mostly david ephgrave

The plum tree my wife bought me for my fortieth has started showing tiny shoots and leaves, which is a handy metaphor for a new beginning as far as these things go. It's surprising what such a tiny aspect of the natural world can do for your mood. Sitting in the garden now in the sun has given me a burst of energy I didn't have before. It's like a balm for the mind. Until I moved out of Hitchin, I've never had a garden, aside from a communal one at my first flat, which we never used due to some deep-seated need to hide from our neighbours. It's the same reflex that makes you pretend you've not seen someone you know on the street, only more intense, as you've less reason to chat to the guy who banged on the ceiling the night before because you were listening to Bob Dylan too loudly. Oh, those carefree student days (when I swear no-one smoked wacky baccy). (For an insight into our antics, my flatmate Mark was once an hour late for his girlfriend because we wer...

I tried to apply a practical mind today by doing some gardening to prevent my incoming directionlessness mindset from scuppering my day. The current circumstances, both personally and on a wider scale, feel like the perfect storm for low mood and lethargy. Meanwhile, I'm standing at Ground Zero, steeling myself against my depressive susceptibility (like Gandalf, dosed up on citalopram, screaming, "YOU SHALL NOT PASS"). At least I'm prepared for this, having spent years attempting to carefully manage my mental health to varying degrees of success. The pandemic, however, has left many people who've never considered what's a healthy strategy to stave off depression and anxiety, ankle-deep in a river of faeces, sans paddle. And that precise location, for those of you familiar with the app what3words, is fuckwit.johnson.shame. The change of scenery from laptop to garden definitely helped, as did focusing on a physical task. It's like when I disappear for an ho...