I will take the time to write down my day yesterday. I am not sure it’s of any interest, but on the rare occasions when I have written about the minutiae of my youth, I find it quite interesting to look back on. It doesn’t quite have the madeleine effect of transporting me back to that time and place, partly because we never write about the things that in hindsight are those memory sinks. For a 90s teen, that would probably be a particular shade and cut of black Levi’s jeans, none of which are reflected in all the fake retro stuff I see now. Or the Vogue photo shoot from 1995 with Bridget Hall, a model who disappeared.
I was not feeling particularly resilient when I got up.. The whole family had gone out to the Scouts AGM the night before, which I was back too late to join. It looked like it was great fun. I had eaten a cheese sandwich and played my violin. When they got back, I somewhat stupidly stayed up watching a Poirot with Richard, which was not very good. I was slightly hungry and took melatonin to ensure I stayed asleep.
I went to work on the 7.25 train, whcih was later than I usually go, but I was busy watering tomatoes and talking to Ingrid a bit. She was grumpy about something. It was a hideously overbooked train, with no air conditiooning, and a drunk person sitting next to an empty seat with a bottle of Stella. I clocked all this a little too late and asked him if the seat was free. He claimed his friend had gone to the toilet, and somwhat aggressively starting asking “is it really that full on this train”, to which I replied yes and swiftly walked on, hearing him ramble on to whoever would listen.
I stood in a corridor, frustrated and hot, reading something frustrating but clearly not memorable enough in the Daily Telegraph. I decided to read Substack instead, partly because it seems oddly good at the terrible wifi on the train. There was a strange article, which caught my eye because it involved a Gittlin in Los Angeles, who surely must have been related to Mike Gittlin (CEO of Capital Group). It was talking about the loss of meaning as a result of the decline of religion, and of course now I can’t find it again. It was quite depressing, partly because I thought it was badly written – admittedly it was a speech, and speeches always read oddly.
I did my make-up in the toilets at Euston, because I usually do it on the train and of course couldn’t.
So when I got on the Northern Line, I was deep into Twitter, because on bad days, I suppose I end up indulging slightly destructive behaviour like looking at Twitter/X. There was a random tweet by a bloke called Adrian Hilton, whom I vaguely follow. I think he’s a journalist. Either he or his brother seem to be alcoholics, not sure which one though. Anyway, he had posted a vaguely interesting open question asking women whether they would feel comfortable going to a pub and having a drink on their own, or whether that would create difficulties such as the assumption that they were there to find a man. He helpfully said he would have no idea, since he is a man. So I humored him, and wrote something along the lines of “At 48, this is not really an issue any more, but in my 20s I would absolutely not have done that. 90% of men are lovely, but it’s always the 10% that get you.”
I got out of the tube at Tottenham Court Road, and shuffled my way into the tunnel connecting the Northern to the Central Line, which at that time of day is always a bottleneck. So I was still on my phone, because the big pile of people wasn’t really going anywhere. I was just writing “the 10%”, when a man punched me on the arm and told me I was a stupid bitch. So I told him to fuck off. He seemed absolutely unhinged, and I walked on as quickly as I could, hearing him still screaming about “fucking bitches”, and a not inconsiderable commotion that appeared to involve several other men preventing him from running after me. There, indeed, was the 10%. It did not even seem remarkable to me, although I was taken aback by the level of rage. Men know they can hurt women with no physical repurcussions. Most people are more afraid of physical pain than of anything else, and some people are unhinged, so they want to inflict pain with no physical repercussions. Fortunately, they are completely outnumbered and constrained by the 90% of men who want to protect women and children, and build a society. Men are builders and destroyers, and women look after the smooth running of the operation. All COOs should be women. I digress.
I got to work; I had a few meetings with vendors, and with the delivery team. It was a fairly normal day, but I felt inadequate. I had a meeting with a senior investor, to whom I had sent my thoughts about AI. His approval is important to me, and I left the meeting feeling I had not really landed the points I wanted to make, nor given him the material he needed. I talked too much, and did not clarify the framework enough. He listens, and thinks, and then asks a question that makes me belatedly realise my whole thought process was simplistic.
