Meanwhile, Everything

It is the end of August 2026, which seems as good a point as any to look back over the last year and ask:

What the fuck have I been doing?

Quite a lot, as it turns out, which is irritating because I have spent significant portions of the year announcing that I have done absolutely nothing. Apparently I have a demanding definition of nothing.

I have written, dug around in the past, investigated dead people and occasionally living ones, and discovered stories I didn't know I had. I have sold a house, more or less, and bought another one theoretically. Most of my possessions are in boxes. I have worried about children and grandchildren, started something new, acquired several completely unnecessary objects and learned considerably more about lamps than any reasonable person needs to know.

I have also developed strong feelings about a rat in somebody else's toilet.

And I have spent an extraordinary amount of time waiting for solicitors to do things.

So, yes.

Nothing.

The writing has probably been the biggest surprise. Not the fact that I can write. I've always known I could write. What I hadn't realised was quite how many stories I already had.

I had somehow imagined that stories required events. Something must happen, preferably something with a beginning, a middle and an end. This turns out to be nonsense. Sometimes a story is a conversation. Sometimes it is a person. Sometimes it is something that happened when I was eight, occupied about four minutes of chronological time and has nevertheless remained lodged in my head for half a century.

Sometimes it is funny now and wasn't remotely funny then. Sometimes it was funny then as well, which is generally more useful.

The difficulty is that once you start recognising your own life as material, everybody becomes a potential character.

Including me.

Especially me.

This is unfortunate for all concerned.

I have also spent a lot of the year going backwards, although not sentimentally. I haven't been gazing at photographs while Eva Cassidy plays in the background.

I've been poking things.

There is a difference.

Adoption means there have always been gaps in the record. People I didn't know. People I knew about but didn't know. Stories passed from one person to another until nobody is entirely sure where the original information came from. So I've gone looking, and DNA is wonderful for this because DNA does not care what anybody said happened.

DNA is the family member who arrives slightly drunk at Christmas and announces something everybody else had agreed not to discuss.

Unfortunately, it does not provide footnotes.

Instead, it gives you a person sharing 37 centimorgans and leaves you to work out what the hell that means. This is how I have ended up following names through records, looking at shared matches and developing suspicions about people who have been dead for years.

Other people have family trees. I appear to have a cold case unit.

There are recurring names, villages, marriages and people somebody was warned away from. There are stories which look increasingly plausible and others which collapse the moment you shine a torch on them. I enjoy this far more than is probably reasonable because I don't want the nice version. I don't even particularly want the dramatic version.

I want to know what was true.

If the truth is boring, fine. If everybody behaved impeccably, unlikely but fine. If somebody was a complete bastard, also fine.

Just don't give me the commemorative tea-towel version of a family.

While I've been digging up the past, I've also been physically dismantling it.

I am leaving the house where I grew up.

Even writing that feels peculiar. I've lived elsewhere. I've had other homes, raised children and lived whole sections of my adult life beyond these walls. But this house has remained the geographical headquarters of an enormous amount of my history.

And now I have sold it.

Sort of.

English conveyancing does not permit declarative sentences. I intend to have sold it. Somebody intends to buy it. I intend to buy another one. Everyone has agreed, money exists and the houses are all still where we left them, but apparently this is insufficient.

For months I have existed in the peculiar state of simultaneously moving and not moving. Most of my possessions are packed. Furniture is in storage. I have mentally occupied the new house to such an extent that occasionally I have to remind myself somebody else still lives there.

Meanwhile, solicitors continue to do whatever it is solicitors do when they aren't actually exchanging contracts.

Packing has been another education, principally in the fact that I own far too much stuff. This is objectively true. It is also apparently not going to stop me acquiring more.

There is something about preparing to move hundreds of boxes of possessions that makes me think: You know what I need? A large antique glass bottle.

I cannot explain this.

I've tried.

Packing the house where you grew up is archaeological. There are layers of my parents, my children and me at various ages. Things that belonged to people who are dead. Things I kept because they mattered, things I kept because I couldn't decide and things I apparently kept because there was plenty of cupboard space.

Every so often I find something and have absolutely no memory of acquiring it. Occasionally this is delightful. Occasionally I hold it up and wonder whether I have been burgled in reverse.

Then there are the objects that ought to be disposable and aren't.

A green Portmeirion egg holder has survived.

Obviously.

I like her.

What she will do in the new house remains unresolved. She has no transferable skills.

She is coming anyway.

And while all this has been happening, actual life has continued, which has sometimes felt unreasonable.

There have been things this year that frightened me properly. Illness. Hospitals. People I love being vulnerable in ways I couldn't fix. There have been moments when the entire landscape of my attention has changed in seconds. That's what real fear does. Everything else falls off the table.

And then normal life creeps back in while the frightening thing is still happening. Somebody needs feeding. A dog wants something. An email arrives. Someone leaves a bowl somewhere stupid. The washing machine finishes. A solicitor wants something else.

