Shows / The Obsessive Diary
The Obsessive Diary
I write a diary and publish it. What could possible go wrong...
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Episodes
The Obsessive Diary43. The Last Stone
And all this time we’d been building a stone circle. Inch by inch over slow grass from pile to track to hole in the ground, the rise and fall of the moon…
The Obsessive Diary42. The Exorcist
We’d gutted a rabbit on the central stone the day Father Juniper came to exorcise the children. Blood and entrails smeared a rock. It didn’t look great. We saw…
The Obsessive Diary41. The Sacrifice
Because every good story needs a sacrifice and something lost. Jesus – devilish handsome, funny and sweet, an electricity coming off him like fire – god we’d…
The Obsessive Diary40. The Passion
Not the real Jesus, obviously. The actor playing Jesus, and the effect he had was unholy. It was instant, that thing I didn’t know I’d been missing. With the…
The Obsessive Diary39. The Aftermath
Remember the girl we sprang from Hackney Marsh psychiatric unit where we danced to the broken strip light in the lift? We returned from Scotland to a chaos…
The Obsessive DiaryUpgrade
I was on the phone to Suzy. She mentioned Joe Dispenza, who I’d never heard of. It’s my last day in NYC, I woke crazy early and after the call I pottered about…
The Obsessive Diary38. The Honeymoon
Shall we take a breath? Because it’s hard, this memoir business, and what happened yesterday and twenty-six years ago, was painful. A man died on my wedding…
The Obsessive Diary37. The Wedding
It’s true, I rode side-saddle, barefoot, silk butterflies tied to my toes, glass jewels about my eyes, a white slip hemmed with pearls and roses, a Victorian…
The Obsessive Diary36. The Build Up
Yesterday a package arrived from my brother’s office, a file of things my father had kept, the notice of my birth, letters from me to him, addresses of all the…
The Obsessive DiaryNo Kings
On the way up 7th from the west village, a man whose jaw stuck way out said, “I like being abused.” His lower teeth prominent like tombstones on a shelf, the…
The Obsessive Diary35. The Proposal
We used to hang out at the Bonnington Café in Vauxhall, but he didn’t propose to me there. He chose a farm trailer parked by the metal barn, straw bales…
The Obsessive Diary34. A Trouble In My Bones
I spent a month in the desert of Sedona training to be a yoga teacher. I hung out with a man and his guitar singing songs that sounded like Paris, Texas. I…
The Obsessive DiaryLast Day
I’ve reached the end of my retreat. Today is my last day. Tomorrow I fly to NYC. It’s been enriching, deepening, hard work and holy. All that I asked it to be…
The Obsessive DiaryLIVE in conversation with SLART
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The Obsessive Diary33. Somewhere In All Of This
Let me expand because we were a village of misfits and outcasts, a tribe of off-grid outer-reaches travellers with an open-door policy that attracted the lost…
The Obsessive Diary32. How We Learnt To Move Rocks
This is how we did it. Telegraph poles and railway sleepers, an engineer taught us how to use a windlass; a rope looped around a stone and a tree, and…
The Obsessive Diary31. The May Queen
This post is dedicated to Lourdes, who we loved. I can name her because of what happened, but it doesn’t happen yet. I have a photograph of her in her finery…
The Obsessive Diary30. Let's Build A Stone Circle By Hand
They came in droves, the druids, led by ex-trucker turned megalithic giant, Ivan McBeth. He was the friend from Longleat who’d opened my eyes to the fuckery of…
The Obsessive DiaryExistential Angst
I finished a shitty first draft the day before yesterday and hey presto, like clockwork, yesterday I fell off an emotional cliff, caught somewhat by two Sams…
The Obsessive DiaryLIVE in conversation with Sam Jordison
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The Obsessive Diary29. How To Start A Commune
Let me set the scene. Me and Angel man. A carpenter who looked like Jesus. A pianist, blonde, many rings, she played the Michael Nyman tune from The Piano…
The Obsessive Diary28. A Leap Of Faith
But first I jumped naked off a viaduct in Normandy. Almost naked. We’d driven in convoy, Angel man and me, to a festival in northern France where there were…
The Obsessive Diary27. House Of Grow
The queue snaked round the block hidden by traveller’s vans. It was fifty pence on the door, up stairs so narrow you had to pass sideways. At the top, a bar…
The Obsessive Diary26. A Day Out With My Father
I don’t think I’d told my friends I was the kind of girl who got keys through the post from law firms in Westminster about houses that were empty and mine, but…
The Obsessive Diary25. The Key
I was living in a squat in Ealing when the key came through the door. Hang on. Let’s roll back a bit. The sea of bodies parted, he was six foot seven and had…
The Obsessive DiaryFlamboyant
I’m midway through my retreat, and midway through the first draft, and much as it feels like I’m wading through concrete, I’m on course to have a 30,000 word…
The Obsessive DiaryLIVE in conversation with Kimberly Warner
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The Obsessive Diary24. Return To The Source
Retrieving my van from the dripping wood where I’d left it to go to Czechoslovakia, I returned to Latimer Road in West London, the house in which I’d lived…
The Obsessive DiarySerializing on Substack with Eleanor Anstruther
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The Obsessive Diary23. A Tall Cold House In London
Home to the tall, cold house in London, my ruptured disc and I, this place of my childhood where Hollywood stars lit cigarettes with survivors of Russian…
