blog | Sadie Hasler

Patchwork Time – for World Mental Health Day

Posted on October 10, 2018 by Sadie Hasler

I had a go at stitching my patchwork quilt the other night. It’s pretty old now. Dad gave it to me years ago.

I spread it on my bed every year, around the time Dad died, because that’s when it starts getting nippy. Early October.

I’ve been meaning to repair it for ages, not wanting it to fall apart, tricking myself it’s because I think everyone should have a cute patchwork quilt that lasts for their lifetime, when really it’s simply because he touched it and touching it makes me feel like a part of him is still here.

Quite without planning the other night I found myself reaching for the sewing tin to begin to sew up the jaggedy rips. It was only as I stopped stitching that I realised it was a funny night to be doing it; the day he was found dead. Two days after he’d done it. The 6th, 7th, 8th of October are always grim days. Picturing him hanging there. This year, I’d been quietly proud of myself all day that I hadn’t been a mess. That I even felt happy. Having a daughter has been fantastic medicine for many things. My subconscious must have reached for the blanket then; a practical way of acknowledging this new phase of grief; a cosy handling of time. In control. Not too sad. I never thought I’d reach this stage.

Dad bought the blanket for the spare bed in 1999, when my sister and I went to stay with him in Wales. It was Christmas. We were sulky to change our usual Christmas tradition of staying in our cosy burrow at home with Mum, but more than that, we were shitting ourselves. After months of bearing the load herself, Mum had told us that Dad had six months to live. She didn’t know why, he wouldn’t tell her. He wanted us to go for Christmas so he could talk to us.

So we had a sort of Christmas. But he said nothing. And then we left, got a succession of trains home to Southend, our brains so confused I can’t remember what I felt anymore. Months passed. He never talked. It was like he had never told Mum he was dying in the first place. Out of necessity, I just carried on, trying to finish a degree I no longer gave the slightest shit about. Numb. One day he gave me the blanket like a gift. Over the years it has become just another lovely thing my Dad gave me, that I’m glad to have, but really, at its source, it is the backdrop of the time I waited to hear what I thought would be the worst news I’d ever hear, not knowing the worst news would come a few years later, in 2003, when he hanged himself. Another unexpected development.

Dad was an ill man. I had been kept from the troubling spots of his bi-polar character and phases my whole life, and then shit got real. That Christmas, when we waited for him to tell us he was dying. Perhaps he was going to lie and say he’d got a massive tumour or something. I don’t know. Perhaps he was planning on killing himself then; preparing us in the only way you can without saying “FYI: I AM GOING TO KILL MYSELF. NO, DON’T TRY TO STOP ME, I REALLY AM SET ON IT. SOZ.” Perhaps having some time with his children made him realise he couldn’t do it, then. It got delayed.

He was ill. Not consistently – very often he was joy and activity and fun and inspiration and kindness and support and sharp intelligence and love – but the illness waited for him, and he waited for it. Mourning him and puzzling over the act of his suicide has made me ill many times through the years. Grief feels like a mental illness because although it might be spun from the circumstances of losing someone rather than inner chemical workings, it is still a mental trap; a dark labyrinth that takes years to find your way out of, often feeling like you don’t have the strength to keep going. Then there’s the worrying you have ‘the same thing’ as you father. The fear of that legacy.

The blanket began as uncertainty and confusion, then it became epic darkness seeming to have no end, then it became merely sadness and fondness and nostalgia and memories, until it became comfort, warmth, a winter friend. Time and I have worked together on it, not always getting along.

And now my daughter is bunny-hopping over it, it’s changing again. It will be her Grandfather’s blanket, the one she’ll never know. She’ll grow up seeing my crude stitchwork, puckering the fabric like scars. My very imperfect attempt at fixing something. And one day maybe I’ll use it to tell her that things change, and how they change, and that they can keep changing. Maybe one day it will be with her when she feels ill, comfort and warmth, maybe it will be with her when she keeps going, a stitched together reparable thing, a winter friend.

Make it kind – Mental Health Awareness Week

Posted on May 14, 2018 by Sadie Hasler

I haven’t written about my father, his suicide, grief, or mental health for a while now.

I felt I should just ‘stop’. Let him rest, let it be, & stop picking the scab. But grief never really goes. It just changes.

