"If the accident will" - Paul Dean's (work)blog

The full playlist, in order, is available here.

The most magical: Tam Lin - Anaïs Mitchell

A long, long time ago now, when the world was still young and when there were more living Beatles than there were Dungeons & Dragons editions, two of my most memorable introductions to the folk canon came via Fairport Convention’s long, rollicking renditions of the sixteenth century songs Matty Groves and Tam Lin.

Bawdy Matty Groves tells the story of a blasé noblewoman who picks up a handsome young man at church. The unrepentant pair are discovered in bed (“Well I like your featherbed but better I like your sheets. Best of all I like your ladywife who lies in my arms, asleep!”) by her furious and then murderous husband, because folk just must have a healthy dose of scandal and death now and then. Tam Lin, on the other hand, is a classic romance, perhaps the classic romance of folk music. A young woman meets an oddly charismatic man in the forest, gets pregnant, but then realises she is carrying not the child of some handsome fellow, but an elf or fae. In different versions of the ballad she is variously frustrated or conflicted, while in Anaïs Mitchell’s superbly-arranged version, elegantly constructed from intricate, almost hypnagogic guitar and vocal interplay, she refuses all help and decides to terminate the pregnancy. As is usually the case with the song, over several beautiful verses the strange man she’s met convinces her they can have a happy family together just as long as she can perform an unusual task to free him from the influence of the evil Fairy Queen.

I’ve heard a few Tam Lin’s in my time, but Mitchell’s may well be the best by a country mile. However, amongst the endless reinterpretations of this song across decades in which empires have risen and fallen, you have to try Benjamin Zephaniah’s twenty-first century genre-spanning take, in which the handsome man becomes a refugee menaced not by the fickle authority of any Fairy Queen, but instead by customs, immigration, lawyers and public opinion around refugees.

The most modern: Los Angeles - Big Thief

In what seems to be one long, delightful and sprawling retrospective, Big Thief unspool a stream-of-consciousness celebration of love and friendship in a beautiful three and a half minutes. Bouncing across time and place, the song touches on travel and great spectacle with subtle moments and small memories. It’s bright and it’s beautiful and it’s a browse through the pages of someone’s most sentimental of scrapbooks.

The whole thing is so charming and affirming that you might not even notice the song is just two chords, which is an absolutely bananas concept and quite the feat. The last song that I failed to notice was built upon just two chords was Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, so that probably tells you something. Shall we talk about Bruce Springsteen now?

The most underappreciated? The Line - Bruce Springsteen

Thirty years old but just as relevant today, The Line follows the very best tradition of folk music everyman storytelling as it narrates a border guard’s experience in southern California. The different chapters almost taste of dust and sand, as they are blown gently, almost effortlessly, across the lightest of accompaniments.

The job, it turns out, is not as simple as it might seem. People are not as simple as they might seem. Perhaps nobody here is really doing the right thing. Springsteen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad is probably my favourite of his folk songs (and has been famously, explosively reinterpreted with Tom Morello), but I think The Line is one of his least appreciated.

The most gentle: I Wish My Baby Was Born - The Be Good Tanyas

So much of the delight I find in folk music comes from discovering reinterpretations of the same song, many of which can be wildly different and sometimes have evolved over hundreds of years. I Wish My Baby Was Born seems to have evolved from a wistful seventeenth century song called A Brisk Young Sailor Courted Me and (as much folk has) found some new forms after crossing the Atlantic.

Some versions of this song (and the many other versions married to different lyrics) are mournful or outright tragic but, over three hundred years later, the Be Good Tanyas decided to record something dreamlike and wistful instead. Almost hushed, lullaby-style vocals glide over little more than three chords like morning mist over a silent woodland lake. I’ve never quite understood why this song seems to combine a wish for one birth alongside the contemplation of another death, but this melancholic mystery is all part of the appeal.

The most excitable: Parson's Farewell - Bellowhead

I’m not quite sure if Parson’s Farewell counts as a folk song or a folk dance, but this piece of music apparently first published in 1651 sure as hell has all the energy needed for the latter. Years back now, when I lived in a shared house in Hammersmith, when the season’s rain would dapple a single skylight above my bed as all tone and hue was drained from the sky, my friend gifted me a Bellowhead CD with the suggestion I might like it. It was an excellent choice.

With a full, modern (or near enough) band arrangement and absolutely clattering momentum, Bellowhead drag you along like a companion who has just yanked you from your seat to return to some celebration or other that is wet with spilled drinks and bright with strings of swinging, shining lights. Who is this person trying to dance alongside you? Is this a wedding you’re all attending? It sure sounds like someone just got married to fun.

The most seasonally appropriate: Christmas in Washington - Joan Baez

Originally written by the American socialist singer Steve Earle, Christmas in Washington tells the story of post-election comedown and compromise around, I believe, the re-election of President Bill Clinton in 1996. Earle’s lyrics describe it as “four more years of things not getting worse” and lament a lack of a real political left in America.

As the ballad progresses, they also recall lost unions and name long-dead Americans who once spearheaded social change, such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and, repeatedly, Woodie Guthrie. With perfectly understated accompaniment from her backing band, Joan Baez again blesses these lyrics, as she does in so many songs, with one of the finest voices in modern folk music.

The most socialist: Worker’s Song - Dick Gaughan

(That's such a folk album cover. Zero attempt to appear even remotely cool.)

Folk musicians new or old (or even olde) have rarely sung about being rich and, in the great spectrum of folk subjects across the ages, you’re infinitely more likely to find a song about dragons, shipwrecks or suddenly getting pregnant. However, folkies fucking love having a job and will tell you all about the job that they have, over and over, until the last syllable of recorded time.

Maybe the job they have is hard or maybe it is fun or maybe it is in the fields or a factory or they have a hoe or a hammer, but as sure as a maiden is fair or a road is long, a folkie is a working person and you’re going to know all about it. It’s always the various lords (or later the landlords) who are the ones that suck. Gaughan’s early interpretation of Ed Pickford’s Worker’s Song, which has been covered many times since the early 1980s, explains why.

The most Dolly Parton - Silver Dagger - Dolly Parton

But wait! As well as money, jobs, death and the dangers of a deep, dark forest, folk music has always been particularly good when it comes to telling you about how positively dreadful men are. It’s been doing this in a plain speaking, matter-of-fact, pre-feminist way since before the first steam trains were hauling coal to the first factories and, thanks here to Dolly Parton and some bouncing banjo, it continues to do so today.

Silver Dagger may be of Welsh origin, making it particularly appropriate for Parton, who is also of the same heritage. Like all genres, the boundaries of folk can be endlessly debated and this version of Silver Dagger might be considered much closer to country by some, but really, who’s to say? (Me, because I’m making this list and because my introduction to “folk” was probably Axl Rose wailing “NAWK NAWK NAWKIN’ AWN HAHVAWNS DAWAWAWAHHHH” and that was just fine thank you very much.)

The most Canadian? The Witch of the Westmoreland - Stan Rogers

The absolute genius of the late Archie Fisher’s (who passed away just last month) The Witch of the Westmoreland is how it sounds like it could be ye olde English folk crafted alongside such classics as Tam Lin or even Scarborough Fair. It was in fact first released in 1976, alongside Devil Woman, Fernando and The Boys Are Back in Town. Carrie was playing in cinemas and flares were flapping around ankles.

It remains just as fantastical as Tam Lin, with its evocative tale of a wounded warrior healed by a spell (and perhaps more than just a kiss), and Canadian folk legend Stan Rogers’ belting baritone gives it a particular strength and majesty. This version holds an extra special place in my heart as Rogers’ classic Northwest Passage was one of the first pieces of Canadiana to really work its way into my soul. I would listen sentimentally to his son’s reinterpretations of it during my over year-and-a-half limbo as I waited to return to Canada.

The most eclectic: Go Your Way - Anne Briggs

If you haven’t heard of Anne Briggs, that’s because she released just two albums to universal acclaim, before declining almost all publicity or promotion and then retreating to the northernmost reaches of Scotland’s remote Atlantic islands. It seems that Briggs really liked to sing folk music and also to have the sort of fun that involves spontaneously jumping in the sea or imbibing large amounts of alcohol, but wasn’t so interested in actually promoting, touring or maybe even turning up to the gigs that she had been booked for. This was a splendid way to live a life, but rather incompatible with the hopes and demands of a record label interested in making money. Various Briggs recordings were desperately sought out and offered up in the decades that followed her brief but intense influence on the 1970s British folk scene, but Briggs herself resurfaced about as many times as you can count on the fingers of one hand after your second drastic and dreadful industrial accident.

Go Your Way is eclectic within even the Briggs canon, being both an original composition co-written by her, but also by featuring guitar accompaniment. Many of the other songs on her debut album are simply sung acapella.

The saddest: Casimir Pulaski Day - Sufjan Stevens

With all the beauty of the clearest of cold mornings, this is surely one of the most sublime songs on this list, as well as one of the most heartbreaking. Replete with double meanings (morning/mourning, a cardinal, complications), this isn’t really about the Illinois holiday, but actually a story of a childhood friend lost to cancer, each line a fragmented memory viewed somewhat from a distance that, together, form the pieces of a shattered image as glorious and tragic as a stained glass triptych. It’s full of understated anger and disappointment at a world that is not fair or just and that no amount of faith can correct: “Tuesday night at the Bible study we lift our hands and pray over your body, but nothing ever happens.”

A piece of music delicately crafted around themes of hope and loss, Casimir Pulaski Day ends with a loss of innocence and the idea that God might be a disappointment: “And he takes and he takes and he takes.”

The most debatable: Whispers of the Past - :Of the Wand & the Moon:

“This isn’t folk!” someone will inevitably protest, and then the next of the great Folk Wars will begin. If that’s a conflict you wish to fight in, then be my guest, but I’m very happy with my accurate and extremely succinct definition of the genre: “Everything is acoustic, all the time, except for when it isn’t.” (See, for example, the end of the Silver Dagger entry, above.)

The post-industrial evolution of folk music has produced neofolk, a subgenre that often sounds like some mix of dark wave or even gothic music, but the instrumentation used here by :Of the Wand & the Moon: really isn’t so far away from the sort of early electric arrangement that Bob Dylan might employ. I first encountered this song during the development of Pacific Drive, and listened to it while endlessly testing all sorts of features. The groove is divine and the rhythm section on this composition are so in the pocket they might as well be the pair of fuzzy gloves you’ve taken with you on a chilly walk. Go on, rummage around in there, you might even have some seeds for the crows. What a delight.

The most twee: Caledonia - Dougie MacLean

After the effortlessly stylish Whispers of the Past there is no way that I can frame Caledonia as a remotely cool or hip composition. It’s the sort of thing that has your pipe-smoking uncle turn up the volume on his record player and then grumble if anyone dares talk while it’s playing. It’s a song for evenings warmed with mid-range scotch and discount dad socks with sewn-in slogans like “DON’T TALK TO ME, I’M NAPPING.” But still, I love it so much.

This modern Scottish ballad is simply one man saying “I like Scotland and I really miss it,” which is indeed very valid and relatable, and the only thing I love more than this simple tribute is the piano player in the video who looks so content with his job and like he’s having the best time playing his instrument. Unbothered. Moisturized. Happy. In his Lane. Focused. Flourishing. And probably about to go and read a magazine about model trains. That’s fine.

The one where the child dies: Annabelle - Gillian Welch

Ah, fuck. While Dougie MacLean might love and miss Scotland, Gillian Welch is not having a good time in Alabama. Her family is poor, her farm sucks and, well, her baby is dead.

Remember how I said folkies love singing about their jobs? More than a few of them kinda like you to know all about their poverty and their suffering, too. The sort of thing where the bank foreclosed, the well dried up, the farm burned down and so on. Sometimes (often, actually), there’s a shipwreck, but Annabelle has nothing quite so tragically epic amongst its lyrics. Instead, we start with twenty acres and one sterile mule. At the end of this highlight from Welch’s critically-acclaimed debut album, we have even less.

The most romantic: She Moved Through the Fair - Van Morrison

Like so much of the best music, at its core a lot of classic folk can be a clever but not necessarily challenging melody complimenting a fairly basic sequence of chords. That’s it. It’s what a musician does with this skeleton of an idea that really shapes a song, and this is how we end up with both terrific and truly terrible interpretations of the same thing. You may think you hate folk music because you heard something that was saccharine or twee or bombastic, or even so refined that any remotely sharp edges or last remaining signs of character were sanded down to nothing. You may love something because it emphasised an excellent singer, or wove in a genius embellishment, or did something with the rhythm you’d never felt before.

