The Awkward Girl's Guide to the Week | In Which There Are No Taylor Swift Tickets

... but there are quite a few Taylor Swift references, unfortunately

[Hi, it’s Amber again, with The Awkward Girl’s Guide to the Week: my rundown of what I’ve been reading, watching, buying and otherwise getting up to over the last seven days. This newsletter is free to all subscribers, but a paid subscription will get you access to exclusive, subscriber-only content, and will also help keep me out of the Victorian workhouse I’m headed to at the end of the summer, so if that sounds like it’s worth a few quid, you can upgrade below…]

AS IF Taylor Swift told us we’d get our email about tickets on the 5th, and then changed it to the 14th. I mean, I feel like she’s just toying with us at this point, and these tickets will literally never go on sale. Which is probably a good thing, because…

On the plus side, there is one extra Edinburgh date, so, as far as I can gather, I’ve registered for the chance to have a chance to buy tickets for it, but I won’t know if I do, in fact, have a chance to buy tickets until next Friday, at which point I’ll be on holiday, and will no doubt miss the notification. Yes.

This is all so stressful. Especially given that the last time I tried to buy tickets for something was R.E.M in 1995, and that’s so long ago that there was no internet, so I had to get up early and walk from my student flat to a phone box, then stand and call the ticket “hotline” (Having got the number from a newspaper. A NEWSPAPER, people!) repeatedly until I got through. Then no one would go with me, so I had to go on my own. Sad trombone.

(Looking back, I have no idea why I went to a phone box? I mean, we had a phone in our flat? And it’s not like it would have been in use at 7am, or whenever the hell it was? Anyway, fond memories of standing on the Bridges in Edinburgh, in the early morning light, for … whatever reason I did that.)

This whole “register-to-register-again-to-get-a-code-or-maybe-not” thing is MUCH more stressful than that, though. In fact, it’s the actual worst. I am not cut out for this cutthroat life of concert-ticket-buying. I feel like one day universities will offer degrees in Getting Concert Tickets, that’s how complex it is. I’m going to have to go and have a lie down as soon as I’m done writing this.

Anyway, in less Taylor-centric news, it’s the first week of the summer holidays, so naturally Terry came down with some kind of hideous bug right at the very start of it. It felt almost as if the universe was looking down at us and going, “So, they think they can stay out of the workhouse simply by working hard and taking every bit of childcare help they can get do they? Well, let’s see if they can ALSO do it with one of them ill!”

And then The Universe would have given an evil laugh and gone back to stroking the white cat on its lap. It would probably have looked a bit like Taylor Swift while it was doing it. Or that’s how I imagine it, anyway.

Here’s me and Max Before The Sickness, having a lovely day out at Culross — a pretty little village in Fife, which has featured in Outlander fairly frequently:

Everyone who goes there has to take a photo with this car. It’s like a law or something. I always like to think the owner parks it there deliberately in a bid to have the most photographed car in Scotland: which it almost certainly is.

Here I am trying unsuccessfully to persuade Max to have his photo taken with me at The Kelpies, later that afternoon:

Alexa, play This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things...

The main headline from this week, however, has to be the surprising fact that — Terry’s strep throat aside, obviously — the summer holidays haven’t been quite as difficult as I thought they would be. So far. And, I mean, I’ve probably just cursed myself by saying that, but my parents have taken Max as often as they can, and he’s spent a lot of time playing with his friends, too, which has given us some much-needed time to work.

It’s not been nearly enough time, don’t get me wrong; so our financial situation is still very much CODE RED. (Or LIKE DRIVING A NEW MASERATI DOWN A DEAD END STREET, if you prefer.) But I think “Not as Bad As I Thought It Would Be” is probably the best we can hope for from this summer. Maybe I should make that my tagline?

READING:

I’m STILL reading The Four Winds — a fact which is in no way a reflection of my enjoyment of the book, and in every way a reflection on how little time I have for reading right now. Woe.

On Substack, however, I’ve been really enjoying

Tiny Chaos by Amy Abrahams

, which this week perfectly summed up what it is to be a mother, with this single line:

‘I feel like I am achieving nothing, but constantly doing something.’ 

I feel this so much. It’s why my biggest fantasy right now doesn’t involve a flight to St. Tropez to join Leonardo Dicaprio on his yacht, but just me, sitting alone in my bedroom, reading a book and not being interrupted even once.

That’s the dream, people. And I sometimes worry that my dreams these days are so utterly mundane, but then I remember how the last time I finished a book in one sitting I had to literally get tonsillitis to do it and I think, yes I said yes I will Yes.

Rosie Spinks

also touched on this subject (Motherhood, I mean, not me reading books in bed) in her excellent post on

What Do We Do Now That We're Here?

, saying:

One thing that my inauspicious start to motherhood has helped me accept is the fact that I am behind on everything, all the time.

