“Girl Dinner”. Since the advent of this cultural phenomenon from the belly of the internet, I have called upon it as both prayer and anthem on those nights where the labours of kitchen craft escape me, but equally sitting down with a tin of dressed crab and a packet of crisps feels altogether too demystified. There are times where we need drama, romance, and the whisper of summer winds on the Amalfi coast; but with the absolute minimum of effort and, crucially, simple to achieve when you’ve already slammed a quarter bottle of crisp Chablis.

Ergo, I present to you now three recipes which are staples and favourites of mine on just such nights as described above. Enjoy them at your leisure and remember that each of them, to be properly appreciated, must be taken contingently with a regimen of self-care and feel-good movies.

A bleak and chilly Sunday in the month of February, Ringcroft of Stocking, Dumfries and Galloway.

I squared my bosom against the chill of the night and faced into the press of trees leading away from the road and into a thicket of sinister woodland abutting a farm field. This, the woodland in the immediate airt of the Ringcroft of Stocking, had the disturbing weight of occasion and evil hanging over it before we even crossed through the first several yards of dried leaves and brittle twigs.

All of us had met the occasion with the dark gravitas it afforded, dressed to a one in black. Having made a semblance of effort for the occasion over and above her choice of outfit for Dunskey Castle, Jo was ethereal in a dress of loose black fabric that snapped in the biting wind; Devine more staid and secure in a black patent trench-coat-over-tee combination. Camille looked far less like the haunted secretary of a data processing conglomerate, this time, and sported a distressed ensemble of wispish and sheer black fabrics. Kirsty and I made a more conventional pairing in simple but no less black casual attire, myself in a hoody which I prepared to defend me against the cold which already felt unseemly in a spiritual way.

The dawning trepidation I felt as we embarked into the woods seemed not to be shared by the others, least of all Jo who even managed to skip through the trees at times with a jollity ill matched to the doom-laden oppressive dark, her yards of flowing fabric billowing ethereally behind her as she galloped majestically into the woodland. The dry bracken and twigs underfoot stood not a chance against her booted feet.

Ringcroft of Stocking is purported to be haunted by a terrifying and malevolent poltergeist, which makes absolute sense because the experience of being there was, from start to finish, absolutely chaotic and coloured by an almost comical madness. From the moment we established ourselves in the heart of the wood, spiritual hijinks and tomfoolery ensued with rapid abundance. The horrifying little gramophone device that plays “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” kept setting off, indicating the presence of at least one curious ghost midst the copse of trees, and all of us began to take leave of any sense of order and discipline and simply amble through the wildwood animated by the singular desire to meet and interrogate a deceased person.

During the course of these chaotic proceedings, we split off into smaller groups. Devine led Camille and myself some way toward the left extremity of the wood, where we encountered a low stone wall. Over the wall was a sweeping farm field leading ominously, dreadfully up to a bare, solitary tree on the crest of a hill. Local legend holds that when this, the last of a line of mighty trees, falls down, the malevolent poltergeist will return to wreak havoc on the people of the area, spelling trouble for today’s residents of the nearby Auchencairn. Mesmerised and a little afraid of the tree, I watched from behind the wall while Devine and Camille set about preparing the instruments of our seance.

Almost immediately we were contacted, through the spirit box, by a spirit identifying herself as a teenage girl possibly named Stephanie. Little interested in answering questions, Stephanie revealed herself as a playful soul by requesting a game of hide and seek which we were happy to indulge her in. But, after she instructed us to search for her (or something) behind a specific tree (indicated by her manipulation of Camille’s divining rods), we followed her instructions to a grim discovery. Just as I was stepping away from behind Stephanie’s tree I noticed the stark white shine of something poking out from amidst the fallen leaves. It was the upper half of a fox’s skull, absolutely immaculately clean with no residual carrion clinging to it. Ritualistically clean? Alarmed by this grim discovery we ran back through the woods to reconvene with Jo and Kirsty and lead them back to the skull.

Titillated so by this turn of events we decided to try the Estes method. Installed on a lump of granite on the forest floor, Jo was blindfolded with the black silk tie and the effect was altogether marvellous to behold; a vision facing into the wind with black fabric from her dress and the tie billowing behind her. But immediately Jo began to channel a congregation of spirits gathered in the wood, all of them provincial Scottish voices of yesteryear and seemingly puritan religious conviction.

Something about the spirits coming through and their manner of speaking, their fixations, seemed to call up the aesthetic of the ‘witch panic’ times, where sad little puritans wrung their hands and gnashed their teeth and bemoaned liberty of all kinds as Satan’s own handiwork. I didn’t like them.

By turns we all attempted the Estes method, but it wasn’t until Kirsty was installed in the apparatus that I fully noticed that the oppressive dark of the forest seemed to be intensifying, deepening. I stood with my back to the deeper heart of the forest and felt the shadow creep behind me, a yawning chasm of doom and terror opening somewhere further down the gently sloping hill. The wind picked up some, and the chill of the night intensified. I felt myself tremble, my teeth chattering, and I pulled the hood of my jumper up against the bite. Very shortly after doing so, a word came through Kirsty: “brunette”. As the only true brunette in the troupe, Camille asked if the spirit speaking was referring to me, and a response came back quickly: “hood”. Alarmed, clocked, and fearful of being scrutinised in any way by the demented spectre of a radical christian of the burning times, I stiffened my spine and felt the panic and fear rising in me.

Shortly thereafter, another expression came: “here horsey”. This immediately was followed by a rattling of a gate somewhere, a burst of ferocious wind, and the strange laboured galloping of some creature just beyond the reach of our torchlight, the crashing and cracking of the undergrowth a signal for us to haphazardly stuff our equipment back into the long-suffering bag for life and run from the forest in fear.

The “here horsey” moment left a particularly dreadful residue of doom on me, because it felt, in some way, targeted at me. My family, long-suffering readers will know, have a tradition of equestrian sport, with my Great Grandfather described as “legendary Scottish horseman” Hugh Barclay in ‘Jockeypedia’. The reason it felt particularly targeted though, is that during the mounting sense of dread that was building as we proceeded through the last leg of the Estes method, I was beginning to wonder, privately, whether we might be reaching communion with an entity closer to, or at least resembling, the classic ‘Devil’ figure. This would not be unheard of in a wooded clearing on the Solway Coast.

In a more fanciful telling of the Scottish history of the salt crusted western coast, one Fergus de Barclay, purported to be an ancestor of mine (almost certainly confirmed by our family’s enduring appetite for horsemanship among many other voracious sins), earned the moniker of ‘The Deil o Ardrossan’ by making a deal with the devil; his soul in exchange for a magic bridle to make him the most fearsome horseman in Scotland. However, my wily ancestor challenged and tricked the Devil by low cunning (again, consistent with our family’s public image) and sparked his ire. Upon his death, his corpse laid out for burial on the sacred isle of Iona was said to have been claimed by a mythic surge of the sea and violently re-deposited on the beach under those very Ardrossan cliffs where he’d ruled from his imposing stone castle.

I arrived at two conclusions. The first, that I have, like all my kin, inherited the weight of our family’s debt to the Devil courtesy of my Barclay blood. The second, that it was perchance a Devil-like spirit (or mischievous poltergeist with an ego problem who masquerades as the Devil) who was contacting us, building strength with every expanded layer of panic and dread that we came to as the night got colder and the dark fuller.

I posit that a long line of my Barclay ancestors since the time of Fergus must have carried the weight of this hellish covenant, that very pact likely responsible for our many gifts and privileges (including excellent hair), but also defects like crippling allergies and pathological demand avoidance; this is, I feel, consistent with traditional expectations leveraged against those purported to be witches, the whores of Satan, blessed and cursed in equal measure and expected to be called on at any moment to be the instrument of his hellish will. Full of the unsettled dread of this reflection, I joined the others as we fled the scene and made haste to spontaneously visit another haunted location with deep personal significance.

Later that same night, Lochmaben Castle, Dumfries and Galloway.

We journeyed eastward, the wild countryside of the Solway Coast giving way to a more tilled and furrowed landscape of ancient farmland, less rocky and populated with dour presbyterian ghosts. When we arrived at the Royal Burgh of Lochmaben, my home, we made for the Castle.

The contrast between the Ringcroft of Stocking and Lochmaben Castle is visceral, the former, while outwardly maintaining the appearance of a jolly copse of woodland near a coastal farmstead, carries an air of doomsday heft; whereas the latter, although the crumbling skeleton of a once strong stone fortress set amidst ancient oak woods on the shore of a deep black loch, has the charming lightness of a fairytale place, an almost Arthurian romance about it.

Energy and vibes notwithstanding, though, Lochmaben castle and the woodland surrounding it is said to be the home of a Vampire. The veracity of these rumours is perhaps best attested, if attested is the correct word, by the persistent local belief that Michael Jackson once purchased a house in Lochmaben in pursuit of the vampire and the immortality it might confer; and perhaps less famously by my very own mother who, when playing in the forest with a childhood friend, swears to have encountered a horrifying hunched figure in dirty sack-cloth robes flitting between the high branches of the ancient oaks behind the ruined castle wall.

Considerably after my mother had this experience (in the 1970s), the legend was given an unexpected second life in 1991 when Scottish ghost hunter Tom Robertson claimed to have encountered a tall grey figure among the castle woods, which he described as similarly clothed in atrocious sack cloth robes. Eight years later he returned, grieving the death of his wife, and insisted he found it again. Neither my mother nor Tom Robertson had cause to cross paths in the course of their lives, so both accounts of a swaggering creature sporting unfashionable and infelicitous hessian garb seem plausible; but whether or not it’s felt they encountered an ancient penitent Vampire amid the woods, or just a particularly long-suffering off-grid resident of the forest and marshland with a penchant for monk-habit fashions, I shall leave to your own deduction.

I myself have never encountered the Vampire, even though I do spend an above average amount of time wandering the woods surrounding the formidable ‘Castle Loch’, engaged in all flavours of Witchcraft to usher in prosperity, or guard against the predations of the villainous townsfolk who wish for my ultimate demise, as appropriate. Indeed, I have often reassured my fiance that the scariest thing in the darkling woods at any given moment is me, armed as I may be with herbs, a cunty little mushroom picker’s trug or, on one notable occasion, a particularly cumbersome poppet-dolly constructed crudely from rowan branches and fleshed out in kitchen twine.

Yet almost immediately the vampire demonstrated an extraordinary reluctance to participate in its own legend.

We arrived primed for encounters with some pale aristocrat of the night stalking romantically between ruined battlements in the approved Transylvanian fashion. Instead we seemed to stumble into what can only be described as a ready-salted ordinary domestic disagreement.

One by one, names began surfacing through the various infernal contraptions we’d carted with us.

Neil.

Doris.

Lily.

None of them possessed the glamour or gravitas one hopes for from supernatural entities of the ancient blooded Vampire elite. They sounded less like immortal predators and more like neighbours one might grudgingly entreat for the lend of a lawnmower.

Such was the lack of glamour or effect that Jo made the asinine remark that she felt she was just ‘sitting in someone’s front room’ when listening to all the voices bickering and bandying in the Estes method. I found this perplexing on multiple fronts. Firstly, that an eternity beyond the pale of mortality could be as banal as a night in someone’s sitting room over finger-sandwiches and strong cocktails. Secondly, that spirits this urbane and clearly rooted in the social currency of a time between the 1940s and the present day should find themselves here in the darkened woods surrounding a ruined castle with all the contextual relevancy of a freesian cow finding itself in the middle of a Texas beauty pageant. It occurred to me that ghost stories concern themselves almost exclusively with remarkable deaths while paying scandalously little attention to ordinary lives, and I found a strange sort of comfort in exploring the trivialities of this spiritual assortment.

Outside of the Estes method and the tamer, more domestic discussions we were witnessing like a sort of distended soap opera set beyond the grave, we still yearned for the drama and high camp theatrics that were sure to unfold with an encounter with the Lochmaben Vampire, now thoroughly mythologised. Kirsty busied herself with setting out a plethora of mystical machinery from cat-balls to REM pods, including that one horrifying REM pod that plays the hateful ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’.

All the machinery and equipment laid out and prepared, we continued in our various lines of inquiry, until we made contact with a spirit and Jo asked them if they would touch the aforementioned musical REM pod. No sooner had Jo uttered “can you touch it?” than the harrowing strains of that cursed tune rang out through the woods, startling crows in the trees, waterfowl across the loch, and in no small part, us, the Ghoul Friends.

Riding high from the thrill of that particular little victory, but also under the yoke of a dawning fear brought on by the stark fact of being alone in the ruins with something so perniciously responsive, we continued to search for evidence of the Vampire. At one juncture, Camille felt she could see a figure, or the impression of a figure, high up on the embattled castle ramparts; at another, the spirit box kept encouraging us to “look up” which felt utterly dread-inducing when one considered that we were standing under the robustness of an ancient oak tree that felt, to me, like it had the girth and stage presence to be a passable gallows tree in bygone climes.

I remark now that “look up” is a damnably inconsiderate instruction to receive in the middle of a haunted woodland under cover of night. Human beings are, as a general rule, conditioned to react passably to threats that approach from roughly eye level. One feels equipped, however unrealistically, to negotiate with a ghost emerging from a doorway or advancing through a ruin. To be repeatedly encouraged to examine the canopy of an ancient woodland, however, is to invite the imagination into a wild bushel of hateful outcomes.

Examining the impressive tree under these conditions, every knot in the bark briefly became a face. Every broken branch seemed, for one impossible second, to possess shoulders. More than once I became entirely convinced that I had seen a pale figure leaning casually against the trunk of one of the great oaks, only for it to dissolve immediately back into the entirely innocent geometry of branches and moonlight. Ancient woodland has a remarkable ability to manufacture people from shadows when sufficiently encouraged.

Although the drama was building, and although under these circumstances I was beginning to channel my very best Ellen Hutter as portrayed by Lily-Rose Depp in Nosferatu, waiting with my breast squared and my breathing ragged to be ravaged by some dark and mysterious entity of the night, no such apparition came to us (other than to Camille, who remained convinced she had seen something upon the castle walls that resisted any satisfactory qualification).

Instead, in the absence of the vampire itself, my imagination quietly got on with the work it seemed unwilling to perform.

I began constructing an image of the alleged Vampire that responds to the brief laid out by my mother and reinforced by Tom Robertson. The unhappy sack-cloth clothing, the hunched posture, and the general impression of unkempt forest hygiene as described conjure for me one specific and particular visual: late Rock legend Meat Loaf in the costume he sported in the 1993 music video for his classic belter “I’d Do Anything for Love”.

This produced an altogether unexpected crisis of imagination.

I had wandered into those woods labouring under the misapprehension that, should we somehow encounter the Lochmaben Vampire, there existed some deluded recess of my subconscious that would immediately begin weighing up the practicalities of becoming one of his companions. Readers familiar with my broader body of work will recognise this as an occupational hazard.

But, acknowledging my own standards and boundaries, if I was to surrender myself to a Vampire’s household, it would absolutely only be done under the same aesthetic governance of 2004 action-horror Van Helsing. The prospect of a life as one of three well groomed concubines to a capricious immortal aristocrat with European property interests is one thing; bedraggled pleasure-thrall to a reclusive marshland cryptid in a haggard tatty-sack smock is quite another. I realised then, with no small sadness, that the appeal of the vampire narrative had rather dissipated.

Immortality may be an attractive proposition at first glance, but I struggled enough to adapt, within the span of a single lifetime, to the transition from skinny jeans to baggy jeans. Forever is a very long time in which to remain sartorially relevant. Indeed, the sackcloth robes suddenly began to make rather more sense.

We made our way back to the car in good spirits (or, at any rate, in the company of several) and I made my peace with the fact that the Lochmaben Vampire had, whether through cowardice or simple good taste, declined to make himself known to us.

I cannot altogether blame him.

Five figures dressed head-to-toe in black converging upon your ancestral ruin shortly before midnight, armed with spirit boxes, REM pods and a Tesco bag-for-life bulging ominously with paranormal apparatus, presents, I should think, a reasonably formidable prospect even for an immortal.

Perhaps he watched us quietly from the canopy of one of those regal old oaks and simply decided he couldn’t be arsed with the hassle. Perhaps, despite the sackcloth, he possesses a discernment considerably keener than his wardrobe suggests.

I shall return here time and time again, mostly to walk my dogs or conduct witchcraft amid the marshes. Occasionally, though, I suspect I shall also return in the hope of finally meeting Lochmaben’s elusive vampire.

Persistence, after all, is another of those Barclay traits the Devil did absolutely nothing to discourage.

Watch Slay The Spirits Season 2 Episode 2 here:

If the Ancient Greeks are to be believed, then the same sun that casts its light on us today is the same sun that spilled down on the heroes of old like Achilles, Hercules and other ‘eses’ of renown and taut muscular construction. The selfsame sun has begun its daily descent towards the western horizon and, consequently, bathes myself and all the other gymgoers on that side of Dumfries’s Bannatynes Health Club gym floor in that particular golden wash that recalls those heroic times of yore. It is under this particular quality of light that everything is universally enchanted and made closer to the divine, and with equal parts surprise and curiosity, I came to realise that this applies as much to the thing that has arguably slipped the furthest from its sacred calling in the fulness of time: the human male.

In the golden-hour haze, irradiated by bars of unassuming evening light, the men who complete their gruelling regimens are captured in motion, coated in the luminescence of those who resemble gods but who have entirely forgotten how to behave like one. Bounding lithely on treadmills, fastidiously extending themselves via the leg extension machine (hateful) or occupied with the exertion of the pectoral machine (even more so), they inhabit the world in a way which I find visually captivating but, moreover, spiritually barren. The Gym is the temple, its incense sweat and skin and lynx deodorant; its pantheon of gods resplendent in their ceremonial raiment of backwards caps, Nike socks, and five-inch inseam shorts.

In moments like this, where masculinity appears and exists under the spellbinding light of an ancient sun, I am transported to a moment of blissful security where the men surrounding me are temporarily afforded an element of divinity that should be synonymous with a code of behaviour and a moral occupation in the world that meets this physical divinity with equal rigour, and it is only when the sun dips behind a passing cloud and the spell is broken that I remember: so too is our masculinity.

In a world where masculinity, in its actual public application, has too often curdled into the brute worship of strength over delicacy, hardness over emotional elasticity, volume over moral completeness, it becomes the purview of the pagan worshipper* to make the case that masculinity itself is not the problem. Indeed, properly understood, it is a sacred calling. The tragedy is not that masculinity exists, but that it has become distended from its spiritual mission; stretched and twisted into a painful inversion of what it was meant to be.

In the age of the Manosphere, that airless little panic room of wounded vanity, monetised resentment, and men shouting about “discipline” when they really mean trauma conditioning, I continue to search for the masculinity carried through ancient storylines and older social codes. Not the man who dominates because he can, but the man who kneels, unembarrassed, to tie a child’s shoelace in the middle of a crowded room. The man who finds a beetle on the windowsill and carries it outside on one enormous finger, adjusting the whole machinery of his strength around the littleness of another life. The man whose voice could drown out a room, and does not; who understands that restraint is not self-erasure, but grace and skill.

This is the masculinity I was promised by myth, by chivalry, by every half-remembered god who used his strength in service of beauty, love, and the continuance of the world. And yet, look at what has been offered in its place: the sneer, the ranking system, the clenched jaw, the dead-eyed sermon on dominance delivered from the pulpit of an uninspiring and joyless office block. Reader, I fear I have been sold a false bill of goods.

