I can’t remember which of my ludicrous family members would occasionally sign their emails with the fake name ‘Helena Handbasket’, but whomsoever it be, they have forever caused a pavlovian response in me to the phrase ‘going to hell in a hand basket’. These days, some stressed-out burned-out wiped-out adult or other will conclude a blank-eyed rant about the state of the world with a declaration that we are going to hell in a hand basket and I will feel, at the very least, unthreatened. In fact, it feels kind of fun and cute that everything is going to hell in a hand basket.

There is one thing I find relatable about people at award shows collecting accolades and that is the horrified stumbling through halting speeches about how they’re sure they’re forgetting someone.

Public Service Announcement: we’re all forgetting someone.

There are two people in my life who I don’t see anymore, by choice. I have seen each of them once or twice by accident but when this happens I tend to cross the road or leap sideways into a hedge or neatly pin-drop into an open sewer. I cannot coexist with these two people under any circumstances. I am, let’s say, emotionally allergic.

This column is dedicated to the person who turned up to a book signing event at a recent festival and asked me to sign, yes, sure, my book, but also a copy of one of my columns in The Big Issue. This person’s name might have been Bec or she may merely have been Bec-adjacent. But let us call her Bec. Now, Bec is a person, but also a metaphor. I know. I’m sorry Bec. But to me, she seemed like a metaphor for that very  human instinct of connecting with like-minded people.

Public Service Announcement: be a festival of you.

I’m farewelling a friend this week. I shared time with this friend only peripherally, but it doesn’t matter how much someone made you laugh, does it? It doesn’t matter how many times they grinned at you with their whole face or briefly placed a hand on your arm. Social connections are the entire basis of our survival as a species. Public Service Announcement: treasure the good ones.

If you’ve never experienced anxiety before, welcome to this handy info pack. Now, you may have imagined anxiety as ‘feeling a bit worried about something’. That’s certainly what I thought it was, but that was before I actually experienced what I would call ‘embarrassingly unhinged panic’ or ‘being possessed by a ravenous all-encompassing fear’. You know the fear is lying to you, but you’re possessed by it, see. This gluttonous, guzzling fear doesn’t listen to logic. It drives you, like a zombie, to grasp for whatever sense of control you might be able to muser. Let’s say you’re anxious about something to do with work. Your mind will, in attempting to solve the problem, run a whole lot of data about it and all the ways your situation could get… worse! Logically, obviously, these are doomsday scenarios but you’re losing control of your ability to process this. Your very survival mechanism - seeking control by thinking it all through - is feeding the seething mass. I know! So fun! You’re welcome! Aren’t you glad you asked. You didn’t ask? Anxiety doesn’t care.

Sometimes in life, and I don’t know if anybody else have ever noticed this, bad things happen. Sometimes they even happen to you. There you are, thinking you’re starring in a sitcom or at the very least light entertainment, and you turn a corner to come face-first into an approaching meteor, chased by a twister, pursued by a bear.

Public Service Announcement: there’s not much we can control in this life. When bad things happen, small things make a big difference.

I was asked recently, by a child, what colour I saw when I saw the colour purple. There is an obvious answer to this one but it soon became clear the child was asking whether we both saw the same thing when we saw a colour known to us both as purple.

Now, sometimes, as an adult, one finds oneself going through the day ticking things off To Do Lists and responding to emails and forgetting to put the bins out and then out of nowhere one is asked to contemplate the subjectivity of ocular perception. And thank goodness for that.

Public Service Announcement: there is no central narrator. Your perspective is yours alone. Use it wisely.

I spent yesterday alone in a foreign city. That’s not quite right, of course. It was a city, after all. I had a lovely chat with a man who made me a smoothie and a confusing conversation with an overworked woman in charge of the sale and distribution of baked goods. Not alone, then. Lonely and alone are different things.

Public Service Announcement: sometimes lonely is the feeling that reminds you what lonely isn’t.

A rumour went around our local secondary school that, due to budget concerns, the arts were being dispensed with. ‘Can you believe it’, I was told with high eyebrows, ‘They are cancelling the arts’. Now, as a native speaker of the arts in crisis, I have heard this kind of thing before. We all have. The arts are usually among the first on the chopping block when pennies are being pinched. There’s a quote often misattributed to Churchill; a journalist asked him if he was going to cut the arts in order to fund the war effort, in reply to which he quipped, ‘then what are we fighting for?’ It’s poetic licence but it’s a nice reframing of a naturally rather unflattering comparison. The truth is, when you put the arts next to, say, the saving of lives, it’s pretty difficult to argue that the people whose lives are no longer being saved are nevertheless better off because at least they can watch a postmodern reimagining of Death of a Salesman in their final hours.

