Some weeks are amazing and when Friday rolls around, it’s just the icing on the bunny-shaped marshmallow cake. Anyone who’s had a week like that, I hate you. Give me your cake. I need it more than you do.
Yes, I’m feeling poorly and so, I am in melodramatic-and-resentful mode. It’s been a week of hibernating, eating six ice-lollies for my dinner each night, and alienating loved ones. I’m a sexy disaster right now. After a lovely (if slightly frenetic) weekend of drinking mojitos and being buffeted by the icy East-coast wind at the Edinburgh Festival, I crashed with a cold and embarked upon Stage One Spinster Cat Lady: shouting at anyone who strays near me.
To review, some things that are playing on my mind this week:
It’s autumn already, which is the pretty, crisp-morning, twinkling-auburn-tree interlude before the 6 Month Scottish Winter Soul Death Dirge commences. Woolly-coat weather again. Huurrhh.
I think I might be literally addicted to coffee (embarrassingly unsexy addiction).
It’s been a week at work. A whole week that was not spent in balmy climes with a good book and a bottle of bourbon.
Also, beyond the minutiae of my own life, the world is clearly a terrible, terrible place and humans are often appalling. All in all, a sad time of woe.
This is for anyone feeling similarly down in the dumps or riddled with the cold. Shout out to my Stage One Spinster Cat Ladies (mittens in the air): we’re owning this look now. I’d like to cheer you up, as long as we don’t actually have to hang out in real life.
Eating well. When I’m ill, I ask my chef to cook vibrant, wholesome vegan dishes for me to aid me on my path to recovery; and then I remember that I’m alone forever in a self-made hovel of despair, so I just get a box of Fabs from Lidl again. Then I go on the internet and look at www.thefirstmess.com. It’s warm and witty and non-judgemental, and the writer really has a knack for beautiful photography. Not only that, she’s an outdoorsy girl with a busy life and a love of healthy junk food (wraps and burgers) and teriyaki sauce. This blog really does cheer you up just by looking at it.
Macaroons! It’s time for a kitchen project. Anyone who moves in rarified baking circles will have taken a dainty intake of breath at this. Yes, macaroons, those little French drifts of munchable airy pastel joie-de-vivre. I’m going in here like a bull in a china shop, with my minimal baking skills, to commence the great winter of discontented macaroon baking. By January I plan to have made one in every colour of burnt. Unwanted updates will follow.
Agony Aunts. My next new best internet thing is www.captainawkward.com. I feel as if I’ve found my spiritual guide. Captain Awkward is blunt when needed, wise in all matters of the heart, and likes to talk about feelings. All manner of problems are solved; assertiveness, wellbeing and self-esteem are championed; and there is absolutely no corner of life too shameful or fabulously weird to discuss. The internet, just as it should be. She also says things like, ‘Let’s Cyrano the De Bergerac out of this’, and calls her blog followers ‘Awkwardeers’, a term I very much wish to steal and use to refer to myself formally. (‘1985 – present: full time awkwardeer’). I also liked her advice to someone in an obviously terrible relationship: ‘Bees! Run!’
Lastly, she has provided the small medieval sampler below (origin unknown), and it almost makes me want to start a facebook argument so I can post this as my witty riposte to an insult:
Word rage. One of my friends pointed out recently that some people are starting to say ‘Pacific’ when they mean ‘specific’, and now I notice it everywhere, which leads to the enduring conundrum: what is WRONG with people?
Who’s so lazy that they can’t be bothered to read all eight letters in a word, so they just grab whatever familiar noun is floating around their brain? ‘Spec… Pacific? Yeah, that’ll do’. Go home everybody, everywhere, because you said Pacific and everything is over now. (This is on my Happy List because I love raging at others for using words wrong; yes, adorable behaviour). (A little hatred is ok – it’s just kindling; it lights up the gloom. Let me fester).
This wonderful novel. O, my bed. O hibernation.
A lion gif. As may be apparent, I’ve just worked out that you can embed a gif in a wordpress blog. I was going round like someone who has recently studied The Internet, talking about gifs: ‘I think it’s pronounced gif, or jif, and it’s like a tiny animated box that somehow must rewind really quickly because it replays again almost immediately. In fact, immediately. And some of them are really funny’. My brother kindly showed me that there are many of these things on the internet and they’re not that big a deal. But THIS ONE YOU GUYS!
Awkward love and lion hugs x
Amy Jardine 
Loved this post on so many levels~ Completely relate to your feelings about allowing yourself to indulge in melodramatic and resentful behavior in response to bad days , weeks ect~ One just MUST indulge from time to time ~ absolutely necessary to prevent going round the bend completely. Love your posts ~ always contain the surprising and unique . Thank you for sharing your thoughts ~ and flotsam and jetsam~ it helped make my day a bit lighter.
Aw thanks so much!! So glad you enjoyed it 🙂 I agree, it’s so good to hibernate and wallow for a few days when you’re ill x