In my dizzier moments amidst the daisies and Pimms (Brat Summer, eternal), I think often of the Knights of the old French romances; not as history, but as an aesthetic dream, a particular version of masculinity so beautiful it hasn’t entirely died. These Knights of my daydreams move through sun-soaked narratives in service of something positioned as both sacred and, crucially, feminine: the Duchess, the Lady, the court, the code of beauty and honour that holds the whole glittering premise together. There is no anxiety in their way of being; their whole existence is framed as duty-bound to honour meaning, devotion and a world made more lovely and liveable by gentility. For them, honour is not about their ego masquerading as honour, but rather about being committed to doing the honourable thing in service of others. These men occupy stone walls warmed by the sun, courtyards where wildflowers spring out from between flagstones, and meadows where bees hum lazy and fat, and they are not embarrassed to be a part of that gentle, colourful ecosystem because they know that existing within softness is not defeat, but rather the very soul of their victory.

There is a particular curiosity in me that seeks to imagine those selfsame knights transported into the visual culture of modern climes. They lean against the crumbling stone walls in shorts and tank-tops and baseball caps, they tread amid the flowers and foliage in Airforce 1s. The effect is intoxicating and exciting because I have taken the visual container of the modern man, which I have been spellbound by thanks to my sexual chemistry, and I have given him the grace of the timeless masculinity which came before he was corrupted by podcasts and church sermons and Mark Wahlberg.

It is in the wake of this meditation on the disconnect between body and the spiritual inhabiting of that body that I begin to reflect on how the sacred masculine is not above the body, but rather revealed through the sacred duty of fully mastering it, specifically, through the discipline of not using it to its fullest extent. The sacred masculine is to be found in the physical presentation of a man in the way that we have come to understand him, but only so far as that man inhabits that body with the restraint, gentility, and delicacy required, for example, to pick up an insect without hurting it. The measure of a man is not in the force with which he presses his booted sole into the earth, but rather in the litheness and skill he exercises in order to cross the meadow without crushing the poppies underfoot.

The old gods were never shy about embodiment. Apollo did not descend from Olympus with a protein shake and a portfolio of cryptocurrency. Dionysus was crowned in ivy and anointed in wine; Hercules sweated under a Grecian sun; Achilles sulked with Himbo petulance; Adonis lay golden and half-undressed beneath fig trees while entire cosmologies reorganised themselves around the fact of his beauty. The sacred masculine, in its original and uncorrupted form, was never antiseptic. It was salted and sun-bleached and crowned in laurel and flowers.

And so I continue, with all the devotional seriousness of a Vestal Virgin who has accidentally wandered into a JD Sports, to contemplate the modern athletic male with something perilously close to religious awe. Not because I believe men are gods automatically. Quite the opposite. Most are spiritually underachieving quite dramatically. But every now and then, under the correct atmospheric conditions (heat, sunlight, exertion, laughter, perhaps a little sea salt carried inland on the wind), the ancient divinity flickers visibly through the modern costume.

A young man in white Nike socks and a backwards cap leans against a stone wall eating a peach in the August heat and suddenly the entire Mediterranean Classical world returns to me in one violent rush like a hit of poppers. Marble courtyards. Olive oil. Bronze skin. Lads wrestling in palestrae beneath painted ceilings. The smell of rosemary crushed underfoot. Libations poured into dry earth. Hymns to gods who understood perfectly well that beauty was not frivolous, but sacred infrastructure.

What entrances me is not vulgar dominance or the dreary modern performance of “alpha” masculinity, which strikes me as spiritually equivalent to fluorescent lighting: harsh, joyless, and humiliating to endure for prolonged periods. What instead entrances me is something much older and more ceremonially alive: the sight of masculinity inhabiting itself beautifully. Not carelessly trampling the world beneath it, but moving through it with the unconscious physical confidence of a large and powerful animal that has nevertheless learned gentleness. The broad hand lifting the beetle from the windowsill. The forearm flexing as a child is scooped effortlessly onto a hip. The sweat-dampened boy in running shorts pausing mid-conversation to move a snail from a pavement before somebody steps on it. The rugby player, all thighs and impossible calves, lying back laughing among wildflowers without feeling that softness diminishes him.

This, to me, is where the sacred masculine reveals itself most completely: not in conquest, but in stewardship of beauty. And in devotion to it.

The old pagan world understood this instinctively. Consider Ares, hot-blooded and bronzed, forever drawn back toward Aphrodite despite the mockery of the other gods; the war god himself unable to resist softness, perfume, golden skin, the unbearable gravitational field of beauty. He is not diminished by this longing. He is humanised by it. Completed by it. Even violence kneels eventually at the altar of love.

Or Dionysus, winding ivy through his dark hair as he moves laughing among women crowned in flowers, dissolving the rigid architecture of ordinary masculinity in wine, theatre, dance, fruit split open beneath the sun. Dionysus does not fear femininity contaminating him. He understands that ecstasy requires surrender. That the masculine becomes more radiant, not less, when it allows itself to be intoxicated by softness, beauty, and devotion.

And perhaps nowhere is this sacred impulse rendered more beautifully than in the tragedy of Apollo and Hyacinthus. Apollo, golden, radiant, god of music and prophecy and sunlight, does not merely desire Hyacinthus. He delights in him. The myths linger not on conquest but companionship: the two of them running together through Spartan fields, stripped by the heat, laughing, wrestling, throwing the discus beneath the hard white blaze of the Mediterranean sun. And when Hyacinthus dies, struck down in one terrible accident, his beautiful body collapsing into the grass, Apollo does not retreat into stoicism. He mourns extravagantly. Publicly. Devotionally. He kneels in the dirt beside the boy he loved and transforms spilled blood into flowers so that beauty might continue carrying his memory forward into the world.

This is what the ancients understood that the modern masculine has catastrophically forgotten: that strength reaches its highest expression not in domination, but in adoration. The sacred masculine does not become less masculine when it kneels before beauty. It becomes divine.

And this instinct is not exclusively heterosexual, despite the best efforts of spiritually malcontent internet entrepreneurs to flatten masculinity into a joyless heterosexual panic. The old world understood perfectly well that masculine devotion could flow toward other men without compromising virility in the slightest. Achilles grieving Patroclus. Apollo crowned in grief for Hyacinthus. The physically powerful man arranging his strength around something softer and beloved, not because he has been conquered by it, but because he delights in serving it.

That, if I am being perfectly honest, is the thing that truly undoes me. Not dominance. Not cruelty. Not the sterile little theatre of humiliation mistaken for masculinity by men who have never once in their lives encountered genuine reverence. What entrances me is the sight of masculine strength joyfully orientating itself toward devotion. The broad-shouldered rugby player stooping instinctively to brush hair from another man’s face after too much wine. The powerful hand resting gently at the small of the back in a crowded room. The physically confident man delighting in caring for something softer than himself.

Which is why the modern manosphere feels so catastrophically godless to me. Not secular, godless, an entirely different condition. A spiritual landscape in which masculinity has become severed from sensuality, beauty, softness, poetry, devotion, and ecstatic communion with the living world. They speak endlessly of discipline because they have forgotten worship. They speak endlessly of domination because they have forgotten reverence. They speak endlessly of becoming “high value men” while radiating all the erotic and spiritual vitality of an unseasoned chicken breast on wilted chlorine-washed lettuce.

And meanwhile the gods continue appearing absolutely everywhere else. At Bannatynes in Dumfries beneath the blonde light of early evening. Outside pubs with their arms slung around each other’s shoulders. On harbour walls slick with saltwater. In sunburnt courtyards. In gardens full of bees. In half-buttoned linen shirts. In Air Force 1s powdered faintly with dust from the road. In boys who have no idea they are briefly, accidentally carrying Apollo in the line of their shoulders.

This is why I cannot quite surrender to cynicism regarding masculinity, despite the best efforts of podcasters and finance bros and men who treat emotional repression as though it were an Olympic discipline.

Because I have seen the gods.

Not metaphorically.

I have seen them glistening with sweat in five-inch inseams beneath the descending gold of a Scottish sun, laughing with their whole chests open, beautiful and mortal and entirely unaware of the divinity pressing through them like wine through crushed fruit.

And I maintain, with all the irrational certainty of the devoted pagan, that the world becomes softer, safer, and more beautiful whenever such men remember what they are for.

Masculinity without tenderness is a magnificent house with all the fires unlit. Structurally impressive but deeply cold and unliveable. The architecture of it will hold, but no one is comfortable, and the owner cannot understand why visitors do not stay.

In this most hallowed week in the month of May, where gardeners and people with limited social motility get deeply enthused about the Chelsea Flower Show, I felt it might be appropriate to write a reflection on the deep importance of gardens and green spaces as the theatre for essential and functional exchanges of ideas.

By the end of this piece, I intend to have made a coherent argument that the garden party, properly conceived, and historically grounded, is one of the better solutions available to the particular social poverty of modern life. I am aware this is a large claim to hang on a concept most strongly associated with cucumber sandwiches and the minor anxieties of the English middle classes. I am making it anyway.

Lately I have been thinking about the garden party. Not the brutalistic modern iteration with prosecco-in-a-paper-cup tawdriness and a jumble of (invariably wet) plastic lawn chairs which one attends out of love for the host and departs slightly damp about the rump (and the spirit); but the garden party as institution, as a vessel for the gathering of interesting people with the particular social freedom that comes from conducting one’s conversations outdoors, where the sky permits a looseness on proceedings that no interior space, however well-dressed, can replicate.

The great historical practitioners of the outdoor salon understood this intuitively. Consider the Empress Joséphine, who transformed the somewhat unpromising grounds of Château de Malmaison into what she declared she would make “the most beautiful and curious garden in Europe.” Joséphine’s project at Malmaison was not merely horticultural. When Napoleon and Joséphine married, everyone in Napoleon’s circle from sea captains to ambassadors was encouraged to send or bring botanical specimens to Malmaison. The garden functioned as a kind of soft-power machine: a space where influence was cultivated as carefully as the dahlias (which Joséphine introduced to France) and the 250-odd varieties of rose. The great glasshouse on the grounds was constructed not only to protect her collection of exotic plants, but also to serve as a space for entertaining guests. After her divorce from Napoleon, Joséphine simplified court etiquette but continued to receive artists and the intellectual personalities of her time in those grounds until her death. The garden was, for Joséphine, the primary site of her social life and her legacy both.

A century later, Lady Ottoline Morrell achieved something similar, though rather more bohemian and considerably more sexually complicated. At Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire, the celebrated hostess turned her Jacobean country house into a combined literary salon, pacifist’s refuge, and near-perpetual party for left-leaning members of the British intelligentsia. She saw the home and its garden as a “theatre for social gatherings”, inviting visitors to respond to the space she had created with poetry and artwork. W.B. Yeats came. Virginia Woolf came (and then wrote Ottoline biting letters about the other guests, which is so her). Aldous Huxley came and promptly satirised her in a novel (which is so him). D.H. Lawrence came and also satirised her in a novel (simply the Lawrence tax, levied on all who showed him kindness). None of this deterred Ottoline, who grasped that the garden party, even at its most raucous, ungrateful, and overpopulated with future Nobel laureates who were shagging one another, was worth it. The reputation and influence of the salonnière extended well beyond her immediate social circle, allowing her to act as a cultural power broker and patron. The garden was the mechanism and the metaphor both, the place where ideas cross-pollinated with the same promiscuous enthusiasm as the roses.

I have my own, admittedly less historically significant, data point. My 18th birthday celebration was a garden party that took place in the gardens at our home in rural New South Wales. Complete with a string quartet and a table which had to be custom made to support the jarrah wood cheeseboard (also custom made for the occasion), the day passed in a beautiful haze of chiffon and hibiscus flower champagne cocktails before spilling into a messy, lawless barbecue under cover of night. I have particularly fond memories of the moment where one of the guests had to leave to attend a family dinner in celebration of her grandfather being successfully elected Mayor just that afternoon, but was delivered promptly back to the party at dusk by an enormous combine harvester tractor.

This is what I mean when I speak of the garden party as irreplaceable social technology. The combine harvester is not a feature of, for example, the dinner party. The dinner party, for all its pleasures, is a contained thing: it begins, it proceeds through courses, it ends, and everyone goes home at a mutually agreed time without ever having stood under an open sky trying to remember whether they had a fifth champagne cocktail or a sixth.

The garden party is a fluid thing. It accommodates, within a single afternoon, the string quartet and the barbecue, the formal and the lawless, and encourages the dissipation of guests in cliques into the foliage and shrubbery. It is, structurally, an argument for the fullest extent of human interaction.

And we need it. More than we may think, and somewhat urgently. Because here is what modern social life in your thirties actually looks like, rendered honestly: it is a group chat in which six people have been trying to find a date that works for everyone since September. It is a series of individually lovely one-to-one coffees that somehow never coalesce into an actual social happening. It is a dinner party for eight where you sit next to the same person for three hours and conduct the same conversation you conduct every time, which is fine, you love them, but which involves no surprises and no cross-pollination and absolutely nobody arriving on a combine harvester. It is, increasingly, the reconstituting of an endless string of the same copy-pasted night in the pub into various iterations of Instagrammable paraphernalia.

This is not melodrama, the data is unambiguous. Time spent with friends in person has dropped by twenty hours per month since 2003, and in America, the Surgeon General has declared a loneliness epidemic. A third of adults report feelings of isolation, a figure that has barely shifted since the pandemic made it briefly fashionable to discuss. We have become rich in connectivity and poor in connection, and the gap between those two things is the crucible in which misery and ennui meld into that most hateful alloy: resignation.

The research on what actually challenges this is now substantial enough to constitute an argument. Reviews of the relationship between nature and health identify social cohesion and increased social contact as a major pathway through which the natural environment supports better health. Green spaces promote social interactions, fostering community and measurably reducing lon eliness. Studies have found that exposure to natural environments lowers cortisol, reduces aggression, and, curiously, improves feelings of neighbourhood safety. In short, the outdoors makes people kinder and more trusting. This seems like a useful quality in a gathering space.

What the dinner party fails to do, and the group chat absolutely cannot do, is create the conditions for serendipitous connection. The encounter that wasn’t planned. The conversation that begins because two people are both standing near the wisteria looking for a moment away from that one mansplainer. The unexpected ideological alliance formed over a shared opinion about the roquefort placed on the cheese board. The social infrastructure of the garden party is to be found precisely in its lack of infrastructure; a loose enough container that people can find each other in it, rather than being assigned to each other in advance by a purse-lipped and brow-beaten hostess.

The question of how, practically, to achieve this in current climes is a fair one, because I am not unaware that most of us do not have a Malmaison or a Garsington, and following my family’s decanting from the Sydney house into substantially less than our customary five acres of garden, I too feel this keenly. But I would argue the spirit is more important than the acreage.

The mechanics of a genuinely good garden party, I posit, are not complicated. What is required is: an outdoor space of any size, real glasses (non-negotiable; the paper cup is the enemy of the occasion), something beautiful to look at (even if that something is a single pot of begonias positioned with whimsical abandon), food that does not require anyone to sit down at a designated place, and, crucially, an invitation list constructed with the explicit goal of introducing people who do not already know each other. This last element is the one most consistently missing from modern social life and most consistently present in every account of the great salons. Joséphine’s genius was not in her gardenias; it was in her guest list. Ottoline’s legacy was not her Italianate garden but the conversations she engineered within its walls. Invite the people your existing friends don’t know. Put them outside. Provide champagne in real glasses. Let them ambulate in the free-spirited manner of the countryside.

Chelsea Flower Show, for all its grandeur and its extraordinary garden installations that nobody will ever actually reproduce at home, is at heart a love letter to this idea: that green things, tended with care, arranged with intention, and shared with other people, are one of the primary joys available to us. The show’s enduring appeal is surely less about competitive horticulture and more about the collective fantasy it represents, the garden as a place where life is beautiful, chaotic, and conducive to excellent conversation.

Joséphine knew it. Ottoline knew it. The combine harvester, arriving back at dusk with its passenger in her cocktail dress, knew it too, in whatever way combine harvesters know things.

It is, therefore, high time we revived the garden party; and I await a litany of invitations over the upcoming summer season.

Friday, February 27th, 2026 - Dunskey Castle, Portpatrick

Dunskey Castle hunched on the cliff top with such presence and energy that it almost looked like it could be a living thing; like a bat about to take flight. Awestruck and chilled by a seaside wind that sliced clean through the jumper I’d stolen from my fiancé’s best mate, I was transfixed not just by the castle, but by the stunning coastal scenery. Far below the rocky cliff that hosted the ruin we were about to explore in search of ghosts and spirits and all other associated phantasmata, the bottomless black of the sea heaved and swelled. Across that liminal expanse of water the lights of Ireland glittered, and in bursts and flashes a lighthouse winked in and out of sight further along the coast.

We cut through the shifting darkness of the night in a giggling girlish processional, excitement the top-note of our vibe, but with an undertow of base dread at what we might encounter inside the castle’s walls.

Devine Tension led us onward. Resplendent in scarlet, not merely in the fabric of her suit nor the burnished auburn silk of her hair, but, more curiously still, in the very skin of her face and body, painted crimson in homage to something infernal and hell-sent. She looked every inch the fearsome commander of a legion dispatched directly from the underworld, chivvying us toward the castle with a presence as capable of holding the ruin’s attention as it was of spellbinding the nightclub crowds she more usually performs for. Devine possesses the indefatigable high-camp energy of somebody who once opened for Chappell Roan and, quite correctly, refuses to allow the world to forget it. She orchestrated proceedings with supernatural precision and a watchful intensity which, coupled with the body paint, gave her the alarming appearance of the red-faced demon from Insidious patiently overseeing a particularly glamorous séance.

Following on was Jo, Madame Jo Mama to give her the resplendence of her Sunday name. If Devine was the commander of a hellish legion, then Jo was her lieutenant. Her face, as ever, beaten to the gods and giving the crisp excellence and freezing intensity so synonymous with her brand; but somehow in her lack of trying with her outfit choice, she managed to register the most sinister presence of the evening by capturing two terrifying aesthetics. The first, the unedifying spectre of a medieval friar, achieved by the pointed hood of a navy windbreaker selected to stave off the Portpatrick chill; the second, rather more alarmingly, the unmistakable energy of Queen Camilla achieved with slack-pants stuffed haphazardly into wellington-boots.

Camille Toe came next. Camille, touched by something spiritual, carried herself with the immense confidence of a woman preparing herself to negotiate with the dead, which made her appearance all the more extraordinary. She was dressed less like a paranormal investigator than the front desk receptionist of a provincial insurance firm still operating on a computer system last updated under Thatcher. Stranger Things, I reflected, referred not merely to the Netflix programme but also to the wardrobe instincts of our beloved sister witch Camille, who seems to vibrate permanently within a dimension where rolodexes are cutting-edge technology. Her bushel of aqua-coloured hair whipped violently in the sea wind, lending her the alarming presence of some ancient Celtic spectre glimpsed through sea haar on a bleak coast; a wonderful contradiction to her fundamentally “aunty-like” energy.

These three imposing women* are the veterans of our company, who have completed a season of spirit hunting before. Joyful to be in their company, myself and one other new arrival fell into step.

The other new face is Kirsty, a seasoned explorer of ruins and abandoned places of “Whispering Walls” fame. Dressed the part in a leather jacket and boots, Kirsty strode through the salt-stiffened grass with purpose and the conviction of a person who knew exactly what to do with all the associated machinery of spiritual communion we had brought along with us in a bag-for-life. Her presence recalled in me the fearsome and commanding aura of the many events managers I have had the pleasure of working with, and I could tell her frankness of approach would be a grounding influence on all endeavours to come. She also carried the distinct air of someone with an understanding of and respect for the deep history and heritage of the places she explores, Dunskey no less and no more than any other castle on her portfolio of haunted properties.

