The hermit

I was supposed to be in London last weekend. The trip was an anticipated one and the schedule stacked, all the more so for being a brief visit. There were plans to see the new house one of my best friends moved into recently; I had a hair appointment booked. Most of all, I was looking forward to several of my favourite people coming together for a birthday night out in East London, which promised dancing, an opportunity to dress up and, best of all, a chicken shawarma wrap on the bus home.

Such a busy agenda was the norm for my weekends when I lived in the capital. Weekdays I deliberately kept clearer, but would usually feature least one solid social plan: a date, a talk, maybe dinner with the girls. But something funny has happened since I upped sticks to Glasgow: I have become a hermit.

According to tarot numerology, 2025 is the ‘year of the Hermit’.

This is not going to be a mini essay moralising on whether someone should stay in or go out (I’m aware it’s a hot button topic right now). Rather, as always, I’m just writing about what I’m thinking. And what has been on my mind today is the strange way I have split myself, Jekyll and Hyde style, between two different cities.

I haven’t written much at all about moving to Glasgow and that’s because I don’t think I’ve been here long enough to make any great pronouncements about the city. But I’ve lived with myself long enough to pick up on personal patterns. One thing that has become obvious is that I am struggling to make social plans. This is not for want of kind offers, or lovely, interesting people. The problem lies with me. I can’t seem to find the energy. Last year, this was because I was mired in depression. Now (knock on wood!), I feel I am through the worst of that terrible, lifeless time but still, when I’m in this city, I can’t seem to rustle up the me that exists in London: sociable, confident and ready to natter.

I go out a lot; it’s just usually on my own. Every day I walk for at least an hour, sometimes via familiar routes if short on time, otherwise undertaking languid, exploratory strolls. I go to shops and restaurants; cafes and the cinema. My job requires me to be in the office twice a week and I frequent the coffee shop opposite so much I now wave to the barista when I see them in the street. Also twice a week I cycle to the gym, where I recognise the ‘regulars’ who, like me, prefer to workout in the studio rather the gym floor; I assume they in turn know my face.

But when it comes to deliberately socialising with others, rather than passing passively through their lives, there is a block. Living with an old university friend drives home the difference. She is extraverted, out at all hours seeing people — when she does not have existing engagements, she attempts to cobble some together and almost always succeeds. Of course, she kindly extends invitations to these: listening parties, pot lucks and birthday dos. The majority of the time, I find myself turning her down. I want so badly to want to go and yet, I don’t and can’t understand why. I think that perhaps, right now, I have a lack of capacity for the necessary discomfort that accompanies being in a new place and making your case for being a new face.

Night-time events demonstrate this most sharply. I have returned from daytime coffees and early evening drinks with potential new friends, buoyed on the promise of life and broadening my horizons. But at night, social anxiety strikes. Several times I have turned up an hour later than I said I would, because of a Substance-esque (another work about splitting the self) meltdown about how I look and what I’m wearing.

When I’m actually at the thing, I despise everything I am saying — or not saying. I fret about how I’m perceived, even though no one actually gives a fuck about this (although on a few occasions, I have been approached by strangers who repeat hearsay back to me which, I must confess, isn’t good for the ol’noggin). Dancing, my standard route to social relaxation, isn’t an option as I haven’t yet discovered the places that play music I like, where the clientele doesn’t have an average age of 19.

When I started university in London, I was so hungry for life that I would steal out on my own into the city, dancing in clubs solo. I had boundless energy then and was a blank slate. I wanted the city to scrawl its bold signature all over me and for me in turn to leave a mark.

In Glasgow, I am timid, worried about stepping out of my lane. There are some understandable reasons for this that I won’t go into here because then I would be stepping out of that lane, making the pronouncements I promised I wouldn’t. It’s also because I’m not silly putty anymore as I was at 18, waiting for someone or something to mold me. But for the most part, my fear is irrational and, perhaps, an excuse to allow me to retreat inwards.

“You’re in your chrysalis,” my housemate said, when I tried to explain my tangled thoughts. Even as I tried to explain, I felt the words slow and dull, so I broke off, saying I had become boring. She assured me I would come out when I’m ready.