In the last few months Dad has been present throughout my pregnancy thoughts, & now that my daughter is here my relationship with him has shifted again. During the last 15 years I have never thought ‘how could you do that to us, to me’. Tenderness battled anger and always won. Now I have a daughter, I can’t help but re-examine my feelings. How could he do that to us, his daughters? I couldn’t do it to her. I never want to leave her for a second, & the thought of being the source of her biggest sadness makes me want to be sick.

So how could he do it to me?

But of course, the answer is, mental health. It can make a man leave the loves in his life because he absolutely cannot face being alive anymore, because he cannot function, because life seems a long and unbearable journey, because it seems unfixable, because he even believes he is doing the best thing for people by leaving. Because the power of depression is sometimes so strong it even outweighs love, that beautiful thing that we are taught is stronger than anything. It’s terrifying when we discover it isn’t.

Grief changes all the time. I have struggled with losing Dad for years, the sadness very nearly made me give up myself at times, and just as grief got easier, I will now struggle with the thought that he would have had so much more love to give and receive if he could only have believed that there was help out there; in medication, in people, in good old fashioned kindness, in miraculously powerful time. I will struggle with the fact that Marcie will never meet my father, one of her granddads, but I will make sure she knows all the good things about him. And one day I will have to talk to her about mental health. I’m not sure what I’ll say yet, but I know it will be kind.

#mentalhealthawarenessweek

More things I’ve written on similar themes

Body

Posted on December 20, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

Sitting on the bed just now, jumble-headed & waiting for my eyes to clear enough to get up for a wee, I looked down at my swollen tummy and really looked at it. What a change. I thought about the inner intricate whirrings & industrious processes, makings of a life that i can take no credit for with my knowing brain. My body has taken over. My body, which I have never loved nor even liked much. I have been unkind to it every day.

Some people love their bodies during sex, or in the act of dressing or displaying, of styling or posing or playing or sporting or pushing themselves beyond a limit they refuse to accept; love themselves in the freedom of private pleasure, of solitary nudeness, in childish unconsciousness or the unthinkingness of orgasm; in relief, in the defiance of unacceptable sickness, in healing, in surprise at still being here, in joy they ever were, in determination to stay and be and live while they still have a body to carry them around, to permit them the grace of their fleeting existence.

I’ve still never liked my body much in any of that. But I just realised in the half-dark, with a little thing stirring awake beneath the massive earthlike arc of my skin, that I really like my body. Love it, even. Not the look of it, but the fact of it. Its new purpose.

I don’t know how I’ll feel about it in the last few weeks of pregnancy. I don’t know how I’ll feel about it during birth, or immediately afterwards, or soon afterwards or long afterwards, until it starts to age and ail me as it will. But for now, the biggest and strangest and most natural-unnatural I’ve ever been, I really love my body. And I will love loving it, for a while.

Up the Duff & Terrifyingly Fine

Posted on November 9, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

I told everyone I was pregnant yesterday. It wasn’t a prank or anything. It’s true. I’ve just been keeping it under my hat for 22 weeks. Well, it started under my hat then when it got a bit bigger I had to admit defeat and transfer it to my tum and honour the traditional gestational process. (Turns out a uterus is definitely better for that sort of thing than a beret.) And now it’s grown even more and there’s no getting around it anymore. Especially in confined spaces with a rucksack on. I am with child. Having a baby. Knocked up. Preggers. Up the duff. In the family way. Expecting. No longer able to say I just ate a lot of pasta.

There’s a little human growing inside me. A girl. Holy smoke.

And this is literally the best way I could think of telling people. A sort of jocular awkward kind of joke about hats and pasta, because I actually feel really shy saying anything about it at all. The kind of shy that people would scoff at and say “Yeah alright, Hasler. Shy. Course.” But I am. Because for all my splurging about sometimes intensely personal things, half a decade of writing a pretty open book column, talking about being pregnant feels like the next level of sharing. Writing columns or articles about suicide, grief, depression, other big dark things, is fine; they’re important to me, part of my guts and nerves and heart and pulse, but I’m not protective of them. I just say what I think and out it goes. But I am protective of this little thing that’s wriggling about in my big round belly. That’s a completely different thing. A creature. A living thing. Something that I must look after with every bit of strength and love and determination I have. Every good thing I possess must go into making this human grow and learn and be happy. I will have to learn and grow more in order to do a better job. A job and a devotion I must honour until I die. I’ll have to keep five steps in front of her, half a watchful step behind, and a silent step to the side, by her side, all at the same time. Until death us do part. That’s an unfathomably massive thing.

