The Obsessive Diary

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I have noticed.

I’ve noticed how I miss the morning chats, coffee in bed together, not talking about you but talking about them, our guests, the dramas and scandals and characters. The deconstructing and unpacking, the judgements (loving) but also judgements that two people make cosied up in bed as the sun rises. Content with each other. Their superiority of togetherness. (Ha).

I’ve missed having An Other with whom to carry this load and host this party and luxuriate in this wonder. And enjoy.

I do not miss the hours you took from me when after sex you’d hate that I wanted to go and wanted me to stay while there was a party downstairs of friends and I wanted to be with them. I do not miss the punishment of that. The guilt-ridden leaving. The annoyance. The price you made me pay.

I miss the languid hot afternoons, naked here.

I don’t miss that look in your eye that said bad today and make me suffer the urgent disturbance of your presence on the terrace, in the kitchen, by the pool when sunglasses on I knew you were gone.

I do not miss the tantrums you threw when the house had emptied and it was just me and you and the children, when you would deal out the stored whipping as if you were a third child. Demanding.

I miss how you made me laugh.

I miss how you made everyone else laugh, too. And backgammon. And your arms around me when it was good and not awful. And how you would cook dinner for fifteen people as if it was nothing and how it was always delicious.

I do not miss your barbs and asides and jealousy and meanness. I do not miss your belly but I do miss your knees which were always funny.

This is the first summer of our non-aquintence. I notice these things.

Eleanor

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Glasgow airport alive with Scottish lads off to the game in Boston. I’m assuming it’s Boston. I’m assuming it’s football. I’m not really keeping an eye on these things. Pints and short haircuts, dads with sons nervous to be with the big man now, go on son, get yourself a drink. Young, red hair. Glasses as thick as bottles. Edgy as hell. Foot tapping, fingers twisting under the table. He’ll be throwing up before Monday.

Girls with their hair in rollers as if they should be under the heaters in 1950 stroll through Departures in shorts and fake tans with their make up done and all that’s missing is the outfit. Will they fly all the way like that? They must be going to a wedding. And now the lads that gather about the table beside me are all wearing t shirts, Reiss’s Stag Do. Ibiza 26. It’s not football that’s brought them. Reiss is getting married. They’re going to have a night of it. A weekend. I wonder where the bride is.

Three days later…

It went like this. A propeller plane, it got up ok and it flew just fine but when we dipped through cloud toward Cork the seatbelt sign came on and so did the sudden drop through atmosphere, the pressurised cabin sending my stomach up into my mouth. I am not a good traveller. I get motion sick just staring out to sea. I cannot get on a boat. I once spent three days in bed having made the mistake of Surfboard Yoga. As for rocketing to earth in a rackety two-hundred seater with cheers going up with each churning plummet, even writing those words makes spin.

We made it, I queued for car hire but when my turn came, “I’m sorry ma’am but your licence is expired” and that small piece of plastic handed back. S**t. I didn’t know such a thing was possible. I rang A whose gathering I was heading for. Wait a minute, I’ll call you back and five minutes later my friend’s broken down, they’re at the railway station, can they come to you? A car but no licence, a licence but no car, we, my new travelling companions heading for a solstice gathering in West Cork were a match with me made in heaven. Except this. He was a fast driver. And I sat in the back.

They’d had the journey from the seventh circle and so moods were frayed. Everyone was tired and wanting to get there. The roads to Goleen Harbour are winding small. I got sick.

I left the conversation to keep my head still, my eyes focused on the green hills. I told myself it was going to be okay. An hour in I said, would you mind if I sat in the front? And N said, I thought you’d gone a little quiet. I watched the satnav crawl from 20 mins to 19, the miles dropping with equal tempo to the bile rising. I thought I’m never going to make it and remembered hurling from the family car, sick flicking in the back window. We turned into the final bumpy off road track and I got out.

