No such thing as

free time.

“It is all falling indelibly into the past.”

Don DeLillo, Underworld

After the school run a week ago, it was a grey morning, unseasonal for July.

I directed steps down the lane towards the ford. I had no agenda, just a vague sense of peace that I needn’t rush off to log in for work like usual. It felt decadent, this untroubled time. I don’t usually walk down to the ford in the morning but it felt like the right thing to do that day.

The river is flat here and so shallow the riverbed seems almost to rise through its surface. As I watched the steady flow, I noticed something: some small creature blemishing the surface of the water.

It was the black burr of a tangled bumblebee. It swept straight towards me and I dipped a hand to pluck it out.

It was as wet as a drowned cat. Bumblebee fuzz plastered to it in clumps, one antenna bent and wrapped around its head, wings a draggled mess.

I let it crawl across my palm. The bent antenna righted itself. It really was a cold morning and the bee looked near-frozen. Gradually it stopped moving at all, thorax stopped pulsing. Spread rigid, legs splayed on my finger, I thought that’s it. The death of a bumblebee.

If I was a bumblebee what would I want to see in my last moments?

Not my skin, I thought, and found a dog rose. It crawled slowly across a blossom and fell back into my hand.

Then, long forgotten, I remembered: sugar water.

I carried him (he seemed to me a he, although perhaps I’m projecting, as the mother of a son) into my kitchen and boiled the kettle. I mixed two heaped tablespoons of sugar in hot water and then cooled it from the tap.

Gently, I dabbed a drop near his head and stepped back outside.

He lifted both antennae. With the tiny sandpaper tongue of a dog, he cleaned every scrap of sugar juice from my palm.

The effect was instant transformation: thorax pulsing, both antennae dancing.

With one quick flick, he flexed wings. They sprang apart, whirred to action.

And, in a blink, he took flight, soared twenty feet up and vanished around a corner of the roof.

This is a continuation of The Longest Day, on which I’ve temporarily lifted paywall. If you already read it, you’ll know I too have been plucked out of the river.

On a separate note, I just finished Travels with Charley, a long-deferred pleasure.

In it, there’s a great scene in the Mojave desert, where Steinbeck has two coyotes in the sights of his rifle. He aims at the heart of one, then the shoulder of the other—but in the end decides to let them live. He wrestles with his inner farm boy—they’re vermin, pests! Kill them, quick!—and puts away his rifle.

“When one man saves another’s life,” he writes “he becomes responsible for that life to the end of its existence. For, having interfered with a course of events, the saviour could not escape his responsibility.”

I owe the bee a lawnmower-free garden.

Steinbeck owed those Mojave coyotes a duty of care for the rest of their lives.

He left open two cans of dog food by the side of the road.

—

Today, it was sunny. I wanted to be outside. Joel wanted to sit inside on his laptop.

“We’ve had sunny days for thousands of years,” he said. “I’m reading about Svelte 5¹!”

I went for a run. At this time of year, the cow parsley is fading, desiccating to seed. It’s been replaced with pink star thistles and chicory, the “blue weed”. Plenty to keep a healthy bee busy. Meadow cranesbill, a type of wild geranium, splashes the lanes with purple and stalks of yellow agrimony—liverwort—intrude roadside.

Place agrimony under an enemy’s pillow and they’ll never wake again, says the plantlore.

So many people are already asleep, I think, no need for agrimony.

The crab apples and blackberry blossoms are fulling out, filling gaps in the hedgerows. There are massive webs of interlinked tunnels. Spiders, I think, but actually: the webs of moths, cocooned and waiting to emerge.

“Hello old friend,” I murmur to a stately oak.

—

I ended up at the posh coffee shop. It’s a place near me, the kind of spot with truffle fries and fishbowl-sized tankards of gin and tonic. There’s a languid contentment in the air. England won in the football last night. Women with thick ankles, hungover partners and blank expressions sit wondering what’s so special about the countryside anyway.

The first time I had a mental schism (that I know about) was during the pandemic. My ex-boyfriend and I were giving it one last go and he suggested we go to his mates for a BBQ. This was at a nice house on a nice street in a nice part of South London. The couple did some jobs I don’t recall—she was maybe in HR and he, a lawyer, like my ex?—and they had a small blonde child. There was a spread of olives and dips and hams on their shiny kitchen island.

It happened about an hour in, as I sat at the marble island sipping a fishbowl-sized G and T.

The three of them, the couple and my ex, morphed in front of my eyes. Their noses shrank, eyes narrowed to slits and voices to squeals. I could feel them pressing around me, all haunches, pink skin and bristly forearms. The other guy grabbed a wedge of ham and shoved it in his mouth, laughing. I watched my ex’s hand on his drink. There was something about his hands I never liked: red, stubby, perma-curved in the shape of a computer mouse. He was born in the year of the pig, I suddenly remembered, referred to his own children fondly as “piglets”.

He once jokingly told me that he wasn’t much of one for tidying. This was in the early days, before I saw it coming. He said the person in a relationship with the lower threshold for messiness should do the tidying. I shouldn’t be punished, he expostulated, just because I have a higher threshold for messiness.

I recognise it now as casual Twitter misogyny, some pearl of wisdom he’d scraped off some dubious online shore. Back then I just laughed and said, haha, I have a high threshold for messiness too.

Mine was much lower, turned out, than his. Surprise, surprise.

