‘The Blunderful Everyday’ – a short story of Flatpacked Ineptitude. Girl buys sofa from @IKEAUK Girl spends entire bank hol watching an avatar of a lorry drive all over UK, past her road, before it… More
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‘CREATIVE WRITING’ – (FUNNY WOMEN AWARDS FINALIST TOP 3 COMEDY SHORTS 2022)

Lola is typing…
(Strap in!)
‘Creative Writing 2:1’ is a new 5 min comedy short about the horrors of modern love directed by Peter Lydon.
It stars Lola- a hapless dreamer previously seen in LIFE IN ADHD (best web series nominee Edinburgh TV Fest New Voice Awards). In previous sketches we see her try to leave the house – ‘Filling’; try to meet a pal for a drink – ‘Russian Doll’; try to commute – ‘The World is not your oyster.’ In ‘Creative Writing’ we see her try to write a text.
Thank you to David Reviews for this lovely 5 star review and for giving it pick of the day!






A Melon Comedy production
Written by: Lorelei Mathias Directed by, Story-edited, & Co-produced by: Peter Lydon
Starred: Lola: Lorelei Mathias Tutor: Ch’Lu (Camilla Mathias) Susan: Lou Taylor Alan: Tom Wragg Emily: Jessica Chamberlain Gabriel: Ryan Duke Yasser: Yasser Kayani Rob: Rob Mayhew
Cinematography: Matthew Riley Sound: Xan Marquez Camera Assist: James Abbott Editor: Elyse Raphael Online Editor: Ben Watson Sound Mixer: Ben Gulvin Colourist: Chris Bell Music: Sacha Puttnam Producers: Nicole Selwyn Lorelei Mathias Peter Lydon Exec Producer: Lorelei Mathias Additional dialogue: Peter Lydon & cast members Director: Peter Lydon
Thanks to Tony Hollingsworth, London Comedy Writers, Holly Hall & Jess Chamberlain, Emmy McMorrow, Lauren Laroth (Taylor)
More sketches at MelonComedy.com More Lola at Loreleimathias.com/LifeInADHD
‘It’s your friends that keep you afloat’ – A deep dive in to the brilliant new Josie Lloyd novel #LifeSavingForBeginners
Ahoy there! A quick post to tell you about fellow writer & mermaid @JosieLloydWriter’s brilliant novel #LifeSavingForBeginners which comes out this Thursday. These are a few of the reasons why I loved it, and why I think you should read it…

🌊 It’s a love letter to Brighton & Hove. A hymn to the power of the sea, and of friendship.
🌊It perfectly captures the way that the sea is our religion. The way we flock there for morning prayer every day we can, via the magic of whatsapp. (Only this morning I was on a snooze-marathon when the reply to my ‘shall we’ got me up and at ‘em like nothing else can, chucking on my ‘no-thinking’ suit & swim shoes and running down to the shore where Susie, Josie and Ziggy the four-legged coast-guard were waiting and we swam out to the second buoy, leaving us feeling charged up for the rest of the day!)
🌊 It’s a celebration of the strength of the sea, and how it really does make you feel super-powered (or, after a winter swim, invincible) against whatever the day throws at you. It’s amazing for dimming the din of the #ADHD brain too. It is absolutely our lifeline. The days I don’t swim, I really feel it. What’s so lovely in ‘Lifesaving for Beginners’ is that the more they swim, the more the sea slowly gives each character strength, (and not just in their muscles).
🌊 It has some lovely depictions of the moon-swim massives… only the other night we were bopping about to music in the waves under a salmon moon just like in the novel! (See fig B)



🌊 It’s super skilfully plotted, with all the threads overlapping wonderfully – so much so that I yelped in glee on the beach yesterday at my friend when a plot twist happened that made me so relieved for one of the characters!
🌊 There is SO much wisdom in the book. Insights into ‘The Change’ that really made me think. And facts about the moon and how it affects the tides, that I’ve never quite understood but now do…just about!
🌊 It very cleverly weaves in the issue of the sewage crisis into the story in a non-preachy way… with some lovely plugs for our @southcoastsirens and @SASBrighton and the dangers of those @southernwatermedia ‘spills’.
🌊 Above all… it’s so visceral in its description of cold-water swimming, and of the warmth of friendship:) If you enjoyed the cameraderie in #BreakUpClub or if you love swimming, or if you’ve ever thought about running away to the seaside… you need to read this book! It made me laugh, it made me smile in recognition, it made me cry AT LEAST three times.
🌊 It made me so grateful to be part of the real life Sea-Gals (and guys!). I was given Josie’s first book #ComeTogether to work on in the Random House Marketing division when I was fresh out of uni. I was a fan girl then; I never dreamed 20 years later I’ve ended up in Hove as a sea-gal! Small world to say the least.