I think I love this relatively simple version of She Moved Through the Fair precisely because it is a little saccharine. If I ever got married, it would be the most sentimentally appropriate song for who I am and how I’d feel. It’s not entirely clear if this is an affirmation on the eve of a wedding or a ghost story about a tragically lost love, but I adore how Van Morrison (meh) and The Chieftains (hooray, though here they do look like a bunch of bored lads waiting for their charter bus) work together to tell the tale of a woman who glides more than she walks. And isn’t that exactly how we think of those we are in love with?

The most tragic: Down the Wrong Road Both Ways - Jason Molina

I first became aware of Jason Molina when a friend of mine linked me to his work with a sombre comment of how the man had just passed away at the age of thirty-nine. I didn’t know who he was. It turned out that Molina had been influencing all sorts of American songwriters through an interesting, meandering career in which he had even played bass guitar in several heavy metal bands.

Much of his work, including the most well-known version of this song, involves full band arrangements. However, I think this solo rendition is not only superior, it’s an absolutely beautiful performance. I have absolutely no idea who recorded this, or when, or where, but if this is how Molina was on a typical day then any and all of us can but hope to be half as good at our very best. Even outside of its broader context, Down the Wrong Road Both Ways is such a sad and soulful piece of music that I don’t think there’s much out there in this big, wide world that quite measures up.

The most vindicated: Pink Moon - Nick Drake

Another sad loss, Drake was only twenty-six when he died. He had struggled with depression, with the pressure of performing, even with socialising with his friends. His three albums had received a mixed, muted response from critics and were not selling. Now, fifty years after his death, his music has been bought, played or streamed millions of times. Whether a validation or not, his work appeared in a commercial, has won gold records and has even been championed by Brad Pitt. It was always something unique, but it took the world a while to realise this.

I don’t know  what Pink Moon is about, but I feel like it’s a gentle warning, someone’s way of hinting that they’re soon to be your “I told you so” friend. I could’ve picked one of several of Drake’s unusual, sometimes haunting songs, composed with his very unusually-tuned guitar, but Pink Moon isn’t simply the signature choice. With its unusual prophecy, it’s by far the most appropriate choice, too.

The most suitable for eventide: The Blacksmith - Planxty

We’re closing in on the end of this collection. Perhaps the wind is picking up, strong enough now that it is almost threatening. Perhaps your drink is not only cooling, but now unpleasantly, distastefully cold. It could be time to close a window, to switch on a light, to turn up the heating. Your thoughts may be wandering, your mind distracted. Something now takes me all the way back to 1998, to the time I played Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues on the sixth form common room hifi, and someone told me they loved it and had never heard anything like it before. Neither had I, I said. Neither had I.

It is time, now, for The Blacksmith, another love story granted that particular framing that folk so often likes to give. Are you excited to be married? And who is your love? And where has he gone? And when will he return?

The most ethereal: The North Star Grassman and the Ravens - Sandy Denny

Sandy Denny gets to close out this collection with not one song but two, so important she is to my discovery of folk. From the first moment I heard her sing “You take away homes from the homeless and leave them to die in the cold” in Genesis Hall my musical tastes were forever changed. Denny is lucky to be not quite as forgotten as Drake nor as obscure as Briggs, but her breakaway work is underrated alongside her time with folk legends Fairport Convention.

The North Star Grassman and The Ravens is the title track from an unusual album that, to me, is more Denny than anything else of hers that I can think of. The slow, somnambulistic, piano-led composition seems to tell the tale of someone forever at sea, never to return to port, perhaps not missing and yet most certainly gone for good. The track may well be one of at least two musical metaphors for one of the defining moments in Fairport Convention’s sixty year history.

The best: Farewell, Farewell - Fairport Convention

In the early hours of the 12th of May 1969 the folk band Fairport Convention were travelling back from a performance when their tour van left England’s M1 motorway and rolled down an embankment in a violent crash. Travelling with the band was guitarist Richard Thompson’s girlfriend Jeannie Franklyn, who died at the scene while, according to Fairport co-founder Simon Nicol, doctors at a nearby hospital “were unable to bring [drummer] Martin Lamble back to life.” Sandy Denny, who had not been travelling with the band, was so distraught when she later arrived at the hospital that she also had to be admitted. Another Fairport co-founder, bassist Ashley Hutchings, left the band before the end of the year, as did Denny, and Nicol said he believed the crash “hung over” the band and contributed at least to Hutching’s departure.

Using the classic English folksong Willie O Winsbury as its basis, Thompson subsequently composed Farewell, Farewell, a short song of guilt and loss and beauty and hope for the future, where happiness and sadness are mixed as one. The song was cut on Fairport’s next and most successful album, Liege & Lief, which was considered not only a breakthrough for the band, but for all of modern British folk. “The cold north wind will blow again,” Thompson wrote, but while Denny would sing these words beautifully, Thompson has never (as far as anyone seems to know) sung them live, refusing to perform the song since its recording. Farewell, Farewell has been performed by other iterations of Fairport over the decades, but no version comes close to the original, which captures a band at the moment before both its breakaway success and also its splintering. Thompson himself would also leave within two years, while Denny would briefly return to the band and then later pass away in 1978 at just thirty-one.

Perhaps more than any other song in folk, Farewell, Farewell is a snapshot of a moment made of tragedy and wonder and sadness and potential, a song made of parts old and new that reminds us how, no matter what may happen, tomorrow offers no promises and yet will always bring the new. You cannot undo what is done, but the future is never certain and, if autumn gives way to winter, no matter how cold that may be, spring is always, always certain to follow.

Instead, I’ve attempted for months to write this, over and over, before once again (metaphorically) scrunching it up into a ball and hurling it into a bin, or returning it to the same (metaphorical) drawer, or yet again (metaphorically) setting what I’d written alight in a mix of shame and frustration. Occasionally I have done nothing but sit, inert, staring at a collection of notes that I can’t turn into anything coherent in the same way I would be unable to assemble a ten thousand piece Lego set without any instructions.

I am doing that right now. And I can’t help but feel all this effort is a whole lot of fuss about nothing.

And I wonder if anyone else can relate.

All of this started almost a decade and a half ago. I had begun to make videos about board games on the internet, something that made me just a little more visible online. Making videos about board games on the internet hurls you into a kind of nicheception situation, slots you into a niche within a niche within a niche, giving you the most marginal but nevertheless tangible profile online. You are proportionally about as famous as the mayor of a rural small town that is way, way past its prime and, in the right context (much like if that mayor walked down Main Street), you might be noticed. Talked about, even. People, even if it’s a tiny fraction of people, perceive you.

I don’t entirely know what it was about me (and, hey, that’s a key thing here: I don’t entirely know what it was about me), but it didn’t take long for the bear thing to start. The bear thing was occasional but repeated comments around how I liked bears, because I do like bears and I used to enjoy being much more enthusiastic about sharing all sorts of passions and interests online. The bear thing was a tiny but vocal group of knowing commenters who knew that what I really liked was bears, that being big, hairy gay men. It didn’t matter that I didn’t talk about those bears, or anything close to that, people still knew. Paul Dean likes bears. Pass it on.

What did matter was that there was a void there that could be filled. A decade and a half ago I’d already made the very deliberate decision that my online presence would be primarily about me (navel-gazingly so, just look at some of the things I write) and I tried to be careful about how I referenced friends or, in particular, partners. I might share personal, revealing things, but other people were often in some way blurred, distanced, or anonymised. Most people didn’t need to find themselves opted in to my bullshit, my small-town-mayor-sized nonsense, and I found I was beginning to resent it when that happened to me, when someone would want to tag or include me in their posts without first checking with me, or tried to portray or exaggerate some association that wasn’t really what it looked like (“Hey, we aren’t actually friends!” “I don’t endorse this thing!” “Please don’t treat me like I’m a cool accessory!”). It became apparent that the spaces I left presented opportunities. They also invited some mix of speculation and extrapolation. Nature abhors a vacuum, but so too does the internet.

Again, I don’t know what invited this speculation (it certainly wasn't me). I don’t entirely know what it was about me.

I quickly learned that, no matter how much navel-gazing guff you ooze out onto the page, how explicit or obvious you are in some action or opinion, a person on the internet may simply not see (or not search for) any of that. Instead, they might assume something quite different about you and perhaps even go as far as to express it. You could, if you want, in your small-town-mayor-sized nicheception existence, attempt to address this and go around the internet Correcting Everyone Who is Wrong About You by providing all the appropriate Facts and Evidence (“Actually, I live in Canada.” “Actually I said this thing, which you can read here.”), but to me that seems like a shortcut to full-blown, eye-bleeding, terminal insanity. Quite seriously, I think this is both a terrible waste of time and yet also something that I think I’ve watched someone try to do. And go at least eye-twitchingly insane from.

You can rent as many venues as you want, so to speak. Host all the annoying brass bands. People will still miss your announcements. People will still make up their own minds. And, to some degree, it’s foolish to expect anything else. The moment you put yourself out there, in any form of out there, you have to accept at least some loss of identity.

Some loss. But my problem was, and still is, not having nearly enough to occupy the spaces that I have created. To fill that vacuum.

I can’t find anything to identify as.

I have participated in Pride for almost twenty years, often more than once a year, should I happen to be in places that celebrate it at different times. I love the host of events, gatherings and parades that not only celebrate queer culture, but that also bring together an incredibly diverse demographic of people in a way that nothing else can. The very nature of Pride, some of the key values of which are inclusion, affirmation and support, encourage a wealth of different people to simply be themselves and to celebrate that. For me, that’s both one of the best and most fundamental things about it. “Turn up as you,” Pride says. “Because you’re fantastic.” Hooray! Cake or canapés. Brass bands. Or something.

I think it’s easy to understand not only how that philosophy brings all kinds of people together, but how it also inspires curiosity about those people. It strips away assumption. You have to start from a place of ignorance and openness. It’s a recipe for both treating people as unique individuals and for giving them the freedom to define themselves. To have so much control over their expression and identity.

People at Pride may or may not ask about me and I can’t offer them that much to define myself by but, most importantly, the vast majority of people will make very few assumptions. There is nothing I have to be.

Glorious.

But then, within a month, it’s all over. This Saturnalian-like freedom fades away and we have to go back to normal, slipping back into the ever-tightening straightjackets of society. We return to the not inconsiderable amount of existence that involves criteria and categories. We must report that we are this old, this tall, this gender, this ethnicity, this nationality, of this income bracket, and I am quickly lost amongst so much demographic drudgery. So many things that I was never consulted on, that I may have had little or no input into, are once again the measure of who and what I am. If that’s not enough, I didn’t get to choose my time or place of birth or my genes or my genitals or anything else about my biological inheritance. I have little say in who I am attracted to, how my body functions or the shape of this face, and many days I struggle to get this thing I’m inside to work the way I want it to, I struggle to feel good about how I look and I struggle to make peace with how my body does and does not function.

It isn’t just strangers on the internet who get to choose how to define me. It’s society, biology, even bureaucracy.

No thank you. I would like to opt out of all of that.

You know what? I’ve always disliked the phrase “coming out.” For me, it has some sense of admission attached to it, even some sense of obligation. You must step forward and declare your difference so that society, so that the straight people, can put you in an appropriate, separate category. It can risk framing someone’s identity or sexuality as a spectacle, or make a novelty of them. People aren’t novelties. I’m old enough to remember an era when many felt pressured to come out, were harassed and hounded about their sexuality like it was something society was entitled to, that the world needed to know, even a mystery to be revealed. And yet the world never needed to know that someone was straight.

I also remember those who would recoil in horror at any suggestion that they might not be heterosexual, who had to immediately set the record straight (pun intended) because of the sheer terror presented by the possibility of people considering anything else. The thought was enough to drive them eye-twitchingly insane. Metaphorically, they rented the largest venues, hosted the loudest brass bands for their various declarations and displays of straightness. Actually, they still do.

I have no intention of recoiling in horror at anyone’s suggestions but, after nearly a decade and a half of hints, conjecture and innuendoes, I am tired of both other people’s projections  and my own ongoing failure to define myself. I am so, so exhausted by so much of modern masculinity. I am sick of forever falling between stools. I am frustrated by assumption and expectation based around my gender or my appearance or my tastes or my behaviour. I am, frankly, extremely depressed by the idea that I cannot properly and authentically connect with any group or community because the best I can do is identify myself by what I am not or, even worse, what I don’t much enjoy being. I am supposed to be something but instead the best I can do is remain slightly alienated by my own body as I engage in an endless process of elimination, a crappy puzzle game that is like assembling that ten thousand piece Lego set without any instructions, knocking down every tile in a boundless game of Guess Who or playing interminable, infinite rounds of musical chairs. Once again, there’s one less spot to sit. The music rattles on. Maybe it’s an annoying brass band. Or something.

