Hello!

Whoops, it's been a while! Today: the problem of daylight; some book/film/game recommendations; a bit of what I’ve been up to lately.

First and most urgently: the problem of daylight. Here in the UK we are only a few days from the end of daylight saving time. Soon it will get dark at five o'clock instead of six o'clock. Horrible! But: what if it didn't?

I can't believe I've never written about this in my newsletter before, but did you know, you can just stick with daylight savings time all year round? I personally haven't experienced winter time since I think 2017 or 2018, and I hope to never do so again.

I’ve posted about this before on various now-vanished sites so old friends will know all this already, but look: if you aren’t an early riser and you find winter hard, why not have a think about whether you can keep daylight saving going through winter? Local time! A timezone just for you.

Here is a slogan for this proposal: YOU TELL THE TIME. THE TIME DOES NOT TELL YOU.

Here is another: SAY NO TO BIG CLOCK.

Here is a third, more unwieldy, slogan: WHAT TIME IS IT? IDK, TIME IS MADE UP ANYWAY, WHAT TIME DO YOU WANT IT TO BE?

Here is a FAQ:

Q: SURELY THIS DOESN'T WORK?
Probably not for most people! Definitely not for farmers / zookeepers / teachers / other early risers. Probably not for late risers who live too far north; a friend in Scotland tried it and found the mornings were just too long and dark.

Plus everyone in your house needs to be on board, and obviously it's easier if you work from home and/or do one task all day. Plenty of reasons it might not work for you! But if it does, it's a tiny miracle.

Q: SO YOU'VE TRIED IT?
Yes, pretty soon Terry and I will have been living on non-stop summer time for a decade. It's great!

Q: HOW DOES IT WORK?
You just… decide summer time is still running. You do have to commit. Every computer, every phone, every clock: set 'em an hour ahead. You might need to claim you're in France or something to get them to comply. The first year we did this, we had one clock that kept connecting to some sort of secret time signal and resetting itself automatically and eventually we just put it in a drawer and taped the drawer shut until spring.

Q: WHY?

• With Local Time, it gets dark at eg 5:30pm instead of 4:30pm

• Effortless early rising: 8:30am for you is 7:30 for everyone else

• You’re offset from everyone else so you naturally end up doing a lot of stuff out of peak hour (eg going to the swimming pool, cafés, travel) (this is particularly useful over the flu/covid/norovirus winter season when everyone spends all their time getting sick and then going into stuffy rooms to breathe together)

Q: ISN'T IT SUPER CONFUSING?
At first! But you get used to it in a week or so.

Q: DON'T YOU JUST COMPENSATE AND DO EVERYTHING AN HOUR LATER?
Weirdly, no.

Q: IF EVERYONE DID IT, WOULDN'T YOU LOSE SOME OF THE BENEFITS?
I absolutely promise you: everyone is not going to do this.

Q: OKAY, WAIT, HANG ON, IF THIS WORKS WHY NOT GO TWO HOURS AHEAD
Double daylight saving! Love it, but if you work out of the house or have meetings or spend time with local friends, I think it'd stretch things too far. Try it though! Let me know how it goes!

Q: HEY YEAH, WHAT ABOUT SEEING FRIENDS? WHAT ABOUT MEETINGS?
It's fine, you just remember your friends and colleagues are in a different timezone to you, like when you're having a zoom with someone in Frankfurt or whatever. And if you forget: well, the worst that happens is you're an hour early. I work from home and don’t have kids so obviously this is easier for me but I do know a couple of people with on-site jobs and/or children who’ve tried it and had success.

Honestly the biggest risk is that your friends will think you're a dick if you explain it to them, but if you're seriously thinking about trying this then you've probably already selected your friends partly for their ability to put up with you.

Q: I FEEL LIKE THIS IS EXACTLY THE SAME THING AS DECIDING TO GO TO BED EARLIER AND GET UP EARLIER
In a way: yes, absolutely. In another way: no, because unlike deciding to go to bed and get up earlier, (1) this actually works for me, whereas many many years of deciding to go to bed earlier and get up earlier never has; and (2) this way you never have to look out the window at encroaching dark at 4pm.

Q: I HATE THIS
Okay!

Q: I WISH I COULD DO THIS BUT MY LIFE CIRCUMSTANCES PRECLUDE IT
I’m sorry, that sucks! This probably also isn’t any use, but my other winter coping strategies are “huge SAD lamp the size of my torso that I hug despondently” and “pet cats who are much more affectionate in cold weather".

Anyway! If you do think it might work for you, why not give it a go! Every time I post about this I get a couple of people who tell me, months later, that they tried it and it was great. Presumably there are at least as many people who try it and go "this is awful and I hate it" and then stop, but you know, no harm done.

SOME RECOMMENDATIONS

Moving on: here’s some stuff I've enjoyed recently that you might also enjoy.

(Film) Extra Geography
A kind-of… upsetting comedy about two intensely ambitious teenage girls in boarding school. They play lacrosse, they do a school play with the local boys’ school, they decide to fall in love with their geography teacher as a summer project, etc etc. It’s an adaptation of a Rose Tremain short story, it was written by Miriam Battye who is the lead writer on the upcoming show of The Husbands, and directed by Molly Manners, and it’s just great. All the actors are excellent; there are so many incredibly particular and gorgeously observed moments; it’s very stressful at times but also feels spacious and funny and occasionally — not too often — sweet.

