A housekeeping matter that involves your money
Love Letter’s paid subscribers might have seen (or are about to see) a refund in their accounts.
I need to explain this.
Substack's paid subscriptions are managed by a company called Stripe. I need to have an account with Stripe, but since I came back to South Africa, I had to change my address on that account and it means opening a new account with Stripe.
The account that had your money in had to be cleared and the clearing had to funnel back to my paid subscribers and not into my account. It’s a security measure to ensure I don’t fiddle the books and nick your moolah.
It means though, that you are now no longer supporting my work financially unless you re-choose to do so.
IF you have the patience and don't want to throw me out with the baby and the bathwater, you can resubscribe here any time you like:
I won’t put up the paywall for a while to give you time.
Please accept my apologies. It’s greatly irritating to be given another bloody thing to do as though we all have nothing to do ever and sit around waiting for other people to have admin issues we can get involved in.
Do let me know in an email if you’re having issues because of the transition.
And thank you for being on my team.
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The comforts of order
After he retired, my father mowed the lawn on Mondays. When my brother and his husband came to visit from far and wanted to take him out to do something nice on a Monday, my father declined. He had a lawn to mow.
We laughed. But he was serious.
Habits are habits. Routines are routines. Order is order.
In the everlasting battle against the entropy that creeps and threatens minute by minute and hour by hour, habit is useful. Routines are reassuring. Order creates space for pleasure that is untainted by guilt about what has not been done.
Habits, routines and order create time to read. Which is all I have ever wanted.
I just hate doing stuff that isn’t the stuff I want to do, but when I don’t do the stuff I have to do, then the stuff I want to do is infected by the stuff I didn’t do. You can’t read in peace when you haven’t sent the invoices or done your taxes.
There is always too much to do and sometimes the too-much becomes too much, and overwhelm sets in.
Overwhelm is the sworn enemy. Overwhelm opens the sluice gates behind which my snakes and worms live. When the snakes and worms are allowed in, I slip and shiver and snivel. Depression is a blackblack place of slithering things. It’s a pit of horror I can’t find my way out of for months. I lose life and time in the pit.
I suspect it was the same for my father. Here’s a poem I wrote about the order in his workshop.
To maintain the kind of order that keeps the crawling horrors firmly on their side of the wall, I maintain habit and order and routine.
The advantage of order is more time to read.
Do you know what to do with that image in your brain…
…the one of the man holding a headless baby under the arms as though to put it into a bath or into its high chair and turning and turning in confusion and horror while behind him tents burn? Do you?
I do not.
This morning, the president coordinating the extinction of Gaza – an extinction you can see from space – called the shelling of tents in Rafah in the night ‘a tragic mishap’.
I was surprised to learn, earlier this year, that there is a concept of ‘just war’, which outlines military ethics ‘to ensure that a war is morally justifiable through a series of criteria’. All the criteria have to be met for the war to be considered just. There are two groups of criteria: the right to go to war and right conduct in war. The theory basically says that yes, war is terrible, but if you behave you can make it less terrible.
I delved into this peculiar concept – it’s peculiar to me because it assumes the fundamental rightness of war, and I believe that despite evidence to the contrary, war is unnatural and unjustifiable – for ages one afternoon back in February.
And I wondered: how can there ever be a just war if there is no just peace?
Three times five things
The five pillars of the longevity diet (a list from my journal):
Wholegrains
Greens
Tubers
Nuts
Beans
Five recent books I’ve read (links are to my Bookstagram responses to each)
Wifedome by Anna Funder
A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir
American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
Breath by James Nestor
Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami
Five Canadians I admire (there are more, but these five were part of my month in some way or another):
Naomi Klein (The most bracing thing I read this month was by her)
Anne Michaels (I’m reading The Winter Vault)
Alice Munro (she died this month)
Rainbow Kitten Surprise (Their music is fresh)
Leonard Cohen (‘You should go / from place to place / recovering the poems / that have been written for you, / to which you can affix your signature. /)
May your week be bomb-free and full of small pleasures.
Love,
K.
Thanks for this, and links. I have resubscribed and paid again — I hope all in order
Resubscribed, thank goodness! Sorry it took a while - Substack insists you can’t manage your subscription through the app and I’ve been deliberately avoiding using my computer since landing back in SA so I couldn’t get carried away and work too much accidentally. What a palaver for you! I’m hopeful that your subscribers are mostly the type of people who are only too happy to jump through a few hoops to continue seeing your writing.