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January 2025

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SWB on Doing Friendship Better

I’m dying to know what you make of this. So, flicking through last week’s Guardian Weekend I read a feature on habits we can fall into with our friends. Great! I thought, because while  articles appear regularly on parenting hacks, or how to jazz up your romantic life, less is written on the topic of friendships. But one particular suggestion took not just the biscuit, but the entire box of Fox’s Festive Favourites.  Instead of meeting for brunch, says the author of The Radical Potential of Female Friendship, owhy not meet for a workout instead (ok…potentially) or wait for it, fill out your tax return together.

Can you imagine! ‘Hi Karen, listen, forget the huevos rotos in General Merchants this week. Yep, that’s right, no extra hot latte for you. You’re coming to mine;  I’ll put on a brew, and we’ll nail those self-assessments forms.’ Well, I know what Karen would say: friendship terminated-don’t let the door hit you on the way out. And she’d be quite right too. I mean, go for a walk, visit a museum, head to the cinema. But a tax return? That’s deadly! Another idea was to do the weekly shop together. Are you having a laugh? I have the concentration span of a praying mantis. I can barely get round Sainsbury’s to pick up  all the ingredients for dinner, never mind make it a social event.

But aside from these two appalling suggestions, others resonated with me because I’d discussed some of the issuess with my friends recently.

‘PLEASE can we go to more gigs this year?’ said Aisling. How we used to love a frolic. Twenty years ago we’d have been tearing up the dancefloor in Auntie Annie’s to the Stone Roses and The White Stripes. The release of a Saturday night dance after a week of teaching practice was not to be underestimated. But if we went to a club now we’d feel about seventy-two, and sure we wouldn’t know any of the tunes. A decent gig would be more like it, with the benefit that they start earlier and we could be home and in bed by eleven. Thus we plan to scour the listings and get booking. #decentnewyearresolutions

Something nice happened last year when I decided to take a risk…

Last February we were going to London and on a whim, I decided to contact two friends I had lived with on my year abroad. I hadn’t seen either for years and I was nervous about initiating a meet up. But was I glad I tentatively sent off those texts? You bet. I met Mary for lunch in Elliot’s on Borough Market while I despatched the family off to the Harry Potter Studio Tour. We had glasses of chilled red wine and ate cheese puffs and marvelled at our new ‘grown-up’ status. ‘How is it possible that we’re married now? That we have mortgages? Children?’ we mused. The years literally melted away and we could have been flatmates again,  in our funny little apartnent above a sex shop* on the Rue du Four a Chaux on Reunion Island. ‘Can we do this again?’ I asked as we hugged goodbye in Blackfriars Station. Abso-bloodly-lutely, she said.

The following day we headed to Richmond to stay with my other old flatmate, Emily. Initially I had said NO WAY when she’d invited us, because four days when we hadn’t met in over a decade felt like an imposition. So we compromised on a two night stay and planned a trip to the zoo with the kids and I booked Plaza Suite in the Savoy Theatre for us both by way of a thank you. It was a joy. Tom, who’s another one of those long-suffering husbands, opened a bottle of bubbly on our arrival, which we sipped with a rich chocolate cake which Em and her daughter had made because it was LSB’s birthday. They’d even dug out a bottle of the rum we used to drink on Reunion Island over which we toasted our reunion. We regretted this over-exuberance as we stood in front of the elephant enclosure in the mizzly rain the following afternoon. (Elephants do have their own quite distinctive odour, do they not?) That night, LSB took all four kids back to Emily’s on the train while we sought sustenance in a cosy bistro in the West End before the play. ‘What  made you agree so readily to have us over?’ I asked, over a restorative plate of samosas. ‘Because I need more fun in my life,’ she replied. Isn’t that just the nicest thing you’ve ever heard? It transpired that a friend of hers had interviewed an aging TV director who was still working despite being in his eighties. He said what kept him young was a conscious decision to have ‘deliberate fun.’ Deliberate fun; I like that. Such is the daily grind that I think we could all do with a bit of this, but it doesn’t happen on its own: it takes planning, risks, perseverance. But worth it in the end, I think.

Sometimes taking a chance is the only way if you want to see the people you care about. On Monday I messaged some girls and asked if they fancied going to Idyll on the Ormeau Road at the weekend. I didn’t expect anyone to be free, but miraculously, five of us sat down to a meal last night, and madder still, most of us drove, which left us sprightly enough to pursue our respective pursuits this morning. I managed a run in Belvoir Forest which I definitely wouldn’t have managed if I’d necked half a bottle of Malbec.

