http://www.sam-binnie.com/blog-1 daily 0.75 2025-01-01 http://www.sam-binnie.com/blog-1/2025/1/1/atzpc2t5fxadeq0g7cysebdo8smij4 monthly 0.5 2025-01-01 http://www.sam-binnie.com/blog-1/2023/6/21/ppot48313hmdznh8ic162tvb9r31uz monthly 0.5 2023-06-21 http://www.sam-binnie.com/blog-1/2021/6/27/nnuvlratdjhq8tunlj0p08m1bcjdmh monthly 0.5 2021-06-27 http://www.sam-binnie.com/home daily 1.0 2013-08-30 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries daily 0.75 2023-06-21 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/2023/6/21/oqlwivd3gadc3i4c0tx3k2w58xfm2q monthly 0.5 2023-06-21 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/winter-solstice-and-we-run-to-the-river-with monthly 0.5 2021-12-21 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/1-happy-mabon-every-autumn-i-forget-that-the monthly 0.5 2021-09-22 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/1-on-bank-holiday-monday-i-woke-two-of-the monthly 0.5 2021-05-25 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/1-i-had-dressed-in-my-swimming-kit-this-morning monthly 0.5 2021-04-23 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/1-the-waters-are-so-high-that-we-are-soaked monthly 0.5 2021-02-02 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/1-its-the-first-time-that-even-with-neoprene monthly 0.5 2021-01-25 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/how-are-you-i-wish-i-had-something-more-incisive monthly 0.5 2020-09-10 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/ive-recently-been-doing-some-day-job-work-for-a monthly 0.5 2020-02-24 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/what-is-to-come monthly 0.5 2020-01-31 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/please-do-vote-on-thursday-i-believe-the-most monthly 0.5 2019-12-09 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/over-the-summer-my-quite-old-but-not-that-old monthly 0.5 2019-10-04 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/the-river-was-cold-this-morning-although-my monthly 0.5 2019-09-12 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/i-promised-to-share-the-arancini-recipe-from-a monthly 0.5 2019-08-13 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/this-weeks-wonderful-worthwhile-things monthly 0.5 2019-05-28 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/i-love-these-beautiful-little-beasts-crisp-and monthly 0.5 2019-04-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381595850-3P1W9XML0OTCH3EKM0FI/tumblr_pq9yhoM0As1rbh1yco1_640.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I love these beautiful little beasts, crisp and custardy, blackened sugar and distant hint of summer.  I tried two recipes today, one which took hours and bowls and careful balancing, and produced the mildly curdled Georgia O’Keeffe numbers on the left, and another which was deliciously simple and made my neighbour’s mother (a cooperative tester) say, ‘Oh, those ones were just… oooh!’  Here we go, my adapted version of the second recipe:  Makes 12 1 320g ready-rolled puff pastry sheet  1 large egg 2 large egg yolks 100g caster sugar 2 tbsp cornflour 400ml full fat milk  1 tsp vanilla extract Zest of half a lemon, v v v finely grated 1 tsp ground cinnamon Butter for greasing  Generously butter a 12-hole muffin tray, a good deep one, not one of those shallow indecisive numbers. Put it in the fridge to keep your puff pastry company.  Put egg, yolks, sugar and cornflour in a saucepan and whhhhhhisk with a balloon whisk until smooth as silk, then gradually whhhhhhhisk in the milk. Turn on a medium heat — just below medium-high, as if you’re threatening the pan that things can get so much hotter — and whhhhhhisk until it thickens up. DO NOT LEAVE THE PAN. DO NOT CEASE YOUR WHISKING. It doesn’t take that long; perhaps a few minutes? But not worth wrecking your day by wandering off. Once it’s thick and custardy, turn off the heat, mix in the vanilla, lemon zest and cinnamon, then put in a heavy bowl and cover it with clingfilm to prevent a skin forming while it cools.  Turn the oven onto 200ºC/180ºC fan.  This is the bit I had to look at loads of recipes to understand, because it seemed so odd:  Remove the puff pastry sheet from the fridge. Unroll it, peel off the paper, then re-roll into its original sausage form. Then slice that sausage into 1-1.5cm portions, so you’ll hopefully have 12 squashed-looking blobs that would be circles if the pastry was, say, chorizo. Does that make sense?  Then! Take your cooled muffin tray, and squash each blob into each hole with your thumbs, pushing it up the sides so it’s a uniform-ish depth throughout the hole, and the pastry reaches up most if not the whole of the sides, cup-like. (Reading the instructions, I somehow imagined the pastry would unravel and I’d be dealing with something like an apple-peel-peeled-in-one, but it’s actually all just dough.)  Into that dough casing, spoon your custard mix. Not riiiiiight to the top, but leave perhaps 4mm. Most recipes say leave a full cm, but I like it toppling over slightly and burning against the hot metal, for that burnt sugar bite.  Cook for 25-30mins, keeping an eye to check the custard top is really darkening in sections and the pastry is golden. Remove once cooked, leave to cool for 5 minutes in the tin, then knife-out and either eat immediately, or leave to cool further on a wire rack (the longer you leave them, the more integrity they’ll have).  (I’ve had the new Loyle Carner album on all day, soundtracking everything from a run this morning to dozing in the garden with my roomie, and repotting successful seedlings to a family-wide repetition of new favourite phrase. It’s such great music.)  Bon appétit, mes anges.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/the-celebrants-smile-dips-occasionally-but-for monthly 0.5 2019-01-23 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/ive-spent-the-last-few-months-entirely-off-social monthly 0.5 2018-09-21 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/january-does-as-january-does-and-transforms-me monthly 0.5 2018-01-15 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/161332410562 monthly 0.5 2017-06-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381596770-JZIZBQ33LKP9LK2KA5VH/tumblr_oqw18kzxln1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/161329989414 monthly 0.5 2017-06-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381596384-SHK1YAXOFR6MDSWNHQ4F/tumblr_oqw18ynTBP1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries ‘I’m not bothered at all,’ I say, when people ask me how I feel about my mother finally selling up and moving out of the home she and my father bought three decades ago. I’m not bothered about leaving this house behind at all — it’s still popping with faint echoes and waves of alcohol, and bottled anger and silences, of illness and waiting and death, at last. But the garden! Oh, the garden! I so rarely go into the garden when I visit now, preferring to nudge the children outside so the adults can all nap in the sunlight through the big windows for a brief handful of minutes. But the last time we visit before my mother moves, the sky is blue, the sun is strong, and I am drawn outdoors. When we moved here thirty years ago, the garden was genuinely magical. The previous owners, in possession of green fingers and an interest in their outdoor space, both of which my parents lacked, had built a wonderland beyond their back door. A rose walkway, paved, and swagged with blooms and thorns; a stone circle tucked halfway down one side, hedged with box and bamboo and red hot pokers, where a sundial stood for my spell-casting; green-spreading winter heliotrope that we all called triffids, before I knew what triffids were; a pond with bright koi carp, and a clear floating ball like a hardened bubble I could tap with one foot to break the thin ice on the winter water; the Narnian pines occasionally dusted with snow; the abundant apple trees, left to wither and fade under our lack of care. I remember the honeysuckle, drenching the evenings with its impossible liquid scent, and the bats that would flap over our heads if we stayed up late enough, a family talking in soft voices just at the edge of where the house lights reached. The garden seemed enormous to me; as a teenager, I saw it shrink again — partly the encroaching weeds and unstopped trees, partly that it never quite seemed big enough to ensure our cigarette smoke wasn’t drifting back to my parents’ window. Now, as an adult sunk deep in property market hypnosis, it seems gigantic again. When I sit at the bottom of the garden writing this, the children have to call twice to find me. The rose walkway became, over a decade or more, an impenetrable Sleeping Beauty thicket, until years later we spent two summers hacking it down and burning the bramble limbs and rotted wood frame. The pond, with the speckled arrival of grandchildren and an acknowledgement that the remaining green sludge was unlikely to grow any more attractive, had the water bucketed out and soil bucketed in. I dug it out a few years later to remove the plastic moulded base, and found it full of potatoes, which my mother had planted then subsequently forgotten about completely. The willow tree loomed beside the house for years — the rope swing tied over one branch became embedded in the folded-over bark, but it was always the perfect spot to sit, away from everything, watching and listening through the narrow leaves, until it felt safe to return — but the whole tree was cut down when it was found to be pulling up the water pipes and threatening the foundations of the house. Chunks of the willow still lie around the garden, like stage-dressing from a woodland fairytale. Because I generally only went out in good weather, the garden was always in summer. I remember how long it would take to set up a sunbathing session with my sister: towels, music, books, sunglasses, pints of ice water, ice creams from the petrol station at the end of the road, suncream, barely, and magazines, hats, snacks, cushions. I remember my sister being back at home one weekday, and me telling my manager at the local packing factory that I had a dentist appointment in the middle of the day, just so we could lie out in the garden together for a few hours, before I returned to work beet-faced and dizzied. I remember camping being the same, three hours of preparations and props before it became too cold or scary and we’d ship back inside. None of us were gardeners enough to take proper advantage of the size and opportunity. Any fruiting plant that survived longer that a few seasons was the victim of sheer luck — we’d harvest blackberries when we tumbled upon them, but we never dug and laid out and cared for the veg beds a garden like that deserved. The noticeable anomaly is the fig tree, still giving out handfuls of fat, splitting figs each summer despite getting no more care than anything else in this semi-wilderness. My sole sign of hostility towards the new owners is a passing urge to snap off all the unripe figs, to prevent these strangers reaping the rewards of our indolence, for this year at least. The birdsong is so familiar to me, even though in thirty years I have not identified a single one. A chattering, a chirruping, a gentle caw, a repeating coo-hoo-coo that woke me most mornings; I leave them all in this garden for the next child to discover and absorb. (My garden is a fraction of this size, and I wonder what I would pay to transport this garden to my own house, somehow — the kind of thought I would have spent hours pondering the logistics of in the garden, slowly grilling beside the triffids — for our children to become lost in, to feel safe in. I feel sadder to lose this garden than I did to lose my father. I want to stay here, and stay, and stay.) I never wore shoes in the garden, and accepted the occasional thorn from a hidden thistle as the required price. The soles of my feet were often black, and always thickened. I saw daisies covered in dew, pink-tipped and sleeping. I heard hedgehogs, and foxes, and mice, and never once wondered how much our mostly elderly neighbours could hear us all, or how much they minded. The garden is paddling pools with scuba-gear made from drinking straws, it is my elder sisters promising a warm jug of water over me once I’ve had two more cold ones, and me still growing up to love them, it is a parent-free party where the beers are chilling in the same paddling pool but my sister, left to chaperone, is gently placed in bed at 7.45 after eating too many of the hash brownies while the rest of us hang out in the gloaming; it is filled with children, ours, our nephews and nieces, our friends’, us, it is silence and peace, hope and space, and private worlds a thousand acres wide and a thousand years long. (This garden brings out my buried sentimentality.) The sundial is gone, the willow is gone, the pond is gone, the rose walkway is gone. What was once a compost heap has grown into a pile of rubble and weeds, so noticeable that the buyers’ surveyor declared it could only be an old air-raid shelter, requiring professional clearance. I still do not know the bird names. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/instagram-is-my-sole-21st-century-vice-these-days monthly 0.5 2017-03-13 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/all-links-mentioned-are-clustered-at-the-end-if monthly 0.5 2017-01-19 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/i-suspect-much-of-it-is-being-freelance-and monthly 0.5 2016-11-17 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/oops monthly 0.5 2016-11-14 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/this-remembrance-day-i-am-thinking-of-all-those monthly 0.5 2016-11-11 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/ive-been-genuinely-successful-in-distracting monthly 0.5 2016-11-08 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/taking-vast-swathes-of-the-summer-off-means monthly 0.5 2016-09-08 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/you-have-to-do-whats-best-for-your-kids-dont monthly 0.5 2016-07-14 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/i-go-for-a-run-at-the-tail-end-of-the-day-trying monthly 0.5 2016-06-27 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/question-of-the-day-can-you-be-friends-with monthly 0.5 2016-06-25 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/rice-pudding-4-eva monthly 0.5 2016-06-08 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/144802137859 monthly 0.5 2016-05-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381596264-AE2TW7XNFQEGQ6LZB6C7/tumblr_o7mlpkMsSe1rbh1yco1_640.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I don’t give the final payment to the builder myself, as I’m sick of his creepiness and don’t want to let him into the house again. I make my husband hand over final envelope of cash at our front door, knowing he’s not been bred with any compunction to let someone in when they request it; to let someone put their arm around his shoulders momentarily, repeatedly, when they discuss plans for a business transaction; to let that paid transaction include any conversation about where my husband should sit in his garden and what swimwear he should be sporting when he does it.  The builder thanks me for the payment by text, then, 24 hours later – having clearly given it some thought – he texts me to say that, after we’ve paid him thousands of pounds to work on our house, maybe I just want to let him know if I want a hug. Winky face.  After several hours where I do some thinking of my own, I eventually reply that his message is creepy and inappropriate, and I block him. It feels good, compared to all the times, day after day after day after day, where I don’t say anything, too stunned in the instance, or too wary of consequences because of where I am and how drunk the men seem. Not all men, obviously: just the men I encounter at the supermarket, on the train, on a run, on the library shelves, on TV, in the newspapers, in parliament, in my local cinema listings, at social events, and online.  At lunch with friends, we talk about the terrible men we work with. Bosses who tell us to cancel our IVF as it’s something we’ll regret once landed with a screaming kid. Bosses who take all the young skinny white boys out for breakfasts, then send emails to their bosses insisting they should be fast-tracked for promotion. Bosses who tell us our own promotions are mistakes, our plans are wrong, our ambitions are foolish.  We talk about you, I want to say to those men. We all know what you’re like. You’re ridiculous. And you make the world worse.   At a PTA breakfast, other friends talk about trouble their daughters are having at school amongst their friendship group. Well, you know how mean girls can be! they say. I say, Look at us, guys! How great are we! I say, The friendship of the women in my life are the most valuable friendships I have. Men are hot garbage. Women are kind and hilarious and understanding and way more interesting. Don’t teach your daughters to hate each other already. Women are the best! Show your daughters how great girls are! If more girls learnt how fucking cool women are, we could make the world a trillion times better!  I am amazed I am still invited to these breakfasts, to be fair.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/144161174774 monthly 0.5 2016-05-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381597102-J2AWFVKRRE2QAESU0DFL/tumblr_o6z7zlhi7U1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I sleep in the car, my nerves sedating me as usual. We drive past the American Cemetery on the way to the hospital – apparently – and when I wake up as we park in the multi-storey my husband says, I’ve always wanted to visit there. I was going to stop on the way but I thought if you woke up you would panic that you’d woken up in Heaven.  A new doctor, an actual brain surgeon this time, rather than a consultant who invites you to consider his proposed brain operation with the words, ‘I’m not a brain surgeon, but I will perform the operation on your brain.’ This latest consultant has a colleague in the room for my appointment who looks like a young Mary Beard, and I am already fond of both of them. The brain surgeon has the air of someone who wears ties with miniature hippos on, like all brain surgeons should. He tells us: If I could be autocratic, if 100 people had your situation, I would send all 100 of them home and tell them to get on with living their lives. He looks momentarily wistful at the thought of clearing his desk so fast. But! we say, and repeat the words from the last appointment: catastrophic risk and life-changing and major trauma and constant bleeding. In a soft voice he says, Yes, you might, possibly, have a major bleed one day, that could affect the speech lobe in which this problem is located, but who knows? It might actually improve your writing.  As if I didn’t love him enough.  As we leave into the white sunshine, eating ice creams, giddy, high-spirited at the thought that maybe my death might just be like everyone else’s, unforeseen, unknowable, hopefully distant, and nothing we have choice in, I say to J, I think that other consultant just really wanted to do my operation. Maybe one more brain operation and he gets the cerebrum badge to stitch onto his white coat.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/143166020474 monthly 0.5 2016-04-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381596395-1GA54NK5QE7VGJ68ET94/tumblr_o5zhyviYLk1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries In bed, I fling my book away from me, and say almost thoughtfully, ‘I’m really, really frightened all of a sudden.’ I can’t tell if it’s the scene I’ve just read about people being buried alive in a mine; the vertiginous feeling I’ve had since lunchtime which I have no way of telling whether it’s a cold in one ear or a pre-stroke event; book deadlines not just whooshing past but sucking me onto the tracks as they race by; the death of my most adored comic writer and performer; or poor sleep patterns and eating habits. Whatever the ingredients of this dazzling cocktail, I’m focusing very hard on my breathing, on trying to force my brain to accept that I’m not really on the edge of a cliff, this aren’t really my final moments. Recognising what this must be doesn’t mean the fear is any less: in fact, this physical sensation is so overwhelmingly like the one bit of childbirth I really liked - knowing when it was time to push, an instinct so clear and true that it felt like an ancient godly blessing - that I’m convinced it must actually be my death occurring, since my body, when it spoke like this before, spoke the truth.  I know it isn’t though. I know this must just be a panic attack - although in 2016, can we not find a slightly gentler phrase than that, please? But it doesn’t stop me saying, ‘If I do die, can you look after the children, please?’ like it would otherwise be something that just slips off the To Do list.  Jack-rabbit-hearting and drop-limbed 18 hours later, I think: I need a warm holiday with a warm pool where I have no deadlines, only bread and olive oil, tomatoes and salt, J and the babies, sun cream and card games. Everyone feels like that, though, give or take the specific company. In the meantime, the baby and I watch this, listen to this, and sleep curled up under a hand-me-down blanket while the world continues on outside.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/140650236639 monthly 0.5 2016-03-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381595734-8Y2RWI0TZ6N2KUGGYK3J/tumblr_o3ot2hblz11rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries One day, I think, one day I’ll learn to ditch optimism at the door of the hospital.  It’s warm inside, full of sun-struck open corridors, Starbucks and welcome desks, still-faced paper-white patients in wheelchairs and walkers, smiling patients in hospital gowns chatting in familiar tones with receptionists, and couples where one of them sports a cannula in the back of their hand like a grim, slipped corsage. Glowing pregnant women roll around the wings like scattered pearls, lit differently to all of us visiting with our own personal decay.  The recent neurology appointment was so reassuring that I can actually read while we’re waiting. The neurosurgeon calls us in to say, Yes, hello, but have you thought about brain surgery? Because that cerebral anomaly is leaking, always, always, he says, and if it blows for good, the result could be - probably would be - catastrophic. And since it’s located in the area of speech, I’d not only be paralysed down my right side, but my ability to find words would be severely impaired, possibly forever.  I think, Seriously? My words? Are you kidding me? It couldn’t have been in my juggling lobes? I couldn’t be putting my Donkey Kong skills at risk? We ask more questions. I try to ignore the creeping sense of icy death spreading from the base of my spine, down my thighs, up my chest. I know I’ll fall asleep as soon as we get into the car; my usual shelter from the storm. The surgeon scoffs as we ask about mortality risks in the operation, which I suppose is the correct response, and we shake his hand and walk around the hospital and decide the best thing is probably to let him incise my skin, remove a section of my skull, and excise this stowaway from the delicate folds and walkways of my brain. I am so glad I am here with my favourite person in the whole world, even in this situation, even with this decision. I wonder what we’d do if I had a major personality change after the operation, as can sometimes happen, according to my vague recollections of fact-less Daily Mail articles. To be fair, my other half says, it’s 50/50 that you might actually end up with a better personality afterwards.  I fall asleep as soon as we get into the car. In the evening, I speak to my neurologist brother-in-law on the other side of the world, who reassures me that I desperately need a second opinion, that I shouldn’t go flinging myself under a brain surgeon’s knife without a little more information. My sister knows how impatient I am to have difficult situations done and dusted, and understands that I would have had the surgery this afternoon if it had been an option.  I would have been calling you right now from my hospital bed, I say.  Yes, but using only your left hand, she says, both of us gurgling with laughter.  With my new vocabulary of twenty words, I add.  Oh my god, she says, I’d finally be able to best you in an argument! I’m beginning to think this operation has no downsides.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/the-more-concerned-everyone-is-for-me-the-worse-i monthly 0.5 2016-02-24 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/a-hollywood-tearjerker-or-a-harrowing-news-report monthly 0.5 2016-02-02 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/136679979944 monthly 0.5 2016-01-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381595942-0L5YMD8HVX6AYLQRA9GD/tumblr_o0hhv5jWrC1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries A wonderful holiday. Not for the first time, I wonder if I’m in BTL, trapped in my own Bedford Falls, where our beautiful children share their presents and gently wrap each other in their blankets and say please and thank you and make me laugh until I’m choking and reassure me during Stick Man and voluntarily watch at least one hour of a silent reindeer-sleigh documentary before taking it in turns to dance on my head. To add salt to that chocolate ganache, however, I’ve got my book deadline, work worries, money worries, mortality worries, worries about my Aged P, worries about others’ worries, guilt, tiredness, and Pringles overdosing. Talking to someone with their own brain adventures makes me realise that I’ve never let myself be bothered by it for more than a moment, and perhaps that’s not a good thing. I’m so busy reassuring everyone that everything isn’t a big deal - a discovery in my MRI scan; my father’s death; my sister’s emigration; an ultimate inability to google the next few decades of mine and my loved ones’ lives; and always always always money worries - that maybe I don’t find time to work out if any of them are a big deal. Or what to do if they are. How do people hold themselves together in the street, when absolutely everyone is going through some version of this? I’ll occasionally find myself close to tears and thinking, ‘Wait, I don’t have time for this now, I’ll have a good weep later.’ Only later I’ve got a deadline to meet, or a kid to stuff into bed. We all have our row to hoe.  Any kind of introspection momentarily blots out the blistering fear to replace it with a literally paralysing rage: I find myself staring out of windows, teeth and muscles clenched, burning at the potential injustice of my early death, and the hundreds-and-thousands of wrongs sprinkled liberally over the rest of the world. I suspect it’s my seizure meds. But I doubt I’ll take the time to find out.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/my-oldest-friends-come-over-for-a-christmas-meal monthly 0.5 2015-12-24 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/my-urge-is-always-to-sleep-when-i-feel-stressed monthly 0.5 2015-12-18 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/135321075474 monthly 0.5 2015-12-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381596499-WR2QTGAV22XGH427WHTU/tumblr_nzgf58j9mX1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I arrive early for lunch, and the woman at the table next to ours lets me hold her newborn while she finishes her food, and we talk about contractions and breastfeeding and self-employment. Coffee from the Southbank food market with a pal at the weekend, our kids ricocheting around the Royal Festival Hall. All-you-can-eat breakfast with old PTA colleagues at our regular haunt. Cocktails with the bookclub, a sneaked cigarette, a peek into the Tinder world on a single friend’s phone. Another lunch, a few days later, in a high marble room filled with harried French waiters, where we order extra extra frites and rub our bellies.  When I get home, J says, You look happy.  I say, I do, don’t I? There’s just something about hanging out with these smart, funny, ambitious, kind women. I didn’t get it for ages, but it’s… magic.  He says, All the women you hang out with are smart and funny.  And I say, Yup. Aren’t I the lucky one.   http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/my-consultant-seems-angry-with-me-a-cancelled monthly 0.5 2015-11-12 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/i-adapted-this-from-an-american-recipe-that-was monthly 0.5 2015-11-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381598748-GKL7E7OCCD4GM2ZTQBSG/tumblr_nxlzphHr3n1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I adapted this from an American recipe that was full of the weirdest powdered shortcuts, but showed utter horror at the thought you’d use sweetcorn instead of hominy. I used not only sweetcorn, but *tinned* sweetcorn. Ha. Cook this in a big pot, over a medium heat. You can adjust everything according to what’s in your cupboards - put in more or less sweetcorn, more or less beans, different spices; I like it spicier, but it can fit whatever you’ve got lying around, really. It’s magic. Good Cheap Soup Big glug olive oil 500g turkey mince (substitute or forego as you wish) 1 onion, chopped 1 red chilli, minced 2 cans chopped tomatoes 1 can cannellini beans (or whatever beans are in your cupboard) 1 can sweetcorn Finely chopped clove of garlic 1 tbsp paprika 1-2 tsp cumin 1 tsp caraway seeds 1 tsp chilli flakes 1-2 tsp salt Big grind of pepper Chicken stock (I used one single pot of that jelly-ish stuff) 2 cups of water To top: 1 avocado mashed with 1 lime and salt Sour cream Corn tortillas, hunks of bread Heat the oil, and cook the mince, onion and chilli until the onion is soft and the mince browned. Add in everything else - adjust the seasonings to your taste. Simmer for 10 mins to make soup, or 15-20 to thicken it up enough to heave huge mouthfuls in on a fork, or wrapped in a tortilla. Top with the mashed avocado & lime, and sour cream, eat as fast as you can. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/you-must-be-a-nightmare-to-live-with-i-blink monthly 0.5 2015-10-20 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/130290221579 monthly 0.5 2015-10-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381599081-BKG3GUJEBZWO2SLDQX6W/tumblr_nvk6xfTP901rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I. The cardiology consultant asks the nurse to give me another ECG, so I lie on the bed and let them stick wired patches on me, from ankle to breastbone. Afterwards, he explains that any heart irregularity I have is within normal parameters, but — he scratches his belly, gutsily bursting out between a popped button just above his belt — do I have a fear of MRIs? Only his lack of English would make him ask me so honestly, so simply. I shrug. I’ll have one if I have to; I didn’t enjoy the last one, though. He watches me for a moment, his head tipped back and to the side, then abruptly, he says, No, we’ll do something else instead. I won’t make you go through that again if we don’t have to.  He checks me over, and I feel him jolt, discovering something. What is this? he says, holding up my wrist. It’s paint, I laugh, and point to my toes, my face, my other forearm.  Ok, he says. You’re fine.  II. One of the kids says to me as I tuck them up, How was your hospital appointment? A whole thick book flicks from front to back while I take a breath: how beautiful they are; how thoughtful; how separate; how our bodies are all disintegrating; how stories about accidents and illness fur up the arteries in my brain for days; how every momentary faintness, every headache, every forgotten word or prickling finger is a black cloud, waiting to burst; how I could never, ever leave them; how I’d ask for nothing other than to see them grow up, healthy and happy and good; how painful it is to love them, bruising and sharp and suffocating; how I want to pour my love in their ear, rich and treaclish and golden, and have it sustain them whenever they’re in need; how I wish when they’re short on good dreams — sometimes they can’t sleep because, they tell me, they can’t find any good dreams — I could light up the inside of their eyes with how I see them, funny and smart and kind and brilliant, so they would glow in their beds; how I wish I could show them, too, all my mistakes, on a gleaming white projector screen, so they can learn at 4 or 8 or 12 or 16 or 21 what it took me cold, aching, marble-lined decades to discover; how jealous I am that I already know Cancer Dad got to see his children grown and well. Fine, I say, Thank you; it was fine. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/129843099174 monthly 0.5 2015-09-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381599140-UVC8GKH7A9L1M3EXAU9H/tumblr_nv8g3jkpon1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries To weigh down the other end of the see-saw — against a fresh, crushing terror of my own mortality — my seizure at the start of the summer has given me a six-month driving ban which actually has worked out pretty well so far; it’s meant I’ve cycled a hundred times more than I otherwise would have done, to parks and friends’ houses and errands. My bike is rubbish, with tyres that flatten within weeks no matter what we do, and the size and weight of the bike locks means I can barely collect anything on those errands, but the joy of pedalling doesn’t seem to fade. Push down with one foot, balance, away.  At one set of traffic lights, BMWs revving behind me, I watch as the cyclist just ahead of me kicks his pedal up and backwards with one foot, preparing himself for the lights to change. I do exactly the same at exactly the same moment, and I wonder if the drivers behind notice that choreography of cycling each time a few bikes get ahead of them.  On the bridge, I indicate right and slow the traffic behind me as I get into position to turn. The cars all stop for me at the junction; the white van behind me gives me plenty of room and neither hoots nor calls out abuse; I arrive in one piece, cruising down the road on my rusty bike to my friend’s front door. In the boundless blue of the day, my hands are shaking, my thighs are aching, and my heart races, as I smile, and Pollyanna the shit out of that driving ban.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/friends-from-overseas-come-to-visit-in-the-summer monthly 0.5 2015-09-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381599556-A2ERA6N6VWUNIDA7OKBG/tumblr_nv1m4jGh3d1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Friends from overseas come to visit in the summer, and their family of five is balm to our souls: funny, smart, kind, with excellent appetites. We talk about parenting - what we’ve received then, what we try to practise now.  And we slip up. Of course we do.  Generally, though, I think this and particularly this sum up our overall view of trying to raise a decent person: don’t badmouth them, and *never* badmouth or laugh at them in front of them. Stop forbidding them arbitrary actions. Don’t deny their feelings. Allow them a private life. Get them to help you.  The key idea for me, which I’m thinking more and more makes up about 80% of a good person, is helping them to understand consent. Don’t pick a child up and pass them round like a doll; don’t force them to kiss or touch someone they don’t want to (I remember my grandfather making it clear the money on his bedside table was for grandchildren who were well-mannered enough to say good morning to him politely, with two kisses pressed to his sweaty cheek. NEVER have I felt so righteous, even at the age of ten or eleven, in my refusal to go near the fucking creep). Teach them that any kind of contact needs to be consented to by the other party - a hug in the line for assembly; a kiss in the playground; a playful smack on a sibling’s bottom. Teach them - now! It’s easier if you do it now, surely? - about ongoing consent, about enthusiastic consent, about withdrawal of consent. Teach them that if someone does something to *them* without their consent, they themselves have done *nothing* wrong. If someone doesn’t want a second slice of cake, then leave them alone. If a guest chooses an early night (AND FRANKLY WHO WOULDN’T WHEN THE CHAT IS AS FUN AS THIS) then that’s their choice. Let people make a decision, and respect it.  We try to stick to those rules too. But oh the challenge when one of them wears an outfit that makes your teeth fizz with loathing, or another really really really really doesn’t want to go to a sports session with all their friends, and you *know* they always have a good time there, always, and it seems a lot like they only want to stay because they know you’re about to cook a cake they can lick the bowl for, or the other wants the cup with no lid even though they’ll just slowly pour the contents into their meal… But we have to live by our sword. So I admire the outfit, or sit and listen about why they don’t fancy the sports session, or give them the cup and put a towel under their plate.  Anyway, the friends and J and I spent those evenings drinking gallons of gin gimlets and that also makes anyone feel like they’re doing everything a-OK, so, good.  Gin Gimlets 2 oz gin ¾ oz sugar syrup ¾ oz lime juice Shake over ice, strain, drink. All is well in the world. Good spirits will continue to ooze from your pores in the morning. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/126607351019 monthly 0.5 2015-08-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381599562-M9G1G5AZVLDLLWEUEX3R/tumblr_nt1b5jQYtM1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I always take at least one book, one magazine and my phone to the hairdresser, just in case they try to talk to me. But today, with the rain hammering down outside and a hot cup of coffee and a head filling with foils, my hairdresser and I talk for almost an hour about, of course, holidays - we’ve both just had holidays from which we need to warm up, and she shows me her secret holiday place, which is exactly where I need to go next time - and end up on families. Her former stepfather and my Cancer Dad seem to have been cut from exactly the same cloth, and we both spent years on eggshells, tiptoeing round mood swings and manipulations. We talk about how we didn’t know how relationships should work, for the longest time. By the time we compare notes on how they’d both pretend to be leaving our families for good, bidding us goodbye and good luck as we sobbed, only to turn up hours later baffled at our tear-stained faces, we are smiling. When we describe how we now imitate their darkest moments, their cruellest words and their scariest actions, exaggerate them to make other family members laugh, we are doubled over with our own laughter, unable to speak. She finishes my foils. ‘We’re fine now, though, aren’t we!’  They are the best highlights I’ve ever had.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/only-when-im-leaving-the-house-foot-on-the-bike monthly 0.5 2015-07-30 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/the-alexander-mcqueen-exhibition-is-just-as monthly 0.5 2015-07-08 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/121601217909 monthly 0.5 2015-06-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381599669-F3K9DQAOB30MLLYJTHN9/tumblr_npzx43zwWA1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries The weekend is full of action: runs and rain and forests. We find a den in a wood, and while the baby sleeps in the buggy - rain dripping from cloud to leaves to her legs - the rest of us build a porch for it, and a front door. We pull branches across the forest floor and twist them and line them up, weaving in fronds of a curled ivy-ish plant someone has thoughtfully left piled up in the clearing. We work until my hands are green and there’s no more clean spots on my coat for the kids to dry their hands on.  Sunday sees the early period I was promised when I took the morning-after pill last week; I always forget quite how little my body appreciates bonus external hormones. The mood I’ve been in for the last four days - spiky-bordering-stormy - blooms in the evening into something apocalyptic, tipped with migraine in a way that makes the car journey home feel like it’s in eighteen dimensions. If I wasn’t worried my skull and mushy brain tissue were about to crumble into a pile of soft red dust, this strangeness of it would almost be enjoyable, an inverted feeling to the hash hot chocolate I drank before a gig as teen, that led me to cling to the arm of a friend’s boyfriend, saying, ‘I’m trapped in a dream. PLEASE, PLEASE, WAKE ME UP,’ while he chuckled softly and stuck me in the corner with some coats piled on top.  In the end, I get pretty much the same now, tucked into bed until I can remember my own name and I stop trying to escape to run with my wolf pack. I’m reassured to find that it’s still the best solution.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/120128598804 monthly 0.5 2015-05-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381600800-JCFOB37SMN73PKDSM87I/tumblr_np2tcgLTNo1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries A friend from distant lands is briefly back in the country. I collect him from the local train station, and he explains that rather than bringing me what I’d asked him to pick up, he’s brought me half a breakfast burrito. I remember why I like him so much.  We sit in my garden and talk about life, while the baby eats mud and chuckles. When we’ve finished our coffees and the burrito, he says, Right, where shall we go for lunch? Pick somewhere you’ve always wanted to go to, but haven’t yet – my treat.  I think, This is the way to live.  We drive into the countryside to a pub, and he tells me about his French neighbour who got a woman pregnant and said, I want nothing to do with it, I will not see this baby, I will go back to France. The woman says, Cool story bro, it’s twins.  My friend says that really it’s his neighbour’s fault, since he’s actually one of triplets. We’re somehow both laughing so hard I nearly drive us off the road.  We eat everything at the pub: devils on horseback, olives as big as my thumb, little chorizo sausages as small as my thumb, herbed cod, rack of lamb, bakewell tarts, and under the warm sun and clear sky I even have a tiny glass of wine. The baby falls asleep after a mouthful of ginger ale. My friend and I make plans to write a film together.  I love Thursdays.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/118047636194 monthly 0.5 2015-05-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381600976-F5158KFNIFNAXKGQUQTA/tumblr_nnsdve9S3F1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381601521-QFGJDP55GK3NBQXWJON9/tumblr_nnsdve9S3F1rbh1yco2_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381600973-Y3U3PAKBJHICM2XCO6YI/tumblr_nnsdve9S3F1rbh1yco3_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381601737-A977U3N0IVX363LR7K01/tumblr_nnsdve9S3F1rbh1yco4_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/ive-spent-the-last-fortnight-in-an-evangelical monthly 0.5 2015-04-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381602536-RIVORY0ON3KXST6MMI3R/tumblr_nm4u0uHYmJ1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I’ve spent the last fortnight in an evangelical Kondo haze, yet the house looks like it’s been hit by hungry burglars. In the last four days, I’ve dropped-and-smashed three precious items of crockery, done a full supermarket shop before realising my wallet was at home, sweatily hurried the children from school to a swimming lesson which wasn’t on this week, and watched through a mashy haze of exhaustion as the baby found a piece of crumbling polystyrene and entirely snowed the ground floor under. My brain is melting, and oozing into my clumsy joints. I’ve discarded - after saying my careful thank yous - more than 75% of my clothes, seven binbags of children’s outfits and more than 500 books. (So many books. So. many. books.) We held a weekend book sale in our front garden that the infants manned; a teenage girl, brought by her father, hates Ian McEwan and I just kept pressing books on her, Free gift, just take it, and this one, oooh, and this is brilliant too, and oh! you must have this. Joyful. I’m now on to paperwork. Despite the fact that it spreads through the house, I’m reasonably good at this, having monthly clear outs of the drifts on my desk. But this is by far the hardest section yet. My birth notes from the last labour, with handwritten messages from the midwife on the front. Three different leaving-card books from beloved colleagues. The recipes I’ve spent years collecting. There’s a bubble in my chest and my throat, and I want to cry more than I thought possible, these days. But when I actually look at them, the bubble shrinks, then dissolves. That birth is in my memory, and always will be. The colleagues I loved then I still see now. The recipes, if they haven’t been made by now, sitting in plastic wallets in a file in my office under the box of photos, are unlikely to ever be. They all go in the bin. I wonder if it’s just rude to throw my father’s Orders of Funeral Service away, or the newspaper notice of his death. Would the kids ever want to see it? What secrets do they hold that we haven’t told them ourselves? But others are strangely impossible. I give up at the calendars I’ve kept at the end of each year. I thought they would be the least sentimental items, but they are thick with changing identities and coded references. When M is 9 months old, I am still going out at least once a week, every single week. When F is born, he gets simply an understated set of his hours-old initials against the date. Friends I didn’t think I was ever that close to pop up almost daily after each baby is born, bringing me magazines or bread or hand-me-downs. The grown-up meetings as I start freelancing. And in those days they weren’t family calendars - J and I had a colour each, and the babies fitted around whatever we fancied doing; now they get their own columns in a grotesque display of a pint-sized calendar coup. But the tearing, biting wind of time makes me feel like a savaged teenager again, aching from an inexplicable gut-punch nostalgia. M comes in to the office to tell me she has to write a poem, that it should rhyme, shouldn’t it? Does it start with a capital letter? Is there a comma at the end of each line? I show her this. It lulls us both, in the piles of papers and the bags of rubbish. I can be nostalgic later. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/115598908794 monthly 0.5 2015-04-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381602782-6COFWILFKJTXRK40BCSF/tumblr_nmco9hHdsL1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Another country house at another country park. At the end of a long lake is a round pavilion, lined inside with trompe l’oeil all the way up to the skylight. The room has doors scattered around the edges, tiny doorways leading to tiny circular stairs, each step even at the widest point only big enough for the children’s feet to fit fully on. M says, Can we go everywhere? Can we explore? Can we adventure wherever we like? The stairs go up and down - the first one we try brings us out into the large basement, with a huge doorway leading back outside. We race around the front and try another. Heading up this narrow stair I’m suddenly aware of the closeness of the walls, and there is a heartbeat of panic before I can see them opening up into a small room, with a small window, glittered with shiny-winged flies. Back down again. Another staircase, down, and alarm bells are firing up in my amygdalae, and we come out into a doorless basement this time, fully underground, with only a slit of a window at the top of one wall to reveal where we are. Other children are coming down now, ones I can’t just trample past, so I have to wait, my heart in my fingertips and my earlobes, the thick brick walls gently pouring into my lungs, my glands filling up with the weight of trapped blood. When the staircase is clear again I leap up, blind, to the sunlight and stand in clear space, door mere steps away. A Peacock butterfly has died on top of the display describing the hunting parties hosted here in another lifetime, and I can’t help momentarily rolling my eyes. Dude. It’s not that bad. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/the-day-starts-in-an-unlikely-vein-by-8am-im monthly 0.5 2015-03-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381602846-U1BD4BZPTQ4I6U2N59Y8/tumblr_nl7x4fA0lz1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries The day starts in an unlikely vein: by 8am, I’m not only up, but have been to the supermarket and made coconut porridge for the gang, rather than hollering from my bed at some time after 9 for a child to bring me tea. The sky is blue, the sun is warm. We pack up a picnic and toss a few coats in the car, just in case, because the sky has gone from golden blue to a shallower powder blue. By the time we get to our destination, it has become a disloyal shade of dove grey. I push away my nagging tiredness - who in the name of God gets up with a spring in their step at 6 fucking 45? - and try to ignore the fuzzing edge of my brain. It’s so incredibly beautiful here. That staves it off for a while. As we walk among the marble statues, I explain to the others about the hypocrisy of much female nudity in Modern Classical Art, the unpleasant legitimacy of buying and owning a nude woman who looks at you over her shoulder while vainly clutching a thin cloth over one breast, and how the same patriarchal path leads to the current dissing of selfies, where women and girls have in many cases reclaimed ownership of their image. My party asks if they can start on the picnic yet.  We shuffle around the gardens and the terrace of the big house, but it’s already too cold for me to joke to J that I’ll definitely have my second wedding here. Inside, a volunteer apologises that the house will be closing at 2 today, due to a wedding. Oh! I say, How lovely! The seating is laid out for the ceremony, two flanks of yellow-cushioned chairs filling a drawing room. I photograph the wallpaper and the mouldings, and I walk down the centre aisle and stand where the bride will be in a few hours. I look down at the chair right by me, aisle seat, front row. When I check a moment later, yes, the rest of the cards are printed - but this one, in careful biro writing, has the name of our flatmate from our first flat in London, nine years ago. Her name is reasonably unique, her spelling even more so.  Whoah, I say to J, I only just spoke to her, after years of companionable social media nods. She was looking for a reading for a wedding she was going to ohhhhhhh. If this was a book, I add, this plot point would be savaged for its unlikeliness.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/my-fathers-birthday-i-meet-my-mother-at-ikea-and monthly 0.5 2015-03-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381602941-W0ECNL4BJVCTXINFKTBL/tumblr_nkt1l3zl8r1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries My father’s birthday. I meet my mother at Ikea and we eat chocolate doughnuts while we walk around, picking the final details of the kitchen she would never have been permitted in his lifetime. We talk talk talk all the way around and through the morning, and into lunch, when we go back to the last place the three of us had eaten together. His favourite eaterie was usually Frankie & Benny’s, something I saw with leaden disdain as yet further proof of the interplanetary distance between us, but that day he’d wanted moules marinière, another optimistic chase of his fleeing appetite. I stayed for lunch. We were together that day because of another hospital appointment, another meeting where another doctor had spoken to my father’s brick wall face, and my father had left the meeting feeling upbeat, prepared to insist on further chemo. More time, he said, cancer ticking away in his liver, his bowel, his kidney; I just want another ten, twenty years. Other people have done it. I was shaking with rage by the time we got to our table. His stubbornness. His deafness. No, he didn’t want a party, he didn’t want his friends over, he didn’t want family visiting from far shores - he would beat this thing first, then he’d think about all that stuff. My vision was blossoming with all sorts of deep purples and reds. I ordered the lobster, the most expensive thing on the menu, and sat in a furious silence that made me feel young again. His appetite wasn’t up to the mussels after all, and the kitchen put them in a discarded lidless plastic box for him to take them home. In case things changed. This time, my mother and I both order the lobster. I also have oysters. I’ve been craving them since halfway through my last pregnancy. Because it’s just us now, because she is a widow, because she is alone, I permit my mother a single solitary oyster from my outsized plate of iced shells. I finish the oysters, and we finish our lobsters, wiping the frites around the mayo on our plates, planning holidays she might take, the yoga she’s meaning to take up again. That night, and the night after, I chase away the overwhelming horror of death by sitting in warm rooms with funny women, and we talk about books and our skin, travel plans and marriage, bullying and food, comedy and ambition. I think about making lobster bisque with the shells I took home in a lidless plastic box. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/hot-damn-its-nice-to-have-my-sister-back-in-the monthly 0.5 2015-02-24 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/111602005539 monthly 0.5 2015-02-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381603038-GSFHJYT9BF0K3BPJJQCK/tumblr_nk3alpulTV1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries A holiday. For the first three days I am so ill that I think the heating’s broken at night, as I talk and toss and tear at my skin to make sense of where I am and who’s with me in the hot air and dizziness. I ride down water park rapids with our wild otter children in my waking hours and feel my legs and arms being pushed by currents hours later, back in bed, dry and still.  I reread Lucy Wadham’s The Secret Life of France, and marvel yet again how much sense it makes, and how much it explains my mother and her family, and the light years that yawned between her and my Scottish Protestant father. As ever, anything French makes me think about the levels of grooming la femme française is assumed to engage in as her duty as a woman. I think about how much I love face creams and washes, Liz Earle cleansers and Clarins serums, Eight Hour Cream and REN exfoliators, Bobbi Brown eyeliners and NARS blushers, Revlon lip crayons and Rimmel nail polish. I love the packaging, the smells, the rituals. But the trouble is, I can’t think where in my day I would find five minutes to groom more than the very bare minimum I do. In our seven-day break I brush my hair three times, and put mascara on twice. I want to be better groomed, I really do. Blow outs and skin care and classic, well-made clothes. But when it comes to the end of each day, I don’t know what I could ditch to make space for even washing my face. Less reading? Less work? Less sleep?  Inconceivable.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/yesterday-somebody-asked-me-if-my-three-children monthly 0.5 2015-02-11 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/children-are-magical-cherubs-who-appreciate-every monthly 0.5 2015-02-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381603236-SY6F6H6Y02TRXXXQ90H2/tumblr_njgz0pB4ht1rbh1yco1_640.png The Sam Binnie Diaries https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381603332-B9USTWJLK97KXRYU0ZSK/tumblr_njgz0pB4ht1rbh1yco2_500.png The Sam Binnie Diaries https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381603461-JSP8FI8OOKWXZRQ6UBP5/tumblr_njgz0pB4ht1rbh1yco3_400.png The Sam Binnie Diaries https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381604654-QOF8PBOMFBC614YDU3UP/tumblr_njgz0pB4ht1rbh1yco4_250.png The Sam Binnie Diaries http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/110279998459 monthly 0.5 2015-02-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381605122-8FIFQQN6OYHX2XUO359D/tumblr_njdbizhZEa1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Back to a hospital, back to a cancer centre, but purely for professional reasons this time. I wander around the back of the hospital for a while, the bit I like the best - cages of laundry and boxes of shrink-wrapped equipment in the sun, all the functioning innards that show this place is working correctly - before I head into the beautiful Maggie’s centre. My meandering route brings back the dizzy, detached, hurrying, comfort-eating horrors of last summer, spent at a different hospital while Cancer Dad was sleepily swelling and shrinking and sealing up for good. I see the point of these places. Warm and bright, full of voices and comfort, soft lighting, soft cushions, space, and time. You could sit there all day, eating biscuits and talking to other people about lymphoedemas, or their childrens’ jobs, or a courgette cake recipe, or the knitting you’ve never quite mastered, or the cities you’ve lived in across the world. I think of the cups of coffee and slices of cake we’d eat in the John Lewis cafe, anything to get away from the hospital (everyone in a dressing gown or in tears or both) and how we’d talk only to each other, going around and around in circles, never really saying anything.  On the way home, a song on the radio reminds me with such Proustian heaviness of a single particular day from my teenage years that I’m amazed I can drive the car at the same time as remembering. It makes me think that maybe the reason I haven’t cried since his death is simply that his not being around any more is a great deal less sad that some of those days when he was.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/109905809729 monthly 0.5 2015-02-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381606116-KPMMV0134JTJCO2F4E54/tumblr_nj5vc5U5fl1rbh1yco1_1280.png The Sam Binnie Diaries A life filled with good things. My dear mother gives me one of her Reverse Pep Talks (“I alwayz know zat wheneffer everysing iss going well, zat’s when sings start going wrrrrong”) (she doesn’t even speak like that, but I know she loooooves my, frankly, inspired impression of her) and even putting aside the fact that the very nature of Things Going Right is that you then notice when something, anything comes up which isn’t great, I make a conscious choice to put that parcel of gifted fear aside.  