#71 A Slow Sunday Scroll ☕️

a trip to cornwall; my novel cover reveal(!) & book recs

Dec 15, 2024

∙ Paid

Welcome to The Hyphen! I send out a 'Sunday Scroll’ email like this every other weekend. It’s a round-up of full of things I’m reading, loving, inspired by. For just £1.30 a week (you can read everything behind the paywall!) <3

It’s December and I don’t want to do any work. My friend

Katherine May

’s book Wintering is back in the book charts after five years of publication. Learning the word ‘Wintering’ has helped so many people navigate these dark months. The importance of lighting a candle, of wrapping up warm, of running a hot bath, of accepting your bodily limitations. I went for a walk yesterday and the trees looked so bare and empty — funny that: I feel pretty bare and empty too! I only learned the word ‘torpor’ recently. The tank is a bit low now and I need to conserve energy so I can be of service in 2025.

On Instagram, which I barely look at these days, I am attacked by Reels of influencers telling people off, with one caption reading: “YOU ARE YOUR CHOICES”. Today it was a woman eating berries in the gym. She springs out of bed early, does press-ups, eats her berries and perfect avocado slices and journals with perfect handwriting. She asks her followers: “What do you choose to do today, to better yourself??”

… yikes. Me? Right now I choose to Winter. No berries in the gym I’m afraid. It mostly means spring-cleaning my house, working, wrapping up Christmas presents in my pyjamas, making a big warm stew that takes hours in the oven, drinking coffees or hot chocolate with full fat milk, enjoying the thickest of blankets and fighting off a cold. I cannot be my best self in these dark months. I choose to allow that to be OK.

For so long, I ignored the seasons. Really wasn’t engaged in what my garden looked like up close. Now, I understand how interesting it is that my burnout symptoms reared their head so aggressively in the winter months. Enforced Wintering. Wintering-by-choice is a much better state of affairs.

It’s December and I’m moving very slowly.

In my old life, pre-burnout, I didn’t like time off. It sounds quite mad now, writing that down. Who doesn’t like time off?

This, of course, always made me feel like an alien, because everyone around me was celebrating Fridays with Prosecco in the office and that song by Hard-Fi Living For The Weekend. Everyone around me couldn’t wait for weekends, and I dreaded them, found them boring. I felt like a leaf drifting aimlessly in the wind. I preferred working.

I did an ask me anything post the other week and someone asked me what life was like now, post-burnout. The truth is, everything has changed: my priorities, my friendships, the way I treat my body, the media I consume, the way I think, how I spend my time. The biggest difference perhaps: how I properly enjoy down-time. I like weekends! Not only enjoy them — I find it all velvety and delicious. Like lying in a field of warm grass, or sipping on a hot chocolate by a roaring fire, or having lavender oil rubbed into my shoulders. Down-time is utterly blissful. How did I not know this before?

Side note: I loved

Clover Stroud

’s recent piece on maternal burnout. Such an important conversation and it affects all of us differently. Kids or no kids, if you never ever learn how to switch off [or aren’t allowed to!]…. you can eventually burn out.

My friend

Selina Barker

has a theory, and that is: the bigger you want your life to be, the better you have to be at resting.

Before understanding how to properly rest, I became truly concerned at how I could keep up with this life I’d built myself. People expected a lot from me, attending book events meant lots of travel, writing books is a bit like running a (mental) marathon, my diary fills up with stuff I want to do with people I like, I want to be out in the world. I was confused at how I could keep up the pace again, after such a specularly bad burnout episode.

Then I remembered what Selina had said. Recuperate with as much intention as you work. I hadn’t realized quite how important the yin is to the yang. (Rest can also mean many different active things: swimming, fishing, reading, painting, dancing — not just lying horizontal staring at the ceiling, which is fine too.)

On the topic of down-time: I spent a delightful weekend in Cornwall with my family at a new coastal aparthotel on Watergate Road called SeaSpace. It is brand new and geared towards families, with different sized apartments for self-catering right on the coast with beautiful blue views. The team at SeaSpace got in touch and asked if I wanted to stay for a weekend (full disclosure it was a “press stay” which meant we were given the rooms complimentary and paid for everything else). I brought along my husband, parents, sister, brother-in-law and baby nephew.

The drive there was calm enough but as soon as we arrived, Storm Darragh let rip. The howling high-pitched ghostly sounds, the windows bending against the strong forces, the heavy rain, the froth from the sea swirling around like snow, the freezing temperatures. We stayed inside for the whole weekend. We made countless cups of tea, eggs on bagels, we put The Holiday on, cuddled the baby, napped, went for a swim in the indoor heated pool, read newspapers, I got my Tarot cards out, we stayed cosy and warm. We did ‘nothing’ together and it was glorious.

Once upon a time, I would have been tense and distracted, wanting to busy myself with my laptop. And now: oh how delicious it is to just be.