Rambling Missive with Louise Leigh

Us Homo sapiens are very keen to pretend we’re different from animals. “Do animals drink flat white?” We ask.

“Would an animal use this woodsy-scented texturising hair putty? Or carry this jaunty hand-stitched satchel? No! Then I am not an animal. I am a person. Very different, actually.”

Bullshit. Personally, I love feeling close to my animal self. It doesn’t happen often. I am mired in jaunty satchels/flat whites/hair putty. But when it does? How marvellous.

Here are just three of the things that remind - or have reminded - me that you and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals:

1. Drinking out of the cold tap in the middle of the night.

Most nights, I get the twin calls of nature around 3am. My body wakes me up: “Fluids out!” It shouts. And, simultaneously, “fluids in”. So after a wee, a drink. Yes, I could keep a glass in the bathroom, or by my bed, to equip myself for this all-too-routine occurrence. But I prefer the tap.

I prefer to let it run for a minute or so, and then put my head down and suck cool, cool water from its fast-flowing stream.

In that moment, I am aware that I stand on a line that reaches through all the other land-dwelling animals on earth. That point? It’s precisely half-way between a bonobo drinking out of a mountain spring, and a Labrador lapping water from a toilet.

I am a beast! I am a creature. I am nature! Domesticated… somewhat.

2. Watching pimple-popping videos.

Yes, I love them. Not the ones with loads of pus. That’s gross. The ones with the blackheads that look like nothing, but actually contain a sort of capsule of sebum. Like a dear little insect egg hatching from the skin. See? Not gross.

I’m not alone. These videos have hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok and they’re not all me. They can’t all be me. Can they?

I would assert that pimple-popping fulfils some kind of primeval need for those of us who enjoy them. We’re primates, and we’re supposed to bond by grooming each other. [Sigh, not like that, Ian.]

We’re supposed to be checking each other for lumps and bumps, and draining boils and picking off parasites. It’s why a bit of me used to love, love, LOVE when my kids got nits.

When my kids were little and they’d come home with the nit letter, I’d say “Oh no!” But I’d mean “oh yes!” Because although it was often inconvenient and time-consuming, oh my god…hunting and gathering those little 6 legged fuckers? Yes please.

If they came home without nits, I’d drop them off at school and say, “see that kid scratching - go and give them a kiss! Go on! Just rub your heads together a little bit. Mama wants to bond with you, primate-style.”

I’d make sure I had a really expensive nit comb and a vat of really cheap conditioner: corner shop, own brand conditioner of no fixed fragrance. Whatever I could get. If it said “coconut” or “apple” or “jojoba” I was spending too much. I needed the conditioner equivalent of that vodka that’s just labelled POLISH ALCOHOL. What flavour was the conditioner? “Floral”.

And then I’d wash the kids, wash their hair and wrap their wet, shivery, little bodies in massive towels while I coated their scalps in Floral-scented hair lubricant and went to work, to free my kids of parasites by hand, as nature intended. Comb, check, wipe. Got one! Comb, check, wipe. Got one! Ape vs arthropod. Gorilla warfare.

3. Giving birth.

Yes please.

I’ve done it twice and both times, I felt so powerful. I felt connected not only to my own mother and my mother’s mother but also to every other mammal on earth. From the humpback whale to the naked mole rat to the gnu, we’re all the same in this moment.

In labour, you can’t escape the heft of your own body. You can’t pretend to be cerebral. Sophistication burns away with the burn of your baby crowning. Abandon ye your playlist! Would a wildebeest listen to Beyonce?

(Absolutely yes. If she knew. Taylor Swift? Not so much.)

I managed to give birth to my second child in the most animalistic way I could.

I was denied my first wish, which was to heave him out of myself on a grubby tartan blanket, in a whelping box, in the cupboard under the stairs. Apparently, we needed the cupboard for some deck chairs and old paint.

I compromised on doing it at home, in my sitting room in front of the fire on a Cath Kidston oilcloth. (Because a timeless floral is still a timeless floral).

If I could have been guaranteed that birth every time, I would never have stopped having babies.

It took ninety minutes all told. Too quick for the midwives to get there. It was just me, the husband, and a doula who calmly looked on as I bestrode my sitting-room, growling and groaning, and as I abandoned all the hard lines of being human in favour of the wet, muscularity of just existing in my body.

I was naked, unafraid, stronger than I’ve ever felt before or since. My god, I unwrapped the cord from my baby’s neck myself as he hung out of me.

I mean… Fuck me. Why have I ever let anyone tell me what to do ever? Animal me is incredible. No wonder I want to get in touch with her sometimes.

Writing this, I’m wildly and acutely aware that I no longer have access to two of these animal selves. I’m never having another baby and unless those babies have lousy babies of their own, I’m unlikely to nit comb anyone else.

I’d better keep on drinking out of the tap.

I want more, though. If you have any suggestions for everyday contact with the mammal in me, do share.

(I’m all over the one that they “do like they do on the Discovery Channel”, by the way).

A show of beastliness:

Talking of animal selves, my show Octopus, is all about this incredible beast, and my humanity. It’s at The Wardrobe Theatre in Bristol on 12th November and at various dates tbc in 2027.

Watch this space.

Promised dog apology:

If you’re listening to the audio, or watching the video, you’ll need this message:

Huge, contrite, apologies to the dog whose “bad behaviour” turned out to be a perfectly reasonable repeated request to be fed at an hour that was in fact, dinner time. Sorry, Diggory.

