The Rooster #7
Goodbye instagram! Hello Substack...
Howrya? Happy New Year!
I didn’t have any high expectations for Christmas. We spent it in London, which I love as it gets so quiet around where we are, everyone leaves. You can park anywhere. Table in a restaurant? no problem. We go for dinner every Christmas Eve. I walked to the restaurant with my Father in law Doug who runs a regular Philosophy club in Sheffield where he lives. Doug is a fantastic conversationalist. We talked about religion and how at Christmas time, I sometimes have a yearning for church, just to be able to stand in a hallowed space and sing with people, to have this sense of a shared spiritual yearning. I miss the sense of togetherness that a congregation provides. I worry that my kids are missing out too. I told him that my friend has found God in her middle age, how I’m envious of the safety net that faith provides, but I don’t believe in God, not the old beardy fellow anyway. Church feels disingenuous. I believe in nature. That’s the closest thing to God for me. Then Douglas proffered the question but where did nature come from in the first place? Who or what created that? And I gave up and went to order my Guinness at the bar.
A lot of Guinness was consumed this Christmas. Despite all the rumours of shortages, I had no problems getting my fill. On Christmas Day I took Douglas to my local Irish pub which was packed. We sat at a table with an American woman we just met and a few of the old Irish regulars and one of their sons and his friend. Everyone gasping to buy pints for each other. All in all around the table we had a DJ, a screen writer, a retired lecturer, a cruise ship chef, a labourer, and a rapper. In the absence of Church, the Irish pub will suffice for now.
On Boxing Day we travelled to Dublin for Christmas with the Irish contingent. My dad has a chest freezer in his shed that he uses for storage for his beekeeping/honey producing. This Christmas he used it to store his many boxes of biscuit and sweets. At the end of every meal, my Dad, a seventy eight year old magician in a V neck jumper, would disappear down the garden and pull out another box of biscuits from the freezer and present it to the table to exclamations of excitement. As the days rolled on, the gasps turned to groans. No more! It was never ending, the Chocolate Kimberleys only came out on the 29th December. Suffice to say I’m ready to get back to salads for a while.
So salads, so far so predictable for January. I have no resolutions, but if I had to name anything in terms of desires for 2025, It would be to have a consistently creative year. This is the year where I will be editing my third novel and I would love to have the time to dedicate to it that it deserves. In order to do this I have started the year by deleting instagram off my phone. Once again, towards the end of last year, after a good chunk of time where I was able to dip in and out in a healthy-ish way, Instagram sucked me back in. I spent so much of the lead up to Christmas with my face in my phone. So I’m going cold turkey. I need instagram for my work, so I intend to go back on to post once a week on a different device, but keep it off my phone. I’m hoping I can sustain that type of usage for a while.
It’s been lovely to have Substack to turn to, to fill the gap. I don’t feel gross when I’m on here like I do after being on instagram. I don’t feel like my time has been stolen from me somehow. I thought it would be fitting for The Rooster this week to show you some of the best articles I’ve read here over the last few months. Spanning the Gisele Pelicot trial, to the occupation of the West Bank, to the homogenisation of women’s faces .. these are all pieces that have stayed with me, that helped me to see things differently or to solidify a perspective I already had. Some are light hearted and fun, some heavy and investigative. This is the joy of Substack. I just read someone on notes say that they print out their five or six Substack articles in the morning and read them like they are the papers. I LOVE this. If reading on a screen is not your bag, maybe you could do it for the articles below.
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things got really weird when I got off social media - Hannah Power
This is a timely for January, when so many people will be trying to extricate themselves from the addictive tendrils of social media. Read it and have the conviction to delete your social media app. Even if it’s just for an experiment to see how it feels and how it affects your mental health, it’s worth doing! (She says, all smug on day two of no instagram. Let’s see how long I last.)
On the 9 Things You Need to Write a Novel - Toby Litt
I loved the tone of this, how unsnobby it was. We hear from the greats, Henry James, Steinbeck and Hemingway, on their approach to writing, Toby writes in a lighthearted way but behind the humour is a genuinely constructive guide to what you really need to be able to write a novel. I especially loved this paragraph on what the nucleus of an idea is.
“An idea can be an area of mess or confusion in your head, or a line of remembered real-life dialogue, or an enticing title, or an exquisite memory, or a feeling of dreadful foreboding. It’s something, in other words, that haunts you.”
It doesn’t have to be fully formed folks! Are you haunted by something? This is an idea. This can be something.