Silly Thoughts, volume 3

At the time of posting, it will be just after my 37th birthday. Hooray! Older, wiser, still alive, etc. I've been looking over past birthdays trying to pinpoint as many of them as I can: birthday parties at soft plays and bowling alleys, or in the back garden with my sister in charge of pass-the-parcel. A surprise one, for my 12th. A fancy dress one, for my 13th (in which I nonsensically bought a blonde wig and dressed up as Buffy Summers, when the obvious choice of Willow was right there). My 16th, in which a bunch of my friends gathered to drink Smirnoff Ice and watch Finding Nemo together. My 18th, a murder mystery dinner party. My 21st, a month after our wedding, a quiet one given the epic celebration a few weeks before. My 23rd, a deafening Rock Band party. My 24th, Birdemic and pizza night. Or was that my 25th? Anyway, what happened to the 26th? The 27th?

I can't remember. They all start blurring together eventually. Even my 30th; I remember taking the kids to an animal park to celebrate and, well, feeling relieved that my twenties were over. That's about it.

Generally speaking, I quite like birthdays. I don't like a huge fuss (although I might feel differently about my 40th). I don't normally use them as a time of big reflection or anything like that. I just like to enjoy the little things. Nice messages and phone calls. Cards the kids make for me. Cake. When people (by which I mean Chris) say things like 'oh no, don't change the litter tray, it's your birthday' and 'I'll do the washing up' and 'you stay there and I'll bring you a coffee'. That sort of thing.

On the 21st, it was the summer solstice. 'Energetically, it is very parallel to the First Quarter Moon, which signifies a time to nourish the seeds planted in the first phase', says some website that I just found. Find that imagery quite appealing. At the winter solstice, I was a little bit broken. I've spent the last six months trying to recover and regain some semblance of myself. And it's worked. I rebuilt the broken bits through talking and writing and sitting still and being quiet, and now I feel stronger, and quite a bit older than I was before.

I would have marked the occasion (the summer solstice, I mean) by doing something symbolic, but actually, it was a horrific heatwave day and my son ended up getting sunburned, and I spent the evening frantically researching signs of heatstroke and trying not to cry.

At the winter solstice, I got together with my two best friends and we burned what we wanted to get rid of. I didn't feel like burning things this time (also I really didn't want to generate more heat). I've been trying to build things in my life: good habits, good routines, a sense of gratitude. And so instead of burning, I wrote down a list of all the things I want to continue to build in my life. And that was about all my sun-frazzled brain could cope with.

I'll probably keep marking the solstices in the same way. There will always be things to burn and things to build, I guess.

Some things I've enjoyed this June:

• This essay by Noisy Ghost titled Soft Boy, Hard World: To Be Holy, But Never Whole on how it feels to be raised as a young man in a loving, wonderful church while also being gay, black, and sensitive. This is a painful and beautiful read, and it's a perspective I think many more people need to hear.
• The book 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. A little nosy into time: how we think about it, what we try to fit into it, and how we try to control it. I loved the deep dive into the history of work and productivity, and how that all shifted during the Industrial Revolution. It's a kind of Stoic look at life. How to accept that your time on Earth is finite, that our own place in the cosmos is fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and how that knowledge can set you free. As a person who often judges her worth via her productivity, but who has also been forced to rest a lot this year for physical health reasons, this book felt like a gift.
• Blue Prince. I FINISHED BLUE PRINCE! (Well, no. I found the 46th room. I keep saying I'll go back and do more runs but actually, I think I'm pretty much done with it now.) I've spoken about it before so I won't go on, but what an incredibly satisfying thing to have reached the credits.
• America's Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Season 2 and Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE, both on Netflix. I won't be taking more questions on this.
• The Borderlands (or Final Prayer as it's known in the US), the excellent debut movie by director Elliot Goldner. Set in Devon, the film follows a team comprised of a priest, a minister, and a tech expert as they set out to disprove a miracle in a small village church. Unfortunately, things go really, really wrong. I quite like found footage horror, and the sense of humour, the developing relationships between the characters, and the headcams made it feel like a bizarre Blair Witch/Peep Show crossover at times. I thought it was great.
• Speaking of: Chris and I enjoyed Back, the series by David Mitchell and Robert Webb, in which soon-to-be-pub-landlord Stephen (Mitchell) is still reeling from his father's death when the extremely sinister Andrew (Webb) reappears. Andrew is the former foster child of Stephen's parents, and his appearance triggers a series of events in which you genuinely don't know what to believe. Loved the twists and turns, loved the characters, didn't enjoy the pacing so much, and ultimately it got cancelled, which sucks. But it made us laugh out loud so many times. And, it has Geoffery McGivern in it! Whom I love. So it was worth it, on the whole. (The main criticism of Back that I've read seems to be that it's not Peep Show, which is unfair. You can't just expect Mitchell and Webb to keep remaking different versions of Peep Show until the end of time. Anyway, I'm sad it didn't get another series.)
• Finally. Sorry, I'll stop going on. I'm enjoying Izzy Bizu's 2023 EP Don't Have to Say. I would like a full album at some point <3

The next time I write one of these, the summer holidays will be in full swing, and I'm sure my television/book/game consumption levels will slow right down. But still, I can't wait.