5 things that have made life better lately
Less scrolling, more mini Battenbergs and celebrating a pair of socks' 70th birthday
I have a friend who messages me fairly often asking for updates on my life. I appreciate her caring, obviously, but I do feel like a bit of a disappointment when I don’t have much news to share - which is every time she asks, lately.
On a personal level, a lack of news mostly feels like a good thing. It’s normally when something’s going wrong that I have lots of ‘updates’ to relay via tediously long voice notes. Just ticking away quietly and mostly having an okay time doesn’t give you much material for an eight-minute WhatsApp monologue. Even when I think back to periods of having more exciting news to share, those haven’t necessarily been the best of times behind the scenes. The news is just a shiny sticker over your same old problems, which I find are generally unaltered by getting a book deal or winning an award or signing a new sponsor. And, anyway, that’s all just work and that’s why we have LinkedIn.
Life mostly feels pretty quiet at the moment, in a good way. No big dramas or crying on buses, very little lying awake at 4am having an existential crisis. Just really enjoying living in Kendal, running more, spending time outside in all weathers, planning visits from friends, trying not to get injured, attempting to eat 30 different plants a week, doing my calf raises every day, spending a lot of time travelling up and down the M6 to talks, being bizarrely excited about a cheese and tomato croissant from Pret now the first one has opened in the Lakes, becoming increasingly obsessed with firelighting techniques for my wood burner... etc. Just normal stuff, I guess.
So in the absence of any big news, this week I thought I’d share five things that have made life a bit better recently. Some might be fairly relatable (trying to overcome my scrolling addiction), others less so (throwing a 70th birthday party for my grandad’s socks).
1. Leaving my phone at home
I’m quite clearly addicted to my phone just as, I would hazard a guess, the majority of the people I know are. That compulsion to scroll for just one more minute? It being the first thing you reach for in the morning and the last thing you look at before going to sleep? The itchy feeling when you’ve not checked it for a while? Your hand still reaching out on autopilot even when the battery is dead? If somebody was describing their relationship with any other item or substance to me in those terms, I’d be worried. And I do worry, to be honest, about the inevitable regrets I’ll have from losing so much of my life to my horrendously high screen time.
In a bid to try and curb my addiction, I’m trying to leave my phone at home if I go to work in a cafe during the day. It’s only a new thing I’ve started this week but I honestly can’t recommend it more. It’s obviously not always practical to be uncontactable though and sometimes I do want to listen to a podcast, navigate somewhere or take a photo. I’m starting to think the only real solution is to reverse-engineer technology by 15 years and trade my iPhone for a Nokia 3310/MP3 player/digital camera/sat nav combo. Any tips for cutting down the scrolling without resorting to this multi-device solution would be welcome.