New Year News

Marmalade and memoir

I have seen a lot of Instagram posts and Substack blogs about how to do January well. Apparently, we should hibernate under a pile of feathery quilts while being lightly toasted by an electric blanket. No hang on, we must be out running, slithering along the icy lanes counting our steps to the designated 10k. Oh actually, we should be sober. Or maybe that’s drunk, should we be drunk? After all it’s not the best month in the calendar. Don’t forget to eat piles of green veg and make bone broths they say, but neither is this the time to deny yourself delicious things, so I guess I deserve to finish the Turkish Delight. January sure is confusing.

I am choosing to take my advice from the brilliant psychotherapist, Julia Samuel, who recommends watching lots of TV over the next few bleak weeks. My love for The Traitors continues (mainly because of my love for Claudia Winkelman) and I am midway through Black Doves, Nobody Wants This and Bad Sisters depending on my mood and who is on the sofa with me. Reading wise, I have had to swerve into murder mystery for work reasons, so I am the last person to read How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie and then I have Fifteen Wild Decembers by Karen Powell lined up. In the kitchen, it’s a Diana Henry pear and pecan cake as well as soups, stews and Sevilles.

Last year, I didn’t make marmalade. I bought the Seville oranges, and they sat in a bowl on the kitchen table, growing more gnarly and mold speckled as the weeks passed. Ditching them would be admitting defeat. It would be accepting that I had ballsed up January and thus ruined the beginning of the year. I had to throw them out in March.

This year, I will be better. In seasonal preserving at least, I can’t vouch for other areas of my life. So, I am currently multi-tasking, laptop balanced on the worksurface while the contents of the jam pan rolling boil and the citrussy steam clouds my glasses, filling the air with its sharp scent. It is helping warm me up as snow begins to fall outside. I may even be able to take off my coat at some point today.

It reminds me of a few Januarys ago which I wrote about in the first chapter of my forthcoming book The Honesty Box (published by Bloomsbury on 27th February). It’s a sort of memoir come diary about a particularly difficult year which turned into something quite life changing.

I know the book’s subject matter will come as a surprise because I have not talked about it openly before, not even amongst some of my friends. And the post I put on Instagram was a bit confusing, making it appear that I was going through a divorce so for clarity that is not the case.

The truth is we (Mr P and me) had reached a point of mutual separation in our marriage. A conscious uncoupling. Or more like an exhausted, raw, ravaged, fearful unhinging. Mr P battled with depression and, after over two decades of supporting him, I just didn’t feel I could do it anymore. That’s where the book begins, with an end. Well, that and marmalade. If we don’t include the prologue which gives some insight into our lives before the decision to divorce, including a particularly triggering Christmas.

What transpires, after a well-timed conversation, is Mr P’s eventual diagnosis of ADHD, swiftly followed by ASD (autism in old money) and a year of discovery, denial, medication and some sort of salvation against the backdrop of village life and city memories. In the midst of it all, we decide to distract ourselves in the garden (a place of refuge for Mr P) and set up an honesty box (one of my obsessions). I promise there are laughs too!

That’s it in the shell of a small nut, maybe a hazelnut, but there is so much to discuss, share and consider and I hope to be able to do that here with you. I want to delve into some of the stories that didn’t make it into the book and keep a journal through the forthcoming seasons, as well as charting the progress of this year’s honesty box which I am very excited about. There will be garden updates, kitchen matters and occasional recipes as well as the odd showbiz anecdote.

In a way, this Substack will pick up where the book stopped, and I will be writing more about my experience of living with someone making sense of a neurodivergent diagnosis. Having resisted charging for this newsletter, I now feel it is important to step up and make the commitment to a valuable transaction of words as many of my fellow writers have done. I haven’t before now because I wasn’t able to provide a regular and sustained communication and did not want to put a price on that. I also knew I couldn’t talk about a large part of my life and that felt disingenuous to my readers. From spring, I will begin to write more for paid subscribers.

I hope this is something you will stay with me for, but if not, there will still be occasional ‘free to read’ updates plus dog and sea pics on Instagram. So, my Substack pals, here’s to 2025 and all who sail in her…