Here’s a video I made of me reading this, because EVERYTHING’S SUPPOSED TO HAVE VIDEO NOW. Please release me from being perceived at every moment of the day.

I’ve never been clinically diagnosed with depression, but I have had periods of my life where I was deeply, dully, sad in the face of really nothing at all being wrong.

A couple of years ago, I was in one such fog. I felt numb, uninterested in life, every step was a trudge.

For about a month, I obsessively reread the passage of Hamlet where Shakespeare writes, “I have of late, (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition… blah blah blah”

While the speech is known better for the next bit: “What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason…”, I couldn’t take my eyes off “I have of late, (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth.”

My mirth.

My. Mirth.

It’s basically all I’ve got, the Mirth. I’ve been given and retained jobs at which I was patently useless, just because of the Mirth.

What am I without the mirth?

People find their mirth in all sorts of ways, but I found mine in something that is - officially - a chore: washing the car.

And look, Patula Clark may have sung, “When you've got worries, all the noise and the hurry Seems to help, I know…. downtown”. But for me, “when life’s a dud, it’s the spray and the suds that seem to help, I know…. Jet wash.”

I don’t know whether I went there to try and get happy, or just to try and get flies off the windscreen, but one day, in the depths of the meh, I took the car to the jet wash.

I chose the second most expensive programme and as I scrubbed and sprayed and rinsed and waxed, I accidentally gave myself a defibrillation of the soul.

When you’re jet washing, you feel Sarah Connors from Terminator levels of powerful. The pressure hose jumps in your hand like the recoil of a sawn off shotgun. You’re a warrior, blazing a trail for shiny hubcaps. On a sunny day, the spray turns you into a one-woman rainbow factory. When you’re doing the foamy brush bit, you can pretend you’re a barber and your car is a giant client come in for a shave, or that you’re Goofy, washing an elephant called Dolores. I love that you don’t have to dress up to go to the jet wash. I love that you can dress up to go to the jet wash. Tiara and a ballgown for the high pressure rinse? Yes please.

I love that on sunny Saturdays, there’s a queue of dads in cars. It’s one of those quietly masculine spaces where men go to ignore each other.

That sunny day, I found that 16 minutes at the jet wash reset my nervous system so completely that somehow my brain remembered where it put the Mirth. And, look, maybe it didn’t get the Mirth out very often, but just remembering where it lived really helped. I typed out a little Dymo label and stuck it on the shelf in my brain: Mirth (top up at the jet wash).

Of all the activities you can do to top up the old Mirth, the jet wash is one of very few that also counts as as a big tick off the to do list. (Hence the dads on a Saturday morning).

When I got asked by local website, Bristol 24/7, to list my favourite places in the city, I got a letter from the editor who said, “In 12 years editing this weekly column, not a single person has ever nominated the jet wash.”

Perhaps more of us should.

I had the pleasure of waking up in Winchester yesterday and so of course I had to pay a visit to its cathedral. Two reasons:

* I am fond of cathedrals. What can I say? I like big buttresses, cannot lie!

Since 1992, every time I ride my bike in a jaunty manner - some might describe this as pootling - I find myself singing Winchester Cathedral by the New Vaudeville Band. Every time.

I was going to write a thoughtful piece about the way women are represented in the cathedral, but instead I thought. More importantly, do I have any other activity-specific earworms?

Of course I bloody do. Here is an incomplete list of activities and their accompanying theme tunes:

Cold Water Swimming

When I am swimming in cold water, I only sing When I Think of You by Janet Jackson. (Mostly the “Ning ning ninga-ning ning ning” bit from the intro, if you know what I mean?

Horseriding:

Once when riding a horse (a thing I have done a lot less than my accent would suggest), I had If Everybody Looked the Same by Groove Armada rocketing round my head and so now if ever I have the chance to ride again, back it comes.

Walking in the Rain

I eschew umbrellas as a selfish pavement-space stealer and also you get wet feet and hands anyway, so why not use the Power of Song to keep you if not dry, then at least cheerful.

I am British and therefore spend enough time in the rain for this activity to have two theme songs: 1.

Obviously I know every word to this. Worth a listen to this version for the deliciously swoopy piano. Also, watch it in Top Hat to see one of my favourite things, which is where they start dancing at 1’40” in. If you like music, or dance, or flirting - seriously, it’s the flirtiest thing on celluloid - watch it. I adore it.

I DIGRESS!

* Other walking in the rain song:

I’m aware that this and its alternate are rather on-the-nose themewise, but that’s okay, I think.

Walking in cold, dry weather:

This is especially good if you are running a little late and need to get a move on. Those sleighbells really get your blood pumping.

Doing Mountain Climbers

Talking of getting the blood pumping, I occasionally do those mountain climber things at my Bottom Strengthening Classes for Vigorous Older Women and I have to sing this (but faster than this) while doing it:

Doing CPR:

(Obviously)

Anyway, this week, my husband confessed that a sound he finds very difficult is “people singing”. Shit. I think I’m people.

In Not Entirely Unrelated News:

Today I got the official paperwork confirming my ADHD diagnosis. How am I feeling about it? Vague.

Vindicated - I’ve known about this for a long time, now I’ve got it in writing.

Annoyed - Those people who called me a weirdo were right, damn them.

Grateful - that I’ve been privileged enough, and supported by so many people, to manage so well until now.