The baby turns her head back and forth on the bed to Taylor Swift, giving me perfect deadpan side-eye in time to the beat. Youngest siblings, right? After a long nap, she hangs out in my office and takes all my carefully ordered drawers to pieces, scribbling over my handmade gift tags and slowly shredding invoices. Tonight, almost two hours after all the buns should be asleep, when I’m desperately trying to finish the urgent work I had to put aside this afternoon to rescue my wireless box from her redesign, I can still hear bright, jolly singing from her cot.  It’s a great pleasure.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/dumsnet-episode-1 monthly 0.5 2015-01-14 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/108010058164 monthly 0.5 2015-01-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381606225-XJGL8LLL96QIOI2NPRC9/tumblr_ni4trrup2W1rbh1yco1_640.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries A double swimming lesson at the end of a pleasant, exhausting day. So many bodies to look after, in and out of the water. And into this place that usually just sees me sweating (the changing rooms of children’s pools are rarely kept beneath Lightly Roast) and chivvying my infants with various Gothic endearments/threats, kind strangers step in. A four-year-old hands the baby her pens and lets it colour all over her careful bright pages. A mother with a face like a Botticelli angel produces an Ipad mini for two others in my gang, and an older girl arrives just in time to keep the baby from eating all the pens.  In the changing rooms, while I sweat myself into moderate-to-severe dehydration and the baby puts on a swimming cap which, combined with chronic ink mouth, brings a young Zandra Rhodes into our presence, one of M’s friends declares to the whole room that They Don’t Have A TV. M – like anyone who’s generally only ever really watched TV when Clockwork Orange-d by her mother into consuming family favourites from two generations ago – doesn’t know how to respond. Her friends says, What? What’s weird about that? And I say, in an attempt to help the situation, Wow, that’s cool. It’s not even out of my mouth before I can hear how sarcastic it sounds to the rest of the room. Her friend says, Does she watch TV? M is apparently paralysed by the two of us. I know the feeling. I try to explain that she doesn’t really, maybe… once a fortnight? Maybe? to try and normalise whatever it is this six-year-old is seeking to shock us with, and I can feel with an audible click the room turn against me. I want to explain, No, I love the Square Au Pair, she’s the best, I just… I… but everyone drifts out and I’m sweating so hard it’s stinging my eyes.  I resolve to try again next week.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/i-cant-stop-watching-this-video-its-a-running monthly 0.5 2015-01-09 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/happy-new-year-christmas-was-filled-with-feasts monthly 0.5 2015-01-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381606433-0DK878F7BQCE2TIVYIV2/tumblr_nhtrgaNDGa1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Happy new year!  Christmas was filled with feasts and gluts: tables groaning under enormous spreads, my mind creaking with the unwilling weight of new realisations, new ideas, new ways to make my life better. A pagan festival of lights and hyggelig, if I may mix my erroneous cultural references, seasoned with a light sprinkling of Painful, Brutal Truths.  And there were friends I hadn’t seen for years, or who had never been to this (no longer) new home, or who I had missed for huge swathes of their lives. And it was magical. All these people! Whom I loved! And who made me laugh so much! And knew me so well! To have a friend at our table who had kicked around with me as young teens, planning our lives with perfect self-importance, as now we sat discussing job plans and home decoration because, shit, man, we love that now. But still also discussing our families, because no one ever outgrows that. Or the entire clan of ex-colleagues, like a bank of blown-out wild roses, dancing and drunken at a wedding, two of whom bundle me out of the back door after the bride and groom have left like I’m Taylor S heading for her blacked-out SUV. Lunch dates and dinner dates and coffees and staying up late playing Mario with old friends and only having little, ever so little twinges about the final moments with my father that I’m not sure will ever stop creeping up on me when I least want them, but then the children, reading to each other, knocking over the rack of drying clothes to build a giant den, starting every sentence when they play among themselves with this moment’s request to Pretend…  For maybe the first January in my life, I’ve taken some New Year’s advice and have made no resolutions. I’m looking forward to events, and people, and possibilities. But I’m making no promises. And it feels good.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/i-promised-myself-a-quiet-december-this-year monthly 0.5 2014-12-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381606540-H3A74EO2VIS33OZ87FV1/tumblr_nghllhaxA71rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I promised myself a quiet December this year. Fewer huge Christmas feasts; less time in the supermarket; longer days under blankets with books and biscuits and babies. Yet somehow I’m so busy I had to cancel my therapist appointment this week - almost comically bad self-care - and my days are split into hour-long segments of ‘Jesus, where am I supposed to be once this has finished?’ Publishers seem to be having end-of-year panics too, demanding blurbs on tighter deadlines than normal, which suits me fine; I might actually be able to afford the presents I’ve got piled up in various cupboards.  Even in December, I really don’t drink. In our book club, the joke is how excited I get about having a whole bottle of Schloer to myself because everyone else is on the prosecco. But our Christmas meeting is at a restaurant, and it seems sociable to have a glass of wine with our meal, then another, and another, and then the chef is sending limoncello shots and someone’s googling niche sex terms and we’re tumbling out into the street, trying to get into closed bars like we’re teenagers instead of members of a local playgroup, and we find an open pub and drink flavoured sambuca shots and someone’s carrying the half-pizza we liberated from the restaurant then we’re inside a club where everyone is either underage or looking like they hope their wife doesn’t catch them there, and when I leave at 2am I realise that I’ve overdressed for the weather, in hat and mittens and coat and scarf, and I think of those New York winter evenings out with my sister where we’d be in layer after layer after layer, sometimes two hats, two pairs of gloves, huge shawls, squinting against the icy wind until we bundle with her friends into bars or galleries or brunch joints, defrosting slowly, the blood prickling its way back into our cheeks, not caring about anything. The weather here is milder. I walk by the river in the dark and the quiet, remembering all the times I did this as a student, and I wonder whether I really was naive to do it then, a young woman alone in the dark, or whether I just wasn’t frightened. I wonder if I’ll ever be not-frightened again, without the aid of sambuca and some house red.  At the school gates in the morning, I am disconnected and chaotic. I get several people’s names wrong. I cry through the school nativity. Afterwards, a bright beaming star of a friend takes me for a cooked breakfast.  Man, I love December.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/my-body-clock-is-fairly-smashed-and-most-days-im monthly 0.5 2014-11-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381606644-JI4CL09UQ5JEDUSOUC6R/tumblr_nezwmmOGcQ1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries My body clock is fairly smashed, and most days I’m unable to tell whether it’s a quarter to Christmas, or ten past the-time-you-need-to-leave-for-school-pick-up. But I’ve got business, exciting business, in Bristol, and through the miracle of an unhospitalised parent and a cooperative J, I’ve headed here a night early. On the drive, I keep instinctively turning around to check on the baby. I’m not used to being alone. I check into my hotel (is there a more magical phrase in the English language?) and head out for coffee. Bristol is beautiful. In the warm November early evening, the city seems to be full of bright creatures heading somewhere worth waiting for. I eat alone - my god, I’d forgotten how much I love doing that - and afterwards, with my takeout coffee, I stand at the ice rink, watching the same ten people circle round and around. The rink sounds like plastic but grates up like ice, and our line of bystanders laughs along with the skater when he takes a dramatic, flailing tumble. It’s been a long time since I could just think these lazy, pretentious thoughts; a slow swim in the world of beautiful things. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/i-worry-for-a-moment-that-a-tv-programme-has monthly 0.5 2014-11-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381606856-F0Y4N7D4LMMJIPQD3PS7/tumblr_new8lcAUpZ1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I worry for a moment that a TV programme has broken me. It was something stupid and utterly manipulative, a throw-away 60 seconds handed over momentarily to a father-daughter relationship that leaves me howling and concerned about how to do the school run when my face is contorted and leaking, but another 60 seconds pass and the howling stops and another 60 seconds pass and I’ve missed the train again; the crying didn’t take, as usual, and instead the echoes have simply shattered something within me, so I’m just smashed shards chink-chinking about within my skin. Friends are good. Daylight or easy meet-ups are perfect - anything else and the sadness of my SAD-ness (something I thought I’d shed a long ago) makes me cancel, excusing it in my head even if I don’t tell them I’m not coming. Many years back, a friend and I defended to our group the practice of friendship-culling, scraping off the vampires. These cheering, beamish people who drink coffee with me and share a pizza and knock for runs and make Christmas park plans will be beloved forever. I do my best to not vampire them. I crave someone to bring me a nightly box of hot, good food: spiced rices; lemon-zest chicken; broth; invalid food. In the absence of that, I wish yet again that I could fold over the dotted line on those family relationships which drag me down, and tear along the perforated dashes. I lie down next to my daughter and read to her about Bruce Bogtrotter, and fall asleep to the sound of her insisting she won’t fall asleep. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/at-times-like-this-people-say-take-care-of monthly 0.5 2014-11-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381606940-DON1A63M7EO0YVUCTVXE/tumblr_nekmffhWjg1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries At times like this, people say ‘Take care of yourself’ all the time. Sometimes it’s a throwaway line, sometimes it’s said with more care, a bit more concern. 'Take care of yourself, yes?’ Of course, that’s an impossibility. Between going to Cancer Dad’s hospital appointments and all the notes and emails around that; writing a book; completing my beloved freelance work - going back a little further: moving house and leaving our friends; having another baby; my sister and her family moving to the other side of the world, probably for good; redundancy; and on top of all that, money worries and the feeding and cleaning up after and home decoration for and clothing and caring for and the hundred small and a few bigger concerns and worries of my golden, delicious family… where does taking care of myself fit in? If I don’t have time to sleep, how do I grieve for this year’s terrible, horrible deaths?  Last week was a perfect storm of crises, and none of them were mine. In the same week, three separate friends, entirely independent of each other, told me about their own experiences of and dealings with depression and therapy. I had intended to miss this documentary on Radio 4, but ended up hearing the whole thing. Serendipity. When several comedians discussed their time in therapy, and their therapists’ patient refusal of their jokes, it was a gut-punch realisation that the sense of humour I prize so highly and cherish over almost all else had actually been keeping me from dealing with any of these difficult, even horrific, experiences. LOL of course I’m fine with my Dad in the terminal ward, have you seen how cheap the food is in a hospital cafe? LOL ACTUAL PAIN MAKES GOOD FUN JOKES LOL Fingers flying on the ol’ magical google also made me finally believe (in a way I couldn’t when it was just *loved ones* telling me - Jesus Christ, what do they know?) that any mood swings or behavioural changes I’d had this year were pretty much 98% likely to have been due to all the shit I’d had kicking around in my Life Events brain section. Less 'You are actually a wicked bastard and it’s finally coming to the surface’, more 'You know you can just go and get help and you’ll feel less like this and more like the self you know you are’. And YES - I am *extremely* privileged that I can just go and pay for therapy, and that I’m able and verbal and open and everything else enough that this is an option for me. I am extremely lucky.  Everyone I’ve discussed therapy with turns out generally already to have had it, and they all say, 'OH MY GOD EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE THERAPY IT IS THE BEST’, with the same hopping up-and-down giddiness I get when someone asks if they should read Wolf Hall. But once I’d booked my first appointment, I started thinking, 'Do I really need it? People never used to need therapy. Certainly not at 33. Not if they hadn’t been in a war zone or something.’ Then I started thinking about the general family skills and life histories of my ancestors, and realised, yeah, we probably all should have a bit of fucking therapy. If nothing else, it gives you fifty minutes to just talk about yourself and god knows I love to do that LOL JOKES ABOUT FEELINGS ARE THE FUNNIEST BECAUSE THEN YOU DONT HAVE TO DEAL WITH THE ACTUAL FEELINGS LOL Anyway. Wish me luck. I feel (a little bit) better already.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/a-city-warm-night-air-cafes-bars-people-in-the monthly 0.5 2014-10-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381607155-I9AISE52BTYTIFHEFS96/tumblr_ne7ulojNKG1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries A city; warm night air; cafes, bars, people in the street, unhurried; a meal out; family; some Philip K Dick and Nora Ephron and Amy Poehler; a long run; good news; good sleep. These are a few of my favourite things.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/i-remember-once-feeling-like-i-was-losing-my-mind monthly 0.5 2014-10-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381608226-03TRHGQWPC52U2B6JQCD/tumblr_ndy6pqyyOB1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I remember once feeling like I was losing my mind - in the depths of heartbreak, my brain untethered itself from my body, and floated away from it, watching it function while occasionally demanding that it do strange, inexplicable things. These days, instead, my mind and body have both been taken over, a Hulk slowly inflating within until I can feel it pressing against my flesh from the inside, taking over my eyes and ears, my arms and legs, all of my organs, raising my blood temp to boiling and making my eyeballs vibrate inside my skull. My thoughts are like candy floss, tangling around each other until I can’t tell the beginning or end of a thought. If I write something down on enough lists, sometimes I’ll discover later that I’ve managed to complete some task, but anything that requires decision-making is utterly beyond me.  And when there’s only a tiny bit of myself left, buried under the grief and stress of the last eighteen months, I can’t even really hear it anymore. I can’t hear that voice insisting that I don’t really want to move out of my life, I don’t really want to flee abroad on my own, I’m sure I don’t want to go out of my way to push away those closest to me. I stand in the middle of Boots and think about dyeing my hair, which becomes cutting it all off, which becomes flying to a new country and committing to some bigamous marriage with someone who won’t even speak my language. But I don’t even feel like this all the time - there are vast swathes, the majority even, where I’m happy, sensible, sad but whole - but when I do feel like this it expands in my memory so that it overwrites the previous day or week and suddenly I’ve felt like this forever, and won’t ever feel anything else again. It is so boring.  The woman in the shop who fits my new glasses is a rung up to feeling better. She performs such wonderful, purposeful goofiness in a too-low chair that if I speak softly enough and carry myself out carefully enough, I can keep that full glass in my head and feel alright for the rest of the day. The good feeling dissipates by the next shop doorway. A gentle council employee with a massive watch who gives me my parking permit within two minutes is another rung up; hand over hand I think I can lift myself out. Things which are not rungs up but instead are a foot on my head: staying up late; eating garbage; cutting myself off from people; lying like a rug on the floor instead of going for a run; reading bad books; watching bad films; accepting unnecessary pressure. I know this, and I maintain those destructive habits.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/to-the-woman-who-did-a-panicked-gasp-in-the monthly 0.5 2014-10-14 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/some-days-it-feels-like-im-all-doing-is-chewing monthly 0.5 2014-10-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381608677-809QBFNROSQMXFKOTXMO/tumblr_nd3bc676kh1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Some days it feels like I’m all doing is chewing this same mouthful of feeling over and over and over again, until the flavour is just a ghost but the substance of it isn’t reducing at all. I’m thinking of my father more, not less. I’m reminded of him more frequently, several times a day now, and the reminders are hurting more, not less. And I’m tired of jawing over this, although it’s only been a month since his funeral. What a day that was! I thought it had put a neat, clean, joyful lid on what had been a horrific experience; but the warm memories are seeping in like a crippling frostbite. I don’t want to remember him decorating the Christmas tree with my unhelpful assistance each year, when I’m trying to watch The Snowman with my children. Oh god, is this the best my memories can do? Christmas? The last refuge of the sentimentalist? Fine: I don’t want to be jumped by all the things I want to show him, or ask him, or talk to him about, even though I’d stopped caring about his answers years ago. I don’t want to remember how desperate he was to live, now that he’s stopped living and won’t ever live again. I bore myself with these pitiful thoughts, looping around on repeat.  My neighbour and I have a long, good conversation about selfishness. About how valuable it is when you have kids, about the vital necessity of carving out your own time, your own work, your own identity. Selfishness was the thing that always made me happiest when we lived in London, and it was the main part of what made me such a good parent: the clear-cut time I had with the children was entirely ours, and I shared it joyfully. Now there is so much to do - freelance work and housekeeping and school runs and friends and countless other obligations that mean you don’t go unmourned when you die - that the selfishness has slipped down to the bottom of the list, and grips on only in name. I *am* selfish. I *definitely* do stuff just for myself.  I think of my dad and the long weeks and months he left my mother while he was training around the world, living up in the sky while she raised his children and moved us from country to country on her own, driving their home across a continent. Did his selfishness make him happy? Did it help us love him?   I’m chewing and chewing, but the mouthful never seems to shrink at all.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/after-our-weekly-saturday-watch-of-gbbo-tiny-paul monthly 0.5 2014-10-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381609537-E1FJ6UVD2AST6DK64VHR/tumblr_nczj2lqdV41rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381609758-KKSPGGYES1SOILO2VAB5/tumblr_nczj2lqdV41rbh1yco2_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/this-photo-doesnt-even-begin-to-do-this-dish monthly 0.5 2014-10-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381609980-63LX1DBJKNIYVW794BIF/tumblr_ncxrwkteoc1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries This photo doesn’t even begin to do this dish justice. I had only seconds before the baby woofed my portion, so this had to do.  It was comforting but not too heavy, and the cabbage and bacon added bite to the soft cheesy macaroni and sweet squash.  Fancy Autumn Macaroni Cheese (serves 6-8) 1 squash Olive oil Flake salt & fresh ground pepper 450g macaroni ½ a savoy cabbage 3 rashers of smoked bacon 600ml whole milk 50g butter + 1 tbsp more 50g flour 300g cheese (with as much flavour as you can get - no point using Mild here), grated Peel and deseed the squash and cut into 3cm cubes. Put in a tinfoiled baking tray, slosh with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, crumble some flake salt over and bake at 180c for 30-40 mins or until soft and a tiny bit crisp at the edges.  Meanwhile, cook the macaroni in a big pot of boiling water (with some olive oil and salt. Blood has been spilt over my mother’s refusal to salt pasta. *It tastes like gummy flour if you don’t*, fyi). While it’s cooking (it doesn’t take long, and you want to leave it with a little bite) chop the half-cabbage into strips. In a frying pan, melt the tbsp of butter and, once bubbling, add the cabbage and stir around for only about 15-20 seconds. It’ll soften more in the heat of the macaroni.  Drain the macaroni and put in a serving dish with the cabbage on top, then cover with some tinfoil and a tea towel (to keep it warm). In a saucepan, put the milk, flour and butter, gently heat and beat continually with a silicon whisk (this is literally the only use I’ve found for that utensil. Imagine people trying to beat eggs with it HAHAHHAHA). It’ll thicken up beautifully and smoothly, at which point you can take it off the heat and add the cheese and a few grinds of pepper. While that cheese melts in, cook the bacon (I tossed it in the cabbage frying pan - you know my motto about reduced washing up - but you can always grill it if that really floats your boat), then slice it into 2cm squares. Precision is not required here.  Remove the squash from the oven once browned and soft, and add it to the macaroni and cabbage, along with the bacon and cheese sauce. Stir gently. Serve with a fresh green salad in a nice lemony dressing.  SIDE NOTE: a jam jar with a lid got M not only into salads, but also into tasting the food as we go along. M’s now our trusted salad-dressing maker. Another chore delegated. #success  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/i-am-crying-as-i-write-this-lol-jk-but-this-is monthly 0.5 2014-10-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381610092-GSMZVDGZ43U0B5MYLSLQ/tumblr_ncu1e3prbG1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I am crying as I write this. Lol, jk, but this is a total thing of mouth beauty and I have to share it with you. It’s liquorishish yet buttery, everything that’s good about an autumnal oven. And it’s perfect for using up those bananas which you bought in good faith but have somehow become scattered around the house, slowly and silently browning.  Banana Bread (serves 1 if you’re quick enough, otherwise makes 10 or so slices) 4 medium-large ripe or overripe bananas 80g butter (plus some to grease the tin) 200g dark brown sugar (this is v v important, it raises the flavour level to MAGIC) 1 large egg 1 and ½ tbsp vanilla paste 1 tsp bicarb of soda Pinch of salt 180g spelt flour (I know this is a fussy ball-ache, and back into the realms of Waitrose, but I have *two bags* in my cupboard from when I keep meaning to make Hugh F-W recipes then never get round to it. It is TOTALLY worth it) Preheat the oven to 170c fan. I don’t know what that is for any other cooking temperature system. Vaguely mash the bananas in a big bowl. They should be ripe enough that it doesn’t take much effort, so you can stop and leave it quite rough, with lots of chunks in. Melt the butter and add to the bananas, along with the dark brown sugar, the egg which you’ve briefly beaten in the melted butter bowl (why make more washing up for yourself), the vanilla paste, the bicarb, the salt, and finally the flour. Mix well, so there are no clumps of flour left.  Pour into a buttered loaf tin, and cook for between 60-70 minutes. The fractionally lower temp but longer time means the loaf is cooked all the way through but the outer layer is *almost* burned, so has a beautiful treacly flavour.  It’s *so* good, it doesn’t even need butter.  I know.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/i-took-no-care-of-myself-at-all-over-the-summer monthly 0.5 2014-10-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381610169-C1N2GVVC6T0QGTKGU4M6/tumblr_ncs492aKpW1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381610234-JEZS3FVUZEBKDZWZKXQK/tumblr_ncs492aKpW1rbh1yco2_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/a-difficult-conversation monthly 0.5 2014-09-30 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/a-month-since-my-father-died-sometimes-the monthly 0.5 2014-09-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381610438-CXYR0LKK63JXDHNB4CUS/tumblr_nc9lgxnzaf1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries A month since my father died. Sometimes the sour-salt smell of his dead body will float to the top of my brain, or the sight of his half-open eyes, and I’ll remember how his skin felt in that close room, in that last bed. In my dreams, he visits with greater frequency than he ever visited my home in life: at first, he was standing behind me while my daughter shouted, Look! Look!; in another, he had just left the room, and the corner of my eye; last night he was at a party one of us was throwing, and he was like his old self, his years-ago self, and it was an enormous pleasure to see him, unlaced with the sick dread of later on.  I spoke about his sense of humour at his funeral, how that was the most defining part of our relationship. And it was, and continues to be, true. It’s been a gift, and shaped the very best of me. For my work, I’m asked to come up with some ad lines for the memoir of a comic actor who’s always reminded me of my father, and it’s only spending the afternoon googling clips - many of which I’d watched with my dad - that it hits me again, dizzyingly, not overwhelmingly, but vertiginously. I cry a bit and get on with it.  At a car boot yesterday, we unpack the car and I see almost all the books we’re selling are ones from his shelves, donated many months ago, Jeffrey Archers and Boris Johnsons and Jeremy Clarksons. Not my onions in the slightest. But one is the William Langewiesche that I sent him after I’d worked on the back cover copy, complete with the note from me tucked two-thirds of the way through, as far as he’d got before moving on to something else. At the previous car boot, before he’d died, I would have given the whole pile away for a round pound. Laid out on the picnic rug this time, it feels like a cheat, a spitefulness, and I hope the buyers know the value of what they’re getting.  I don’t regret not telling him that I loved him, because I did. But I wish I could have understood when I was saying it that it was true, that he’d made my life better more than he’d made it worse. But not one ounce of that is going to make me any more willing to have leftover Clarksons, Johnsons and Archers in my own home for a single second longer than is necessary.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/a-good-lunch-with-good-friends-in-our-garden monthly 0.5 2014-09-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381610772-UAKAFYKRCQCAC2SC7W5T/tumblr_nc3lq9pZVs1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries A good lunch with good friends in our garden - ginormous Goop-ish Mexican feast, followed by my rice pudding, which I make differently each time but which was so successful this time that I shall attempt to share that recipe with you.  Rice Pudding (serves 6-8) 1 large tablespoon butter 300g arborio rice  200ml some zinfandel or something similar, I don’t know, whatever’s in the fridge 600ml double cream 1l whole milk 2 tsp vanilla paste 100g caster sugar  Juice of ¼ of an orange Melt the butter in a heavy-based saucepan. Roll the rice around in it, getting it translucent and handsome-looking, then add the wine and bubble it gently for a minute or two. In a bowl, mix the cream, 750ml of the milk, the sugar and the vanilla. Pour into the pan with the rice. Stir well, add the orange juice, and keep over a medium-low heat, stirring occasionally. Add the remaining 250ml of milk as needed, if the liquid is completely absorbed and the rice is not yet ready, or you just want to make it a little looser at the end. Should take around 30 minutes.  