Forgetting the Strawberry Moon

New (full) moon diary #7

Two days before the full moon I was in Ma Kelly’s on Talbot Road, drinking bottled Peroni and singing to S Club 7 with a group of women dressed as grandmas. The moon looked big, dangling over Blackpool Tower in the otherwise empty sky, but it was not, we concluded upon examination, quite full.

The Strawberry Moon, the full moon of June, is my favourite moon. A few years back, I think it was in 2022, I was crossing a road outside the fancy apartment building in Salford Quays, where some of our friends used to live – Duet – and there she was, low and fat. I gasped and grabbed Frances and we never forgot. Then, in 2024, I danced under the Strawberry Moon when it happened to fall on the summer solstice, a once-every-19-years occurrence, at a music festival in Portugal. Under the glow, I tried to soothe my aching body with some yoga and I am pretty sure I cried.

I didn’t see it this year. Back home in St Helens, recovering from some awful flu I picked up at this year’s iteration of the same festival, which was certainly made worse by three days at another one in Blackpool, I lay in the bed my grandad used to sleep in and forgot all about it.

I have been publishing my once monthly full moon diary all year. It was a promise I made to myself to stay consistent. But in June I missed it. Of course I did.

A few months ago I read back the journal I started in November 2024, hundreds of pages of the same two problems: a completely psychotic ‘romantic’ entanglement that went on much longer than it should have and my inability to complete any work on time. Fuck me, I thought. If anyone ever gets their hands on this they are going to think I am fucking stupid.

That was two journals ago. I have been trying and failing to grasp this Thing – this neurosis – for years. It’s completely debilitating and completely unaffected by willpower. I have, in the past and in recent months, felt powerless to it. Even this essay is an attempt to avoid the actual, consequential tasks still looming over me.

Just now as I lay on my bed, basking in the high of deleting Instagram and trying to figure out where I could possibly go to work when France is playing Spain in the World Cup semi final, I felt this familiar pinch of discomfort about the lack of a full moon diary for June. But what am I going to do? Write it two weeks later? No. The only option, obviously, is to discontinue the series altogether.

So I’m sitting on my bed doing anything but starting my work. The last page in my notebook contains just one sentence: “I don’t follow through on things”, and on my now playing bar on Spotify sits an unfinished This Jungian Life podcast episode titled Procrastination.

It’s actually quite funny when I type it all out like that. I have built some kind of deranged identity about not being reliable, or not being committed, or something like that. I don’t know why, I really don’t. I am sure it serves some purpose or other, keeps me small, keeps me separate, however you look at it. Discarding the full moon series would have been just another evidence point.

So here is my entry, two weeks late, a little bit raw. Thanks for reading.

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Recent work

• For David Hillier’s What Are You On, I wrote about going 100% sober at a five day music festival

• I also wrote about the emerging research around psychedelics and sport for DoubleBlind

• And, earlier this year I went back to St Helens to write about how sports impact the town’s identity for Dispatch