Radio 4 or extreme electronica – and nothing in between.
Sunday evening? I watch everything. There are beautiful pieces like Severance that I hold in rare esteem, but I’ll happily stare at Rudy’s butt cheeks in cargo pants on SAS: Who Dares Wins. If my mum is round, we’ll watch someone’s eye being removed on Surgeons: At the Edge of Life.
Sunday unwind? I’m a voracious reader. It might be a graphic novel, it might be The Body Keeps the Score about how trauma inveigles itself into your central nervous system, or it might even be the Collins Guide to British Birds. My attention span isn’t great. Not sure if that’s an ADD thing or that we all live in the shallows now because of social media, but I’ll doom scroll and then it’s ‘Night night’ until first light.
Sue Perkins is a judge of the 2023 Kindle Storyteller Award which seeks to find the best self-published story. To find out more visit, amazon.co.uk/storyteller
