Notebook

  • Shepherd’s pie

    For reasons I may never go into, I’ve been back and forth to my parents’ house in Greater Manchester for the past year or so, living there for months at a time. Every time I returned to the vicarage, they’d cook my favourite: sheppy.

    I can taste it now. Mum or Dad peeling the potatoes. Baked beans mixed into the mince — unorthodox, but right. The Pyrex dish waiting for the oven to do the Lord’s work. My plate garnished with pickled beetroot and lashings of HP sauce. Two people quietly making room for me again. Me, eating sheppy with the same useless gratitude, unable to say much beyond how good it always is.

  • Ghost in the machine

    Ghost in the machine

    I almost forgot to look away as the doctor drew my blood. Then she checked my heart.

    “It’s quite fast,” she said. “But that’s probably because of your journey here, based on what you’ve told me. You took the Tube?”

    The NHS GP on my street had a two-week waiting list — to speak over the phone. The private GP saw me the day I called. She was based in a skyscraper.

    I was desperate for answers. Why did I feel unbalanced on the Tube? And then in crowds? How was this physical sensation a symptom of anxiety? It was surely going to be too much for a blood test to answer.*

    Outside the skyscraper, I realised I hadn’t eaten. I ate a banana by the side of the road and felt better. Then I took the Tube home.

    Days later, I took a guided tour of the west side of Highgate cemetery, built by the Victorians to keep the bodies far away from central London. In the terrace catacombs, those feelings returned. I leaned to my left as the ground swallowed me up. I couldn’t help but see the dark humour in it as the shelves of coffins propped up my body.

    *It was.

  • Throwing the book

    Throwing the book

    I started this blog to support my efforts to get writing. It was a week before England’s second lockdown began. Like a lot of people, I believed I had a book in me. And I thought the pandemic would provide the room to write it.

    I’ve done a lot of things during the pandemic. I got into the habit of long midnight walks. I worked out, and then I stopped working out. I got into Pokémon cards, podcasts, audiobooks and crypto (I keep saying I’ve “got into” things, which I find interesting). I watched the Adam Curtis documentary series Can’t Get You Out of My Head, countless episodes of Friends, and the third series of Succession. I’ve been hooked to social media.

    I also moved from one newspaper to another. I reunited with friends between lockdowns. I’ve felt happy and ordinary between the dark moments.

    I’ve done a lot of things during the pandemic, yes, but not much writing.

    A new idea for a novel came to me a couple of months ago. Let’s call it a ghost story. Late last year, I learnt of a new competition for first-time novelists. I planned to write thousands of words a day to meet the competition’s deadline in April. My present word count? 1,300. Every sentence is a room but I can’t always find the key to the next one.

    I could have added more words tonight. Instead, I watched the first episode of Euphoria with some microwaved popcorn and went on a walk in the rain while listening to Foreverland, a book about marriage by Heather Havrilesky. And then I wrote this.