Congrats Josie, and good luck with the launch this Thursday! I’ve no doubt it will be a huge success for you… and for Brighton tourism! I reckon once people read this novel, new seagal recruits will flock here in their Dry-robes in droves, and our lovely beach will be even busier… luckily there’s plenty of sea to go around. See you on the pebbles:)

PS Here are a few of my favourite extracts which sum up why I love this book… albeit badly snapped, sorry…



LifeSavingForBeginners is out this Thursday with Harper Collins @hqstories – Order your copy now!
WE’VE BEEN WEARING MASKS SINCE LONG BEFORE COVID-19 : THE TRUTH ABOUT WHAT IT’S LIKE TO LIVE WITH FEMALE ADHD
Hello, and thank you for enduring a tsunami of ADHD related content on my socials the last few months. Hope it’s given you some insight into what it’s like to live with a frenetic barrage of scattergun things in your face all day every day! I thought I’d take a moment to put it all in context of what living with ADHD is really like – ’cause the struggle really is real – and it’s not just about little boys on window sills.
Chances are if you’re a woman with ADHD – diagnosed or otherwise – you’ve been ‘masking’ your whole life. Trying to squeeze your lostness, your lateness, your ‘too-much-ness’ (and your brilliance?) into an ‘NT’ shaped mould for so long that you’re probably pretty exhausted by now. All because society hasn’t cottoned on to the ways in which ADHD manifests in women – and that it’s not just a little boys club. I’ve been masking for as long as I can remember. I’d love to see it change for the next generation.
COMPUTER SAYS NO
Here’s the really crazy thing: As I write this, the word ‘Neurodiversity’ is still being underlined with a squiggly red line, like it’s not even a thing.
How are we going to push for more understanding if people think we’re a typo?! Sure, society is slowly becoming more inclusive of divergent brain types, but when Google, Apple and Microsoft don’t recognise the word itself, we clearly still have a way to go.
Take it from me: ADHD is real AF. And it’s funny AF. It’s as close as you can get to everyday clowning without a Gaulier diploma. Leaving the house takes 5 re-entries, minimum.
You lock up. You forget something. You go in to get what you forgot, put something down. Lock up, remember you’ve left that thing. This goes on and on, ad infinitum. (See our sketch ‘Filling’). I truly believe there should be a bell that rings out every time an ADHD-er manages to finally leave the house and start their day.
THE STRUGGLE IS CLINICAL
So ADHD is funny. But having ADHD is also f*cking horrific, and f*cking hard. It affects the brain’s executive functioning and your ability to ‘adult’… in a multitude of amusing yet tragic ways.
Imagine you had a SatNav and you’d programmed where you were going, but it turns out the SatNav is possessed and keeps changing its mind… also the driver is an orangutan on acid and keeps turning the wheel and veering off into B roads. That’s what it feels like to have ADHD all of the time.
Like you’ve gone into a room and forgotten why you went in there.
Like you just cut a huge chunk of text but forgot to paste it and now it’s lost in the sky forever.
Like you’re fighting not to interrupt someone but you know if you wait your turn, the thing you want to say will have melted like a Dali clock.
Like your brain has an air traffic control centre but all the operators are having a nap, so all the thought-aeroplanes and ideas keep crashing into one another.
Like when you have an idea, there’s another four inside it, nesting like matryoshka thought-bubbles which could burst at any time if you don’t act on them that second… so much so that I actually now live in a state of suspended terror of having new ideas.
It’s like you’re writing a blog about ADHD and keep jumping metaphors, or switching medium half way through. This, what you’re reading now, is trying to be a blog, but it has been all of the things. A TV show, a live show, a Whatsapp group, an interpretive dance… a poem, a song, a podcast… and now it’s a blog. again…truly, it can be exhausting.
forgive us – WE DON’T HAVE A BOUNCER 🙂
So if you know anyone that’s always losing things or always late but you’ve never understood why they can be so selfish – spare a thought today for what their brain is doing to them that day: I promise you inside they’re crying inside and chastising themselves for letting you down. They love you really but their brains just work differently. Their brains are rapier sharp, and lightning fast, but in all the wrong directions. They are constantly seeing connections between things, instead of the things themselves. They’re trying desperately to go straight ahead but they can’t because someone else keeps grabbing the wheel.
BUT WE ALL LOSE THINGS A LOT, AND GET DISTRACTED EASILY!
Of course. Of course! The confusing thing about ADHD is that the symptoms seem normal. Lots of people struggle to get out of bed, run late, or struggle to find their train ticket…

