Newsletters

I have a note on my Italian holiday (v glam) to send, but as I was writing it I got struck by the chest infection that is going around (victorian novel glam). So I’m gently emerging from days spent in bed watching my laptop (opposite of glam) and reading the Ice Planet Barbarian books. Enjoy that google search on your personal devices. Anyone who says Avatar left no cultural imprint is a liar. Jake Sully has helped the illustrators of the Deviant Art community pay bills.

I will finish writing about my holiday, don’t worry, but I’m going to take it slow as I’m trying to ignore all but the most pressing noises this year. Everyone set up a newsletter in January and every newsletter I read is very good and considered and I felt like a lobster who finally cops he’s being boiled. I was like ‘these people have references for their work!’ Some even had end notes and further reading. As a committed solipsist, I was rattled. After all, I’ve named my newsletter after myself and write mostly about myself. The noise sounded like a bee hive. But this space is mine, and theirs is theirs, and I love reading lots of things. Memories, reviews, short fiction, between the lines. If it is an email that isn’t a receipt or a reminder my car insurance will be due in two months’ time, I am there messing up my posture reading and forwarding.

Ever since I said no more to any voluntary work my email is no longer this suffocating yoke. It is a place to organise my life, read, write. I even use labels now and yesterday I added ‘holidays’ to a booking confirmation from Aer Lingus. I’m going on a minibreak in March with my sister to a small city in England and I’m so giddy. We’re getting one of the little planes where you sit with the bag on your lap.

I didn’t spend my twenties travelling or holidaying much. I spent it stressed about so many things. Big things with no easy solutions. Inconsequential things I gave too much heed. I think a lot of people do. But in recent years I’ve taken two biggish trips I saved up for and realised how lovely it is to be away from the usual patterns and spaces, and looking at stuff in museums and knowing, briefly and intensely, the names and shapes of unfamiliar streets. How fabulous it is to have a glass of ice full of a beverage and a strange horizon in front of you. To walk slowly back to a hotel under streetlights and to wake up with no real obligations, just vague plans for culture, history and pastries.

When I started driving lessons well over a year ago, I drove past a takeaway I remembered eating food from ages ago with a loved one in their car after a long day. It’d been such a great meal. They don’t deliver to where I’m now living and I had the funniest pang in my chest over that. Over a takeaway! That was probably not that good! I thought: my world has been so small because I had kept it small. Then I conked out at a busy junction.

P.S. If you’re interested in more newsletters:

• Irish Independent: “Why writers are turning to newsletters to reach their readers”

• Like entertainment news? Try Vickipedia. Reflections on culture? An Unceasing Round of Amusement and Sweet Oblivion.

• And one I’ve been reading for a while and isn’t too regular, in case you’ve got a stressful inbox, is Science of Fiction. I’m a big movie and tv sci-fi fan so this newsletter is made for my daydreaming brain.

• A post I forwarded to someone this week is Dare by Heather Havrilesky. It is about taking singing lessons as an adult.