I know what I did last summer

(...and this one. But only because I wrote it down)

I don’t think that what-I-did-on-my-summer-holidays essays could ever capture the real magic of six weeks off school. The sense of achievement from chewing through the sweet shop’s supply of Anglo Bubbly for two whole weeks after my mum finally capitulated in her war on bubble gum (“so common”). The joy of turning a fishing net into an approximation of a lacrosse stick, using a clothes peg, having read one too many Mallory Towers books. Given how much I loathed PE, it’s wild that I wanted to dabble in lacrosse at all, but it sounded exotic - this was before the internet or Quidditch.

Yet for the past two years I’ve found myself writing if not essays, then lists, of what I’ve done each summer. It’s not to show anyone, although I am going to share bits of them with you now. Instead it’s to remind myself of the good stuff, and to stave off the predations of the voice in my head that tells me I am rubbish, lazy and I’m not even doing either of those things with much efficiency. 

Last summer was my first academic summer holiday in more than 20 years, and, without wanting to complain about the fit of my diamond lacrosse boots, I went a bit mad. Not Ibiza mad, off my face and rabidly shoving towels under the doors when dawn light illuminated my poor choices (been there, done that in the Noughties, now limp with relief that I lived to tell the tale). And not as mad as I’d been during the smouldering years before burnout incinerated my old life. 

But in a bid to “properly appreciate” this swathe of time, rare as hen’s teeth in adult life, I hadn’t organised much beyond a couple of weeks’ work at my old company and my one-day-a-week freelance job. Plenty of time, I thought, to make art, go to exhibitions, write, run, swim and generally become a better - less lazy, unrubbish - person. Other than the running, I did a bit of all of those things, but predominantly I spent too much time on my own indoors. My eczema-prone skin had become wildly unhappy in heat and sun, so I hid in the shadows, berating myself for not accomplishing more while alternating between rumination and too much Instagram.

Prospect Cottage, home of the late Derek Jarman

I couldn’t get motivated to work on my self-set projects, felt increasingly weird about leaving the house - in London it can seem like just opening the front door costs £7 so at least it saved me money - and I had a sense of being unmoored while friends lived sensible lives full of work and family stuff. This is why I can’t have nice things like free time. With every passing day, I felt like I was ungratefully squandering the precious summer. Eventually, when the shame I felt at the grubbiness of my flat exceeded the agony of tidying it up, I ended up having an epic clear out. The weekly solo cleaning rota never really got off the - slightly sticky - ground, alas 

The thing is, though, that I actually did a bunch of good things. It’s just that my mind was telling me that I hadn’t. Eventually I started to make a note of all the things that I did. Not as a to do/done list, as it wasn’t necessarily about what I achieved, instead it was a reminder that I lose all sense of perspective when I’m asked to mark my own work, and I tend to judge my own worth pretty brutally. A friend in recovery has a great line: “the problem is, half of my brain manufactures bullshit and the other half buys it.” I never think I’m doing enough and need evidence to back up a more positive evaluation.

Some people use Instagram for this, posting monthly round-ups of their most fabulous moments, the implication being that, sorry, they were too busy living their best lives to post on an event-by-event basis. I was feeling too strange by far to do this. Looking back though photos is also a great way to see what one has been up to, but so often I forget to do that, instead just mindlessly adding to my photo hoard without actually sifting through. So I started using the Notes app to write down anything nice that I’d managed to organise, anything new that I’d learnt and the actually-bloody-amazing-but-unplanned things that had happened that I was so quick to forget.

What did I do on my summer holidays? Made needle-felt disco snails

The inner critic, of course, scoffs at this. What did I do with my one wild and precious life? Wrote notes to try and convince myself I’m less shit. But I want to rebrand that: I have been telling of my endeavours if not in sagas, then in micro chronicles. And so I can look back at last year and remember seeing the Marina Abramović retrospective at the Royal Academy, the first time I’d come face to face with her work. I went to Prospect Cottage and The Manor at Hemingford Grey, the real-life inspiration of the Green Knowe books. I worked hard at a new part-time job and I did drag-queen life drawing. I visited my brother before he left university. I was of service in my recovery community and helped a family friend’s daughter settle in London. I successfully dyed a charity-shop dress from sickly chamomile pink to orange. Without my list I don’t know that I’d easily recall all of these things. 

A fraction of the glorious variety of the Summer Exhibition

I learnt from what I did last summer. To keep a record and also not let myself drift so aimlessly. This year’s list has some big wins - assisting and learning from Charlie Russell, a wonderful artist who has become a treasured friend; helping to install a friend’s exhibition and driving in France for the first time; learning to needle felt and crochet; attending the RA’s Summer Exhibition, something that I’d never done before, and delighting in the work rather than feeling that its excellence negated my creative efforts. Also smaller delights: buying a mad and excellent dress; making disco snails and a pair of linen trousers; visiting sacred wells and drinking a London Fog.

Mad, excellent dress worn as jacket

What did I do on my summer holidays? Really quite a lot for a lazy, rubbish person, apparently. And I very much hope to remember that.

What did you do this summer? What did you discover? I though I’d share some of the cool stuff I’ve enjoyed recently:

Reading the phenomenal Home is Where We Start: Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream by Susannah Crossman (My review in the ipaper is here)

And Only Here, Only Now by Tom Newlands. I tend to read more non-fiction than fiction (rapidly inhaled crime novels notwithstanding) but this debut novel knocked my socks off. Listen to him in conversation with Katherine May over on The Clearing.

Starting Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It by Janina Ramirez

Becoming the last person in the universe to listen to The Rest is History podcast

And also the last to watch Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro.

Discovering the gross, wonderful work of Alona Sobolevska

Getting obsessed with the historical knowledge and insane hotness of Pat Mandziy on Instagram

Downloading Matt Murphy’s abstract portraiture class although not actually starting it yet…