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The Obsessive Diary

The diary of a literary obsessive

I write a diary and publish it. What could possible go wrong... eleanoranstruther.substack.com

society & culture books

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4:05

Existential Angst

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/10/09

I finished a shitty first draft the day before yesterday and hey presto, like clockwork, yesterday I fell off an emotional cliff, caught somewhat by two Sams. It always happens; not the being caught by two Sams but the falling off. I’m locked in. I get to the end. I have a small cry. I wake up the next morning and am hit by a gust of such existential angst and, What’s the f*****g point that it knocks me right off my pins. I should be used to it by now. I should have learnt to step away from the

77:44

LIVE in conversation with Sam Jordison

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/10/08

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

2:22

29. How To Start A Commune

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/10/07

Let me set the scene. Me and Angel man. A carpenter who looked like Jesus. A pianist, blonde, many rings, she played the Michael Nyman tune from The Piano almost constantly. A man of the woods and his Wiccan wife and her daughter. An ex-trucker turned megalithic giant. A soft-spoken road protester who’d lived up a tree. A long, thin, angular beanpole with glasses. An old man and white-haired woman, both of them rounded like the bender they built in the wood. These were the first members of the

2:21

28. A Leap Of Faith

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/10/06

But first I jumped naked off a viaduct in Normandy. Almost naked. We’d driven in convoy, Angel man and me, to a festival in northern France where there were more crew than punters and we lay about in the sunshine smoking pot and he said, Let’s go bungee jumping. It was appropriate, that leap into nothing, trusting a rope I couldn’t see and trusting the calculations of others who said if I reached out my hand, I would touch the water in that microsecond halt between going down and bouncing up. A leap

2:25

27. House Of Grow

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/10/05

The queue snaked round the block hidden by traveller’s vans. It was fifty pence on the door, up stairs so narrow you had to pass sideways. At the top, a bar fashioned out of a plank of wood across a doorway, behind us coats were thrown onto a mattress on the floor. We sold cheese and gave away booze to get around the licensing laws. The mushroom tea was free, ladled into plastic cups from a vast, hot vat; harvested ourselves from the fields we hadn’t bothered to pick out the grass and mud, England

2:30

26. A Day Out With My Father

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/10/04

I don’t think I’d told my friends I was the kind of girl who got keys through the post from law firms in Westminster about houses that were empty and mine, but they took it in their stride. As we piled into my camper - my tall and pretty as an angel boyfriend, his dog, some of the band, a few friends who’d been passing by - I remembered the last time I’d been there. It had been a day like that one, sunny and bright, summer coming. I was eleven years old; I’d been hanging about in the low-beamed

2:35

25. The Key

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/10/03

I was living in a squat in Ealing when the key came through the door. Hang on. Let’s roll back a bit. The sea of bodies parted, he was six foot seven and had the face of an angel, we hugged hello and maybe we hung out a bit on that pulsing psychedelic dance floor and then we went our separate ways. The next time we met was by firelight in the woods near Newbury where a camp was set up to protest the building of a bypass. People were living up trees and refusing to come down, I’d driven out in my

68:42

LIVE in conversation with Kimberly Warner

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/10/01

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

2:37

24. Return To The Source

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/09/30

Retrieving my van from the dripping wood where I’d left it to go to Czechoslovakia, I returned to Latimer Road in West London, the house in which I’d lived before my detour to Glastonbury and snare in a ménage à trois. It was a time of parties and protests, MDMA and Reclaim The Streets, me and my split-screen camper with its twenty-one windows and a roof that slid back, a miniature sink and tiny plug under the bed, I named her Hera. In Hera I drove to derelict buildings behind King’s Cross taken

67:31

Serializing on Substack with Eleanor Anstruther

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/09/29

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

2:40

23. A Tall Cold House In London

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/09/29

Home to the tall, cold house in London, my ruptured disc and I, this place of my childhood where Hollywood stars lit cigarettes with survivors of Russian oppression, where refugees and royalty passed each other on the stairs. Or used to. As a child, my father’s friends and my mother’s politics built a world of artists and argument. My father was Scottish aristocracy, a Tory-voting, Maggie-loving, patron of the arts. My mother was a member of the Labour Party who liked to pretend to be in touch with

