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The 5am Writing Residency 2025

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  • 4th

    07/07/25

    11.18am

    ‘pellucid’

    A beautiful word I’d never heard of, meaning translucently clear.

     ‘… in deciding what will be remembered, a museum … is also deciding, in part, what will be forgotten.’

    Quote from Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers In The Sky

  • 3rd

    05/07/25

    10.26am

    I turned up in good time to teach Yoga Align, Virgin Active’s class which isn’t Vinyasa. I still can’t get my head around it as a concept, the timings in my head don’t really work and I get a mini sick feeling when I know I have to teach it. 

     I don’t really plan classes – or I do but it’s more like I have a structure in my head and then season it with elements and trinkets here and there. 

    Place a few pebbles around the place. 

    Except that I came to the wrong gym. I’m meant to be in Streatham and I’m in Fulham. 

     We cross the river on the Mildmay line to bring us south. The book I’m reading at the moment ties the Thames and the Tigris together in a story that flits between centuries and eastern and western cultures and peoples. Oppressed, ethnically cleansed, growing up in extreme poverty, literally born in a sewer in the case of the character born on the Thames. 

     I didn’t want to teach Align anyway so I guess there’s a positive there. I have lost the £28.50 I got out of my hangover bed for, however. 

    Later…

    6.10pm

    The first 5amWR outing! To the Cinema to watch a gay film, as it is Pride today. My proud friends have hit the streets along with the 1000s of other friends, but mine will be taking ketamine.

    As part of this residency is managing my misery and my alcohol use, I’ve swerved it.

    So I’m going to watch Hot Milk at Genesis, which has been on the current site in Stepney since 1800s. The film got 36% on Rotten Tomatoes, which if you don’t know is like the ‘the people have spoken’ film review page. But I think sometimes gems are found in the bin store.

    This film, even though set in Spain and filmed in Greece, with an ending to which I exclaimed out loud in the cinema ‘HOW CAN THAT BE THE END?!’ was beautiful, tense, scenic, sexy, lulling, lusty, dusty and sweaty. I could feel the mosquito bites from not having a net completely covering my ankles. Mostly set in a crumbly house on the sea in Spain (Greece) with the concrete jetty and clothes line with holiday clothes blowing on the line, Fiona Shaw constantly calling to her daughter to help her with something and the daughter audibly rolling her eyes. Played by Emma McKay from Sex Education, assisting a mother who can’t or won’t get up and walk out of her wheelchair as is the sense we are given. It was claustrophobic, familiar, not a huge amount happens, but it encapsulated for me the feeling of hot summers in your early 20s when nothing you do is of any real consequence and boredom permeates everything because you are privileged and purposeless.

    McKay’s love interest in sensual, enticing, entitled and a total nightmare, as any youthful crush should be. I was there with them during their deep and scary bedtime chats, the awkwardness, the sexiness, physical touch being the love language which is painful to watch for it’s needy familiarity.

    I was sat in the cinema watching it with only a handful of other women around my age on their own, apart from a couple behind me who cackled with laughter after my outburst at the end. ‘YEP!’ they concurred as I turned around in exasperation for the ending and they met my gaze with knowing nods.

  • 2nd

    04/07/25

    Day 2 of the 5am residency.

    10.49am.

    I came across a document just now that I wrote after a man in the underground asked for my number without ceremony and then accused me of being judgemental of him when I waited for him to walk on. 

    I don’t remember if I was drunk or not when I wrote it. It’s kind of poetic but also not something I would ever show anyone.

    I woke up today at 6.45am which is to say I woke up. Pleased with myself I rolled over and woke again at 10am.

    When my son is here, a gentle wake up was never an option because I was drinking 6 beers a night and crashing out with exhaustion ready for the school run the next day. Blearily ready – not fighting fit for it.

    I’m slowly packing the house down as the landlord wants to sell the property and gave a few months notice to be fair to him, which I ignored. But we are talking about moving a whole family (yes it’s still a family when there are just 2 of you) away to an unknown when my son goes to the local school and all his friends live in a mile radius.

    I am asset rich (which is to say I own a flat) but cash poor. 