A decade and a half and I can’t find a word or description or category for what I am, but my public profile sure means plenty of other people have, wholly without my input or permission, even though I don’t entirely know what it was about me. I didn’t ask for that, much as I didn’t choose so much else, so I have only three things left to say today.

The first: This is not my coming out post. This is my opting out post.

The second: Don’t fucking tell me what I am.

The Luftwaffe would continue making sweeping changes to the urban geography of London, as well as several other British towns and cities, for quite some time. Enough so that, by the time I came to live in the city, decades later, a significant amount of its infrastructure existed as a direct result of efforts to rebuild and redesign. The consequences of fascist aggression were not abstract and historical, they were physically present in the world around me, much as they were directly responsible for guiding the growth and the branching of my family tree. Without twentieth century fascism, I might have been born at a different time. I would certainly have explored a differently designed country and even flown out of different airports that would have existed in different places, rather than have developed from the legacy of my nation’s air defence demands.

The Europe that those airports took me to would have looked different. Cities like Paris or Prague wouldn’t have had to advertise themselves as unspoiled, a word that we all knew meant you’d been spared remarkable new forms of warfare such as blitzkrieg or carpet bombing, where fascists found ways to wage war even faster and even fiercer, our continent their canvas. The people I met in many interesting journeys over many years would have told me different stories, none of which would have involved how their country was occupied or attacked. A man in Norway wouldn’t have told me how his family had to hide a gun under a tea cosy during a surprise visit by members of the fascist garrison. Veterans in Denmark wouldn’t have told me how they can’t forget what a burned body looks and smells like. Malta would not wear a medal on its flag after the small island spent years suffering some of the most intense air attacks of any place on the planet.

Fascists love to project power, and by far the most significant part of that projection effort involved the widespread use of force across Europe, manifested in generous bombing, shelling and demolition efforts. This was served alongside that new cocktail known as blitzkrieg, which combined lavish helpings of air and land forces mixed in with new military technologies to quickly seize land and objectives. Like London, a wealth of towns and cities were dramatically redesigned by this historic effort, resulting in the patchwork present we all grew up with. And, of course, countless hundreds of millions of lives were changed as a result of everything from deployment to displacement, not to mention the tens of millions who died in combat, as a result of collateral damage, or as a result of state sanctioned genocide.

Fascists have to project power, have to manifest aggression, because otherwise they can’t get things done. They can’t achieve what they want. They are bad at exercising logic, reason or empathy. They are bad at co-operation or compromise. Other people don’t want the things that the fascists want, so they have to use force, manipulation and coercion. Sometimes a lot, an awful lot. Maybe even a whole continent’s worth of people don’t want what the fascists want, so the fascists respond with continent-wide, even world-wide force, manipulation and coercion. It doesn’t matter how many people oppose the fascists. They’re fascists, so they think they’re better.

Fascists aren’t very good at self-reflection.

Fascists reshaped the twentieth century the only way they knew how, which was through this pugilistic persistence, through trying to punch their world into the shape that they wanted it to be, like a boxer trying to attack clay with the belief it will become a statue. Their legacy is craters and body counts and death camps and occasionally the shapes of sunken ships that are laid bare by low tide. Most of the things that they focused their efforts on, the technologies or ideologies they bent their brains toward, were things designed to punish, subjugate or kill anyone they decided was an opponent. Those opponents were other kinds of people, not only in other nations, but also in their own, should those people be deemed too different, or even simply dissenters. Conformity was really important to the fascists. Everyone should get along like one big, happy family. One, big, wholly identical, eternally harmonious family.

Fascists love to project conformity. And obedience. Neither of which tend to encourage criticism, compassion, analysis or new ideas. In fact, projecting power and conformity and obedience creates a culture of punishment. I guess punishing people makes you feel strong. And like you’re getting somewhere.

Their opponents, by their own definitions, turned out to be an awful lot of people. I’m going to step out on a limb here as I suggest that attempting to subjugate or to kill people, especially increasing numbers of them, might just alienate a lot of folks.

The fascists, projecting all that force, manipulation and coercion in all kinds of directions, all that power and conformity and obedience, were not very clever and, as their legacy shows, not very successful. It was a bad idea for them to try the things they tried and it caused a lot of problems for a lot of people, though ultimately the fascists found themselves among those suffering the most. They didn’t have the foresight to anticipate this. They didn’t possess the self-reflection to stop. They didn’t tolerate the kind of dissent and disagreement that would have allowed the development of any other ideas beyond their own very narrow, very tiny philosophy.

The fascists weren’t very clever and, unfortunately, they kept hating all the people who were clever. The people able to use empathy and intelligence and deduction and reasoning and data and research and patience and analysis and debate and discussion to point out when and where the fascists were wrong, over and over and over. It seems pretty obvious to me that repeatedly getting rid of anyone or anything that disagrees with you, whether a person or a piece of information, is a terrible idea. You will end up with people who are unable or unwilling to object. You will lose all perspective.

In spite of their carpet bombing and their blitzkrieg and their blowing the door off my grandparents’ house, the fascists were defeated by a combination of co-operation, innovation and their own colossal stupidity. The co-operation came from a remarkably diverse alliance of nations and peoples working together to use everything that they had, including widespread resistance in the countries the fascists occupied and even in their homelands. The innovation came from all these many different people offering new ideas and new technologies, some of which were even developed by people that the fascists had hated and alienated and tried to silence, discredit, expel or kill. The stupidity, as you can probably guess, also came from the fascists trying to silence, discredit, expel or kill just so, so many people who disagreed with them. Over and over. Like they were engaged in some sick, extremist form of absurdist performance art. Their inability to self-reflect, disagree or handle dissent lead to the fascists making a series of monumentally batshit fucknut book-of-records-level-idiot decisions across the years. Over and over. Their greatest hits included such things as invading new territories in which they didn’t have the strength to fight, ignoring such obvious strategic elements as predictable but horrific weather or the challenge presented by bodies of water, changing their minds constantly, hurling time and money after stupid projects or inventions, disregarding battle projections or reports they didn’t like, failing to follow through on plans, failing to correctly provision themselves for conflicts, inventing planes that frequently blew up and, at one point, building a tank that was so melodramatically heavy that not only would it sink into the ground, but it was also unable to cross almost any bridge.

The fascists invested time devising, funding and then constructing to completion a fighting machine that was too heavy to go anywhere and actually fight, not to mention too slow to get itself either into or out of trouble.

Think about that for a moment. They continued to consider themselves superior. These fascists thought they were a type of extra special, extra clever human being. They really weren’t very good at self-reflection. They had begun to lose imagination, creativity and, increasingly, even common sense. It turned out that people excited by power and force weren’t able to sustain much together, to foster much beyond infighting, bullying and corruption.

I talk about absurdist performance art but it’s perhaps important to remember the fascists' own relationship to art. Like dissenting people and dissenting ideas, the fascists would throw out or reject or destroy great swathes of art that they decided was inferior, irrelevant or insulting. Before the war in Europe started, some of the fascists actually staged two concurrent art exhibitions, one of which showcased only their own, superior art, the other of which contained a variety of other art they had decided was “degenerate” and unworthy. They were attempting to make a statement, but it seems that the irony was lost on them when the attendance figures made their own statement, showing that far, far more people, their own people, had visited the degenerate art exhibition.

The fascists sometimes made buildings. Fascist architecture was, like fascists, not very subtle or inventive or original. It was all about conformity and repetition and re-using old ideas, but in simpler and less expressive formats.

Part of the problem of hating everything that is different is that you are also doomed to hate things that are new.

Isn’t that sad?

Being born in nineteen eighty, I grew up under the still receding silhouette of twentieth century fascism. Not only had it shaped my family tree, remapped my country and reshaped my continent, it also remained fresh in the minds of so many millions of people. Its consequences were marked in stone in every town and village around the country. It was depicted in every type of media I consumed, whether that was films or music or books or the simple comics I’d read as a child. Again and again, they all showed how the fascists had done such terrible things, often simply by telling us relatively unvarnished, even uncritical facts. The fascists would be near caricatures, almost unbelievable but for all the evidence and all the personal accounts and even the ongoing discoveries, decades later, of some new transgression or travesty.

It was pretty obvious how bad the fascists were and how much worse they made everything. For everyone. Still, evidence and personal accounts and education, to remind people about the fascists and help them learn for themselves what had happened and how, was sure to help everyone remain disgusted and dismayed by it all. You wouldn’t want it to happen again and, even more so, you wouldn’t want to find yourself somehow ignorant of or even involved in something fascist. That would be unthinkable. That receding silhouette of fascism may shrink, but the harsh lessons of it all were too valuable to lose, in much the same way it would be foolish to throw away any other progress gained from such collective human effort.

Yet now I wonder if that receding silhouette was only the shadow cast by a sundial, ready to return again and fall over anyone ignorant or hateful enough to entertain the same ideas, to build the same habits, to express the same love for projections of power and conformity and obedience, the same desire to force, manipulate and coerce. I wonder about those who express such disdain for, and turn away from, examples of empathy and intelligence and deduction and reasoning and data and research and patience and analysis and debate and discussion. I wonder about the superiority they feel. I wonder about their capacity for self-reflection.

Six years ago this month I destroyed my suicide note. I burned it on a rainy August night and watched it curl into a tiny, helpless twisting of ashes and charred plastic that no longer had any power or purpose. The note was inside of a ziploc bag, a choice I’d made to ensure its integrity and survival against any of the several different plans I’d made to end my life, and this had melted into black strands of hair-like debris that reached up to nothing. One or two of my handwritten words remained half legible in this mess and tried to reach beyond the flames, to share their intent with the world, but they would never again mean anything to anyone.

I made videos of the burning and took a few pictures, a sort of ritual of recording, then I told a close friend what I’d just done, and then, for a very long time, I set the image as the wallpaper on my phone. It would be an ever-present reminder to me of my choice to stay alive. It was supposed to help me feel strong, though the truth is that I rarely did. It was the worst, most harrowing and most damaging period of my life and with help, honesty, insight, therapy, time and invaluable connection with others who have either seen the same things that I have or had comparable experiences, I managed to fumble and fight my way through it all. But I will never be the same. Six years is a long time and I am still profoundly affected by so much. I am still trying to understand things. I am still trying to figure myself out, to make sense of my identity, my situation, my experiences. To work out where I went and what happened. And I am still trying to move on.

These words are something about that ongoing experience, that work in progress, and about the dual significance of a span of six years. It is not so much about causes or causers, but instead about consequences and changes, and that’s for three reasons.

The first is because what happens after and as a result of trauma is so enduring and significant, perhaps even the most significant consideration of all, and it’s how we find ourselves discussing things like spans of six years or, for some people, far longer. I want to try to explain some of that sort of intensity and that sort of timescale.

The second is because it’s my hope that this is the most helpful way for me to talk about all this, the most illustrative to other people, the most constructive. I could have chosen many approaches, some which I believe might have been more harmful and destructive, and I don’t generally want to be a punitive or destructive person. Ultimately I think this is the most positive and productive approach.

The third is because I’m still not ready to unpack many things, as so much is still ongoing. I am not at the end of this, not out of the woods, and I think I need to know that I’ve reached the end of whatever journey I’m on before I can return to the start.

There is, allegedly, a power in choosing how your own story is told. So I’m choosing to tell it this way and, I hope, with the awareness that any exercise of power requires consideration and responsibility.

Six years is a long time, and while I’ve been trying to write and rewrite this thing for months, those months still pale in comparison to more than half a decade. A lot has changed in six years, and yet I also wish some things weren’t still the same, that I would have been able to make more progress, that I would have been able to create more distance.

Because, while I am six years from that burning note, from that summer rain, in my memory and my mind it doesn’t work like that. I still find myself beside that moment in time, like I could open the door to the next room and once again be right there.

---

Writing this has been very difficult. Writing is supposed to be one of the things that I am best at, and in the past words used to spill out of me so regularly that I wrote a tri-weekly diary, but I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that my relationship to writing has changed. It’s not just that this is a difficult topic. It’s that words don’t come as easily or as fluidly as they once did, making it much easier, all too appealing, to simply not push myself. To avoid things entirely.

But I wanted to write this, in part, because it would be another act of not giving up. I wanted to show myself what I could do, what I still can do, and that, even if I’m changed, I’m still stubborn enough to fumble and fight my way through.

---

I want you to imagine a house. It can be any kind of house, that part isn’t important. What is important is that the house is your home and you have lived there for a very, very long time. It is comfortable. It is safe. It is so intimately familiar that it is a part of your identity. Perhaps you grew up there, or you raised a family there, or you retired there. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s your home and that everyone knows you live there.

