Does anyone else feel like they are living an episode of Doomsday Preppers right now? (one of the best shows on Netflix, in case you were wondering – it follows folk in the States who have a very specific doomsday scenario in mind and are preparing for it, mostly by buying guns apparently)

I went to the shops earlier to buy a toaster, and while I’d seen all of the toilet roll and soap panic-buying posts, I was still surprised.

And listen guys, here’s the thing. For some people in our community, stockpiling is legitimate. If you are vulnerable and don’t have a strong support network, the threat of being asked to self-isolate is very real isolation. People who feel they have no-one to call on may be very reasonably buying enough of products to ensure they can properly self-isolate should they need to.

There are other people who might feel the need to stockpile. Those who don’t have the financial means to buy food ad-hoc on delivery, or who fear they may not have the funds to buy essentials if they rise in price during a crisis.

While at the shops earlier however, I ended up at the checkout behind a woman who had 6 bottles of disinfectant, an entire shopping bag of crisps, and two full trays of beans.

And some mascarpone.

I am not necessarily shaming this particular woman. Maybe she was buying extra goods to give to a charity or a food bank. Maybe she was buying for vulnerable neighbours. I know I don’t know her personal story. But she didn’t look like that was her motivation, and I think she is reasonably representative of a lot of people out in the world right now. Selfish people, who are not considering the impact to their wider community of their greed. That is what it is at the end of the day.

The same kind of people who have bought all of the pasta in the UK are still going out to busy pubs each night, still planning trips across the country to see elderly relatives, and still (somehow still) not washing their damn hands properly. Because they don’t think they’ll get sick, but if they do then they have plenty of food in, so they’ll be fine.

I have no faith in the UK government to properly manage a crisis, or effectively contain an outbreak of Covid-19. I have more faith in our experts, but they need to be heard. I have even more faith in the staff of the NHS, but they are reliant on resourcing from our pitiful government.

As ever, I have the most faith in our communities. Community action is powerful, and people are generally good, and caring. But those communities can only be properly supported if the greedy people take a long hard look at themselves and consider their priorities.

Let’s look after our neighbours, not threaten them with (proverbial, or real) guns, and fight them for the last tin of chopped tomatoes. As a community we are far stronger than that.

And listen seriously. If you can afford to buy mascarpone as part of your panic-shop, you don’t need to be panic-shopping.

Listen, when I was 19 and just starting a blog for the first time, it was easy.

Why? I hear you ask. Well. Let me tell you. It was easy, because I had nothing else to do. And now I am a grown up and so instead of blogging I do things like hoovering, or choir accountancy, or baking, or sometimes I just slump in front of the TV because I am SO TIRED.

Honestly, how do people do it. Maintaining a blog presence while also being an adult is mad.

I do still have things I think about writing. Ideas pop into my head often. But there’s something about getting home at 11pm and writing a blog post that I just can’t get behind. There’s a little whisper in the back of my mind that honestly feels like it is somehow unprofessional to post ramblings at 11pm. As if any of this has ever been professional in the first place.

Tonight writing is easy, because tonight I am cloistered and hiding (fairly unsuccessfully) from the fireworks. People who know me personally will have heard the fireworks rant plenty of times before, but maybe a stranger will read this post, so here goes.

Why on earth, in the world we live in, do we still think it is acceptable to sell practically anyone brightly-coloured explosives? Why? They are offensively loud, stupidly expensive, and easy for a stupid person to light and throw at a car. Or a cat. Or another human person. To explode. Like explosives are designed to.

I am not here to suggest that UK bonfire night is on a par with the horrible violence that exists in other communities around the world, but it continues to baffle me that we don’t just ban fireworks except at organised events. Some reasons:

• They look better, because they are professionals and not your uncle Steve
• They cost less, because you pay a fiver to get in rather than spending £100 in Asda for a makeshift light-show in your grubby garden
• People who don’t want to be involved don’t have to be (for example, a bloke in a 4×4 would not have just pulled up opposite my living room window earlier and set off 20 minutes of fireworks on a residential road, because no-one is paying £5 to watch that. I’d have paid him £5 to leave but I didn’t really feel safe leaving the house because he so evidently had no clue what he was doing)
• Just go spend time with other humans rather than bothering me
• No seriously
• Also, pets would not be traumatised
• Also also, other humans with very valid reasons (babies, the elderly, those with mental health conditions) could avoid the fireworks

I really don’t like bonfire night.