Unchanged - Still me, acronyms notwithstanding.

Energised - I’ve had a quadruple shot espresso to help me focus to the end of this newsletter.

Upcoming Live Gigs

In case you fancy it:

Manningtree, 17th April.

Portsmouth 25th April

Newquay 26th April (can’t find ticket link but it’s at Sailor’s - because GLAMOUR)

That’s it for April.

I’m just back from the Edinburgh Fringe where I did two shows a day, 22 times in 24 days. One show, Aaagony Aunts, is a panel show with my friend Pauline Eyre, where we solve problems brought to us by comedians and audience members, using mystic utensils, including the World Famous Salad Spinner of Destiny.

The other is my solo show, Octopus.

Neither of them is entirely without whimsy, but Octopus leans heavily towards silliness.

I spend a lot of time dancing about in a ridiculous costume made of tights sewn to a belt. I do voices, I wang the tentacles about, I flirt aggressively with the audience. I have some incredible euphemisms for wanking.

See? Whimsy! But just as the octopus has only one bone - a beak that can crack a clam shell - my show is built around a hard, sharp core:

Rage.

Rage that women still live in a world where we are expected to be both superhuman - handling the workplace, the home and everyone’s feelings at the same time - and somehow subhuman - a “decorative fuckhole”. (A line I dropped a few days into the run because it simply hit too hard to be funny.)

Rage that we have to remain vigilant to male behaviour at all times, and yet turn a blind eye to it when it really matters.

Rage that we live on the same planet as men, but somehow they have a totally different view of it.

It’s like they’re on the land, looking out at it the sea we live in and seeing only the surface.

This difference was gavelled home, half way through the Fringe, when I took part in a comedy improvised court room show.

The idea is, before the show, audience members submit “crimes” that their companions have committed. Three comedians then use that information to play the parts of judge, prosecution and defence; they have a jolly fun time saying “m’lud, I put it to you that squeezing the toothpaste from the middle is not a crime under juris prudence statute lorem ipsum in pictura est puella” or whatever.

It was my first time playing this game; as prosecutor I was to speak first.

The first case came up.

A woman, let’s call her “Echo”, accused her boyfriend, (“Narcissus”), of hitting a man who had been chatting her up in the pub.

First of all, if true, this is an actual crime. Absolutely not an appropriate case for a jolly pretend courtroom panel game.

Next, on examination, it turned out that Narcissus was happy to tell us that he had indeed hit the chatty man, giving the reason that the man’s “hand was moving nearer to Echo’s bum.”

Not even touching it, just moving towards it.

I asked Echo if she had felt unsafe with the chatty man, she replied no. She said she could handle herself, and that if she needed rescuing, she’d let her boyfriend know. She was - rightly - pretty cross with Narcissus, who could have chosen any number of non-violent means of interrupting her conversation with the chatty man, but chose to punch instead.

It was clear she was bringing this “case” to seek public validation for her view that he had behaved badly.

Meanwhile, Narcissus was pretty pleased with himself that he’d fended off the competition with what he described as “just a little slap.”

But a slap from this man… ? Not so little.

It transpired that Narcissus was an ex pro fighter, a martial artist. I’ve googled him. They called him “the KO kid” and “The Body Snatcher”.

A trained martial artist is the last person who should be throwing fists at a man in the pub for any reason, let alone for something as trivial as this.

So far, so distressing. So not comedy.

As prosecution, I rested, letting my distinguished colleague on defence take over and I think he didn’t do too badly, to be honest, using sarcasm to show that he clearly thought Narcissus was in the wrong, while just doing his job of defending the indefensible and being as funny as he could about it. After all, it’s a comedy show, right?

Meanwhile, I’ve taken it all a bit seriously, and Narcisssus is giving me death stares from the audience.

The truth is, I’m standing up to him, but I’m a little scared.

At the end of the case, the audience vote to see whether Narcissus is guilty and, guess what?

Yes, he is guilty.

By a whisker.

Men in the audience call out to him he’s “a legend”. His own girlfriend cheers for his innocence (I suspect because she, too, feels the seething rage under his public jollity). The audience clearly haven’t picked up on the sarcasm in m’colleague’s tone. Or they did, but they prefer to vote against the strident killjoy, me. Echo doesn’t get her wholehearted validation.

There are another two cases to limp through. I try to keep my stress levels down, be a bit funny and ignore the looks Narcissus is still shooting across the room at me. It’s nigh on impossible. The other cases are cut-and-dried in favour of my colleague.

Throughout them, all I can think is, Echo is at risk.

A man who is jealous and violent? Red flag city. I wonder how to slip her a pamphlet from a domestic violence charity from the stage. I worry that my fearlessness in confronting him may lead to repercussions for her.

Once the audience has left, I bring up to the other comedians (all male, did I say that?) how hard I had found it to be funny because of the unpleasantness of the first case. I stated my genuine concerns for Echo.

They agreed in a fairly dismissive way that we probably shouldn’t have “tried” that case in this comedy court, and that Narcissus had definitely overreacted by punching the chatty man. And then one of them said “ah, but it was good value for the show.”

Good value for the show.

Like they were looking at a sea full of shark fins, thinking it was a dolphin display.

It’s exhausting, handing out metaphorical snorkels and masks and asking men to take a look into the other world that exists alongside their version of our planet.

It’s what I’m trying to do in Octopus and I know that men who have seen it have experienced the sense of wonder and unsettledness that I feel when I’m exploring the sea.