Next, imagine that you have a terrible day. The worst day. And at the end of this terrible, terrible day, on a bleak and dusky evening, you expect at least to be able to come back to your house, your home. You take the same route back to the same address, where you see the same building stood before you and open the same front door, ready for the comfort of a place you’ve made your own.

You enter this space that you’ve known for so long and you notice something is wrong. The first clue is something small, perhaps a lamp missing from its usual spot, or you collide with furniture moved somewhere unexpected. You feel for a light switch that is now on a different wall. You stumble on the stairs as you make your way to a bed that is hard and unwelcoming. In the morning, the light from the window is not only a different shape, but cast in the opposite direction.

The changes stop being so subtle. After you notice that a carpet is suddenly faded and pale, you open a closet to find it is twice as deep. Some of your possessions are missing. The spare room no longer has a skylight. The kitchen is a different colour, with different appliances, with no back door, half the size it once was because the walls have been moved. There are new rooms whose arrival and contents are both equally inexplicable. Your most cozy corner is now cold and uncomfortable. You must relearn the entire layout, from bathroom to basement, because moving around the way you once would only causes you to stub your toes, to trip, even to fall.

Your friends don’t understand why you no longer enjoy going back to your house, your home. They don’t understand why you screamed at the different closet, why the sunlight on the wall makes you nervous. Being in your own home now hurts and scares you. How can you possibly relax here? But this is still your same house, at your same address, the one that everybody knows. You can’t argue that it isn’t. And if you invite a friend inside, after ranting about everything that is different, they ask “Why did you change all this? It’s so much worse.”

What can you even say in return? “I didn’t”? That shit’s insane.

But that is how it feels, like I live in a house that isn’t my home. Sometimes I don’t recognise myself. Sometimes, on the worst days, I don’t know who I am any more.

“Where did you go?” ask the voices, entering through every crack. “What happened?”

---

Last summer, a man came roaring down my street in his flawless luxury emerald convertible. I remember him well. He had dark sunglasses and a tan suit jacket and a hairstyle slick with oil, like he was being a parody of a rich man from an eighties film. He surged through the stop sign right in front of me and I let him know what I thought of his public display of privilege and indifference.

“Go a little faster, you cunt,” I yelled. “Maybe you can hit a kid.”

He swivelled his head, looked back over his shoulder and stared straight at me.

He also slowed down.

It was then that I realised the volume I must have used to project myself, over the noise of his engine and toward a driver already continuing down the street, meant a few of my neighbours had likely heard me too.

I’m not sure I cared.

I used to be a more modest and deferential person, and often that is still the case. But often it is not. I have less patience. I have less fear. And I have less trust.

The fear thing is great. Last autumn I walked across a narrow, quivering suspension bridge with no care for the drop below. Later, I found another far narrower, far smaller one and, all by myself, alone in the woods sixteen kilometres up a trail, I jumped up and down on the thing until it shook and swung.

I used to be terrified of heights.

My sense of fear isn’t gone. But it’s both so much more manageable and also, quite often, a thrill. It’s taken me a while to realise that I increasingly seek out things that are exciting, risky or extremely stimulating. I am frank with strangers. I am quick to make decisions. I am keen to try new things.

It doesn’t sound so bad, does it? That’s because it isn’t. Not all change is bad and not every consequence of my experience has been negative. Slowly, gradually, I am learning to appreciate a few of the changes, to lean into them. While one part of me feels sad that I’m less trusting than I used to be, another part of me sees this as more practical. I’m far quicker to drop something or someone like a rock the moment I sense things that I don’t like, and my sense for such things is certainly sharper than it used to be. Am I always right? I don’t know about that. Perhaps some people have been casualties of an overabundance of caution. Or paranoia.

That might just be the new cost of doing business.

---

It was some time in early 2020, while talking with my GP and taking some evaluations, that we began to look at my behaviour more closely. A year before, I’d talked extensively with a therapist about anxiety and about a growing sense of discomfort and distrust. I had far less patience, particularly for those who pushed boundaries, violated or were exploitative, often regardless of whether these things even involved or affected me. Anything that felt uncomfortably familiar, whether it was something I saw in a film, caught on the news or heard about on social media, could ruin my day. I would become jumpy, irritable, scared, or simply unable to do much beyond lie down and try everything I could to banish the feeling that my chest was being crushed. This might take hours. One evening, an ex found me curled up on the floor, ashamed of my own sadness. On another evening, a routine trip to see an exciting film turned into a sleepless night of panic and distress.

I began taking tests and found myself either dismissing the results or retaking them over and over in an attempt to get different answers. The outcomes kept telling me I had the symptoms of PTSD. This was far too dramatic a result and there had already been enough drama in my life already. I myself was too much drama.

Anyway, I thought, having the symptoms isn’t the same as having.

Sometimes I think about how, during some of my most difficult moments, the toughest weeks and months that I didn’t really know how I was going to get through, I made a lot of haphazard decisions motivated by panic and fear and ignorance, by doing my best to improvise and cope and adapt. Some things worked out. Some things did not. Probably the deciding factor there was luck and I’m not really sure I can look back with any wisdom or insight.

I didn’t always know what to do, what to say, who to trust, or how much to trust, how to respond to new information and changing situations, or what in holy hell might ever work out. My response to all of this was to keep secrets or to be cagey, to avoid places and people, to suddenly and liberally cut others off through a mix of ghosting, avoidance and outright blocking, or to occasionally have three-day long anxiety spikes in which I remained highly activated, oversensitive and endlessly insecure. During one of these, someone teasingly pushed me to take part in something that I didn’t want to, something that wasn’t even a big deal, and I was so close to breaking down that I had to almost run from my friends and find a quiet place to catch my breath, all the emotions in my body somehow pinched into a single point somewhere in my gut. During another, a laptop accidentally nudged half an inch sent me into panic mode, manifesting a feeling like a blade of ice slicing straight through my pulmonary artery.

These sorts of responses and behaviours would happen even in spite of all the various combinations of therapy and medication and support I was cycling my way through. I don’t feel proud of how I handled many of these things. I would love to be able to say that I handle them so much better now, with the aid of wisdom and insight. Perhaps sometimes I do.

Sometimes I have simply made terrible decisions and, looking back, I am still not sure how I might have ever done any different. I am lucky that the vast, vast majority of those decisions didn’t fuck things up further.

---

It’s a magnificent day as I write this. The world is jade and azure and gold. The sky is exquisitely, flawlessly blue. Every leaf is rich with the gloss of summer. The sun is setting into the sparkling sea beside a succession of fading distant mountain ridges, each hazier than the last, the furthest so indistinct it looks almost like mist, a ghost of an idea two thousand metres tall. Container ships the size of city blocks sleep in the bay, their hulls traced and wrinkled with rust from a lifetime of global migration. As the growing shadows of slowly swaying trees reach their way toward me, the last light of the day glides over the ground, over the grass and even over my body itself, like spilled wine gushing from a glass. It colours everything the sweet shade of nostalgia. The air is gently warm and the grass is soft beneath me.

I love days like this. They are one of the reasons why I moved here, why I put so much time and effort and energy into relocating halfway around the world. Into building the life that I wanted, piece by piece.

And I love so many of those pieces. I love my little apartment, with the balcony that I always wanted, with its ragtag assortment of secondhand furniture collected one item at a time, with its shelves tucked in here or squeezed in there, never quite tidy enough to look presentable. I love my walkable neighbourhood, with its shops and cafés and cats that follow me from block to block, or critters that peer out from between bushes in the rustling dusk. I love how low cloud creeps in to cover the tips of the skyscrapers downtown, or how the jagged outline of mountains shape the horizon in almost every direction. I love trying to make things, especially with other people, and the reward of being creative, of being silly or being funny. I love all the things I’ve learned to cook, or the ways I can warm myself up on a cold day, or the late nights I can so often indulge, with no care for what might come tomorrow.

I have so much to be grateful for and so much to be proud of. So much here. So much now.

Pretty soon, the sunset will transform the whole sky into a gradient of colour. Someone somewhere will be playing guitar on the beach, and maybe they’ll be good. Stars will appear in the sky, above the familiar urban zodiac traced out by the city lights of apartment buildings. If I stay up late again, the dawn sky will turn the royal blue of an emperor’s cloak. And then all of this will happen again.

I have so much to be grateful for. So much to appreciate.

---

A few weeks ago I had my first nightmare in some time. They still happen. The specifics matter less than the broad themes. Deception. Gaslighting. Manipulation. Boundary violation. All of it in plain sight, yet still unseen, making me feel like I’m helpless, like I’m crazy, like I have no hope of ever being believed.

I thought about it all day. The situations, the faces and the fears. This is the way it’s always been and once one of these nightmares visits you, it stays for a while. It’s like a small stain, an odour that gets into your clothes, the stink of cigarettes after a party the evening before.

Can you wash out a stain? Sometimes. With the right substances, with the correct regimen. And with some aggressive, persistent scrubbing.

One summer night years ago an ex woke me up because I had been thrashing about in my sleep. I had worried her by rolling around and muttering like a madman. Was I having a nightmare, she asked, and it wasn’t just that I was, but that I had them all the time. Every week, at least, each leaving that same gross feeling of violation and abuse. The anxiety medication that I had been prescribed was helping me sleep more, but it also seemed to make my dreams more vivid and profound. It was either that or barely being able to sleep at all, woken by the slightest of noises, up before the crack of dawn because some unresolved tension in my body overpowered all tiredness and fatigue. Even with medication, the smallest of things could still turn me into a nervous wreck, and one night I cried cross-legged on my bed as I explained to my ex not just that I had interpreted a few of her utterly inconsequential actions as a sign she wanted to leave me, but also that I might always be like this. Forever.

The nightmares began a few months after I burned my note. It was right after I opened up to another friend about what was going on in my life, and their response was to tell me about something else that had happened, the full story of an event from another six years before, from distant 2012.

It’s not my tale to tell, but six years is a long time to not know the full story of something. A long time to be deceived, to find out you’ve been lied to by someone you trust and that your ignorance has affected many decisions that you’ve made. Again, I am lucky that the vast, vast majority of those decisions didn’t fuck things up further. But some did.

Six years. It hit me then how long it can take for people to feel able to talk about something, as well as continue to be affected by it. How far the ripples travel and who they touch. And now, here I am, with my own six years.

That discovery was one of several experiences that transformed me into that person having three-day long anxiety spikes, remaining highly activated, oversensitive and endlessly insecure. That person thrashing about in his sleep. That person yelling “You cunt,” down his street.

---

I’ve written before about my physical health and my relationship to my body. I was anxious about things being wrong with it long before I had thorough examinations and validating diagnoses, but as part of those treatments I wrote about, a trio of doctors warned me about how stress was worsening every condition and symptom I experienced. Stress was ruining my health. I was having so many migraines that my GP sent me for an MRI that revealed how those migraines were changing the white matter in my brain.

I would have to do something about this.

Those doctors would help me do something about this, as would other professionals, and their help was invaluable. This would be impossible to tackle alone.

Sometimes I think about people I’ve heard say such things as “It’s not your responsibility to fix someone else,” and, while I don’t disagree, doesn’t such a phrase also imply it’s surely somebody’s responsibility, in this society that we all share, built from things that help us support one another?

Otherwise we’d be suggesting that people fix themselves.

Sometimes I think about people I’ve heard tell others, or themselves, or sometimes the world via the spontaneous and sneeze-like broadcasts of social media “It’s on you to fix your shit,” and I wonder if that’s where that sentence should terminate, if that’s exactly how it should be phrased, if those are really the words that everyone, or anyone, needs to hear.

Because sometimes I also think of another clumsy analogy I once put together. It’s a scenario in which I describe a pedestrian struck by a car, perhaps one driven by a rich cunt with dark sunglasses and a tan suit jacket, perhaps even one that has mounted the curb or surged into a crossing. The pedestrian is knocked down, maybe immobile from the pain and injury that comes from a broken pelvis or fractured leg. An ambulance is summoned, a customised vehicle equipped to transport them to a hospital. In that hospital, that specialised medical facility, a team of trained experts will use skills and equipment to triage and manage, to analyse the pedestrian’s injuries, to provide relief and to chart a course toward recovery. There will be x-rays, there will be drugs, there may well be physiotherapy. I doubt at any point that the person lying in the street would be told, by someone coming upon the scene, “It’s on you to fix your shit.”

No. Not any more than they’d be expected to walk to the hospital, to interpret their x-rays or to prescribe their own medication. Indeed, if they attempted any of these things themselves I wouldn’t be surprised if someone along the way communicated to them some more polite version of “What the holy fucking fuck do you think you’re doing?” and “You’re in no state to do this yourself, let alone know what you need,” and “Fucking hell. You’re at your most vulnerable right now. Fuuuck.”