I cannot believe they’ll only let people drive a vehicle after months of expensive lessons and a big scary test, but this – actual creation – we can just crack on with on our own after a bottle of wine on a Friday night and a couple of pregnancy tests a few weeks later in the bog at work. I keep expecting someone to say “Sorry Hasler, the results have come back and you’re not cut out for it after all. That’s it; put it back.” And I wouldn’t know where to start with putting it back. I can’t even get cereal back in the box after it’s spilled on the floor. (Not that you should, but I do hate waste. Five second rule and starving kids in Africa and all that.)

And here I am, still joking about it, like it’s a box of Cheerios I could adios.

When it’s the least funny thing I have ever known. Having a baby. It’s the biggest, realest, scariest, loveliest, most important thing. I am insanely wired on the all-consuming seriousness of it, and already ready to kill for her. I am protective of her eyelashes and fingertips and her tiny little pouting mouth. I am protective of her tiny doll parts as all this sexual abuse stuff still blows around in a gale. I am protective of her heart and her receptiveness to the world and her experiences and all the people she will ever love and all her future joy.

I am having a baby. I can feel her kicking and I’ve got a feeling that’s what it’s all going to be about, for me, for the rest of my time from now on. And that is terrifyingly fine.

Lucky Shampoo

Posted on March 28, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

Finding the right shampoo is like finding the right man. You hope its scent will make you stop cross-eyed and swoon, you want it to bring out the best in you like some kind of magical transformation, and occasionally you get it in the eye and wish you hadn’t.

I’m not a superstitious person, usually, I don’t think, (though I do still say hullo to lone magpies and never tread on three drains; the learnt behaviour of childhood) – but whenever I find a nice new shampoo I sometimes attribute any good luck I have to its sudsy powers until the bottle is finished. I know this is ridiculous, like some kind of new age dickhead witch seeking magic in potions, but the possibility still pops into my head nonetheless. The things we allow to course through our noggins while we’re trying to find sense and reason and patterns in life are quite often completely uninvited, unfounded, or just plain bonkers. Our imagination pitches itself against the science of the world we have been taught and think we know.

I remember my first feeling of wondering if shampoo had some kind of glutinous destiny when I was about fourteen. My first love, a boy named Joel whom I had loved from afar for months, with whom I then went on to have a steamy on-off smoochy love affair that peppered my teens like summer christmases. He liked the smell of Revlon Flex, and by golly if I wasn’t using Flex I thought our union would crumble like a cake with no butter. Then for a brief while I started doing well in science at school and put it down to the discount brand I was using at the time that made my hair softer than ice-cream and smell like blueberries. I never found the shampoo again; we only went to Kwiksave that once. Good science & I were clearly not meant to be. (This could in fact explain my formulating hotchpotch ideas about shampoo. No hard facts; just lunacy.) Perhaps this strange linking is purely down to the evocative power of scent; the nose blindsides your other senses with that power that can call to you toddler memories unbidden at the age of 36 when you smell milk formula or the perfect trinity of twiglets and orange squash and the warm plastic of a wendy house.

I suppose I still occasionally do this baffling fusing of shampoo and luck in my head, but last week I found myself thinking of it even more. I’d just cracked open a bottle of caramel and cocoa-smelling goodness that left my hair feeling like fresh combed straw, too stripped clean to be soft, and then in a succession of an intense 3 days I had heart-stopping sad news, got burgled, and then had some possibly life-changing good news that left me dizzy. Given the fact the new shampoo had brought with it two bad days and one day of giddy smilebursts, in my head I had to label the bottle ‘intense experiences’ rather than ‘good luck’. And now I’m halfway through the bottle and wondering if the bit of possible good luck will die once it’s empty. What will happen next?

Maybe thinking small things like shampoo affects anything is easier than believing in god or some other greater steering power or giving yourself up to the utter randomness of life. It comes in a bottle, contained and potent and fresh and clean, and pushes you out into your day with a lingering scent, the feel of your hair on your head, the air than moves between the strands, a constant tangible feeling.