Somehow these things coexist.

You can be carrying something enormous and still become incandescent because somebody has failed to put something in the dishwasher.

This is not emotional inconsistency.

It is family life.

The children have continued being the children despite being adults, which I suspect is the contractual arrangement, while the grandchildren have supplied a completely different scale of importance.

Small children are extremely useful correctives to adult bullshit. Adults can spend an entire morning discussing something apparently consequential.

A child discovers a worm.

The worm wins.

Quite right too.

They also say things adults have learned not to say. I increasingly regard this as a loss of skill rather than a developmental achievement.

I've encountered some spectacular people this year too, some in real life and some online. The internet remains an astonishing invention which gives me immediate access to almost the entire accumulated knowledge of humanity and then uses this capability to show me a stranger discussing her bodily functions.

I have deactivated Facebook again.

I only reopened it to sell things or give them away. That was all I wanted from it. Instead, it presented me with people as though we were at some dreadful networking event.

Anna, have you met Sarah? She tells 180,000 people things you wouldn't tell your GP.

No.

Take Sarah away.

I have read too, and some of what I've read has annoyed me.

Good.

I like being annoyed by an idea if it gives me something to think about. I've become suspicious of writing that asks me to nod. I'd rather have something I can argue with. Give me somebody prepared to say the impolite bit. I don't need to agree with them. Sometimes disagreement is the entire entertainment.

There are few things more satisfying than reading a paragraph, saying Oh fuck off aloud, and immediately turning the page.

That is engagement.

And while I've been dismantling one house, I have spent an unreasonable amount of time mentally inhabiting another.

There is another house waiting at the end of all this. I have spent so long looking at photographs of it that I occasionally forget I don't live there. Furniture has migrated between rooms. My desk has enjoyed an especially nomadic existence. Walls have changed colour without being painted and rooms have acquired purposes their current owners know nothing about.

I have planned a future in considerable physical detail.

Books here. Chair there. Lamp there.

No, not that lamp.

Different lamp.

Larger lamp.

At some point I decided that an enormous ceramic vessel ought to become a lamp, which resulted in my acquiring a working knowledge of brass plates, threaded tubes, E27 fittings and lampshade rings.

This information is now permanently occupying brain space where something useful presumably used to live.

I regret nothing.

Somewhere among all this, I also began building something new for myself. I won't attempt to turn that into a triumphant paragraph about reinvention because I haven't reinvented myself.

I was already here.

I've simply started giving some ideas that have been knocking around in my head somewhere to go. That feels different. Quieter, perhaps.

And considerably more interesting.

All the writing and digging has made me think about stories, though. Not because I've suddenly started looking at things properly. Looking has never really been my problem.

The more interesting thing is what happens when you go back and look again.

Families can tell a story confidently for decades without anybody checking whether it is actually true. Memory is peculiar. Two people can remember the same event differently and neither necessarily be lying. There are things everybody remembers but nobody mentions, things one person remembers and everybody else has forgotten, and things I didn't understand when they happened because I didn't yet possess the information required to understand them.

Age changes the story without changing what happened.

I can look at something from childhood now and see the adults.

As a child, adults simply were. Now I can look at them as people who were my current age, or younger than my children are now, making decisions with whatever information and damage and stupidity they happened to possess.

Sometimes that makes me more sympathetic.

Sometimes considerably less.

Both are useful.

And now I'm fifty-nine.

Sixty is no longer an abstract future age inhabited by women who own sensible coats. It is next year.

This does not trouble me particularly. I don't feel as though I am approaching the end of anything. If anything, the evidence suggests I have a problem with accumulation.

Projects. Stories. Questions. Objects. Plans.

I have bees, chickens, dogs, an unreasonable quantity of furniture, several unfinished pieces of writing, a house move that may eventually become an actual move and a family that generates material faster than I could ever write it.

And somewhere out there are still several dead Irish people refusing to explain themselves.

I am busy.

Perhaps that's what has been peculiar about this year. Not that everything has changed, because it hasn't. Not that I've learned to look properly, because I was already looking. It is that so much of it seems to have been open at once.

Stories I thought I knew. People I thought I understood. Memories I'd filed under childhood and left there. Family legends. Evidence. What I want to write. Where I want to live.

Sometimes I've looked again and thought: Yes. Exactly as I remembered.

Sometimes: Oh.

Sometimes: Well, that's bollocks.

And quite often: That is much funnier than I realised at the time.

I don't feel a great need to extract wisdom from any of it. I distrust years that end with lessons.

Life isn't a corporate away day.

I've had a year. Some of it has been wonderful. Some of it has been frightening. Some of it has been tedious beyond human endurance.

A surprising amount has been extremely funny.

And now, at the end of August, most of my physical life is sitting in cardboard boxes while I spend my time opening everything else up.

Which, now that I think about it, is probably the story.