The Sentimental Garbage UK tour!

Well hello! Happy Friday! I started my career in blogging and yet I become so self conscious every time I sit down to write a substack post. In some ways it feels like going back to your childhood bedroom in the hopes of finding your imaginary friend still there. Can you still talk to nobody in the same way?

I will be talking to somebodies, all over the UK, this June. More specifically, I will be talking to somebodies in London, Brighton, Salford, Glasgow and Bristol. And that’s just the beginning! We’re planning on more Irish dates, possibly another Australian date if we can this year, then America, if they’ll have me. My advice? Get tickets ASAP if I’m in a location convenient to you, and/or bookmark this link for future dates.

Let’s see, what else is new? I am currently experimenting with being on social media zero per cent of the time. It’s been about a month. Someone else is checking my accounts, posting event dates, and flagging when important stuff comes through. It’s been really good for me, I think. Who knows whether it will last, or how I will convince myself that I need to log back on and ruin this current period of sanity and calm. But for the meantime, please envision a huge GONE FISHIN’ sign on my Instagram page.

In that time, I’ve been on my honeymoon! It is the first holiday I’ve been on in over a decade that I didn’t post about on social media. This is a terrible sentence to have to write about yourself, but nonetheless true, and it felt really nice.

A honeymoon is a weird concept in an era where co-habitation before marriage is already a given, international travel is extremely common, and everyone is on holidays what seems like all the time. This is a thing you can say as a childless millennial but you would spit poison if someone older said it to you. We go on holidays all the time. It’s my first day back at my desk, and I just turned my out-of-office off. I sent three emails, and got two out-of-offices in return. We’re obsessed with holidays. We’re obsessed with what Croatia can do for us. So making a honeymoon feel different and special is kind of a quandary. Here’s the answer we came up with: make a honeymoon feel different and special by not talking about it to any other motherfucker alive. Don’t tell the internet! Don’t tell anyone except the people who need to know! Sometimes we would be in a random town and have this elated sense of “nobody knows where we are???” and that felt sexy and fun and funny to us.

I recommend it, particularly if you, like me, have been eternally damaged by twenty years of being online. Twenty years of baiting the hook with the worms of your private life in order to nail the grander catch, a fish that keeps getting bigger and weirder and that you struggle to describe to the people on land. Sometimes the big catch is a commission, sometimes it’s the ambient sense that a few thousand people are into your opinions on Save The Last Dance.

I didn’t realise that this substack emails would contain so many mixed metaphors about fishing, but there you go. In summary:

• Come to Sentimental Garbage live!

• Don’t bother to DM me on Instagram because I won’t read it!

• I went on my honeymoon!

• fish!

Have good weekends everybody xx