Do you go out and buy exactly the same shampoo in the hope that it will be similarly charged with serendipitous particles, or do you seek a different better luck in a new bottle, a different smell or brand promise? Or do you accept that you’re mental and shampoo has got bog all to do with anything and you make your own luck? I know the truth in my head, but my imagination is boss. And my hair smells really dreamy.

The Trouble with being Burgled

Posted on March 24, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

The trouble with being burgled is that it makes you question how good your stuff is when they decide not to take any of it. That, and the safety of your abode. But mostly your stuff. I got called home from work last Thursday saying there had been a break in. My neighbour had disturbed them and they’d been into both flats. I legged it home assuming that the only thing I own of any value – my mac – would definitely have gone. And surely the reprobates would have had the good sense to spot that the 1980s brown glass perfume bottle in the shape of a bassett hound was a fine collectable that might not fetch much on the Cash Converter circuit, but would provide hours of whimsical inner mirth. Neither were touched. And when they’ve flung your clothes out of the drawers onto the floor of course you’re going to judge yourself. As you fold it back up and place it back in the drawer, you’re thinking “fine, ok, so these sequins weren’t the best decision I’ve ever made, but I’d had some darn good times holding my stomach in in this skirt and if you can’t see that then it’s your loss”. Burglary makes you take things very personally.

Turns out they hadn’t taken anything except for some Royal Horticultural Society vouchers my neighbour had got for his birthday. That’s quite niche isn’t it. I imagined the robbers stalking around the walled gardens of a stately home, guiltily opining the peonies. I comforted myself that they had only blatantly disregarded everything I own because they had been rumbled by my neighbour before they could bag up the loot. Of course they would ordinarily have taken the knot of sterling silver necklaces I have amassed since my teens that would take seventeen hours of picking apart with patient fingers and possibly a pin to make any of them wearable again. If only they hadn’t been cut short by the vigilance of Stephen downstairs they would have been right in the money.

When the attending cop came round he introduced himself as Christian and I thought it was a bit inappropriate, changing established police protocol in such a friendly manner. If I was going to be questioned, I wanted to feel sufficiently ill at ease to call him Officer. My burglary, my rules. Officer Christian was satisfyingly big and burly. I found myself wondering if he could lift me with one hand while batting back hardened crims with the other. I decided I bet he could if he wasn’t feeling tired and I had only had a light breakfast.

I felt bad that Officer Christian had to come round to mine for a rather lacklustre tale of a basic bungled burglary where nothing was taken. I wanted to pep it up for him so he had better stuff to jot down in his neat tilted handwriting. Then he mentioned he’d just come from a double-stabbing and of course I felt inferior. I couldn’t compete with murder. My knives couldn’t hack the seeds out of a tomato anymore let alone disembowel someone.

It’s a funny feeling knowing someone’s been in your home without asking. I’ve been burgled before and the last time left me feeling vulnerable for months; it felt like the windows and doors were permanently left open for all and sundry to come bursting through, and in the darkness at night I was jumpy at every sound. It’s not about the stuff. I don’t have much and what I do have is not going to support anyone with a £200 a day heroin habit, not even long enough for a five minute high. It’s about feeling safe. So while I stared around at the mess and the broken glass and the worthless things I own and felt that familiar unsettled feeling of my private space having been violated, I mostly felt relieved that I have never had to feel the desperation that one day turns ordinary people into thieves. That can’t be fun. Especially if Officer Christian catches you and pins you by the balls to the wall, which I’d kind of like to see if I’m honest. That’d teach the tykes for thinking my stuff is shit.

Women’s Snickers

Posted on March 24, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

I had a lovely International Women’s Day last week. I’d been feeling a bit grumpy on account of lady problems – my bits ached, I was emotional, and I had a savage craving for Snickers like you wouldn’t believe, so I wasn’t massively in the mood to celebrate being a woman. Everything was narking me off and I was very cross at the disruption that hormones can cause. I didn’t want to play the worldwide sport of owning our femininity, I wanted to watch Meryl Streep films in the dark and throw things. Maybe have a little cry over nothing in particular into the dog’s tummy and then eat another Snickers.

