Trees, newsletters, netball
Look I "started" a "newsletter" because I thought: I guess I need a way to be in touch with people when Twitter dies. But then I didn't actually send any newsletters because of course I didn't. But now I have a big project that I'm going to want to tell people about eventually and so I figured: ah yeah I theoretically have a newsletter, I could use that to inform people when the project is public. And then I thought: no, Holly, you can't only write to people when you have a big project to tell them about. And THEN I thought: oh but I could just write to people anyway, in the accepted manner of a newsletter, with some interesting facts and/or incidents, and do that occasionally on an ongoing basis, and that way when I announce the big project nobody will suspect a thing. Hey! Okay! Right! I hope you're well!
FACTS REPORT: Did you know! That netball! Was invented by someone who sent off for the official rules of basketball and then misunderstood them? I kinda hate netball but I absolutely love this way of coming up with a sport.
INTERNET REPORT: God there really is a part of me that thought that, having escaped Twitter, I would be a new and less procrastinatory person, that I would make the bed every morning and turn off all my screens at 9pm and stop abandoning books three chapters in and just be better. But it turns out the problem was inside me all along. I no longer read twitter but instead I spend even longer than I used to reading advice columns, and also I am occasionally "on cohost". What does it mean to be "on cohost"? Well, do you remember Livejournal, but you don't really miss it, but you do just suddenly remember sometimes that it used to exist? If so you are probably already on cohost and if not then I don't imagine you'd care for it. But just in case, here is my cohost.
GARDEN REPORT: just a bunch of tulips out this week and somehow the squirrel is visiting but not tearing their heads off in malice. If this keeps up I might stop running out the back door and waving my arms whenever I see her digging recreational holes and biting the last wilting flowers off the winter-flowering viburnum.
In other garden news, there is a big sycamore tree just on the far side of our garden wall and. Well. You know how sycamore seeds are really neat and aerodynamic and fun and the first helicopter was made by tying a bunch of sycamore seeds onto a diving bell or whatever? Anyway today I pulled about fifty baby sycamore trees out of our garden, and there are at least that many left. The garden, to be clear, is about three metres by ten metres and half of it is paved, so this sycamore is extremely ambitious and hard working and I guess I'm excited to thwart it every spring for as long as we live here.
BOOK REPORT: this week I enjoyed Celia Fremlin's The Jealous One, which is from 1965 and is a kind-of early domestic thriller in which a feverish woman dreams that she has murdered her terrible neighbour, and then wakes up to find the neighbour missing. Funny, ominous, extremely precise, mean enough about tulips that it made me briefly doubt my own gardening decisions.
Okay great, goodbye,
Holly