Why there will be neither words nor pictures this weekend

I know what a stress illness feels like, and I know what this means I have to do.

It started at about seven o’clock on Tuesday evening. That feeling that you get when you know you’re coming down with something. My legs started to feel heavy, as though someone had attached irons to them. My nose started to run. My shoulders slumped. I knew what was coming the following morning.

So this week, I’ve rested. Well, I say rested. I still found the time to chuck out a couple of thousand words on here and hang around on social media like a bad smell. But I had a tonne of housework to do and I put it all to one side. I trimmed my dealings with the kids to what I could deal with. I slept for a couple of hours while they were at school, and I was in bed and asleep again by 10.30.

The fact of the matter is that I need a breather of some description. Anybody who read my write up of the Billericay game last weekend will be fully aware of the fact that even my days off are often not ‘days off’. There will be a lot of travelling to do, or housework to do, or any one of the million other jobs that I never seem to get the time to do.

The previous few days had been mixed, on the energy exertion front. Saturday involved a lot of travel, Sunday was more relaxed. Over the course of Monday and Tuesday I wended my way back to the coast via an overnight stay in London after the FSA Awards, at which I didn’t win anything but at which we did at least get to drink tequila from champagne glasses, which is, I presume, what posh people do.

So this illness is partly self-inflicted and partly stress-related. I can feel the latter of these in my bones. I carry a lot, and burnout is always in my rear-view mirror. But I also have a lot on and other people who are entirely dependent upon me, so at such times I have to ration myself, and that’s why this week there’s a strong chance that there will be no weekend match.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve made a couple of really silly mistakes in my normal, everyday life, elementary level errors in things I’ve said, things I’ve written and things I’ve done. I got on a bus at the wrong stop and didn’t even realise. I failed to send work which I would have sworn blind I’d sent. I’ve seen this all before, and I know when the pressure is all getting a little too much.

So I may well be taking this weekend off. Should we decide to rise from the slumber of watching movies under a duvet in my warm living room it will almost certainly be to go to the kitchen and get something to eat or drink. The both of us are frazzled and need a couple of days doing the minimum possible.

And there is another reason for this post, which is that I will be changing the structure of how I write this Substack from next Monday. Firstly, I’ll be putting Kofi links on the bottom of all posts so that those who are appreciative of my work here but who don’t wish to subscribe—and hey, I totally get that—can make a one-off payment.

But more importantly, I’m changing the structure to be a little more rigid and to offer more to paying subscribers. I will continue to aim to post here daily. From January paying subscribers will receive five guaranteed pieces a week, on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. They won’t all be huge and in-depth—there are only so many hours in the day—but I hope they’ll provide better value.

Mondays will feature a piece on the history of the game. Tuesday will be non-league. Wednesday from somewhere in the weird and wonderful world of the EFL. Thursday will be a free-for-all. Sunday will probably be a comment piece from the weekend’s football. Material that I consider to need a wider audience will continue to be free-to-read.

It’s a big assignment for me, considering that I have my other parenting duties, as well as other freelancing and copywriting work to do. For December, all posts will be free to everybody so you can see what you’ll be getting (and so that I can get my eye in and used to this schedule), but from the start of January I’ll be paywalling five posts a week. The good news here is that it’s only a fiver a month, which is about the cost of a half of lager in some parts of London, these days.

Now, if you don’t mind, I’m off for a little snooze.

Accompanying image by Jörn Heller from Pixabay