But I cracked on because it would have been frowned on if I’d skulked around wincing at my boobs and muttering that I wanted to be a man. That’s not the kind of thing that’s expected of you on International Women’s day. You’re supposed to be at your best, showing anyone who will notice that you are part of a franchise of Gender Awesomeness, not just today, but every day. You are an ambassador of all that is Woman; you certainly can’t grumble about your fallopian tubes.

Somehow I got through the day without weeping, throwing anything, killing anyone or performing a self-hysterectomy with a spoon, and set up for the International Women’s Day event I was doing in the evening, which was a talk on the theme of The Invisible Woman. “I WISH I WAS RUDDY INVISIBLE AND THEN NO ONE WOULD NOTICE ME SITTING IN THE CORNER, PICKING SNICKERS NUTS OUT OF MY TEETH”, I wanted to bellow as I laid out the seats. But that wasn’t the point of the evening.

The point of the evening was to welcome a small number of women to talk openly about whether we feel seen; whether we have to struggle to be seen as young women, get seen for a few years, and then slowly get forgotten again. To discuss whether we want to be seen at all, and if we are seen in the way we want to be seen. I was expecting maybe a handful of people to turn up for an hour’s chat before attending the next events; a talk on domestic violence and a talk on the Essex Girl and her stereotyping. The talk got going and slowly the room filled up until there were no more seats. More women turned up and eventually there were people sitting on the floor, standing by the back wall, and filling the pockets of space at the side. I was pleasantly surprised and settled in to the talk with a warm feeling growing in my tummy. Not unlike when you clutch a hot water bottle to your abdomen because Eve ruined it for all of us when she mucked God about all those years ago or whatever.

The assembled women had brilliant things to say about their experiences; how our lives are shaped by our gender, how often things get brought back to our sexuality when they shouldn’t, and how sometimes it feels very much like some men forget to address things to our faces instead of our boobs. “If anyone talked to my boobs right now I could ruddy bash their face off with one slight jerk” I muttered inwardly, still a bit peeved at the enlargening effects of the monthly tribulation.

It was an inspiring hour of a diverse collection of brilliant women of all ages meandering off and on subject as we achieved what was essentially the point of the day; be with each other, share our stuff, listen to each other, and support each other. We ended the session saying we should do it again soon. On the whole I was glad I’d turned up. Especially as it was my event.

It was so nice I even stopped thinking about Snickers. For, like, an hour.

Spring is Always a Surprise

Posted on March 24, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

The sun’s come out. No matter how old you get Spring always feels like a bit of a surprise. Like bumping into an old friend in the street who’s been living abroad for a while. Familiar and lovely but somehow not expected. You turn a corner into March, the sky gets brighter, the days get a fraction longer, and the real new year starts. January feels like a month of pretending. We know we’ve ticked into another calendar year but it doesn’t really feel real until the sun unfurls itself from its February chrysalis and colours everything differently. Fresh.

It’s amazing how everything changes. The birds pipe up, the clouds look freshly scrubbed, the streets get greener, the trees look less sad, the first flowers of the season pop up shyly, the blue above us looks crisp as a dry-cleaned suit. Our lungs feel lighter; our steps have a different energy. Something in us changes. Even the winter lovers among us are rejuvenated by the vitamin D, you can’t fight the science, and for those whose soul feels a bit bedraggled from months of gloom it really is a new start. We are reunited with something in ourselves; something that we quite like. We’ve not been our best, and now we feel like we can be.

It feels easier to tackle things with this strange new energy that nature gives us. More realistic resolutions for the year come into play. After months of spreading myself too thin, feeling frazzled and too brain-weary to do anything particularly well I feel like I’m shaking things off, mixing things up. I have promised myself I am going to manage my time more strictly so I can allow myself time to switch off. I am going to keep work within certain parameters so I get to keep my evenings and weekends for remembering that I am human. Or that’s the idea anyway. I lay in bed quite late on Sunday listening to the spring birds and it felt strange. I felt like a lazy slug but then realised that that is what people do on Sundays. It is a day of rest. I can’t remember the last time I really did that. I had myself a proper weekend. It felt sort of dirty but I loved it.