I also know that I’m glad that in Aaagony Aunts, we take problems seriously - as well as stupidly.

Yes, we’re using the Salad Spinner of Destiny, and that’s a lot of fun. But when a 19 year old woman told us in one show, that she had been approached online by a distinguished man in his 50s, we put the format aside. All four female panellists listened carefully, then gave her proper advice on safe ways to disclose what had happened.

When a man revealed that he was lonely after his divorce, we thanked him for talking about it, and suggested places to meet people. Some of them were funny, but in between the jokes, sensible, useable advice emerged.

It’s all very well having a comedy format, but when you’re playing with audience’s lives, the game can get real. It’s worth remembering.

You can see Octopus at the Wardrobe Theatre, Bristol, on 12th November. It’s genuinely a lot of fun, even for men. One Gen Z man called Lewis, who saw it wrote,

“Absolutely brilliant! Everyone in our group had such a great time. The humour was seriously on point, with loads of moments that had us all laughing.The show is clever and poignant underneath all the comedy. It has quite a lot to say about men, masculinity and the things we don't always talk about, but it never feels preachy.I'd definitely recommend taking your boyfriend, son, dad, brother or any men in your life. I honestly think there's a lot that many men could take from this show (as well as having a really good laugh!)”

Sadly, Narcissus couldn’t make it.

https://thewardrobetheatre.com/shows/louise-leigh-octopus/

FIRSTLY: I can’t believe there are now 100 of you. Thank you so much for joining and staying with my ramblings! Genuinely, if I picture you all coming round my house it’s quite overwhelming.

Here’s the missive:

I’ve loved romantic fiction since I was a teenager. The happy endings, the yearning, the tropes, the sexual tension, the sexual sex? I love them all.

First, I read Mills & Boon novels. 20p for a 1970s book from the charity shop for a roller-coaster will-they-won’t-they with a guaranteed happy ever after was a bargain. In those days, sex outside of marriage was not going to happen in these books. Many of them involved a chaste courtship, a quick kiss at the end and the couple skipping down the aisle without so much as the whiff of chemistry.

If you wanted to find what I euphemistically called “realism”, the only way to find them was to carefully interpret the book blurbs like they were estate agents’ descriptions. A marriage of convenience? They’ll smash. A long lost husband back in your life? Permission to bang! Phrases like “uncontrollable passion”, “would he master his feelings?” flagged up that there would be a pinch of horniness for teenage me to enjoy.

Here’s the thing, everything I learned about sex in my youth was that I would have to defend the citadel that was my body from boys with urges. Not one adult told me that I would have urges too.

Of course, I did. I still do, and I refuse to be ashamed of it, and reading swoony - and often smutty - romantic fiction remains my first and most long-lasting love.

The swoon matters more than the filth to be honest. Romantic fiction is a great, safe place for this old married woman to experience and enjoy the feeling of limerance - the dizzying, giddy feeling of infatuation - without running off with a personal trainer or passing tank commander.

Over the years, while reading “proper literary” books I’ve always had romance in between; a palate cleanser between problematic narrators, tragedy, social satire, the Great American Novel, whatever. I love the guaranteed happy ending, characters that are simply drawn, plots with so many holes it’s actually kind of beautiful. The book as a doily. It’s a curly-wurly, not an oatcake.

Just as readers of mystery find comfort in knowing that Poirot will always find the killer, us romance readers feel safe within the tropes: the forced proximity of the overbooked motel, the grumpy loner in the plaid shirt who turns out to be kind, the enemies who will inevitably become lovers, the sham relationship that turns real all too quickly, the family of four handsome brothers who each get to fall in love in 200 pages. And yes, the swooping feeling of falling in love vicariously.

Romance (in book form) has never let me down. (Actually, sometimes it’s genuinely bollocks, but the books are delightfully short and disposable - a comic for girls - so no big deal.)

Cut to 2020. We all know what that date means. For me, literature-wise two things happened.

One: I watched Bridgerton. Adapted for Netflix, from a series of exactly the kind of dodgy quality romance I love, it was suddenly the biggest series in the world. I immediately downloaded all the books. Two: I read Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell. This extraordinary, beautiful novel wrung me out. I sobbed for days. I absolutely couldn’t handle it.

Against the background of what I will wave at vaguely and call “world affairs”, I suddenly couldn’t read anything that didn’t end well.

And, since 2020, apart from almost finishing a William Boyd novel on holiday last year, I’ve read non-stop romance. Happy ever afters ever after.

I’ve read cowboy romance, contemporary romance, small town romance, Regency romance, sports romance. I’ve been hoovering it up on the highest setting for five years.

But since it came out in the UK, nothing has had me by the short and curlies like the Canadian queer ice hockey romance, Heated Rivalry.

If you haven’t watched it, why not? Jeez, Louise!

It’s based on a series of novels by Canadian author Rachel Reid and it’s hot stuff! Yes, there are two very beautiful young men getting naked. Yes, it’s horny AF. But as horny as it is, it’s even more swoony. Oh god the tender swooning! The deliciousness of a happy ending.

I’m obsessed, not only with the story of the show, but the wider Story of The Show. The actors who have gone from waiting tables to worldwide fame in a matter of months; the director who got funding from the Canadian government to make the show for not much money, and decided to take the project extremely seriously; the legions of people writing fan fiction, the community on social media…. it’s FASCINATING.

