Page 5 of Love from Pretty Beach

I t was the dawn of the new year. Darby had continued not to allow herself anywhere near the doldrums, for fear that she might never emerge from them.

Indeed, if she had let them, they may well have swallowed her whole.

In fact, she’d actively formulated a strategy to avoid them.

Have notebook will scheme and plan. That in itself felt good.

That morning, she’d had a nice long self-indulgent bath with a coffee as a companion, had spoken to all three of her children and cooked herself poached eggs to go on avocado-topped homemade bread.

She’d tidied up the sofa and coffee table, cleaned the kitchen, zapped the bathrooms, hoovered and planned a lovely cosy afternoon with her online friends.

One of the main reasons Darby Lovell liked to get lost in the vortex of her favourite channels was the delicious, mind-numbing escapism her pastime provided.

As she settled into someone else's day-to-day, her own thoughts fell away, and she would slowly decompress from what was essentially the reality of her life. It wasn’t rocket science, to be quite frank; watching other people always made her feel better.

It really was as simple and cut and dried as that.

Over the years, here and there, she’d had the odd fleeting thought about starting her own channel.

The reality of actually creating a channel of her own, however, was a different thing.

It was all very well watching, chuckling, judging, swooning, criticising and analysing other people via the slightly grubby screen of her laptop, oh yes.

It was a whole other kettle of fish to put herself out there and broadcast to the depths of the World Wide Web.

A part of her wanted some of it. Another part really wasn't sure she was prepared for the fish or the kettle at all.

She'd had enough sadness and judgment in her life without adding on the intricacies of strangers who might find her by way of an algorithm.

However, as her mind buoyed and her determination to turn the new year into a fresh start took form, she started to wonder if a channel would provide her with some focus, a reason to get up every day.

As she sat, scrolled, flicked, watched and decompressed, she considered creating her own channel and what it could and would be about.

It didn’t take her long to work out. Really, there weren’t many things to choose from; she’d just vlog about being Darby.

She didn’t have a lot else. Maybe filming a few things she loved would help dig her out of a hole.

When the night before, she’d been lying in bed with a hot water bottle under her knees, she’d gone over and over again how she was the only one who would be able to grab her life by the balls, haul it up and get it back again.

Would, in fact, documenting her life here and there help her to achieve that? Perhaps.

Taking out a favourite leather-covered notebook, Darby mused a little bit more and jotted down what she could talk about: doing up the house, her love of books and reading, rescuing the garden, recipes and things she liked to cook and eat.

How she kept herself looking as good as she could on a budget, how she got around her day-to-day being on her own at her stage of life.

Looking down at what was, surprisingly, a long list, she turned her head to the side, squinted and pondered.

The more she thought about it, the more she thought that, actually , there might be other people in the same boat who’d be interested.

There were perhaps other people out there who might like to talk about the same things.

Turning to a fresh page, she jotted down a few more points.

Underlining "YouTube Ideas" with two thick lines and doodling a little heart on the end, she mused.

Then, pausing, she felt a tad foolish. Who was she even kidding?

She could barely manage to decorate her own sitting room, let alone document the process for the entertainment of strangers on the internet.

Something, though, whispered to her that it might be worth having a go.

Somewhere in the depths of those doldrums, she could hear the old Darby calling. Waiting and wanting to come back.

Flicking to the Irish cottage channel, she watched with new eyes as the Irish vlogger, Siobhan, pottered about her restored kitchen, explaining how she'd learned to make soda bread from her neighbour's grandmother's recipe.

It was hardly brain surgery; Siobhan was just chatting to the camera.

Speaking to her viewers like old friends dropping by for tea, sharing triumphs and disasters of cottage life.

Siobhan, on the outside at least, was natural, authentic, made mistakes and showed them.

Darby wrote in her notebook that Siobhan was doing a very good job of making her viewers feel like friends.

With her eyes drifting around one of the peach roses, Darby deliberated.