The Obsessive Diary22. My Handsome And Kind Knights Templar
The house in France was a haven and still is. It sits on a crystal mountain on the edge of a national park, its walls hold a peace and a sanctuary. It’s where…
The Obsessive Diary21. Like The Third Eye In A Skull
I don’t remember much because my disc was slipping. Because I was out of my mind in pain. Rainbow Gatherings are surreal places at the best of times, an army…
The Obsessive Diary20. A Connection With Czechoslovakia
There was a connection with Czechoslovakia that I didn’t think of as I set off in that coach, a shaved head, a disc slipping. In the tall, cold house in London…
The Obsessive DiaryWelcome to Les Aumarets
I was caught off guard by the heat; 31 degrees in September, balmy t shirt weather and I’d forgotten how much further south I was from Paris. The house greeted…
The Obsessive Diary19. Gaslighting
“Relationship? What relationship? You were just renting a room.” Gaslighting hadn’t reached Somerset in 1995 but even if it had I’m not sure I’d have named it…
The Obsessive Diary18. An Inch Of Me
They moved me out in inches. It began with a mushroom trip. Pigtails and the girl, two peas in a pod went out under the stars arm in arm. I saw them seated on…
The Obsessive DiaryThe Storming of Le Bastille
Protests in Paris, over half a million people on the streets, the taxi driver cursed blocked roads and sirens, la gendarmerie waved us from trouble into bottle…
The Obsessive DiaryBusy
It’s been a busy few days. On Tuesday we held the memorial dinner for my mum, a London affair for her London life, Susan Walker, architect and school governor…
The Obsessive Diary17. She Came To Stay
I’d been searching for something and as far as I knew, in this farmhouse on the Somerset Levels, I’d found it. Security, safety, a home of my own with me and…
The Obsessive Diary16. This King Of Glastonbury
It seems these are a litany of relationships gone wrong, choices made to do with men and not to do with me. That’s what happens when you write a memoir. A…
The Obsessive DiaryIn conversation with Kit de Waal
Subscribe to Kit de Waal : This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit…
The Obsessive DiaryEmpty Nest
I always found, “Empty nest?” a supremely irritating phrase, yet it happened yesterday. Though they’ve both been away from home since they were sixteen, when I…
The Obsessive Diary15. Too F*****g Serene
A photograph was sent to me last week by a Dakini goddess. She didn’t know I was writing this memoir, could not have known that the photo would arrive…
The Obsessive Diary14. Flesh At The Haçienda
Who knew that a bursting fallopian tube would burst the sense of what’s the point? I woke up with the gloves off, a nineteen-year-old in a raver's paradise…
The Obsessive Diary13. Blackout
Let’s roll forward. It’s 1990, Manchester. I am in my first year at university, not yet living in the house where I would meet the boy who’d been kidnapped by…
The Obsessive DiaryGotham Girl Interrupted
Did you catch the LIVE I did with Alisa Kennedy Jones yesterday? If not, here it is: It was a blast. Alisa has become a friend and colleague, but way before I…
The Obsessive DiaryIn conversation with Alisa Kennedy Jones
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The Obsessive Diary12. A Bar That Never Closed
My friends got me out. Realising I was missing from the weekends in Harare they came to see me. I remember Eddy, who wanted to be a policeman one day, sat on…
The Obsessive Diary11. Forgetful
My mum, who hates planes, who has a fear of flying, who at this very moment is lying in a hospital bed in the endgame of life, did something reckless and…
The Obsessive Diary10. Not Out Of Africa
Of course I had the outfit. What fool would go to Africa without a long swishing skirt and cowboy boots? I believed I was all set. During the week I stood…
The Obsessive Diary8 Questions for… Kemi Nekvapil
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The Obsessive Diary9. A Magnificent African Sun
A bunch of White, English, public-school kids off to teach in Zimbabwe. What could possibly go wrong. We gathered at Heathrow, I said goodbye to my mother, we…
The Obsessive Diary8. I Remember That Hurt
His footsteps on the stairs, not the boy (I’d got him) but my father whose ferry had not left for France because of the hurricane that had ripped through…
The Obsessive Diary7. A Party In A Hurricane (or How To Get A Boy)
Home was a tall, cold house in London; intellectual, artistic, my father a writer, my mother an architect, guests, lodgers, friends and strangers, the bedrooms…
The Obsessive Diary6. Oh How They Laughed
I rang him from a payphone in the arrivals hall. I hadn’t told him I was coming. I saw him weaving through the crowds of families reunited, suitcases…
The Obsessive Diary5. A Momentary Flick of the Switch
I sat with the Rabbi in his plush, Regency room, red cushions, a view of the park. I told him I wanted to convert to Judaism. At school I had sided with the…
The Obsessive Diary4. Lost Girls Like Me
I found my voice in the hands of a self-styled Colonel Kurtz on an island in the Gulf of Thailand. A white man running from something, he’d decided himself a…
The Obsessive Diary3. Mute
The Israeli was handsome and unkind. I grew fat on German pastries, he poked my backside and said so. His cool Israeli friends came over and sat about smoking…
The Obsessive Diary2. He Took The Bike
My boyfriend and I took off on the motorbike, a Royal Enfield Bullet heavy with luggage, and purring. We headed first to meet his brother – also estranged…
The Obsessive Diary1. A Journey To India
When I was eighteen, I met a boy who told me a story of being kidnapped from his mother when he was four years old. He was taken to England by his father…