The sudden firm earth and all hell broke loose. I was vaguely aware of the car stop starting away as J caught sight of me in the mirror, wavered, and drove on. But this wasn’t the end. A gathering in this remote and beautiful place and I was out for the count for thirty-six hours. There was no getting up to see LH play, no feast, no hellos and how are yous. There was me in the cabin with the Irish Atlantic still as a mill pond and the curlews and cormorants and lapwings and knots singing praises to the sea and themselves. There was a body taken and a mind gone to swirling hallucinations. When I tried to stand a force turned the world upside down. When speech was near me I felt the waves churn through my system. A would come and say what do you need? and I would say stillness and silence and away she would go again. There have been thirteen months of change. This, by the cliffs, was the first time I have stopped. She said later she sat by my bed and watched my lips turning blue, my eyes rolling back in my head and I remember a moment her face appearing, Shall we call a medic? and my answer No. I felt calm. And there was also this: seven thousand miles away my son was having something wild and later, when I was back on planet Earth and not travelling dimensions I had seen before but not for many years A and I would put the two together. There was some astral mothering going on. I was with him. I saw. I had been called. He and I were in the dimensions together.

I knew this much later when returned and lying in the stretch tent while H over from Germany entranced us in sound bath - this after I woke suddenly at the dawn, solstice morning, and felt the call to the cliffs, found my way to a group and slid down beside A who thought I was dying if not dead, her face the picture of you’re back! I knew it when I took my mother’s ring, heavy with grief that I’ve carried for a year, and threw it in certain dive into the sea. I knew it when I looked at my jeans and sweatshirt and realised all this time I’d been wearing his clothes. The interconnection of us all. Have I said before that we are one?

And so I danced, when I was returned from liminal mothering and the dissolution of thirteen months of change. I swam and took saunas and cried and danced and praised these heights and this place, Goleen Harbour, portal that you are. C, who was my angel through it all, who kept appearing with painkillers and electrolytes, said you held the place between land and sea for us, and she meant as the party raged and stomped through the shortest night and I lay on my back, the cormorants calling, the ocean a mill pond from my bed. The next day we walked for Gaza. The last night we danced until my boots broke. Goleen Harbour, my Irish friends, the intricate and inexplicable tapestry that places here and here, the higher workings that ask for submission, I love you.

Eleanor

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The beautiful and the damned at Electric House on Tuesday night where I got dinner before the kitchen closed, I sat at my favourite corner table from which I can see most others, they were on the banquets through the arch. He looked like Jim Morrison, it was impossible not to stare. His companions an inch less stellar but with that jagged razor of wild that would see them step too close to the edge. They didn’t see me. Even as I did a fly by to get another angle. They were polite to the waiting staff. Jim Morrison was used to eyes upon him. He centred their table. I wondered if all three of them were nice.

At Euston station the next morning sweating in the closeness of departures, not enough sleep, a heavy bag hauled from tube to concourse, coffee in one hand, a salad already collapsing in a bag. A man twisted with demons and propelled by some sort of rage weaved through the crowd, a small wide woman followed in his wake. I wondered if he ordered her to walk ten steps behind him or she did it for her own sake. They were locked in relationship. I put on my merkaba.

The sluice gate opening of a platform called, the crowd that was me moving as one, the cries and laughter of a man and woman: They looked the same! I’m so sorry! Thanks so much! Oh my God they looked at exactly the same! Two silver suitcases, handles up, ribbed sides, solid and hard and a story revealed itself of strangers happening to stand side by side with identical pieces of luggage. A misdirected hand, a distracted take, a comedy of errors that brought two people together on a crowded day. Would they fall in love? Would they never see each other again? As I descended the ramp I wondered at what point they realised the mix up, ran, said excuse me, I’m so sorry, but -. They were happy about it, laughing and full of apology. It was a beautiful thing.