But here’s the thing: to live with ADHD is to have the symptoms of inattentiveness that neurotypicals (NT)s identify with occasionally… but dialled up to the power of clusterf*ck , ALL DAY, EVERY DAY to the point where your brain is on fire and you’re curled up on the floor of a supermarket aisle with indecision paralysis. That’s when you’re not just ‘a bit scatty’, you need to seek help.
“You Can’t Have ADHD. You’ve had books published.”
The biggest challenge of ADHD is its invisibility. The second biggest is getting diagnosed in this country as a female: a ten-year Crystal Maze ‘Admin’ zone for people who clinically can’t do admin. ADHD is still dangerously misdiagnosed, among female-identifying people in particular. Far from being just a thing noisy little boys have, it’s a condition that affects approximately 4 % of UK adults, of all genders.
Like many women, I don’t have the ‘H’, and I’ve also been a relative high-achiever, which is why it took me 37 years to get properly diagnosed. I was told I couldn’t have it because I got a First at university and because I’ve published books. Because of this stereotype and misunderstanding of the condition, many girls have ‘lost’ half their lives – being written off as having anxiety or depression. What’s closer to the truth: they’ve probably LEARNED anxiety after 20 years of masking, and trying to live with a square-peg brain in a round-hole world.
Send in the Clowns
Luckily for some of us, the ability to laugh at our folly, or turn it into comedy has been a lifeline, and it’s got me out of some very dark places. That’s why I wanted to write this today – to give a bit of background. After being made covid-redundant with only one month of furlough, from what was allegedly one of the most ‘inclusive’ and ‘diverse’ agencies in the UK, I found myself living in lockdown with my multi-talented best friend from childhood Lauren Taylor, also ADHD but the inattentive type. She’s also ACTUALLY a professional clown among other things.
See Fig A. – taken around the time we both suspected we might have ADHD and began the 10 year process of getting diagnosed. Living with Lauren again in 2021 after Covid hit, she persuaded me to take a year off to focus on comedy… and we started work on this… a whole nesting doll of comedy content from a neurodiverse universe – about what it is to feel like a square peg girl in a round hole world.
‘Life in ADHD’ was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever made, simply because – in the strictly pre-Zuckerberg sense of the word – the ‘META’ ness of it became unmanageable. The attempt to put into words & film the chaos of what the ADHD brain feels like – to make the viewer and reader feel a little of what it’s like – but on film – while also trying to write a book about it (side note must finish that)- well, it turns out that trying to convey the chaos of an ADHD brain on screen, while being in the chaos of that ADHD brain, is a recipe for absolute insanity.
So the actual editing process quickly became so endlessly brain-smashing that Lauren & I nearly drove ourselves utterly crazy, and we had to sound the Meta Alarm. See Fig. B
ADHD + ASD = Organised Chaos
So it couldn’t have been done without the brilliance of Tristan Alice Nieto – who stepped in a year later – around May 2021 when I’d begun to utterly unravel in the edit. Editor & graphic artist Tristan Alice took my swirling pit of creative matryoshka dolls and mixed metaphors and made sense of it all… and shaped it into something a neurotypical viewer can actually process. Truly her ASD superpowers saved the day. I couldn’t be more grateful to her, to Lauren, and everyone else that’s helped along the way. If you know anyone wanting an editor, graphic artist or story-finder, hit up Tristan Alice Nieto; she’s your gal.
The end result – despite being another no-budget venture – is something I’m really proud of. Not least because it was made only with a neurodiverse team – even the beautiful soundtrack by singer-songwriter/angel-voiced ADHD-er Fiona Fey. It was a joy to co-write the lyrics with her – a last-minute scramble of Whatsapp voice-note demos kind of joy – but a joy nonetheless. Hear the track here in the trailer above, which we released 3 months after the film release (obv).
