Just you?

And I would drive a thousand miles...

I was a thousand miles away and now I am not. My daily swim in a beautiful lake is a thousand miles away too, and I am sad about that because along with friends, good food, fresh air and cycling, it kept my broken heart ticking along with a tolerable level of grief. I cry less. I sleep better. There is no issue with my appetite. But it has not been long, in the general scheme of things. Nine years does not dissolve in a few weeks. I know that, and I am prepared for that.

I have great plans now I am home: for a start, I need to earn money so I have to finish my book. I have to work. I have been unable to think straight for months and my work has suffered. They used to call it a nervous breakdown. Whatever. Being ignored for weeks at a time, out of the blue, by someone you considered your intimate partner, by someone you had been with for nine years: it triggered a madness that I have never known before.

If I asked people who know me for some adjectives to describe me, they would probably include “intrepid” or “strong.” (Some would say “scary” which I don’t like.) But I don’t think anyone would say “vulnerable.” So yes, I am strong and I am intrepid, but I have learned — sorry to go all Brené Brown on you and what kind of a name is Brené anyway — that being vulnerable is also strength, because it reaps good things. The good things in this case are support from dozens of friends, expressions of love, offers to meet, go out, do this, do that. My family also has my back. In France, the food I bought the day after I arrived ended up uneaten because I was so well fed by friends. I posted on Instagram about my wrecked heart and mental health and heard from so many people who had experienced the same. There are ways to end a relationship with kindness, but it seems the unkind and cruel ways are far too common too. Perhaps the way mine was ended was accidentally unkind, perhaps not. The net result is the same: a mountain of hurt, shock and loss. But because I revealed this, I got more support and love than I had anticipated and I’m very bloody grateful.

And the support did not just come from friends. Finally I wrote a clear and honest letter to my editors who are waiting for my book edit, and who have been waiting for months. In my most popular-ever piece, about menopausal depression, I wrote this:

For many months, I told people I was “unwell”. Not crippled, not weeping, not disabled. “Unwell.” The implication: that there is something physically wrong, a “proper” illness. What if I told everyone I had a severe headache? They would understand. Then, one day, as I sit at my computer and think of my writing deadline and feel despair, I try to read medical literature and instead put my head in my hands. I decide to write to the commissioning editor, even though we have not worked together before and this may form her opinion of me, and say: I can’t function today. I can’t write. And it is because of depression. Please give me leeway. It shames me to write it, but I do. And I do it again, when needed. So far, every response has been profoundly kind. I should have done it sooner.

Mental illness. Such an odd concept. How strange to put a division between mental and physical illness, as if the brain is not in the body. As if emotions are not regulated by the brain. As if feelings are not linked to hormones. And still mental illness is put in a different category. Easier to fix, to underfund, to sweep into the dark corner of the unspoken. Imagine the contrary. Broken your ankle? Cheer up. Third-degree burns? Chin up. Think yourself better, you with your chronic lymphocytic leukaemia. Smile.

Same this time. I was honest, and I was vulnerable, and I was forgiven. It is a lesson. Strength isn’t always what you think it is.

I’ve been reading lots, still, about break-ups and grief. There are rules, it seems:

• No contact, ever (oops).

• Break-up means it was broken. Stop being nostalgic. (Yeah, OK, but my brain won’t listen.)

• Fill your life, keep busy. Do yoga, exercise, whatever floats your boat, but do something and do a lot of it.

• Be like a duck : glide even if underneath you are kicking furiously through the enduring sadness.

I’m doing all that. France healed me somewhat, and now I have to keep healing.

But still I wonder how long this will take and how I will endure it. I know there will be bumps. One bump : the border control man at Calais looking in my car and saying, “Just you?”

Yes. It’s just me, now.

I’ve always been fascinated by how people endure. I searched through accounts of people in the second world war who spent days in open boats in horrific conditions, to find out how the time passed for them. What did they think about? How slow were the minutes? In Ninety Percent I wrote about a woman named Diana Jarman who survived three weeks on an open boat, then died onboard the German ship that rescued her and the other two survivors.