A Quaker accompanied me all the way to Glasgow, an MA from Birkbeck, a medical journalist and researcher with tendrils reaching into the Society of Apothecaries, she was writing a non fiction paper when it become clear as Preston gave way to Penrith that a novel was trying to get out. I’m a story teller she said and I replied, Yes you are.

The walk from Glasgow Central to Citizen M may as well have been New York City in 1891. It all became clear in the baroque swirls and gothic curls of red Scottish stone where Carnegie got his ideas from; nineteenth century Manhattan is this green place - Central Park and Carnegie Hall, the original Gotham City.

Glasgow Women’s Library once the main library for that side of town, built and filled by Carnegie, the men’s reading room twice the size of the women’s at the time, the children with their own entrance round the back. It’s been in the hands of women for over a decade now and equality reigns. All are welcome. We gathered around a large low table made of outsized black slices fitted together like cake for purpose. A happily crowded room, wonderful humans, all, we talked Greenham and Fallout for almost two hours.

At the end a Polish woman asked me to sign her book with something I’d said. I knelt to lean on a chair and wrote, No f****r has the right to tell you who you are or how to live. She told me about the shock of coming to the UK in the nineties from a Socialist country where gender equality was written into the blood and constitution. I heard a pregnant woman turn down the offer of a seat on the bus claiming it was an insult to her principle. What is the second wave feminism? It makes no sense. I had to agree. I like having the door opened for me. So do I. When ideology imposes its weight over ideas which spring easily you have the makings of a scene confused by its own presence. Always offer to carry my bag. I will not turn you down.

Eleanor

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Kimberly Warner is one of the best interviewers on this platform, she’s also a marvellous writer in her own right and a great friend. So who better to spend an hour with talking about Fallout? We recorded this LIVE when I’d just got back from a whirlwind trip to the US promoting the novel in Boston and NYC; for those who missed it, here it is in full.

And why not order your copy today?

One runaway girl sets a family on fire - and lights the way to liberation. In the bleak winter of 1982, fifteen-year-old Bridget has had enough of Thatcher’s Britain, of being invisible, of her family’s secrets. Armed with little more than a sharp tongue and a fierce sense of justice, she runs away from her suburban life to join the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp - one of the most iconic protest movements in British history.

But Bridget’s disappearance doesn’t just blow open her own life.

While I’m on the subject have you read Kimberly Warner‘s memoir?

What happens when your body becomes uncertain territory?

In Unfixed, Kimberly Warner chronicles her descent into a world shaped by chronic illness, neurological instability, family secrets, and the destabilizing realization that the foundations of identity may be far less fixed than we imagine.

As Warner investigates the hidden truths surrounding her father and family history, she simultaneously confronts an elusive illness that alters not only her physical reality but her perception of the world itself. Water becomes both metaphor and lived experience: disorientation, drift, immersion, survival.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

Home to the farm as Solstice approaches, I left London on Friday after breakfast with J, H and others; in those morning hours as the market crowds with candlesticks and ragged chairs, we meet up the top where they having been meeting for over a decade. Every Friday, that’s where they’ll be, and now me, too. It’s exactly why I moved back to the city, this easy connection, no phone calls or train times involved. Eggs on toast and a coffee, a conversation that dives immediately into heart regulation, memoir and alien life force. H pointed me at the audio book of A New Science of Heaven by Robert Temple and I listened to Plasma all the way from Ladbroke Grove to Guildford where a second root canal awaited me.

This one wasn’t as fun as the first and the first was no fun at all. She, my dentist, is lovely, couldn't be sweeter nor more adept at her craft. We’d already bonded over Mangalore - her birth place and where I landed when I ran away from Uni to search for my boyfriend’s mother and we were on a roll of trust and careful hands but nothing beats metal in the mouth and screaming drills to bring nightmare to a reclining seat. I dug nails into pain points as instructed by J before I left Golborne. I breathed out as the needles went in. An hour went by. My heart rate went up about a thousand notches. She told me I was doing well and I had no measure for that.