I wanted to extract some concessions from the vendor on their licence structure, which I also felt I had not positioned well, because I had misunderstood the data set his subsidiary controls, versus the data set his parent company owns. I did not know enough about their product to really have an interesting conversation about how to think about their MCP connectors and what the future looks like. He was very flattering and put me in touch with his boss, but that usually means I’ve provided too many ideas that are beneficial to them.
I left the office quite abruptly at 5.15, hoping that I could somehow see some of the school play at Conrad’s school. He was really keen for me to see it, and I had bought tickets, but accidentally booked for the same day as my violin lesson. I had practiced the Paganini for many hours, and was hoping for some praise or progress. I had thought about rearranging the lesson, but it is almost never possible.
I got home just before 7, by which time they had all left. I should have got my violin out immediately, but I felt defeated and sat on the sofa, scrolling on my phone. There was some leftover carbonara, which I warmed up in the microwave and shovelled in with little enthusiasm. It never reheats well.
I eventually got the violin out and played the piece through a few times. It still has so many weaknesses, but I had improved a few of the higher shifts, I thought. So I drove off, thinking that I had created quite a high-stakes situation, because I was dsiappointing my child purely to pursue my own hobby. It had to matter, and it had to be worth it.
Julian’s room in the music school is upstairs, and faces onto the main road. It is warm every day of the year. On a 28 degree day, it is a furnace. I had completely underestimated that, and I didn’t really understand how to go about playing, with my fingers sticking to the ebony and getting absolutely nowhere near 7th position. Julian had many things to say. None of them involved any concessions to the heat, or really anything that hinted at progress. He doesn’t really work like that, and I am usually quite happy to work through the corrections and work out what he is looking for. Most of the time, he’s really looking for me to spend more than 2 hours a week practicing, but I had practiced closer to the required 6 hours, so I was expecting more. The rhythm was still wrong. The intonation was of course wrong. The bowing was “all over the place”. There is a small section of the score that isn’t covered in scribbles of bowing and fingering, mainly because I have never got it wrong, but of course I was getting that wrong too.
He picked up the dreaded pencil, and marked everything up with completely new bowing patterns, which I couldn’t understand. I have spent 4 months on the existing bowing, and until today it didn’t seem to be an issue – unless he hadn’t mentioned it. I tried what he had written. I could not do it. I entirely lost my cool and waved the bow and my violin around, in proper primadonna fashion, wailing about the heat and how this was just too many corrections. Then my shoulder rest fell off, which at least gave me an exit from my dramatics and I tried to achieve the thing he wanted some more.
This was the going-wrong section, which had previously gone unremarked:
Admittedly, that shift to 7th position has never gone well, but the section beforehand was a pleasing reach to the harmonic E. That would have been quite a reasonable criticimm of my poor accuracy in reaching shifting, which wasn’t really helped by the sticky fingers in the heat. But then there was also this section, which is easy but apparently that also needed the bowing marking up for the first time:
But my improvement in this mad scale went completely uremarked:
I got back in my car, crying and angry with myself and the world, at my total lack of skill at anything. I decided with new resolve to stop being pathetic, and texted Richard to ask how I could possibly gain entry to the play. Of course there was no reply, so I thought to myself,
“No, I will not be a quitter, I will not give up, I’m driving there and I’ll figure it out”.
I got there about five minutes later, speeding along, and vaguely hoping that my arrival would coincide with the interval. I parked up in Sainsbury’s, and jumped out. Tears banished, marching through my life to the front door of the school. It was locked. I tried texting Conrad and Richard. No reply, not surprisingly, since I imagine they were following the play and not looking at their phones. So I finally, entirely gave up, and wandered around Sainsburys for a bit, buying a Fanta I didn’t particularly want just so that I’d have something to do. I sat in the car for 20 minutes in the hope that someone would text me back and tell me where I was supposed to go, and eventually drove back home. I missed them, missed being part of their lives, giving up everything that matters to me in exchange for money or a sense of achievement.
The resting writer 
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