Hopefully.

Once, many years ago, I knew someone who broke their pelvis. It takes months to recover, maybe a year or more for a limp to fully disappear. And it requires all kinds of help and oversight. It worked out. Doctors and medical professionals can be remarkable.

I have read a lot of books and papers over the last six years. I have listened to a lot of podcasts and interviews. I have been recommended a lot of material by therapists, by friends, by fellow PTSD sufferers. One well-known trauma expert I was pointed toward is Canadian psychologist Dr. Gabor Maté. And he says this:

”Everybody is born needing help.”

He means that it’s a fundamental element of the human experience.

---

Sometimes I go running and sometimes I go to the gym. The reasons I do this are complex, ranging from wanting to be healthier, to wanting to feel better about my body and how it behaves, to feeling like I am making progress with something. That last one is particularly important, because I’m doing something where I’m objectively able to recognise change.

When I run, an app tells me how far I ran and how long it took. I can’t disagree with the app, because it’s entirely objective, and so when I have a bad day, feel terrible and wonder what the point of anything is, the app still shows me that I achieved a reasonable or even an improved time.

It wasn’t always like this. I was bad at these things. I run better than I used to. I perform better at the gym than I used to. I have the metrics to prove it, and while I’m not a particularly dedicated or regular person with my exercise, I still keep at it and I still see improvements.

Whatever it is I’m doing, these apps and their statistics all offer me the same, very simple analysis:

“You’re doing better.”

I motivate myself to run, to go to the gym, to go on twenty-five kilometre hikes over difficult terrain, but I don’t do these things without some kind of help that comes from either expert resources, advice or training.

I don’t exist in a vacuum. None of us do.

---

Help is important because it offers things like perspective and expertise and informed advice. And don’t all of those things sound so extremely important?

How about we imagine that our immobilised pedestrian wasn’t collected by an ambulance. Let’s imagine instead that the driver of the car that hit them stepped out of their vehicle, shook their head, put their hands on their hips and said “Look what you’ve done.”

And then “It’s okay, I know what’s best for you,” before carrying the inert person into their car and driving away. Perhaps even unseen. No witnesses.

If such a thing happened, in this society that we all share, with that person at their most vulnerable, who is responsible then? Who is responsible for what happens next? Who is responsible when that pedestrian, forever limping, says things like “It was my fault, I shouldn’t have been walking there,” or “I should have been looking out,” or “I should have been more visible,” and so on?

A lot of accidents and injuries and collisions and whatnot can be traumatic, scary, confusing. “How do I make sense of this?” asks that person, whether carried away alone in a car, or surrounded by doctors in the emergency room, or anywhere else they may happen to find themselves. “How do I deal with this?” And who might be around them at that moment to help answer such things?

And what will they say?

Perhaps you know someone who was, metaphorically, struck by such a car, before being then carried away by a driver with all sorts of ideas about what’s best, and who later blamed themselves for everything that happened. I don’t know.

I do know how important it was to receive the right help from the right people.

---

It’s hard to know exactly what to do. You may respond to your trauma with a desire for revenge, retribution or restoration. You may not have the insight or the time or the means to do anything much at all. There is the ideal of what could or should happen when harm has been caused, but there is also the uncomfortable reality of how such things actually play out, of how long justice can take, of who is granted credibility, of how complex social dynamics can quickly become, of how awkwardly and uncomfortably people can react when they discover something they would rather not have, or that they have been misled, or so much more. We’ve all seen such things play out secondhand and firsthand.

I have had six years to consider the most helpful way to respond, the most constructive, the most positive and productive. I am still considering. I don’t have much in the way of answers or advice there.

Sometimes I think about the anonymous Broken Teapot essay, with all it has to say about the complexity of dealing with abuse dynamics, of harm happening within a group or community, about social consequences. It was written over a decade ago now, but it remains a very relevant piece of writing that brings up all sorts of considerations around responsibility, about trying to come to terms with trauma and abuse, and about how people might try to use systems or processes to try to solve things in unhelpful ways or even for their own ends.

People can have a lot of opinions about how to handle trauma, how to respond to abuse and how to leap into some sort of process of justice or accountability or reparation or even plain old revenge. So many opinions.

It’s exhausting.

Back in 2020 I tried to write something about all these complications and considerations that I was going to title The Calculus of Abuse. Like much else, it rots in my drafts folder.

Sometimes I think about how many of the ways that we push people to address both their trauma and the things or people that have caused their trauma only makes things worse. I am sceptical about the practicality, value and effectiveness of processes of justice, reparation and accountability. I think a lot of people believe that they will fix things, that they will be fair, that they will spotlight situations and systems and people that cause harm. That, in this cold and unflinching exposure, justice will be done and books will be closed on long and difficult stories.

And I think that’s because we see this happen now and then. Sometimes it happens very publicly. It seems to at least occasionally all work out.

Sometimes I think about friends who were excluded from social circles because they spoke up about something creepy or problematic, because it mattered less what actions or behaviour someone had demonstrated, even what could be proven, and much more who was more popular, or that the status quo be maintained, or that applecarts not be upset. I think about how different people share or don’t share their traumas and their experiences, what they include and what they leave out. I think about people who weren’t believed, people who were misrepresented, people who were shut down. I think about people who spent so long trying to get a handle on their trauma that any thing or person they might want to stand up to already had so much time to prepare, to seed the ground, to dig in, to get a head start. And I even think about the capacity people have to improve, to feel regret, to move forward as better humans. It’s a potential that I hope exists in us all and the writer Kai Cheng Thom seems to agree, saying that even those who cause harm themselves need help to “exit harmful behaviour patterns.”

Sometimes I think about what a friend of mine said about abusive people just being "regular people with very limited tools." And that’s not so different from a child. Doesn’t that make you feel sad?

I think about all of these things because how could you not? How could you not worry about how taking action to address a terrible thing would, in fact, only make that terrible thing even worse?

There is a paper by the American psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman called Justice From the Victim’s Perspective that touches on how many processes and pushes toward addressing abuse and trauma can be retraumatising, without any guarantee they will lead to a meaningful outcome or significant change. It touches on how legal processes and systems can be manipulated to further harm and harass those seeking redress, or how disparities of power and status and money can immediately put the damaged and disadvantaged people who try this on the back foot. It touches on difficulties presented by such things as burden of proof, especially combined with the challenge of a memory minced by traumatic events. How does someone demonstrate and prove trauma, or gaslighting, or manipulation, or anything else?

It also talks about how not everybody seeks such things as justice, restitution, revenge, or not always in the ways that we think, and for a multitude of reasons. These can vary from worrying they won’t be believed or that the process will serve them, to wanting to move on, to the idea that it may be pointless, as some “offenders are empathetically disabled… not capable of a meaningful apology, so they can never provide anything to victims that would be useful.”

Both this and the Broken Teapot essay also feature people examining how they themselves have handled abuse and trauma. I think this is probably the most difficult part of many years of therapy, reading and reflection. Sure, it sucks to have been harmed by an event, a situation, a person or a system, but at some point you also start asking yourself difficult questions like “How do I avoid something like this again?” and “Did I do anything that made this worse?” and “Was I codependent, did I enable someone or did I perpetuate something with my reactions or my responses?”

“Abuse dynamics aren’t so simple,” says the Broken Teapot essay, at one small but very important moment, not long after “I was not solely ‘a victim’. Is anyone?” And, after all those years of therapy, reading and reflection, I’ve come to believe that abusive people and systems gain at least some of their power from how you interact with and respond to them. If we were, all of us, perhaps better informed, we might understand, avoid or escape so many difficult things so much sooner.

And while both the Broken Teapot essay and Justice From the Victim’s Perspective talk a lot about sexual assault, their considerations and their examinations of consequence are more broadly applicable. This reflects how I find myself relating to so many stories of trauma and abuse, regardless of what the specifics of any incidents might be. It’s because I recognise the same things in the subsequent developments, reactions and outcomes, much like I might recognise the same chord pattern in different songs. I see people trying to understand their own changing behaviours, trying to articulate why they won’t do a particular thing or go to a particular place any more, trying to both explain and understand how their body or their health has been affected. The specifics don’t need to be the same for so many of the consequences to be. And I recognise and am much more attuned to recognising those consequences.

Both these pieces of writing are also very good at illustrating one of the most important things that you can learn about trauma, and that is, whatever happens or whatever choices you make, things can never be put back in the box.

Trauma is never erased.

---

Here’s what I think is another of the most important things we can learn about trauma, which is that people are generally very bad at dealing with it and are even worse at dealing with it if they are unsupported. And even if they have all the support in the world, they are probably still going to make bad choices, self-sabotage, lose perspective and do things they regret.

They will probably be foolish, be confused and be likely to make choices that could hurt other people. They may not have great insight or work against their own best interests. That doesn’t mean that they get a free pass. It doesn’t mean we are obliged to simply accept these behaviours. But I think these are realistic expectations that we should have.

In his pioneering book The Body Keeps the Score, the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk writes that many trauma responses are “irrational and largely outside people's control,” coming from people who are “rarely in touch with the origins of their alienation.” An awful lot of the book is about helping such people to find ways past this, rather than disregarding them or pushing them away, even though this will be difficult. I don’t remember anything in the book that comes close to “It’s on you to fix your shit.”

---

While one part of me wishes many things had not happened, feeling both weaker and sadder, another part of me acknowledges that I have gained new skills and strengths. And one of the best things about what I’ve gained is that all this doesn’t just help me, but can also be applied to help others.

That’s a good thing.

I’m a tiny bit wiser than I used to be. A lot of reading and talking to experts and digesting all sorts of media leaves its mark. It’s not just that I know a little more about myself and my experiences, it’s that I can now better recognise parallels to those experiences in other people’s situations, behaviours and pasts. I anticipate slightly better, seeing problems further ahead, and I have a stronger sense of what I need to drop or to avoid.

I’m doing better.

---

I don’t have much that I can write here in terms of the specifics of therapy. I would describe a lot of the process of unpacking and analysing the causes of my PTSD as being extremely painful, like trying to both tidy up and then reassemble broken glass with your bare hands. The things that brought about your PTSD are shameful and harrowing. Their analysis can also be, through a process that can variously be sad, scary, frustrating, educational, validating and empowering. It takes a long time and requires expert assistance, which means the help you need can be a somewhat scarce resource and very, very expensive.

You pay for your trauma for a very long time.

---

I discovered one of the most beautiful sounds in the world some time after 2016, some unknown amount of time after I moved into this apartment of mine, with its balcony and its skyscraper views. I don’t remember now when I first heard it, but it’s been years now and I still adore it whenever it happens. It’s small and subtle and can happen at almost any time of night or day. It’s a sound that makes me think of safety and independence, of making my own space and then occupying it. Of security and stability.

I really, really appreciate security and stability. Much as I increasingly seek out change and crave new experiences or opportunities, these things feel so much better if I can enjoy them with the understanding that I have some sort of foundation under me. Something solid. No matter how small or how far away. Some place of safety.

The sound happens when it’s raining. Whatever metal it is that rings my balcony is hollow, so that when rainfall strikes it, it responds with a kind of subtle but sonorous singing. This ringing isn’t the specific sound I’m talking about, though. That sound is slightly different, something that rises above this other background arrangement.

When a particularly large drop of water hits my balcony railing, it gives a flat, gentle ping of appreciation. The background patter of the other raindrops will continue and then, again, after some irregular interval, presumably as water has collected from the balcony above into a particularly large drop, the ping will sound again.

I heard it one morning this spring, months ago now, right after I woke up and not long after I had started writing all this. I lay there in bed on a day the colour of slate and cigarette smoke and I thought about how the world is made up of so many beautiful, tiny things. Ping, goes one of them, and maybe nobody else on the planet notices or cares. But I try to remind myself of this and how my life is full of so many other probably stupid little things that I like, that I love. Don’t lose these things, I try to tell myself. Don’t forget about them and don’t forget to notice them when they happen. You gave yourself so many more of them when you chose to stay alive.

You get a lot of time to think on days the colour of slate and cigarette smoke.

---

You’ll notice I say “sometimes I think about” a lot here, when reflecting on less positive things, and you might consider this a writing device or a cheap hook or some other writer’s cheat. It partly is, but it’s also a truth. I do think about these things, and so many other things, very often. I think about one or another of them almost all of the time. I find it very hard not to think, to turn my brain off, and the unfortunate truth is that it reminds me about things to do with my trauma almost every day. It has done so for six years now and, as we’ve already established, six years is a long time.