Anyway, they all stood there, laughing at something I don’t remember. I fled my body for a moment and sat on the glass roof above that kitchen island, looking down at myself with naked disgust.

This latest schism bears little resemblance to that one, save that it too involves a shedding of the parts that no longer serve. Then it was about how I spent my love. Now, it’s about how I spend my time.

The two are not unrelated.

What we spend time on, when time is so precious, is the highest expression of love.

_

Thoughts about how I spend my days are high on my mind. I suddenly have a lot more time.

When I was little, I thought my idea of heaven would be that you get to watch back a video of your whole life when you die and see everything again. You would only get to revisit what you had done in waking life so you better make it count. All those floats down the river on July 4th, all those hours playing with friends and in swimming pools and eating ice cream on a hot day.

Later, as a young woman, I still thought I’d get to live it all again: epic climbs in the High Sierras, powder days in deep snow, smoking weed under the stars. Train rides in China. All those hours of great sex, the butterflies, the early kisses, the orgasms. The better life you had lived, the more cool shit you had done, the better heaven would be.

Recently, I’ve been reconsidering. I don’t need to see some of my days again. Some things I don’t feel the need to watch back. I see them enough, when I don’t want to. Perhaps that’s what the fast-forward button was invented for.

Instead I’ve been thinking that maybe heaven would be my own personal archivist. Someone to come along a few weeks before my death, maybe with a tape recorder and a clipboard and a filing cabinet, and help me go through the Notebooks, pin relevant things together, date them, number pages in sequential order. It would give me a great deal of peace to put things in order before I go.

Jesus, calm down, I can hear you thinking. Melodramatic, what? You’re in your thirties.

This is true. All being well, I hope to be around for many more years—but the future is never guaranteed, is it.

Much misery is occasioned by worrying that no one will care about putting the detritus of your life in order. No one will care to make sense of it. Shoeboxes of notes and diaries will be spat on, hawked into the trash².

A personal archivist is a pipe dream.³

When all the infinite depths and chasms of the mind blink out, all that’s left are the senseless scraps.

That’s what this newsletter is about, really. The question of what we leave behind perplexes me. I’ve written before how so often in life it feels like trying to grasp a long-forgotten thread. Call it whatever you want: collective consciousness; a past life. I don’t know either.

There’s no one sitting in the clouds with a projector screen and a tape reel, waiting to show me my highlights.

If a human lifespan is, from birth to death, a bridge through time, the only way to span beyond is to leave something behind.

Oxford, today. Quaking Bridge.

The only way those moments come again is to write them down, read them back.

That’s why I write about my travels and my good days, in Vienna, Paris and Copenhagen. I write them so I can read them in years to come and live those days again. If the certainty that I have something to leave behind feels like misplaced confidence, well, nothing humans haven’t been doing for millennia.

Now feels like a good time to re-introduce my self, in all this life with all this litter.

I’ll try to keep it brief but I am not skilled at reducing myself to a byte⁴.

I’m Jill. I write about the things that happen to me, to give shape to the fluid mish-mash of life.

What am I interested in?

I’m interested in the past, and how we all write our stories, even if we don’t write them down. I feel like a parishioner of the past and often wonder am I its prisoner or its product. How much of it (or any of it?) is mine?

I’m interested in the grey matter around the edges of black and white. Often, I think the only truth is everyone’s conflicting truths at once.

I’m interested in the real world where things don’t line up or ascribe to definitions; the uncoded and uncode-able world where, no matter how many times you run it, the test won’t pass. I’m also interested in people who think only in Yes or No: those God-complex mouse-jigglers⁵ who think, if you burrow “deep enough in the shit to see the texture patterns”⁶, the real world can be coded like a computer programme.

Here’s the crux: if it can be, it already is.

So we may as well get out there and enjoy it instead of sitting inside, trying to replicate it again.

What’s changing?

Going forward, I’m going to be publishing more paid-only content.

I write a lot and edit pieces together like stitched cloth. I work hard at it. If you like what you get, if you read my pieces every week, or if you maybe open them more than once or maybe even just think about a line afterwards, please upgrade to paid.

It’s just me. I don’t have a team of assistants. I don’t pay an editor or a “brand consultant” (perish the thought) or a “content strategist” (NEVER). The closest I have to any of this is my long-suffering boyfriend Joel who suffers through reading all my pieces before I publish, bears my ire when he offers a pointed (correct) critique and edits my voice-over audio, because I don’t know how to do that. I don’t pay him, except in blowjobs (kidding! Kind of).

Often I feel that writing these essays saved my life—or at least saved me from a lifetime of lies.

When something saves your life, it owes you care in perpetuity for the intercession.

Please upgrade to paid and leave me the equivalent of a couple cans of dog food by the side of the road.

1. This is, I understand, something very exciting to software engineers and no one else.

2. Spit on that thang. Incidentally, here’s my take:

3. Unless this newsletter *really takes off or I ever finish that fucking book….

4. I said it ages ago. Facebook was the short form self. Substack is the long form self.

5. I love this phrase “mouse-jiggling”. I came across it in the office, where the screen on a scrolling feed of the Daily News informed me that twelve “mouse-jigglers” at a different bank had been fired for, well, mouse-jiggling (you know, jiggling their mouses to make it look like they were working, that old chestnut). I love it no less because when I first wrote it down, my phone auto-corrected it to “mouse-juggling.”

6. Love everything about this phrase and image and concept, courtesy of the totally-not-run-of-the-mill Mills Baker, here:

Mills Baker messes with the Best