Except for the interesting history, where some people wanted to blow up the houses of parliament (as we all do, regularly, at the moment) but they got caught, so we…light fires…and blow things up…to celebrate them…not?

Honestly, the whole thing is a mess, and I’m not just saying that because I’m a tired blogging adult.

**minor content warning, sexual harassment**

I’ve repeatedly insisted over the last weekend that I’m going to write a ranty blog post, and now here we are. Get ready, you’ve been warned.

I have been known, at times, to wear relatively low-cut tops. My favourite most comfortable vest tops all have quite low scoop necks, and I am aware that I sometimes draw attention because I have quite a lot of cleavage on show. Let me be clear. It is in no way indecent, and I am 100% comfortable in the clothes I choose to wear. I understand that sometimes people catch themselves looking, and I don’t honestly mind. If I did, I’d wear different clothes. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with accepting the fact that we all sometimes find ourselves looking at something, knowing that social rules dictate we should look away. It’s fine. It’s a thing. Whatever.

I was walking along the south bank of the Thames, in central London, last Friday. About 6pm, still nice and light, still very busy. It was a lovely evening.

And then a person actively changed the path they were walking to make a bee-line for me, and once they got close to me, they dipped their head towards my chest and I could feel their breath on me for a moment before they carried on walking. Smooth as you like.

It made me want to scream. Imagine believing you have the right to do something like that. But of course, it’s a massive issue. I’ve been grabbed in the street before, I’ve been bothered in nightclubs, and I’ve been harassed walking down the pavement. And I live in an age where somehow, I feel lucky that I’ve gotten away with so little. LUCKY. As if.

The problem is, we’re still not teaching each other that personal space is a valid thing. Recently a new colleague quite emphatically rubbed/patted my arm in response to something I’d said. They were trying to be affectionate maybe, or show they were engaged in what I was saying, but all I wanted to do was tell them not to touch me, because we’re still basically strangers. And yet I didn’t say that, because I didn’t want to offend them.

I was in a coffee shop over the weekend, and a parent joined the queue behind me with about 5 children in tow. They were messing, and the parent was distracted, but two of them just kept bumping into me, elbowing me, and nudging me around. It was a pretty small coffee shop, and once again I kept my mouth shut, but it totally enraged me.

Listen. You can look at me and form views. Fine. You can just stare at me because you fancy me. Fine, whatever. But do not touch me. I am not yours. And teach your children not to touch strangers and to respect others’ personal space. Because you should already be teaching them that strangers should not be touching them, and should be respecting their personal space. It’s an incredibly simple, but apparently vital lesson that we are just missing as a society.

Some people are touchy-feely, and I do understand that. I know my colleague wasn’t trying to make me uncomfortable. I know those kids didn’t even know I was there.

But that doesn’t make it ok.

Because not teaching your kids to respect others, and not respecting others space when you should know better, is what leads grown adults to think they can go up to a stranger on a busy street and breathe on her breasts. And as I cannot stress enough – I am one of the lucky ones.

I maintain** that one day I will write the story of my life. And when I write my novel (read: when I cop out and compile this blog into a book, which apparently works for some people and frankly they aren’t great at writing so I don’t see why I shouldn’t benefit as well, but I digress) I am thinking of the above title.

Mediocre – well, it is a bit. Today I had a huge life drama when I realised that the person who is trying to sell me their house probably won’t succeed in selling me their house, because they are terrible at paperwork and adulting. In the grand scheme of my life, that’s  big news,  but in the grand scheme of the world it’s not exactly a tsunami. My drama is very much the teacup-based storm type.

Middle-Class – in every way really, from my background, worldview, lifestyle, the whole kit and caboodle (inc. idioms, apparently)

Millennial – despite my best attempts I fall firmly in this category. Not least because I write a blog, which is almost as millennial as avocados and depression.

My book will include wonderful anecdotes of failed attempts to lose weight, terrible dates,  and awkward encounters with old acquaintances whose names I can’t quite remember. It will be oddly interspersed with playlists and reviews of musical theatre productions.

