Welp. Thank you so much for all the kind and wise words after I wrote about my breakup in the last Substack. But the prize for the best nugget of heartbreak consolation must go to my mother1.

I was weeping on the phone to her and my father and my dad said, ‘Remember, Issy, everyone goes through this at some point.’ And then my mother uttered the immortal, never-to-be-topped line: ‘I bet even Vladimir Putin has been messed around by somebody.’

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The warmonger of Europe and his probable experience of heartache aside, it has been an odd old time. For the first few days I couldn’t really eat (this is very unlike me) or sleep - I’d go to bed but I’d wake up, bolt upright, at about 3am, thinking and thinking, unable to get back to sleep for at least a couple of hours. And then there was the crying. I have long suspected that my tear ducts are overactive but my God... the first few days the crying was pretty much constant, then it turned into weepy snatches throughout the day: Wake up, get ready for work, cry on the bus on my way into the office, sit at my desk dry-eyed for a few hours, go for a walk at lunchtime, listen to music and cry, come back to the office and put in another dry-eyed few hours, cry on the phone to my parents on my way to a work dinner, have dinner dry-eyed and laugh and joke and actually have a good time, get on the bus and cry all the way home.2

Heartbreak is this weird mix of feeling absolutely awful and yet also - and this is the really mad thing - terrifyingly alive. A very strange concoction of business-as-usual (it should be illegal but somehow the earth keeps turning) and this strange pain that somehow changes everything, even the way time operates: time goes very fucking slowly when you’re heartbroken.

It is also when you turn to music. And what luck - what luck!!! - that Lily Allen released the break-up album to end all break-up albums at this very moment. I mean, if that’s not proof of a Higher Power, I don’t know what is. Even though I can’t really relate to Allen’s opus about what happens when an open relationship falls apart - my relationship was not open and there was no cheating - there’s plenty I can relate to in there: the ruminating, the obsessive thoughts and the absolute horror of having to wander back into the trenches of modern dating (’I hate it heeeeeeere’ as she sings on Dallas Major). My favourite tracks are Sleepwalking (just for the bouncily addictive lyric ‘Course I trusted you and took you at your word’), Madeline and Beg For Me (’I want to be told I’m special and I’m unusual’ oh Lord yes) and the final track, Fruityloop, which somehow rescues the album from any sense of self-pity or playing the victim: ‘It is what it is/ You’re a mess/ I’m a bitch.’

But Taylor Swift is the main chronicler of heartbreak that I turn to. I’m having a Tortured Poets moment. My number one is probably Prophecy: ‘Hand on the throttle/ Thought I caught lightning in a bottle/ Oh, but it’s gone again.’ And The Black Dog, she knows how to strum at my heart when she sings, ‘I just don’t understaaaaaaaaaand/ How you don’t miss me.’ Then there’s I Can Do It With A Broken Heart, in particular the lines: ‘I can hold my breath/ I’ve been doing it since he leeeeeeeeeeft’ and the very apt (for me): ‘I cry a lot but I am so productive/ It’s an art’.

If I want to go old-school, it has to be Abba’s The Winner Takes It All which my mother once described as ‘a song about a girl who has clearly had a complete nervous breakdown after the end of a relationship’ and I’ve never been able to see it any other way; it cuts to the quick when poor Agnetha sings, ‘And I understand/ You’ve come to shake my hand’.

In all honesty, I’m coming out of that indulgent, listening-to-music-that-both-relieves-the-pain-but-allows-you-to-relive-it-a-little-too phase, but I did do a quick survey on Instagram to discover what tracks people listen to when feeling an ache of the heart. It was such a helpful exercise, not only to get a load of recommendations, but also to be reminded (as my father and mother did point out) that everyone goes through this, which actually is the great comfort of music in the first place: you’re not the first person to feel this horribly helpless heartache.

Here are the recommendations I got, with notes next to them by the recommender in certain cases:

• If I Don’t Have You - Guns n Roses

• Everybody Hurts - REM (if I need to cry)

• Cry To Me - (if there’s someone offering me a shoulder)

• Music When The Lights Go Out - (when I know heartache is about to descend)

• Anything by The Skyliners

• The Weakness In Me - (when I feel guilty)

• Unchained Melody - (all occasions)

• Crazy Love - (when all despair and I need to return to the memory of my great, great love for comfort)

• Coldplay - [no extra explanation or particular songs given!]

• Brokenhearted Girl - Beyonce

• Shout Out To My Ex - Little Mix (if you wanna feel upbeat)

• Alanis Morisette - (If he left you for someone else and you’re really really mad about it)

• You Were Mine - The Dixie Chicks (the saddest song for people whose husbands have left them)

• Wings - Birdy

• State Lines - Novo Amor

• Decimal - Novo Amor

• Break Free - Ariana Grande

• Love Hurts - Gram Parsons

• Motion Sickness - Phoebe Bridgers

• The 345 - Self Esteem (my kind of ‘pull yourself together’ tracks)

• This Feeling - Alabama Shakes

• Ur Mum - Wet Leg (also good if you hate them)

• How Can You Mend A Broken Heart - Al Green (always think of that iconic scene in Notting Hill...)

• Passion - Stephen Sondheim

So there you have it, probably don’t listen to all of them in one go!

That’s it from me this week. Thank you very much for reading, if you have any recommendations for your own heartbreak tracks please put them in the comments, and see you again very soon xxx

P.S. Some pictures of the Thames Path walk (see first footnote) - it really was just gorgina!