Things I think about when I'm meant to be working
Procrastination 101
8am, Wednesday, and I’m sitting on a train with a large coffee and an egg mayo sandwich (don’t hate me) heading to London to record some interviews for the next season of The Shift podcast, and I’m rapidly discovering that I don’t need to be near a washing machine or a fridge to procrastinate. I can do it wherever I am, any time, day or night. (Next time some idiot podcast host asks me what my superpower is there’s my answer right there.) Anything, rather than work or, you know, do something that might pay the bills. In the time I’ve been writing this paragraph I’ve also written four WhatsApps and five texts. Hardly focussed. (Both those numbers had more than doubled by the time I reached the end.)
Anyway here’s what I’ve been thinking about:
1 Obituaries
Why, when famous women die, do all their obituaries feature pictures of them taken when they were in their 20s rather than as they were later in life? Take the French singer / actor / cultural figure Francoise Hardy, who died earlier this week aged 80. (Some British papers referred to her as “a muse” but I refuse to use that. When did you last hear a man described as a muse? Anyway, I digress.) The (stunning) picture below was taken six years ago, when she was 74, after more than ten years living with lymphatic cancer. Off the top of my head, the same goes for Jane Birkin, Shirley Conran, Annie Nightingale, Tina Turner, who all died in the last year but you could be forgiven for thinking they had been frozen in time at 28. All their achievements airbrushed into extinction.