I offered it with chocolate chips (which made all the kids do little jigs), raspberry jam, or just on its own. Bon appetit.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/on-her-recent-uk-visit-my-sister-notes-how monthly 0.5 2014-09-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381611549-MJI66W7E4NBRUUL4AOML/tumblr_nbslltg8Q71rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries On her recent UK visit, my sister notes how beautiful and various the architecture is where I live now. I haven’t noticed, not really, not in any complete sense, just odd observations here and there. At the moment my father dies I have been sent out of his room - my mother wants to wrap my birthday presents for the next day - and am sitting at the kitchen table, flicking through a Sunday Times magazine, marvelling at their levels of trolling and trying to count how many chocolate chip cookies I can fit in my mouth at once with the aid of a hot cup of tea. My mother comes into the kitchen, pale, still, eyes wide, and says my name once. It takes a second before we are both racing upstairs, not hesitating at his doorway - there is something to be done and we absolutely have to do it. But even standing over him, touching him, me tonguing chocolate chips from between my teeth, we aren’t sure. I have to ring up his GP and say, “I’m really sorry; I *think* my dad’s died?”, sounding twelve years old, not thirty-two (for another eight hours). We watch him and watch him and watch him, our eyes so used to seeing the living that we keep seeing a vein pulse, a chest rise, an eye twitch. The doctor comes and takes long, long minutes to pronounce him; my mother and I terrified past words that he might still be alive, that this could be the final stage which goes on for more weeks, or months. We call who we need to call, and we sit with him. We both kiss him.  Because his illness was fast but linear - diagnosis; prognosis; declining speech; declining movement; increased fatigue; bed bound; mute; eyes closed; slowed breathing; less breathing; slower pulse; FIN - it seemed a matter of shading. But the truth I’m struggling with is far more black and white: alive; alive; alive; alive; alive; dead. That’s what jolts me when an elderly man reaches across me in a supermarket aisle, his forearms just like my father’s. It’s not my father’s forearm: he’s dead.  The vast majority of the messages of support I receive understand the complexities of the relationship we had. One particularly pragmatic friend reminds me that ‘If you take the euphemisms out of an obituary, you’ve got prepositions and a resume’. But even a gentle death, at home, on a sunny day, of someone with whom you have this complex relationship, is savage and impossible to understand.  I’m noticing the local buildings again. Mostly Victorian, with hints of Dickensian munificence, plus my beloved high rise blocks and some Georgian scraps around the edges. The temptation is to make a pun about how I’m looking up, but these reminders of dead builders and dead architects and dead designers are reminding me to look forward instead.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/my-mother-and-i-take-my-sister-to-the-airport-this monthly 0.5 2014-09-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381612333-P6RAMYTDDBDO6M0S5GLF/tumblr_nblranruOJ1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries My mother and I take my sister to the airport this evening. It’s been two weeks of almost non-stop laughter, and between friends and those two and my family and extended family, it feels like I’ve been lifted through something which could have been truly awful, and instead was utterly good. So much so that at the airport tonight, despite that ol’ light of my life disappearing to the other side of the globe again, all I could notice was luggage tags and eye blinds and bag straps and travel pillows and a bubbling excitement of voyages, even if I’m going nowhere right now.  Driving home in the dark while my sister texts me film options before take-off, my mother and I talk about my dad, of course. We allow the possibility, and the blessing, of binary thoughts about him at last, at last, co-existing in our contented minds.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/cooking-a-breakfast-pancake-feast-for-my-most monthly 0.5 2014-09-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381613032-9AZ7R0YTKZX50AZCETGO/tumblr_nbjps1Sf2z1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Cooking a breakfast pancake feast for my most beloved people, all of them sitting in my garden, in the sunshine. I still dream about taking J and the kids around the world, but days like this also make me daydream about painting the kitchen, going on a bike ride, having another day like this.  In the afternoon I send the kids up some local apple trees, and we return with an enormous bag of fruit. I find a recipe for cheddar and apple pie, and after slaving in the kitchen for hours (I end up making a pie for our neighbour too, such is the glut) while they watch Great British Bake Off, I am forced to listen to my tiny Paul Hollywood telling me with familliar unbearded bluntness that my pastry is too salty. For that reason, I offer you instead my recipe for the roast peaches I made the night before, easy and quick and tear-jerkingly delicious.  4 fairly hard peaches 2-3 tablespoons of brown sugar 2 tsp of vanilla paste 75ml water Cut the peaches along the seam and twist apart, leaving in the stone. Put in a deep sided-baking dish, sprinkle with the sugar and drizzle over the vanilla paste. Put in a pre-heated oven - maybe 180c - and leave for 15 minutes. Once that time is up, pour the water over the peaches. Leave in the oven for another 20 minutes, until they look like forlorn old shoes. Serve two halves in each bowl, with a bowl of cool, cool cream.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/i-drive-to-the-committal-service-behind-the-car monthly 0.5 2014-09-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381613245-PY8YUR6X5A1IGFLXM2FC/tumblr_namiw9qbuL1rbh1yco1_1280.png The Sam Binnie Diaries I drive to the Committal service behind the car with my mother, her sisters and J, following the hearse. In my car, my sister and I have our French cousin and French uncle, the latter of whom plays us the Benny Hill music on his phone as we travel in convoy and bangs the top of my head until all four of us are weeping with laughter. At the Crematorium, we meet my dad’s family, his sweet sisters - really, we have so few men in the family, we’ve had to marry them all in or produce them ourselves - and suddenly the simple horror of his still body in a box makes me feel sick and weak and bovine. We shuffle into the Chapel, accidentally wedging my mother down the end of one row, and listen to the RAF Padre talk about the Kingdom of Heaven for a while. He mispronounces my mother’s name over and over again, and I smirk each time. We enjoy the hymns. I’m distracted by the buttons he pushes when it’s time to draw the curtains across our view of the coffin - he’d told us about them earlier, and once you know he’s doing it, you can’t un-notice it, like the weather presenter’s discreet thumbing for a new screen - but when the service is over and my mother’s choice of exit music begins, ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’, the front row - my mother, my sisters and I - fall apart, starting up a howl in perfect sync, which of course instantly turns to laughter in my mouth and sets us all giggling. We sit and cry and sing along, then realise when the song starts up again that everyone is waiting for us to move first.  As we drive out of the Crematorium ground, we see my father’s oldest friends, the ones we were wondering about the absence of, driving in. We have given them the wrong time. For the rest of the day, we all laugh about this, and friends tell us that my father would have found it hilarious, that error. (He wouldn’t. Appropriately, somehow, he would in reality have been so angry that he would have refused to attend the entire rest of day.)  At the afternoon Memorial service, the church is full, bulging, standing room only. The Padre brings us to the door to see where we’ll speak our Memorial words, and the verger misunderstands and makes 300 people stand up, while we back away from the door, doubled-over with fist-in-mouth silent laughter. When our chosen organ music strikes up, we feel any tension has been destroyed by the premature rise and burst in, the four of us marching down the aisle to our blank pew at the front. It feels like some kind of last-minute provincial rep, not a sacred ritual; Bring Your Own Costume.  We head straight to the pub afterwards. J reassures me that I got the biggest laugh of the service - is there any other reason to speak at a funeral? - and I am tearful at the sight of my friends there, pressed fresh and smart in black. They buy me tiny glasses of sambuca. I am struck by how few people I know at the wake: there are hundreds, literally hundreds, and I wonder at how far my father’s life drifted from the one he loved to the one he had when I knew him, that I don’t think I’ve met even half of these dear friends before. But the ones I do know, the beloved family friends whose children we were raised with - their hugs and hand clasps and laughter are a cure for what ails me. By four o'clock, I am cadging cigarettes from mon Oncle Georges and when my mother comes outside, she gives me a mock-shocked look and I reply with an exaggerated What?, letting a pop of smoke bubble from my mouth. She laughs. I am so proud of her, as she stands in stockinged feet outside the pub, next to my friends who tower above her and listen to her stories. Her oldest friend finds me too, and tells me such beautiful things about my mother that I wrap them up carefully in my brain, to tell her that evening, when we are quiet, after midnight, back at home.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/sometimes-i-get-non-musical-earworms-the-other monthly 0.5 2014-09-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381613534-VDUY5CNNLMKN4LCM4QVN/tumblr_nb7sfr7DkY1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Sometimes, I get non-musical earworms (the other day I had the name Jaqen H’ghar going round and round all morning), and one of my most common is Nick Hornby’s “Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?” It rattles back and forth inside my brain, serving no purpose but to remind me that I should avoid sad music, for the instant and crippling effect it has on me. Is that just how ears and brains work? Even if I’m in the jolliest mood in the world, a few bars of On and On by Longpigs will have me bed-ridden for days. Is that usual? I’ll wake up craving some NIN but once I actually put it on I’ll not be able to speak for a couple of hours. That’s how music and humans function, right? All of this is just to say that when I’m attending my father’s cremation tomorrow and the sky is beige and weeping, I probably shouldn’t have picked up a Tori Amos CD. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/the-sideboard-is-filled-with-cards-and-the-table monthly 0.5 2014-08-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381613446-YJ1ROPCA2TIV72OMS6MH/tumblr_nax9jroHuC1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries The sideboard is filled with cards, and the table is full of vases of white lilies, a flower none of us like. It’s beginning to feel like the front door is host to some kind of haunted letterbox, too; we can’t turn our back without another note arriving on the mat. Letters - handwritten on thick personalised stationery with a fountain pen - tell us that we must be devastated, that he was the very best of men, that he was stoic and silent in his illness.  My mother, my sisters and I go to register the death, then to the funeral director to choose the cheapest coffin and plan the cremation and memorial details. There may be hundreds at the service. We rarely stop laughing, giddy fools, while our mother alternates between fondly rolling her eyes and kicking us silent so she can give details of her husband’s birthday, their wedding day, the GP who cared for him until his death, five days ago.  In his absence, we are swearing a lot. It mostly makes our mother laugh. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/im-beginning-to-understand-why-i-need-to-be-here monthly 0.5 2014-08-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381613936-ZVT0XYI7YTMBA14S9GLA/tumblr_nam3waxjy91rbh1yco1_1280.png The Sam Binnie Diaries I’m beginning to understand why I need to be here so much, at my father’s bedside. Having had 24 hours off yesterday to take the kids to meet friends in town, it was so hard - like underwater punches - to go back into his bedroom, to see his yellow skeleton head on the pillow, to hear his puffs. If I never leave the room, that disintegration isn’t quite so striking. I understand why people keep away.  The family doctor visits and makes an almost-comical face when describing his bafflement at his patient’s continued survival. It seems we all have to keep remembering how serious this is, even though it seems ridiculous, utterly unreal. Why are the nurses taking this so seriously? Why are there so many carers here? Why are they all treating this like it’s a *real* life or death situation? We are getting worse and worse at maintaining our poker faces. I don’t even stop my iPhone game when the nurses come in, now. But I have developed a horrible new fear, too, to match my horrible new habit: what if this really *isn’t* real? It’s all just makeup and camera trickery, and tomorrow he’ll leap out of bed and berate us all for not fighting for his life hard enough.  Soon, says the doctor. Soon.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/last-night-after-three-days-sitting-mostly-alone monthly 0.5 2014-08-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381613833-J0C737GRR5RYS4RBRWQL/tumblr_nabh6bPdLY1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Last night, after three days sitting mostly alone at my father’s bedside, I go a bit Bertha Mason. A phone call from someone infinitely more sensible than me stops me from torching the place, and tells me that while my father *will* die, we will all keep living. So we need to keep living.  This morning I wake up to pouring rain. By the time I’ve got my running kit on, it’s become a full-blown thunder storm and the rain’s coming down so hard I can’t see the end of the road. My mother forbids me from going. It’s all the fuel I need. I run away from the traffic and into the fields, and in the middle of one huge open field I’m already drenched and the thunder booms and it’s like a perfect Dawson’s Creek moment and I remember how much I liked being a teenager, for moments like this.  In the afternoon I get in the car for the first time since Monday and drive to the shopping centre to get shoes for a wedding on Saturday I’m glad to know I’m finally definitely going to attend, whatever happens. The teenage boy at the till asks me if I’ve been shopping long today, and I respond with a beaming non-sequitur that I’ve just come from my father’s deathbed. ‘I take it from your smile he’s OK, though!’ he smiles back at me, and I find that I’m smiling even more now, as I explain in way too much detail (Him: 'Right, if you could… just… put your card in… please…’) just how long they think he’s got, and that it’s just sheer magic to be out in the real world again. When the transaction is finished he smiles at me, properly, and wishes me luck, and I want to hug him and have him hug me and we would both feel total peace and that feeling would spread out from us to all the shoppers, out past the glass walls of the shopping centre, out across the country, out over the world, and all wars would cease forever, for good. But I take my bag and thank him and look away, not knowing how one deals with this precise situation.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/besides-the-family-doctor-the-only-people-in-my monthly 0.5 2014-08-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381614109-SHRNM924NJTS7B3ZGHAU/tumblr_na73oyJ7Pe1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Besides the family doctor, the only people in my father’s room are women. Carers, nurses, palliative teams; my mother, my sister and me turning him over in bed. Five of us today, daughters of mothers and mothers of daughters, cackling at his bedside at the thought of any man demanding a son. I try not to breathe in his smell of warm, rotting cabbage when I touch him or bend down into his lemon-yellow eyeline, attempting to interpret the sounds from his mouth. When we unbutton his pyjama top for the nurses to fit a syringe driver to his upper arm, I see that the skin on his chest is rolling hills, valleys between each rib and shadowed craters of collarbone dips. His upper body is all bone and wasted sinew, with binding muslin skin.  Mostly he doesn’t greet us when we come into his bedroom, only fractionally rolling his semi-open eyes. Dude, I know what you mean.  This morning, my mother brought me orange juice in bed and said he was the same as yesterday, peacefully sleeping. I told her I’d had a terrible nightmare that he was up and about again, and she asked if that wasn’t a nice dream, then we looked at each other and I rubbed my puffy face like people don’t do in real life.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/baby-clothes-bagged-up-for-the-charity-shop-each monthly 0.5 2014-08-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381614365-EBDMMB4H55QLRP2OZTWS/tumblr_na54tsTGbq1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Baby clothes bagged up for the charity shop, each one faintly stained with memories and ghostly food smudges, and it’s hard to justify my sadness at seeing them leave. It seems inviting disaster to wonder if our babies might have babies, and need these same clothes many years from now. At my parents’ house two days ago, my dad tried to laugh at the idea of his plans for the future, for retirement. A grimace, no sound, then a blank Parkinson’s stare again. Today, every window is open to try and rid the house of the smell, and he doesn’t wake much even when my mother strokes his face. I almost make myself cry by playing the Judi Dench performance of ‘Send in the Clowns’ in my head, even though my dad has very little affection either for Dame Judi, or for any musical theatre that doesn’t contain pop hits of his younger days. It’s just a beautiful song. We sit with him, and listen to him breathe. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/neither-of-ms-best-friends-at-school-have-english monthly 0.5 2014-08-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381614947-GMVI29MTPPDWKUV3E8CM/tumblr_n9xz31ystn1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Neither of M’s best friends at school have English as a first language. At a Sunday afternoon barbecue with their parents, we are about seven languages behind everyone else (although I can now say “Pleased to meet you” in a pretty good Brazilian accent, though I say so myself). Of course, the food is excellent. At one point, the host takes a leg of chicken from J’s hand mid-bite, saying, “Don’t waste your time on that - have more steak.” The next night we are served daal gosht and melt-in-the-mouth chicken liver kebabs at a 1-year-old’s birthday party which runs from bedtime to 11pm, the freshly feral pack of children running wild and sleepless in their darkening garden. There are pockets of deep goodness in the world, and I appear to have stumbled into one. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/exactly-half-way-under-the-channel-my-muscles monthly 0.5 2014-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381615842-70IRM31FPLEDPJSV9MXP/tumblr_n9mflht4jB1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Exactly half-way under the Channel, my muscles started knotting, my breathing came shallower, I shucked off my week-old cocoon to reveal my new shape, same as the old one. I drove home angry, the pre-holiday rages settling like ratty fox furs back on my shoulders. But past the front door, my in-laws waited, smart and funny and kind. And past them, past the night and into the morning, were the children, all taller and browner and funnier than before. M wants to grow a moustache. F doesn’t like crabs. P wears everyone’s shoes. My fancies of flight can wait for another day. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/the-fields-are-filled-with-sunflowers-but-we monthly 0.5 2014-07-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381616738-UNTO2HTPE531CXAS9EZB/tumblr_n9krzo0OG91rbh1yco1_1280.png The Sam Binnie Diaries The fields are filled with sunflowers, but we leave before dawn so get past most of them without being seen. I loathe those creatures. At best, they’re a forced jollity, a Chuckle Brothers prettiness with lipstick smudged round its mouth and a novelty balloon in one hand; at worst, by late August, they are fields and fields of blackened, charred children, berated, punished, burnt and sorry, their bowed heads just begging someone to forgive their cindered little faces, unable to even meet your eye. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/i-remember-only-after-ive-booked-it-that monthly 0.5 2014-07-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381616662-V2KL2VFI6UG8PQAIZ8QQ/tumblr_n9j6boxexg1rbh1yco1_1280.png The Sam Binnie Diaries I remember only after I’ve booked it that trente-deux kilometres seemed trop loin pour nous paddle, last time we came, but it’s too late now - they’ve enquired if I am French, admired my accent, and there’s no way on earth I’m asking for the shorter route. It is a long way, and we are in a tiny minority in our single kayaks (and thus have half the potential speed as our two-man colleagues), but I am fast, and I am strong, and the paddle feels familiar in my hands, and I do not even want to stop for lunch but I feel it’s not really in the spirit of going on holiday with someone if you just keep leaving them behind. Towards the end, we pass a naturist beach, and every single canoeist ahead of me is fascinated by one figure on the beach, and as I get closer I see it is an apple-breasted woman, waiting with a buggy just like she’s waiting for a bus, waiting with infinite patience while some of our fully dressed paddlers bicker amongst themselves on the beach where they are not permitted. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/i-have-brought-all-the-wrong-music-i-have-brought monthly 0.5 2014-07-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381616933-JC8CTORE67HSVQSXH006/tumblr_n9hlu69B9z1rbh1yco1_1280.png The Sam Binnie Diaries I have brought all the wrong music. I have brought PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea; an Elton John Best Of which *doesn’t* contain Tiny Dancer; a White Stripes album which is so soaked in New York memories it’s as if I’m insisting on a bagel and lox from the boulangere; and the sole summery album in the car, wedged at the back of the glove box, an old Nelly Furtado CD, made in the era of claggy, spray-on, William-Orbit-esque over-production which renders much late-90s-early-2000s pop unlistenable. I really need some Solange. Or some Sia. Even some Lana del Rey, and we can pretend we’re crossing the blood-lust wasteland of American states. So we drive in silence. And it’s *wonderful*. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/sometimes-clich%C3%A9s-are-lazy-half-truths-perpetuated monthly 0.5 2014-07-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381617141-Z9XE91A8L7CUN73P9775/tumblr_n9fjdlPAF71rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Sometimes clichés are lazy half-truths perpetuated by a handsome-sounding rhyme, and sometimes clichés kick around for so long because that truth just keeps coming around and reminding us with a humble shrug, Nope, still true. French food, man. French food. Even the humblest service station serves us tender, spiced ham with a rich Marsala gravy. At the grubby supermarket a few kilometres down the road, the saucisson sec and the fromage du chèvre are enough to make a grown woman keep eating hours after she is sated. And the bread. Oh, the bread. As we sit down to our breakfast each morning, golden crust and airy, tangy, chewy innards fresh from the boulangerie, I think (as best I can) of the final sentence of Jeffrey Steingarten’s essential essay on bread: “And on good days, we eat nothing else.” Jeffrey, I know *exactly* what you mean. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/nous-allons-%C3%A0-la-rivi%C3%A8re-aujourdhui-en-route-to monthly 0.5 2014-07-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381617436-58V83F3AZ62R3XIERC5P/tumblr_n9dn475V3P1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Nous allons à la rivière aujourd’hui, en route to which I discover possibly my most annoying habit yet: reading out loud all the French signs. Worse, and more bafflingly, I have to do each one in a different, strange voice. Miel, in a hoarse growl; Les Chevals, in a giddy high-pitched squeal. At the river, the beautiful Euro-women have pouched, puckered stomachs over their bikinis which match mine, and I feel completely contented, even with the children jumping into the river from 60 feet up the cliff face. When there is a particularly painful sounding water-landing, the whole river bank applauds in that sarcastic French way. The noise I took for distant thunder at first is actually plastic canoes scraping over shingle in the echoing gorge, and when we’re in the water, we must dodge the canoes and paddles, as we have better speed and versatility than many of their pilots. My lunch is pa amb tomàquet, my mother’s go-to summer lunch, warmed in the sun for a few hours. Its olive, salty smell is the most summery scent I know, more than cut grass, more than sun cream, more than anything. It is my mother making several baguette’s-worth of Catalan goodness for me and my sisters and pushing us back into the garden. One day I might even give you the recipe. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/half-way-through-my-fifth-book-of-the-holiday-and monthly 0.5 2014-07-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381617333-TQ6529Q8ZJI4DK4W2PFR/tumblr_n9c0erTJte1rbh1yco1_1280.png The Sam Binnie Diaries Half way through my fifth book of the holiday, and I’m no longer able to tell you which day of the week it is. The number of hours we are both awake is in the single digits. I’ve even started making my usual assessment of ‘in a zombie apocalypse, how long should/could we stay here?’ Which I suppose is my brain’s way of saying it’s having a good time. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/i-am-taught-basic-differential-calculus-on-our monthly 0.5 2014-07-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381617706-SKJ84LNCPWIW0IIQ55ZB/tumblr_n9a1pa7JMZ1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I am taught basic differential calculus on our drive down, and when I fall asleep here on the sofa after a three-hour lunch of cheese, with one bent leg somehow balanced on top of a stiff cushion, I dream that I must calculate how to find a new father, that there is a new father waiting for me in one of the tiny dark doorways I must get my unanswering long limbs to visit. I think of the maths teacher telling me at eleven that Maths Is Everything, that anything may be calculated if we only know the variables with which to begin, and the two novels I’ve been reading today metastasise in my brain to shape my dreams into airless, endless puzzles to which the answer is “the Father”. I might eat fractionally less cheese tomorrow. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/warm-rain-most-of-the-day-which-means-i-must-just monthly 0.5 2014-07-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381617968-1C9OEG2RT7DOGHUBOPLS/tumblr_n99u5oxexU1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Warm rain most of the day, which means I must just eat cheese and bread while reading under a blanket on the sofa. The horrors. Three days of radio silence from my mother and I was imagining the worst. Just temperamental technology, it turns out. Isn’t it always. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/weve-taken-le-p%C3%A9age-mais-je-naime-pas-le-p%C3%A9age monthly 0.5 2014-07-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381618612-57IDFS6FMW9AJXDDFKL3/tumblr_n98d7k05au1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries We’ve taken le péage, mais je n'aime pas le péage avec les personnes, par ce que je suis sans culottes, partly so I can epilate while J drives, partly because it’s so damn hot and I somehow put on my thickest trousers to travel. Don’t stare at me, buddy, I’m just trying to pay your damn toll. When we get to our destination the sky is lavender and lilac and peach, the same shade as the flowers by the pool, colour-matched perfectly, clouds darkening to distant booms over the hills. I walk from the shallow end to the deep end over and over, pretending to be the men in Under the Skin. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/vader-in-german-means-father-his-name-is monthly 0.5 2014-07-24 http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/two-cups-of-coffee-three-croissants-plain monthly 0.5 2014-07-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381619264-RZ7CJTXWWPI4GWBMLNQC/tumblr_n97gy3WXcY1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Two cups of coffee. Three croissants. Plain yoghurt and watching the other guests at the hotel. I’ve started reading an excellent book - oh, excellent books, how I’ve missed you - but that doesn’t quite cover up how I’m missing les enfants ce matin. (Not enough to head home already, but enough to be staring at a busy family a few tables over.) But look at that sky. http://www.sam-binnie.com/sambinniediaries/off-on-hols-piles-of-books-mad-men-box-set-a monthly 0.5 2014-07-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1646381620133-O02G416YBBCBKKOJWH2T/tumblr_n95z4kgvYD1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Off on hols. Piles of books, Mad Men box set, a few swimmers, suncream, pack of cards. C'est tout. 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http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/what-is-to-come monthly 0.5 2020-01-31 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/please-do-vote-on-thursday-i-believe-the-most monthly 0.5 2019-12-09 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/over-the-summer-my-quite-old-but-not-that-old monthly 0.5 2019-10-04 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/the-river-was-cold-this-morning-although-my monthly 0.5 2019-09-12 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/i-promised-to-share-the-arancini-recipe-from-a monthly 0.5 2019-08-13 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/this-weeks-wonderful-worthwhile-things monthly 0.5 2019-05-28 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/i-love-these-beautiful-little-beasts-crisp-and monthly 0.5 2019-04-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933123881-GNABE4XMRT4NKZ28TX3R/tumblr_pq9yhoM0As1rbh1yco1_640.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I love these beautiful little beasts, crisp and custardy, blackened sugar and distant hint of summer.  I tried two recipes today, one which took hours and bowls and careful balancing, and produced the mildly curdled Georgia O’Keeffe numbers on the left, and another which was deliciously simple and made my neighbour’s mother (a cooperative tester) say, ‘Oh, those ones were just… oooh!’  Here we go, my adapted version of the second recipe:  Makes 12 1 320g ready-rolled puff pastry sheet  1 large egg 2 large egg yolks 100g caster sugar 2 tbsp cornflour 400ml full fat milk  1 tsp vanilla extract Zest of half a lemon, v v v finely grated 1 tsp ground cinnamon Butter for greasing  Generously butter a 12-hole muffin tray, a good deep one, not one of those shallow indecisive numbers. Put it in the fridge to keep your puff pastry company.  Put egg, yolks, sugar and cornflour in a saucepan and whhhhhhisk with a balloon whisk until smooth as silk, then gradually whhhhhhhisk in the milk. Turn on a medium heat — just below medium-high, as if you’re threatening the pan that things can get so much hotter — and whhhhhhisk until it thickens up. DO NOT LEAVE THE PAN. DO NOT CEASE YOUR WHISKING. It doesn’t take that long; perhaps a few minutes? But not worth wrecking your day by wandering off. Once it’s thick and custardy, turn off the heat, mix in the vanilla, lemon zest and cinnamon, then put in a heavy bowl and cover it with clingfilm to prevent a skin forming while it cools.  Turn the oven onto 200ºC/180ºC fan.  This is the bit I had to look at loads of recipes to understand, because it seemed so odd:  Remove the puff pastry sheet from the fridge. Unroll it, peel off the paper, then re-roll into its original sausage form. Then slice that sausage into 1-1.5cm portions, so you’ll hopefully have 12 squashed-looking blobs that would be circles if the pastry was, say, chorizo. Does that make sense?  Then! Take your cooled muffin tray, and squash each blob into each hole with your thumbs, pushing it up the sides so it’s a uniform-ish depth throughout the hole, and the pastry reaches up most if not the whole of the sides, cup-like. (Reading the instructions, I somehow imagined the pastry would unravel and I’d be dealing with something like an apple-peel-peeled-in-one, but it’s actually all just dough.)  Into that dough casing, spoon your custard mix. Not riiiiiight to the top, but leave perhaps 4mm. Most recipes say leave a full cm, but I like it toppling over slightly and burning against the hot metal, for that burnt sugar bite.  Cook for 25-30mins, keeping an eye to check the custard top is really darkening in sections and the pastry is golden. Remove once cooked, leave to cool for 5 minutes in the tin, then knife-out and either eat immediately, or leave to cool further on a wire rack (the longer you leave them, the more integrity they’ll have).  (I’ve had the new Loyle Carner album on all day, soundtracking everything from a run this morning to dozing in the garden with my roomie, and repotting successful seedlings to a family-wide repetition of new favourite phrase. It’s such great music.)  Bon appétit, mes anges.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/the-celebrants-smile-dips-occasionally-but-for monthly 0.5 2019-01-23 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/ive-spent-the-last-few-months-entirely-off-social monthly 0.5 2018-09-21 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/january-does-as-january-does-and-transforms-me monthly 0.5 2018-01-15 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/161332410562 monthly 0.5 2017-06-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933123586-29VX35FEDIW3DYKUBF27/tumblr_oqw18kzxln1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/161329989414 monthly 0.5 2017-06-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933124032-C7SXSJLWO4M9I67U6BYT/tumblr_oqw18ynTBP1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries ‘I’m not bothered at all,’ I say, when people ask me how I feel about my mother finally selling up and moving out of the home she and my father bought three decades ago. I’m not bothered about leaving this house behind at all — it’s still popping with faint echoes and waves of alcohol, and bottled anger and silences, of illness and waiting and death, at last. But the garden! Oh, the garden! I so rarely go into the garden when I visit now, preferring to nudge the children outside so the adults can all nap in the sunlight through the big windows for a brief handful of minutes. But the last time we visit before my mother moves, the sky is blue, the sun is strong, and I am drawn outdoors. When we moved here thirty years ago, the garden was genuinely magical. The previous owners, in possession of green fingers and an interest in their outdoor space, both of which my parents lacked, had built a wonderland beyond their back door. A rose walkway, paved, and swagged with blooms and thorns; a stone circle tucked halfway down one side, hedged with box and bamboo and red hot pokers, where a sundial stood for my spell-casting; green-spreading winter heliotrope that we all called triffids, before I knew what triffids were; a pond with bright koi carp, and a clear floating ball like a hardened bubble I could tap with one foot to break the thin ice on the winter water; the Narnian pines occasionally dusted with snow; the abundant apple trees, left to wither and fade under our lack of care. I remember the honeysuckle, drenching the evenings with its impossible liquid scent, and the bats that would flap over our heads if we stayed up late enough, a family talking in soft voices just at the edge of where the house lights reached. The garden seemed enormous to me; as a teenager, I saw it shrink again — partly the encroaching weeds and unstopped trees, partly that it never quite seemed big enough to ensure our cigarette smoke wasn’t drifting back to my parents’ window. Now, as an adult sunk deep in property market hypnosis, it seems gigantic again. When I sit at the bottom of the garden writing this, the children have to call twice to find me. The rose walkway became, over a decade or more, an impenetrable Sleeping Beauty thicket, until years later we spent two summers hacking it down and burning the bramble limbs and rotted wood frame. The pond, with the speckled arrival of grandchildren and an acknowledgement that the remaining green sludge was unlikely to grow any more attractive, had the water bucketed out and soil bucketed in. I dug it out a few years later to remove the plastic moulded base, and found it full of potatoes, which my mother had planted then subsequently forgotten about completely. The willow tree loomed beside the house for years — the rope swing tied over one branch became embedded in the folded-over bark, but it was always the perfect spot to sit, away from everything, watching and listening through the narrow leaves, until it felt safe to return — but the whole tree was cut down when it was found to be pulling up the water pipes and threatening the foundations of the house. Chunks of the willow still lie around the garden, like stage-dressing from a woodland fairytale. Because I generally only went out in good weather, the garden was always in summer. I remember how long it would take to set up a sunbathing session with my sister: towels, music, books, sunglasses, pints of ice water, ice creams from the petrol station at the end of the road, suncream, barely, and magazines, hats, snacks, cushions. I remember my sister being back at home one weekday, and me telling my manager at the local packing factory that I had a dentist appointment in the middle of the day, just so we could lie out in the garden together for a few hours, before I returned to work beet-faced and dizzied. I remember camping being the same, three hours of preparations and props before it became too cold or scary and we’d ship back inside. None of us were gardeners enough to take proper advantage of the size and opportunity. Any fruiting plant that survived longer that a few seasons was the victim of sheer luck — we’d harvest blackberries when we tumbled upon them, but we never dug and laid out and cared for the veg beds a garden like that deserved. The noticeable anomaly is the fig tree, still giving out handfuls of fat, splitting figs each summer despite getting no more care than anything else in this semi-wilderness. My sole sign of hostility towards the new owners is a passing urge to snap off all the unripe figs, to prevent these strangers reaping the rewards of our indolence, for this year at least. The birdsong is so familiar to me, even though in thirty years I have not identified a single one. A chattering, a chirruping, a gentle caw, a repeating coo-hoo-coo that woke me most mornings; I leave them all in this garden for the next child to discover and absorb. (My garden is a fraction of this size, and I wonder what I would pay to transport this garden to my own house, somehow — the kind of thought I would have spent hours pondering the logistics of in the garden, slowly grilling beside the triffids — for our children to become lost in, to feel safe in. I feel sadder to lose this garden than I did to lose my father. I want to stay here, and stay, and stay.) I never wore shoes in the garden, and accepted the occasional thorn from a hidden thistle as the required price. The soles of my feet were often black, and always thickened. I saw daisies covered in dew, pink-tipped and sleeping. I heard hedgehogs, and foxes, and mice, and never once wondered how much our mostly elderly neighbours could hear us all, or how much they minded. The garden is paddling pools with scuba-gear made from drinking straws, it is my elder sisters promising a warm jug of water over me once I’ve had two more cold ones, and me still growing up to love them, it is a parent-free party where the beers are chilling in the same paddling pool but my sister, left to chaperone, is gently placed in bed at 7.45 after eating too many of the hash brownies while the rest of us hang out in the gloaming; it is filled with children, ours, our nephews and nieces, our friends’, us, it is silence and peace, hope and space, and private worlds a thousand acres wide and a thousand years long. (This garden brings out my buried sentimentality.) The sundial is gone, the willow is gone, the pond is gone, the rose walkway is gone. What was once a compost heap has grown into a pile of rubble and weeds, so noticeable that the buyers’ surveyor declared it could only be an old air-raid shelter, requiring professional clearance. I still do not know the bird names. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/instagram-is-my-sole-21st-century-vice-these-days monthly 0.5 2017-03-13 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/all-links-mentioned-are-clustered-at-the-end-if monthly 0.5 2017-01-19 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/i-suspect-much-of-it-is-being-freelance-and monthly 0.5 2016-11-17 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/oops monthly 0.5 2016-11-14 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/this-remembrance-day-i-am-thinking-of-all-those monthly 0.5 2016-11-11 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/ive-been-genuinely-successful-in-distracting monthly 0.5 2016-11-08 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/taking-vast-swathes-of-the-summer-off-means monthly 0.5 2016-09-08 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/you-have-to-do-whats-best-for-your-kids-dont monthly 0.5 2016-07-14 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/i-go-for-a-run-at-the-tail-end-of-the-day-trying monthly 0.5 2016-06-27 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/question-of-the-day-can-you-be-friends-with monthly 0.5 2016-06-25 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/rice-pudding-4-eva monthly 0.5 2016-06-08 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/144802137859 monthly 0.5 2016-05-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933124115-7JNQPAA5T1Y9102IWUZI/tumblr_o7mlpkMsSe1rbh1yco1_640.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I don’t give the final payment to the builder myself, as I’m sick of his creepiness and don’t want to let him into the house again. I make my husband hand over final envelope of cash at our front door, knowing he’s not been bred with any compunction to let someone in when they request it; to let someone put their arm around his shoulders momentarily, repeatedly, when they discuss plans for a business transaction; to let that paid transaction include any conversation about where my husband should sit in his garden and what swimwear he should be sporting when he does it.  The builder thanks me for the payment by text, then, 24 hours later – having clearly given it some thought – he texts me to say that, after we’ve paid him thousands of pounds to work on our house, maybe I just want to let him know if I want a hug. Winky face.  After several hours where I do some thinking of my own, I eventually reply that his message is creepy and inappropriate, and I block him. It feels good, compared to all the times, day after day after day after day, where I don’t say anything, too stunned in the instance, or too wary of consequences because of where I am and how drunk the men seem. Not all men, obviously: just the men I encounter at the supermarket, on the train, on a run, on the library shelves, on TV, in the newspapers, in parliament, in my local cinema listings, at social events, and online.  At lunch with friends, we talk about the terrible men we work with. Bosses who tell us to cancel our IVF as it’s something we’ll regret once landed with a screaming kid. Bosses who take all the young skinny white boys out for breakfasts, then send emails to their bosses insisting they should be fast-tracked for promotion. Bosses who tell us our own promotions are mistakes, our plans are wrong, our ambitions are foolish.  We talk about you, I want to say to those men. We all know what you’re like. You’re ridiculous. And you make the world worse.   At a PTA breakfast, other friends talk about trouble their daughters are having at school amongst their friendship group. Well, you know how mean girls can be! they say. I say, Look at us, guys! How great are we! I say, The friendship of the women in my life are the most valuable friendships I have. Men are hot garbage. Women are kind and hilarious and understanding and way more interesting. Don’t teach your daughters to hate each other already. Women are the best! Show your daughters how great girls are! If more girls learnt how fucking cool women are, we could make the world a trillion times better!  I am amazed I am still invited to these breakfasts, to be fair.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/144161174774 monthly 0.5 2016-05-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933124556-IQMNPCP24DJXXH592F0K/tumblr_o6z7zlhi7U1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I sleep in the car, my nerves sedating me as usual. We drive past the American Cemetery on the way to the hospital – apparently – and when I wake up as we park in the multi-storey my husband says, I’ve always wanted to visit there. I was going to stop on the way but I thought if you woke up you would panic that you’d woken up in Heaven.  A new doctor, an actual brain surgeon this time, rather than a consultant who invites you to consider his proposed brain operation with the words, ‘I’m not a brain surgeon, but I will perform the operation on your brain.’ This latest consultant has a colleague in the room for my appointment who looks like a young Mary Beard, and I am already fond of both of them. The brain surgeon has the air of someone who wears ties with miniature hippos on, like all brain surgeons should. He tells us: If I could be autocratic, if 100 people had your situation, I would send all 100 of them home and tell them to get on with living their lives. He looks momentarily wistful at the thought of clearing his desk so fast. But! we say, and repeat the words from the last appointment: catastrophic risk and life-changing and major trauma and constant bleeding. In a soft voice he says, Yes, you might, possibly, have a major bleed one day, that could affect the speech lobe in which this problem is located, but who knows? It might actually improve your writing.  As if I didn’t love him enough.  As we leave into the white sunshine, eating ice creams, giddy, high-spirited at the thought that maybe my death might just be like everyone else’s, unforeseen, unknowable, hopefully distant, and nothing we have choice in, I say to J, I think that other consultant just really wanted to do my operation. Maybe one more brain operation and he gets the cerebrum badge to stitch onto his white coat.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/143166020474 monthly 0.5 2016-04-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933124704-DXQOS3EMIDMWEWQJ8686/tumblr_o5zhyviYLk1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries In bed, I fling my book away from me, and say almost thoughtfully, ‘I’m really, really frightened all of a sudden.’ I can’t tell if it’s the scene I’ve just read about people being buried alive in a mine; the vertiginous feeling I’ve had since lunchtime which I have no way of telling whether it’s a cold in one ear or a pre-stroke event; book deadlines not just whooshing past but sucking me onto the tracks as they race by; the death of my most adored comic writer and performer; or poor sleep patterns and eating habits. Whatever the ingredients of this dazzling cocktail, I’m focusing very hard on my breathing, on trying to force my brain to accept that I’m not really on the edge of a cliff, this aren’t really my final moments. Recognising what this must be doesn’t mean the fear is any less: in fact, this physical sensation is so overwhelmingly like the one bit of childbirth I really liked - knowing when it was time to push, an instinct so clear and true that it felt like an ancient godly blessing - that I’m convinced it must actually be my death occurring, since my body, when it spoke like this before, spoke the truth.  I know it isn’t though. I know this must just be a panic attack - although in 2016, can we not find a slightly gentler phrase than that, please? But it doesn’t stop me saying, ‘If I do die, can you look after the children, please?’ like it would otherwise be something that just slips off the To Do list.  Jack-rabbit-hearting and drop-limbed 18 hours later, I think: I need a warm holiday with a warm pool where I have no deadlines, only bread and olive oil, tomatoes and salt, J and the babies, sun cream and card games. Everyone feels like that, though, give or take the specific company. In the meantime, the baby and I watch this, listen to this, and sleep curled up under a hand-me-down blanket while the world continues on outside.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/140650236639 monthly 0.5 2016-03-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933124418-BZ0ZY1F2UFDK64GZ5U88/tumblr_o3ot2hblz11rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries One day, I think, one day I’ll learn to ditch optimism at the door of the hospital.  It’s warm inside, full of sun-struck open corridors, Starbucks and welcome desks, still-faced paper-white patients in wheelchairs and walkers, smiling patients in hospital gowns chatting in familiar tones with receptionists, and couples where one of them sports a cannula in the back of their hand like a grim, slipped corsage. Glowing pregnant women roll around the wings like scattered pearls, lit differently to all of us visiting with our own personal decay.  The recent neurology appointment was so reassuring that I can actually read while we’re waiting. The neurosurgeon calls us in to say, Yes, hello, but have you thought about brain surgery? Because that cerebral anomaly is leaking, always, always, he says, and if it blows for good, the result could be - probably would be - catastrophic. And since it’s located in the area of speech, I’d not only be paralysed down my right side, but my ability to find words would be severely impaired, possibly forever.  I think, Seriously? My words? Are you kidding me? It couldn’t have been in my juggling lobes? I couldn’t be putting my Donkey Kong skills at risk? We ask more questions. I try to ignore the creeping sense of icy death spreading from the base of my spine, down my thighs, up my chest. I know I’ll fall asleep as soon as we get into the car; my usual shelter from the storm. The surgeon scoffs as we ask about mortality risks in the operation, which I suppose is the correct response, and we shake his hand and walk around the hospital and decide the best thing is probably to let him incise my skin, remove a section of my skull, and excise this stowaway from the delicate folds and walkways of my brain. I am so glad I am here with my favourite person in the whole world, even in this situation, even with this decision. I wonder what we’d do if I had a major personality change after the operation, as can sometimes happen, according to my vague recollections of fact-less Daily Mail articles. To be fair, my other half says, it’s 50/50 that you might actually end up with a better personality afterwards.  I fall asleep as soon as we get into the car. In the evening, I speak to my neurologist brother-in-law on the other side of the world, who reassures me that I desperately need a second opinion, that I shouldn’t go flinging myself under a brain surgeon’s knife without a little more information. My sister knows how impatient I am to have difficult situations done and dusted, and understands that I would have had the surgery this afternoon if it had been an option.  I would have been calling you right now from my hospital bed, I say.  Yes, but using only your left hand, she says, both of us gurgling with laughter.  With my new vocabulary of twenty words, I add.  Oh my god, she says, I’d finally be able to best you in an argument! I’m beginning to think this operation has no downsides.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/the-more-concerned-everyone-is-for-me-the-worse-i monthly 0.5 2016-02-24 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/a-hollywood-tearjerker-or-a-harrowing-news-report monthly 0.5 2016-02-02 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/136679979944 monthly 0.5 2016-01-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933123953-MEVHB5X2E6AO0TZ69147/tumblr_o0hhv5jWrC1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries A wonderful holiday. Not for the first time, I wonder if I’m in BTL, trapped in my own Bedford Falls, where our beautiful children share their presents and gently wrap each other in their blankets and say please and thank you and make me laugh until I’m choking and reassure me during Stick Man and voluntarily watch at least one hour of a silent reindeer-sleigh documentary before taking it in turns to dance on my head. To add salt to that chocolate ganache, however, I’ve got my book deadline, work worries, money worries, mortality worries, worries about my Aged P, worries about others’ worries, guilt, tiredness, and Pringles overdosing. Talking to someone with their own brain adventures makes me realise that I’ve never let myself be bothered by it for more than a moment, and perhaps that’s not a good thing. I’m so busy reassuring everyone that everything isn’t a big deal - a discovery in my MRI scan; my father’s death; my sister’s emigration; an ultimate inability to google the next few decades of mine and my loved ones’ lives; and always always always money worries - that maybe I don’t find time to work out if any of them are a big deal. Or what to do if they are. How do people hold themselves together in the street, when absolutely everyone is going through some version of this? I’ll occasionally find myself close to tears and thinking, ‘Wait, I don’t have time for this now, I’ll have a good weep later.’ Only later I’ve got a deadline to meet, or a kid to stuff into bed. We all have our row to hoe.  Any kind of introspection momentarily blots out the blistering fear to replace it with a literally paralysing rage: I find myself staring out of windows, teeth and muscles clenched, burning at the potential injustice of my early death, and the hundreds-and-thousands of wrongs sprinkled liberally over the rest of the world. I suspect it’s my seizure meds. But I doubt I’ll take the time to find out.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/my-oldest-friends-come-over-for-a-christmas-meal monthly 0.5 2015-12-24 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/my-urge-is-always-to-sleep-when-i-feel-stressed monthly 0.5 2015-12-18 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/135321075474 monthly 0.5 2015-12-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933124310-EZ93KAAV3IGLWZPC2G5O/tumblr_nzgf58j9mX1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I arrive early for lunch, and the woman at the table next to ours lets me hold her newborn while she finishes her food, and we talk about contractions and breastfeeding and self-employment. Coffee from the Southbank food market with a pal at the weekend, our kids ricocheting around the Royal Festival Hall. All-you-can-eat breakfast with old PTA colleagues at our regular haunt. Cocktails with the bookclub, a sneaked cigarette, a peek into the Tinder world on a single friend’s phone. Another lunch, a few days later, in a high marble room filled with harried French waiters, where we order extra extra frites and rub our bellies.  When I get home, J says, You look happy.  I say, I do, don’t I? There’s just something about hanging out with these smart, funny, ambitious, kind women. I didn’t get it for ages, but it’s… magic.  He says, All the women you hang out with are smart and funny.  And I say, Yup. Aren’t I the lucky one.   http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/my-consultant-seems-angry-with-me-a-cancelled monthly 0.5 2015-11-12 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/i-adapted-this-from-an-american-recipe-that-was monthly 0.5 2015-11-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933126706-PYIE04VAX2AWPVWGQOWK/tumblr_nxlzphHr3n1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I adapted this from an American recipe that was full of the weirdest powdered shortcuts, but showed utter horror at the thought you’d use sweetcorn instead of hominy. I used not only sweetcorn, but *tinned* sweetcorn. Ha. Cook this in a big pot, over a medium heat. You can adjust everything according to what’s in your cupboards - put in more or less sweetcorn, more or less beans, different spices; I like it spicier, but it can fit whatever you’ve got lying around, really. It’s magic. Good Cheap Soup Big glug olive oil 500g turkey mince (substitute or forego as you wish) 1 onion, chopped 1 red chilli, minced 2 cans chopped tomatoes 1 can cannellini beans (or whatever beans are in your cupboard) 1 can sweetcorn Finely chopped clove of garlic 1 tbsp paprika 1-2 tsp cumin 1 tsp caraway seeds 1 tsp chilli flakes 1-2 tsp salt Big grind of pepper Chicken stock (I used one single pot of that jelly-ish stuff) 2 cups of water To top: 1 avocado mashed with 1 lime and salt Sour cream Corn tortillas, hunks of bread Heat the oil, and cook the mince, onion and chilli until the onion is soft and the mince browned. Add in everything else - adjust the seasonings to your taste. Simmer for 10 mins to make soup, or 15-20 to thicken it up enough to heave huge mouthfuls in on a fork, or wrapped in a tortilla. Top with the mashed avocado & lime, and sour cream, eat as fast as you can. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/you-must-be-a-nightmare-to-live-with-i-blink monthly 0.5 2015-10-20 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/130290221579 monthly 0.5 2015-10-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933127040-KZGJN0RCUD7P76IMUPNM/tumblr_nvk6xfTP901rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I. The cardiology consultant asks the nurse to give me another ECG, so I lie on the bed and let them stick wired patches on me, from ankle to breastbone. Afterwards, he explains that any heart irregularity I have is within normal parameters, but — he scratches his belly, gutsily bursting out between a popped button just above his belt — do I have a fear of MRIs? Only his lack of English would make him ask me so honestly, so simply. I shrug. I’ll have one if I have to; I didn’t enjoy the last one, though. He watches me for a moment, his head tipped back and to the side, then abruptly, he says, No, we’ll do something else instead. I won’t make you go through that again if we don’t have to.  He checks me over, and I feel him jolt, discovering something. What is this? he says, holding up my wrist. It’s paint, I laugh, and point to my toes, my face, my other forearm.  Ok, he says. You’re fine.  II. One of the kids says to me as I tuck them up, How was your hospital appointment? A whole thick book flicks from front to back while I take a breath: how beautiful they are; how thoughtful; how separate; how our bodies are all disintegrating; how stories about accidents and illness fur up the arteries in my brain for days; how every momentary faintness, every headache, every forgotten word or prickling finger is a black cloud, waiting to burst; how I could never, ever leave them; how I’d ask for nothing other than to see them grow up, healthy and happy and good; how painful it is to love them, bruising and sharp and suffocating; how I want to pour my love in their ear, rich and treaclish and golden, and have it sustain them whenever they’re in need; how I wish when they’re short on good dreams — sometimes they can’t sleep because, they tell me, they can’t find any good dreams — I could light up the inside of their eyes with how I see them, funny and smart and kind and brilliant, so they would glow in their beds; how I wish I could show them, too, all my mistakes, on a gleaming white projector screen, so they can learn at 4 or 8 or 12 or 16 or 21 what it took me cold, aching, marble-lined decades to discover; how jealous I am that I already know Cancer Dad got to see his children grown and well. Fine, I say, Thank you; it was fine. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/129843099174 monthly 0.5 2015-09-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933127281-CXQJB1X91EY3D2PNXG1T/tumblr_nv8g3jkpon1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries To weigh down the other end of the see-saw — against a fresh, crushing terror of my own mortality — my seizure at the start of the summer has given me a six-month driving ban which actually has worked out pretty well so far; it’s meant I’ve cycled a hundred times more than I otherwise would have done, to parks and friends’ houses and errands. My bike is rubbish, with tyres that flatten within weeks no matter what we do, and the size and weight of the bike locks means I can barely collect anything on those errands, but the joy of pedalling doesn’t seem to fade. Push down with one foot, balance, away.  At one set of traffic lights, BMWs revving behind me, I watch as the cyclist just ahead of me kicks his pedal up and backwards with one foot, preparing himself for the lights to change. I do exactly the same at exactly the same moment, and I wonder if the drivers behind notice that choreography of cycling each time a few bikes get ahead of them.  On the bridge, I indicate right and slow the traffic behind me as I get into position to turn. The cars all stop for me at the junction; the white van behind me gives me plenty of room and neither hoots nor calls out abuse; I arrive in one piece, cruising down the road on my rusty bike to my friend’s front door. In the boundless blue of the day, my hands are shaking, my thighs are aching, and my heart races, as I smile, and Pollyanna the shit out of that driving ban.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/friends-from-overseas-come-to-visit-in-the-summer monthly 0.5 2015-09-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933127223-EU6X7LM6SXJ1QGIH4H6K/tumblr_nv1m4jGh3d1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Friends from overseas come to visit in the summer, and their family of five is balm to our souls: funny, smart, kind, with excellent appetites. We talk about parenting - what we’ve received then, what we try to practise now.  And we slip up. Of course we do.  Generally, though, I think this and particularly this sum up our overall view of trying to raise a decent person: don’t badmouth them, and *never* badmouth or laugh at them in front of them. Stop forbidding them arbitrary actions. Don’t deny their feelings. Allow them a private life. Get them to help you.  The key idea for me, which I’m thinking more and more makes up about 80% of a good person, is helping them to understand consent. Don’t pick a child up and pass them round like a doll; don’t force them to kiss or touch someone they don’t want to (I remember my grandfather making it clear the money on his bedside table was for grandchildren who were well-mannered enough to say good morning to him politely, with two kisses pressed to his sweaty cheek. NEVER have I felt so righteous, even at the age of ten or eleven, in my refusal to go near the fucking creep). Teach them that any kind of contact needs to be consented to by the other party - a hug in the line for assembly; a kiss in the playground; a playful smack on a sibling’s bottom. Teach them - now! It’s easier if you do it now, surely? - about ongoing consent, about enthusiastic consent, about withdrawal of consent. Teach them that if someone does something to *them* without their consent, they themselves have done *nothing* wrong. If someone doesn’t want a second slice of cake, then leave them alone. If a guest chooses an early night (AND FRANKLY WHO WOULDN’T WHEN THE CHAT IS AS FUN AS THIS) then that’s their choice. Let people make a decision, and respect it.  We try to stick to those rules too. But oh the challenge when one of them wears an outfit that makes your teeth fizz with loathing, or another really really really really doesn’t want to go to a sports session with all their friends, and you *know* they always have a good time there, always, and it seems a lot like they only want to stay because they know you’re about to cook a cake they can lick the bowl for, or the other wants the cup with no lid even though they’ll just slowly pour the contents into their meal… But we have to live by our sword. So I admire the outfit, or sit and listen about why they don’t fancy the sports session, or give them the cup and put a towel under their plate.  Anyway, the friends and J and I spent those evenings drinking gallons of gin gimlets and that also makes anyone feel like they’re doing everything a-OK, so, good.  Gin Gimlets 2 oz gin ¾ oz sugar syrup ¾ oz lime juice Shake over ice, strain, drink. All is well in the world. Good spirits will continue to ooze from your pores in the morning. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/126607351019 monthly 0.5 2015-08-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933127743-2FBLB9TPG4JVGFH3IPMC/tumblr_nt1b5jQYtM1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I always take at least one book, one magazine and my phone to the hairdresser, just in case they try to talk to me. But today, with the rain hammering down outside and a hot cup of coffee and a head filling with foils, my hairdresser and I talk for almost an hour about, of course, holidays - we’ve both just had holidays from which we need to warm up, and she shows me her secret holiday place, which is exactly where I need to go next time - and end up on families. Her former stepfather and my Cancer Dad seem to have been cut from exactly the same cloth, and we both spent years on eggshells, tiptoeing round mood swings and manipulations. We talk about how we didn’t know how relationships should work, for the longest time. By the time we compare notes on how they’d both pretend to be leaving our families for good, bidding us goodbye and good luck as we sobbed, only to turn up hours later baffled at our tear-stained faces, we are smiling. When we describe how we now imitate their darkest moments, their cruellest words and their scariest actions, exaggerate them to make other family members laugh, we are doubled over with our own laughter, unable to speak. She finishes my foils. ‘We’re fine now, though, aren’t we!’  They are the best highlights I’ve ever had.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/only-when-im-leaving-the-house-foot-on-the-bike monthly 0.5 2015-07-30 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/the-alexander-mcqueen-exhibition-is-just-as monthly 0.5 2015-07-08 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/121601217909 monthly 0.5 2015-06-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933127570-4WWX4M5ABK70OR71TC3E/tumblr_npzx43zwWA1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries The weekend is full of action: runs and rain and forests. We find a den in a wood, and while the baby sleeps in the buggy - rain dripping from cloud to leaves to her legs - the rest of us build a porch for it, and a front door. We pull branches across the forest floor and twist them and line them up, weaving in fronds of a curled ivy-ish plant someone has thoughtfully left piled up in the clearing. We work until my hands are green and there’s no more clean spots on my coat for the kids to dry their hands on.  Sunday sees the early period I was promised when I took the morning-after pill last week; I always forget quite how little my body appreciates bonus external hormones. The mood I’ve been in for the last four days - spiky-bordering-stormy - blooms in the evening into something apocalyptic, tipped with migraine in a way that makes the car journey home feel like it’s in eighteen dimensions. If I wasn’t worried my skull and mushy brain tissue were about to crumble into a pile of soft red dust, this strangeness of it would almost be enjoyable, an inverted feeling to the hash hot chocolate I drank before a gig as teen, that led me to cling to the arm of a friend’s boyfriend, saying, ‘I’m trapped in a dream. PLEASE, PLEASE, WAKE ME UP,’ while he chuckled softly and stuck me in the corner with some coats piled on top.  In the end, I get pretty much the same now, tucked into bed until I can remember my own name and I stop trying to escape to run with my wolf pack. I’m reassured to find that it’s still the best solution.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/120128598804 monthly 0.5 2015-05-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933127670-QWMU5RVGMC053SF9KB0J/tumblr_np2tcgLTNo1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries A friend from distant lands is briefly back in the country. I collect him from the local train station, and he explains that rather than bringing me what I’d asked him to pick up, he’s brought me half a breakfast burrito. I remember why I like him so much.  We sit in my garden and talk about life, while the baby eats mud and chuckles. When we’ve finished our coffees and the burrito, he says, Right, where shall we go for lunch? Pick somewhere you’ve always wanted to go to, but haven’t yet – my treat.  I think, This is the way to live.  We drive into the countryside to a pub, and he tells me about his French neighbour who got a woman pregnant and said, I want nothing to do with it, I will not see this baby, I will go back to France. The woman says, Cool story bro, it’s twins.  My friend says that really it’s his neighbour’s fault, since he’s actually one of triplets. We’re somehow both laughing so hard I nearly drive us off the road.  We eat everything at the pub: devils on horseback, olives as big as my thumb, little chorizo sausages as small as my thumb, herbed cod, rack of lamb, bakewell tarts, and under the warm sun and clear sky I even have a tiny glass of wine. The baby falls asleep after a mouthful of ginger ale. My friend and I make plans to write a film together.  I love Thursdays.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/118047636194 monthly 0.5 2015-05-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933127792-R5AC4J3CM99QIA9P9ROR/tumblr_nnsdve9S3F1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933127967-2DAQR2HXVAA5B436L1K9/tumblr_nnsdve9S3F1rbh1yco2_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933128138-L0LKZ0LBPO7PZ4DYGYGW/tumblr_nnsdve9S3F1rbh1yco3_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933130656-OF7YDHMPTAFJIN9JJ8V2/tumblr_nnsdve9S3F1rbh1yco4_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/ive-spent-the-last-fortnight-in-an-evangelical monthly 0.5 2015-04-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933130894-PG557GWO24JVZZ6ZBWYN/tumblr_nm4u0uHYmJ1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I’ve spent the last fortnight in an evangelical Kondo haze, yet the house looks like it’s been hit by hungry burglars. In the last four days, I’ve dropped-and-smashed three precious items of crockery, done a full supermarket shop before realising my wallet was at home, sweatily hurried the children from school to a swimming lesson which wasn’t on this week, and watched through a mashy haze of exhaustion as the baby found a piece of crumbling polystyrene and entirely snowed the ground floor under. My brain is melting, and oozing into my clumsy joints. I’ve discarded - after saying my careful thank yous - more than 75% of my clothes, seven binbags of children’s outfits and more than 500 books. (So many books. So. many. books.) We held a weekend book sale in our front garden that the infants manned; a teenage girl, brought by her father, hates Ian McEwan and I just kept pressing books on her, Free gift, just take it, and this one, oooh, and this is brilliant too, and oh! you must have this. Joyful. I’m now on to paperwork. Despite the fact that it spreads through the house, I’m reasonably good at this, having monthly clear outs of the drifts on my desk. But this is by far the hardest section yet. My birth notes from the last labour, with handwritten messages from the midwife on the front. Three different leaving-card books from beloved colleagues. The recipes I’ve spent years collecting. There’s a bubble in my chest and my throat, and I want to cry more than I thought possible, these days. But when I actually look at them, the bubble shrinks, then dissolves. That birth is in my memory, and always will be. The colleagues I loved then I still see now. The recipes, if they haven’t been made by now, sitting in plastic wallets in a file in my office under the box of photos, are unlikely to ever be. They all go in the bin. I wonder if it’s just rude to throw my father’s Orders of Funeral Service away, or the newspaper notice of his death. Would the kids ever want to see it? What secrets do they hold that we haven’t told them ourselves? But others are strangely impossible. I give up at the calendars I’ve kept at the end of each year. I thought they would be the least sentimental items, but they are thick with changing identities and coded references. When M is 9 months old, I am still going out at least once a week, every single week. When F is born, he gets simply an understated set of his hours-old initials against the date. Friends I didn’t think I was ever that close to pop up almost daily after each baby is born, bringing me magazines or bread or hand-me-downs. The grown-up meetings as I start freelancing. And in those days they weren’t family calendars - J and I had a colour each, and the babies fitted around whatever we fancied doing; now they get their own columns in a grotesque display of a pint-sized calendar coup. But the tearing, biting wind of time makes me feel like a savaged teenager again, aching from an inexplicable gut-punch nostalgia. M comes in to the office to tell me she has to write a poem, that it should rhyme, shouldn’t it? Does it start with a capital letter? Is there a comma at the end of each line? I show her this. It lulls us both, in the piles of papers and the bags of rubbish. I can be nostalgic later. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/115598908794 monthly 0.5 2015-04-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933131078-QETM79AGWXM11U1Q02IG/tumblr_nmco9hHdsL1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Another country house at another country park. At the end of a long lake is a round pavilion, lined inside with trompe l’oeil all the way up to the skylight. The room has doors scattered around the edges, tiny doorways leading to tiny circular stairs, each step even at the widest point only big enough for the children’s feet to fit fully on. M says, Can we go everywhere? Can we explore? Can we adventure wherever we like? The stairs go up and down - the first one we try brings us out into the large basement, with a huge doorway leading back outside. We race around the front and try another. Heading up this narrow stair I’m suddenly aware of the closeness of the walls, and there is a heartbeat of panic before I can see them opening up into a small room, with a small window, glittered with shiny-winged flies. Back down again. Another staircase, down, and alarm bells are firing up in my amygdalae, and we come out into a doorless basement this time, fully underground, with only a slit of a window at the top of one wall to reveal where we are. Other children are coming down now, ones I can’t just trample past, so I have to wait, my heart in my fingertips and my earlobes, the thick brick walls gently pouring into my lungs, my glands filling up with the weight of trapped blood. When the staircase is clear again I leap up, blind, to the sunlight and stand in clear space, door mere steps away. A Peacock butterfly has died on top of the display describing the hunting parties hosted here in another lifetime, and I can’t help momentarily rolling my eyes. Dude. It’s not that bad. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/the-day-starts-in-an-unlikely-vein-by-8am-im monthly 0.5 2015-03-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933131153-IZMXZIBN7G4M96LOFCNU/tumblr_nl7x4fA0lz1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries The day starts in an unlikely vein: by 8am, I’m not only up, but have been to the supermarket and made coconut porridge for the gang, rather than hollering from my bed at some time after 9 for a child to bring me tea. The sky is blue, the sun is warm. We pack up a picnic and toss a few coats in the car, just in case, because the sky has gone from golden blue to a shallower powder blue. By the time we get to our destination, it has become a disloyal shade of dove grey. I push away my nagging tiredness - who in the name of God gets up with a spring in their step at 6 fucking 45? - and try to ignore the fuzzing edge of my brain. It’s so incredibly beautiful here. That staves it off for a while. As we walk among the marble statues, I explain to the others about the hypocrisy of much female nudity in Modern Classical Art, the unpleasant legitimacy of buying and owning a nude woman who looks at you over her shoulder while vainly clutching a thin cloth over one breast, and how the same patriarchal path leads to the current dissing of selfies, where women and girls have in many cases reclaimed ownership of their image. My party asks if they can start on the picnic yet.  We shuffle around the gardens and the terrace of the big house, but it’s already too cold for me to joke to J that I’ll definitely have my second wedding here. Inside, a volunteer apologises that the house will be closing at 2 today, due to a wedding. Oh! I say, How lovely! The seating is laid out for the ceremony, two flanks of yellow-cushioned chairs filling a drawing room. I photograph the wallpaper and the mouldings, and I walk down the centre aisle and stand where the bride will be in a few hours. I look down at the chair right by me, aisle seat, front row. When I check a moment later, yes, the rest of the cards are printed - but this one, in careful biro writing, has the name of our flatmate from our first flat in London, nine years ago. Her name is reasonably unique, her spelling even more so.  Whoah, I say to J, I only just spoke to her, after years of companionable social media nods. She was looking for a reading for a wedding she was going to ohhhhhhh. If this was a book, I add, this plot point would be savaged for its unlikeliness.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/my-fathers-birthday-i-meet-my-mother-at-ikea-and monthly 0.5 2015-03-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933131519-EQEUI1X7O4Y1MRJVL3UR/tumblr_nkt1l3zl8r1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries My father’s birthday. I meet my mother at Ikea and we eat chocolate doughnuts while we walk around, picking the final details of the kitchen she would never have been permitted in his lifetime. We talk talk talk all the way around and through the morning, and into lunch, when we go back to the last place the three of us had eaten together. His favourite eaterie was usually Frankie & Benny’s, something I saw with leaden disdain as yet further proof of the interplanetary distance between us, but that day he’d wanted moules marinière, another optimistic chase of his fleeing appetite. I stayed for lunch. We were together that day because of another hospital appointment, another meeting where another doctor had spoken to my father’s brick wall face, and my father had left the meeting feeling upbeat, prepared to insist on further chemo. More time, he said, cancer ticking away in his liver, his bowel, his kidney; I just want another ten, twenty years. Other people have done it. I was shaking with rage by the time we got to our table. His stubbornness. His deafness. No, he didn’t want a party, he didn’t want his friends over, he didn’t want family visiting from far shores - he would beat this thing first, then he’d think about all that stuff. My vision was blossoming with all sorts of deep purples and reds. I ordered the lobster, the most expensive thing on the menu, and sat in a furious silence that made me feel young again. His appetite wasn’t up to the mussels after all, and the kitchen put them in a discarded lidless plastic box for him to take them home. In case things changed. This time, my mother and I both order the lobster. I also have oysters. I’ve been craving them since halfway through my last pregnancy. Because it’s just us now, because she is a widow, because she is alone, I permit my mother a single solitary oyster from my outsized plate of iced shells. I finish the oysters, and we finish our lobsters, wiping the frites around the mayo on our plates, planning holidays she might take, the yoga she’s meaning to take up again. That night, and the night after, I chase away the overwhelming horror of death by sitting in warm rooms with funny women, and we talk about books and our skin, travel plans and marriage, bullying and food, comedy and ambition. I think about making lobster bisque with the shells I took home in a lidless plastic box. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/hot-damn-its-nice-to-have-my-sister-back-in-the monthly 0.5 2015-02-24 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/111602005539 monthly 0.5 2015-02-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933131937-8Z8529SWVXF9PBTSBBYX/tumblr_nk3alpulTV1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries A holiday. For the first three days I am so ill that I think the heating’s broken at night, as I talk and toss and tear at my skin to make sense of where I am and who’s with me in the hot air and dizziness. I ride down water park rapids with our wild otter children in my waking hours and feel my legs and arms being pushed by currents hours later, back in bed, dry and still.  I reread Lucy Wadham’s The Secret Life of France, and marvel yet again how much sense it makes, and how much it explains my mother and her family, and the light years that yawned between her and my Scottish Protestant father. As ever, anything French makes me think about the levels of grooming la femme française is assumed to engage in as her duty as a woman. I think about how much I love face creams and washes, Liz Earle cleansers and Clarins serums, Eight Hour Cream and REN exfoliators, Bobbi Brown eyeliners and NARS blushers, Revlon lip crayons and Rimmel nail polish. I love the packaging, the smells, the rituals. But the trouble is, I can’t think where in my day I would find five minutes to groom more than the very bare minimum I do. In our seven-day break I brush my hair three times, and put mascara on twice. I want to be better groomed, I really do. Blow outs and skin care and classic, well-made clothes. But when it comes to the end of each day, I don’t know what I could ditch to make space for even washing my face. Less reading? Less work? Less sleep?  Inconceivable.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/yesterday-somebody-asked-me-if-my-three-children monthly 0.5 2015-02-11 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/children-are-magical-cherubs-who-appreciate-every monthly 0.5 2015-02-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933131319-1FPEFUKRK09OTALA7RKL/tumblr_njgz0pB4ht1rbh1yco1_640.png The Sam Binnie Diaries https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933131822-EOOCHMCN7H55IYMGBWGJ/tumblr_njgz0pB4ht1rbh1yco2_500.png The Sam Binnie Diaries https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933131601-AEPT4LGLTVJLC2EU2YP7/tumblr_njgz0pB4ht1rbh1yco3_400.png The Sam Binnie Diaries https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933132091-1FN8TSZY3A27FH3UP4J1/tumblr_njgz0pB4ht1rbh1yco4_250.png The Sam Binnie Diaries http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/110279998459 monthly 0.5 2015-02-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933133974-1G2RO9JNX5XZSBWIAT6S/tumblr_njdbizhZEa1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Back to a hospital, back to a cancer centre, but purely for professional reasons this time. I wander around the back of the hospital for a while, the bit I like the best - cages of laundry and boxes of shrink-wrapped equipment in the sun, all the functioning innards that show this place is working correctly - before I head into the beautiful Maggie’s centre. My meandering route brings back the dizzy, detached, hurrying, comfort-eating horrors of last summer, spent at a different hospital while Cancer Dad was sleepily swelling and shrinking and sealing up for good. I see the point of these places. Warm and bright, full of voices and comfort, soft lighting, soft cushions, space, and time. You could sit there all day, eating biscuits and talking to other people about lymphoedemas, or their childrens’ jobs, or a courgette cake recipe, or the knitting you’ve never quite mastered, or the cities you’ve lived in across the world. I think of the cups of coffee and slices of cake we’d eat in the John Lewis cafe, anything to get away from the hospital (everyone in a dressing gown or in tears or both) and how we’d talk only to each other, going around and around in circles, never really saying anything.  On the way home, a song on the radio reminds me with such Proustian heaviness of a single particular day from my teenage years that I’m amazed I can drive the car at the same time as remembering. It makes me think that maybe the reason I haven’t cried since his death is simply that his not being around any more is a great deal less sad that some of those days when he was.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/109905809729 monthly 0.5 2015-02-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933134622-505ZLGU8TTWKPMYZCLRL/tumblr_nj5vc5U5fl1rbh1yco1_1280.png The Sam Binnie Diaries A life filled with good things. My dear mother gives me one of her Reverse Pep Talks (“I alwayz know zat wheneffer everysing iss going well, zat’s when sings start going wrrrrong”) (she doesn’t even speak like that, but I know she loooooves my, frankly, inspired impression of her) and even putting aside the fact that the very nature of Things Going Right is that you then notice when something, anything comes up which isn’t great, I make a conscious choice to put that parcel of gifted fear aside.  The baby turns her head back and forth on the bed to Taylor Swift, giving me perfect deadpan side-eye in time to the beat. Youngest siblings, right? After a long nap, she hangs out in my office and takes all my carefully ordered drawers to pieces, scribbling over my handmade gift tags and slowly shredding invoices. Tonight, almost two hours after all the buns should be asleep, when I’m desperately trying to finish the urgent work I had to put aside this afternoon to rescue my wireless box from her redesign, I can still hear bright, jolly singing from her cot.  It’s a great pleasure.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/dumsnet-episode-1 monthly 0.5 2015-01-14 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/108010058164 monthly 0.5 2015-01-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933134724-2MNVLX48GPVTCNA3OBB5/tumblr_ni4trrup2W1rbh1yco1_640.