After That Day, I Stopped Worrying

I’m reading Sea State by Tabitha Lasley.

It looked journalistic when I picked it up — plastered with glowing and collegial-looking praise from the Irish Times and Financial Times and the Observer — and supposedly based on interviews with offshore oil riggers.

In fact, it’s the memoir of an extramarital affair, which makes all that praise look a bit selacious.

It is good though! Inciteful and well-written. It’s another citation toward my evolving theory that the point of reading is a form of psychonautics; to travel in the experiences of others, whatever they might be.

It’s also Escapological. Lasley quit her job in journalism, dumped her crap boyfriend, and abandoned London in favour of becoming “a writer without portfolio” in chilly Aberdeen.

On her quit:

When I gave my notice in at work, my editor told me she’d miss me, then had a long conversation with another editor, over the top of my head, about the unlikelihood of attracting a decent replacement, given my simean day rate. Up until that point, I’d thought walking out of a job might be one of those decisions I’d come to regret. After that day, I stopped worrying.

On starting over:

I went to Morrison’s [supermarket] on King Street for a knife and chopping board, and had a sudden sense of what I must look like to the other customers. A whey-faced woman in her thirties, spending Saturday night alone, buying kitchen utensils cheap enough to shame a student. A battered wife. An asylum seeker. Witness to some violent crime, relocated by the govermnent, her new address designated by alghorithm.

On a darker flavour of walking away:

Married men never leave their wives. And yet, I always knew he would. I had a sense that if I led by example, if I left my job and the city where I lived, if I showed him how easy it was to walk away from things, he would follow. I was shocked and unsurprised at the same time.

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