If she documented her progress in the house, maybe that alone would give her the oomph to actually get the place sorted.

Even if she filmed herself and put the channel on private, it could be a secret log of turning her life and the place she lived in around.

Clicking on another channel, Coastal Cornish Living with Lucy, Darby continued to not just watch but observe.

Lucy had started her channel after a divorce, moving from the city to a run-down house that was all she could afford after the settlement.

There was something in Lucy's voice when she talked about the early days that Darby recognised.

A horrid, brittle yet relatable sort of cheerfulness hiding someone determined not to let the world see how scared they were.

As she got lost in it all and flicked between channels, Darby continued to make a few notes.

The more she clicked, watched and noted, the more something struck her.

Each woman had carved out a little niche all about them and not in a look-at-me, oh-hey way, more a just life way.

None of it was particularly exciting or special; rather, they were just doing their own thing.

They'd found their own voice, their own corner of the internet where they belonged and they owned it all the way to the bank. Rather than shrinking away, they’d taken hold of their life by the neck, given it a good old shake up and got the devil on with it.

Darby sat upright as the penny that had arrived the night before dropped a bit more. Of course. Documenting a glow-up of her life would help her get her out of her head. Provide her with some focus, stick a rod up her backside and make her get on with things. Give her back her life.

Turning another page, Darby pondered what in the name of goodness she could actually offer if, and it was a big if, she started her own channel.

Staring at the blank space on a new page, then the large peach roses on the wall, she mused.

A swirl of life, highs, lows, ups, downs, experiences good and bad, jostled for space in her head.

Three failed relationships, the challenge of starting over in a new town, and an attempt at building a life from scratch when most people were settled into comfortable routines.

The very particular and what felt like unique loneliness of being on her own, when friends were busy with their own lives.

Real talk about starting over in your forties, she wrote, then crossed it out. Stuff that for a game of soldiers. Way too depressing, plus boring, too. She tried again: Authentic living when you’re not a twenty-something - the bits other people don't show. Nah.

Watching another video showing Siobhan’s garden, she thought about her own garden, the patch of overgrown land behind the cottage that she'd been meaning to tackle for five years.

She'd grown up helping her mum in their suburban allotment and fiddled with her own gardens before Pretty Beach. The move and the plan had been to garden more. It hadn’t materialised further than keeping on top of it all, mowing the weeds and tidying the pots.

More and more ideas began to take shape as Darby contemplated. She could document her own journey of getting rid of the blasted peach roses, the agonising over paint colours, ripping out the pine kitchen and the reality of living in a building site when doing everything yourself on a tight budget.

Thinking about the other aspects of her life that might translate to video content, she pondered her large and growing collection of cookery books.

All of which was testament to the fact once upon a time she’d loved nothing better than to cook.

Living alone, though, had somehow translated to not bothering.

As Darby skimmed down the lists in her book, whether she liked it or not, she had to admit she’d become lazy about many things in her life.

Cooking, a case in point; too often, toast for dinner or heating up any old thing had been her game plan. That needed to change.

As she noted and mused, her lists went from ideas about making proper meals for one to maintaining some semblance of put-togetherness when your face was showing every year of your age and your budget didn't stretch to expensive treatments. A very strange thing happened as Darby noted and wrote: she realised firstly that she might be onto something and secondly that actually her life wasn’t quite as boring as she’d assumed.

The notebook had the potential to get quite fat.

Who would have thought? Her mind loved the creativity as it flicked this way and that between her lists of potential.

The stuff nobody talks about. Empty nest, being lonely, dating over forty, making friends as an adult, starting again when everyone else seems settled.

As she flicked over the pages, she shook her head and wondered.

Really, it was probably all a pipe dream, but even that was okay.

She’d started. A tide had turned. Whether she acted on the lists or the channel or not, the notation and thinking had flicked a switch.

Allowed a small voice to speak up. One that told her that Darby was on the way back.