I’m hyperfixated and loving it.

These days, as it’s so easy to access ancillary media, I’m listening to long podcasts analysing the show shot-by-shot, I’ve downloaded a full script analysis webinar and can’t wait to watch it in full, in peace.

It’s my Star Wars. It’s my Marvel Universe. Suddenly I understand why my kids were obsessed with the post credit sequence on those films. I’m discovering the joy in really sitting in a piece of media; of knowing it backwards and forwards and inside out, of spending time online with fellow obsessives.

Part of being middle aged is reconnecting with your teenage self, and I’m doing that and then some. I’m a fan. I’m a proper fan. I’ve become a nerd for horny queer hockey romance.

I actually never did this as a teen. I was never so into a musician or a band that I wanted to know everything, and information was pretty hard to find. You had to go into a shop and ask a lady if she could order you a specialist publication. Or you had to say out loud to your parents that you wanted money to send to a fan club, or to get tickets to a concert and please can I have a lift and can you ask Aunt Mary if I can stay at her house in Edinburgh or can you take me to London so I can go and see something that you think is trivial and you think I will probably go off before we get there and actually you may have a point, I might, but can you anyway?

Because I never found anything in popular culture to love this much, I’ve always erred on the side of side-eyeing the obsessed. Of thinking that this behaviour was not for me. Maybe, even, that it was for boys. In my generation there were boys who collected comics or transcribed entire series of Blackadder, or who reenacted the Life of Brian into their family camcorder. Nerdy, but kind of normal. For boys.

Girl fans? I kind of bought the line that they were mad or hysterical, and that what they loved was trivial and disposable. Sindy Dolls, scented rubbers, friendship bracelets. Well more fool me. It’s so joyful. I’m having so much fun.

To people who’ve been fans of things before, it may feel like I’m nerdsplaining. The thing is, I’ve never viewed fandom from the inside before.

Please let me just have my joy.

On the other hand, part of me is aware that I’m putting a lot of energy (and money) into this one thing; and as a creative (and self-employed) person, maybe I should be doing Something More Worthwhile with my time.

Or if I can’t be doing Something More Worthwhile, maybe I could make something out of the obsession. A podcast? A show?

As us Heated Rivalry fans (Loons, as we’re known) would say, “Maybe… probably… yes.” So that’s why we’re here.

But also, maybe joy is enough. Maybe it’s okay for me to spend time doing something that makes me feel good? Like a boy would.

Maybe allowing myself to fall in love with these beautiful characters and their story and the director and the cinematography and the set designer and the intimacy coordinator and the books and all of the amazing fan-created writing and film-making is in fact a tiny act of feminism. Maybe? It’s definitely a gift to teenage me.

I’m working on a new show, it’s called Octopus and I have a feeling some of this may be in the mix, but I’m having a lovely time working it up.

You can catch it - in progress - at a bunch of festivals over the spring and summer and at Edinburgh Fringe in the Autumn (more news on this and a ticket link as soon as I have it!)

In the meantime, tell your friends in: LANCASTER (COMEDY FEST - 16th April)

DROITWICH (RIK MAYALL COMEDY FESTIVAL - 30th May)

DERBY - (RAM COMEDY FESTIVAL 5th June)

EXETER - (COMEDY FESTIVAL - 6th June)

And keep an eye out for tickets on this page.

Furthermore, my friend Pauline Eyre and I are working on a silly panel show called Aaagony Aunts for the Fringe and for other things and we’re trialling it in Bristol on 25th April in the afternoon. Tickets on Headfirst.

In October I spent almost a week at my parents’ house helping my mum to declutter. My mum is resolutely strong and fit (my dad a bit less so), but she’s also resolute in a promise she made when she was my age: that her children wouldn’t be torn apart by fighting over her stuff.

Hence she’s trying to shuck off as many possessions as she can bear to while we can enjoy looking at them together and hearing the stories they prompt.

Let me tell you, the stories are legion. Every precious item, whether heirloom, gift or household good has a provenance, a tale, a mythology. One of the best tales is attached to “The Swan’s Down Cushion” but it’s not my story to tell here. (If you know me in real life I will tell you, but it involves a CRIME so I mustn’t spill it publicly!)

In a world where second hand things simply don’t have value any more, where everyone is overwhelmed by a rising tide of hoarded household goods, the only way you can get rid of these treasures is to carefully unstitch the articles from their stories, and try to move the stuff on.

It’s hard. You take them to charity shops whose volunteers peer out from great heaps of other people’s “too good to throw” and baulk at gems like the coat “I had made by Natalya out of tweed my father bought in 1937,” the books that are “my sister Mag’s collection of CP Snow,” (which you have to say with Mag’s lisp, “Theepee Thnow”) - or to the tip, like the five million unframed photos of a long-dead spaniel, “well, you kids had been to stay and we needed to finish the film”.

It was an emotional few days, not least because we weren’t ever going to deal with everything, and we knew it. Mum would wave her hands over a rammed bookshelf, her wardrobe, a pile of photos and say, “You can deal with that when the time comes…”.

The time.

The time will come. We don’t know what it will look like, we don’t know when, but it will come. And when the time comes, going through things and looking at them is an important part of processing whatever happens at the time.

How glorious, though, to go through a chunk of that process while the stories can still be accessed from the horse’s mouth. Oh that’s another good one - but no time!

Sometimes the best stories are attached to the least glamorous of objects.