And, I mean, SAME. Rosie also talks about living her life with “If I just” syndrome, whereby you constantly feel that everything will be better if you could just achieve whatever it is you feel is holding you back (For me: earn more money, fix up the house, be selected to spend the money I don’t have on Taylor Swift tickets…), and I, too, live with the “If I justs”. I’ve lived with them my entire life now, in fact, which is why I very much admire Rosie’s plan to ditch the “justs” and try to live with the “now” instead. Which sounds like a much better idea, all things considered.

Finally, it was an instant subscribe to

Still looking for the Joke

for this post, simply entitled “Women Who Write While Lying on Their Stomachs”. Because, seriously, WHY?

WATCHING:

Living

After I watched Living, I read a review which described it as “a little movie about big topics”, and I think that sums it up for me, really. This is the slowest of slow-burns: a movie that made me bounce wildly between “This is getting a bit dull, really,” and “this one one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever seen.”

Ultimately it wasn’t the MOST wonderful thing I’ve ever seen (I actually think that credit goes to one of Bill Nighy’s other movies, About Time, which is actually life-changing — and no, I’m not exaggerating (for once): it’s literally life-changing.

But Living is pretty good too, and Nighy is absolutely superb in it, so I’m glad we took a chance on it.

BUYING

School uniform. Yes, even though school just broke up last week, it seems there’s only one company that makes the logo sweaters for Max’s school, and their deadline for orders is this weekend. So, yeah, £42 plus shipping for three sweatshirts, at which point we decided NOT to buy the matching logo polo shirts and just get a pack of 5 for £3 or something from Lidl, otherwise that would’ve been almost £80 just for tops.

The moral of the (very short) story? Get thee to Lidl if you have kids in need of school uniform, and get thee there fast…

TRYING

THREADS (The new Twitter clone from Meta, not any of the many other things that seem to be called Threads…)

When Elon took away my blue tick a few weeks ago, I said I was done with Twitter. DONE. (Which, to be honest, was really freaking inconvenient, because it was around the time Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn broke up, and I really wanted to talk to someone about it. Seriously, someone come and talk to me about this, because WHAT DID YOU DO, JOE?) Then, this weekend, he announced they were going to be limiting the number of tweets we could read every day, and I decided that was IT: I was REALLY done this time. Twitter and I were never, ever, getting back together.

Like, EVER.

Then I logged on the next morning (For, er, one last look…), and realized they’d changed the algorithm, and, instead of my timeline being filled with stuff Twitter thought I’d want to see — and which inevitably just infuriated me for the rest of the day — it was once again showing me just the tweets of the people I follow.

Yes, gone were all the angry people, locked in a constant battle with each other over who could be the most self-righteously furious; in their place, a bunch of fellow authors, all tweeting politely about their books.

“That’s brilliant,” said my husband, pretending to care. “That’s what you’re always saying you wanted it to go back to. You must be thrilled.”

“Not really,” I replied, morosely. “Because now all I see is a bunch of authors tweeting politely about their books.”

That’s when I realized I’d become addicted to the outrage. Obsessed with doom-scrolling. I was getting some kind of weird satisfaction out of reading Twitter threads I didn’t agree with, populated with some of the most obnoxious people ever to use the internet, and I was enjoying it. (Well, I mean, I was also hating it. But I was apparently enjoying hating it? And, I mean, how messed up is that?”)

A few days later, the algorithm reverted back to being All Rage, All the Time, which means the authors disappeared and I no longer had to think too much about how I didn’t actually want the thing I thought I wanted, and was back to thinking about how I didn’t want the other thing, either.

It’s me, folks. I’m the problem.

(I feel like this was one too many Taylor Swift references. I’ll stop now.)

Anyway, motivated by this surprising new level of dissatisfaction with Twitter, on Thursday morning I downloaded Threads, which is META’s clone of it, basically. My first impressions were not good: I was greeted with a tweet — sorry, a Thread — about football (I hate football), from someone I wasn’t following, and immediately declared that Instagram had obviously imported their spectacularly awful algorithm to the platform, and that I’d be sticking to Substack Notes, thanks.

The thing about that, though, is, as I’ve observed before, Substack Notes tends to be very serious and intellectual, and I am… well, not… which means I’m frequently too intimidated to post anything.¹ Also, a lot of Substack Notes seem to be about Substack itself, so if Threads is able to offer a place that lets me have a lighthearted chat with people who don’t just ignore me, then I’m happy to give it ago.

So far, though, all I can gather is that it’s not Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Notes, despite being very similar to all of them, so I hope that clears things up for anyone who was wondering. It’s also kind of strange, really, because, prior to this, I had Twitter (Angry, political), and I had Instagram (Calm, beige), and there was little to no crossover between these two worlds. But because Threads is linked to Instagram, it means the Instagram people are now the Twitter people, and it’s hard to know which of my personalities to bring out for that, you know?

Who will I be on Threads?

Or will I just use it to re-post memes, like I usually do?

Finally…

This week I was going through an old hard-drive, and I found an entire folder filled with some of my past attempts at fiction writing, so I decided to start publishing them on my fiction Substack, while you’ll find here:

Enjoy!

1. The real reason I’m too intimidated to post on Notes is that hardly anyone ever responds, which feeds my belief that everyone hates me.