The Art of Single Tasking

And a love letter to my favourite store in the world. And socks.

My favourite shop in the entire world is in Oak Bay, the village in Victoria, Canada where my parents live. As a rule, I hate shopping. I mean I really despise it. Like writer and podcaster Gretchen Rubin, I most definitely fit into the category of being an ‘underbuyer’. I am not someone who finds it easy to buy more than one of something, even something that I use on a regular basis, such as toothpaste or deodorant. It takes me giving myself an actual talking to to buy things before they run out. I resent the time spent shopping and revert back to the small child that my Mum once had to throw over her shoulder in a shopping mall and get the hell out of there as I was wailing my head off.

But in this one shop in Oak Bay, time feels like it’s my own and I can literally spend hours there over the course of my stay with my parents whilst I’m visiting from England, often visiting it on a daily basis or at the very least staring into its windows. I will peruse the aisles, smiling away to myself, feeling calmer than I do in perhaps any other public space. I look at the jewellery, pick up mugs that are shaped like cats, smell the candles, look at all the quirky games that I know I will never actually buy, as tempting to me as the 90s music trivia card game they always seem to stock is.

There is also an aisle that sells vitamins and supplements, the aisle furthest from the entrance is the candy aisle and at the very back is a chemist.

My favourite store in the entire world is actually a pharmacy, called ‘Pharmasave’.

My whole family knows of my deep-rooted love of this store and most likely find it to be one of my many oddball quirks that I can spend hours in a shop that, in name if nothing else, centres around being a Pharmacy. Last year my parents sent me a postcard that depicts the outside shopfront in watercolours. I intend to frame this and put it up on the wall but, being an underbuyer, I haven’t quite managed to buy a frame yet (damn you non-standard-uk-frame-size Canadian postcards). While they humour me and occasionally forward me Pharmasave’s email newsletter, I am actually not alone in my adoration of the store: my niece Scarlett, age 11, my sister’s daughter who lives in another part of Victoria, shares my love. My sister often remarks on our similarities and as I watch her navigate the aisles of the store I feel like I am watching a little mini-me. She gets it, she gets the magic of this place.

My favourite section is the sock section and I can spend many minutes chuckling away to myself at the socks with messages on them, like “People I would like to meet…. dogs”. I’m particularly fond of the ones with the ‘F’ word on them. My Mum, who is not a fan of swear words, once bought me a pair that had ‘Bitch’ on them, which she managed to justify as being a female dog. Of course. So I guess in her mind they read “You fancy female dog”.

On my most recent visit to my parents for Christmas, me and Scarlett booked ourselves in for a date to visit Pharmasave together. Me and my Dad went to pick her up and she was waiting at the door, dressed in all the layers required for a Canadian winter, eager to go. When we are in Pharmasave she stipulates - as she always does - that we must walk down every aisle at least once.

There are at least two things I envy about Scarlett: that she gets to go to Pharmasave whenever she wants, and that she is able to be quite decisive in her purchasing. Despite my love of the place, I am still overwhelmed by the amount of fabulous things and my underbuyer brain and the other part of my brain that wants nice things battle it out to a point where neither side feels like they’ve won. At one stage of our shopping spree I show Scarlett all the things in my basket and ask her if I am being too extravagant, buying too much. There is a brief pause of consideration and she then replies “No it is the perfect amount of extravagant.” I love her.

When I reach the sock section I breathe out, I will be here for some time. Perhaps this experience equates to meditation for me? I have only had one failed attempt at meditation and I would actually just rather look at socks to get in touch with my spiritual side. I look at one of the brands I really like, the same brand that make the socks that my sister’s family bought me last year. They read ”God, my teen years must have been so unpleasant for so many people”. Scarlett’s Dad Ed expresses concern that I might be offended by the message but I say that, first of all, it is really difficult to offend me and secondly, it’s true: I was a nightmare.

This time, though, I can’t find any that have a message that feels apt. The pair I like the colour of the most, a deep cobalt blue, read “Multi Task Master”. I feel such a strong gut reaction to this that it surprises me. I ponder this feeling of being irked until I finally think “Fuck that! Fuck multi-tasking!”

Fuck the glorification of ‘busy’, of trying to do too much at one time until you feel utterly emotionally and physically exhausted. Fuck the overwhelm that comes with all that. What I want is stillness. What I want is to do one thing at a time. Maybe do it well or maybe do it half-assed. I don’t really care, but I do know that the idea that we can successfully go around doing everything at the same time with complete success is utter crap.

In summary, screw Multi-Tasking, I’m going to practice Single Tasking.

After a busy 2 years working on my photographic project ‘Where the Red Kite Flies’ and planning and holding 5 solo exhibitions in 2023, I got to the end of the year feeling like I needed a break. I didn’t really know what that break would look like and I knew that it wouldn’t be an actual break from either my commercial photography or my personal photography, but instead, perhaps, a break from projects and the demands that come from doing project work. I want to remember how to play again and have fun and get out of my head as much as humanly possible.

I came up with the idea of calling 2024 ‘A Fallow Year’ for myself, a year focusing on rest, restoration and play.

My brain is a busy, overthinking, overplanning and generally overwhelmed place to be. For me, this year is more about recognising that, instead of trying to plow through, and finding a way to allow some stillness in my life.

I’ve started a running list on my laptop of ‘A Fallow Year Aims’. So far it has a few things listed which include:

• Be more playful, focus on process, fun, enjoyment

• Give yourself more quality downtime

• Less screen time

• More days spent reading

• Write more

• Less focus on outcomes

• More black and white photography

• Less overplanning, more simplifying, less dashing, less of trying to fit too much in

• More feeling into, considering what is actually me and not writing/taking photos with a subconscious awareness of who my audience is

And now I’m adding

• More Single Tasking

Over the coming months I’m going to continue to explore what learning to single task looks like for me and report back here. Hence naming this The Art of Single Tasking Part 1. Part 2 will be along at some point but first I think I might want to tell a tale of the eccentric regulars in the coffee shop in my parents’ village and also an experience involving falafels in Sheffield.

On another note, the socks I did end up buying read: I need to pee… again. I love them. And it’s true.