In the bottom of my mum’s teatowel drawer, we found an unused Irish linen dish cloth from her trousseau (the purchase of which, in 1968, is an AMAZING story by the way, involving two dozen udder cloths. Two dozen udder cloths!). It’s a true treasure, both as a story and an object. Don’t worry, I took it home. If nothing else, because a weakness for textiles is a dominant gene in my female lineage.

At the kitchen table, making mash with my mother’s peeler, using her chopping boards, her potato masher, I’m struck that many of these things are the Utensils of my Childhood. Even if my mum doesn’t have stories, I do. I know things about these utensils. “This is the bowl from my mother’s Kenwood Mixer, long gone. It’s time came after 20 years or so of making our birthday cakes and after many repairs. The bowl stays because it’s an unbeatable bowl for making meringues*.”

(*Yes, I DO see what I did there - unbeatable… meringues - and wasn’t it terribly clever, actually?)

Many are not the Utensils of my Childhood. She bought a new set in her fifties - claiming that lots of the Us of my C had fallen apart and weren’t useful any more, but I experienced something close to grief to know that she’d replaced the potato masher.

You see, I also have a weakness for a good utensil. Years ago, I started a Facebook group for people who want to share pictures of ergonomically satisfying fish slices, camp pepper grinders and beautiful spatulae,

When I set out on my grown up life, I believed that true adulthood would be achieved when my utensil drawer contained only well-made tools: an ice cream scoop with a certain heft to it, tongs that enhance my dexterity, a slotted spoon with authority.

Every kitchen tool would have the same perfect balance of form and function that my tiny red colander has.

Let’s take a moment to admire my tiny red colander.

Mmm… isn’t she gorgeous. You should feel her in the hand!

She is among a handful of items I own that are grown up enough to satisfy these criteria. The rest are interim utensils, the ones I’ve been waiting to upgrade.

This Christmas, I realised that I’m never going upgrade them. That kind of adulthood remains a distant peak, shrouded in mist.

The thing is, my own children are entering their grown up phase. For the first time, this year, they came home for Christmas from where they are living away..

It hit me that my interim utensils are here to stay. The crappy plastic ice cream scoop I threw into the trolley at Tesco one day in about 2010 has become the Scoop of Their Childhood.

The palette knife that I found in a drawer in a flat I lived in in Streatham, discarded by the previous owner because it was old and useless, has smoothed the icing on hundreds of birthday and Christmas cakes over the last 30 years. It has developed its own patina of story.

Unless they spectacularly collapse, I wouldn’t dare replace these utensils with things that are perhaps better designed but less storied. I want my kids to feel that sense of home in our spatulae and bread knife and peeler as well as the building.

I’m forced to declare my utensil selection complete in its mish-mash state. Potato mish-masher? If my children are adults, then god, maybe I am too. And I suppose I’m a mish-mash too.

Bits of me are like the colander: functional and beautiful. Bits of me are like this weird garlic peeling plate I got for Christmas once: pretty but I’m not sure whether it really earns its place in the drawer. Bits of me are like the palate knife: actually very much fit for purpose, even if I would have never have chosen them. There are bits of me that are like the plastic ice cream scoop. I thought I’d be able to upgrade them, but I have to live with them as they are.

Things are never just things, are they?

UPCOMING SHOWS! I’m writing a new show. It might be ridiculous. It’s called Octopus and SO FAR it is booked into the following places:

Bristol Comedy Festival JANUARY 28TH

Leicester Comedy Festival FEBRUARY 14TH

Glasgow International Comedy Festival MARCH 18TH

But please look out for it at a festival near you because I’ve got applications in for a bunch of them.

I’ve talked on here before about how I wear my internal monologue the way Superman wears his pants (on the outside).

If you think I talk too much, imagine if I didn’t. Imagine being in my head where all that noise is. If I didn’t occasionally (often) open the sluice gates and relieve the pressure, what would happen? I’m convinced my brain would blow up like a gigantic balloon, but not a balloon because that’s stretchy.

The pressure would build up and up and my skull would finally explode and there would just be words everywhere. And it would be on the radio : Sally Traffic would say “Avoid Junction 3 of the M32 where there’s an overturned woman and the carriageway is just covered with words.”

I’ve talked about how my brain plays specific tunes for different activities.

What I don’t think I’ve covered is what happens in the gaps. When I’m not actively thinking or doing, or humming a particular song, what happens in my brain?

For some people, I imagine a sort of blissful quiet.

Not for me.

Even when I’m at my most relaxed, it’s noisy. I noticed it on holiday in Crete in October. I was in the sea, lying in the salty water, gazing at the sky, nothing to worry about, as tranquil as you can imagine, full of tasty feta cheese… and there it was:

“Do do do do do do do do do do dodo dooooh (ba dabba dabba doh)”

The hold music in my brain. The background to my every movement: the default. The factory setting. My normal.

It goes like this:

It’s the same tune, over and over again. A tune I appear to have made up. (If you recognise it from somewhere please tell me).

Sometimes I riff on it. It has a rumba-esque percussion line, and little taggy extra bits I do when I’m feeling fancy, but mostly it’s just that. Do do do do… doodling away in the background. It’s elevator music. Whenever I’m between floors, there it is.

Elevator music was invented by Otis and pumped into the Palmolive building in Chicago to comfort the passengers, who were terrified of the noisy mechanism and high speed travel of the first lifts. And I guess my elevator music does the same thing. It soothes me as I ricochet between the floors of my life, in a brain that insists on stopping at every level.

