Grace

The heavens may open but the sky will not fall

Hello Dear Reader

It’s been a while. My absence on Substack has, perversely, been due in large part to my putting my head down and writing pretty much every day for the last few months. Apart from a brief trip to the Highlands at the end of October, I have been diligently plonking my arse on a chair and chaining myself to my laptop to write the I Digress show.

To return to the same level of mental focus that came naturally to me before the invention of the internet, I had to put my phone in a room far, far away and write cold: as in, just write. Not tidy corners of my house that don’t need tidying; not wade in on a Reddit thread about whether a woman was right to boycott her sister’s wedding after her sister used the pregnant OP’s baby’s name for her dog. (Consensus was OP should not boycott wedding but instead get a pet snake and give it her sister’s name. I’m going to do this for anyone who wrongs me in the future.) Not spend hours looking through my holiday photos, wishing I lived in the Highlands and then waste a whole afternoon on Rightmove looking for the perfect house near Inverness.

Although, come on - look at these photos and tell me you don’t want to move to the Highlands:

After giving it many hours of consideration, here is where I will live. It’s only five million quid, which - if you’ve been browsing Kate Bush’s old house which is on the market for £11,500,000 as I have - is an absolute steal. (Note to self: play Euromillions this week.)

It’s got ten bedrooms, which means I will have ample room for all the cats I plan on having.

Perhaps I loved the Highlands so much because it took my mind off what I was certain was impending doom. So worried was I, that only two days after returning, I picked up a chest infection and was laid low for a fortnight, and found myself unable to do very much at all during the week A Psalm for Emily Salvi was released. Releasing a new album is a stressful experience - doing it within weeks of writing and reading and performing my first one-woman show of sorts is a temporary madness.

I was tremendously worried about these I Digress shows. So much so, in fact, that I deliberately refrained from mentioning them to you too much. But now, with the first one under my belt, I feel confident enough to say there are still a few tickets remaining for the show on Monday December 9th at The Marylebone Theatre and I enjoyed doing it so much I wish I had been more gung-ho about it all.

But now, with only days to go before my last show of the year, I sit here looking back on a landmark year where I vowed I would terrify myself, on purpose. Terror is not my thing - the bumper cars are about as adventurous as I get - but this year, I played the Palladium, climbed Ben Nevis, released another album, made some serious headway on my book and have been testing material from it in front of an actual audience, and the sky did not fall.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

It’s why I chose Grace for this week’s ‘Only The Old Songs’ on YouTube. When I wrote it for my younger sister all those years ago, it was to remind her that all the uncertainty and pain of her teenage years would one day be but a memory; and that she should ‘just hold on, for grace will come.’

I woke up yesterday morning, feeling a relief and gratitude so sweet I knew it could only be grace.

I know some of you must bumble your way through life in much the same way as I do; and the collective mood in the country - in the world , even - is not one of unfettered optimism, shall we say. So it’s not surprising that we have a lot of us been conditioned by the events of the last few years, to prepare for the worst on a regular basis.

But today, I want to say just one thing to you:

Just hold on, for Grace will come.

With love as ever,

Nerina xxx