I am so obviously not ready. When Storm Eowyn scuppered the London plans I had been so excited about, at first I entertained trying to recreate them in Glasgow. But I just didn’t want to. They didn’t map onto the Moya that currently exists here.

Instead, what I found myself hankering to do was wake, bake, read and walk. On Saturday, I was in Lidl by 8.30am, a chocolate tiffin hardening in the fridge an hour later. As sleet lashed the big bay windows, I curled up in our lounge reading nook with a piece of tiffin and a decaf coffee, reading Half of a Yellow Sun. Later, winter sunshine banished the icy showers, so I went for a long walk, then came home and attempted skoudehkaris, the national dish of Djibouti (sometimes I have produced this with perfect, fluffy rice but — as I did on this occasion — I have also frequently fucked it up by using too much water. Still, it tasted fine).

Focaccia review: needed less kneading and more salt but pretty happy with it for a first go

My housemate — who had also been expecting to be in London — invited me to an evening event. But I was engrossed in my book and, finally I accepted, without internal remonstration, that maybe the Glasgow version of me doesn’t have it in her right now. In bed, I finished Half of a Yellow Sun and set my alarm for 7.30am because I had decided that on Sunday I would try and make focaccia for the first time, plus a version of the cob rolls that taste so much of my childhood home.

I did all these things, and an amble around Glasgow’s beautiful Necropolis graveyard before breakfast, where I planned out the next instalment of a creative project I’ve been quietly working on since December. A man waved at me as I walked back from Morrisons, and I realised it was my neighbour several long minutes after tentatively smiling back. Back home, my mixing, proving, baking and nibbling was soundtracked by the audiobook of Julia Fox’s memoir, Down the Drain, probably the best companion for anyone looking for reassurance that it’s fine to miss a few functions. In the afternoon, waiting for my dough to rise, I slotted in a 20 minute workout. Drying off, post-exercise shower, I lay on my bed and replied to all my texts, feeling safe in the knowledge of my myriad friends on the other end with whom I am in 24/7 contact, come rain, shine or time zone.

“You know, all the tarot heads say it’s the year of the Hermit,” my housemate said to me in the kitchen, mouth full of focaccia. She’d just returned from a run, and lunch with one of her besties.

The Hermit, explains my tarot book, is wise. “He knows the difference between being alone and being lonely. His solitude is the companion to his bright mind”.

When the Hermit card comes up, the book instructs, it’s a positive. “When it’s time be with others again, you will feel your energy restored […] Allow yourself as much time alone as you need to look within”. The writer suggests meditation or long walks. The Hermit works alone and thinks alone but he’s not isolated. He’s just biding his time.

Reviews and views

• Down the Drain has convinced me that anyone who has clawed themselves to fame just for being themselves must be delusional, unbearable, gorgeous and magnetic all at once. Julia Fox sounds like a true blue nightmare (no doubt because of all the shit she’s survived). A fantastic listen/read.

• When I read books like Half of a Yellow Sun or Intermezzo, I remember that top level literary fiction can be read as easily as a sharp knife sliding into soft butter. I don’t subscribe to the idea that you shouldn’t persevere with ‘difficult’ fiction (my obliterated attention span means I struggle with a lot of reading my 12 year-old self would breeze through) but the way these two authors write is like a symphony.

• I read Dubliners (James Joyce’s collection of short observational stories about people in Dublin) as well this week and that held up (given it was published in 1914!) but it didn’t sing to me like HoaYS did. I won’t be attempting another Joyce for a while; I’m too scared to get bogged down in Ulysses this early on in the year.

• I did not finish Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn, his 1998 account of the lives and crimes of Fred and Rose West. I picked it up idly in a charity shop; I loved Burn’s social history of Peter Sutcliffe so thought I’d give it a try. A 2019 Guardian review described Happy Like Murderers as a “book to be survived”. I did not survive it. Gordon Burn is probably the best true crime writer modern Britain has had (although I think I slightly prefer Brian Masters). But every part of the Wests’ story is horrendous. Generations of brutality and violence that stretch from Herefordshire, the rural country I come from, up to Glasgow, the city I live in now. I couldn’t do it.