Anyway, I’m about to start working on a new show, called Octopus. I’ve just summed it up as a show about “mental load, what to do when you’ve ‘completed parenting’ and how to live with a mind that can’t shut up” and I’ve got a feeling my Hold Music will be featuring.

Find out where I’m going to be performing/working it out at festivals in 2026.

Around the turn of the 21st Century, I was working in a TV newsroom for a major international press agency. Yeah, baby, I was (kind of) a journalist.

I wasn’t; I was a newsroom assistant - a junior producer. It was my job to book guests who could analyse the stories live on air; to make sure that clips from interviews made it to the gallery in time for broadcast, stuff like that. Yes, yes I did run across the newsroom with tapes like in Broadcast News. Yes, I wrote short pieces to camera for the presenters. Yes, precision and timekeeping mattered. Not my strong suits but there’s nothing like knowing that the news is called the News at 10, not the News at … ooh about 9 minutes past… to help you understand how long a minute is.

Our channel went out directly from our gallery to the desks of city traders. Our news moved markets. If we made a mistake, the value of the Zloty could drop like a stone until we corrected it. It felt thrillingly important.

Honestly, it was one of the best jobs of my life. It was largely reactive, so if nothing was happening in the news, the activity level dropped and we had time to talk nonsense, to sing The Girl from Ipanema in Portuguese and English, to bound across the newsroom in the style of a Shifarka lemur, to bond.

On the other hand, when something happened, everyone was switched on and pointing in the same direction. Dynamic. A team.

There was very little time for politics of the office variety. If someone pissed you off, you told them, someone apologised, you got on with it. When I left the office in the evening, I didn’t have to think about work at all because it was being handled by a different bureau.

It was probably less than a year of my life, but it was a vivid time. While I was working there I stopped smoking, I met my husband, I called the fire brigade because my sausages were perfectly cooked. All the big stuff.

Cut to almost 2 years later. The bursting of the dot-com bubble and various other factors meant that I was no longer working in that field when the biggest story of the period broke.

When Al-Qaeda committed this most cinematic of atrocities, I had just taken a job for a brand new shopping channel.

HSN, the US market leader in proper, old-fashioned shopping telly, were launching a UK service and they recruited a bunch of talent (and David Emanuel, the guy who designed Lady Di’s wedding dress, here very obviously in his comfort zone in the DIY show) to work in a massive purpose-built studio outside London.

Only, the American company had reckoned without British efficiency. The purpose-built studio hadn’t been purpose-built yet.

Cue a several-month delay.

Rather than let us all go, then re-recruit as they would do now, they decided on a period of extensive training in conference hotels and portacabins in the Hertfordshire area.

On September 11th 2001 I found myself in a large Edwardian house that had been converted into TV studios some time in the 1950s, with a bunch of young producers and a mixture of hopeful new and veteran presenters.

I could do an entire nother substack on the people you meet and where they are in their career curve when you work at a crappy cable channel… but I digress.

Anyway, we’re in this TV studio (I think it might have been Rank’s Hillside Studios in Bushey ) The vibe was very much “David Niven or Diana Dors could come sauntering round the corner at any moment”. It had last been decorated in the 1970s, I reckon. There was a panelled drawing room repurposed as a canteen, a once-magnificent staircase, a blousy, slightly-overgrown garden. It was drab in a way that fans of “mid-century chic” can’t even imagine. That 1970s love of brown and orange did not age well.

The presenters were in the studio, learning how to talk for 5 minutes about the features, benefits and advantages of this particular kettle, while showing the kettle to camera 2 and speaking into camera 1 while listening to the producers tell them that - unbelievably - ten percent of the stock is now gone and not to forget to show the audience the maximum fill line.

I’m in an ancient, nicotine-coloured gallery, I was learning how to behave on “open talkback” (absolutely no swearing in the gallery) and how to feed the presenter prompts like “that maximum fill line is going to keep kids safe by making sure that kettle never boils over.”

It’s the least real thing I’ve ever done.

Shopping telly wasn’t “real” telly, and we weren’t even “really” doing it. The feed out of the gallery wasn’t going anywhere, except a Umatic tape recording for training purposes.

During the lunch break we sat downstairs in a panelled drawing room that was a conference room, tables arranged in a U shape. There was at least one TV set on a trolley, like the ones they wheeled in at school.

It was common practice in TV environments at the time, to just have the telly on in the background, I guess to remind us what we were making. LOOK! Telly!

I don’t know whether the TV was already on, whether it was already showing the news, or whether someone got a phone call on their Nokia from off site.

Anyway, we watched the news. We watched that second plane hit. We watched the plane fly into the Pentagon. We sat, and we watched. We watched the horrors unfold.

My muscle memory was still primed to respond to a big news story. I knew what to do. I knew how to hit the phones to find people to talk about it, to sort out satellite lines to New York, Washington and other bureaus, to set up a timeline for an emergency bulletin, to make sure the script had all the VT details in it. I had all these skills, but nowhere to take them.

I felt so impotent. We all did, I imagine. But it was particularly strange to have had this life where I had had a real purpose when the shit hit the fan, but when the turd-of-all-time crashed into the entire ventilation system of a building, no ability to use that knowledge.

So we watched.

