Newsletter #9: Routines, Castles, and Free Speech Champions
Hello folks. I return once again to regale you with exciting tales from my life. This week: the start of a workday routine! Thrilling, to be sure.
Yes, I have decided to kick myself out of the amorphous daily life I led, wherein bed-times and risings varied almost as much as the Scottish weather in summer and tasks were done almost as haphazardly as the SNP’s governing of the country. Hopefully this will make me more productive. If not, at least I’ll be more disciplined in my laziness. But I do think it’s useful to have such a broad routine. I’m not keeping myself to it religiously, but it will provide a loose structure for my time, which is especially important when you’re living at home and the work you do is entirely remote.
So: wake up is at 9.30am or thereabouts, after which I shower, get ready, meditate, and glance at the news. 11am-6pm is set aside for work during the week. 6pm till bedtime will be for relaxation: reading, TV, dinner, and the like. At weekends, I’ll stick to the same sleeping/waking times but the days will be set aside for pleasure, though if any miscellaneous tasks need doing or meetings attended, I shall do so. Also: I’m cutting down on the sugary monstrosity that is Pepsi and may even try to do some exercise in the evenings. Walks or workouts, perhaps.
And what does work consist of, I don’t hear you ask? Most of the work is piecemeal or freelance, and some of it doesn’t pay, but I’m comfortable enough living at home in Fife with the small amount I can scrabble together from the various jobs that do. Writing, assisting at Areo Magazine, commissions (e.g. to fact-check, one of my current tasks), Free Speech Champions volunteering, helping out as a freelance consultant at the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation, and other projects (I’m not quite ready to go public in any more detail yet, but I’m writing a book) make up my workdays. It’s a tenuous existence, but I’m lucky to be able to just about afford it and to have family able to support me. Still, I repeat: if you know of any work in writing/journalism, or any odd job freelance commissions like fact-checking and editing, do get in touch.
As with last week, the news is dominated by Afghanistan. There’s not much more I can add at the moment. I expressed my despair last week, and nothing has changed, except, of course, that my despair has only increased at the sights we have seen over the past few days. I will be writing about the upcoming 20th anniversary of 9/11 next month and might have more to say on Afghanistan then.
Next Sunday, I’m getting dressed up in academic robes to attend a graduation ceremony of sorts, a celebration at Edinburgh Castle. So I might have missed out on the normal ceremony thanks to the pandemic, but this is even better. Missing out on the grandeur of McEwan Hall for the rough splendour of Edinburgh Castle isn’t so bad: marching up the esplanade in scholarly regalia, feted by Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo musicians, into the Great Hall of one of the world’s finest castles? Fair compensation, I think. ‘Epic’ is the word. A little piece of trivia: Edinburgh Castle has a fair claim to being the most besieged fortress in Great Britain and one of the most attacked places in the world. I’m sure I’ll write more about the ceremony and that great castle perched menacingly atop volcanic rock in due course. I mention it now not just to boast but to say that I might not be here next Sunday, depending on how busy I am through the week.
Finally, the Free Speech Champions event with Jonathan Rauch which I helped to organise and host is now available for viewing on YouTube, as is the FSC drop-in with Lionel Shriver and Tomiwa Owolade on literary censorship for which I was one of the panellists. See here and here.
Farewell for now,
DJS