She was waiting for time to pass. Survivors have not recorded their methods for doing this. The excruciating slowness of the minutes must be best forgotten. MacDonald writes that by now, “a good few people sat all day with their heads on their chests doing and saying nothing.” This was dangerous: there was work to be done. The boat had to be steered. People had to keep watch for a ship, for anything. Sharks had to be batted off.

I do not need to bat off sharks. I’m not watching for a ship. But I have to endure, even without strawberry tarts. That’s all there is to it.

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Good stuff

• A film by Dan McDougall for Lloyds Register and RNLI on three young women who work on the Oban boat. Gorgeous, thoughtful and featuring lots of urgent running. Will make you want to move to Scottish west coast immediately.

• I’m very fond of unfashionable creatures. For a few months now I have been determined that my next book will be about rats. I love them, for their cleverness and for the way they fearlessly try to share our space, or steal it. Anyway I can’t do that now because Joe Shute has written a splendid book about rats and I reviewed it for the Spectator. Joe sent me this nice tweet (sorry, X-post) :

I think the phrase “ratty canon” should now become common speech. And I disagree with Joe: his book is so good there’s no point trying to do another. Not that competing books cannot both be successful. When I was writing Ninety Percent/Deep Sea, I discovered, while sitting in a bar in Salalah, Oman, watching American sailors get shit-faced, that someone called Horatio Clare was also travelling on a Maersk ship and also writing a book that would be published at the same time. Horror. But it all worked out in the end: Horatio’s book came out six months later, and it was very different to mine, and there was room for both, and Horatio and I have been mates ever since.

• Another unfashionable creature : the wasp. I have been bitten by wasps, when I disturbed their home in my compost bin. Sorry, wasps. I didn’t want to kill them because I knew they were valuable to my allotment. So I took the long view and left them there until winter, when they died naturally. Here’s a piece on why wasps are great.

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Animal hero of the week : Scarlett

I often question how humans treat their beloved pets. We breed them, they have offspring and then we remove the offspring from them. Isn’t it cruel? Or maybe my concern is naive. I am prepared to accept that, because when I was a teenager I refused to have my beloved cat Didier neutered. I said it wasn’t fair, and who were we to do that to him. The pompous righteousness of youth. So he did his business far and wide, and he got Feline Immunodeficiency Virus and died horribly. But when I adopted my cat Dora, she was a kitten. She jumped onto me immediately at the foster home and started licking my neck. Yes. I’ll take her. As I was leaving, the foster carer said, that’s her mum over there and I saw a pretty cat sitting on the windowsill. The same emotions kicked in as they had when I was a dumb teenager. Oh, I can’t take her kitten away from her, that’s so mean. I’ll take both of them.

They hated each other. Each time the kitten came near the mother, the mother hissed and swiped at her. The vet told me that after six months cat mothers don’t give a damn about their kittens. When Tamcat (mum) was run over in the street (by someone who didn’t stop), Dora sniffed the place where she had sat on the bed, and then never again exhibited the least distress.

But Scarlett did not not give a damn about her kittens. She lived with five of them in a crack-house in Brooklyn which caught fire. Once the fire was under control, a firefighter noticed Scarlett going back and forth into the burning building, each time carrying a kitten in her mouth. She was badly burned.

(Spot the difference »)

Scarlett’s fur and paws were singed, and her ears were burned.

They were all placed in an oxygen chamber to be treated. One kitten, which some idiot decided to call Toasty, died. But the rest survived. Scarlett and her kittens became famous, and the shelter that took them in received 7,000 letters offering to adopt them. I usually write about animals rescuing humans, but it seems humans like animals who rescue animals too. Sometimes. Scarlett was eventually adopted by Karen Wellen, who had also been in an accident and so wanted a cat with special needs. “I expected to see a scrawny, hairless cat,” said Karen, 'but she was gorgeous.”

Scarlett died in 2008. When the North Shore Animal League, the shelter that had taken in the burned cats, notified the press of Scarlett's death, Reuters screened a huge image of her in Times Square.

I really hope this is true. Better a screen than being stuffed.

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