Numb all the sunny way back to the station, another train ride to Milford where my car had been gathering sticky dust for a fortnight in the carpark of the railway. Waitrose, because dinner was needed and I wasn’t planning on driving again till Sunday. An odd feeling of grip in my mouth where tooth recreated filled the jagged gap I’d been living with. Home to a garden exploding in summer. Nesting birds darted from the hedges as I drove in and I rang the farmer to say let’s defy those sightline furies of many years and leave them be till November. He wrote back, You must be psychic. I was just about to text you. Jasmine left me no option but to bury my face in flowers at the gate. Artichokes impersonated triffids. Michaelmas daisy’s moved in tides across the yard. Agapanthus stuck up like sentries to remind me of my mother. Poppies budded with opium. Vine tendrils reached for me as I lay on the day bed talking to M. later on the phone to A she asked me what I do with weeds. I said I didn’t recognise the word because the land is singing. The air is pulsing. There is life in great multidimensional stories spilling into every gap and the farm is happy. There is no such thing as a weed.

An email from a journalist told me an interview I did a while back is live on BBC Sounds and I listened to ten minutes of me telling tales of the stones which on hearing in edited bites came across as so other, as if it had happened to someone else, and I found myself thinking wow, how amazing, the wish I’d been there I often have when hearing of other people’s lives enflamed before remembering I had been there, it was mine. We’re such funny creatures, aren’t we?

B is at the flat about to fly to France. I’ll be there in about a week and I can’t wait. J is in Jakarta posting videos of terrifying bike tricks at traffic lights that make me pray he’s on two feet, or at least on a bike taxi who isn’t an idiot. And I’ve been thinking about this third life which is without blueprint. My parent’s are dead, my children are out of the nest and for centuries this would have been the slowing down, the baking bread, the pottering in the garden with arms ready for grandchildren when they come but in the lull nothing but a looking back - but not for us. We are the first generation for whom a third life is granted. I see a decade before grandchildren, thirty years of an energy for who I am now; hands free and working. Eight months ago in the tumult of endings I stood in my kitchen, the quiet overwhelming, and said aloud, I have to get out of here. I had a vision of waiting at that table for my children to need me, the oppressiveness of a farmhouse that once overflowed with endless meals and Lego turned silent like a ship when the wind drops, a vessel caught in the doldrums, rocking me into ancient age.

My therapist asked, Do you miss the hub? and I said yes - the clamouring cacophony of family life, the mess and exhaustion, the no time for anything else yet somehow I made time, publishing three books, bringing up words as well as children. This is your third life, she said in response to my wobbling. There is no blueprint, and I thought, yes, that’s it. My mother worked throughout our childhood, we were a blip fitted into the slats of an architectural practice rather than the central pivot of her world and so when we left, although I cannot know for sure, I imagine she hardly noticed. Her house remained full of the waifs and strays with which she’d filled it. Her days and weeks and yearly routines remained exactly the same. She did not up and leave and rent a flat, there was no need. I’ve worried my shift in focus, the farmhouse here but without me in it, will have wobbled my children - their anchor in place but the captain jumped to a swifter, more agile vessel that as we speak is cutting through waves like the farmhouse never could; I am revelling in the ability to tack left and right at a moment’s notice, to see the sun hit waves at entirely new angles, to feel the spray so close, the light so piercing. B said I like the idea of you being at the farm but I wouldn’t want you to feel stuck. God love them both. Here we are. Third life. Let’s go.

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Thank you Sara Santa Clara, Angie Browne, Francesca Bossert, and many others for tuning into my live video with Simon K Jones! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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Due to being a tech nincompoop I've just found this in drafts when it should have been posted weeks ago. My apologies to Louise! Here it is, belatedly, my conversation with Louise Fein. Thank you to everyone who tuned in, and please do join me on Monday when I'll be LIVE with Geraint Anderson.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe