Snowmen and Facebook Funerals
I woke up with the kind of hangover I haven’t had in ages. My phone was ringing under my pillow. It was my downstairs neighbour, Nelly.
‘Are we going to the park to make snowmen?’ she asked, in her gorgeous French accent.
‘What?’ I said. My head hurt.
‘It’s snowing! Let’s have a snowball fight!’
I reached across my bed and opened the blinds to see bright white everywhere. It was so unexpected.
I said I’d see her and our other neighbour outside in an hour.
I got dressed and ate some cold pasta, left over from the night before, and put away the empty bottles I’d consumed during a late night Zoom.
I hadn’t drunk like that in quite a while. Funny how things change without you realising. Alcohol was once such a big part of my life and now it isn’t. I used to have hangovers all the time, now I don’t. I wondered how I used to do it.
As soon as I stepped outside, the hangover melted.
The snow was coating cars and pavements like a marshmallow dream.
The snow was coating cars and pavements like a marshmallow dream. Nelly was wearing thin tights and a bright red beret. Thomas was in a blue jacket. When we got to the park, it looked like an art gallery of snowmen. One was being lovingly tended to by a child who had built his on top of a wooden bench. He was carving the cheekbones with such care and concentration; he was the Da Vinci of snowmen.
‘Does he have a name?’ I asked the child.
He looked at me and thought for a second. He looked at his mother who nodded, encouraging him to come up with something.
‘Mr Black,’ he said.
Mr Black had one eye made from a bottle top and fir branches that stood up like a mohican on his head.
We kept walking.
Nelly picked up snow and started to fling it at Thomas and me. A churlish, stick-in-the mud part of me didn’t want to join in but I did. It was fun. My hands were cold, sore and happy in the white slush. We laughed, and for a while, I felt like I was about ten years old.
We laughed, and for a while, I felt like I was about ten years old.
At some point, Nelly flung herself into the snow for dramatic effect. We laughed some more, and this time, I felt 13 — in a good way. The excitement of being with friends you like and everything feeling fun and possible and new.
We kept walking and talked about coming off social media, dating, not dating and ex-boyfriends. Nelly’s phone rang. It was her mother Facetiming from the South of France. She showed us the blue sky and green trees in her back garden. The juxtaposition of our two different worlds meeting on a tiny screen made me feel homesick for a second. I had a yearning for things to be normal.
I had that same feeling twenty four hours later, attending a Facebook funeral for my much loved great-aunty Maureen. She was 94. She was born in 1927, growing up in a house without heating and indoor toilets, and yet here she was, having her funeral on the Internet.
Nothing is normal anymore.
At some point, Nelly stopped feeling her feet and we turned around to go home. The boy was still working on his snowman. I thought of the British artist, Maggi Hambling, who said you had to make a friend of your work, to go to it no matter what mood you were in. This boy was making a friend of his work. He had a future.
We kept walking.
A boy and a girl were at the pedestrian crossing, pushing a snowman in a wheelbarrow.
‘They wanted to bring him home,’ smiled their mother. I thought how lucky these children were to have a mother who lets them take a snowman home, pushing him down these London streets in a wheelbarrow.
I worried about how they’d react when their new friend started to vanish.
I wondered if this day was something they would remember, years from now when they looked back on this weird, sometimes beautiful, time.
When nothing was normal.
WHAT I’M READING
My memory has gone to pot this year. I’m swimming around my days like a goldfish. Emails are going unanswered, I walk into the supermarket and have no memory of what it was I needed and I am forgetting words in the middle of sentences. There’s a good article on the BBC by Claudia Hammond about why our memory is suffering in the pandemic. Fatigue, anxiety and lack of social interactions play a part, so does the fact that we are not leaving the house. Apparently a variety of surroundings helps to anchor memories and when we leave the house we are generally more alert, in order to stay safe. This means that we notice more and remember more. Makes sense.
The Guardian ran another good article about how important touch is to us humans. I imagine this is going to be one of the greatest lessons from this pandemic, how much we need physical contact with each other. We were already touch-deprived before the pandemic, now it’s gone to another level and many of us are wilting as a result. I was on an online dating event a couple of weeks ago and one of the exercises involved hugging ourselves in front of a stranger. It is a testament to how many weird workshops I have now done that did not feel strange to me. In fact, it felt surprisingly good. Everyone in my family has now got a pet so they can get their hugs from them, but I live in a tiny flat and am a bit dead inside when it comes to animals, so I’ll stick to hugging myself for now.
The Atlantic is publishing a lot of good, if slightly depressing, articles about how the pandemic is affecting our relationships. This one is about how the pandemic has caused us to lose a whole category of friends - those casual friendships that used to pad our days at the office, gym and coffee shop.
I thought this article by Vicky Spratt in Refinery 29 about the collective numbness we now feel was excellent.
On a more cheery note, I loved this interview with fashion designer Zandra Rhodes. It made me want to dye my hair pink. I love seeing and reading about women who are doing and wearing whatever the hell they want into their seventies and eighties and nineties. Bring it on. Although maybe I should just do - and wear - whatever the hell I want now? And not wait?
WHAT I’M WATCHING
Post snow hangover, I ordered a burger on Deliveroo and settled in for an afternoon of watching It’s A Sin on Channel 4. It’s a dramatisation of the Aids crisis in 1980s London and it was brilliantly full of life for a show about death. The last episode has stayed with me all week. Do watch it.
I’m also watching the sunrise every morning thanks to Ger Holland. Ger is a Dublin-based photographer who used to work in events, but since lockdown, that’s stopped so she is getting up every morning to photograph the sun rising instead. Her photos and videos are mesmerising. Follow her on twitter or instagram, you can also see them here on her website.
WHAT I’M BUYING -
I keep thinking about getting a weighted blanket, as another hug substitute.
Click here for the full list of events! As usual we have Writing for Fun and Sanity this Saturday and we are also doing Wednesday evenings too.
This Sunday I’ll be doing a re-run of New Year Imaginings with Aisling. This isn’t a resolutions or goal setting workshop, more a ‘wouldn’t it be nice if….’ kind of session where we meditate, write, chat and use our imaginations to dream up a more beautiful future. The feedback from the first one was gorgeous so if you are in need of a gentle lift, do come. It will be a bit magic. Stuff with Aisling usually is. No need to be a writer or a meditator, just a human.
And next Sunday 7th February, I’ll be doing a workshop with my good friend Shahroo Izadi based on her book The Kindness Method. It’s about how to change habits by going easy on ourselves. Shahroo is a rare beast in the wellness world in that she is funny, honest and non-preachy. She has worked in addiction services for years and used her own approach to lose eight stone in weight. She is the real deal.
Details of the How to Love Your Life event with Carrie to come!! Sorry for keeping you hanging on that one. Thanks for all the interest.
Okay, that’s it for now.
A car alarm has been going off outside my window for the last twenty minutes and it’s making me feel hungover again, even though I’m not.
Oh well.
Okay, lots of love and see you soon. Thanks as ever for reading.
Mx