Another thing: Routine maintenance

Some thoughts on shifting with the seasons to mark the emergence of the sun.

Welcome to Letters From the Knot. This is a free weekly newsletter, primarily built as an outlet for a fiction writing project I’m working on. On the weeks I’m not publishing fiction, though, I’ll be sending something a bit more freeform and personal. This is one of those.

The sun is creeping out at last. If where you live is anything like London, you’ll have woken up to a scene of slate grey skies and relentless drizzle for the last trillion years (or thereabouts), so this is a welcome change. It’s an energising time and, even if this wretched island remains politically adrift and morally bereft in the revealing light of the spring sunshine, there is at least some beauty to be enjoyed. 

Spring is a time of changing behaviours and routines. Some of these routines change organically. The clocks have gone back, making going out at certain times of the day more palatable. The post-work pint is more tempting by the day. The temperature is soon to skyrocket into double figures and the clothes we wear will evolve with it. But why stop there? I was at my friend Cat’s house yesterday and she explained that she’s rearranged the furniture in her flat as a form of seasonal transformation, positioning things to better catch the light, to signal a deeper change of spirit. 

It’s made me reflect somewhat on my own routines, and I’ve found I don’t have that many. I make nerve-twangingly strong coffee every morning, I suppose, and, along with some friends, we’ve recently got into a nice cycle of cooking each other Sunday dinners. But beyond these small rituals, everything else seems to shift and change over time. For a while I got into a nice rhythm of reading every morning before work but, now that I’ve got a deadline for my novel looming, I’ve decided to use that precious nugget of time to write instead. Sometimes I’ll spend this time in bed, sometimes at a café (Pret) and, in the summer months, sitting on our small balcony.

Similarly, I gave up running late last year. I thought I was just sick of it. There’s nothing less dignified, I reasoned, than huffing and puffing around the local park in little shorts, dodging toddlers and leaping over dog turds. But last week, with the light lingering longer into the evenings, I found myself being drawn back to it. Perhaps it wasn’t the indignity of it that made me lose interest after all, but just the rain and the cold and mud and wind. Perhaps I’m just a seasonal runner after all. Perhaps there’s something seasonal to all of my changes.

I think it’s always been important to me to never become too fixed in any one rhythm. I know for some people routine is vital, a kind of anchor around which they construct their lives. We’re told that, especially for children, routine is deeply important, and that may well be true* but I also think routine can be a cage. 

(*disclaimer, I am not a child psychologist) 

In my first ever office job, about a decade ago now, I worked with a guy who ate the exact same thing for lunch every single day: a microwaved tin of Heinz Tomato Soup and two slices of Warburtons Thick Bread. I once happened to walk past while he was rummaging in his locker and glimpsed its contents. Row upon row of Heinz Tomato Soup tins, stacked as high as they would go, arrayed and destined for a certain fate. The red and black bars of this poor man’s prison.  

And look, no shade to the guy. He seemed happy. He found comfort in this ritual. But it always seemed so limiting, and only served to highlight the unending repetitive grind of most people’s working lives. The image of him piling the tins into his trolley during his weekly shop still makes me feel sad. But obviously eating a different lunch every would be exhausting and depressing in a whole new way. The sweet spot seems to be openness to change, to bigger rhythms.  

And I feel like the pandemic, at least for those of us who have found ourselves working in office jobs, has allowed us to explode out of our usual routines to some extent. I don’t come to the office every day anymore, or even on the same days each week. I get up each morning and look at the weather and, if I like what I see, I’ll cycle to the office, enjoying the sunshine. By an odd roundabout way, the pandemic has meant I’m more in tune with nature than ever before, a creature of the seasons.

One of the best things about living in this stupid country is its cycle of seasons, and I’m looking forward to submitting to the changes, however fleeting they may prove to be. I want to do something new! Maybe I’ll track down that bloke and encourage him to switch out his soup choice for a while. It’s spring mate! Treat yourself to a can of Minestrone for crying out loud!

Cultural indigestion

Things I’ve seen and done.

Watching: The last few weeks have been pleasantly relentless. Lots of friends to see, people visiting, a wedding. It’s been the kind of fun and full on time that makes me grateful to have so many wonderful people around me. The best moments, though, have been a series of gigs my significantly more talented partner, Kelli Blanchett, has performed at the Hammersmith Apollo, supporting the excellent Self Esteem. It was massive and amazing and you should check her out here.

Looking at: Went to see some ART this week for the first time in ages, Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons at the Hayward Gallery. It ticks a lot of my boxes for an exhibition in that it took me out of my own head for a hour or two and made me look at things differently. There are a couple of stand-out massive installations that draw together collected materials to prompt you to think about consumerism, and industry, and mass-production, and the end of the world. And then a load of smaller pieces that really just reminded me of that episode of the Simpsons where Homer becomes a famous artist by messing up a BBQ pit. This latter observation isn’t really a critique of Mike Nelson though, more a reflection of my naïve unseriousness as a patron of the arts.

Watching: It feels like I’ve barely watched any TV in weeks but I know that can’t be true. All I can think of is a haunting couple of hours watching High Life (2018). Yet another illustration of the fact that people being weird and quiet does not, in and of itself, equate to artistic merit. It dips its toes into a lot of themes (sexuality, justice, parenthood, the self, masturbation, celibacy) but I came away quite unsure of what it was trying to say about any of it.

Anyway, more of this waffle in a couple of weeks.