I’d spent the afternoon in the pub on the Saturday after getting my hair cut and my new fringe that I suspect makes me look like a simpleton was making my eyes a bit blinky. I sat in the pub garden in the spring sunshine with a friend and we played each other new songs we’d discovered on our phones. One of his contributions was a French band named Pamplemousse who I loved mainly because the French word for grapefruit is about as good a word as you can get. You can’t get a fresher word than pamplemousse. Use it in a sentence today. It will make you feel like you’ve just licked a tart bit of pink citrus. French music always gives me a little flood of imaginary memories. You can fancy yourself a bit French when you were conceived in Nice harbour. You owe it to yourself to be a bit French when your mum and dad banged you into being on a boat after nearly dying crossing the channel. Sometimes these appended selves from little tributaries of our lives can make us feel new and fresh when we imagine ourselves in different stories. Our imagination makes us know that change is ok. Spring is the time for imagination and for changes. I am a tiny weeny bit French and have a new fringe like Amelie’s idiot older cousin and I like it.

As I write this, eyes squinting at the sun as my eyes grow accustomed to the brightness, there’s a fat fly jittering against the window – like a bulb that grew wings that can’t quite carry him far enough. He looks like he’s been locked inside all winter and has just noticed that’s it’s sunny. He wants to get outside. I know how he feels. It’s nice to reemerge.

The Next Big One

Posted on December 27, 2016 by Sadie Hasler

I think we were all kind of expecting someone else to go. I’ve found myself internally semi-squinting, waiting for ‘the next big one’ – the next person to go who would prompt national outpourings of distress. As my eyes trawl across some digi-obit or other I’ve muttered little mortality mantras – “Not Tom Hanks, Not David Attenborough, Not Judi Dench, Not Dolly Parton.” – ticking off names of people I love like prayer beads. This year feels steeped in the energy of portent, we might as well see the rest of it out without expecting some sort of cosmic kindness to kick in now.

I’ve had numerous conversations with friends about who we’d hate to hear had died. We compiled depressing little lists of awesome people whom it would be a great shame to lose. But of course the worst losses are those people who die ‘too young’. The people who don’t make it past an age of general acceptability, which gets a little older every year such is our insistence for living longer.

We were wrapping up our Christmas night, drowsy from our day of food and booze, when I saw that George Michael had died. 53. No age at all. I was staying at my mum’s so I ran up to her bedroom and shared the horrible news with her and my step-dad. That’s a nice way to thank them for a lovely day isn’t it; being the bedtime bearer of bad news. We chatted for a couple of minutes and then I went back downstairs and sat for a bit. It felt sort of apt hearing the news while I was with mum. We listened to George’s beautiful album Listen Without Prejudice over and over again together when it came out.

As I got ready for bed I tried to block out the horrible inevitable thought that one of the great Christmas songs, Last Christmas, was forever going to be tinged with a horribly apt sadness. George had just had his last Christmas. I’m sure we all were thinking similar. I’m sure a lot of people made the bad jokes too soon as well. Some people can’t resist thinking they’re some sort of great wit when actually they’re just a great twit and should stay quiet and resist the dreary puns gushing around their brains like sloppy shit.

It’s sad to lose people at Christmas.

But of course it’s just an ordinary day for the human body. A weak heart or a tumour or a blood clot won’t wait for the new year out of obligation to festive family feasts and our urge for sloth-like contentedness. Death waits for no one. It doesn’t just stand in the corner looking for the nod. There is no respectful time for our bodies to sever themselves from us, and that is what it is, a sort of parting of ways – our mind and our body. One day the body says “No, this is not how it’s going to work anymore, and for all your wonderful strength, dear Mind, you are powerless. I’m in charge now.”

Perhaps some of us feel these Christmas losses deeper because there is usually a strange sense of all normal business coming to a standstill for a day. When someone dies on or around Christmas, we feel betrayed, like security has been breeched, like fair play has been abandoned. The child inside us still believes in a great overarching fairness, despite everything we learn to the contrary in adult life. We unconsciously demand immunity from being mortal for the day, fool ourselves we are in closer contact with some sort of great magic, whatever our religious beliefs, there’s still surely some sort of magic, please. It is a day we trick ourselves we are somehow untouchable, swaddled in a sort of sanctity we are desperate for, like babies. “Just give us this one day in our impenetrable bubble.” We all want that, as the year draws to a close and the new year stretches out before us like the not-so-distant present with a bow on top.

But our bodies are still just our bodies, wonderful beautiful miraculous, intricate frail and finite, a gift we never quite make the most of before they bow out.