I had a similar feeling of impotence 4 years later when - on my way to baby swimming with my three month old firstborn - I encountered 14 vehicles full of SWAT teams off to arrest the perpetrators of the failed bombings of 21st July 2005. That I’d encountered this huge story, that I used to have the ability to *do* something with a big story, but I’d lost that power was jarring.

On that day in 2005, all I could do was continue on, to take my baby swimming, to forget the face of the man who told me to “stay where you are. We’re going past you and there are a lot of us.” (I can’t).

On September 11th 2001, after an extended lunchbreak, our boss came into the room and rescued us from our horrified inertia with the immortal words: “Come on everyone. Those toasters aren’t going to sell to nobody by themselves.”

.

Earlier in the summer I spent a few days at home - by which I mean the place I don’t live.

I mean - of course - the place I’m from.

Angus. Beautiful Angus on the East Coast of Scotland. North of Dundee, South of Aberdeen, it’s not even the good bit of Scotland, but it shits all over anything south of the border. Imagine Northumberland had a baby with West Wales, and it lay in a pram with a frill of ancient mountains around its beautiful face.

Go back four generations on my mum’s side and you find ancestors in Angus; go back four generations on my dad’s side? Angus. I’m from there. It’s odd to be so very rooted somewhere but to have left, and for it not to be betrayed in any way by my accent. I’m a Scot like a vegan’s a vegan. You can’t immediately tell, but don’t worry. I’ll let you know. And I will judge your sausages.

After this recent trip, I came back to England where I have lived for thirty five years, and filled my notes app with things like:

“Dreamed I was repeatedly driving the road back from the beach - that view as you drive towards Friockheim; again and again looking north towards the Cairngorms across the bright of the fields. The light in my eyes and the lightness in my heart and the sand between my toes and the salt in my hair.”

and:

“Down here, the sky is so small and the rivers are muddy and it’s too hot and there are no hares galloping across the barley and where am I supposed to get raspberries? And where are the hills?”

I’ve always missed Scotland. In 1990 I left to go to university in Surrey - nominatively in Surrey, but in reality in a sort of Switzerland of the South East: a point where in a handful of miles in either direction you could be in Berkshire or Middlesex or Buckinghamshire.

If you don’t know what Surrey is, it’s what “they” are thinking about when they talk about England. A mild, wooded, landscaped, Tudorbethan, prosperous, self-satisfied cucumber sandwich of a place. Sliced up by dual carriageways, seasoned with cul-de-sacs, even its name is an apology. Surrey.

You can live there perfectly happily and never own wellies. It has good transport links. Even the pretty bits are a suburban type of beauty. A girl next door, virtually indistinguishable from the other basic bitches in the girl gang known as the Home Counties, the girls with names like Bucks and Herts and Berks!

Imagine Essex went to private school and was actually ruddy good at tennis. That’s Surrey.

Anyway, once, at uni in Surrey, I asked that question: “Where are the hills?”

I remember feeling like Heidi. You might know her from the most poorly-dubbed television programme of the 80s. She was the little girl who ran across the mountains with goats in the real Switzerland. In the books I loved, she went to stay in the city with her friend, but she couldn’t sleep for homesickness. She couldn’t sleep without the sound of the wind blowing through the pine trees. Heidi prowled the city night, seeking the comfort of home and I felt such kinship with her in those early years.

“Where are the hills?” I asked Julie Gardner - the first musical theatre girly I ever met and a resident of the Home Counties. She replied: “We’re on one.”

We’re on one. My outrage.

The hill we were “on” has the A30 on it. And not in a wild Bodmin-Moor-ish Cornish way. In a dual carriageway with a Porsche dealership at the bottom of it and an entire university at the top kind of way.

Not good enough. There’s a proper mountain in the middle of my capital city for god’s sake. Where are the hills?

I missed the wildness, the sky… the fucking sky that wasn’t on a flight path. Where planes going over was an event. We were somewhat North of RAF Leuchars and somewhat South of RAF Lossiemouth. Occasional aircraft were Vulcans on Manoeuvres. They meant something. Not the incessant banal drone of Heathrow.

And so I have always missed Scotland, the country.

But when people asked me about moving back I would say “Well… on the one hand, all my family are there. And on the other… all my family are there.”

I was good at missing the landscape - and the sausages - but I didn’t really miss the people.

Three reasons:

1- ADHD means I don’t, really, miss people.

2- Boarding School from 12 means I got all of the missing people done in my youth

3- I was desperate to escape the sticky web of interconnectedness you live in as member of a small, middle class population. I’ve written about the joys of this in another Substack, but as a young adult it felt suffocating.

In my show, Distracted I joked that the women of my home town were Olympic level judgers, holding the record for Synchronised Tutting, Freestyle Nitpicking and the Individual Damning with Faint Praise. Someone once told my mother she “hung a lovely washing.” Judgement of even her smallest things.

Now, though, at fifty-three, the petty rivalries, the judgements that felt like attacks on my un-realised self are deflected by the flak jacket of being more sure of who I am, of having almost adult children: the delicious fruits not only of my loins but also of some decisions that might not have been approved. Great A level results from local comp - hoorah! Iffy table manners, beautiful hearts.

I have very little left to be judged on.

So now, I’m free to painfully miss not only the hills, the sky, the peaty water of the lochs, the sweetness of the berries, the clarity of the light, but also the people.

Shit.

A bit of a longer read so I have narrated it, extremely imperfectly. You can find the transcript on my Substack. Follow me on the socials @louiseleighcomedy if you want gig news and more nonsense.