Here’s why I think you should watch the show – if you’re ADHD or not:
I’ve been blown away by the many heart-warming messages and comments from people all over the world that have loved it … that they feel ‘seen’ and it’s ‘every day of their life explained’. Even actual doctors and lecturers in Germany saying they’re going to teach their students with it! And some lovely tweets from Rory Bremner who called it ‘🤣 So true’ and said he has ‘a degree in Filling’.
I’m relieved there’s been only positive comments from the ADHD world and NTs alike… and that some of the sketches have blown up on Tik Tok, Facebook & Youtube already. We also had over 100 new subscribers in a few days which is a lot for us! We also gained full support from the ADHD Foundation & Neurodiversity Charity among others. All this with no budget.
‘K, but what IS ACTUALLY IN THE SHOW ?
Life in ADHD is a mixed-media omnishambles designed to mimic the scattered feeling of the Dopamine-deficient mind. It’s a sketch/character comedy show that goes under the hood of the ADHD brain… exploring its hilarity and horror. It tells the story of a dreamer Lola Mildew trying to do adulting in spite of her executive dysfunction, while her alter ego Prof. Penny, PhDADhD, guides us through WTAF ADHD even is. Truly, the struggle is real.
Much like an ADHD brain, the pilot episode breaks off into little nesting pieces – so you can consume it as inattentive bitesize pieces here as ‘modules’, or watch the whole Cluster-f*ck Matryoshka 25” edit which they slot into here – along with many other bonus scenes.
It’s also a tiny bit educational about why we get tangled up like Lola (we don’t have a fully operation pre-frontal cortex – more of a pre-frontal vortex!). As well as standalone observational sketches there are educational modules like The Science Bit (ish), the ADHDictionary and ‘ADD FML’ (F*CK MY LIFE) – confessions from real life ADHD-ers.
It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea but do check it out and take it in the spirit it’s meant: to find a way to laugh at the challenges of neurodiversity, and also to celebrate its power too.
Masters of the Neurodiverse
Because that’s the other thing: As much as it can be a disability, when ADHD is treated and understood, it is also a super-power. Some of history’s greatest thinkers had/have it – from (apparently) Albert Einstein to Richard Branson to Ant McPartlin.
As Rory Bremner put it in his BBC documentary, ‘People living with ADHD are the shark bait, the ones that go the extra mile and warn others of danger… We’re the ones who take the risks… show others where the possibilities are…. that’s great. We’ll have that.”
There you have it. We are trailblazers, not typos
So if you’ve made it this far without someone else grabbing the wheel then thank you, and I hope you enjoy watching the pilot or snacking on the modules… If they resonate or you know someone that they might help, please help share them on any of the socials.
It goes without saying that this has been a no-budget production, so if you enjoy it then please consider donating to our Patreon so we can eat (not that we remember half the time).
Love & dopamine, Lorelei & the Melon Comedy crew x
P.S. Sorry this post is now two months late (standard ADHD time!). I meant to write it for the last day of #ADHDAwarenessMonth in November, and of course I started it but I got distracted with gargantuan tech issues and overwhelm so it sat in drafts for months while I started a million other projects like a non-fiction book about the hilarity & horror of female ADHD… which amazingly, is now about half-written and I’m really excited by! Just need to pick from the 4 billion titles.
CC: The ADHD Gift ADHD humour ADHDAdults Jenn has ADHD Neurodiversity Support Group Neurodiverse AF Neurodivergents and Friends ADHD Shitposting help with ADHD Laura Clery Neurodivergent Rebel ADHD Foundation