Netflix Induced Murder Immunity

Posted on December 27, 2016 by Sadie Hasler

I know it’s not very Christmassy but I can’t stop thinking about murder. It’s not because I’ve just been in an M&S tussle, passive-aggressively battling with a lady in a goose-down gilet for the last filo pastry parcel selection and hoping she burns the turkey and/or dies. Horribly. And gets decapitated. And her head gets stuffed inside the turkey and they don’t find it until they finish pulling the meat from the bones five days after Christmas because it’s a really fucking big turkey and then, boom, oh Christ – Judith’s skull. No. It’s because I have been watching Dexter. That series about an American serial killer that everyone was banging on about years ago.

I don’t usually watch much stuff, but every now and then I get pulled down the rabbit-hole of a major series and everything else stops existing. Usually about a decade after everyone else has watched it. I like to think it’s because I’m an individual who doesn’t get swept along with the tide but it’s actually because I’m in a bit of a daze most of the time and it takes ten years to get me to go “Huh? Sorry, what were you saying in 2006?” So I finally succumbed to watching an episode of Dexter after lots of mates told me they liked it – grand recommendations like “Dexter saved me from a life of bunny-hugging benevolent optimism and opened my eyes to the innate evil in the world”, “We actually thought about naming LouLouBelle Dexter. But then her little winky dropped off and we realised it was just a bit of ham”, and “Dexter shits all over everything”, which as a plot descriptor is alarming but as an idiom of general enthusiasm can’t be bettered.

Anyway, one short sesh in bed down and I was hooked on this dirty Miami cop epic.

Last Christmas it was Breaking Bad. There I was, propping my eyes open until the wee small hours of the morning because I had to watch Just One More. Waking in the morning with a jump because I had had feverish dreams about shit going down at the meth factory and I simply had to watch the next episode to make sure everything was ok. I needed to know that the meth was ok and that Walter White was ok; that he hadn’t got arrested while I had been irresponsibly sleeping on the job in my real life. I annihilated the entire lot in about two weeks. It became a bit of a problem. I was a bit blinky and distracted and real life felt fake and Breaking Bad world felt real. I haven’t really watched much since then. I would’ve felt cheap, cheating on Walter so soon after our emotional goodbye. Plus I had stuff to do. You can’t put your life on hold for crystal meth, things get out of hand.

But now I’m hooked on Dexter and everything’s turned to murder. I cannot look at a bin-bag without assuming my neighbours are wronguns. “Bet there’s some dude’s fingers in that Dolmio jar”, I size up as I pass. I pass an alleyway and assume that in the shadows are some muscly Cubans with a grudge. I hear the theme music in my head, all the time, and can feel my spine prickle like a psychic hedgehog; I know that something killy is about to go down nearby. But it’s not the same as Dexter. Murder fantasies in Southend are a bit more like Danny Dyer Goes to the Seaside. More likely to get suffocated with a sausage roll than splayed on a beach in a ritualistic Santa Muerte glory kill with hispanic candles neatly arranged around your decapitated noggin. Murders are dead exotic in Miami. Sigh.

I’ve found the most worrying thing about being addicted to Dexter is not that you are prepared to forego urinating for eight hours until you’ve finished a season, but that you start caring for Dexter himself. You go on a journey with the characters that far exceeds anything that can be achieved by a two hour film and you start to absorb parts of it. Moral quandary ahoy. Because you want him to get away with it all. The murders. You can’t bear the thought of him getting caught and spending the rest of his life on Death Row. I mean, that’s not right is it? That’s pretty clever telly. Making a psychopath the hero; inciting you to care about someone who ends people’s lives. Making you think “Well, it’s only a bit of stabbing, hacking, chopping, and dumping the body in the sea. People do way worse in goosedown gilets in shopping queues at Christmas.” We are very murky creatures, us humans. No wonder we get ourselves in such pickles.

I’m not sure what I’ll do when it’s over. I probably won’t kill anyone. I don’t think. I might just rest my eyes for a year until the next big series drags me down the rabbit hole. Maybe think about watching something less stabby. But it’ll take me a while to stop thinking about killing in the meantime so, er, make a list and I’ll see what I can do. I’m sure there’s such a thing as Netflix Induced Murder Immunity, there must be.