Weekend supplement
+ a few gift ideas
Long post, might chop off in email (in my experience they never actually do but we all dutifully say it anyway)
Good morning! Last Sunday I woke up ready to go to the Aldeburgh Documentary Festival to see this film, and… couldn’t get out of bed. I tried, and nearly fell over. Waves of nausea, room spinning etc, sort of like being monumentally seasick while being really drunk and having acute morning sickness.
(An inexcusable scenario, unless it was the late 1700s and you were a lightly pregnant teenage runaway who’d joined the Navy posing as a boy and had to roar and drink the rum to blend in, and also there was a wild storm. But you’d be tenacious! You’d be brave! You’d have mettle. By the end of the decade you’d be a sea captain, and the old men in the Admiralty would gather —
‘Tis a wondrous thing to conceive, sirs, yet the wench stands as Captain now. Let this matter be kept in the strictest confidence, for were it known, the clamour it would raise would shake the very docks’
— and your 10-year-old born-at-sea daughter could scarper up to the crow’s nest in her sleep. God, wouldn’t it be fun to write historical fiction? Sadly I don’t think I could keep it up).
Anyway - I tried getting up again ten minutes later and this time did fall over. And so it went on, all day, and on Monday too. I literally couldn’t stand up, let alone go downstairs, let alone unpack boxes, let alone open my laptop and work because moving my eyes made me want to throw up.
On Tuesday, day 3, I melodramatically started wondering whether I’d had a mini stroke. I urgently summoned my partner and daughter. ‘Is my face sagging on one side? No, look properly! Quick, because I could die any minute of a MUCH BIGGER STROKE! What do you mean, normal? Are you sure? The problem is you’re both really unobservant,’ etc etc.
So I called the doctor (who, to be fair to me, did immediately check for stroke symptoms). Long story short: BPPV, or Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo, which is an imbalance in the inner ear. Very common in women 40+, apparently. The solution is something called the Epley manoeuvre. It works, but it took several goes over several days.
I’d never heard of any of this, and both the diagnosis and the remedy felt so hippieish, like it should all be happening in a patchouli-smelling room with dreamcatchers, because my ear’s vibes were off and we had to realign its chakras. I generally love hippieish remedies - and believe in quite a lot of them - but when you can’t actually stand up you do slightly fancy Big Pharma.
The new house is old, so it has sloping, crooked floors upstairs. I didn’t think anything of it, and in fact have been sleeping like an absolute log. But the bed was steeply slanted/sloped - like, pretty dramatically - on my side. Turns out a week of sleeping at a mad angle really buggers up the delicate component parts of your inner ear, which obviously affect your balance, and I’d comprehensively messed up mine. The bed has been raised and is now completely straight and I am fine again - still mildly dizzy, but it’s abating. When I went out for the first time on Thursday afternoon, I walked like a drunk, very slowly and carefully, lifting up my feet like a pony, and not in a straight line (which is why I couldn’t make the Foyles Christmas signing, in case any of you looked for me - very sorry, I’ll try and sort out a London alternative although I can’t believe it’s nearly December already).
So weird, the whole thing. Moral of story: don’t sleep in madly sloping beds for more than a night or two, even in e.g. charming country inns with wonky floors - the floor is fine but the bed really needs to be absolutely level.
Right, let’s get on. Oh - Brodie update. The surgery went very well, he’s home (sans spleen), he’s pissed off at being in a cone (we’ve now got him one of these, much less bothersome) but he’s otherwise cheerful and trotting about as of old. We’ve bought him some more months, and for that I am very very grateful.
This week’s post for paid subscribers has a few present ideas from me (many more in my shop, which is basically Santa’s Grotto at this point, e.g. look at this fireplace bunting), a roll call of my favourite gift guides by other people, and the usual links to things I’ve especially enjoyed reading, watching or listening to recently.
But before that, look at this from the multiply award-winning garden designer Jo Thompson, whose The Gardening Mind is the most lavishly-generous-with-expert-knowledge newsletter on the whole of Substack. Her lovely post about my book was the first thing I saw when I rose from my sickbed. I nearly died of joy.
You can read Jo’s piece for free below. I have to warn you that at some point before Christmas I’m going to put all the nice things people have said into one giant post. It’ll be nauseating, but these things can’t be helped. Nobody writes books pour la gloire. (Actually I suspect some people do. Not me! I write books for sales).
I couldn’t have hoped for a nicer write up, let alone someone I so admire. Here’s the obligatory link to Home, the book. It makes a supreme Christmas present for anyone who likes their house/flat/room, or would like to like it more.
By the way, you can gift subscriptions to any Substack by using the formula addressofthesubstack/gift, so for instance jothompson.substack.com/gift. Hers makes a particularly good one I think, both for experienced gardeners and for total novices, such is the breadth.
I write these posts for paid subscribers once a week, and for free subscribers once a month. This is a paid post. The most recent free post is here. All posts auto-paywall after 4 weeks.
Present ideas
An enormous jar of outstanding, award-winning marmalade, with a satin ribbon around it. Who wouldn’t be pleased?