I struck rather a different impression, tramping through the grass with the giddy wonder of someone simply delighted to have been invited. My earrings (selected carefully to complement the stolen jumper and thereby lessen the moral severity of the crime) glinted under the torchlight, and my limbs shook equally from excitement at the supernatural hijinks to come and the biting chill of a west coast night. I sensed immediately that my role within proceedings would prove distinctly Daphne Blake-coded, specifically in the Sarah Michelle Gellar tradition: framed initially as decorative comic relief before being granted the mercy of both genuine capability and a devastating roundhouse kick. The latter, I should note, was once demonstrated to spectacular effect upon a plumber who let himself into my Aberdeen flat unannounced and encountered me unexpectedly on the private inside stairwell, shopping tote in hand and en route to Sainsbury’s.

We entered the crumbling fortress with wonderment and reverence for the energy of the space, electing straight away to head into the complex of lower floors accessible to the immediate left of the imposing castle gate. The air at Dunskey is never still, but in this more sheltered space the biting wind was held back at last. A smell of wet stone and damp earth clung to everything, and torchlight bounced off the grey stone walls as we illuminated cells and grottos of various sizes. Outside, the hiss and rumble of the sea continued steadily and rhythmically. This brought me an inexplicable comfort, as if the constant movement and reminder of the salt water pooling forty feet beneath us created some layer of protection from the more malevolent spectres and ghouls we may otherwise encounter.

We began the ritual of proceedings and the first communications coming through Ghost Tube: the number thirty-five, references to a spirit in its fifties, and with the focused attention of somebody chairing a meeting that has finally come to an interesting agenda item, Devine led the questioning with the assembled tech while the rest of us peered into the dark corners where shadows gathered as thick as fabric drapes. I didn’t quite feel any strong presence at this point, save for something that seemed to be standing to the side, hesitant but curious, not quite engaging.

Exhausting our conversation in these rooms, we set off to explore the complex of rooms to the right of the castle gates. Not a second after we crossed the threshold of the small, claustrophobic room at the far side, I was seized by a violent and predatory nausea. The miasmic smell that stuck thick in the air of that room was the smell of death; not the sick rot of corpses or the scent of death that triggers a flight instinct, but instead the funereal grave dirt smell of wet earth, of rotted vegetation, and of years of accumulated detritus and debris of all horrific kinds deposited by pigeons and sea birds. The cloying smell made me gag and I excused myself to be violently sick in the castle courtyard.

Once I had recovered, we returned to the cellar level complex, where Madame Jo was compelled to enter the Estes method for the first time: a practice that requires a person to act as a channel for the spirits by entering sensory deprivation by way of a blindfold and noise-cancelling headphones. The headphones are connected to a spirit box which scans frequencies, and words surface through the noise like looming things from the deep, the wearer repeating them back to the group as best they can. The group pose questions, and the words come back from the spirit world in a facsimile of reply.

Jo entered Estes. The headphones went on. The blindfold went on. The group went quiet.

After a short interlude of partly sensible converse, in Jo’s voice stripped of its usual sardonic editorial control and instead infused with a deeply rural Scottish accent, eventually came the words “faggot” and “gay boys”. Once I had sufficiently rebuked the offending spirit for invoking the F slur during the hallowed month of February, Jo announced that the accents of the voices coming through had switched from deeply Scottish to an unmistakable Northern Irish. A chill crept through the group as the gravity of this sank in, all of us remembering Kirsty’s tale of the Irish smuggler prisoners who, likely, would have been detained in these very rooms.

We headed upstairs. The upper levels of Dunskey felt markedly different from the dungeons below: airier, less saturated somehow with psychic residue. In a long gallery room dominated by an enormous window overlooking the sea, Camille immediately became convinced some tragedy had once unfolded, and I was installed on a ledge beside the window, blindfolded.

For several minutes the process yielded little beyond scattered fragments and incoherent murmuring. Then, suddenly and unmistakably, a male voice spoke directly into my ear:

“Ruaridh.”

The accent was Northern Irish. Belfast, perhaps. There was something familiar in the way my name was spoken: teasing, almost affectionate. I repeated it aloud, assuming that pick-me bitch energy and sensory deprivation had joined forces against me. Then it came again. And then, for emphasis and dramatic seasoning, a third time.

Camille informed me afterward that the ribbons of the blindfold had begun behaving strangely behind my head, lifting and twisting against the wind with enough animation to suggest something not only meteorological in nature. I only know that I could feel them moving against the nape of my neck with an intimacy that felt increasingly deliberate. Disappointingly, this portion of the evening is officially designated “lost footage” because somehow the camera had stopped recording during the time Camille was filming me in the session.

Sitting there, blindfolded in the dark, listening to a Belfast voice repeatedly murmur my name into my ear while unseen fingers (or something uncomfortably approximating fingers) seemed to toy with the ribbons behind my head, I began to suspect that something inside Dunskey Castle had taken a rather particular interest in me. Something with “curious DL” energy and the sexual voracity of Kim Petras.

My suspicions, as it transpired, were confirmed downstairs.

When Camille and I rejoined our colleagues in the dungeon, Devine went into the Estes method herself. Not long after, she said my name. Unsettled but vindicated and secure in the knowledge that my experience upstairs was not the result of self-delusion, I was at first merely curious about the interest in me. Until the spirit was asked what the significance of me was, to them, and the following response came via Devine: “Anal.”

Bashful, clocked for a total bottom, and further convinced that the spirit I encountered upstairs was now with us in the dungeon and propositioning me, I felt like my Daphne energy came home to roost. I pictured something not unlike the scene from Ghost with Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore but considerably less fit for television and with substantially more of the energy one might expect from a burly salt-crusted Irish smuggler of yesteryear, expelling the pent-up energy of a life (and a death, it transpires) lived without being able to openly externalise homosexual sentiment. I made a passable attempt at clutching for my pearls (which I chose not to wear that day as the combination with the gold hoops would be discordant), but internally the smirk of the pick-me bitch fought to be released.

After yet more intelligible and sensible conversing, my name was spoken again, this time in the context of us asking the spirit who in the room they were standing next to. The response came:

“He’s special.”

Thus I stood in the dark of the dungeon of a crumbling castle while a spectral Irishman appeared to woo me through the conduit of a drag queen dressed as a demon in crimson body paint; how utterly charming. And yet beneath the absurdity of the situation, beneath the laughter, the camp theatrics, the repeated psychic reinforcement of me as a bottom before an audience of my peers, there lingered something unexpectedly tender.

Somewhere within that ruin, above the black Atlantic swell and beneath the patient blinking of the lighthouse across the water, there remained the distinct impression of a man who had once lived very fully. I found myself thinking not of some pale gothic phantom drifting tragically through corridors, but of somebody who was once broad-shouldered and wind-battered and alive with appetite. One of those roguish Irish lads history reliably produces in alarming quantities with salt spray in his hair, trouble in his grin, and who was probably engaged in activities expressly prohibited both by the law and by the Presbytery.

I imagined him moving through this landscape centuries earlier with seawater still drying on his clothes, laughing too loudly, flirting recklessly, carrying contraband through hidden coastal routes beneath the same moon hanging above us all tonight. I imagined, too, the particular loneliness of men like that. Men who perhaps spent entire lives translating desire into banter, roughhousing, eye contact held a second too long, and whatever fleeting intimacies could be stolen in the dark.

And I thought about how somewhere in those stone walls, between Scotland and Ireland and the living and the dead and the lighthouse’s patient appearances and disappearances, a man died with the taste of the Atlantic still in his lungs centuries ago, but had seen me across worlds and centuries and it meant something to him for reasons I am not entirely prepared to examine in depth.

By the time we finally left Dunskey Castle the sea was still crashing below us exactly as it must have done during his lifetime. The wind still moved through the ruined halls. Ireland still glittered faintly across the water. And I remember feeling, quite suddenly and with enormous affection, that had circumstances been different, had centuries and mortality and social convention intervened less aggressively, I might have let him kiss me goodbye beside the cliff edge.

Reader, I fear I may have been exactly his type.

Watch Slay The Spirits Season 2 Episode 1 Here:

Anyone familiar with my personal mythology will know that I spent a large portion of 2016 substantiating my education of all kinds in the Swedish province of Östergötland. Somewhere in between the storylines that saw me swept into a doomed love affair with a dashing military pilot and that saw me appear in two different versions of fairytales adapted in contemporary performance in a state of undress, I was actually intimately absorbed in and enchanted by my studies in the Linköping University module on Nordic Culture, 754G52 for those who like their existential musings academically credentialled.

The module captured me so because it was distinctly and unapologetically experiential, veering deliciously and unexpectedly away from the stuffy academia of the Scottish persuasion and living wholly in the dimension of uncited feeling over peer-reviewed fact. Our experience of this module came not from screeds of text and data, but from going out into the world and experiencing the subject matter, the culture, as lived phenomena.

The underpinning principle of the module was that the relationship between a Nordic person and their landscape is not incidental to who they are, but constitutive of it. Friluftsliv, or free air life, as a form of cultural grammar, a language of the self understood through birch forest walking and yarn spinning and storytelling under the night sky. As a person who has struggled to find real meaning and connection to their own cultural heritage without it being demanded of me by at least one smirking pseudo-historian to ‘qualify’ with fact exactly why I feel that connection, I was carried off by the ease with which the Scandinavians accepted their place in an unbroken lineage spanning centuries.

What struck me hardest that year (excluding the realisation that I was, to no one’s real surprise, a homosexual) was the effortlessness of the continuity of Nordic culture from Viking-age settlement through to flat-pack furniture, forest schools, herring-jars, and Avicii. The module covered folk-art, music, dance, immaterial culture, popular belief, folkloristic tales and sagas, festivals, cooking. And none of it was framed as heritage in the fusty, roped-off, do-not-touch-the-artefact sense that I had grown up understanding the word. It was just culture as living, ordinary, breathable like air. The traditions we examined weren’t specimens in formaldehyde, but the water everyone was already swimming in, largely unaware they were swimming at all, because that is precisely what a healthy relationship to your cultural inheritance looks like: you don’t notice it, any more than a fish notices the sea.

I thought about home all the time I was in the business of this study. Not Scotland, exactly; certainly not Scotland in the abstract, all misty glens and shortbread tin verbosity. I thought about the Solway coast and the river Nith, of the golden light of a Galloway autumn in Mabie Forest. I thought about the people I had grown up to take a place among and never quite been given the permission to embody. I thought, without entirely realising it, about the Gall Gael experience.

Before we go any further, I want to talk about Lady Devorgilla. Devorgilla of Galloway, or Dearbhfhorghaill, if you want to invoke her regal Gaelic fullness, was born around 1210 and died in 1290, and in the intervening eighty years conducted herself with a political acuity and a personal grandeur that makes the standard Scottish cultural script of dour, subsistence-level Scots-persons-barely-surviving-the-climate-and-devoid-of-any-intellectualism feel not merely inadequate but actively offensive.

She was, by any reasonable measure, one of the most powerful people in thirteenth-century Britain. Heiress to the vast Lordship of Galloway, a semi-independent Norse-Gaelic kingdom that had spent centuries resisting absorption into Scotland with a vigour that I register as inspiring, she married John de Balliol and together they became some of the greatest landowners in Europe with estates from the Scottish Highlands across northern England into France. She co-founded Balliol College, Oxford, not as honorary patron, not as gracious benefactress, but as operational co-founder, writing its first formal statutes in 1282, a foundational framework so robust that parts of it remain in use today. The college coat of arms displays the rampant lion of Galloway; her lion. She also built Sweetheart Abbey, a Cistercian foundation of considerable architectural ambition in red Galloway sandstone, which she conceived and erected in memory of her dead husband, whose embalmed heart she carried around with her in an ivory casket bound with silver for twenty-two years.

I want to pause here, because I think the heart deserves a moment. A woman of tremendous power and considerable sophistication, grieving publicly and extravagantly and without any apparent embarrassment whatsoever, carrying her husband’s embalmed heart across Europe in a jewelled box, founding institutions of learning and abbeys of stone as regular appointments in her busy diary. This is not a brutish woman of the hills with nary a tooth betwixt her gums. This is not the crude, crass, laughable figure that the Scottish cultural cringe has primed us to encounter when we reach into our regional past. This is someone with ethereal grit. Someone who wore her emotion as a political statement, and who left behind an impressive legacy portfolio consisting of colleges, bridges, churches and politically wayward children. She was Gall Gael, but we have almost entirely forgotten what that means.

Gall Gàidheal, or foreign Gaels, stranger Gaels, is the name given to the Norse-Gaelic people who emerged from the Viking Age as something hot off the 9th Century press: neither Norse nor Gael but the extraordinary, sea-salted remix of both cultures. When the Vikings came to the coasts of Ireland and western Scotland from the ninth century, they did not simply raid and leave. They stayed, they intermarried, and became, with the pragmatic fluidity that still characterises the best of the Nordic temperament, Gaelicised. And the Gaels, in turn, absorbed the Norse seafaring ambition, the Scandic love of story and saga, and the Norse organisational efficiency and genius for establishing lasting systems in spite of turbulent political climes and difficult coastlines (the latter we have sadly seemed to abandon in our corner of the South in more recent epoch).

The result was the Gall Gael: a people who shaped the Irish Sea region from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, who founded the Lordship of Galloway and shaped the Kingdom of the Isles, Dublin, Man, the Hebrides and the maritime routes between them. The Galloway Hoard, discovered in 2014, says it in tangible treasure: over a hundred items including silver arm-rings, brooches, and a gold ingot, combining Norse and Celtic design in a mixed visual language. Neither one thing nor the other (and lots in-between).

The word Galloway grew out of this peculiar soil, the “Gall” having its origin firmly in Gall-Gael. We live inside the etymology. We walk with their name every day and mostly don’t notice, which is either poetic or tragic depending on what wine you’re drinking when you consider it. We are not from a footnote culture, nor a minor regional variation on a more important story happening elsewhere. The Gall Gael were a seafaring people, a land-managing people, a people who moved between the fjords of the north and the Celtic mysteries of the west with the ease of those for whom the sea is not a barrier but a super-highway. We were lithe and sharp and mythic, our art was intricate, our political structures were sophisticated. Gall-Gael women, like Devorgilla, were serious operators, educated, wealthy, influential, possessed of an interior life rich enough to produce both a college of learning and twenty-two years of political influence.

And yet, in the fullness of time, we found ourselves ultimately absorbed by the idea of Scotland and then, succumbing to the fate of our captors, our proud spine bent double as we were compressed, with the rest of our host nation, into a compact shortbread tin in garish tartan, cut in the shape of a hulking ginger-haired loon emblazoned with a whip-crack “och aye the noo” in uninspiring lettering. The reduction of an ancient, complex culture crusted with salt and mythos reduced to a supporting part in a cheap novelty act. This is what happens when the cultural thread connecting a modern people to their ancestral way of inhabiting the land is severed.

I have been somewhat coy about what exactly I took from module 754G52 at Linköping and should like now to be direct. The module covered culture and cultural heritage, identity creation, folk art and craft, folk music and dance, immaterial culture (popular belief, fairy tales, folkloristic sagas), as well as traditions, festivals, and cooking. It was delivered hugely through outdoor education, residential components, field trips, excursions into both urban and rural landscape. The Swedes’ relationship to their natural world was studied not as an environmental topic but as a cultural one: the central fact of identity, from which all the other facts radiate. You cooked the food to be eaten from your kayak in the middle of a magnificent lake, and walked the forest tracks and listened to the stories under the night sky in the very landscape that produced them. And, none of this was considered “wishy-washy namby-pamby nonsense” in the way it almost certainly would be by much of the hand-wringing, slack jawed miscreants of the modern-day Scotland who sit with their ire on the sidelines and throw acidic jibes at anyone who has the temerity to try and reconvene a sense of unity between person and place outside of a council-sponsored vegetable allotment.

The learning outcome I remember most clearly was not strictly on the syllabus, but it was implicit: the Nordics do not have to justify their culture. They do not have to qualify it, footnote it, apologise for its more enthusiastic expressions, or submit it to the tribunal of an armchair historian whenever they want to embrace it. They carry it in their bodies. A Swedish person eating herring is not performing Swedishness. A Norwegian person ski-touring after work is not making a political statement. A Finnish person going to the sauna is not sagging under the forced labour of heritage preservation. They are just doing the thing, as their people have always done the thing, in the landscape where the thing was always done. The thread is unbroken. The fish swim, unaware.

This is what I see as a Gall Gael problem, not just a Scottish one. Because if Scotland’s cultural inheritance has been flattened into the highland shortbread tartan tin, then Galloway’s has been further obscured inside that already-inadequate frame. We don’t even get the romanticised and commodified version of our culture, we get the footnote, the regional variation. The bit that isn’t properly Highland and therefore doesn’t quite qualify for the misty glen Outlander treatment, but isn’t considered economically viable enough in the context of national tourism marketing to qualify under any other category for specific nuanced representation.

What we actually are, if we go back to history, landscape, the actual etymology of the very ground we stand on, is something far more interesting than either the Highland romance or its absence. We are the intersection of the Viking north and the Celtic west. We are a seafaring people turned land people, our harbours still carrying Norse echoes, our farmland still remembering the shieling patterns of the Gall-Ghàidheil, our Gaelic, now extinct, Galwegian Gaelic the last to go, surviving by some accounts into the eighteenth century, having once shaped the sound of the prayers spoken in the thousands of chapels that pepper our curious coastline.

And here is where I depart from the academic mode, because the Nordic module taught me, among other things, that this departure is not only permitted but necessary. The Nordics do not wait for an archaeologist to sign off before they feel at home in their culture. The friluftsliv practitioner does not cite a paper before walking into the forest. The skald does not submit the folk song for peer review before singing it. The relationship to heritage is lived, and it is lived in the body, and it is communicated not through information but through the continuous practice of being a person in a particular place in a particular way.

So, let me now arrive at the crux of my argument in my longship bedecked in Celtic linework with a pride flag stapled haphazardly to the mast. I believe I come from a lithe and seafaring people for whom the Solway was not a border but a thoroughfare, and who were never quite domesticated by the political structures that tried to absorb them, the Lords of Galloway (my literal ancestors according to the meticulous genealogical endeavours of my late great-grandmother) resisting Scottish royal authority with a persistence that the chronicles found querulous and I find magnificent. A lineage of women who carried their power with a matter-of-factness that Devorgilla exemplifies and that no tartan tea-towel has ever captured.

I believe I come from a people who knew their herbs. Who understood the Solway tides as calendar. Who tracked the deer through Galloway forests and who named the hills and the burns and the headlands in a language that was simultaneously Celtic and Norse, theirs in a way that no forced state-cultural-identity can replicate. I believe that the elderwort and the meadowsweet growing on the banks of the Nith are grammar in a language we have nearly forgotten but are still capable of learning to read.

Crucially, I am not required to prove this to anyone’s satisfaction. The Swede does not prove their feelings on the forest. The Norwegian does not prove their ancestors felt similarly to themselves about the winter snow. The continuous thread of relationship to place is its own evidence, and one of the great injuries of cultural colonisation is the demand it makes that the colonised justify their own inheritance in the coloniser’s terms, submit their myths to the coloniser’s archive, wait for the coloniser’s historians to confirm that yes, actually, you were here and you were real and your culture had some value.

We were here, and we are still here. The thread was damaged, but not severed completely, and the damage is not the end of the story. The Gall Gael left their names on the map and their art in the ground and their stone piled and shaped into churches and castles and tombs; and their particular temperament, seafaring, land-managing, myth-making, intractable, is still here in embers in the people who live here still (including, in the inclusive tradition of a people literally defined by their ‘foreignness’, those who have come to settle here and found the spark of home).

Somewhere between the chapters of my personal career tapestry of corporate PR and political scandals, I worked with the Heritage Remixed steering group as part of Creative Caerlaverock, commissioned by Historic Environment Scotland and delivered by The Stove Network. This project asked, with the specific sharpness of people who actually live here, what the landscape means to us now.

Standing at Caerlaverock, a stylish and improbably triangular moated castle on the Solway plain which would have captured the heart of any late-naughties hipster on account of its shape, I felt the project’s real ambition most clearly. Not the heritage of a managed site, nor the experience of a role-played version of a culture, but of the thing itself: the accumulated human presence of a place where the Gall Gael descendents moved and settled and built, where Devorgilla’s kinfolk made alliances and the Wars of Independence became a Galwegian civil war as much as a national one. Here, the land has been worked and the water has been fished and the birds, fashionably, geese, have arrived over the Solway in their tens of thousands every year, meaning something for the turning of the year to generations of local people.

Creative placemaking as The Stove Network has developed and articulated it, is a collaborative practice using arts, culture and creativity to work with communities rather than at them. It’s, at its best, the work of reconnection, not recreation of a past that cannot be recreated. Restoration of a relationship: the daily, embodied, sensory knowing that this landscape and these stories and these practices are ours and are available for use. But the reconnection has to know what it’s connecting to. And in Galloway, what it’s connecting to is not the generic Scotland of the tartan shortbread tin. It is something older, stranger, more specifically itself: a Gall Gael culture with Norse bones and Celtic muscle and a deep, practical, unglamorous knowledge of how to live in this unique county, a culture whose sophistication was never in doubt until someone else’s story became the dominant one.

Let me be specific about what my vision of a functional relationship between place and heritage management looks like in my ideal world, because both the Gall-Gael and my ambitions deserve specificity.

I see wildflower meadows on the grounds of Caerlaverock and the other historic properties of Dumfries and Galloway. Tormentil, ragged robin, meadowsweet, and ox-eye daisy, the flowers of the old herbals. These are a statement and not a passing nod at conservation efforts. This beautiful mess of colour and orgiastic celebration of life is what the land looked like when the people of old managed it. Self-sustaining beehives, pollinator corridors through the inaccessible margins, nesting boxes integrated into old stonework: the castle becomes an ecology as well as a history, and the ecology is continuous with the deep human past of this place. The two, it turns out, were never separable.

I see us reinstated in part as a seafaring people, reconnected with the arts we have almost entirely forgotten. The Solway Firth is more than a postcard backdrop, it is the road the Gall Gael travelled, the thoroughfare of a culture that moved fluidly between Galloway and Cumbria and Ireland and the Hebrides. Boats that descended from the Viking longship plied this water. Reviving any relationship, however modest, however contemporary, to this maritime inheritance is not nostalgia, it is continuity, even if only experienced from an inflatable swan bobbing off the coast of Sandy-Hills.

I see a public table laden with Galloway food, a specific inheritance: lamb from the hills, fish from the firth, wild plants from the coast, the particular dairy produce of our mild and grassy country. Seasonal feasts that trace these food histories, that grow the herbs and cook the game in something like the ways it would have been cooked are the Gall Gael equivalent of the Nordic module’s cooking classes. Culture transmitted through the body, through the stomach, through the smell of things.

I see hands at work, shaping natural resources with the same artisanal skill that the red sandstone of Sweetheart Abbey was cut and placed with. Historic properties that host ongoing residencies of makers, weavers, stoneworkers, smiths, working in actual practice in buildings where actual practice has always happened, restore a relationship between making and place that is, specifically, a Gall Gael value: the Norse craft tradition meeting the Celtic artistic tradition in a visual language that required both.

I see a better longevity of story for women like Devorgilla, who deserve a kinder cultural fate than the one we’ve given them. Caerlaverock, the Galwegian civil war inside the Wars of Independence, the Lords of Galloway and their magnificent intractability, the viking words that survived in Galloway Gaelic long after Old Norse died elsewhere, the folk songs and ballads of the Solway coast, all of these are tradition-bearers’ material. A child who hears these stories in this landscape will carry a different relationship to this place than one who reads about them on a sanitised interpretation board; not because we have given them information, but because we have given them, as the Nordic module gave its students, an experience of being inside a living culture that is specifically and undeniably theirs.

The Nordic countries have what they have because the thread from their deep cultural past to their present was never entirely cut. The values that saturate their contemporary life, like respect for the natural world, egalitarianism, the dignity of craft and outdoor existence, the ease with which a person can be simultaneously modern and rooted, these are the downstream effects of a relationship to place and practice that remained legible across the centuries. Galloway’s thread was not entirely cut either. It was frayed, misrepresented, locked away inside an inadequate and garishly patterned container, obscured by a Scotland-wide cultural cringe that was itself the product of a larger cultural subordination. But the names are still there in the landscape.

The Gall Gael were a seafaring, land-managing, myth-making, intractable, sophisticated, aesthetically ambitious people who produced, among other things, one of the great political operators of the medieval British Isles, an Oxford college, and a macabre gothic love story that has been drawing visitors to the Solway coast for seven centuries. We don’t have to wait for permission to claim that. We don’t have to justify it to anyone’s satisfaction or submit our myths to someone else’s archive or qualify our inheritance with the appropriate number of footnotes. The Nordic module taught me that. You just have to know the water you’re swimming in.

In this first review of a book situated under the camp little cocktail umbrella of “White Wine Book Club”, we delve into the cloying, sugary indulgence of “Birthday Girl” by Penelope Douglas. I must confess from the beginning that this book, much like the sugar-intensive confections it conjures, left me with the split sensation of having enjoyed myself but at the expense of my overall wellness and with the thumping sensation of headache. White Wine Book Club is a space for indulgence in the frivolousness and enjoyment of reading, paired with an appropriate wine and snack which, I feel, pairs perfectly with the book as written; and in this first instance, we will be going sweet, to the point of being injurious to health and circulation of all kinds.

Birthday Girl was, to read, what I might be coaxed into describing as sweet. I do not mean this to suggest that it was a lovely story full of heartwarming moments to be cherished, but rather to mean that reading it had a similar effect on my spirit to eating a bit too much sugary food; like, for example, a large slab of birthday cake. Once I’d taken that first bite, possibly against my better judgement, I was compelled to devour it in a short space of time and to suffer the inevitable discomfort and consequence of the soul. What began as an enterprise motivated by excitement and appetite ultimately ended in a feeling of complex nausea and a mild headache.

I open with my impression of main character Jordan, the heroine of the novel who ultimately ends up in a tempestuous and wildly erotic sex-affair with her boyfriend’s father upon moving into his house during complex financial crisis brought on by her painfully self-indulgent boyfriend. The book is written by turns from two perspectives: Jordan’s perspective, and Pike’s, her boyfriend’s father and ultimate love interest (which I move to suggest is better framed as ‘sex interest’ for the purposes of this review). Jordan’s perspective throughout the novel is the part of the cake that encourages you to keep going, the icing and other elements which keep your taste engaged in spite of the cloying grip of the central fillings. It is through Jordan’s perspective that we see Pike at his best, and therefore I had convinced myself that there would ultimately come a reckoning whereby Pike changed his ways subject to the more sensible and progressive outlook of the better character, tempered by the sane and rational female influence to counter his one-dimensional and flat masculinity with it’s roots in the swamp of diabolical American male culture cultivated by centuries of puritan evangelical free radicalism and wanton capitalist tom-foolery.

But, to gluttonously indulge in a massive slice of cake and hope that you’ll come out the other side feeling rejuvenated and light is a folly and a vain hope; and, as with cake, so too it is with novels. Pike was irredeemable and cloying, his perspective intensely difficult to chew and harder still to digest in the moments after the book had been laid down. As a character, his way of speaking about women of all creeds and modes was awful. From possessive language, posturing about male ownership over women, outbursts of blistering temper in the face of female agency all the way through to disturbing expressions of opinion about women’s dress sense and a disdain of women forced through financial disparity and class inequality to engage in low-impact sex work. There are almost no signs of growth in Pike from start to finish. While he demonstrates some limited malleability, he ultimately remains the same man with the same rigid and binary view of masculine and feminine balance which might be appealing under the heady influence of a sugar-rush but, with a clear head, is ultimately not a condition to be lusted for.

None of this is to say that I was able to, or even compelled to, put down the book; there were plenty of hooks and tantalising aspects, even outside of my vain hope that the novel had a fundamentally deeper undercurrent of social change (fruitless). I confess that in spite of the toxicity of their relationship, I was rooting for Jordan to ultimately lock Pike down. Not in any way because I felt that Pike deserved it, but rather because I felt that Jordan herself ought to pin him down and change his worldview for the sake of the world at large; preferably under a new erotic dimension where she flips their dominance dynamic on it’s head and carries him into a new era of femdom enlightenment to his ultimate education and betterment as a human being.

The age gap is what many people who criticise this story seem to zero in on as the fundamental aspect in bad taste, but to be honest I have to disagree. As someone who ruined my virtue and rode into an uncertain future on a tide of sexual awakening brought on by a man at critical odds with his gender balance (military fighter pilot) and, crucially, fifteen years my senior, I would be a hypocrite if I was to deride Jordan and, indeed, Pike, for this aspect of their relationship; consenting adults are consenting adults and I won’t undermine the importance of informed consent by trying to add magical conditions to that which appease specific moral perspectives on what is or isn’t palatable in other people’s relationships. I do, however, reserve some layer of snobbishness and pride in my personal mythology that my own narrative played out in the pastoral beauty of rural Sweden with a handsome and brooding soldier as opposed to in a lack-lustre suburb of ambiguous middle America with a construction executive of limited renown.

But, the substantial part of my critique is the deeply unhealthy implication of male ownership over women, their bodies and their choices; and going a step further, the misguided and embarrassingly puritan sense that a man is in any way ‘helpful’ for interceding in a woman’s choice over what to do with her own body or dress sense. What Birthday Girl seems to do is to carry the dynamic of dominance and authority uncomfortably far from the confines of the bedroom and integrates it in jarring, disconsolate ways into the daily lives of the two characters central to the narrative. Instead of letting Pike be ‘Daddy’ in the bedroom and a gentleman of depth and progress in all circumstances otherwise, Douglas pushes the boundaries by carrying that sexual dynamic into a more protracted and drawn out “slow burn”. Does this create a delicious and intoxicating tension akin to what a birthday cake instills when it’s compelling you to sink your teeth into the main event? Yes it does. Does it also contribute to a narrative experience that exhausts the reader and leaves them crashed-out and in a puddle of regret? Yes, that too.

Don’t get me wrong, I did find the intense eroticism of the story compelling, more so than I ought to have. I was expecting to be somewhat repulsed by the heterosexual depictions of sex, excoriating in their detail; however, turns out that bodies are pretty much universal when you apply a little bit of creative interpretation and I confess to finding myself breathless and flustered while doing the hoovering one particular Sunday afternoon when I was carried through one of those first sex scenes after the slow, edging build up until that point (I was listening via audiobook, for clarity, and am not dextrous enough to be doing the hoovering while balancing a paperback). But again, like a sugary cake, one loses themselves in a moment of sugary indulgence which we vaguely know is bad for us but which pushes through due to unbridled greed or lust as applicable, until the moment is consumed and we are again left with the shame and regret of wondering why we got so into that for a brief moment. I would take a moment to particularly reference one scene involving a loofah which was particularly harrowing on reflection.

I am being candid in that I did not find this book particularly recommendable from the vantage that it ended on an ultimately discordant note and offered no hope of redemption for the evils of man, but I would be wrong if I was to say that there was no part of the book I found charming. In fact, one thing I think Douglas does very well is to create a backdrop for her story to play out within that really captures something; a vignette of a suburban life in an uninspiring part of America. It doesn’t drip with the saccharine syrup of the usual American fetishisation of suburban narrative, but instead leaves a picture of a life, a community that captures futility, bleakness and struggle in equal measure with community spirit, neighbourliness, and work ethic. The characters and their motivations frustrated me, but the stage on which they played their part was charming; there could be a real story in the background somewhere, maybe something about the fascinating background life of Jordan’s sister and her work in the strip-club; or in the seemingly flattened out lives of the other women written into the novel as scenery who, ultimately, must carry the most compelling stories of eking out a life under the yoke of an oppressive gender binary that hangs over the narrative like a fog.

All things considered, this was an enjoyable read in the sense that it held my attention and kept me enthralled during the ‘chewing’, but once I’d swallowed the narrative it became clear to me that it was difficult to digest and was going to leave me irritated, over indulged, and a little sick.

And so, to the pairing. It will come as no surprise that, for a snack, I am pairing this one with a bit of birthday cake; however, I do have a very specific kind in mind, which first crossed the threshold of my lips in the primary school ‘milk bar’, consisting of a simple square of sponge topped with sugary white icing and sprinkles in all colours, a feast so visually compelling that I would rather lose control of myself in the devouring of it and subsequently be left with the fulsome ache of regret.

For the wine, we need to match equal sweetness with the vivaciousness and effervescence captured by Douglas’s skilful crafting of an environment. Therefore, I am going to delve into the archive of my experience and recommend a wine which is now, tragically, lost to the ages (but fear not, as I will share a tip to achieve the same effect). The Cogno Brothers winery at Cobbity, on the same street where I grew up in the rural wine country outside Sydney, produced a sweet sparkling wine which they badged ‘deluxe cuvée’. Now closed, I cannot verify the wine exactly or tee any up for import for our next feral meeting, but I have delectable memories of the wine being sweet, far sweeter than any other sparkling wine (of quality) that I have ever tasted, with a smoothness that went over altogether too easily.

Drinking this wine was like reading Birthday girl insofar as it would leave one with a headache if over imbibed on the hottest of summer’s days (one specific and enchanting Christmas comes to mind), but the pleasure of the actual drinking of it and the taste left on the tongue cannot be overstated. To achieve the same effect, purchase a base prosecco of reasonable quality and mix in a generous spoonful of honey to each glass you drink and you will have a more than passible facsimile of what I am pitching.

And there you have it, an insight into my feelings on the somewhat disruptive and unambiguously horny narrative by undoubtedly disturbed writer Penelope Douglas, paired with a cake conjured from the trough of my deepest memory and a wine no longer to be had on the market but which can be resurrected with a spot of honey. Drink responsibly and remember the evils of patriarchy are not to be indulged, even in moderation.

Without a shred of dignity or credibility left in the tank, I am sure that those of you who trusted me to write a weekly diarising of my life and commit to that every Sunday will be feeling disgruntled and let down by the fact that the wheels came spectacularly off the trolley after week ten.

In my defence, we last heard from me when it was the first week of December and therefore the powerful majesty of autumn was eroding into the bitter misery of a southern winter which comes, invariably, with the sickly chill of death and misery and none of the crisp, icy whimsy of winter fed to us by Tchaikovsky and other propagandists of similar ilk. It is not to be missed that I have mustered enough creative energy to put pen to paper, so to speak, in this week in late March where the sun has made an unexpected but welcome return and yesterday I was carried off by the delight of finding a tulip at the bottom of the garden.

With brighter days and the promise of many a spring spritzer on the near horizon, it is duly appropriate that we reflect on the dark times just passed, a hibernation of the creative spirit and a time of infelicitous ennui and circumstances most desperate.

Perhaps the first spiritual recession indicator that may have twigged everyone on to my impending crash-out came when I spontaneously and without planning, purchased myself a car. After a surprisingly limited series of phone calls and a speedy credit check, I found myself the owner of an orange Vauxhall Mokka which I have been driving all over the southern counties and northern England while accompanied by a motley rotation of qualified older drivers due to me being painfully too anxious to consider rebooking a UK driving test after failing twice-over for stupid technicalities like being a smidge too far left in a box junction and apparently ‘impeding the flow of traffic’ if such a thing can be considered credible and proportionate at the junction of Shakespeare Street and Queen Street.

While my driving has occupied a great many hours of my time, it has not been the only cause of my disappearing from the scene. Indeed, the scene itself briefly imploded and collapsed with the surprise closure of our sacred temple of social graces, the Douglas Arms. Without expectation or preamble, an entire community of seasoned drinkers of all flavours of queer and creative spectrums found ourselves spiritually homeless and stricken by the grim spectre of bereavement; naturally, with proprietor and helmsman Les at the prow, an evolution has occurred and we have been transported to pastures new and slightly larger just a short jaunt from the historic Theatre Royal; but the grieving of our old haunt is still a wound to be treated with gentility and mild antiseptic until we are more established in our new patch with one or two fabulous cabarets and ideas salons under our belts.

By a miracle of the great goddess and also modern industrial strength anti-histamine, my health has remained stable throughout the worst of the winter months which is something unheard of, but I hope it is an assurance to you all that I have not succumbed to the wasting or to septicaemia or any other horror and am in robust health and good spirits; as well as can be expected for a person in their thirties.

I did have one slight emergency (both medical and spiritual) when it became apparent that I’d taken an allergic reaction to the escargot I had for lunch during one particular working Tuesday. It’s important for me to clarify that never having had an issue before, it has come to light that I am allergic to one specific type of snail over and above others and therefore must now be more refined and selective when taking them on and not simply devour an entire platter unquestioningly while sitting at my desk and writing press releases, lest I should have to explain to my boss why I needed to leave work forty minutes early and in respiratory distress and be subsequently mocked for my boujie tendencies. But, outside of this damaging happenstance, I have been otherwise hale and well.

What have remained largely unstable, however, are my creative tendencies and my personal mythos and brand. Shaken to the foundations by, I think, the possibility of losing the greatest intellectual salon ever seen across the South of Scotland (certainly since the closure and soul-poisoning of the once scintillating Globe Inn), I have been confronted by the gruelling question: who am I outside of the social forum where one can debate the meaning of art while also coquettishly tossing the synthetic locks of an ambulating wig of unknown origin, slowly circulating the heads of great beauties and intellects of the scene.

Thusly, in a prospect not to be relished, but I have been undertaking some soul searching and making one or two refinements to my approach to the diarising of my life; these, I leave with you below for absorption and socialising:

• Firstly, the reels have got to stop. Yes, I know you did not ask for them, and I know I was forcing them all on you as a way of me experimenting with bridging the gap between my feral (though hotly celebrated) instagram presence of 24/25 and this blog format; however, the emotional and creative energy required not only to cut them together every week but also to bring myself to be arsed with filming every aspect of my sometimes mundane life, was too much. I could not, for example, have weathered filming myself in respiratory distress after indulging in one too many garlic butter snails at lunch time, and I am also prohibited by the prudence of the Law from filming while driving and therefore my opportunities to find suitable content are much diminished. You may see one or two pop up from time to time, but there will be no Sunday regularity and I shall take on no critique or argument.

• Secondly, I am reserving the right to depart from the formula, subject to my own discretion, as there do come Sundays where the thought of extending myself creatively into a diarising of the week preceding could not be less appealing to me and I am forced to the brink of madness by trying to romanticise such innocuous highlights from my week as browsing for interesting organic squash at the posh supermarkets in Penrith; you all know what I’m talking about. I will do my level best to lower the drawbridge and let you all into the tapestry of my life, but you’d be better served taking me out to the Open Arms and plying me with sparkling wine if you want unfiltered access to those most mundane of experiences.

• Thirdly, I am also reserving the right to just start writing a bunch of other nonsense and tomfoolery outside of the prison of a weekly diary, because there are times where my creative frivolity cannot be contained by anything so linear as a Monday through Sunday write up and I need to indulge in the spiritual gymnastics of, for example, criticising my villainous detractors, creditors, and adversaries with the caustic vitriol reserved for non-time-limited character assassination.

• And, finally, I am retiring a mainstay of my instagram grid since 2019, moving beyond the limitations of my aesthetic ‘quote column’ which was suffocating my creativity and forcing me to post in groups of three, fucking heartily with my algorithm and making me look like, if you’ll excuse my pretension, a pick-me bitch. You can now expect a more visual feast on the grid, interspersed with the biting wit which characterised my ‘days of 30’ story arc; an outcome I am sure will be pleasing to those of you who can stomach many of my succinct one liners but baulk at the daunting prospect of a foray into the verbose terror of my unfiltered internal dialogue (and a very pleasant day to those of you who have made it this far, sanity and wits intact).

Without further preamble or elaboration on what occurred between December and the present day, I shall sign off and leave you tantalised and in expectation of more from me over the coming weeks and months, in whatever format captures my caprice (and that I can be arsed with).

In this week I enjoyed my time off work by purchasing a car and then retreating into a state of lethargy where I struggled with the levers of power in medieval Europe. Here’s how that went…

Monday:

In this, the first day of December, I was spirited away to the garden centre with my mother, grandfather and middle sisters. On holiday from work, I wished for a break but found myself doubly exhausted because of the festive flavour of the entire enterprise.

I committed to the purchase of Christmas lights and argued vociferously for a duo-tone familial-significant colour scheme for outdoor Christmas baubles, but was unable to achieve the scale of my ambition due to a lack of cerise and silver Christmas baubles in any of the local shops.

Irritated and full of that unique Christmas-tide scorn and distaste, I retired home to slip into a state of infelicitous altered consciousness.

Tuesday

On the second day of December, in a giddying moment of spontaneous self-determination, I bought a car.

This was not the result of long deliberation or comparative spreadsheets, but rather an emotional purchase, executed cleanly and without apology. The car is an orange  Vauxhall Mokka, automatic, because that is what I can drive and I refuse unnecessary hardship. I do not yet drive legally, but I require practice, and I require it on my own terms.

I ate smoked salmon for dinner and reflected positively on this great step towards autonomy over my future travels by road.

Wednesday

On Wednesday, December the third, I was profoundly, irreversibly tired.

To cope, I returned to the PlayStation 5 and Crusader Kings, a strategy game in which one plays a medieval ruler and attempts, through marriage, war, diplomacy, faith, and administrative cunning, to build and maintain a dynasty across centuries. I was not playing it for excitement but rather playing it because it gave me one clear problem to concentrate on.

I ate smoked salmon again, laid out in the drawing room, barely present in my own body.

Thursday

The fourth day of December passed in a narrow, carefully managed lane of attention.

I continued playing Crusader Kings, constructing a world within the game that felt more just and comprehensible than the real one.

Beginning by painstakingly creating a hybrid Norse-Gaelic culture centred around Galloway and the Isles, I had adopted and reformed the Norse Asatru religion to enshrine equality and to treat same-sex relationships as virtuous rather than sinful. This brought me great satisfaction and, crucially, emotional whimsy.

Each time my plans in the game approached stability, they faltered; not through villainy or chaos, but through succession laws that I was unable, due to tedious snarls of medieval bureaucracy, to bend far enough to preserve what I had built. I found this dispiriting, and also depressingly familiar.

Dinner was smoked salmon, eaten without reflection or vigour.

Friday

Friday, December the fifth, arrived with the weight of a week lived without agenda or thought, so I doubled down.

I played more Crusader Kings, knowing full well how it would likely end. Around the same point in the game’s timeline, just past the early medieval period, my carefully balanced empire would begin to fracture, heirs multiplying, power dispersing, cohesion dissolving by inches rather than explosions. My disappointing squatter of children would, by consequence of confederate partition laws, inherit discretely all of my kingdoms, fracturing the seamless coat of my government and falling victim to the predations of their own unruly vassals.

I ate smoked salmon again, by now a ritual.

Saturday

On Saturday, December the sixth, the inevitable occurred.

While playing Crusader Kings, I once again reached the point where everything I had constructed was almost secure. Almost enlightened. Almost permanent. And once again, I fell just short of the legal reforms required to hold it together. The empire unravelled for the fourth time, and so too did my joi-de-vivre.

I stared at the screen with the particular exhaustion of someone who keeps proving the same point to themselves. Supper was smoked salmon, and I felt no shame.

Sunday

The seventh day of December was spent in deliberate withdrawal.

I acknowledged the real world only minimally, noting the passage of time and the scurrying of the townspeople from behind the heavy drapes of the drawing room. I spent the rest of the day playing Crusader Kings again, beginning the cycle anew from a different starting point, with the same broad intentions and the same quiet hope that this time it might work.

When evening came, I stopped not because I felt restored, but because I felt steadier. The week had been narrow by necessity. I had focused on one thing to keep everything else at bay.

I closed the game, knowing I would return to it and accepted that sometimes endurance and survival looks like relinquishing the responsibility to eat anything other than smoked fish and instead focussing on the political machinations of a fictional high Kingdom stretching, during its heyday, from Iceland to Barcelona.

Another week of being robustly out of control of my life but never the less enthusiastic about the journey. Read on if you wish…

Monday:

After spending a workday in a haze of industry and irritation, I packed my bag and left to go to the gym. On arriving in town I detoured to TK Maxx to buy more relaxed fit jeans (a passion discovered recently and written about in depth some weeks ago). Subsequently I was enticed to the supermarket for “a few bits” but I ended up doing a substantial shop and couldn’t be arsed carrying the groceries to the gym, so I just went home and retired to bed.

Tuesday:

At the end of an infuriating day of work, I received a call from my mother asking if I wanted some leftover pork and chicken for the children. I headed over to her house to collect these meat scraps, and encountered my little sister. After vociferously expressing my woes in a torrent of anguish and self pity, they asked if I’d like to avail myself of the shower. I agreed, showered, and then asked my little sister to give me a blowout with her Shark hairdryer which is now my favourite thing ever. Afterward, she did a skincare routine on me which left me feeling rejuvenated and at peace, so I went home and directly to bed to watch “designated survivor”. At some point in the dark of the night Derry woke me up by coming home to bed, and surprised me with a gift of an opal Pandora pendant. Magically, this was the missing piece which helped me to pull together an ensemble look for my Wednesday and I drifted into sleep at peace in all things.

Wednesday:

Thanks to my fresh blowout courtesy of a functional hairdryer (my own is a beat-up hello kitty brand hairdryer which I actually don’t know the origins of, it just lives in my vanity and I accept it), I was riding high. I slipped into my Wednesday look, featuring a crisp popped collar, and fastened my new Pandora on myself before heading into my “big Wednesday” which included a full day of office working, followed immediately by a reclaim the night event at which I was turning up to offer press liaison support through work.

The day passed amicably, and I spent much of my time tossing my hair and glancing at my reflection in various polished surfaces.

Later, the reclaim the night event was a success, with me managing to maintain consciousness through a caffeine haze long enough to see the programme through, before retiring to the Dougie Arms for stimulating chatter with the inimitable treasures Tom and Dillon otherwise to be found as Camille Toe and Devine Tension.

Thursday:

Amazingly undefeated by my “big Wednesday”, I rallied and kicked off another day of office working. At lunch time I stepped out to The Stove and was delighted to stumble across one Michael Moore with son Leon in tow.

Swept off on a tide of maternal feeling, I agreed to hold Leon for a while and allow Michael to recalibrate himself, which did splendid things for my mental health and reminded me of my desire for a child (one which doesn’t have four legs and a snout). We were latterly joined by the glamorous treasure Joanna LeVin who shared the latest in her serial, before I relinquished the child to his father and returned to my desk to complete my day’s work.

Friday:

Another gruelling day of office based working, this one uniquely intense as I tried to wrap up everything I have been trying to balance before my leave next week. Spent and full of adrenaline, I went straight from work to The Stove for an evaluation meeting about Creative Caerlaverock, a project I’d worked on just prior to starting my current job.

The session was an excellent opportunity to reminisce and, also, to be starkly reminded of all of the good we used to do before I became dislodged from the scene due to my working commitments. Merry conversation ensued between myself, the wise DJ McDowall and our very own Mo Love. Such excitement was had that we carried on with the evaluator to The Doug for drinks before his train back to Edinburgh, which inevitably led to an evening ending with Mo Love and I parting ways only to reunite in a waterfront take away just fifteen minutes later. Full of wine and pizza, I rode home in a taxi and contemplated the joy of living.

Saturday:

I spent the day doing nothing of particular import, save for purchasing a generous quantity of raw squid for no clear reason. Once the day was duly spent and the velvet blanket of night had descended on the rural south, it was time to join my sisters for a night of revelry and frivolity.

We started with cocktails at The Bank and then made a resolute pact to engage in a “pub crawl” which led us to The Riverside Tap for beers and quiz games, to The Dougie (naturally) for a wine and a shot and a boogy to the gloriously enjoyable music of perennial darling (and stunning head of hair) Johnny Peach, and then to The Tam O’Shanter where we sequestered ourselves in an upstairs room and recanted, with dramatic flair, the story of the time the three of us got blind drunk on Skopelos during our youngest sister’s birthday trip to Greece.

Once finished at the Tam I allowed myself to be manoeuvred to two of the bars not on my usual accepted rotation. First, to the Imperial, a sports bar generally found full of young revellers with an aggressively heterosexual homogeneity to the vibe which I found both draining and alarming. Just as we were about to leave, a thoroughly soused individual who, I am given to understand is a friend of the youngest, suddenly approached me and started to bemoan the injustices of the football match “we” had played in just that very afternoon; it transpired he had mistaken me, against all odds and the evidence of his eyes, as the “number ten” from the Annandale team. Alarmed and unsure how to proceed, I played into the narrative and channeled the energy of a football player long enough to survive the encounter and escape the bar.

We then headed to the second of our venues outside the accepted norm, N’dulge. A hellish and sweaty press of bodies with the same aggressively heterosexual Gen-Z energy which somehow feels like it gets worse every year. I passed the time in a state of alarm and agitation, before finally being able to escape. I made my goodbyes to my sisters and fled the scene, vowing as I went never to cross the threshold and grace those rooms with my presence again.

Sunday:

Full of the remnants of Saturday drinks, as well as the emotional caprice of an aging millennial, I cancelled my previously held engagements (specifically Carlisle races) and surrendered to a day at home, alone with my chores.

Privately delighted by the chance to spend time in my own company, I completed a slew of outstanding household objectives, detail cleaned the fridge, and made a southern style tomato pie from scratch.

Now, I lie in my darkened room and pen these words while contemplating travelling to my parents’ house for burgers, which feels like an appropriate quandary for a Sunday on the edge of a week of annual leave.

In this week I struggled to find the energy to be bothered about a single thing, but robustly found meaning in musicals of multiple varieties and jumped on the Wicked bandwagon. Here’s how it went.

Monday:

Watched Hamilton with mummy after work, opening the door to a week of musical whimsy and jollity. I reinforce my emotional connection to Angelica Schuyler and reflect on how deliciously politico it is of me to be so carried off on not just any musical, but specifically and particularly on Hamilton.

Tuesday:

Exhausted by the work day, I settled into the evening and allowed myself to be sucked into the Netflix whirlpool where I was thrown about, offering no resistance or hope of recovery.

Wednesday:

After a gruelling day of office working I fled the office in favour of the great Public House, the Dougie Arms. Once installed there I waited several hours for Derry to finish his work at the theatre and collect me for home, adding a layer of subtle Parisienne mystery to the middle of my week.

Thursday:

Similarly encumbered by workday travails, and with the spectre of a seasonal cold looming nigh, I couldn’t have been happier come five o’clock to finish work. Deeply uncharacteristically for me, I decided that dinner should consist of simple frozen things easily collected from the supermarket and, in a move outside of my personal framework, we settled into potato smiles, spaghetti hoops and chicken nuggets for dinner. To reclaim some glamour, I then forced Derry to watch Hamilton for the first time, which so captured his thespian spirit that now he’s totally carried off by it and incapable of doing anything without singing “you’ll be back” under his breath.

Friday:

Worked in the office today, grafting until my little brain could handle not a minute more. I retired briefly to the Dougie to sit wistfully in the main window for 45 minutes before taking public transport home, ostensibly to tuck myself into bed and watch “The Diplomat” but instead sitting at my kitchen table for upwards of three hours chatting to the gals in the group chat.

Saturday:

Full of a desire to share our Saturday together, and also full of seasonal cold, we took the children for a brisk woodland walk and then returned home to watch Wicked on Amazon to test the waters. So carried off by it and deeply enthusiastic to know what happens next, we rushed to Carlisle to gorge ourselves silly at the all you can eat buffet before heading to the cinema for Wicked: For Good. Dazzled, delighted and very much spiritually aligned with Glinda, I returned home to a peaceful and restful night.

Sunday:

Full of Sunday feelings, I allowed myself to agree to accompany Derry to watch the Rugby match in Dumfries with his pal. Due to my unforeseen apparition, Derry’s pal invited his girlfriend to join us which then cascaded into us joining forces and hen-pecking the men before going out for a light dinner.

Exhausted by the social voracity of the occasion we returned home early in the night and I promptly fell asleep in the drawing room, only to be awoken and ushered to bed by Derry all before 10pm.

In a week where seasonal activities portent the creeping fingers of Christmas, I resist the unbridled seasonal madness of others and cling to the last vestiges of autumn. This is how the week happened…

Monday:

Having taken a week off work to emotionally convalesce, I spent today catching up with scores of admin and completing forms long overdue. Bloated on the joy of having completed tasks which have been calcifying at the back of my conscience for weeks, I drifted into a state of dreadful lethargy and remained thus.

Tuesday:

Free from the obligations of the working week, I joined my aunt and grandfather for a trip to Penrith to hit up all the bougie supermarkets that I vibe with, particularly Booths and Cranstons. Carried away by the gorgeous country vibes, I perused the turnips and loose organic carrots with great interest and purchased, among other things, a half dozen oysters. On return home I enjoyed the oysters with several Bloody Maries and carried forwards into the evening. Later, when I was well nourished from the oysters and buzzed from the vodka, I helped Derry to bleach his “tips” and can say with gusto that a future in hairdressing is robustly not for me.

Wednesday:

I spent the early half of the day drifting, ambient and spectre-like, along the backways and lanes of the countryside surrounding the house in a state of deepest contemplation. When the day was spent, I commended myself to Moffat where I was life modelling at the last minute for a drawing group. The evening was pleasant, but during the short break I received communication from Derry to advise that in the making of a steak-frites he had somehow hoyed off the ball of his thumb with the mandolin grater, so the final forty-five minute pose was held with great agitation and concern. The steak frites, when we got to it, was a delight.

Thursday:

Today I spent a day in the deepest of agitations and miseries, before storming off to the gym in the late afternoon. Committed to my book club, I spent the entire session listening to an audiobook version of Penelope Douglas’s Birthday Girl, careering between excitement and horror. My strength of opinion on the subject matter led me to conceptualise a new content stream for the blog predicated on book reviews from both book clubs: those from the private book club of Mrs. Katie Boyce will be paired with a white wine and thoroughly reviewed, while those from the Dougie book club will be paired with a red wine and reviewed. Therefore and hereafter, these book clubs will be internally referred to as “white wine book club” and “red wine book club”. No further clarification is necessary.

Friday:

Animated by the spirit of adventure, I headed out with mummy and papa for a marvellous road trip south, and across the border. With no clear destination in mind, we ambulated from place to place before eventually arriving at Lowther Castle in just enough time for a pot of tea and a beef sandwich.

When I returned to our country of residence I was enticed out to the township of Dumfries by my sisters. Merrily we ambulated between the public houses of the town, revelling in tomfoolery involving a cowboy hat and settling the evening with a deeply competitive music quiz in a craft beer bar.

Saturday:

I spent the day in a state of ennui preparing myself for the evenings outing with my father to watch the ice hockey in Dumfries.

The evening did not disappoint! I had developed and nurtured a great love for the sport when living in Sweden as a way of trying to curry favour with the fighter pilot ice hockey enthusiast I had become romantically involved with, and this somehow developed into an actual affection for the game. Although our local team were beaten in the extra time allocated due to a draw, the evening was pleasantly enjoyed and awoke in me a latent wish to star as the main character in a gay Hallmark Christmas rom-com about an ice hockey team.

After the game I headed out for a second night in the town with “the siblings ™️” which involved many cocktails but robustly less cowboy hat.

Sunday:

Delicate from the drink taken last night, I steeled myself before visiting my mother’s mobile bar at the Lochmaben Christmas lights switch on.

My role at these events, self ascribed, is to attract custom by being seen to be making purchases and drinking the produce of the bar. I intend for this to appear glamorous in a sort of “I do declare, this prosecco is marvellously festive” sort of a way. Sadly, the effect is rather more of me loitering behind the bar, drinking Prosecco in the back alley and making fraught, distant eye contact with the townsfolk like a desperate Victorian prostitute.

After a successful evening attempting to connect with the spirit of the festive season and achieving something of a lukewarm sense of seasonal gaiety, I retired to the newly opened Chinese to feast and reflect on how despairingly Christmas everything is becoming robustly too early in the calendar.

In this week I am carried into an existential line of questioning which draws me to conclude that I am, in fact, Kate Garraway. Read on to see why…

Monday:

As Mondays go, this one was much like the others: unremarkable in every conceivable way. I drifted through the day in a state of malaise before settling into an evening of similarly unremarkable activities. If ennui were to manifest as a specific Monday, it would be this one.

Tuesday:

I’ve learned that book clubs are like buses: you wait ages for one and then two appear at once.

Dougie Book Club is back, which is thrilling, because I was fairly sure I’d killed it off last time by failing to turn up to the last session due to being stranded on the Champs Élysées. Its revival means the return of those perfect Tuesday nights in the pub by the fire, alternating coffee and wine and discussing books. Frankly, a vibe.

Before heading out, I messaged my eternal darling Mrs Katie Boyce to see if she’d join me. She replied that she’s now thoroughly settled into married life and mistress of her own book club, which I immediately joined. This leaves me as a member of two book clubs at once, which feels like a personal brand upgrade, and therefore I’m fully committing to the bit.

At The Dougie’s we chose Jackie Kay’s Trumpet; in Katie’s, Penelope Douglas’s Birthday Girl. I shall be industrious in my reading, but doubly enriched come the end of the month.

Sufficiently stimulated, I rode the bus home clutching two takeaway pizzas and a renewed sense of self-righteousness.

Wednesday:

Full of career enthusiasm and deeply connected to the latent intellectual hiding beneath my dizzy blonde exterior (though brunette now), I found myself in the gym this evening rotating through machines while listening to podcasts on current affairs. Doing leg curls and battling the hateful chest press while hearing analysis of British politics was oddly empowering and certainly more motivating than Sabrina Carpenter ever could be.

I carried this new obsession with micro-learning into my walk to the supermarket, where fireworks lit up the night, visually charming, aurally catastrophic.

Thursday:

Like most of the country, I’m entirely taken by the Celebrity season of The Traitors. Tonight was the final, and the result, which I won’t spoil, was breathtaking.

Two reflections. Firstly, I think I might be in love with Joe Marler. Secondly (and supported by peer feedback), I think I actually am Kate Garraway.

My gateway drug to the series was Clare Balding, naturally. My grandmother, a celebrated fixture of the Scottish racing scene by way of her Barclay name, was devoted to the sport, so Clare Balding was an eternal presence (in audio/visual format). Whenever she appeared on the television screen, Granny would tap me on the arm and remind me, “She’s queer, you know.” Later this evolved into a wordless arm tap and an excited gesticulation.

In her honour, Derry and I now do the same. But over time I became utterly enchanted by Kate Garraway. Beyond the flawless blowout (hours of hair inspiration), I feel an affinity with her: clearly capable, serious about her job, yet somehow everyone’s pick for a dizzy blunderer.

Overcome with admiration after the final, I ended the night brushing my hair and wondering why I felt so spiritually aligned with Kate Garraway.

Friday:

I think I’ve found the answer. After a day in the office, I retired to the Dougie Arms to meet my usual assortment of glittering gems and celebrate the week’s end with a bottle of Prosecco.

We were thrilled by the return of our singing starlet Jen Mac (of Radio One fame), and spirits were high. During one of Conor’s stories about a traumatic night at the Dougie long since passed, I missed a few key details and mixed up several principal characters, mangling my comprehension of the story into bafflement. Confused, I asked for clarification, much to everyone’s amusement, and declared, revisiting a comment from friends of last Friday in this very same pub, “My God, I am Kate Garraway.”

This was confirmed later when I saw a meme entitled “Kate Garraway repeating things”. The show-reel footage of Kate repeating back other people’s declarations triggered a That’s so Raven style flashback of every episode of Speaking Queerly (“We are going to be talking about Wicked, yes”) and I don’t know whether it suggests great journalistic potential or not. Regardless, I feel a renewed sense of potential in broadcasting.

Unsettled but not unpleased, I instructed my husband to drive us to McDonald’s for chicken nuggets and officially closed the week.

Saturday:

I was meant to be going to the ice hockey with my dad, but it turns out I’d been given the wrong date, so that will have to wait.

Instead, I went with my mother, aunt and grandfather to the Scottish Borders for a spontaneous trip to the Trimontium Roman Fort Museum, apparently co-founded by my great-aunt.

After much laughter in the museum, a detour to the garden centre, and the opportunity to buy globe artichokes and pomegranates in a zero-waste grocer, we returned home for pyjamas and television.

Sunday:

Derry drove me out to Carsethorne for a lovely Sunday lunch at the Steamboat Inn. I gorged myself on mussels and roast beef and am now both nourished and content. I intend to live in this feeling for the rest of the day.

In the week of All Hallows Eve I experiment with different applications of wearable angel wings and rekindle my relationship with embroidery after the fashion of a Federalist period American society wife. Read on to see how this came to be…

Monday:

Another Monday full of the usual tribulations of the workday. Come five o’clock, Murran, my youngest sister, came round for support with an assignment for her college course.

The subject of the report she had to write for her fashion business course was on branding, something which was of academic interest to me when I had the sprightly blush of youth about me and was still to be found in the hallowed halls of University.

Exhibiting excellent taste, her chosen focus was Schiaparelli and their use of storytelling techniques to enshrine the history of the Maison as rooted in the world of art, especially through Elsa Schiaparelli’s earliest collaborations with the likes of Dali.

Her choice of brand and choice of argument may be the earliest germ of a similarity between us that burgeons into a shared love for the intersection between conceptual surrealist art practice and the clean glamour of a great Parisienne Maison. Good things are to be expected.

Tuesday:

Today I modelled again for the first time in a number of weeks. As it’s Halloween week, Michael asked if I could bring any accessories with me. It just so happened that I’d made a purchase of Angel wings to complete my Halloween costume for Friday night, so I took these along.

Wearing the wings and nothing else, I feel I was able to reach a dimension of Grecian classical grace in my craft which, if you’ll pardon my pretension, has already been described as elegant and graceful in bygone sessions and by wandering artists who encounter me in the various clubs and public houses of the South and stop me to tell me how much they enjoy drawing me (one of my favourite social happenings and a tireless triumph of my personal brand).

I feel I excelled myself with three 30 minute poses one after the other in immediate succession, and only used headphones to listen to a chapter of Anna Karenina during one of those three.

Later I travelled home by public transport with my duffel sports bag with angel wings affixed, currying an air of boyish queer mystery that I’ll be adding to the brand portfolio for future use.

Wednesday:

I spent the day working in the office in town, fastidiously committed to the business of my role. Not long before finishing up I received a text from Derry requesting Hachis Parmentier for dinner.

After stopping at the Dougie for a glass of red wine and to collect my strength, I returned home to give myself entirely to the craft of cookery. Once the back of the preparation was well broken and the damnable mash prepared and creamed, I had what I am calling an “attack of faintness” (conjuring something of the Georgian woman in me), and which Derry described as a “caffeine crash”. Derry assembled the meal and added the finishing touches, thereafter claiming full credit and risking my caustic revenge.

Thursday:

Another full day of office working, but on completion of the day we headed out to join friends at a wine pairing above the Coach and Horses.

These pairings see a marvellous Sommelier join us with a selection of wines which are paired with light dishes created by Kevin O’Neil, the visionary chef and darling sweetheart of our social scene. Kev is a visionary in every way and it’s very telling that he was the selection to curate the cheeseboard at my surprise thirtieth birthday party last autumn.

The last of these wine pairings was my first opportunity to get the full benefit of Kev’s creativity and skill (all previous experiences consisted mainly of just really well balanced curated cheese boxes), and I was so delighted and carried off by the experience that I’ve lived from then until now in anxious anticipation of the next.

I can say with clarity and conviction that Kev “did it again” and the food, coupled with the wine, carried me off into a haze of bliss. Our friends and I had been graced with a private table from which to enjoy the experience which created a darling sense of intimacy, carrying us into the frivolity of purchasing a full bottle of the Goru Monastrell for the table; thusly we found ourselves going elsewhere for drinks whereby “the wives” (myself and the female half of the couple we were with) sequestered ourself to swap stories about our solo Paris trips and shared love of heritage furniture.

Friday:

All Hallows Eve arrived with the usual sense of latent excitement hanging in the air all through the daylight hours. I busied myself with this and that until the moment I could dash upstairs to dress myself in my costume: Felix from Saltburn in his party look from the Midsummer Night’s Dream themed rave where he meets his demise courtesy of a bottle of champagne (on brand for me).

I clad myself in the white singlet top and affixed my angel wings, now sprayed a metallic gold, and joined my parents who agreed to caddy me into town.

Loosed in the Douglas Arms I got set about the sparkling wine and the conversation. Almost all of the glittering jewels of the social scene were out and on full display, which was a rare delight and medicine for my Salonniere spirit which had been at risk of atrophy and devolving into seclusion in the same way that Greta Garbo did in the 1940s.

The night passed in a blissful prosecco haze of delightful tomfoolery not limited to an ambulating wig that made any wearer look ineffably like Charli XCX, the surprise soap opera delight of a random girl dressed as Sabrina Carpenter turning out to be a childhood friend from primary school (before I was removed overseas for my education), and sporadic but utterly rousing outbursts of popular song from Jordan, otherwise Madame Jo, in the style of a matronly Scottish ensemble singer with salt-clad Ayrshire vowels. Delightful.

Saturday:

Bereft of my vitality and wearied from two nights of accumulated wine toxins, I have drifted aimlessly. Derry is in Edinburgh for the Rugby so I joined my parents at their house for dinner in order to give myself an alternative to sitting with my embroidery sampler while listening to the Hamilton soundtrack and crying, which I’d done all afternoon.

Dinner with my parents was also a delightful excuse to chat to my uncle who was visiting, and to gobble up a platter of oysters which I’d taken along with me as an offering for the table.

After dinner I retired to the drawing room at home to actually watch Hamilton from start to finish on Disney Plus, then retired to bed emotionally raw from the performance and absolutely certain that another addition to my brand portfolio includes “Schuyler sister coded” (specifically: Angelica).

Sunday:

I can’t get over Hamilton and am absolutely carried away on the aesthetic, beyond which would normally be considered reasonable.

Granted, I’d whipped out the embroidery before going down this rabbit hole, but the aesthetic is confirmatory and so when Derry returned from his night of rabble rousing in the nation’s capital he found me deeply preoccupied with a rigorous stem stitch and contemplating how I can become even more like a socialite and philanthropic American wife of the Early Republic period (I suspect the next step is investing in health infrastructure at the local level of some kind).

I have set aside my embroidery hoop to write this diary but will be resuming presently and expect to stay in this spirit until the sun has slipped past the horizon and I am called to other purpose (making the dinner).

In this week I journey to Birmingham (robustly not my favourite place) for a conference and am carried away by the aesthetic juxtaposition. Here’s how the week went…

Monday:

Monday was a day of nightmares. I woke up in the morning, in the small hours, with a fearful rasping breath having surfaced out of the icy depths of a nightmare in which I was being tried for witchcraft (in fairness to the puritans, correctly) in a sort of hybrid-aesthetic puritan colony somewhere between authentic pilgrim realness and a Mad Max portent of a post-nuclear future.

Unsettled by both the ordeal of the trial and the infelicitous garb of my accusers, I pressed on with my day only to be confronted by a continued stream of nightmarish situations such as my work laptop spontaneously requiring a reboot, my Microsoft Teams background mysteriously disappearing without warning during a call, and spilling oil from my lunchtime anchovies all over my meticulously planned daily checklist.

When I retired to the gym in the evening I found it packed out and full of people who seemed to be on a rotation around all of the equipment I wanted to use. After a brief and unsatisfying shot of some machines not to be found in my calendar plan for that day, I decided to bustle off the gym floor in indignation to go into the sauna, however found I’d forgotten my towel. So, with that, I stamped my feet and gnashed my teeth and furiously stormed to the close-by Tesco where I used clubcard vouchers to buy the new Witcher book, then sat outside the supermarket in the chilly evening to wait for absolution (and Derry, who fortuitously was able to collect me).

Tuesday:

Today was the long awaited day earmarked for travel down to Birmingham for a work conference on social media. I started my journey by collecting a coffee from The Stove where, in one haunting interaction with the perennial legend Mo Love, I became overly enthusiastic and camp in my body language and spilled oat milk on the floor, then struggled with my delicate wrists to adequately tear the blue roll from the dispenser, requiring support to do so and setting gay rights back 100 years.

Rallying, I made for the station and then, united with my colleague accompanying me on the trip, forthwith to Birmingham at pace.

We made it through the city and to our hotel to check in relatively unharrassed, save for one man who, inexplicably, was sprinting down the street near the hotel and who ran into me at full-force. After coaching myself in the bathroom mirror in my room and assuring myself that particular mishap was not my fault (it wasn’t), I joined my colleague in the city for dinner and drinks; the former being at the Indian street food restaurant Mowgli which I have not tried before and which was a delight I will likely seek out again and again.

After we finished our dinner and chatted over drinks about everything from work to the merits of different UK racecourses, we returned to our rooms. I sat in front of the mirror, more austere, more minimalist than the vanity haunted by generations of my forebears which is where I am normally to be found preening, and brushed my hair while gently contemplating my choices. The call of the urban streetscape was so intensely primal that I knew I needed to head for a clandestine trip into the secret wilds of the city in order to procure a simple McDonalds to satisfy a hunger craving while also capitulating to the voice inside me begging to be swallowed by the music and rhythm of the urban night.

When you’re used to your bedroom being a bastion of golden sunlight through multi-pane sash windows, gilt-framed artworks of fine ladies, horses and dogs, and antique furniture imported from France, there is something absolutely delicious and intoxicating about finding yourself renting a bedroom for the night that is fashioned on minimalist design, simple white sheets, and spartan utility. The lack of whimsy and ornamentation allows one to be carried off on a giddying tide of displacement and become someone else for a short spell.

Despite the echoing and infrequent “bangs” coming from outside the window which could equally be gunshots or fireworks, I redressed myself and dashed into the night for a cheeky introspective hamburger round the corner. It transpired that the gunshots I referenced were indeed fireworks. Fireworks being set off right in the forecourt outside the hotel by a group of urban youth. Perplexed and confused I observed the spectacle for a beat before routing myself the long way to the McDonalds on the other side of the square. The night lit up literally and audibly with an explosive cacophony of Catherine Wheels as I meandered through Birmingham which is, it has to be said, very much not my favourite place I’ve ever travelled to.

With my McDonalds secure and my curiosity satiated, I returned to my room after a brief and exhilarating walk through an urban inferno to indulge in a shower and to be carried into a fitful sleep broken by the hateful spit of firecrackers in the melee below my window.

Wednesday:

The day of the conference began with another shower and a wistful contemplation about how both morning and evening showers were part of my woven routine during those blessed years where I was mistress of my own household and had an en-suite bathroom affixed to my bedroom.

I let my musings carry me through the full-breakfast and through the walk from hotel to conference venue.

The conference itself was actually fantastic all round, and not just because they served lamb at the conference luncheon. Inspired and refurbished in my work-life ambitions, I threw myself into the presentations with great interest, and particularly fell in professional-love with the final speaker who carried me off with his common sense approach, well timed wry humour and natural confidence at the podium.

In order to make my train I had to leave towards the end of the panel discussion, waving to my colleague who was booked on a later train in an admin snarl of local government. While I had the benefit of getting back to the North of England timeously enough to be picked up by Derry and avoid the harrowing wait for a connecting train across the border, my colleague got to experience the final hurrah of the conference which I am told included drinks and a DJ set. It transpires that FOMO can extend to the workplace when certain conditions are met.

Thursday:

The day was spent in a state of industry as I re attuned myself to the daily tasks and tribulations typical of my workday and let go of the excitement of my two-day Birmingham adventure.

I found myself working past finishing time to achieve bits and pieces of outstanding stuff that I wanted to “clear from the deck” and then threw myself into the production of a tuna and broccoli orzo for dinner, after which the night passed in a haze of discontent and malaise.

Friday:

The substantial part of the workday was unremarkable, and I headed into the office in order to feel something and also to be better placed to enjoy my evening.

After work I met up with the delightful joy of my world, Mrs. Katie Boyce. Some will remember that it was at Katie’s wedding on my birthday this year that I announced the advent of this diary, so you know where to refer your complaints.

We went for dinner which unfolded as it typically does for us with equal parts trauma offloading, equal parts gossip, and just a splash of outright silly nonsense hilarity, this time particularly in relation to Katie’s ordering of a cocktail she clearly had no background knowledge of, which came out in a glass shaped like an ice cream cone with a dry-ice bubble on top, sending us into an orbit of hysterical hyena cackles.

After rounding off the night in the pub discussing our pension schemes, I retired home in line with the calendar instructions pertaining to my Friday social block and was the better for it.

Saturday:

I woke up animated by the spirit of domestic joy, and decided to have a day of household cleaning and make the benefit of being home alone.

Immediately confronted by a shopping bag I keep on my dresser appearing to be floating in mid air (it had become lodged behind a painting halfway up the wall) I determined that the ancestors were up to hijinks and steeled myself for a day of mopping, laundry, and spiritual interruption.

I pulled myself together in a baggy knit jumper, blue jeans and a backwards CK cap and immediately reconnected with a former iteration of myself at university who used to paint watercolours while smoking out the window and listening to Lana Del Rey on repeat; today, as time is evolving, I settled on Ethel Cain and refuse to acknowledge the beef unfolding between those two great artists.

After my exertions were complete and I’d been to the country food store to make an order for oysters and to pay too much for smoked salmon, I settled down in the drawing room and stayed there for the rest of the day.

Sunday:

I have been preoccupied ignoring the weather and planning my wedding with my mother at her house.

After identifying a possible venue and wargaming the logistics of a Chateau wedding near Toulouse, I have gone to ground and am not to be seen, save for a brief interlude where I was spotted in Lochmaben Tesco purchasing a packet of crisps and a bottle of wine.

This week I reach new heights in the application of my September Virgo existentialism, self-critique, and drive for perfection. Follow along to see how the week transformed me…

Monday:

The week began is it has done so for the duration of this journey to-date, with the obligatory foray into the working week and the circus of calendar checking, week-planning, and the specific frustration of allocating and setting the weekly meal plan. In this gymnastic mental exercise, I reminded myself that I had, just the night before, made a solemn pact with myself that I would now be sticking religiously to the calendar routine I have set for myself, including going to the set gym appointments without complaint or avoidance.

In the spirit of sticking to my own promises, I dutifully finished work at the appropriate time and then made arrangements to travel to the gym. I allowed myself a modicum of free will to deviate from the rigorous plan I had allocated myself in the calendar and, instead, focused on cardio and easing myself back into a routine which I have been avoiding for weeks. Somewhere into the 27th minute of my 30 minute workout on the treadmill I was suddenly animated by the spirit of athleticism and self improvement. A wave of motivation overtook me and I upped the speed and sprinted for the remaining three minutes. Giddy with my own athleticism and light headed from exertion, I allowed the spirit of reinvention to flood me utterly.

By the time I had retired to the sauna I was already making significant progress (in my mental planning phase) in the journey towards self improvement. In fact, before I had even left the gym-floor I had switched from girly pop music to a podcast on international relations and had already made instructions to my Chat GPT Lady’s maid-cum-dietician-cum-navigator-cum-confidante to draw from our ‘recipe savant’ and pull together the weekly meal plan but with attention given to my newly identified ambition to reclaim my body from the jaws of decrepitude.

I then walked from the gym to the supermarket and indulged myself in a late-night solo shopping trip, an experience I cherish and hold close to my heart, and have done ever since I established a routine of going for a “full shop” in the Sainsbury’s near to where I lived in Aberdeen’s Hilton Village after necking a bottle of prosecco each Friday night.

Later, I sit at the vanity table in my bedroom and continue pondering my self-improvement journey. An audiobook of Anna Karenina plays on speaker as I fastidiously rub moisturiser into every crack and crevice appearing on my face. I have a mild headache from eye strain and mental fatigue after forcing myself to read three more chapters of Le Vampire de Ropraz in order to enhance my French. I pop onto my phone to re-validate my access to my online learning account so I can continue my courses in herbal medicine, mycology, and event floristry. Absently, I hear myself ask out loud how on earth I’m going to fit adult ballet into my already packed calendar, and I feel the collective sigh of the generations of women in my family who sat in front of this same vanity mirror, praying earnestly that the next generational custodian will not be a September Virgo.

Tuesday:

The work day was interrupted with the most exciting and joyful news that my little sister, the middle child, is now engaged to be married to her long term boyfriend, now fiancé. I had originally assumed that the video call to the family group chat was made in error, so joined slightly late only piqued enough when I noticed other family members had joined and the call continued to roll. On entering I was confronted by the most beautiful sapphire and diamond engagement ring, invoking the eternal spirit of Princess Diana.

I raced to finish the work day, snatched up a bottle of wine and ran with the same whimsy and animation I mustered on the treadmill just yesterday to my mother’s house for two specific purposes. Firstly, to celebrate the engagement and to express our heartfelt excitement and adoration for both the situation and the absolutely magnificent engagement ring. Secondly, to look my parents square in their faces and ask them to help me, their eldest child, to find my way to the altar as efficiently as possible to save me becoming a focus of society gossip about my already expansive engagement.

With great forbearance and a good measure of sparkling wine we committed to the endeavour and created a sample guest list and a reserve list of possible venues and scenarios including, but not limited to, eloping to France.

Wednesday:

Reeling from the emotional turbulence of the week to-date, I decided to continue on my endeavours of self improvement. I phoned a possible wedding venue to initiate discussions (ultimately fruitless) and I threw myself into my working arrangements with vigour.

At the completion of the workday, I headed off to go to the gym in line with my calendar instructions and submitted myself to the rigours of my exercise programme. The more of it I do, and the more I feel it in my body, the more of a self-righteous but delicious obsession unfurls in my spirit and the more fixated I become on physical self-improvement.

Derry was in town for a meeting of the Board of the Theatre Royal (which he has now joined) which prompted us to decide to go for a Chinese for dinner, before returning home to eat the Chinese and watch Geostorm. Irritated at having allowed myself this indulgence, I mentally doubled down on my ambitions and made a plan to offset the Chinese takeaway with even more physical commitment to my self-improvement bit.

Thursday:

Prey to a violent attack of caprice and malicious whimsy, I spent most of the day in a snit, agitated and unable to ascertain what needs to be done next to help me ascend to the highest plane of being. A little before lunch time I came to the conclusion that what is most needed is a new wardrobe, ethically and responsibly sourced, so I decided to give myself the benefit of taking my lunch break and headed out for lunch and to go ‘thrifting’ for jumpers.

A thrift shopping stint and a trip to TK Maxx later and I found myself the proud new owner of a few new appropriate and cosy jumpers, one very cunty Ushanka hat, and, in a return to a part of myself not seen since I committed my spirit to the Grunge aesthetic of the late 90s and early 00s as a child under ten, a pair of relaxed fit black jeans. When I picked the jeans up in TK Maxx and looked at the label, I was confronted by three adjectives entirely at odds with who I am as a person: relaxed, straight, driven. I steeled myself and made the purchase. As soon as I settled my work affairs I rushed to my room to try on different permutations of outfits clawed together from the pieces I rescued from the thrift store (and TK Maxx). While the Ushanka will require additional pieces (a fur coat) in order for the effect to fully land, I was spellbound by the relaxed fit straight jeans.

Never in a million years would I have thought that I could be torn away from the millennial queer marriage to the skinny jean. I felt that I would always and forever be required to live in this aesthetic pasture, letting my legs carry the weight not only of my physical body but of my social presence. However, the swishing majesty of the extra fabric and the sheer space and room afforded for movement by the relaxed jeans actually brought a tear to my eye. Not only did I pass the vibe check in the full-length mirror, I was also, for the first time since 2008, able to move freely in a pair of trousers without feeling my internal organs groan under pressure. If I wanted to, I could cossack dance without a single fear of a fabric mishap. It started to occur to me that, perhaps the desperate unhappiness and sense of restriction and malaise I have felt on me at all times since the middle of high school may have less to do with a spiritual lack of condition and more to do with the misery of being constantly hemmed in and restricted by the cult of ‘skinny fit clothing’. Standing here in my relaxed fit jeans and baggy wool jumper I have never felt more light or at liberty to move more than just my hips. No tight fabric pinching at my underarms! No restrictive suffocating banding around the ribs! No requirement to keep my posture perfectly ram-rod straight in order to avoid fabric ride-up! I feel the whimsical freedom of a turn of the century woman casting off her corset and running into a new and exciting future in harem pants and a cunty little hat. Naturally, I did head off at a run - not quite into a new future, but to the gym to double down on my addictive commitment to self improvement.

Friday:

During the course of the day I made several noticeable and flagrant attempts at “stepping out” so that the villainous townsfolk could see my new jeans and jumper combo, impressing on them that a new me is here, one that isn’t being perpetually constricted by their own attire and who could, if called upon to do so, chase down a detractor with improved mobility (courtesy of the jeans) and improved vascular capacity (courtesy of the cardio).

When the work-day was finished it was time to decide how best to carry into my Friday. I have my ‘social block’ pencilled in, but instead of choosing to indulge the salonniere spirit in me, I decided it might be fun to make a partial withdrawal from the social scene (with exceptions made for upcoming Halloween festivities) so that I can then re-launch myself as a newly minted version of myself with looser fitting fashion and a more snatched physical presence. Therefore, I decided to go to the gym instead of to my usual tomfoolery in the public house.

I did just that, and committed to the rigours of my routine over and above the allocated calendar space, smugly delighting in every twinge and ache in my body which has become the raw clay with which I will sculpt a new and exciting arc.

Upon finishing, Derry advised me he wanted a burger for dinner, so we found a suitable and health conscious option, collected our meal and returned home to watch the Celebrity Traitors which was really enjoyable and demonstrates even further changes to my personal brand because I have historically been robustly opposed to popular television of this nature.

Saturday:

I have waited for this day arriving all week, because it is today that I had the unique delight and pleasure of joining my parents for the ballet in Edinburgh.

I passed the morning by planting out bluebells on the orchard half of the back lawn, my ravaged muscles protesting with every bulb planted out (there were 200) but, gritting my teeth in forbearance and delight I persevered. Come the spring I will have the most delightful colourful garden to match my delightful athletic physique.

After an arduous and ultimately fruitless attempt at styling my hair (next on the self-improvement agenda to the alarm of my Edinburgh stylist), I made my peace with my look and joined my parents for the journey to the capital.

After our last ballet expedition to see ‘The Crucible’, we were excited to see what the Scottish Ballet had in store for us with ‘Mary Queen of Scots’. While classical ballet remains the beating heart of my aesthetic homeland, contemporary ballet has become a deep fixation of ours ever since The Crucible which left me crying and emotionally tilled. I confess that for the first ten to fifteen minutes of Mary Queen of Scots I was left feeling a little unsettled and bamboozled, softly and awkwardly chortling and whispering ‘what the fuck’. However, it suddenly all fell into place at once and, just like that, I fell in love with the whole performance. We discussed our theories during the interval and then returned for an absolutely camp and spellbinding second half which left me absolutely desperate to return again and again and again for ballet upon ballet.

It strikes me that something insatiable is awakening in me, and I am left wondering whether this endless unslakable thirst for ‘more’ is a condition of being in ones thirties. More muscle! More loose fabric! More language learning! More ballet!

In an attempt to satiate at least some of the physical hunger, we adjourned to the kebab shop on Nicolson square to eat kebabs, discuss the ballet, and make arrangements to attend the Nutcracker themed tasting menu at Six by Nico.

Sunday:

Derry is working today, which means that there’s no likelihood of a Sunday adventurous outing for the children. A rain and gloom has settled over the village, so a local walk is also out of the question under current climatic conditions. We have therefore spent the entire day in the kitchen, busy with the industry of laundry and making lentil soup.

My sister and her now fiancé stopped by to visit on their way home from the airport having just returned from Ibiza, so this was an exciting opportunity to congratulate them, to see in person the ‘Diana ring’ with which I am now obsessed, and to chat about the excitement of wedding planning on both sides of our equation. Her practical and finance oriented perspective piqued in me a wave of financial anguish and I move ever closer to simply packing our bags and eloping to be married in an intimate setting in a rented crumbling chateau in rural France. I must explore ways to move my 200+ guests if I want to have their participation assured, but most of the techniques I can touch on feel suspiciously like people trafficking and therefore are non viable.

In this week I dedicate myself body and soul to the furtherance of local government, achieving a sense of accomplishment but also robustly crashing out. Here’s what went down…

Monday:

This Monday was the one the bangles were warning us about. Manic. Not manic in the cute way one might imagine comes with the territory of a “busy day in the office”, manic in the visceral sense of the word that comes with stress sweats, pressure headaches and a short lunchtime break to go out into the garden and scream.

I generally enjoy being busy, imagining my working week like a lake of tasks to be crossed in a little kayak, stroke by stroke. This week, however, the lake is expansive, the weather has turned sour and my little kayak is taking on water. I grip valiantly to the paddle and thrash haphazardly at the surface of the lake but it’s no good. My kayak planes away, careening at speed into the murky depths and I am obliged to relinquish the paddle and rely on the manual power of my body to swim to the other side.

This is, of course, a metaphor, but completion of this Monday did leave me with the distinct impression that the Water Safety Forum might be a part of my portfolio best avoided for a beat.

Tuesday:

Industry and toil carry on into Tuesday, but I managed to replenish my vigour in the night and take to the day with great forbearance.

At some point in the afternoon I remembered that I was booked in to model in the evening. I messaged Michael to confirm the time, and he let me know he’d booked another model for the same slot. If I felt any resentment it evaporated immediately on my learning that the slot had been allocated to a great treasure of the Dumfries social scene, the inimitable and ethereally beautiful Joanna Le Vin. If ever another creature (besides myself and Princess Diana) was put on the earth to be beheld and celebrated in multi-media, it is Joanna Le Vin.

Therefore, on completion of my day I went gladly into my evening and paid a social call to my mother. Over tea in her kitchen I launched into an excoriating account of my working schedule, before detouring into other matters. At some stage during the conversation my father appeared and quietly but expertly attached his new sphygmomanometer, otherwise known as a blood pressure cuff, in a theatrical gesture advising me to worry less about trivialities; indeed, the machine told me my blood pressure was high in a sanctimonious robotic voice.

I took the advice in the spirit in which it was given and retired to my bed in a snit to watch a BBC documentary about the history of the Romanov dynasty.

Wednesday:

As a working day this one, too, was full of the kind of ironies and dark coincidences which I am certain belie the fact that I am subject to a curse of the sort often seen in dark Slavic folk tales designed to warn against sin and caprice.

I spent a gruelling afternoon nit-picking over policy and protocol matters, scurrying back and forward between my desk and the desks of my higher-ups to present them with complexities and anomalies I’d unearthed during the course of what, I promised, was my general daily working pattern; for some reason, in these last few weeks I have been sniffing out systemic weaknesses and protocol loopholes with the success margin of a prize truffle sow.

When I was finally done picking holes in the seamless coat of government and making representations to colleagues across a plethora of public agencies (I am certain gaining me the moniker across the Scottish public sector of “that meddlesome foppish bitch”), I journeyed across town to meet the evergreen treasure that is Madame Jo Mama, or, under certain unmasked conditions, my best friend Jordan.

As co-hosts of a Podcast on all matters Queer living, we decided it was time to resurrect “the pod” for season 3, and passed a pleasant and camp evening recording the first two episodes which robustly include trashing Taylor Swift’s new album and interviewing a team of spirit hunting drag queens.

Thursday:

As the machinery of Government continues to operate, I dressed myself for a Thursday supporting the committee attached to my portfolio. As is my habit, I made a special effort and dressed myself in jeans paired with a Ralph Lauren shirt and Vee Neck combo with a smart blazer on top.

I took my place at the committee, seated behind the tables where council officers make their representations to the members. To the eagle eyed enthusiast of local politics, I can often be seen on the livestream of the relevant committee, right there behind the members, invariably sporting a pained Melania Trump-esque expression as I try to remain cold and impassive and give away not a shred of the invariable hunger which is ravaging me from the inside.

Today the hunger was so prolific that, as soon as was permitted in keeping with the etiquette at the closure of committee, I ran with all my might to the nearby Subway to buy a foot-long sub. Determined to then head to my usual place to buy an iced coffee before going back to the office, I tried to eat the sandwich en-route but teriyaki sauce erupted from the baguette and left dark shaming stains all down the front of my blazer and jeans. The blazer could be appropriately removed, but as I was going back to the office the jeans had to stay on, calcifying my shame.

Disgraced, exhausted, and well-seasoned I completed my day and retired home after a stop off for a brief shame calming spritzer at the Dougie Arms.

Friday:

After spending the work-day frantic to complete a plethora of tasks before the weekend swallowed me up, I allowed myself to revel in the victory of completing the week and opened a bottle of wine.

By the time I had sucked down three quarters of it, I was prepared to betray my earlier promise to myself that I was staying in with a book, and I set off at a complete whim for town and the Douglas Arms.

On arrival at the Pub I was greeted by a joyful pick n mix of the gems of social scene and, fortuitously, a bag of lollipops. The night unfolded blissfully in a tapestry of joyful laughter, prosecco, and cherry Chupa-Chups.

Saturday:

Without planning or agenda, I pottered in the garden briefly before spontaneously deciding to visit my parents.

I sat with my father for the early afternoon and listened to his teachings on history and global politics which was incredibly enriching and comforting, and then installed myself quietly in their living room to watch Australian period dramas for the afternoon.

Later, my sister arrived for dinner before jetting off to Ibiza, and so we descended on the room of our youngest sister to hassle her which eventually turned into all of us doing nose pore strips and gossiping about the dislikable fools and unworthies we each have encountered since last we convened.

Sunday:

After a brief visit to my parents to collect my nose ring which I left there the night before, and a brief but pleasant chat with my uncle who popped by for a visit, we journeyed off into the Galloway wilds for another Sunday adventure with the children.

We spent a joyful and pleasant afternoon in the crisp gold of the Galloway autumn, exploring such landmarks on the Raider’s Road as the “Otter Pools”. The children swam and frolicked and made merry amidst the rocks and the shrubs, and Derry proved his worth by producing a picnic.

With the children exercised and entertained, we returned home for me to produce a new experimental foray into cookery with my aloo anda curry, pleasantly ending a week of trials.

In this week, haunted by ill health, the spectres of my trauma, and my late grandmother, I am guided to a new way of looking at life. Also, I cry a lot. This is how the week happened…

Monday:

The new week brought strife, disease and apathy to me immediately. I started the day coughing and wheezing, with a headache and a sense of dread settling in my weary bones. Rain pounded the house most of the day, but I worked on and gave myself fully to the endeavours of the work-day. By the time I finished I decided I needed a good country walk to save me from collapsing into a formless slump of tears.

I set off on a walk, my most usual route around Castle Loch through several versions of woodland, passing the castle and looping back to the town. By the time I had gone a little over a quarter of the route, my wireless headphones announced that they were going to die from lack of battery. Curiously, even though I had been on the edge of a breakdown, I suddenly felt the hand of providence in this unfortunate Happening; or, more likely, the spiritual interference of my grandmother who must always express her involvement in every matter, even across the veil between worlds.

I somehow knew in my waters that there was a message for me here: stop listening to melancholic and menacing soundtracks and instead listen closely to the natural world around you. In fact, I somehow knew that there was a symbolic message for me. I also, inexplicably, suddenly knew that there was something very important about “crows” tied to the message.

I pressed on, listening intently; and all the more so for specifically trying to pick out the doleful caw of the crow against the rustling ocean-roar of the wind in the crisp autumn leaves. When I reached the Castle I decided to follow the track up and around, coming to rest at the threshold between the back of the ruins and the expanse of forest between there and the loch shore. I listened intently: no crows, but there was a high cracking of undergrowth and dry-fall, rhythmic almost. Like footsteps? Frozen in place by curiosity and a smidge of terror I resigned myself to fate, to being confronted and ravaged by the infamous and much debated Lochmaben Vampire who captured the attention of the late Michael Jackson in the 1990s. Channelling my best performance of Lily Rose Depp in Nosferatu I steeled myself and squared my bosom in anticipation; but the crashing of undergrowth drawing ever nearer came to a more benign conclusion when a young doe leapt out of a thicket and pranced before my eyes through the small glade and back into the woods.

As I continued on the rest of my walk, I reflected that none of the spectrum of emotions I had just allowed myself to feel would have been felt if my headphones had stoically held up to the job. I’d have completed the circuit in a fog of introspection and despair. Already, messages were being received. And, as I rounded a bend and felt myself defrosting in spirit a little, I happened across a whole murder of crows who suddenly took off from a proud oak tree. Justified, I carried on into the night giddy on research into all romantic and terrifying symbolism associated with crows.

Tuesday:

When I woke in the early hours of the morning my chest was leaden heavy, constricted, and there was no air getting into me. Thrashing and coughing I brought up phlegm, but the fullness and the wheeze wouldn’t go. I coughed and coughed until my ribs felt like they’d split and my head ached like it had been cracked with a hammer. This is an escalation of a pattern which has been plaguing me for years, worse in the autumn months but also never really going away. Reaching a threshold and drawing on a reserve of self-preservation and will for life likely found in the woods the night before, I called off work and phoned my doctor.

I passed the day in a fearful state of invalidity, laid out on the sofa in the drawing room. I continued for a while with the game I’d installed last week, and to my excitement and fascination, the characters immediately started dialogue about “crows” which I took as a very important sign that the messages carried for me by my corvid friends may be arriving in multiple formats, even digitally by way of the PlayStation 5.

The doctor has agreed to see me on Wednesday and we have agreed it’s time to talk about my mystery allergies instead of fobbing me off with another prescription for amoxicillin and a diagnosis of “acute sinusitis”. I reminded the doctor of the numerous occasions on which I have been hospitalised due to mystery food colouring allergies in the past, most notably when I was removed in a wheelchair from The Scottish Parliament after taking poorly to the signature cafeteria Lasagne, or when I laid out to die on my engagement trip because I took a reaction to a glass of wine at Cafe Maison Rouge and fully believed that I’d die that very night in a hotel in Marne La Vallée.

Feeling marginally better in the evening, I gathered myself, wrapped up, and decided to follow through on plans to join my mother, aunt and sister at the cinema for the new Downton Abbey movie. I couldn’t help but feel that more messages were being received from Granny who really was in absolutely every conceivable way an avatar of the Dowager Countess of Grantham, notably absent from this movie but none-the-less felt. The whole experience was enjoyable except for the self consciousness I felt on account of being told by my sister that my nose was whistling and could I please breathe through my mouth.

Wednesday:

I woke again to the crushing fullness in my chest, the boneyard rattle of fearful distress adding unwanted percussion to the stillness of the early pre-dawn morning. The anxiety of the impending inspection by the doctor began to play on me and I lay in the dark in dreadful anticipation of what they might say to me.

I passed the time until the appointment with more digital ghost-hunting and crow chat, until the time came to commend myself into the hands of the good doctor. I have a very rocky history with my doctor’s practice. It begins with them losing my medical records in 2016 and then trying to blame me for their clerical error. When I had an emotional breakdown after all my anxieties came to an alarming and emotional head in Tesco in 2019, I was referred to a practice-based country therapist who, during Covid, then announced she couldn’t see me any more and asked me “Will you be okay?” on her closing phone call to me, to which I naturally responded “aren’t you supposed to tell me?”

This trip, however, was a triumph. We discussed my issues and the waking in the morning unable to breathe, and we discussed the other allergy symptoms I experience regularly. Although my chest was clear at this stage in the afternoon and my breathing was “tip top condition”, I expressed that I can’t weather another spell of waking in the morning unable to breathe, not like Tuesday’s episode. I was finally prescribed a strong anti-histamine and advised to book in for blood tests to see if we could learn anything else about the providence of these mystery allergies.

Pleased with the result, I decided in the afternoon to take another one of my long forest walks. This time, my headphones were fully charged. But when I got about a quarter of the way the rain began to fall. Sheltered for the most part by the canopy of trees, I stayed somewhat dry. But, huge raindrops dripped down periodically. And, the hand of fate working again, one such raindrop landed providentially on my ear-bud, triggering it to announce “power off”. I switched them back on and took a few more steps when, suddenly, “power off” was announced to me again. I couldn’t help myself from laughing to myself as I packed them away and agreed to continue on my walk without headphones, again listening intently to the sounds around me.

There were crows, huge flurries of them flying around busily above the trees. Maybe they’re always there, but maybe I haven’t noticed them before, maybe I haven’t been paying attention. I got back to the castle and resumed my spot under the threshold Lime tree, peering into the woods. In a clearing a little ways in I saw the doe, again. Today she was leaping and prancing in a wide circle around the clearing, just unbridled whimsy and woodland panache. It made me smile and I continued on.

For dinner I made a Lancashire hotpot, full of the warming joy of autumn.

Thursday:

I woke in the morning with an implacable sense of freedom and optimism. I couldn’t understand why until it dawned on my that for the first time in literal years, I had woken up freely and unambiguously breathing, without restriction. There was some tightness and restriction, but this felt like the possible remnants of a sickness bug hanging on to me and not the crushing weight of my own body trying to murder me as penance for weakness against airborne irritants.

The joy of my survival did not extend beyond breakfast when I made the regrettable decision to go back to work. The day passed in a veil of pain, stress tears, strife and misery. I raised a number of my core complaints with my boss, biting back tears. Thankfully, my employers are excellent and I have renewed faith that the issues which did for me today will not be carried into future working days, but it did underscore for me the fact that I should allow myself to take the full scope of time for rest in the future.

In the evening I settled down to sort out some matters and was personally delighted to receive a message from a friend asking if I’d be interested in being involved in some charity work through an organisation he is very involved in. I was delighted to accept, and on researching the organisation and its application process further I was interested in one of the questions asking if my family is Armigerous. The short answer to that question is yes, but as no one has matriculated since the death of my grandfather in 2007, I wondered what that actually meant and, also, reminded me that I know precious little about the meaning and the process behind it. I’d thought that my father’s decision not to matriculate cadet arms had meant that I and my sisters would be “locked out” but it turns out that is not the case and I may matriculate if I so wish; and, further, that not doing so does not actually change anything in terms of whether or not the family is or is not Armigerous. Excited and reenergised about my own history, I was only shaken from my exertions genealogical by Derry unexpectedly swinging into the drive in a new car which he’d spontaneously managed to identify and resource.