I do think it might hit harder if you were, to pick an example entirely at random, a scholarship girl at a private school who was radically overinvested in her sense of her own cleverness and whose friends once called a meeting to explain that she couldn’t hang out with them any more because she wasn’t interested in boys yet. But I saw it with three other people who also had a great time; maybe it’s one of those stories where the details are so specific and feel so real — the landscape, the lacrosse, the grumpy librarian, the gardens, the trampoline — that different people watch it and pick different things to kind-of go “ahhh of course many people can enjoy this story but MY relation to it is PARTICULARLY close because of these four shared details that I have decided are especially important”.

Anyway, it’s great, strongly recommended! It’s still in a bunch of UK cinemas at least through this coming weekend; here’s a lovely Guardian article interviewing Rose Tremain and some of the people involved.

(Film) Muriel’s Wedding
Speaking of great upsetting comedies, I watched Muriel’s Wedding a couple months back and god, what a movie. It’s so good. I hadn’t seen it since the actual 90s and I thought I should rewatch it because most of the other big 90s Australian comedies that I’ve rewatched in the last few years held up surprisingly well (Strictly Ballroom, The Castle).

It’s so awful! It’s so sad! And yet so watchable! It’s structured like it’s a normal comedy but the joke is almost always “something upsetting happens”. If you want to laugh at things but feel mostly bad most of the time and really just ride that line of “is this so upsetting that I’m going to turn it off” then watch Muriel’s Wedding I reckon.

(Videogame) Twenty More, Somehow Even Smaller, Mazes by FLEB.
A really charming inventive puzzle game with a distinctive sense of humour. Solve a series of small and enigmatic and sometimes quite obstructive mazes; it’ll take you maybe half an hour or an hour. Free on Steam, a sequel to the also free and charming 20 Small Mazes which you might as well play too if you feel like it (but I don’t think you have to have played it to enjoy this one). It’s a particularly great game to play with someone, taking turns to deal with different mazes, handing over if you get stuck.

(Videogame) Tactical Breach Wizards by Suspicious Developments.
Turn-based tactics game where you play as a bunch of wizards with different powers and you have to, you know, break into a series of rooms and deal with the awkward situations you find there. Generally speaking the awkward situations are something like “there are loads of other wizards in the room already and they want to kill you”. This is not a type of game I’m particularly good at but the lower difficulty settings here allow even me to feel like I’m laying clever plans and resolving unexpected problems with aplomb, and presumably the upper difficulty settings let people who are good at this sort of thing feel the same thing, with the difference that for them, it’s true. Also, a lot of really good videogame writing, characters broadly sketched enough to get you into the game quickly but with enough subtleties to keep the story going, some excellent jokes, such a fun time.

(Book) Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset.
A 1928 novel, recently republished, about a light-skinned Black woman in New York who decides to pass as white, and who gets into a relationship with an extremely racist white guy. I mean if you’re only going to read one late-1920s novel about this specific situation then it’s probably still sensible for it to be Nella Larsen’s extremely famous Passing (which came out a year later). But if you’ve got room in your reading life for a second then Plum Bun is here for you. It’s absorbing and fun and sometimes joyful; the main character, Angela, wants to be an artist and there’s a lot about her ambition and training and process, plus it’s a bit of a coming-of-age and also a bit of a romance. The subtitle is A novel without a moral and I wonder if part of what that’s getting at is: Plum Bun is a book in which it is sometimes possible for characters to make bad decisions and not suffer terrible repercussions. Relief is maybe an underrated emotion in books but Plum Bun really gives it a workout. Sometimes some things turn out okay, you know?

(Book) The Strangers by Naomi Alderman.
This is a sort-of memoir/autofiction/whatever of a particularly difficult year or two in Naomi’s life, and also, it’s a science fiction novel about the mimmoth, a new species of not-a-fox not-a-cat not-a-badger wild creature that starts turning up in gardens and streets and fields, across the UK then the world. Obviously this is a quite weird combination of things for a book to be and part of the pleasure of The Strangers for me was that it’s very good at making you just go along with it. Naomi’s world changes and the wider world changes and the threads keep touching each other in a way that feels very organic. Naomi is a real-world friend so I’d heard her talk about this novel while she was writing it and yet it still felt, as I was reading, both surprising and inevitable. It is, I think, very good and very distinctive. Here’s maybe the best thing I can say about it: I got a Kobo earlier this year and one of the things that happens when I finish reading a book on the Kobo is that it tells me how long each “reading session” with that book was, on average. I read a lot while brushing my teeth, and waiting at bus stops, and while oil heats up so I can start frying onions, and while the coffee machine sputters out its coffee, and so on, so usually my average “session” is something between 5 and 15 minutes. But for The Strangers it was 40 minutes, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.

MISC. OTHER STUFF I’VE BEEN UP TO

• Pink Shorts Press asked me to write an introduction to their reissue of Moya Costello’s 2000 novel The Office as a Boat; Moya taught me at uni so this was so lovely to be able to do. (Also from Pink Shorts’ September releases: Olivia De Zilva’s excellent poetry collection Sick Note.)

• Went to Gdynia and Gdańsk, gonna write up my visit to the Gdynia playing card museum next week I think, it was: very good

• Glasgow Indie Games Festival was also a wonderful time, if you’re looking for UK-based games things to go to

GELATO AND MADELEINE UPDATE

Both cats continue excellent.

Okay great, that’s it for now, speak soon,
Holly