Occasionally, it will attempt to be “real” writing and deal with controversial topics (badly) or to be incredibly deep and meaningful.

Mostly*** though, it will be remarkably average. Which I like thinking about, because on days like today when it feels like most things aren’t going very well, it reminds me that all of my woes are terribly average, storm-in-a-teacup problems. And if a whole world of exceptional writers who have experienced really fascinating, troubling, amazing experiences have lived through them, then I’m sure I’ll be fine.

___

*Yes, I am aiming to use every ‘M’ word in the English language
**5 points to Gryffindor
***more additional points

Let’s be clear. There’s really no upside to fireworks.

They are momentarily pretty, sure, but there are so many things which are pretty. Stars, sun-kissed hills, ice cream, rainbows, art (misc). And most of them are pretty for far longer than fireworks.

And of the above, only one is an explosion, and stars are far enough away that I’m not immediately afraid for my life. Fireworks, on the other hand, are often very nearby, and are (in this country anyway) often handled by people who are wildly ill-equipped to manage explosives.

That’s really all I have to say.

Down with fireworks.

It’s moving into summer, days are long and everything is getting really vanilla. Not vanilla in the sense of exotic and full of tiny black specks, but in the sense of plain and safe and totally fine but not really thrilling.

Now, after the amount of things which have happened and are happening to people around the world, I’m keen to point out that I don’t need my life to be more thrilling. We feel stuck solidly in an era where the more plain and simple your life is, the better. But there’s no getting away from the internal buzzing that your mind makes when you’re a person who is driven by things-going-on in the absence of those things.

I am driven by things. What is the next step, where is the next aim, is this the next milestone and how do I reach it? Small things or big, I need them going on to function, or I descend into a world of shoulda-coulda-woulda whispers.

Those whispers found their way into my head recently, and made a little nest of possibility which began (accidentally) to feel like a real, tangible goal. I found myself making plans without waiting for step 1 to happen, and imagining all the magical world of things I felt like I was about to get involved in. I kidded myself outwardly into thinking I wasn’t getting dragged under by the whispers, but really I was.

And then the vanilla tide swept in this week, and I realised that the castle in the air was just a slightly funny-shaped cloud (as they often are) and back down to Earth I came with a mild thud, cushioned by all of the vanilla.

It’s not that I’m bored. People who get bored haven’t tried hard enough to be interested. It’s more that life is just happening near me right now, and I’m happening near it, and it feels like I can’t do much to alter it, mostly because would I want to? Why would I shake it up, force a change to something so perfectly inviting as nice, plain, satisfactory vanilla? People who do that are crazy. That’s the kind of thing Donald Trump would do.

So for the moment it’s living on for me, waiting for the thing to happen which turns my vanilla into raspberry ripple again for a little while.

Zingy.

I like to think that I’m not quick to anger, except for certain situations. I get very angry very quickly if someone is rude or inconsiderate, because I fundamentally believe there is no excuse or cause to make the people around you feel bad. But that aside, I’d say I have a long fuse.

So for me to say that I was furious ALL DAY today, is a fairly big deal in my books.

My fury stems from having spent a long time now watching something done badly. For weeks I’ve been plagued by that gnawing feeling you get when you see someone do something and think “why would that be the best way to go about that?” – not, to clarify, because anyone is doing anything wrong per se. I get this a lot with boyfriend though, when he cooks. You’re not wrong to put dry pasta into cold water and then let it heat up as the water boils. But WHY would you do that. W.H.Y.

This feeling provokes me into my worst bad habit, which is doing things which aren’t mine to do. Things in which I have no expertise other than the gnawing feeling that I could do them better. That feeling is a lie.

I took several things into my own hands today, and don’t for a second think it was the best use of my time, because it only  served to irritate me more, to the point where I ended my day petulantly insisting that I would move some barriers myself because I didn’t believe the builders would do it (under my watchful eye, the builders did it).

And this is really the sticking point, because like all habits, it’s difficult to give up when it actually scratches an itch. My itch is things not being done, and knowing that if I get petulant enough things will get done is a very dangerous motivator.

I guess what I’m saying is, I’m grumpy and I can’t be trusted to not tell builders what to do.