Good morning this is your perspective speaking. I write this on a plane flying from Melbourne to Perth. Of course, people take flights like this every month, every week, even every day. For me, though, as an infrequent flyer, the very concept of humans flying is absurd. It’s not a new thought, but for me it gets me every time. All that metal. All those people. All those individual lives undertaking the same four and a half hour journey for these four and half hours only.

I was sitting at a train station on the weekend, alone, waiting for some of the people I love the most in the world to arrive on the next train. It’s strange to think that people — talking, thinking, moving people — are in the tiny dot on the horizon. Not just my people but other people, too, and here? Here with me there is nothing but yellow train station lighting and, eventually, a man in a puffer coat bouncing on his toes, hands in pockets, glancing occasionally at the oversized clock.

I realised recently that it might be a good idea to have a makeover. I’m a big fan of watching things get made over. You know when they do fast forward through the entire reconstruction of a house or something? So satisfying! And the world is full of experts who can help and who look attractive in overalls for heaven’s sake. But I needed my own makeover because I am a writer who lives in a glorified hovel and I was asked to do a photo shoot. I learned a lot in my makeover.

Public Service Announcement: all kinds of makeovers are free. You can change your whole life into a before and after picture! Metaphorically!

Trigger warnings are everywhere these days, and quite right too. We are adrift in a sea of noisy information designed to trigger the reanimation of whatever deep-seated trauma lives within our bones. Shocker: living in this state is not, apparently, terribly good for us. Annoyingly for those of us who (adorably) believe in free will, this is cellular, deep-seated stuff. It’s not a case of ‘cheer up, ya quivering shambles’; it’s to do with neural pathways and brain plasticity and the release of hormones. This is why, if you follow a neuroscientist on TikTok, they will most likely encourage the following repulsive activity: positive self-talk. I know! Ew! Noticing the great things in your life and being grateful for them! How embarrassing! Going outside in nature! Well fiddle-dee-dee.

Perhaps you have noticed a popular custom when organising a meeting, whereby one person will text or email another asking if there is a time that would be convenient for the two of them to partake in a phone call. Now, in the olden days, when phones had spiralling cords you could twiddle while you chatted, one person would simply call another. On the telephone. Out of nowhere. A stealth attack. A mini meeting in the lead-up to the proper meeting. All of this has had me wondering: the meeting is a famously unpopular means of communication, but it shouldn’t be, should it?

You know what’s wild? Other people’s choices. The ridiculous things some people do with their time! Some of them go cold-water swimming at 5 in the morning! Some of them get dressed up as knights and fight each other with pretend swords in suburban parks! There are knitters and bedazzlers and people who make jewellery out of bottle tops or leap from aeroplanes or restore vintage armchairs.

Are you a gossip? Of course you are. You might know how to keep a secret, but all humans are, in some way, inherently attracted to gossip. Maybe it’s not about your friends. Maybe it’s about people you’ve never met on reality TV. Maybe it’s other people’s work gossip. A friend of mine had a string of work stories better than any serialised TV show I’ve ever seen.

I was driving in the dark in the rain the other day. Significant rain. Significant dark. The kind of rainy dark people write poetry about. The kind that comes at you from all directions. There I was, the roar of it all around me, watching great arcs of water curl up like waves from beneath the wheels of anybody ahead of me driving too close to the edge of the lane, whump, through a puddle. It was melodramatic, as was I. Not sad, exactly, but  contemplative. I came to a set of lights then, and I glanced down at my hand on the steering wheel. Under the street lights and through the lens of the thick rain on the windscreen, the shadows dripped long, lugubrious droops of water rhythmically down my fingers. It was beautiful and slightly alarming, as though what I was actually watching was the blood pulse through my veins or my hand being swiftly dissected.

It was a moment I couldn’t photograph. There was nobody to show it to. I wondered: did that make the moment more meaningful because nobody saw it? Or, as our memory would have us believe, as Instagram would have us believe, is the moment not important at all, because nobody saw it?

Are you always telling your friends you wish you saw more of them? I wish I saw more of my friends. I realised the other day, though, that I was overlooking the opposing viewpoint. I’m not saying it’s better to never see your friends at all. Having just spent the weekend with a bunch of beloved old friends and delightful new ones, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Perhaps it is time, though, to acknowledge the small joys of friends we don’t see enough of.

Public Service Announcement: jettison friend guilt. Celebrate your pals where they are.

There’s a word I’m attempting to discourage at my place. It isn’t a swearword. It isn’t an insult, either. Not exactly. It is slightly ironic, however, that in attempting to explain to the constituents of my domestic jurisdiction exactly why this word is so antithetical to my worldview, I am met with a one word answer. The word against which I campaign, and which is used to dismiss my concerns, is cringe.