Evenings can be the most difficult time. While I’ve always had a flippant attitude toward sleep schedules, I never used to have trouble going to bed. Some nights my brain will never switch off. My memory is overflowing. It doesn’t matter if I’m tired, it makes no difference if I’m exhausted. The rules around sleep are different now and I think I’m still trying to relearn them.

One therapist described the traumatised mind as like an overflowing wastepaper basket full of difficult memories that are constantly falling out. Any new addition can cause one or many of them to spill and scatter. Time and therapy can help to more properly sort them and make space for other, new things.

What a good analogy.

Occasionally, there might be a suggestion of ADHD sent my way. I can understand why things would look that way and a lot has been said by people more experienced than I about how ADHD and PTSD can seem similar. I think if ADHD had ever been the case some mental health professional or other member of the medical community that I’ve dealt with would have spotted this by now. But no. I’m distracted by some memory or flashback. I’m avoidant, or I’m in need of some thrill or stimulation. I might be full of nervous energy or unusually, intensely focused on something because it feels so good to be thinking about something I enjoy.

And sometimes things are bounding out of that wastepaper basket like clowns out of a clown car. I can feel like I've lost a lot of control over my mind and it's all I can do to rein it in. Some days I have coping strategies and some days I'm sick of it and wish I didn't need to have to cope.

And so I keep myself busy with the stimulation and the novelty that I crave. With people. With events. With runs, with the gym and with twenty-five kilometre hikes. Whatever it takes, whenever I can. It’s not ideal. I’m still figuring out what I need. I don’t always get the balance right. Sometimes unexpected things make me very emotional, either very sad or very frustrated, and I rarely know in advance what might do that. Sometimes I sleep less than four hours a night. Sometimes I want to be alone. Sometimes I desperately need company. I probably seem very strange.

But, let’s not forget, in the past I would lose whole days. For hours, my chest would feel like it was being crushed. I might be found curled up on the floor, ashamed of my own sadness. The nightmares would come every week. So things have clearly, obviously, demonstrably improved.

I’m doing better.

---

I still suck at writing. I don’t know how to fix that yet. I still very regularly feel like there is a gulf between me and so many other people, even my friends. I still have outsize reactions to irrelevant, immaterial things. I still lack confidence in my own personal calibration. "Many traumatised people find themselves chronically out of sync with the people around them,” writes Bessel van der Kolk. Yeah.

Toward the end of its six season existence there is an episode of BoJack Horseman where an actor reacts angrily to some improvisation and unexpected physical contact that happens during filming. Her colleagues are confused as to why she does this, and perhaps she doesn’t understand herself, but we the audience know that this a response to a physical assault by the titular character some time before. She never finds out, but this leads to her missing out on perhaps the biggest opportunity of her life, after a director discreetly describes her as erratic.

There is no further development with this plotline, no resolution to be had. Nobody finds out why she is like this, nor wants to, nor sets things on a new, better course. I try to remind myself that this sort of thing can be happening all the time, to try and grant people some grace and compassion, but also I try to remind myself that this is me. I have my versions of this behaviour. Maybe fewer than I used to, but still. I can be erratic and I have to face the consequences of that, as well as minimise it as much as I can.

I recently stopped buying fresh fruit from my local store because they would repeatedly put mouldy, furry produce on display. The last time I discovered this, I was holding up a box of ostensibly shiny, blood-red strawberries to once again discover the mass of fuzz hidden underneath. Food is expensive enough as it is, I thought, and it doesn’t also need to be garbage. Too late, the look on the face of the customer standing next to me clued me in to how vocal I’d been with my three-word expression of disgust and displeasure.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

---

You’ve read a little about my first dream, about old friends. You’ve read a little about my second dream, the nightmare. Here comes my third, from earlier this summer.

I dreamt that I was trying to get home again. I was confused about where I was, trying to remember a route through unfamiliar Vancouver alleys. It was evening, not yet dark, but the time between when you lose the long shadows cast by the last of the sunlight and begin to wear the rich, jewelled canvas of the stars. None of  the people I stopped and spoke to knew the streets I named. None of the alleyways I walked down took me in familiar directions.

I never found my way home, but I never stopped trying. Perhaps this does indeed mean I haven’t reached the end of whatever journey I’m on, that I can’t yet return to the start. I think it’s both practical and pragmatic for me to accept that the next six years might still present me with many challenges. That I will have bad, directionless days. That sometimes I’m going to fuck up and fall short.

I woke up to another bright, warm summer’s day, far later than I meant to, and I made myself a fine cup of coffee and a rich breakfast that I would be foolish not to enjoy.

Sometimes I think about suicide. Those thoughts haven’t left me yet and I’m not sure they ever will. Sometimes they arrive strong and loud and insistent, from out of nowhere and with all the power of a thunderbolt in a storm. Sometimes I want to be a shining example of how to conquer PTSD and sometimes I'm so sad I can’t get out of bed and sometimes I am just pissed off and angry. Each day is still different. But tomorrow I will wake up and perhaps I will think to myself “There are blue skies today,” or perhaps I will hear ping, or perhaps I won’t need anything at all to feel great. And perhaps there will be some undeniable sign in the day’s events, in my behaviour, even in the world around me, that demonstrates to me how much I’ve improved.

Each day is still different and today the glib part of my personality says “I sure hope you’ve improved, it’s been six years! That’s six years of painful PTSD examination, therapy, medication, reading, research, specialist appointments, many thousands of dollars spent and a god damn MRI of your weird and messed up brain.” And am I being disrespectfully flippant of my own experiences when I add that having an MRI of my brain was, at least, kind of cool?

Because another part of my personality wants to remind me I’m wiser, braver and maybe even a little more able to help others, people who I will remind myself can’t be expected to fix their own shit alone. People who shouldn’t be pushed aside, in this society that we all share.

And I don’t regret calling that cunt a cunt.

It’s been six years and each day is still different and this morning, when I pause to ask myself how I’m doing, I find I have the most simple of answers.

It’s three words.

I’ve got a few things that I want to write about here today, everything from sandwiches to suits to submarines, but before I go on I have to ask: Do you know that phrase “like I was shit on her shoe”? Do people say that where you’re from? Some of my lexicon is loaned from Chiswick and Southall, passed down from people who worked as labourers and long-suffering housewives, from bricklayers or from the lower decks of the Royal Navy, from homes that had no hot water and outside toilets. It’s the sort of language muttered past cigarettes on brick stairwells, or yelled across loading docks embellished with incoherent graffiti.

Sometimes these things slip out of me and no-one has any idea what I’m talking about. I make a right pig’s ear of it. And in those moments I’m suddenly somewhere else. I’m in a different time, a different place. And a different income bracket.

Or perhaps the different income bracket is where I am now. So in which do I really belong? Tell me, which would you associate me with? Graffiti and slang? Or poise and politeness?

It’s a question we can return to, if you want, because this piece of writing is in part about returning to things. When I began drafting it, months ago now, I didn’t realise just how much it echoed something I had written nine years before. I was already trying to articulate trends and patterns, without realising I had fallen into one myself.

For now, I have a different question. Did you know that one of Vancouver’s most infamous shortcuts has just closed? The three story, two hundred and twenty thousand square foot Nordstrom store that sits right between the city’s central plaza and two of its busiest stations is no more. Vancouverites will no longer be able to use it to pass diagonally through a whole block, as the crow flies, weaving dreamily amongst racks of designer handbags and thousand dollar flip-flops, before finally returning from this fantasy realm like Dante stumbling out from the underworld.

It’s a shortcut I’ve taken hundreds of times. Sometimes I would stop to inspect a shoe, or to check the price on a tie. The shoe would be upward of seven hundred dollars. The last tie I looked at was one hundred and eighty.

This Nordstrom had its own coffee shop, restaurant and even a cocktail bar. Curiously, its drinks were no more expensive than any other café nearby and, as I began drafting this in the early spring, I stopped for a drink on my way through. I asked the person serving me about her Totoro tattoo and she beamed. “Nobody who shops here recognises Totoro,” she said, and began talking about her clientele. They don’t have that kind of thing on their minds, she said.

She told me that the stations serving drinks were closing within a week and that she didn’t know if she’d have a job after that. “They’ll probably put us on the shop floor with everyone else at minimum wage.” Her colleague, selling suits that ranged from fifteen hundred dollars to eight thousand, told me he didn’t know when his last day of work would be, nor what kind of severance package anyone would have. Apparently, more than six hundred staff didn’t know when their jobs would end, but if Nordstrom did know one thing it was that it certainly wasn’t making enough money in Canada, with its thousand dollar flip-flops sold by minimum wage staff. It was time for the retailer to skedaddle.

I like talking to working people. Often, the conversations are more grounded than the kind of armchair politics you can abruptly find yourself enmeshed in at a house party, trapped suddenly in a kitchen surrounded by revellers armed with dangerously articulated glasses of wine.

The suit-seller had to go. He was run off his feet. Nearby, a rack of torn, pre-ripped jeans was on sale for three hundred dollars, more than seven times what I paid for my pristine pair. They were hung within grasping distance of some thousand dollar dresses.

I’m not an expert on dresses, but the thing about many of those seven hundred dollar shoes, those thousand dollar flip-flops, is that they were shit. They looked absolutely terrible.

Nordstrom allowed an aimless Dante, momentarily directionless in this realm, to sip their coffee and watch people buying their branded shoes and bags and clothes, and to try and perform some mental mathematics. It was a strange experience, because the conclusions you would reach would be that some of the school-age people buying things here were far too young to be able to earn the sums of money they were spending, whilst others were obviously spending many thousands as they bought items for themselves and others, nevertheless gliding through this experience with the casual indifference of a sleepwalker fumbling through a fridge.

Back in my local fancy café they are advertising for staff and perhaps they can take on one or two of the Nordstrom exodus. I look up the posting and wages start at fifteen dollars sixty-five an hour, which I confirm is the minimum wage in British Columbia. Once again, the coffee here costs about the same as anywhere else nearby, but everything else is expensive. The sandwiches are at least double.

And many of those sandwiches don’t look very good.

The staff here often talk to me. They say they talk to me not because of The Other Coat, but because I’m The Englishman Who Tips. It turns out, they tell me, that a majority of their customers do not tip. Most of these staff are smiling young women with accents from France and Romania and Peru. They are always smiling and they are always on their feet and they are always outnumbered by customers who want things and who will not hesitate to slide into a line with practised skill. They are dressed head to toe in white uniforms, but sometimes their footwear gives them away. They are not wearing thousand dollar flip-flops, or any of the sort of things that their customers are. They are much less affluent or, as we bluntly say where I am from, they are poorer.

I worked about five years of retail when I was a smiling young man and much of it was at or around the minimum wage. There were a lot of customers who wanted things and more than a few slid into lines at the till in manoeuvres that seemed all too practised. I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it here again, because it bears repeating: One of the places I worked was a flagship store that made over twenty million pounds a year, a figure that the Bank of England Inflation Calculator tells me is equivalent to thirty-six point seven five million today, more than three million a month. We’d have these weekly briefings where the managers would urge us to work as hard as possible to help make those numbers as big as possible.

Later, when the Labour party came into power, the minimum wage bumped up to three pounds twenty an hour for young adults. But I wasn’t yet an adult and so that rate did not apply to me.

The great thing about young people is that you can make them do exactly the same things as older people, but pay them much worse. Because young people aren’t as important, are they? They’re not as worthy.

Sometimes these retail roles were very cold. Sometimes they were very hot. Whatever the weather, those customers would surface out of nowhere like submarines. They would glide, as if lubricated by their money, but I suppose money always has been something that helps you grease your way through life. I’m certainly slipperier these days. Occasionally I will glide over problems that might have punctured the Paul of the past. I throw money at stuff like a wizard casting a spell and it just goes away.

When I caught sight of the shoes worn by one staff member in The Fancy Café I was suddenly hurled back through time to my years in retail, and a hundred and one experiences came back to me in the blink of an eye. I still have many, many memories of how customers treat retail and service staff, because when a stranger treats you in an extraordinary and unexpected way, it tends to stay with you. I remember one furious man saying “I pay your wages,” which was not true, because Kingfisher plc paid my wages, but he really believed his money and his transactions gave him entitlements and that this was how you spoke to a sixteen-year-old service worker.

It’s been a hot minute since I was sixteen, but I still react to a nearby “Excuse me” with the assumption that someone must want something.

Nordstrom is all gone now. While I was drafting and redrafting all this, it gradually emptied the last of its inventory, first discounting its shoes and its suits and its ludicrously expensive tableware, before then going on to sell even its fittings and its fixtures. Nordstrom offered you the chance to buy a greasy, scratched glass table for a thousand dollars, for some shelves for four times that. Realising that this may sound unbelievable, I took a picture.

