CULTURE CLUB

Ten years ago I started up this club – gathering, soiree, salon, thinly veiled excuse for a rant and a piss-up, whatever – with a couple of mates of mine because basically I was lonely and fed up and frustrated.

I’d just jacked in my teaching career after 16 years and moved from the centre of Brighton to the suburbs. My social highlight of each day was the school run.  I was working from home, struggling to get my new writing career off the ground.  And most of my energy seemed to be going into studiously ignoring stuff that needed.... doing.

Oh Lordy, the Doings... Doing the breakfast. doing the laundry, doing the lunch, doing the shopping, doing the school run, doing the homework, doing the dinner, doing the dishes, doing the tidying up, doing it all the next day all over again.

How had this happened to me? I was supposed to be living my ‘dream life’ of writing but somehow instead I had found myself in this never-ending silent mortal combat to stop the ‘doings’ taking over.

I didn’t have a problem with self-discipline. I can be very disciplined.  But I was conscious that even when I closed the door on all the doings that needed to be done and sat at my desk,, they didn’t go away. They just grew, this silent demanding Doing monster, insatiable and invincible.  Peeling paint; weeds taking over, laundry piles growing, dank fusty corners turning mouldy.  

And the school run. My only face to face encounters in the day outside my family.  The bright smiles.   The chirpy banter. Oh, the chirpiness of it all.

And it was one afternoon, while I was pairing up socks, ‘fuck-saking’ under my breath over the fact that only two in the entire pile had a matching pair, that my brain went cold. My body went cold. I started crying. And I couldn’t stop. 

Those carefree times in my life – the summers I spent lazing away over backgammon boards in Greek tavernas and swimming in crystal waters;  the siestas I spent gazing into my partner’s face; the nights I tirelessly spent ranting and dancing; the feckless hours of indulgent lazy times during which I did absolutely fuck all but read, daydream and doze...   that now seemed like the kind of fantastical life I could only read about in a book.

If only I had the time to read one.

Even the idea of doing a Book Club – reading a book chosen by someone else – felt like a luxury and an ‘ask’ that I couldn’t find time or energy for.

The turning point came when my mate said she felt exactly the same – only for her, the cold moment of existential despair had come when digging soggy cheerios out from between the kitchen floorboards with a knife...  

Our conversation was enough to make me realise that I wasn’t alone.  That maybe there were more women out there screaming unheard in their homes over the way the small daily domestic frustrations - the ‘doings’ – were taking over just WAY TOO FUCKING MUCH...

Socks, breakfast cereal...  The relentless petty smallness of it all.  The repetitive meaninglessness of it all. The unpaid, unvalued thanklessness of it all.  The inescapable necessity of it all.

The energy and time it eats up. The things it prevents us from achieving. The pension and money it doesn’t earn us. The lives it thwarts us from living.  The books it stops us from reading...

Where’s the beauty? Where’s the meaning? Where’s the bloody fun?

How do we fill ourselves up? How do we enrich ourselves?  How do we find the energy to do things that aren’t draining? How do we find the pleasures of a book when we haven’t got enough time to read one?

These are the kind of questions we decided that Culture Club would set out to ask and tackle.

And the theme of the first one in particular: Carpe Diem or in plain English, How to seize the Fucking Day (and stop the Doings from taking over).

Watch this space because soon I’ll be sharing it…