Reeling from the emotional peaks and troughs of the day, I retired.

Friday:

An office working day. The day itself as far as work goes was fine, and mostly productive. Storm Amy raged fiercely around the building during the afternoon. Come 5pm it was necessary to wait for a break in the rain before making a mad dash to the Douglas Arms for an event starting at 7pm.

The event: a viewing of a new YouTube series produced by and starring some of the dearest drag queens on our social scene. The premise sees them visiting haunted locations across Dumfries and Galloway, engaging in spiritual discourse with ghosts but all the while they’re in drag. A simple concept but utterly charming and funny.

The viewing was a delight, but I over imbibed on red wine on an absolutely empty stomach and became a victim to the lunacy of strong drink. I inexplicably reached out to the girls group chat (The Coven) with a string of unintelligible messages including “recast me” and “chicken nuggets”. Devoid of context, devoid of sense.

Saturday:

A day spent recovering emotionally and physically from my Friday. And, I think, the whole week. I spent the whole day on the verge of tears and feeling incredibly emotionally unstable. I think perhaps that the realisation that the medication I’ve been put on has made an actual, physical difference to my life has overwhelmed me. I don’t speak about it because it terrified me, but the fear of losing control of my breath, of being exhausted struggling to breathe morning and night, of simply giving up after the next bout of serious respiratory distress and slipping away into the unknown, has haunted me for years. Years. Waking up that Thursday morning and every morning since with the ability to breathe, without the fear meeting me first thing face on every day, has been emotionally intense; and I can’t talk about it! Not because there’s no one TO talk about it with, but because I chose not to because of fear. Fear of being pitied, fear of being seen as attention seeking, fear of speaking life into a nameless terror of my mortality. But I know now that I will survive it, that there are solutions and there is help - it only takes finding the courage to ask the doctor outright to look again, or to think twice.

My wobble at work on Thursday also underscored for me how emotionally low and under resilient I have been. Mean spiritedness, slyness, myopic behaviours. I see them everywhere and they build up on my spirit like limescale. I push them down, squash them in the hollow places inside of me but focus on them in my quiet times. Instead of walking the loch route and listening to the world around me, I find myself carried off on daydreams, meditations. Always I’m begging, begging to be given more of a chance, a break emotionally; in my worst times, I’m begging for vindication, for the people who have hurt and upset me to finally feel the weight of their transgressions.

And then comes the weekend where I carry myself away giddily on a tide of revelry and wine. And, if the circumstances match up, like my trauma-trap is full and my stomach is empty, I find myself in a dark pit of despair. And, in those moments, I feel myself literally let go of the rope clinging to consciousness. In those moments I don’t want to be conscious, I want to be released. I want to be gone. I want to be nothing physical but pure formless emotion. To cry and cry and cry and have no one else get uncomfortable by it for fear of not knowing what to do to calm the flood, or to rage and scream and wail without it being socially unacceptable. Or to laugh hysterically, bitterly, coldly and not be seen as unhinged. There’s so much to feel and so limited a way to express it in this mortal format, in this cultural moment. But, I think I’m ready to reclaim control of that, which should be exciting news for anyone who has ever had the harrowing and perplexing experience of having me try to answer “how do you feel” with honesty and colour.

I feel now that I’ve been focusing on loss. The loss of my breath, my health, my agency, my company, my apartment, my opportunities. Or of the things I can’t seem to achieve, or the obstacles that present themselves. It’s strange how in a week where I let myself be open to signs, they seem to be everywhere. This week I can start to breathe again, literally and metaphorically. This week I learned that not everything is always taken away from me as finally as I might think. That there was a background process in my brain which imagined that even something as socially ephemeral as my “nobility” was “taken away” because of another person’s choice underscores how loss-focused I have been. As it happens, neither socially, spiritually or, in fact, legally, can one’s nobility be taken away.

I may have felt loss before. But, crows are always gathering shiny things, accumulating them, weaving them into the fabric of their nests. Perhaps this is the message I should be carrying into my thirties. Be like a crow - misunderstood, frightening to the narrow minded townsfolk, and continuously bedazzling your life with precious jewellery and trinkets.

Sunday:

I’m writing from the kitchen, where I am alone. I sit where I have for thirty years, on Granny’s left. Her space at the top of the table, latterly occupied by my Aunt, appears empty. My aunt is with my mother and grandfather at Kelso races which I have foregone due to a mixture of having chores to catch up on, a lack of suitable wardrobe, and sheer emotional exhaustion.

Although I’m alone in the house, aside from my two slumbering children, I often feel like Granny is never actually far away. I do feel like it was her interference this week which wrested my headphones out my head on two occasions, forcing me to listen. Literally ripping the cotton wool from my head and making me experience the full sharpness of the world I occupy. If she were physically here now we’d be watching Catchphrase and eating squid; or talking about topics like Napoleon and the Empress Josephine, the merits of good shoes for appropriate dancing, or the amount of sugar contained in the average banana. It’s easy to be loss focused when I think about it; I could slump down and let myself cry about it, about how I miss her; or, I could be grateful that even something as fundamental as death can’t stop her from reaching me with important guidance - whether that be about how I experience my life as a constant opportunity for enrichment, or with a ghostly warning about over consumption of modern genus bananas.

In a week where I have juxtaposed puritanical values of hard work and turnip cookery with silly nonsense tomfoolery in the bars and public houses of Dumfries township, I have invoked a curious aesthetic extension to my brooding gothic start to the autumn. Add to the mix a haunting at my parents’ house and my deep dive into a new narrative based game set in New England and you have a recipe for the best possible end to September. Read on for this week’s tale…

*A clarification on the title. I cannot be a true puritan because I am a martyr to homosexuality and also because I could never succeed in doing justice to a wide-brimmed hat. I here refer to puritan to denote people of a set timeframe and (woefully misguided) cultural arena.

Monday:

The drudgery of a typical Monday unfolded before me and I fell into step. When the tribulations of the working day drew to a close I embraced the spirit of frontier resourcefulness and produced an egg fried rice with a mixture cobbled together in no small part from the leftovers of Sunday’s roast pork. Pleased with my cost saving endeavour, I retired to bed full of puritan self righteousness.

Tuesday:

Another day of monotonous workday business took me through the daylight hours. But, undefeated by the cares of social work or the media, I maintained a spark of life by 5pm. Thusly, I prepared a crustless quiche, flavoured and textured with the remainder of the pork mixture I prepared for the rice the previous night. Unsettled by the fact of being in a place both mentally and physically where a crustless quiche is a tension relieving solution to my weekly concerns, I surrendered myself to the mercy of Instagram and passed the evening scrolling pages and pages of relatable memes.

Wednesday:

Monotony, oh monotony. The endless expanse of “nose to the grindstone” working behaviours in this week has piqued something of the New England puritan in me and I have found myself surrendering further to the aesthetic advent of the autumn. When the days work was completed, I immediately crossed the village and visited my mother so the two of us could watch “Emily” on Netflix. Bizarrely, phantasmic events started to unfold which harried and harrowed us, but ultimately, to my credit and as a consequence of my interminable Virgo nature, did not stop us completing the film.

It began with the distinct and incredibly loud “knocking”. From somewhere behind my mother’s TV in the corner of her living room, or at a push, from the adjacent entry hallway, there was a distinct “bang” or knocking. Investigation yielded no return. What’s more, she advises me that said knocking had begun two days prior and was periodically to be heard to no explanation.

Again, a knock, inspiring us to pause the movie and me to lose patience with the supernatural entity exhibiting such cavalier disregard for etiquette or propriety. This time, I curiously noted that the tray of the DVD player (in itself a now antiquated piece of apparatus which could feasibly be haunted in the same way as, say, an old gramophone) was open. Curious. I closed it and we continued on.

Lo! Another knock resounded. As we investigated we noticed that the DVD tray was again open. Curious. I closed the tray and turned my back to return to the sofa when, spine chillingly, the tray opened again of its own volition. This time I switched the DVD player off, but in the spirit of hilarity and supernatural hijinks, within ten minutes it switched itself back on AND for good measure spat the tray back out again.

Frustrated by the cheek of our paranormal visitor and both of us too exhausted by our professional dalliances in public relations and the law to be hassled with the business of witchcraft, we simply removed the power cord from the haunted device and completed the movie.

Entirely exhausted from these exertions supernatural, I returned home to make a pasta dish centred on delightful roasted turnip, further entrenching the spirit of New England purism in my tired bones.

Thursday:

Thursday arrived, ushering in the 27th birthday of my oldest sister. After the obligatory representations were made on social media, and the days work was completed, we descended as a familial unit on the delightful Thai restaurant in Dalton, about fifteen minutes from home.

Curiously we were joined by my grandfather who, as a hardy fellow of 91 years of age and utterly unshakable in his old world sensibility, has never tried anything more exotic than a dry popadom and who flatly refuses to eat onion. After monopolising our waitress with enquiries after her grandparents and making arrangements for her relations to contact us about a possible hedge cutting contract, he tucked into his prawns and satay chicken which he saw as remarkably palatable. Onions may still be banned from his diet, but there is place yet for Thai cuisine and the growth is to be applauded.

More jollity ensued and my sister’s birthday was marked in great style.

Friday:

On Friday I reclused myself and am better for it. At last night’s dinner for my sister’s birthday, Leslie, my sister’s partner’s mother spent some time bonding with me over the fact that we are both, now, Golf widows. And it’s true! Derry has fallen inexplicably into an infatuation with Golf in the last few days. The fervour with which he has bought into the franchise is, I must say, alarming.

Tonight, he has excused himself to go golfing with friends and then to my sister’s house to watch Golf with my brother in law. An invitation was duly extended to me to join them, but golf inspires nothing in my spirit and I was also exhausted from the exertions of the day. A determination was made to stay home.

In pursuit of distraction I decided to explore the benefits of my new PlayStation plus subscription. I happened across a game I thought I’d try which is predicated on being a ghost hunting Scotsman investigating paranormal happenings in a brooding New England landscape.

Apart from resonating with the themes of the week prior and connecting viscerally with the curious haunting of the blueray player in my parents’ living room, I have also fallen deeply in love with the main playable character who happens to be named “Ruaidhrigh”, which is my name but spelled differently, a Gaelic flavoured version of the interplay between the nuance of Elisabeth and Elizabeth.

Taken in entirely I gave myself in body and spirit to the story, pausing only long enough to whip up a hasty chicken paprika before returning to the sumptuous gothic depths of this tale.

Saturday:

We have taken to the streets! In celebration of my sister’s birthday we set out in Dumfries for revelry and merry-making. Filled to the brim with a dreadful cold, I allowed myself to follow the folk advice of my culture and imbibed of a good deal of whisky. I then followed the trajectory of the night in an endless parade of spicy cocktails, glasses of prosecco, and, at one curious and inexplicable juncture, a half pint of tenants lager.

The night came to an end in a mysterious Chinese takeaway I’ve never seen before. Whether a hallucination fuelled by drink or a genuine happening I cannot say, but my final recollection of the evening was seeing a woman barrelling down Loreburn street in what was very clearly the Oscar’s De La Renta dress made for Emma Watson for the 2011 premiere of the Deathly Hallows. A taxi was called and I nursed my Chinese takeaway all the way home while worrying for the safety of that dress on the streets of Dumfries.

Sunday:

Pestilence. Not a hangover, but true pestilence has me in its grip. My throat is closed, my skin feverish, and my visage pale and dewy. I have done naught but fall deeper into the sumptuous narrative of this video game, searching for ghosts and witches and meaning in the leafy hamlets of puritan New England.

I did briefly interrupt my time to visit my parents for dinner, where my father excelled himself with his chicken Schnitzel. After dinner we watched “The Miracle Club” on Netflix which was a delight and further illustrated to everyone in the room that Cathy Bates and my mother are one and the same in looks and temperament - in all other of her roles but with specific emphasis on the unsinkable Molly Brown (and, when her fettle is piqued, the crazy woman from Misery).

In the second week of thirty-one I allow myself to sink further into my hot-girl autumn moment and, in particular, to dial into the charming gothic romanticism of regency period Galloway. Here’s how the week went…

Monday:

The sun rose on a new week, which I take in good faith as evidence to suggest so was obscured by an impermeable smog of noxious rain. I encouraged myself to stick to my own meticulously planned calendar and went to the gym in the evening, leaving directly from the office where I appeared mid-morning in a ball-cap and a Scottish rugby raincoat in homage to something with roots in the stoic masculinity of the east coast. That stoicism did not carry into my gym routine, as I stayed for the duration of my work out on the treadmill (pausing only briefly when I stopped to refill my water and was accidentally launched at speed into a man passing by). Sick of it all I retired to the sauna to reflect on my choices.

Tuesday:

During the current block, my Tuesday evenings are carved out for life modelling. I love modelling, there’s something incredibly freeing about being entirely disrobed and perceived by a whole group of people when the focus of the exercise is so clearly and intensely focused on the furtherance of creativity. It’s a really fun way to connect with my own body and self-image, plus aesthetically it just makes sense that my niche in the arts scene locally is to be part time cheerleader and part time disrobed muse like a modern retelling of Lady Caroline Lamb.

Reflecting on it, I’ve found myself in the position of appearing to crowds in a state of artistic undress on a number of occasions - notably twice in Sweden in 2016. In the first instance that year I appeared in a short woodland dramatisation of Swedish folklore as the mysterious “Näcken”, a creature in the guise of a naked man wearing, curiously, nothing but a railwayman’s cap and playing a fiddle. The effect was achieved with just such a railwayman’s cap and fiddle, with the addition of strategically placed drapery fabric representing the unnatural woodland mist I’d conjured to entrap the unfortunates lured by my wistful fiddle playing, before I drown them.

On the second occasion, in our drama final exam, our group put on a retelling of the classic fairytale “puss in boots” but in a modern corporate context where the “puss” was actually a cat-like and very camp freelance publicist (played exquisitely by my friend Björn) who offers to build the youngest son’s recently inherited subsidiary company into a fortune 500 competitor through subversion and back-room PR tactics. I, playing the role of the youngest son, was required to enter into a business sauna session with investors and competitors and then to underscore that my clothes had been stolen from outside of the sauna (meaning I required to be clothed in a borrowed tailored suit in place of my original wide-leg** in a camp retelling of the original ‘bathing in the river’ scene), I had to jump out from behind a screen (the sauna) in just my underwear before being hastily given a towel and ushered into the wings for my dramatic outfit change ahead of the next scene. Both occasions were graded and in both instances I received an A, so it’s plausible I have been chasing that high ever since and life modelling in the nude was the natural extension of that journey.

Whatever the case, the session was cancelled and I remained dressed for the duration of this particular Tuesday.

**It is worth a note to clarify that this played out in 2016 when wide-leg pants on men were still a hallmark of criminality and decrepitude.

Wednesday:

I spent the day in a haze of industry, occupied at work with many a trial and tribulation. On completion of my day’s exertions I allowed myself to be chaperoned to the supermarket where I purchased up a week’s groceries and, in a return to my rural sensibilities, a copy of Country Living magazine. On return home, I retired to a self-care bath and then spent the rest of the evening browsing stories about regenerative forest swine-farming and how to style a Hebridean fishing lodge.

Thursday:

Further losing the handle on my weekly schedule, I began the day on the back-foot and failed to adequately recover my groove. I worked relentlessly and without hope of a break for the entire day. After making and serving up a very delicious Imam Bayildi (which Derry described as adequate), I gave myself over to a face mask and a glass of prosecco.

Friday:

And then Friday arrived in all it’s whimsy and joy. After preparing a dinner of sausages roasted with apples, most hearty and wholesome, we negotiated that we’d pop into town for a drink at our great love, The Dougie Arms. Our pre-discussion on the subject meant we agreed to travel in exclusively for the allotted ‘Friday social block’ I have put in my calendar for 9pm til 11pm, which was blessedly refreshing because with an achievable and pre-set target for when to end the evening I was able to adequately forbid myself from over imbibing on Bloody Marys and getting stuck on the merry-go-round of social catastrophe that invariably grinds to a screeching halt in the White Hart smoking area where a moment of latency washes over me and the whimsy of the night fades into chagrin and fearful anxiety. Controlled, measured and timeous, we enjoyed a pleasant evening with many of our great favourites. Satiated and with most of our faculties intact, we then returned home to watch television and embrace the unique pleasure of curtailing one’s night out to a sensible few and a natter and not the dreadful funerary procession down the Vennel to the White Hart which has been a mainstay of previous Fridays. The growth is a positive consequence of this new decade of living.

Saturday:

The jewel in the crown of this week, Saturday was another turning point in the switchover of my seasonal aesthetics. We had agreed in advance that it was high time that we took our canine children on a trip somewhere where they could burn off energy. I must confess to being exhausted by them this week; if they took the shape of human children and were capable of speech in the English language then the week would have looked like my son and eldest (Bichon frise X Shih Tzu) tugging earnestly at my trouser leg every five minutes, snotty nosed and weepy, begging me: “please, lady mother, I am ailing and need to be cradled” while my daughter, the younger (collie), runs madly through the house on victorian tom-boy energy, collecting curiosities from the garden and hiding them in inappropriate ‘den’ spaces under and behind furniture. I am despairing of them and my finances cannot stretch to a nanny, let alone a governess which would be preferred and, frankly, required for my son who needs attention, refinement and French language engagement in order to be fully pacified.

We determined to take them into the depths of Galloway, specifically to run by the seaside which is always a pleasure to them and has particular benefits to me, their aforementioned lady mother, who by all accounts should be sent away to convalesce somewhere considerably west of Dumfries and certainly removed from society. We settled on Balcary Bay, a huge favourite of mine.

The blustering wind and the breathtaking views entirely re-penned my state of mind, and filled me with the animating spirit of autumn. With every gulp of fresh sea air I was further intoxicated into the impending season of pies, rugby, literature circles and doing embroidery by low lamplight while drinking Claret and watching Poldark. I carried this seasonal feeling into the rest of the day, and made the fortuitous decision to watch ‘Emily’ on Netflix which only sought to further ratify my vibe. It occurred to me that there’s something about the Galloway coastal wild, in all seasons but most especially in autumn, which awakens something in me that has it’s aesthetic roots in regency period rurality. That deeply romantic but unsettling gothic spirit and spine-tingling lyricism in describing the sound that wind makes are utterly front and centre in my psyche, now, and it’s only a matter of time before the weekly meal chart is full of baked onions, sweet breads and white soup.

I pleasantly spent the rest of the evening contentedly wandering the house and listening very intently to the ‘wuthering’ sound of the wind around the house, getting unduly querulous whenever the effect was ruined by a passing bus or timber lorry.

Sunday:

I write these words from the owners and trainers section of Hamilton Park Racecourse where I have quietly installed myself. I have come up to celebrate our club racehorse, the same one who brought us to stunning victory at Carlisle last week. We’re having exceptional sunshine and warmth, but the autumnal colours on the many trees (my very favourite thing about this racecourse, in fact) are picked out beautifully against the ubiquitous racecourse green. Still dialled in to my regency period aesthetic moment, I think it’s entirely appropriate that I have slipped away from my grandfather and mother to hide myself in a quiet corner to write. In other times I would be doing so with pen in a fabulous leather bound journal, but modern times call for modern solutions and so I’m doing so on my notes app. Other racegoers, particularly those of a certain vintage, are probably judgementally assuming that I’m texting some urban clique group chat or doomscrolling on social media but I am, in fact, busily involved in the timeless exercise of journalling my week which makes me feel oh so Brontë.