Around the same time, I talked to a friend about Nordstrom and, by coincidence, discovered that they used to work in one in the US. “Nordstrom deserves to close,” they said. “If you don’t make enough via commission, they pay you minimum wage. But you get a warning. You can only do that three times before they fire you. What’s worse, they have a lifetime return policy, no questions asked. If a customer returns an item within a year of purchase, it comes back out of your commission, because ‘if you did your job as a salesperson right, they’ll love it so much they won’t ever return it.’”

“I sold this guy nine hundred dollars of stuff for his daughter for Christmas and I didn’t want to because he had no idea what she wanted. Months later my paycheck was docked because she returned everything.”

Well, it has closed now, but I still wonder about those six hundred staff, much as I wonder if it will be replaced by anything kinder. I think about working a job like that, and how only a handful of circumstances or coincidences separate me from being in that position.

But why should I wonder, and why should I worry? These days, I have the class camouflage. I have the fancy coat, or the ability to speak properly and, provided I don’t accidentally let loose a school story of how one of our teachers was stabbed or talk about bored classmates crashing cars for fun, I can avoid too many strange stares from the people around me. I could pick up one of those thousand dollar flip-flops in Nordstrom and nobody acts like I shouldn’t be there, contemplating two shitty, stuck-together pieces of plastic that I could take to the checkout and buy from someone who would have to work at least sixty-four hours to be able to afford them, a length of time I doubt those flip-flops would even last.

Yeah. Why should I worry?

But these days I can’t avoid the slow swell of something I’m increasingly feeling, a kind of growing gravity that has been tugging at me from my past. These last few months it’s given me a kind of emotional whiplash, as I’m pulled in every direction by currents and collisions, by connections in my personal life, by events in the news, by conversations I share with my therapist on lamplit evenings in those generic and inoffensive spaces made from featureless pictures and neutral colours. Even by my own writing pulling the stitching out of the past as it heals, closes up and knits itself together behind me. Because when I press on the place that it was, I can still feel the contours.

All this pulling and tugging has made for an uncomfortable ride. I haven’t had enough high-g training. Usually when you’re in situations where you’ll be experiencing sharp and sudden manoeuvres there are ways to prepare you, to toughen you up. Pilots and astronauts are put in specialist equipment or precisely-engineered simulators that spin them around and shake them about until they no longer flinch or vomit or pass out. The rest of us have to hold on and hope for the best.

Here’s the thing: much of the last year has been very comfortable for me. Work has been terrific. I travelled to the United States for the first time since 2019, and then again, and then again. I was able to put money into a pension for the first time in more than a decade. I bought myself new things. I made plans for a future that could be more open than ever.

And two of the strongest feelings that I have in reaction to this are guilt and confusion. I am fidgeting awkwardly in that wrong income bracket, in the wrong tax bracket. I redraft this now in the local fancy café, surrounded by people wearing capital B Brands and carrying designer bags, designer scarves, designer hats, even wearing elaborate designer watches, because they have decided they need to spend thousands of dollars to have a second way to tell the time.

I don’t come here to write so much because I choose to be in the fancy café, but simply because it is near and it is open late and it has the most space and the least clamour. There are other places I would prefer to be, but some of those don’t exist any more, others have been pushed too far away. I don’t have much choice.

You see, the wealth that leaks from the fashionable, expensive shops downtown, right where that Nordstrom used to be, has been slowly rolling downhill toward my historically more modest neighbourhood. Like molten gold, it bubbles toward us, gentrifying everything it touches. I see it in the shops and stores that have opened after the peak of the pandemic, replacing the businesses that couldn’t survive. That which regrows is better, because it is more expensive, more exclusive. And I see the same change bubbling through the people on the pavement, the cars parked in the streets, even the photoshoot faces on dating apps.

Bubble, bubble. It’s like the rising tides of climate change.

There used to be a burrito place on the corner that would sell you your dinner for seven dollars. Now it’s a store selling designer clothes for babies. One toddler’s jacket is nine hundred and seventy dollars. Before tax.

Your child will grow out of that in six months.

Back in the spring, some time between my many Nordstrom shortcuts, I went to a party in my apartment building for its longest-serving resident. After forty-five years, this woman in her mid eighties was moving to an assisted living residence. Many people from my building’s ninety apartments turned up, including some who have lived here for decades. Without prompting, several talked about how they could never afford to move out, since the province’s rent caps mean existing residents only have to weather a very gradual increase in rates. This doesn’t apply to signing a new lease somewhere else, and so new people moving into our own building are paying at least a thousand dollars more a month than when I first arrived, and even more than other, longer-term residents. We are all sat tight on islands of safety amongst ever-rising tides. We have become surrounded in our stubbornness.

Around the corner from me, a four hundred and thirty square foot one-bedroom apartment is being rented out for a fairly typical two thousand, six hundred and ninety dollars a month. That’s over thirty two thousand dollars a year. Various contemporary census reports list the median income in my neighbourhood as being between fifty and fifty-five thousand dollars a year, before tax. Someone earning that much would be spending sixty percent of their income just to rent such an home.

I would say that this feels uncomfortably familiar, but a decade ago I was spending maybe three quarters or more of my earnings to cover my rent. And a decade ago I was starting to write something just like this, once again surrounded by notes and drafts that I hoped to shape into something not just coherent, but that people would understand.

And once again I remember what it’s like not to have money.

Those rent caps aren’t protecting us from the ever rising price of everything else. I go shopping, see a pack of bagels apparently price frozen at three dollars and remember when it cost almost half this. It wasn’t long ago, it wasn’t some childhood memory, it was less than two years past. The other week, two dollars were suddenly added to the price of yoghurt. Cereal costs a third more. The cheapest bar of budget chocolate suddenly became fifty percent more expensive. This isn’t happening to luxury brands or inessential items, but staples and budget foods. You can watch it happen almost in real time, like accelerated footage of shoots sprouting or plants budding in the spring.

Wait a second, was I saying this a decade ago, in another country, in another time?

It’s happening again.

I just got forced back a place in line, mere seconds from being served. Another patron, presumptive and impatient, slid between me and the coffee I ordered, snatching it away in a move that I would describe as all too practised, as smooth. They had ordered the same drink as me, after me, and presumably it had never crossed their mind that someone else, stepping up to the counter, could possibly come before them. They make no eye contact. Indeed, they don’t even acknowledge my existence. I’m just some slightly scruffy guy in a New England gallery, probably someone who shouldn’t really be here enjoying art, and I’m not nearly as well-dressed, as well-decked, as they are.

I don’t know if it’s my imagination or not, but sometimes I wonder if, in my scruffier manifestations, I become invisible, inconsequential.

I remember a lot of strange stuff these days. Some people say that the Coronavirus pandemic played havoc with our memories, our restriction and isolation turning our minds inward and having them engage in an odd kind of archaeology. I’ve remembered old friendships, old journeys, old habits. And lately I’ve remembered folded broadsheets on kitchen tables in richer friend’s houses, with the features they carried and the writers who wrote them. I’ve remembered the economic downturn of 2008 and how one broadsheet ran a feature where “We Asked 100 People how they’re Coping with the Credit Crunch” and how what this really seemed to have done was ask one hundred people who were antique shopping in Islington how they had cut back on au pairs and skiing holidays. I’ve remembered how this was when I first noticed the peculiar distance from which such newspapers would observe and report on people who lived on lower incomes, who were poorer, occasionally letting one of them grace their pages with authentic stories of jobsearching and social housing.

Poverty was talked about as if it was some curious other country. It existed somewhere else.

I think I remember this in part because news reporting in the pandemic followed the same patterns the same way a little music box quickly repeats the same cutesy tune. Poorer people, it turned out, were feeling the effects of the pandemic much more, said the reports, officially marking such as observation as news, as if poorer people hadn’t felt the effects of everything else much more, since the god damn start of recorded fucking history.

Or maybe I remember it because, as spring began, a CBC News report on a (the?) housing crisis described the state of some poorer people’s living states as shocking, as if it was new, novel, never before seen. And yet such things can only truly shock someone who has gone through life unaware that some of the human beings around them have much less. I was not shocked by any of the things depicted in that report, much as I am never shocked to learn that someone has mould on their walls, broken windows, dangerous appliances, leaking plumbing, freezing bedrooms, failing electrics, collapsing walls or some sort of exploitative landlord or manager (nor that these things make you sick). I am only shocked that there are people in the world who still fail to comprehend the scope and scale of the poverty around them, who have become so swaddled and spoiled that they may as well be sleepwalkers.

You know what else I remember? I remember  how the pandemic turned my neighbourhood into richer people’s racetracks, how they would roar down my street at night. They rode oversized rollerskates costing a quarter of a million dollars along tight roads full of parked cars and blasted through the stop signs at every intersection. They growled in the night, grumbling down my road at three, four, five in the morning, probably achieving top speeds of thirty miles an hour but making a lot of noise as they did so. Their owners thought a good use of their money was to buy fast cars and drive them somewhere they’d be slower than a galloping horse. Most of these were not even good-looking cars. Most of these looked like shit.

When I first wrote that paragraph, a quarter of a million dollars had not quite achieved the significance that it currently has. But more on that in a moment.

I didn’t grow up poor. I grew up well taken care of and fairly safe. But I did grow up more modestly, poorer, than many of the people I came to know, the kind of people you might meet at a university, or in a New England art gallery, or a convention overseas, or who might make analogies about Dante. I also grew up knowing other kids with families who had much less, families couldn’t always surface their floors or fix their windows or fill their fridges. Wedged between two classes, I grew up knowing people who had multiple bathrooms and multiple garages, as well as those who tried to hide the rot on the walls or who didn’t know how to clean up when their disaffected, distressed dog had shit in the semi-carpeted living room once again.

I never forget that dog, though I never told anyone that before.

You know what else I remember sometimes, at random, when my brain decides to reminisce? I remember taking a bus home from work after a terrible Hampshire day, feeling awful about my life, when an old schoolfriend’s younger sister greeted me with excitement and enthusiasm. She came from the same household as the shit-stained floor. She sat on the back seat of this bouncing bus and delightedly told me how, by the age of seventeen, she was finally going to become a mother.

And then I remember how we were encouraged, pushed, expected to move beyond and away from something such as that. Don’t be like those people. Create distance. Escape.

I stopped writing this thing for a while, because each time that I opened it I became sad or I became overwhelmed, and I wondered both what right I had to write about things like this, being the guy with a pension and a safe apartment, and also who would care to read it. There are likely many reasons that people don’t want to read about some of these experiences and situations and one is that they aren’t very much fun. Why read about people with shit-stained floors when you can do anything else, such as watch a television show about starship battles or elves going on an adventure. These shows have CGI now and it’s all very exciting. It’s hard to compete in a world of CGI shows, funny dog videos and services that deliver dinner to your door.

But then it happened again.

I am trying a different fancy café (we have so many now). I just got forced back a place in line, mere seconds from being served. Another patron, presumptive and impatient, slid between me and the coffee I ordered, snatching it away in a move that I would describe as all too practised, as smooth. Again, they had ordered the same drink as me, and it either never crossed their mind to see if another person might claim this order, or I was somewhere between invisible and insignificant compared to how well-dressed, well-presented they were.

Is that just in my head?

I stepped out onto the street, past a row of sports cars and luxury vehicles. They are all over the place now, and I rarely walk a minute before seeing something that costs more than my neighbourhood’s median annual income. And then there was that whiplash, that high-g experience as I was also reminded of this half-written draft and everything else it contained.

And then I was angry.

I stopped writing this because, in part, I don’t know what it says about me that I didn’t so much leave so many of my low income experiences behind as find ways to run from them. Growing up, I was subconsciously sold a story of aspiration that was all about making yourself better than people who were struggling like this, about doing everything you can to create distance between yourself and them, about finding ways to identify with and relate to a different class. Become richer, sure, but become separate too. I think there is something in some poorer, lower-income, working class mindsets where such people are encouraged to resent themselves, to feel embarrassed, to aspire to be or to pretend to be something else, and to lose that past as soon as you can. I went and re-watched old material by the stand-up comedian Billy Connolly wherein he talked about things like his family throwing coats on the bed to keep warm, then pretending that a kids’ argument over those coats was a fight over the eiderdown (“The coats are in the cloakroom, near the mezzanine.”). I watched another where he tells a story of a person falling from a plane’s undercarriage and of a worried local calling the authorities and asking them to come and remove the body not out of concern for the tragedy or the person’s welfare, but because “I think he’s working class.” I have also never forgotten Connolly venting his frustration at someone who said to him “I was going to buy a copy of the Big Issue [a magazine that supports the homeless and unhoused], but the man was smoking.”