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries A double swimming lesson at the end of a pleasant, exhausting day. So many bodies to look after, in and out of the water. And into this place that usually just sees me sweating (the changing rooms of children’s pools are rarely kept beneath Lightly Roast) and chivvying my infants with various Gothic endearments/threats, kind strangers step in. A four-year-old hands the baby her pens and lets it colour all over her careful bright pages. A mother with a face like a Botticelli angel produces an Ipad mini for two others in my gang, and an older girl arrives just in time to keep the baby from eating all the pens.  In the changing rooms, while I sweat myself into moderate-to-severe dehydration and the baby puts on a swimming cap which, combined with chronic ink mouth, brings a young Zandra Rhodes into our presence, one of M’s friends declares to the whole room that They Don’t Have A TV. M – like anyone who’s generally only ever really watched TV when Clockwork Orange-d by her mother into consuming family favourites from two generations ago – doesn’t know how to respond. Her friends says, What? What’s weird about that? And I say, in an attempt to help the situation, Wow, that’s cool. It’s not even out of my mouth before I can hear how sarcastic it sounds to the rest of the room. Her friend says, Does she watch TV? M is apparently paralysed by the two of us. I know the feeling. I try to explain that she doesn’t really, maybe… once a fortnight? Maybe? to try and normalise whatever it is this six-year-old is seeking to shock us with, and I can feel with an audible click the room turn against me. I want to explain, No, I love the Square Au Pair, she’s the best, I just… I… but everyone drifts out and I’m sweating so hard it’s stinging my eyes.  I resolve to try again next week.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/i-cant-stop-watching-this-video-its-a-running monthly 0.5 2015-01-09 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/happy-new-year-christmas-was-filled-with-feasts monthly 0.5 2015-01-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933134807-XQRJDL7J6NRPPNR5OEMN/tumblr_nhtrgaNDGa1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Happy new year!  Christmas was filled with feasts and gluts: tables groaning under enormous spreads, my mind creaking with the unwilling weight of new realisations, new ideas, new ways to make my life better. A pagan festival of lights and hyggelig, if I may mix my erroneous cultural references, seasoned with a light sprinkling of Painful, Brutal Truths.  And there were friends I hadn’t seen for years, or who had never been to this (no longer) new home, or who I had missed for huge swathes of their lives. And it was magical. All these people! Whom I loved! And who made me laugh so much! And knew me so well! To have a friend at our table who had kicked around with me as young teens, planning our lives with perfect self-importance, as now we sat discussing job plans and home decoration because, shit, man, we love that now. But still also discussing our families, because no one ever outgrows that. Or the entire clan of ex-colleagues, like a bank of blown-out wild roses, dancing and drunken at a wedding, two of whom bundle me out of the back door after the bride and groom have left like I’m Taylor S heading for her blacked-out SUV. Lunch dates and dinner dates and coffees and staying up late playing Mario with old friends and only having little, ever so little twinges about the final moments with my father that I’m not sure will ever stop creeping up on me when I least want them, but then the children, reading to each other, knocking over the rack of drying clothes to build a giant den, starting every sentence when they play among themselves with this moment’s request to Pretend…  For maybe the first January in my life, I’ve taken some New Year’s advice and have made no resolutions. I’m looking forward to events, and people, and possibilities. But I’m making no promises. And it feels good.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/i-promised-myself-a-quiet-december-this-year monthly 0.5 2014-12-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933134917-GGZCKNNA3S4SCOI2324J/tumblr_nghllhaxA71rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I promised myself a quiet December this year. Fewer huge Christmas feasts; less time in the supermarket; longer days under blankets with books and biscuits and babies. Yet somehow I’m so busy I had to cancel my therapist appointment this week - almost comically bad self-care - and my days are split into hour-long segments of ‘Jesus, where am I supposed to be once this has finished?’ Publishers seem to be having end-of-year panics too, demanding blurbs on tighter deadlines than normal, which suits me fine; I might actually be able to afford the presents I’ve got piled up in various cupboards.  Even in December, I really don’t drink. In our book club, the joke is how excited I get about having a whole bottle of Schloer to myself because everyone else is on the prosecco. But our Christmas meeting is at a restaurant, and it seems sociable to have a glass of wine with our meal, then another, and another, and then the chef is sending limoncello shots and someone’s googling niche sex terms and we’re tumbling out into the street, trying to get into closed bars like we’re teenagers instead of members of a local playgroup, and we find an open pub and drink flavoured sambuca shots and someone’s carrying the half-pizza we liberated from the restaurant then we’re inside a club where everyone is either underage or looking like they hope their wife doesn’t catch them there, and when I leave at 2am I realise that I’ve overdressed for the weather, in hat and mittens and coat and scarf, and I think of those New York winter evenings out with my sister where we’d be in layer after layer after layer, sometimes two hats, two pairs of gloves, huge shawls, squinting against the icy wind until we bundle with her friends into bars or galleries or brunch joints, defrosting slowly, the blood prickling its way back into our cheeks, not caring about anything. The weather here is milder. I walk by the river in the dark and the quiet, remembering all the times I did this as a student, and I wonder whether I really was naive to do it then, a young woman alone in the dark, or whether I just wasn’t frightened. I wonder if I’ll ever be not-frightened again, without the aid of sambuca and some house red.  At the school gates in the morning, I am disconnected and chaotic. I get several people’s names wrong. I cry through the school nativity. Afterwards, a bright beaming star of a friend takes me for a cooked breakfast.  Man, I love December.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/my-body-clock-is-fairly-smashed-and-most-days-im monthly 0.5 2014-11-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933135010-E0V5WMZF3RY2DLAWFWUP/tumblr_nezwmmOGcQ1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries My body clock is fairly smashed, and most days I’m unable to tell whether it’s a quarter to Christmas, or ten past the-time-you-need-to-leave-for-school-pick-up. But I’ve got business, exciting business, in Bristol, and through the miracle of an unhospitalised parent and a cooperative J, I’ve headed here a night early. On the drive, I keep instinctively turning around to check on the baby. I’m not used to being alone. I check into my hotel (is there a more magical phrase in the English language?) and head out for coffee. Bristol is beautiful. In the warm November early evening, the city seems to be full of bright creatures heading somewhere worth waiting for. I eat alone - my god, I’d forgotten how much I love doing that - and afterwards, with my takeout coffee, I stand at the ice rink, watching the same ten people circle round and around. The rink sounds like plastic but grates up like ice, and our line of bystanders laughs along with the skater when he takes a dramatic, flailing tumble. It’s been a long time since I could just think these lazy, pretentious thoughts; a slow swim in the world of beautiful things. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/i-worry-for-a-moment-that-a-tv-programme-has monthly 0.5 2014-11-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933135253-V5H6EMWPTP0X7JK3NZMQ/tumblr_new8lcAUpZ1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I worry for a moment that a TV programme has broken me. It was something stupid and utterly manipulative, a throw-away 60 seconds handed over momentarily to a father-daughter relationship that leaves me howling and concerned about how to do the school run when my face is contorted and leaking, but another 60 seconds pass and the howling stops and another 60 seconds pass and I’ve missed the train again; the crying didn’t take, as usual, and instead the echoes have simply shattered something within me, so I’m just smashed shards chink-chinking about within my skin. Friends are good. Daylight or easy meet-ups are perfect - anything else and the sadness of my SAD-ness (something I thought I’d shed a long ago) makes me cancel, excusing it in my head even if I don’t tell them I’m not coming. Many years back, a friend and I defended to our group the practice of friendship-culling, scraping off the vampires. These cheering, beamish people who drink coffee with me and share a pizza and knock for runs and make Christmas park plans will be beloved forever. I do my best to not vampire them. I crave someone to bring me a nightly box of hot, good food: spiced rices; lemon-zest chicken; broth; invalid food. In the absence of that, I wish yet again that I could fold over the dotted line on those family relationships which drag me down, and tear along the perforated dashes. I lie down next to my daughter and read to her about Bruce Bogtrotter, and fall asleep to the sound of her insisting she won’t fall asleep. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/at-times-like-this-people-say-take-care-of monthly 0.5 2014-11-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933135638-WPHAK62R2EKBJYY7VACC/tumblr_nekmffhWjg1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries At times like this, people say ‘Take care of yourself’ all the time. Sometimes it’s a throwaway line, sometimes it’s said with more care, a bit more concern. 'Take care of yourself, yes?’ Of course, that’s an impossibility. Between going to Cancer Dad’s hospital appointments and all the notes and emails around that; writing a book; completing my beloved freelance work - going back a little further: moving house and leaving our friends; having another baby; my sister and her family moving to the other side of the world, probably for good; redundancy; and on top of all that, money worries and the feeding and cleaning up after and home decoration for and clothing and caring for and the hundred small and a few bigger concerns and worries of my golden, delicious family… where does taking care of myself fit in? If I don’t have time to sleep, how do I grieve for this year’s terrible, horrible deaths?  Last week was a perfect storm of crises, and none of them were mine. In the same week, three separate friends, entirely independent of each other, told me about their own experiences of and dealings with depression and therapy. I had intended to miss this documentary on Radio 4, but ended up hearing the whole thing. Serendipity. When several comedians discussed their time in therapy, and their therapists’ patient refusal of their jokes, it was a gut-punch realisation that the sense of humour I prize so highly and cherish over almost all else had actually been keeping me from dealing with any of these difficult, even horrific, experiences. LOL of course I’m fine with my Dad in the terminal ward, have you seen how cheap the food is in a hospital cafe? LOL ACTUAL PAIN MAKES GOOD FUN JOKES LOL Fingers flying on the ol’ magical google also made me finally believe (in a way I couldn’t when it was just *loved ones* telling me - Jesus Christ, what do they know?) that any mood swings or behavioural changes I’d had this year were pretty much 98% likely to have been due to all the shit I’d had kicking around in my Life Events brain section. Less 'You are actually a wicked bastard and it’s finally coming to the surface’, more 'You know you can just go and get help and you’ll feel less like this and more like the self you know you are’. And YES - I am *extremely* privileged that I can just go and pay for therapy, and that I’m able and verbal and open and everything else enough that this is an option for me. I am extremely lucky.  Everyone I’ve discussed therapy with turns out generally already to have had it, and they all say, 'OH MY GOD EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE THERAPY IT IS THE BEST’, with the same hopping up-and-down giddiness I get when someone asks if they should read Wolf Hall. But once I’d booked my first appointment, I started thinking, 'Do I really need it? People never used to need therapy. Certainly not at 33. Not if they hadn’t been in a war zone or something.’ Then I started thinking about the general family skills and life histories of my ancestors, and realised, yeah, we probably all should have a bit of fucking therapy. If nothing else, it gives you fifty minutes to just talk about yourself and god knows I love to do that LOL JOKES ABOUT FEELINGS ARE THE FUNNIEST BECAUSE THEN YOU DONT HAVE TO DEAL WITH THE ACTUAL FEELINGS LOL Anyway. Wish me luck. I feel (a little bit) better already.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/a-city-warm-night-air-cafes-bars-people-in-the monthly 0.5 2014-10-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933136324-G2ZT7HYWGFOT6SO1SOJ9/tumblr_ne7ulojNKG1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries A city; warm night air; cafes, bars, people in the street, unhurried; a meal out; family; some Philip K Dick and Nora Ephron and Amy Poehler; a long run; good news; good sleep. These are a few of my favourite things.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/i-remember-once-feeling-like-i-was-losing-my-mind monthly 0.5 2014-10-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933135919-MH259D40LZ9H6HS95XNA/tumblr_ndy6pqyyOB1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I remember once feeling like I was losing my mind - in the depths of heartbreak, my brain untethered itself from my body, and floated away from it, watching it function while occasionally demanding that it do strange, inexplicable things. These days, instead, my mind and body have both been taken over, a Hulk slowly inflating within until I can feel it pressing against my flesh from the inside, taking over my eyes and ears, my arms and legs, all of my organs, raising my blood temp to boiling and making my eyeballs vibrate inside my skull. My thoughts are like candy floss, tangling around each other until I can’t tell the beginning or end of a thought. If I write something down on enough lists, sometimes I’ll discover later that I’ve managed to complete some task, but anything that requires decision-making is utterly beyond me.  And when there’s only a tiny bit of myself left, buried under the grief and stress of the last eighteen months, I can’t even really hear it anymore. I can’t hear that voice insisting that I don’t really want to move out of my life, I don’t really want to flee abroad on my own, I’m sure I don’t want to go out of my way to push away those closest to me. I stand in the middle of Boots and think about dyeing my hair, which becomes cutting it all off, which becomes flying to a new country and committing to some bigamous marriage with someone who won’t even speak my language. But I don’t even feel like this all the time - there are vast swathes, the majority even, where I’m happy, sensible, sad but whole - but when I do feel like this it expands in my memory so that it overwrites the previous day or week and suddenly I’ve felt like this forever, and won’t ever feel anything else again. It is so boring.  The woman in the shop who fits my new glasses is a rung up to feeling better. She performs such wonderful, purposeful goofiness in a too-low chair that if I speak softly enough and carry myself out carefully enough, I can keep that full glass in my head and feel alright for the rest of the day. The good feeling dissipates by the next shop doorway. A gentle council employee with a massive watch who gives me my parking permit within two minutes is another rung up; hand over hand I think I can lift myself out. Things which are not rungs up but instead are a foot on my head: staying up late; eating garbage; cutting myself off from people; lying like a rug on the floor instead of going for a run; reading bad books; watching bad films; accepting unnecessary pressure. I know this, and I maintain those destructive habits.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/to-the-woman-who-did-a-panicked-gasp-in-the monthly 0.5 2014-10-14 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/some-days-it-feels-like-im-all-doing-is-chewing monthly 0.5 2014-10-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933138701-IGX5SI7KKJO5704HAD6F/tumblr_nd3bc676kh1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Some days it feels like I’m all doing is chewing this same mouthful of feeling over and over and over again, until the flavour is just a ghost but the substance of it isn’t reducing at all. I’m thinking of my father more, not less. I’m reminded of him more frequently, several times a day now, and the reminders are hurting more, not less. And I’m tired of jawing over this, although it’s only been a month since his funeral. What a day that was! I thought it had put a neat, clean, joyful lid on what had been a horrific experience; but the warm memories are seeping in like a crippling frostbite. I don’t want to remember him decorating the Christmas tree with my unhelpful assistance each year, when I’m trying to watch The Snowman with my children. Oh god, is this the best my memories can do? Christmas? The last refuge of the sentimentalist? Fine: I don’t want to be jumped by all the things I want to show him, or ask him, or talk to him about, even though I’d stopped caring about his answers years ago. I don’t want to remember how desperate he was to live, now that he’s stopped living and won’t ever live again. I bore myself with these pitiful thoughts, looping around on repeat.  My neighbour and I have a long, good conversation about selfishness. About how valuable it is when you have kids, about the vital necessity of carving out your own time, your own work, your own identity. Selfishness was the thing that always made me happiest when we lived in London, and it was the main part of what made me such a good parent: the clear-cut time I had with the children was entirely ours, and I shared it joyfully. Now there is so much to do - freelance work and housekeeping and school runs and friends and countless other obligations that mean you don’t go unmourned when you die - that the selfishness has slipped down to the bottom of the list, and grips on only in name. I *am* selfish. I *definitely* do stuff just for myself.  I think of my dad and the long weeks and months he left my mother while he was training around the world, living up in the sky while she raised his children and moved us from country to country on her own, driving their home across a continent. Did his selfishness make him happy? Did it help us love him?   I’m chewing and chewing, but the mouthful never seems to shrink at all.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/after-our-weekly-saturday-watch-of-gbbo-tiny-paul monthly 0.5 2014-10-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933139311-L546SRVQN30UFN4VR6RW/tumblr_nczj2lqdV41rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933139503-C86BIDFTMK4U8HLHWVSU/tumblr_nczj2lqdV41rbh1yco2_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/this-photo-doesnt-even-begin-to-do-this-dish monthly 0.5 2014-10-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933139567-R5BAIWHL94TGM07B6WX7/tumblr_ncxrwkteoc1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries This photo doesn’t even begin to do this dish justice. I had only seconds before the baby woofed my portion, so this had to do.  It was comforting but not too heavy, and the cabbage and bacon added bite to the soft cheesy macaroni and sweet squash.  Fancy Autumn Macaroni Cheese (serves 6-8) 1 squash Olive oil Flake salt & fresh ground pepper 450g macaroni ½ a savoy cabbage 3 rashers of smoked bacon 600ml whole milk 50g butter + 1 tbsp more 50g flour 300g cheese (with as much flavour as you can get - no point using Mild here), grated Peel and deseed the squash and cut into 3cm cubes. Put in a tinfoiled baking tray, slosh with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, crumble some flake salt over and bake at 180c for 30-40 mins or until soft and a tiny bit crisp at the edges.  Meanwhile, cook the macaroni in a big pot of boiling water (with some olive oil and salt. Blood has been spilt over my mother’s refusal to salt pasta. *It tastes like gummy flour if you don’t*, fyi). While it’s cooking (it doesn’t take long, and you want to leave it with a little bite) chop the half-cabbage into strips. In a frying pan, melt the tbsp of butter and, once bubbling, add the cabbage and stir around for only about 15-20 seconds. It’ll soften more in the heat of the macaroni.  Drain the macaroni and put in a serving dish with the cabbage on top, then cover with some tinfoil and a tea towel (to keep it warm). In a saucepan, put the milk, flour and butter, gently heat and beat continually with a silicon whisk (this is literally the only use I’ve found for that utensil. Imagine people trying to beat eggs with it HAHAHHAHA). It’ll thicken up beautifully and smoothly, at which point you can take it off the heat and add the cheese and a few grinds of pepper. While that cheese melts in, cook the bacon (I tossed it in the cabbage frying pan - you know my motto about reduced washing up - but you can always grill it if that really floats your boat), then slice it into 2cm squares. Precision is not required here.  Remove the squash from the oven once browned and soft, and add it to the macaroni and cabbage, along with the bacon and cheese sauce. Stir gently. Serve with a fresh green salad in a nice lemony dressing.  SIDE NOTE: a jam jar with a lid got M not only into salads, but also into tasting the food as we go along. M’s now our trusted salad-dressing maker. Another chore delegated. #success  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/i-am-crying-as-i-write-this-lol-jk-but-this-is monthly 0.5 2014-10-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933139760-94D42C8BIWVC94AURG41/tumblr_ncu1e3prbG1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I am crying as I write this. Lol, jk, but this is a total thing of mouth beauty and I have to share it with you. It’s liquorishish yet buttery, everything that’s good about an autumnal oven. And it’s perfect for using up those bananas which you bought in good faith but have somehow become scattered around the house, slowly and silently browning.  Banana Bread (serves 1 if you’re quick enough, otherwise makes 10 or so slices) 4 medium-large ripe or overripe bananas 80g butter (plus some to grease the tin) 200g dark brown sugar (this is v v important, it raises the flavour level to MAGIC) 1 large egg 1 and ½ tbsp vanilla paste 1 tsp bicarb of soda Pinch of salt 180g spelt flour (I know this is a fussy ball-ache, and back into the realms of Waitrose, but I have *two bags* in my cupboard from when I keep meaning to make Hugh F-W recipes then never get round to it. It is TOTALLY worth it) Preheat the oven to 170c fan. I don’t know what that is for any other cooking temperature system. Vaguely mash the bananas in a big bowl. They should be ripe enough that it doesn’t take much effort, so you can stop and leave it quite rough, with lots of chunks in. Melt the butter and add to the bananas, along with the dark brown sugar, the egg which you’ve briefly beaten in the melted butter bowl (why make more washing up for yourself), the vanilla paste, the bicarb, the salt, and finally the flour. Mix well, so there are no clumps of flour left.  Pour into a buttered loaf tin, and cook for between 60-70 minutes. The fractionally lower temp but longer time means the loaf is cooked all the way through but the outer layer is *almost* burned, so has a beautiful treacly flavour.  It’s *so* good, it doesn’t even need butter.  I know.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/i-took-no-care-of-myself-at-all-over-the-summer monthly 0.5 2014-10-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933139860-Y1VJJAK5BO9JRYDFQTTO/tumblr_ncs492aKpW1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933140500-P65R11EFJ40YPLN0NRUK/tumblr_ncs492aKpW1rbh1yco2_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/a-difficult-conversation monthly 0.5 2014-09-30 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/a-month-since-my-father-died-sometimes-the monthly 0.5 2014-09-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933140381-YEAAFWTL709KZKSDT2XH/tumblr_nc9lgxnzaf1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries A month since my father died. Sometimes the sour-salt smell of his dead body will float to the top of my brain, or the sight of his half-open eyes, and I’ll remember how his skin felt in that close room, in that last bed. In my dreams, he visits with greater frequency than he ever visited my home in life: at first, he was standing behind me while my daughter shouted, Look! Look!; in another, he had just left the room, and the corner of my eye; last night he was at a party one of us was throwing, and he was like his old self, his years-ago self, and it was an enormous pleasure to see him, unlaced with the sick dread of later on.  I spoke about his sense of humour at his funeral, how that was the most defining part of our relationship. And it was, and continues to be, true. It’s been a gift, and shaped the very best of me. For my work, I’m asked to come up with some ad lines for the memoir of a comic actor who’s always reminded me of my father, and it’s only spending the afternoon googling clips - many of which I’d watched with my dad - that it hits me again, dizzyingly, not overwhelmingly, but vertiginously. I cry a bit and get on with it.  At a car boot yesterday, we unpack the car and I see almost all the books we’re selling are ones from his shelves, donated many months ago, Jeffrey Archers and Boris Johnsons and Jeremy Clarksons. Not my onions in the slightest. But one is the William Langewiesche that I sent him after I’d worked on the back cover copy, complete with the note from me tucked two-thirds of the way through, as far as he’d got before moving on to something else. At the previous car boot, before he’d died, I would have given the whole pile away for a round pound. Laid out on the picnic rug this time, it feels like a cheat, a spitefulness, and I hope the buyers know the value of what they’re getting.  I don’t regret not telling him that I loved him, because I did. But I wish I could have understood when I was saying it that it was true, that he’d made my life better more than he’d made it worse. But not one ounce of that is going to make me any more willing to have leftover Clarksons, Johnsons and Archers in my own home for a single second longer than is necessary.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/a-good-lunch-with-good-friends-in-our-garden monthly 0.5 2014-09-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933140515-6P9F7VODQXRK3YEEHFQ3/tumblr_nc3lq9pZVs1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries A good lunch with good friends in our garden - ginormous Goop-ish Mexican feast, followed by my rice pudding, which I make differently each time but which was so successful this time that I shall attempt to share that recipe with you.  Rice Pudding (serves 6-8) 1 large tablespoon butter 300g arborio rice  200ml some zinfandel or something similar, I don’t know, whatever’s in the fridge 600ml double cream 1l whole milk 2 tsp vanilla paste 100g caster sugar  Juice of ¼ of an orange Melt the butter in a heavy-based saucepan. Roll the rice around in it, getting it translucent and handsome-looking, then add the wine and bubble it gently for a minute or two. In a bowl, mix the cream, 750ml of the milk, the sugar and the vanilla. Pour into the pan with the rice. Stir well, add the orange juice, and keep over a medium-low heat, stirring occasionally. Add the remaining 250ml of milk as needed, if the liquid is completely absorbed and the rice is not yet ready, or you just want to make it a little looser at the end. Should take around 30 minutes.  I offered it with chocolate chips (which made all the kids do little jigs), raspberry jam, or just on its own. Bon appetit.