    I am looking for more work but I don’t want to work a full time desk job. I want to work part time and float around musing and reading and working out and looking at things. I don’t want to make the most money of every hour that I can.

    If I could teach yoga 9-5 I probably wouldn’t want to do that either. The hours being spread out make more sense to me, I would just like to be a bit more in control of them.

    ‘Finding Your Voice’  was a course I was keen to go on, and I’m wondering if that could be part of this programme. We are still in early development of what this is – and the main purposes of this residency are:

    1. It’s a free, hotdesking, laptop in lap, residency state of mind piece of writing

    DING!!!!!!!!! An idea has landed in your LapTop!

    • Create a meditation which serves as a residency state of mind. So as with a guided meditation – it is a guided meditation taking you to a place in your mind where you can freely create. 
    • One for relaxation
    • One for sitting and actually making something

    2.   The perimeters are still to be set. 

    3. This beginning garbled stage is like writing a proposal for a dissertation. The development stage is notes and thoughts and inklings of ideas, until something more solid is formed.

    4. Instead of having to be next to a palm tree, can we make that view and that palm tree so vivid that it mimics the sensation of having a clear open view to the ocean.

    5. Drawing from my experience of leading meditations, can we use the hammock as part of it?

    Hypnosis? Yoga Nidra? Yoga Mind book

    I’ve got about 7 minutes left here so I think stream of consciousness is a good way to go.

    I’m spending the biggest part of my brain regulating my emotions. Because my son has been removed from me by social services for the 2nd time because of incidents where I’ve been too drunk to take care of him properly. If i  had any family, no matter how useless, he would be with them and this would be a battle of the wills with the family. They would be taking the flack, and I guess I would be in debt to them, emotionally and spiritually. 

    A person who had a mum and a dad, a sibling, and a few aunties and cousins here and there, if they were in my position, being drunk picking Son up from school I feel would be a major problem in the sense that it is just self indulgent drinking without the thought of consequence when the network is there to provide.

    What is not understood by the services and court, is that there is not another soul who supports my family. I have friends, and they are kind and have tried to help.

    The invisible labour of always asking for favours is not seen.

  • 1st

    02/07/25

    Day 1

    The first 20 minutes of the 5am writing residency.

    The turning point method, the london snapshot method, finding Solice in writing, not knowing how to start, wanting to write a best selling memoir. 

    This is me getting up at 5am to write. Except it’s 1.04pm and I got up at 10.20am, was glad it wasn’t midday, scrolled instagram and laughed a bit at a video of seagulls who have been given cartoon arms and phones and are having a secret affair, as narrated by the australian comedian who has come up with this genius concept.

    I think focussing on why I am writing is not important and is just a distraction from leaning into the holistic benefit of writing, whatever happens.

    Reading stories by writers grappling with alcohol addiction, with putting themselves into time travelling science fiction stories, wow, what a way to travel.

    This is writing for catharsis above all.

    There have been several turning points, or uncountable ones. There are the ones we tell to counsellors and therapists, GPs, the retelling of stories to friends where we create a purpose/narrative to help us make the world make sense. 

    When the voice ‘what is the point in (insert creative process I am experimenting with)?’ creeps in it’s time to face that dickhead and carry on doing what I’m doing and getting my head down. 

    This is too hard. I need some pointers. 

    OK I’m not allowed to give up. I’ve set a timer on my phone which is a cute gadget for focus. You start a timer (20mins as standard) and a tree is planted. As the time ticks away the tree grows. If you give up the tree loses all its leaves (brutal!) and you’ve killed a tree which is probably worse than killing a human.

    I went on a creative writing course for humans a few years ago at the Centre for Better Health in Hackney. 

    The centre for better health is a lovely charity based Mare Street close to the cinema. I would cycle up there on my blue bike, whose name is River but that memory has only just come back to me. Her handle bars have blue and white speckled bar tape. The fork of the bike I had to get replaced after I bent it out of use with my rib. Story for another time but anyway that part of my bike is shiny chrome silver, almost gun-metal grey.

    It was called writing for well-being. We were given a note book and pens provided and every week we would meet, a group of sad brave women, and we would write from prompts given by the facilitator.