Still Life: Diary Of My Week (Plus What I'm Wearing, Writing, Reading, Watching And Eating)

Last week was a time...

A subscriber to Death Is Coming (hi Jade!!!) recently suggested to me that I do a breakdown of my working day and I was very touched to think that anyone would be remotely interested ;)

I was self-conscious initially but then I remembered how much I love reading this kind of thing. The Sunday Times has a long-running column called a Life in a Day where people describe their average day and growing up it was my first port of call in the paper. I have an unending appetite to hear about people’s routines. I love Rosemary MacCabes money diaries for the same reason. Now, as I am a contrarian, I can’t just do what I am asked and instead have decided to do a diary of my week as I feel like a day might be a bit light on content.

So big moves this week – and yet can I remember it? Let’s find out.

I definitely got dressed a few times and actually chronicled my efforts:

Sitting down to write this letter reminded me of this meme:

Monday February 12th

My day starts very early at 6am (this is very early for me a person who sleeps like a corpse and has to set six alarms if I’m to have any hope of getting out of bed – most of the time my children do the honours by jumping up and down on the bed and screaming ‘cock-a-doodle-dooooo’). I’m up and working (in a puffa jacket in the leaba because it is freezing in my house due to the Irish Horror of turning the heating on). My husband, Seb, brings me up a cup of coffee (he is an early riser) and I blast through the work because at 7.45am I must commence actually parenting and start throwing random items into lunchboxes for my children to ignore and wrestle unwilling small people into clothes. I’m working early because I have a 9am deadline for the producers of Recipes For A Nervous Breakdown – the TV show we are developing of my first book. I am prepping to start writing episode two and am fine-tuning the beat sheet. This is the second draft of that and I am incorporating the feedback from Eleanor who is the development executive. Beat sheets are basically an outline of an entire episode/movie from beginning to end that lists each point of action, guides the writing and can help in determining where the show breaks if indeed it has breaks.

8am: The beat sheet is sent to Eleanor. I get dressed, take my meds and consider brushing my teeth (see my essay about self care aka self giving a shit).

Then Seb and I throw clothes, lunch boxes, laptops and kids from one to the other until everyone is ready to go out the door. He walks the older two to school and I cycle my youngest to creche then cycle on to my office which is currently in the Museum of Literature Ireland. I have a three-month residency there so I can use the space every day from 9am to 1pm. It’s a huge room in a beautiful Georgian building and my desk looks out onto the Iveagh gardens. Stunning.

9am -1pm: I have breakfast at my desk (bread and avocado with olive oil and chili flakes brought from home and make copious pots of coffee in the staff kitchen – my pet peeve is buying food and drinks out for stupid money when I can make nicer myself). According to my do-to list from that day I do emails and write my column Nobody Tells You though I have only a dim memory of this. I have a filing system for my columns after they are written so having consulted that, it appears I wrote it about toilet brushes. Please enjoy this extract of the opening paragraph:

Nobody Tells You… how often the tiniest life improvements make the biggest difference and have you wondering “how did I live like this?”

This is probably the saddest sentence I'll ever write but I recently got a new toilet brush and it has improved my life exponentially. This replacement toilet brush purchase had been an embarrassingly long time coming. I'd been struggling on with the previous, sub par toilet brush for eleven years. Eleven years with a toilet brush that was making my life miserable. Back when I'd first purchased this stainless steel number, I'd realised from use one that I'd made a terrible error. And one that, though I didn’t know it then, was to colour my life for years to come. The brush had some core design flaws that meant it would simply never be the toilet brush I'd hoped it'd be. Of course, I didn't discard it. The WASTE.

At some point mid-morning I have a snack of apple and peanut butter. Then I cycle home for lunch. No idea what that might have consisted of unfortunately.

2pm - 3pm: Some vague cleaning of my house takes place and I listen to my audiobook, Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger which I am really enjoying but only in small doses. It’s kind of dense? Or maybe I am dense? It’s good anyway.

At 3pm Jen (O’Dwyer who I co-host not one but two podcasts with) arrives and we have diet cokes and record two episodes of Mother Of Pod, which is a comedy podcast that claims to be about parenting. We also sample the creme egg bar and give a detailed review of it on the pod. Recording the podcasts is the highlight of my week and I still can’t believe I get to do this as part of my job.

At 5pm she leaves and I throw on clothes and cycle to the TikTok offices to do a book event. I’m interviewed about my latest book My Hot Friend (currently available for 85c on Amazon) by my pal, Louise McSharry. Because I’m the one being asked questions I don’t need to do any prep just show up on time which I just about manage.

We finish at 8pm and go for pizza with our friend, Emer.

I get home at 10pm and edit the two Mother of Pod episodes and go to bed. Monday is always a long day and the only day I work past 6pm.

Tuesday February 13th

Completely unintentionally I wake up at 5:45am and when I can’t get back to sleep, I decide to continue with my Creep Dive research and read a New Yorker longread about serial killer, John Wayne Gacy’s life in prison and his horrific crimes – Good Morning ME! When I’m doing a big story for the Creep Dive (a podcast where my co-hosts Jen and Cassie and I tell each other weird and often horrible stories) I’ll usually be researching it over a good few days listening to podcasts and reading articles to compile my notes. I finish the longread and manage to fall back to sleep (what does this say about me?).

7.45 - 9am: Repeat of yesterday’s parenting chaos.

9am - 1pm: Breakfast of bran flakes and sliced banana (my love of bran flakes baffles even me) at desk while I do emails. Listen to more horrendous Gacy content while I set up the document for the script for episode two (Eleanor has emailed to say she is happy with the second draft of the beat sheet so I am ready to dig into actually writing the script). Prepping the doc is the kind of housekeeping I can do while listening to other stuff. I use Scrivener to write my scripts. I basically lay out all the scenes in the episode down the left hand side and it allows you to navigate from one to the other really easily.

Scrivener is also great for novel-writing but not what I personally use. I also finish up my Gacy notes and no doubt eat an apple with some peanut butter at some stage.

1pm - 2pm: I eat lunch in the cafe downstairs in the museum because when it comes time to go home at 1pm I find I am dangerously famished. Waterford Blaa (the nicest bread ever for any non-Irish people reading) with sausage, egg and chutney with a coffee. Over lunch I am on Instagram when I come across this picture of Barry Keoghan and debate revising my position on whether he is hot or not (original view: not).

I’m wavering and then I notice that the Barry in the picture is young… very young. I feel suitably creepy and quickly abandon the debate.