2:37

22. My Handsome And Kind Knights Templar

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/09/28

The house in France was a haven and still is. It sits on a crystal mountain on the edge of a national park, its walls hold a peace and a sanctuary. It’s where my parents spent time together without one of them disappearing off to his studio and the other packing her car on a Sunday night. There were guests, but they were nice, the rooms were broad and warm, the garden messy and secret, at night wild boars came snouting about the roses. As a child I’d play on the drive with my busybody men mending

2:40

21. Like The Third Eye In A Skull

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/09/27

I don’t remember much because my disc was slipping. Because I was out of my mind in pain. Rainbow Gatherings are surreal places at the best of times, an army of people who believe in walking, they collect around the world in barefoot harmony, moved by a prophesy that the People of the Rainbow will make war go away. Everything is shared, there’s a sense of life simplified, a medieval camping trip without the toothache. There are no nations or nationalities, only feathered hippies, their children on

2:26

20. A Connection With Czechoslovakia

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/09/26

There was a connection with Czechoslovakia that I didn’t think of as I set off in that coach, a shaved head, a disc slipping. In the tall, cold house in London where I’d grown up, we’d had a nanny, a refugee from the revolution, the Prague Spring that was crushed by the Russians. My mother had taken many people in and this nanny was one of them, she was given the flat in the basement and the job of looking after us. She had curly red hair, and she was traumatised though I knew her as frightening

4:16

Welcome to Les Aumarets

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/09/25

I was caught off guard by the heat; 31 degrees in September, balmy t shirt weather and I’d forgotten how much further south I was from Paris. The house greeted me with a hug and a sudden bird flying fast through the sitting room and cannoning head first into the window. I gently laid a tea towel over it as it panted half bruised and awkward caught sideways in the radiator. Outside I expected it to fly off as soon as I revealed its freedom, but it didn’t. I sat on the swing chair, Yves Klein blue

2:39

19. Gaslighting

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/09/23

“Relationship? What relationship? You were just renting a room.” Gaslighting hadn’t reached Somerset in 1995 but even if it had I’m not sure I’d have named it, I was that shocked. In his kitchen, the uneven floor and books falling over, the dog looking up at me, I’d made the mistake of naming that other thing, heartbreak, betrayal, cruelty. He looked at me and I looked at him and only one of us was brazening it out. I went to stay with my friend at Longleat, a yurt dry and mossy hidden from the

2:57

18. An Inch Of Me

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/09/22

They moved me out in inches. It began with a mushroom trip. Pigtails and the girl, two peas in a pod went out under the stars arm in arm. I saw them seated on a log in the herb garden that he and I had built. I left them to it. I told myself I was being mature. They stayed up, or at least out, all night. I know this because he didn’t come to bed. And the next morning when I saw them in the kitchen, leaves in their hair, ruffled as if they’d slept on grass, there was a smile to them. I cooked and

3:50

The Storming of Le Bastille

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/09/21

Protests in Paris, over half a million people on the streets, the taxi driver cursed blocked roads and sirens, la gendarmerie waved us from trouble into bottle necks of horns blaring, Parisians throwing up their hands. Avoid the Bastille he said as I got out at Citizen M, à côté de la Gare de Lyon. I love how the French strike at the drop of a hat, they are socialist to their core, it is written into their constitution and it pleases my anarchist heart. Power to the people. So I avoided the Bastille

5:22

Busy

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/09/20

It’s been a busy few days. On Tuesday we held the memorial dinner for my mum, a London affair for her London life, Susan Walker, architect and school governor. My brother hosted, the room was nicely filled, I knew a few people but not all, many of her students turned up, those who’d come to her practice as part of the study for theirs. My brother spoke, her practice colleague gave a speech and the former head of Marlboro School described how much my mum had meant to her. It’s funny hearing of these

2:34

17. She Came To Stay

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/09/19

I’d been searching for something and as far as I knew, in this farmhouse on the Somerset Levels, I’d found it. Security, safety, a home of my own with me and him; in my mind I was in bliss. For six months I cooked and cleaned and fed the dog, made candles for the candle shop, labelled bottles for the incense shop, fired chai pots in the pottery, struck up friendships in the high street, fetched water from the Chalice Well. I watched his mind at work and thought it brilliant, watched his hands

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