I’m standing in my Hackney bathroom with the extractor fan rattling like it’s about to give up, steam still fogging the cheap mirror, and I’m slathering this Tesco own-brand lotion over every last bit of skin because that is what Megan taught me in first year and I have never once stopped. She was from somewhere up north, proper no-nonsense, and she used to stand there after every shower in our shared kitchen-bathroom combo doing her whole body like it was a ritual she would rather die than skip. I watched her do it for weeks before I asked why. She just shrugged and said your skin is the only coat you never take off so you might as well look after it. I was eighteen and thought she was being dramatic. Now I’m twenty-nine and I do it every single time, even when I’m late for a Zoom call or the Coven group chat is blowing up about some new government mess. The lotion is cheap and smells vaguely of nothing, but I still use the same circular motions she showed me, starting at the shoulders and working down so I don’t miss the bits behind my knees. It takes three extra minutes I never have, yet I do it anyway.
That was the first one I kept. There have been others. Little things passed across toilet cubicles or muttered in the back of a night bus or dropped into a voice note at two in the morning when someone in the Coven is having a proper melt. They are not grand feminist statements. They are just the quiet stuff women hand each other because nobody else is going to bother teaching you how to make the day slightly less of a slog.
Take the socks. I used to buy packs of white ones because they were on offer and I thought they looked clean. Then I started working in an office that had this one older woman, Denise, who always wore black. She caught me one Monday morning staring at my own feet after I had walked through a puddle outside Liverpool Street and the white had turned this grim grey. She leaned over and said, never buy white socks love, they look filthy by lunchtime and then you spend the rest of the day feeling like you have given up. I laughed it off at the time. Two weeks later I went out and bought three packs of black. I have not owned a white pair since. They hide the London dirt, they match everything I own which is mostly grey hoodies and old jeans, and they save me that tiny flash of embarrassment when I put my feet up on the opposite seat on the train home. Denise is probably retired now. I still think of her every time I open the drawer.
There was a girl at college whose name I cannot even remember properly, something like Chloe or maybe Caitlin, who used to put little circles instead of dots over her i’s. I saw her doing it on a shared notes page and thought it looked daft. Then I tried it once when I was bored in a lecture and now I cannot write a shopping list without those tiny loops. It is completely pointless. It does not make my handwriting any better. But every time I do it I remember sitting next to her in that overheated classroom with the windows that never opened and feeling like I had been let in on a secret that cost nothing. I still do it on the back of receipts when I am waiting for the kettle or scribbling notes for a pitch. The Coven lot take the piss when they see it on a shared document. I tell them it is my one glamorous habit and they can do one.
The plastic bag trick came from a woman in Tesco of all places. I was standing there in the meat aisle trying to pick up a pack of chicken without getting the packaging all over my hands because I had just done my nails the night before and the blue polish was still tacky. This older lady next to me opened one of those thin bags they leave out, shoved her whole arm inside it like a glove, grabbed the pack, then flipped the bag round so the chicken was inside and her hand stayed clean. She caught me staring and just said, works every time hun. I have done it ever since. It is the sort of thing you only notice when you are the one doing the weekly shop after a twelve-hour day and you cannot be arsed washing your hands three times before you even get to the till. I have shown it to two people in the Coven and they both use it now. One of them sent me a voice note last week saying she felt like a genius in Sainsbury’s. That is the whole point of these habits. They travel.
I picked up the spare hair tie thing from my mate Shar during a night out in Shoreditch years ago when I still thought going out was a good idea. We were in a pub toilet that smelled of bleach and regret and she pulled a second band off her wrist and handed it over without even asking why I needed it. My own one had snapped halfway through dancing and my hair was doing that thing where it sticks to the back of my neck and makes me want to scream. She just said keep one on you always, you never know when the first one will give up. I have carried an extra one on my wrist or in my bag ever since. It has saved me on trains when the heating is broken and I need to get the hair off my face, on Zoom calls when I look like I have been dragged through a hedge, and once in a proper posh meeting when I had to pretend I was not having a hot flush from too much coffee. Tiny, stupid, necessary.
There is the way I sit on the floor to film anything. That came from a woman I only met once at a protest. We were both cross-legged on someone’s living room rug waiting for the rain to stop and she said it is the only way to look like you are not trying too hard on camera. I thought she was talking rubbish until I tried it in my own flat. Now every Reel I do starts with me plonked on the rug or the end of the bed, barefoot, hoodie sleeves over my hands, looking like I have just rolled out of bed even when I have been up since six. It makes the whole thing feel less like content and more like I am just chatting to the Coven. The comments are kinder when I sit like that. People say I look approachable. I look like I have given up on chairs and I am fine with it.
I still fold my clothes the way my mum showed me when I was twelve, even though I live in a flat the size of a postage stamp and most of my stuff lives in a pile anyway. She used to stand over me in the Basildon bedroom making me do hospital corners on a single duvet like it mattered. I rolled my eyes then. Now I do it without thinking when I am putting laundry away after a Sunday roast visit. It takes longer. It makes the drawer look less like a bomb has gone off. It is the one thing from home that still works in Hackney.
These are not the habits they put in magazines. Nobody is getting a book deal for telling you to lotion your elbows or buy black socks. They are the ones that get passed in the places men do not bother going. Pub toilets at closing time. The back of the 38 bus when someone has had a cry. Voice notes that start with “right so this is going to sound mad but…” They are the opposite of the big speeches. They are the stuff that lets you get through a day that was already designed to wear you down a bit more than the bloke next to you.
I think about that a lot when I am on the train home with my feet up and the black socks hidden under the table so nobody can judge the state of them. Or when I am in the bath with the Kindle balanced on the tap and the lotion waiting on the side because I know I will do it the second I get out even if I am knackered. Or when the Coven drops another tip at midnight and I add it to the mental list without even writing it down. We do not talk about the big wins most days. We talk about the tiny ones that stop the small stuff from stacking up until you cannot move.
I used to think these things were just practical. Now I see them as the quiet inheritance. The women who came before me, the ones I only met for five minutes, the ones I still message every week, they all handed over something that cost them nothing and saved me hours of faff. I do the same now. Last month I showed a girl in the Tesco queue the plastic bag trick because she was struggling with a pack of mince and bright pink nails. She looked at me like I had given her the meaning of life. I just said pass it on hun.
That is how it works. You keep using them years later because they still work. The lotion still soaks in. The socks still hide the dirt. The extra hair tie still sits on my wrist like a tiny promise that the day will not completely fall apart. I am twenty-nine, I still go home for roast, I still vape cherry in the car park after a late shop, I still film everything cross-legged on the floor, and I still do every single one of these small things I was shown by women who did not have to bother. They add up. They make the chaos slightly more liveable. And on the days when the news is grim and the pitches are dead and the flat feels too small, they are the reason I can still get out of the shower, put the lotion on, pull on the black socks, and keep going. That is the whole story really. Nothing dramatic. Just the stuff that sticks.