In essence, effort is required to keep friendships going. It’s too easy to do the same old things, and sit round the dinner table rehashing the same tired subjects. (Can I put my hand up and say that I bore the absolute bastard out of myself doing this so God knows how my poor friends feel.) So make plans, have craic, and seize the day. But for the love of God, do NOT suggest filling in a tax return.

*It was quite a large first floor apartment and below were three shop units: one which sold climbing gear, another was a pet store and then the aforementioned sex shop. I was only in the latter once, to borrow some chairs for a party we were hosting. Incidentally, our landlord lived next door to us and he was a Hindu priest. His wife, a lovely woman,  used to bring us home made rougail, which was a pickle made from green mangoes and evil little birds’ eye chillis. Merely opening the jar was enough to singe your nostril hair. My eyes still water thinking about it.

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SWB on Wintering

Last night I celebrated Nollaig na bhan in a beautiful, understated way. Initial plans to host a pre-emptive soiree on Saturday evening hadn’t materialised, so instead, a friend and I opted for ‘Mellow and Mindful’ yoga with Carla in Studio 52 in Hill Street. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the building, but it’s a gem in the Cathedral Quarter, and we practised on the top floor in a candle-lit room with creamy walls and dark beams.

The session focused on floor work with low lunges and lizard and pigeon poses and the occasional downward dog: it wasn’t the night for warriors and balances. As we stretched out on our mats for savasana at the end, I could hear the soft padding of Carla’s feet on the wooden floor, as she came around and dabbed our wrists with a drop of sweet-smelling oil- a fusion of lavender, eucalyptus and bergamot.

It felt like the wisest thing I’d done in a long time, to allow myself to lie in the company of other women and melt into forgiving poses. ‘Thank you’ said my aching muscles after a gym session that almost killed me last week.

‘Push. Push. Push. Keep going, just get the through the week.’ That’s like the mantra of modern living, isn’t it? Diaries bulging with targets and deadlines, endless chores and commitments. And inevitably we get sick, and then we feel bad and guilty for falling behind and ‘letting people down.’ We can’t even recuperate in peace.

Surely it’s basic biology, that in the cold our bodies have to work harder, and in the absence of daylight our rhythms naturally want to slow down. Then comes Christmas, with its heady mixture of adrenaline, expectations and over-indulgence which can drain us further.

And then, just when should be nourishing ourselves as we face three more months of could weather, we are hit with the usual January shite of ‘New year new me!’ Well, excuse me when I say, Fuck that. I’m not even sorry. In the words of Anne Lamott, ‘It’s hard out there.’ And she lives in sunny California!

Now is the time to cultivate warmth, to go slowly, reflect. Sleep like a squirrel. Doze like a dormouse. Hibernate like a hedgehog, and should you be disturbed, feel free to fire up those prickles.

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”
Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

Over the holidays I had plans to write; to pick up after a fallow period. But the more I forced it, the less it came. I wrote NOTHING. This was exacerbated by LSB gifting me a new laptop since my older one was banjaxed, with a battery life even flatter than mine. ‘Now you can write,’ he said gleefully. Oh the pressure! And then the negative self-talk came in- you’re useless, you haven’t a creative thought in your head… on and on it went. I wasn’t very nice to myself. So instead of feeling relaxed and rejuvenated after the break, I fell a bit miserable.

But I wasn’t producing anything because I felt like I had to, trying to tick boxes before I went back to work. What I wasn’t acknowledging was that I had to release the pressure before I could flow, which sounds a bit new-agey but I don’t care. The writer Katherine May sums up my feeling in her words below:

On Sunday I took myself to The Black Box to hear Stuart Murdock from Belle and Sebastian in conversation with Wendy Erskine. He suffers from ME, a condition for which he is now an ambassador. But he recognises that were it not for the disease and the enforced periods of incapacity, that he would never have become the songwriter that he is today. The time spent alone in a room, made him more introspective, and this lent itself to the creation of some of his most memorable lyrics.

Surrender has been a word which kept appearing in Miranda Hart’s recent book. She too has endured long bouts of illness, but having recently discovered the root of it, she has learned to live, and to live better. By acknowledging her limitations and not just doggedly ‘pushing through’ she has found peace and acceptance. I don’t think she’d be having any truck with this ‘New You’ bollocks, unless it’s about self-kindness, making better decisions and reflecting what it is you really need.

So I leave you with this today- what does ‘wintering’ mean to you, and how are you going to prioritise your needs when the ground is icy and the sun resolutely sets before five pm? Take care of your lovely selves, and it is so good to be back on here with you.