Equinox, and the swans are back at it. Two of them have taken to floating around our entry spot, the one in the background gradually arcing both wings in a way that suggests somewhere in its cold avian brain we are very much the enemy. We swim downstream instead, then back up, but the bird is getting closer and closer and finally settles on nibbling the weeds near us meaningfully as we hurry out of the water and up the bank. But the air is warm, and the sky is a gentle pinkish-blue towards sunrise. There are people at home waiting for me with whatever is left of the breakfast I laid out at 5.30 this morning. 

One housemate has gone, moved not so much out as off, taking their wisdom and humour and frankly astounding catching skills to new climes, and a remaining housemate asks me how I’ll feel if one day everyone should go. I say, ‘I’ll miss everyone, but I’ll look forward to hearing what new things they’ve seen,’ then I say, ‘Plus at that stage I’ll move in all my beautiful new lovers,’ and they make a face like they’re about to be violently sick and back out of the room, while my cackling follows them like a bad special effect. 

Everything, as ever, is chaos. I’m halfway through writing a new book, which I deeply love and is purely for my own pleasure at this point, but am horribly, hair-falling-out-in-clumps worried about money, which I have none of (which I don’t love), but we threw a party a few weeks ago which was probably not the right thing to do at this exact financial moment, but the world being what it is, stability-wise, future-wise, it also feels like the only possible moment. So we filled a room with balloons and silver foil curtains and coloured streamers and our friends and family, and I started panic baking around lunchtime when I realised I’d never actually had to cater dessert for that many people before, and we ordered pizza from the woman downstairs, and the DJ played our playlist, and there were people I hadn’t seen for twenty years, and others I’d never seen out of their swimming kit, and I still feel dizzy with how absolutely huge a gift it is to give your time to someone. (Why so grateful? Ask me about my eighth birthday party. I dare you.) To receive an invitation and schlep all the way to the venue, whether it’s across town or a long drive and a hotel stay away, and be there and engrave yourself on the host’s heart forever. Plus, I danced with actual young people, four of us the only ones on the dance floor at the end of the night, stone-cold sober and prancing about to songs they think of as theirs even though they came out when I was their age. Happiness is an unselfconscious teen. 

So, post-party, and post-various job disappearances, it’s very much no buns for tea, and I’m scraping through all the jobs like everyone else I know to try and find something that fits in with the work I still have. Will I deliver post? Can I sculpt a friendly enough face to be a receptionist? Can I somehow monetise my film and TV trivia knowledge? 

In the meantime, I revise for the latter by continuing to watch some of the greatest TV ever made. We picked up Widow’s Bay on a recommendation in June, finished it in a week, then immediately started rewatching (what more could you expect from the creator of history’s only good tweet). The three leads may never have had such perfect roles; the jokes fold in beautifully with the horror and scratch the deepest sedimentary layers of my brain, monsters and gags, emotional terror and deadpan comedy (‘Are you mad at something I said?’) tapping into the rich amber sap of The X-Files and Buffy, M.A.S.H. and Ghostwatch, Kit Williams’ creepy picture books and the strange variety of supernatural villains our home seemed to be filled with for a hungry reader in the 1980s, from the faux-leather bound Readers Digest Strange Stories Amazing Facts (I only ever read the bits about unsolved mysteries, and our certain future doom) to the terrifying library books like A Goose on Your Grave and the Puffin book of Ghosts, Spooks and Spectres (you know, the one with a dead? dying? child with a skeletal hand on their shoulder, that Puffin classic, you know) that we’d be merrily handed as impressionable infants. Or the Nightmare VHS boardgame, or the weirdness of Terry Gilliam’s animations in Monty Python, or the muffled frightening hysterical collapse of John Cleese in Fawlty Towers, or the sense as a child that maybe something is funny, but you have a terrible fear that you can’t see everything that’s behind the joke; or that something is terrifying, but you might as well laugh anyway (‘I think your dad is looking for you’). 

So we laugh at Widow’s Bay, and we laugh with our friends at our party, and we laugh with and without our absent housemate. I try to be a good community member. I smile when people tell me all the things they use AI for, and wonder what I would give my life for. There has to be a balance, doesn’t there? Isn’t that what the equinox is about? That for every person with their phone on speaker in a public place, there are people who take a train to your party; for every foam-filled, corn-syrup cultural dross, someone somewhere is watching Widow’s Bay then dancing to Corona’s ‘The Rhythm of the Night’. 

On the way to the day’s errands, I see a father and his young daughter rollerskating to school together. Things can’t be that bad.