A Clean Slate Strategy

Because the season of freshly sharpened pencils is approaching

Pull Up A Chair is a weekly newsletter containing all the things I’d like to be chatting about if we could hang out together in real life. Every week, I start with three things I’ve enjoyed, and then write in more detail about something I’ve been thinking about. 

• 🥐 Society Cafe. Making up a bit for missing my favourite indie cafes and bakeries in Edinburgh is getting to discover all of Bristol’s best coffee spots, and rediscover some that I visited when I was a student in Bath. One of my university friends wasn’t a coffee drinker, so he had tried every hot chocolate in Bath and, believe me: Society Cafe’s was the best. In Bath, Bristol, Oxford, and Cheltenham, Society Cafe serve up incredible coffees and delicious pastries. For a Friday treat on the way into work, I had one of their coffees and a ‘cinnamon pretzel’, which was a sort of pretzel-shaped laminated pastry filled with sweet cinnamon sugar. 

• 📚 Rosaline Palmer Takes The Cake by Alexis Hall, read for audio by Fiona Hardingham. Alexis Hall is one of my favourite contemporary romance authors; his books are full of the kind of dry, very online, humour that could have been written especially for me. I’ve even used his fantastic Boyfriend Material as a gateway drug to get my best friend into romance books. I hadn’t yet read any of his books on audio, but I had an audiobook credit to use and thought I’d give Rosaline Palmer a go. Much like one of my other favourite books, this involves the cake-based tribulations of a chaotic bisexual who’s trying to live up to society’s expectations - and it was hilariously funny as well as having a very deep heart. (Bookshop.org | Amazon - affiliate links) 

• 💼 Herschel Retreat Tote. Now I’m in the office four days a week, I can leave my laptop, keyboard, and noise cancelling headphones in a locker overnight (I need to take a big scarf in to leave there too, to cancel out the overzealous airconditioning), which means, for the first time since pre-Covid, I’ve been able to invest in a non-backpack work bag. When I saw the ivy green ‘Field Trip’ edition colourway of this tote bag, I knew it would fit in well with my wardrobe - plus it’s ‘ludicrously capacious’ enough to carry extra layers, lunch, and my giant water bottle. 

As an extreme introvert who had a flexible job and a home workspace, my life this summer still looked more like summer 2021 than summer 2019: I was mostly working from home, socialising in small groups at weekends, and so on. I knew I would benefit from being ‘out in the world’ more, but somehow hadn’t managed to make that habit change happen. This week, by comparison, I was in the office for all the days I was working (I had Monday off on holiday). I don’t think I’ve done that since February 2020!

Gretchen Rubin, the author of books like The Happiness Project and Better Than Before, calls this the strategy of the clean slate. She says:

It’s a Secret of Adulthood for habits: Temporary often becomes permanent, and what we assume is permanent often proves temporary.

Bearing this in mind, I’ve prioritised gym time over getting my boxes unpacked: if I take a while to unpack properly, there will be no lasting negative impact, but if I had put off getting my workout routine back, it might have taken months. Funnily enough, although my legs are very unhappy with the increased movement, my brain is working well and I’m enjoying feeling strong in my body again. 

We’re rapidly approaching September 1st (although the weather’s doing its best to feel autumnal, I’m camping next weekend, so I’m trying desperately to stay in summer mode!), which is, as all You’ve Got Mail fans will know, the season for freshly sharpened pencils. Gretchen Rubin says September is the other January - and I actually think it’s better than January for habit formation. Unlike in January, the days are still quite light in the Northern hemisphere, and it’s not exam season. In my workplace, we have annual target-setting cycles, so the final part of the year is crunch time for achieving our goals. That’s another difference from January - with the end of the year firmly in sight, setting up new habits feels much more achievable than trying to do them for a whole year. 

Speak soon,

Lily

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