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/on-her-recent-uk-visit-my-sister-notes-how monthly 0.5 2014-09-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933141884-1J6US6Z12E4OBWRH5Z36/tumblr_nbslltg8Q71rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries On her recent UK visit, my sister notes how beautiful and various the architecture is where I live now. I haven’t noticed, not really, not in any complete sense, just odd observations here and there. At the moment my father dies I have been sent out of his room - my mother wants to wrap my birthday presents for the next day - and am sitting at the kitchen table, flicking through a Sunday Times magazine, marvelling at their levels of trolling and trying to count how many chocolate chip cookies I can fit in my mouth at once with the aid of a hot cup of tea. My mother comes into the kitchen, pale, still, eyes wide, and says my name once. It takes a second before we are both racing upstairs, not hesitating at his doorway - there is something to be done and we absolutely have to do it. But even standing over him, touching him, me tonguing chocolate chips from between my teeth, we aren’t sure. I have to ring up his GP and say, “I’m really sorry; I *think* my dad’s died?”, sounding twelve years old, not thirty-two (for another eight hours). We watch him and watch him and watch him, our eyes so used to seeing the living that we keep seeing a vein pulse, a chest rise, an eye twitch. The doctor comes and takes long, long minutes to pronounce him; my mother and I terrified past words that he might still be alive, that this could be the final stage which goes on for more weeks, or months. We call who we need to call, and we sit with him. We both kiss him.  Because his illness was fast but linear - diagnosis; prognosis; declining speech; declining movement; increased fatigue; bed bound; mute; eyes closed; slowed breathing; less breathing; slower pulse; FIN - it seemed a matter of shading. But the truth I’m struggling with is far more black and white: alive; alive; alive; alive; alive; dead. That’s what jolts me when an elderly man reaches across me in a supermarket aisle, his forearms just like my father’s. It’s not my father’s forearm: he’s dead.  The vast majority of the messages of support I receive understand the complexities of the relationship we had. One particularly pragmatic friend reminds me that ‘If you take the euphemisms out of an obituary, you’ve got prepositions and a resume’. But even a gentle death, at home, on a sunny day, of someone with whom you have this complex relationship, is savage and impossible to understand.  I’m noticing the local buildings again. Mostly Victorian, with hints of Dickensian munificence, plus my beloved high rise blocks and some Georgian scraps around the edges. The temptation is to make a pun about how I’m looking up, but these reminders of dead builders and dead architects and dead designers are reminding me to look forward instead.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/my-mother-and-i-take-my-sister-to-the-airport-this monthly 0.5 2014-09-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933143800-M58IZVP20MCCM4CSE147/tumblr_nblranruOJ1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries My mother and I take my sister to the airport this evening. It’s been two weeks of almost non-stop laughter, and between friends and those two and my family and extended family, it feels like I’ve been lifted through something which could have been truly awful, and instead was utterly good. So much so that at the airport tonight, despite that ol’ light of my life disappearing to the other side of the globe again, all I could notice was luggage tags and eye blinds and bag straps and travel pillows and a bubbling excitement of voyages, even if I’m going nowhere right now.  Driving home in the dark while my sister texts me film options before take-off, my mother and I talk about my dad, of course. We allow the possibility, and the blessing, of binary thoughts about him at last, at last, co-existing in our contented minds.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/cooking-a-breakfast-pancake-feast-for-my-most monthly 0.5 2014-09-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933144845-SEUIOBWQ9L6TK2UGRMO8/tumblr_nbjps1Sf2z1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Cooking a breakfast pancake feast for my most beloved people, all of them sitting in my garden, in the sunshine. I still dream about taking J and the kids around the world, but days like this also make me daydream about painting the kitchen, going on a bike ride, having another day like this.  In the afternoon I send the kids up some local apple trees, and we return with an enormous bag of fruit. I find a recipe for cheddar and apple pie, and after slaving in the kitchen for hours (I end up making a pie for our neighbour too, such is the glut) while they watch Great British Bake Off, I am forced to listen to my tiny Paul Hollywood telling me with familliar unbearded bluntness that my pastry is too salty. For that reason, I offer you instead my recipe for the roast peaches I made the night before, easy and quick and tear-jerkingly delicious.  4 fairly hard peaches 2-3 tablespoons of brown sugar 2 tsp of vanilla paste 75ml water Cut the peaches along the seam and twist apart, leaving in the stone. Put in a deep sided-baking dish, sprinkle with the sugar and drizzle over the vanilla paste. Put in a pre-heated oven - maybe 180c - and leave for 15 minutes. Once that time is up, pour the water over the peaches. Leave in the oven for another 20 minutes, until they look like forlorn old shoes. Serve two halves in each bowl, with a bowl of cool, cool cream.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/i-drive-to-the-committal-service-behind-the-car monthly 0.5 2014-09-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933144147-J7EKQF0SFW59QWN5BNET/tumblr_namiw9qbuL1rbh1yco1_1280.png The Sam Binnie Diaries I drive to the Committal service behind the car with my mother, her sisters and J, following the hearse. In my car, my sister and I have our French cousin and French uncle, the latter of whom plays us the Benny Hill music on his phone as we travel in convoy and bangs the top of my head until all four of us are weeping with laughter. At the Crematorium, we meet my dad’s family, his sweet sisters - really, we have so few men in the family, we’ve had to marry them all in or produce them ourselves - and suddenly the simple horror of his still body in a box makes me feel sick and weak and bovine. We shuffle into the Chapel, accidentally wedging my mother down the end of one row, and listen to the RAF Padre talk about the Kingdom of Heaven for a while. He mispronounces my mother’s name over and over again, and I smirk each time. We enjoy the hymns. I’m distracted by the buttons he pushes when it’s time to draw the curtains across our view of the coffin - he’d told us about them earlier, and once you know he’s doing it, you can’t un-notice it, like the weather presenter’s discreet thumbing for a new screen - but when the service is over and my mother’s choice of exit music begins, ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’, the front row - my mother, my sisters and I - fall apart, starting up a howl in perfect sync, which of course instantly turns to laughter in my mouth and sets us all giggling. We sit and cry and sing along, then realise when the song starts up again that everyone is waiting for us to move first.  As we drive out of the Crematorium ground, we see my father’s oldest friends, the ones we were wondering about the absence of, driving in. We have given them the wrong time. For the rest of the day, we all laugh about this, and friends tell us that my father would have found it hilarious, that error. (He wouldn’t. Appropriately, somehow, he would in reality have been so angry that he would have refused to attend the entire rest of day.)  At the afternoon Memorial service, the church is full, bulging, standing room only. The Padre brings us to the door to see where we’ll speak our Memorial words, and the verger misunderstands and makes 300 people stand up, while we back away from the door, doubled-over with fist-in-mouth silent laughter. When our chosen organ music strikes up, we feel any tension has been destroyed by the premature rise and burst in, the four of us marching down the aisle to our blank pew at the front. It feels like some kind of last-minute provincial rep, not a sacred ritual; Bring Your Own Costume.  We head straight to the pub afterwards. J reassures me that I got the biggest laugh of the service - is there any other reason to speak at a funeral? - and I am tearful at the sight of my friends there, pressed fresh and smart in black. They buy me tiny glasses of sambuca. I am struck by how few people I know at the wake: there are hundreds, literally hundreds, and I wonder at how far my father’s life drifted from the one he loved to the one he had when I knew him, that I don’t think I’ve met even half of these dear friends before. But the ones I do know, the beloved family friends whose children we were raised with - their hugs and hand clasps and laughter are a cure for what ails me. By four o'clock, I am cadging cigarettes from mon Oncle Georges and when my mother comes outside, she gives me a mock-shocked look and I reply with an exaggerated What?, letting a pop of smoke bubble from my mouth. She laughs. I am so proud of her, as she stands in stockinged feet outside the pub, next to my friends who tower above her and listen to her stories. Her oldest friend finds me too, and tells me such beautiful things about my mother that I wrap them up carefully in my brain, to tell her that evening, when we are quiet, after midnight, back at home.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/sometimes-i-get-non-musical-earworms-the-other monthly 0.5 2014-09-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933144268-O45283LV52RL03UAKNFO/tumblr_nb7sfr7DkY1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Sometimes, I get non-musical earworms (the other day I had the name Jaqen H’ghar going round and round all morning), and one of my most common is Nick Hornby’s “Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?” It rattles back and forth inside my brain, serving no purpose but to remind me that I should avoid sad music, for the instant and crippling effect it has on me. Is that just how ears and brains work? Even if I’m in the jolliest mood in the world, a few bars of On and On by Longpigs will have me bed-ridden for days. Is that usual? I’ll wake up craving some NIN but once I actually put it on I’ll not be able to speak for a couple of hours. That’s how music and humans function, right? All of this is just to say that when I’m attending my father’s cremation tomorrow and the sky is beige and weeping, I probably shouldn’t have picked up a Tori Amos CD. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/the-sideboard-is-filled-with-cards-and-the-table monthly 0.5 2014-08-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933144437-8IEXVYO6O3URJYCNL2ZA/tumblr_nax9jroHuC1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries The sideboard is filled with cards, and the table is full of vases of white lilies, a flower none of us like. It’s beginning to feel like the front door is host to some kind of haunted letterbox, too; we can’t turn our back without another note arriving on the mat. Letters - handwritten on thick personalised stationery with a fountain pen - tell us that we must be devastated, that he was the very best of men, that he was stoic and silent in his illness.  My mother, my sisters and I go to register the death, then to the funeral director to choose the cheapest coffin and plan the cremation and memorial details. There may be hundreds at the service. We rarely stop laughing, giddy fools, while our mother alternates between fondly rolling her eyes and kicking us silent so she can give details of her husband’s birthday, their wedding day, the GP who cared for him until his death, five days ago.  In his absence, we are swearing a lot. It mostly makes our mother laugh. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/im-beginning-to-understand-why-i-need-to-be-here monthly 0.5 2014-08-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933144790-91NPA2ZFJE833UNOQVWH/tumblr_nam3waxjy91rbh1yco1_1280.png The Sam Binnie Diaries I’m beginning to understand why I need to be here so much, at my father’s bedside. Having had 24 hours off yesterday to take the kids to meet friends in town, it was so hard - like underwater punches - to go back into his bedroom, to see his yellow skeleton head on the pillow, to hear his puffs. If I never leave the room, that disintegration isn’t quite so striking. I understand why people keep away.  The family doctor visits and makes an almost-comical face when describing his bafflement at his patient’s continued survival. It seems we all have to keep remembering how serious this is, even though it seems ridiculous, utterly unreal. Why are the nurses taking this so seriously? Why are there so many carers here? Why are they all treating this like it’s a *real* life or death situation? We are getting worse and worse at maintaining our poker faces. I don’t even stop my iPhone game when the nurses come in, now. But I have developed a horrible new fear, too, to match my horrible new habit: what if this really *isn’t* real? It’s all just makeup and camera trickery, and tomorrow he’ll leap out of bed and berate us all for not fighting for his life hard enough.  Soon, says the doctor. Soon.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/last-night-after-three-days-sitting-mostly-alone monthly 0.5 2014-08-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933145356-HQQPRL7HE0NBFQIG99QV/tumblr_nabh6bPdLY1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Last night, after three days sitting mostly alone at my father’s bedside, I go a bit Bertha Mason. A phone call from someone infinitely more sensible than me stops me from torching the place, and tells me that while my father *will* die, we will all keep living. So we need to keep living.  This morning I wake up to pouring rain. By the time I’ve got my running kit on, it’s become a full-blown thunder storm and the rain’s coming down so hard I can’t see the end of the road. My mother forbids me from going. It’s all the fuel I need. I run away from the traffic and into the fields, and in the middle of one huge open field I’m already drenched and the thunder booms and it’s like a perfect Dawson’s Creek moment and I remember how much I liked being a teenager, for moments like this.  In the afternoon I get in the car for the first time since Monday and drive to the shopping centre to get shoes for a wedding on Saturday I’m glad to know I’m finally definitely going to attend, whatever happens. The teenage boy at the till asks me if I’ve been shopping long today, and I respond with a beaming non-sequitur that I’ve just come from my father’s deathbed. ‘I take it from your smile he’s OK, though!’ he smiles back at me, and I find that I’m smiling even more now, as I explain in way too much detail (Him: 'Right, if you could… just… put your card in… please…’) just how long they think he’s got, and that it’s just sheer magic to be out in the real world again. When the transaction is finished he smiles at me, properly, and wishes me luck, and I want to hug him and have him hug me and we would both feel total peace and that feeling would spread out from us to all the shoppers, out past the glass walls of the shopping centre, out across the country, out over the world, and all wars would cease forever, for good. But I take my bag and thank him and look away, not knowing how one deals with this precise situation.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/besides-the-family-doctor-the-only-people-in-my monthly 0.5 2014-08-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933145213-NRG4JX2S83PCHAKZ23KP/tumblr_na73oyJ7Pe1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Besides the family doctor, the only people in my father’s room are women. Carers, nurses, palliative teams; my mother, my sister and me turning him over in bed. Five of us today, daughters of mothers and mothers of daughters, cackling at his bedside at the thought of any man demanding a son. I try not to breathe in his smell of warm, rotting cabbage when I touch him or bend down into his lemon-yellow eyeline, attempting to interpret the sounds from his mouth. When we unbutton his pyjama top for the nurses to fit a syringe driver to his upper arm, I see that the skin on his chest is rolling hills, valleys between each rib and shadowed craters of collarbone dips. His upper body is all bone and wasted sinew, with binding muslin skin.  Mostly he doesn’t greet us when we come into his bedroom, only fractionally rolling his semi-open eyes. Dude, I know what you mean.  This morning, my mother brought me orange juice in bed and said he was the same as yesterday, peacefully sleeping. I told her I’d had a terrible nightmare that he was up and about again, and she asked if that wasn’t a nice dream, then we looked at each other and I rubbed my puffy face like people don’t do in real life.  http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/baby-clothes-bagged-up-for-the-charity-shop-each monthly 0.5 2014-08-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933145840-AY1IBVO3IZ3AHCV6ZHZ4/tumblr_na54tsTGbq1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Baby clothes bagged up for the charity shop, each one faintly stained with memories and ghostly food smudges, and it’s hard to justify my sadness at seeing them leave. It seems inviting disaster to wonder if our babies might have babies, and need these same clothes many years from now. At my parents’ house two days ago, my dad tried to laugh at the idea of his plans for the future, for retirement. A grimace, no sound, then a blank Parkinson’s stare again. Today, every window is open to try and rid the house of the smell, and he doesn’t wake much even when my mother strokes his face. I almost make myself cry by playing the Judi Dench performance of ‘Send in the Clowns’ in my head, even though my dad has very little affection either for Dame Judi, or for any musical theatre that doesn’t contain pop hits of his younger days. It’s just a beautiful song. We sit with him, and listen to him breathe. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/neither-of-ms-best-friends-at-school-have-english monthly 0.5 2014-08-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933146494-Q0DO2U2C1V5Y7DI6GSG5/tumblr_n9xz31ystn1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Neither of M’s best friends at school have English as a first language. At a Sunday afternoon barbecue with their parents, we are about seven languages behind everyone else (although I can now say “Pleased to meet you” in a pretty good Brazilian accent, though I say so myself). Of course, the food is excellent. At one point, the host takes a leg of chicken from J’s hand mid-bite, saying, “Don’t waste your time on that - have more steak.” The next night we are served daal gosht and melt-in-the-mouth chicken liver kebabs at a 1-year-old’s birthday party which runs from bedtime to 11pm, the freshly feral pack of children running wild and sleepless in their darkening garden. There are pockets of deep goodness in the world, and I appear to have stumbled into one. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/exactly-half-way-under-the-channel-my-muscles monthly 0.5 2014-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933148532-VU97PNXN7UMT8C2NFIHK/tumblr_n9mflht4jB1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Exactly half-way under the Channel, my muscles started knotting, my breathing came shallower, I shucked off my week-old cocoon to reveal my new shape, same as the old one. I drove home angry, the pre-holiday rages settling like ratty fox furs back on my shoulders. But past the front door, my in-laws waited, smart and funny and kind. And past them, past the night and into the morning, were the children, all taller and browner and funnier than before. M wants to grow a moustache. F doesn’t like crabs. P wears everyone’s shoes. My fancies of flight can wait for another day. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/the-fields-are-filled-with-sunflowers-but-we monthly 0.5 2014-07-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933149111-JDB2Q4YCFI5928LR0KFK/tumblr_n9krzo0OG91rbh1yco1_1280.png The Sam Binnie Diaries The fields are filled with sunflowers, but we leave before dawn so get past most of them without being seen. I loathe those creatures. At best, they’re a forced jollity, a Chuckle Brothers prettiness with lipstick smudged round its mouth and a novelty balloon in one hand; at worst, by late August, they are fields and fields of blackened, charred children, berated, punished, burnt and sorry, their bowed heads just begging someone to forgive their cindered little faces, unable to even meet your eye. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/i-remember-only-after-ive-booked-it-that monthly 0.5 2014-07-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933149320-6ASN9XWRLQV44TL1T268/tumblr_n9j6boxexg1rbh1yco1_1280.png The Sam Binnie Diaries I remember only after I’ve booked it that trente-deux kilometres seemed trop loin pour nous paddle, last time we came, but it’s too late now - they’ve enquired if I am French, admired my accent, and there’s no way on earth I’m asking for the shorter route. It is a long way, and we are in a tiny minority in our single kayaks (and thus have half the potential speed as our two-man colleagues), but I am fast, and I am strong, and the paddle feels familiar in my hands, and I do not even want to stop for lunch but I feel it’s not really in the spirit of going on holiday with someone if you just keep leaving them behind. Towards the end, we pass a naturist beach, and every single canoeist ahead of me is fascinated by one figure on the beach, and as I get closer I see it is an apple-breasted woman, waiting with a buggy just like she’s waiting for a bus, waiting with infinite patience while some of our fully dressed paddlers bicker amongst themselves on the beach where they are not permitted. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/i-have-brought-all-the-wrong-music-i-have-brought monthly 0.5 2014-07-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933149169-B2QS4WIWC76UD3JUPY5F/tumblr_n9hlu69B9z1rbh1yco1_1280.png The Sam Binnie Diaries I have brought all the wrong music. I have brought PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea; an Elton John Best Of which *doesn’t* contain Tiny Dancer; a White Stripes album which is so soaked in New York memories it’s as if I’m insisting on a bagel and lox from the boulangere; and the sole summery album in the car, wedged at the back of the glove box, an old Nelly Furtado CD, made in the era of claggy, spray-on, William-Orbit-esque over-production which renders much late-90s-early-2000s pop unlistenable. I really need some Solange. Or some Sia. Even some Lana del Rey, and we can pretend we’re crossing the blood-lust wasteland of American states. So we drive in silence. And it’s *wonderful*. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/sometimes-clich%C3%A9s-are-lazy-half-truths-perpetuated monthly 0.5 2014-07-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933149362-37ZGFCYNNWY70PFV8O5D/tumblr_n9fjdlPAF71rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Sometimes clichés are lazy half-truths perpetuated by a handsome-sounding rhyme, and sometimes clichés kick around for so long because that truth just keeps coming around and reminding us with a humble shrug, Nope, still true. French food, man. French food. Even the humblest service station serves us tender, spiced ham with a rich Marsala gravy. At the grubby supermarket a few kilometres down the road, the saucisson sec and the fromage du chèvre are enough to make a grown woman keep eating hours after she is sated. And the bread. Oh, the bread. As we sit down to our breakfast each morning, golden crust and airy, tangy, chewy innards fresh from the boulangerie, I think (as best I can) of the final sentence of Jeffrey Steingarten’s essential essay on bread: “And on good days, we eat nothing else.” Jeffrey, I know *exactly* what you mean. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/nous-allons-%C3%A0-la-rivi%C3%A8re-aujourdhui-en-route-to monthly 0.5 2014-07-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933150442-Y5NVN6I3KV90GO4EY7FU/tumblr_n9dn475V3P1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Nous allons à la rivière aujourd’hui, en route to which I discover possibly my most annoying habit yet: reading out loud all the French signs. Worse, and more bafflingly, I have to do each one in a different, strange voice. Miel, in a hoarse growl; Les Chevals, in a giddy high-pitched squeal. At the river, the beautiful Euro-women have pouched, puckered stomachs over their bikinis which match mine, and I feel completely contented, even with the children jumping into the river from 60 feet up the cliff face. When there is a particularly painful sounding water-landing, the whole river bank applauds in that sarcastic French way. The noise I took for distant thunder at first is actually plastic canoes scraping over shingle in the echoing gorge, and when we’re in the water, we must dodge the canoes and paddles, as we have better speed and versatility than many of their pilots. My lunch is pa amb tomàquet, my mother’s go-to summer lunch, warmed in the sun for a few hours. Its olive, salty smell is the most summery scent I know, more than cut grass, more than sun cream, more than anything. It is my mother making several baguette’s-worth of Catalan goodness for me and my sisters and pushing us back into the garden. One day I might even give you the recipe. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/half-way-through-my-fifth-book-of-the-holiday-and monthly 0.5 2014-07-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933150134-EL5Y6P9Z2BI0OS2YXV6K/tumblr_n9c0erTJte1rbh1yco1_1280.png The Sam Binnie Diaries Half way through my fifth book of the holiday, and I’m no longer able to tell you which day of the week it is. The number of hours we are both awake is in the single digits. I’ve even started making my usual assessment of ‘in a zombie apocalypse, how long should/could we stay here?’ Which I suppose is my brain’s way of saying it’s having a good time. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/i-am-taught-basic-differential-calculus-on-our monthly 0.5 2014-07-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933150074-VFHDXR3HL2AYRPRPW3YV/tumblr_n9a1pa7JMZ1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries I am taught basic differential calculus on our drive down, and when I fall asleep here on the sofa after a three-hour lunch of cheese, with one bent leg somehow balanced on top of a stiff cushion, I dream that I must calculate how to find a new father, that there is a new father waiting for me in one of the tiny dark doorways I must get my unanswering long limbs to visit. I think of the maths teacher telling me at eleven that Maths Is Everything, that anything may be calculated if we only know the variables with which to begin, and the two novels I’ve been reading today metastasise in my brain to shape my dreams into airless, endless puzzles to which the answer is “the Father”. I might eat fractionally less cheese tomorrow. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/warm-rain-most-of-the-day-which-means-i-must-just monthly 0.5 2014-07-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933150637-V7UN261H4WBNBP29ILTB/tumblr_n99u5oxexU1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Warm rain most of the day, which means I must just eat cheese and bread while reading under a blanket on the sofa. The horrors. Three days of radio silence from my mother and I was imagining the worst. Just temperamental technology, it turns out. Isn’t it always. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/weve-taken-le-p%C3%A9age-mais-je-naime-pas-le-p%C3%A9age monthly 0.5 2014-07-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933151420-676W1TBVQ46QNP7KIT3O/tumblr_n98d7k05au1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries We’ve taken le péage, mais je n'aime pas le péage avec les personnes, par ce que je suis sans culottes, partly so I can epilate while J drives, partly because it’s so damn hot and I somehow put on my thickest trousers to travel. Don’t stare at me, buddy, I’m just trying to pay your damn toll. When we get to our destination the sky is lavender and lilac and peach, the same shade as the flowers by the pool, colour-matched perfectly, clouds darkening to distant booms over the hills. I walk from the shallow end to the deep end over and over, pretending to be the men in Under the Skin. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/vader-in-german-means-father-his-name-is monthly 0.5 2014-07-24 http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/two-cups-of-coffee-three-croissants-plain monthly 0.5 2014-07-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933153377-B6ZUR3BONWDX8MV01IH1/tumblr_n97gy3WXcY1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Two cups of coffee. Three croissants. Plain yoghurt and watching the other guests at the hotel. I’ve started reading an excellent book - oh, excellent books, how I’ve missed you - but that doesn’t quite cover up how I’m missing les enfants ce matin. (Not enough to head home already, but enough to be staring at a busy family a few tables over.) But look at that sky. http://www.sam-binnie.com/the-sam-binnie-diaries/off-on-hols-piles-of-books-mad-men-box-set-a monthly 0.5 2014-07-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55704ca5e4b0471c52e7d1e7/1663933213788-Z8TA7C2V9D4SEYZR5X1H/tumblr_n95z4kgvYD1rbh1yco1_1280.jpg The Sam Binnie Diaries Off on hols. Piles of books, Mad Men box set, a few swimmers, suncream, pack of cards. C'est tout. 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