Connolly’s take on this was “HE DOESNAE HAVE A FUCKIN’ HOOSE. ALLOW HIM A WEE FAG WHILE HE WORKS OUT WHERE HE’S GONNA SLEEP TONIGHT.”

That’s an anger I understand, but it’s also an anger I am baffled to not see more often, perhaps even all the time, expressed as it should be in proportion to the amount of poverty and hardship I see every day. When I first moved to Vancouver, I encountered dozens of people sleeping on the streets. When I returned as a Permanent Resident in 2019 there were hundreds. There must now be thousands occupying doorways or amongst the growing tent cities that are constantly moved from place to place, an ever-growing population that is pushed away whenever they get too close to those expensive apartments or luxury cars.

When I see these people, I think how only a handful of circumstances or coincidences separate me from being in that position. Bubble bubble, go those rising waters, those rising rents and prices, and I have only climbed a little higher.

A few years ago, I sat next to a person on a train who volunteered their dismay: “It’s such a shame these people don’t want to work,” they said, as if people willingly chose to live in freezing tents without running water or safety or income. And there is valid anger to be thrown at a person like that, but also perhaps the consideration that they have never been exposed to the mathematics or practicalities of poverty, never had to worry quite enough about the cost of living, and have only ever talked about poverty as if it was some curious other country. A remote place of foreigners.

But I still don’t get how anyone can talk of the shock of poverty when it is so ever-present. I don’t understand. Do they look away? Are these the same kinds of people who, surveys have increasingly shown, see their above-average incomes as being unremarkably normal? After all, it now seems that wealth (and poverty) substantially alter psychology.

Nine years ago, in the spring, I shared an essay similar to this one called On Poverty. I talked about the rising cost of food and housing in England, as well as my frustrations around how something that for me was ever-present precariousness seemed somehow surprising, shocking, to many other people. It took me nearly a year to articulate and I only published it because I ran out of patience. To my surprise, it was shared in all kinds of places. Writers I admired got in touch, activists reached out, someone from the UK housing charity Shelter contacted me.

It was already six years after “We Asked 100 People how they’re Coping with the Credit Crunch” and nothing had changed. There was a growing trend toward not buying property in London, but investing in property, to the point that properties that didn’t yet exist were already being pre-bought with the understanding that they would become more valuable and could then be sold to others. Homes were no longer most useful as somewhere to live, but as investments that would appreciate. While I can’t say that this first started in London, I have certainly seen this practice and its consequences everywhere from Vancouver to New England to cities across Europe and Australia and… perhaps you can tell me somewhere where this hasn’t yet begun to happen.

And it is now fifteen years after “We Asked 100 People how they’re Coping with the Credit Crunch” and nine years after On Poverty and all the things that haven’t stopped have only gained momentum. Bubble bubble, the waters keep rising, because whyever would they not? We are, at least, talking more about the trends that we see as the waters reach more of our ankles. In Canada now we talk about how real estate prices that have increased up to three hundred and thirty seven percent mean that Toronto’s housing price to income ratio is now six, while Vancouver’s is ten, how twenty percent of properties are owned by investors (including half of all new condominiums in Vancouver), how the nation’s households now owe more money than the entire GDP, how insolvent an entire generation is. We now do our own versions of stories about, say, how a furnitureless room just big enough for a bed is now nine hundred dollars a month (this kind of story is so familiar… it’s happening again…). In Britain, the food bank usage I was furious about a decade ago is increasingly acknowledged, with a dialogue around how having more food banks thank McDonald’s restaurants might not be a good thing, how an ongoing cost of living crisis pushes more people toward sex work, how raising a healthy family and maintaining a basic standard of living has become increasingly difficult or downright impossible, how ill health is on the rise while life expectancy has stopped increasing and young adult mortality has risen, how almost four and one quarter million of Britain’s children now live in poverty while their parents struggle to feed them (and themselves), all against a background of increasing stagnation. In the United States there is also greater awareness of how wages have stagnated while the cost of living has increased and of how property prices have again wildly outpaced earnings, and continue to do so in no small part because more new properties are bought for the exclusive purpose of being profit-making stock, not to mention how more and more people are not taking lower paying jobs simply because they know those jobs won’t allow them to cover even their most basic needs (there is also an examination of the attempts to fill these voids by relaxing child labour laws in some states and how it might not be a good thing for ten-year-olds to be working the McDonald’s night shift). I see cost of living and inflation discussion across Europe. In South America. Even at the bottom of the world.

But it should never have got this bad, should never have spread this far, and it has done so in part because we ignored the poorer people around us who were the canaries in the coal mine, whose experiences (separated from ours only by chance and coincidence) could very well have been our own, but were instead treated as something happening at a peculiar distance. Those first people caught up in the rising tides were not like us, not our concern. It is only now, as these stories increase and as these graphs grow and as these numbers multiply, that more of us are beginning to understand that the surging waters might well engulf us all. We cannot outpace economics much as we cannot outjump gravity.

And so maybe, just maybe, a few more of you are angry too. You should be.

Two of the challenges I had over the many months that I tried to write this work were trying to start it and trying to finish it. These may sound very fundamental, perhaps even existential, and I suppose they are. Longform writing has been difficult for me the last few years. Trying to find a fresh way to articulate my anger and frustration over something that I have already written about, in one form or another, so many times was hard. There are only so many times I can say that it’s happening again before I wonder if people care. If people care about the increasingly obvious truth that, for a growing number of us, it has essentially become too expensive to be alive, and that if you can’t afford to live, the only thing you can do, either slowly or quickly, is die. And often I wonder why people are not mad about this every day, all of the time, and why much of this increasing poverty and inequality and struggle to survive is still reported and remarked upon with that peculiar distance, rather than being one of the chief concerns of our time. It certainly is a chief concern if it is your day to day life.

And then the submarine happened.

By now just about everyone knows at least something about how the OceanGate Titan submersible was lost at sea, suffering a catastrophic failure as a result of what seems to have been reckless policies and a contempt for safety standards. Tickets for a spot on this tiny, dangerous submarine cost a quarter of a million US dollars, while two nations and multiple air and sea forces invested tremendous resources in trying to locate the missing vessel. I have since witnessed what I think can generously be described as a lack of sympathy for this mixture of carelessness and privilege, as well as the enormous response that had to be deployed in an attempt to rescue rich tourists considered to have made poor choices. In particular, many people noted the contrast between the widespread coverage and intense efforts on behalf of five missing rich people versus the relative dismissal of the recent death of hundreds of refugees, including around a hundred children, in a Mediterranean shipwreck. It was an extremely transparent case of starkly different treatment based upon status.

And I had already woven my submarine analogies throughout half of these paragraphs.

This response is as important as the events themselves. It reflects a growing discontent around the wealth divide and a contempt for the rich, particularly the powerful rich, those who can make decisions that have enormous consequences that they themselves will not have to face. The past week I’ve been presented with thousands of tweets and short video essays by people explaining why they feel so little sympathy and how they’ve had enough. These are presented alongside more and more stories covering things such as the Clearlink CEO celebrating a worker selling their family dog in order to keep their job, or the increasing belief that ongoing inflation is in part caused by a transparent and unregulated desire for profit (including perhaps thousand dollar flip-flops sold by minimum wage staff). In the last few years it’s been revealed that even economic reporting itself is biased toward talking about richer, more comfortable people.

It’s almost July as I prepare to publish this work. The bagels that were, it turns out for only a brief moment, price frozen at three dollars are now thirty cents more expensive, a further ten percent price rise. I look at them and I remember what it was like to count every penny I spent when I was food shopping and I decide that I will include the following paragraph, which I was going to cut from this draft:

You know what the fresh pastries in the supermarket look like when you have only a handful of coins in your pocket? Those cherry-red centres, that glistening applesauce oozing out between crisp layers of puff pastry? They look like lights hung for a festival, they look as bright as Christmas decorations. They lose some of their sense of reality.

I’m not going to celebrate rich tourists lost at sea, but I’m glad it has lead to more people expressing their frustration, their discontent, their helplessness against economic forces that strike them, strand them, like a tidal wave, the surging waters that they cannot begin to climb clear of. I don’t think this means things will change this month, or this year, and I believe that change against forces and trends that have already developed so much momentum will require much more energy, much more pushback. I hope they continue to be angry, that they become angrier still, that they keep articulating and focusing their rage about the growing inequality and unaffordability around them as it begins to affect more and more people. That they express how disgusting it is that it is happening again.

Nine years ago I wrote that I felt we were regressing to the Victorian era, but now I wonder if we’re falling back even further than that. In my world of CGI shows, funny dog videos and services that deliver dinner to my door, almost all of the people who deliver that dinner or who will make me a coffee or who will drive me to the airport, or who perform all those tasks I can request when I throw money at stuff like a wizard casting a spell, are paid garbage and treated like they are disposable. This is usually because they are, and they have few other options. They are not lazy or stupid and we are only separated from one another by circumstances or coincidence, things we had about as much control over as weather, as rising tides, as economic forces with all the power of a tidal wave and which could still strike again and sink yet more of us. It could be happening again. Bubble bubble.

A significant factor in the success of someone like me, of the safer position I now find myself in, is luck, and we don’t talk about that enough.

People are trying so hard to survive. Last week someone broke through the latticework on the door of our building’s dumpster enclosure so that they could slide a hand through a tiny, sharp filigree of twisted metal and operate the handle. They did this in order to reach the trash inside, because their life had become so difficult that they needed to risk harming themselves in order to get trash.

Two blocks away, I finished writing in my local fancy café and stood briefly to return my cup to the counter, which is a common habit in the Pacific Northwest and takes but a moment. The patron next to me looked up from behind gold-rimmed, heart-shaped sunglasses.

I have to. It’s not even optional, like the proffered pledge being suggested by broadcasters and organisers back in my country of origin (who are giving the British public the chance to recite their allegiance to King Charles III, his heirs and successors). I can, at least, remove some amount of dignity from this and speak this pledge to the King of England in French. It is, after all, one of the official languages of Canada.

If that seems ridiculous to you, consider then that I first debated writing this entire thing as a farce, filling it with parody and invention. I could invent rituals and objects and people and titles, mix them in with some of their very real equivalents, and it might all be passably funny or passably believable. However, I learned a lesson several years ago: I invented some quotes (as well as some politicians) that referred to Donald Trump for a piece that attempted to satirise double standards and the vacillation that happens when those in office take a hypothetical position they are well aware they may have to change, only to then have people repeatedly and sincerely ask me if what I had written was real.

Pre-election, it had already become difficult to satirise or exaggerate Trump, a man who boasted about assaulting women and mocked a reporter with a disability, among so many other things. His behaviour was so monstrous and melodramatic that it was hard to find much that was funny by building upon that.

Similarly, it has also become too difficult to satirise the coming Coronation, which will involve lords with swords, pieces of what are alleged to be Christ’s cross, a magic stone, the King riding around in a genuine golden carriage and an archbishop who will simply present the orb. It turns out there are a few objects that are given and then taken back. Presented and then put down again. There is a special oil with a special formula. There will be salvoes and salutes fired by guns in London and Edinburgh and Belfast and Cardiff and at sea. There will be multiple flypasts. And did you know there is a special glove? But just one. Just one glove, which is put on for a little bit, before then being taken off again. That part sounds like something from a Michael Jackson performance. Someone will play something called the Weiner Fanfare and I swear to God I am not joking.

Some objects will be borne and some will be presented, each by a different person. Some will have both a separate person assigned to carry them and to present them. The sceptre with a dove (of course there’s more than one sceptre), for example, is carried by one person but presented by another. I don’t know why. I don’t know why members of the clergy will have to turn in each compass direction and hear the assembled audiences there shout back at them.

All this will happen tomorrow, eight hours away from me, and I’m very glad I will sleep through it. Maybe I will wake up to England, Great Britain, or the United Kingdom, or the Commonwealth finally getting past some of the extraordinary bullshit it’s been on for a while now, with so many people and services and institutions and organisations that will bend and bow in deference to one person. Seven months ago, the death of the previous monarch brought out a host of bizarre and undignified reactions that included a black and white Funko Pop image of the late Queen, a weird £349 limited edition royal bear and a sombre tweet from London’s Shrek Experience.

And then at least a quarter of a million people decided to spend up to twenty-four hours waiting in a line that reached sixteen kilometres in length in order to get a short glimpse of the Queen’s coffin. If (and this is a big if), on average, those people had spent just eight hours each queuing, that is already two million hours of people’s time, or two hundred and twenty eight years.

And I wonder if less of that time could’ve been spent in deference to a single monarch and more of it on things that would have benefited the wider society that the late monarch wasn’t really part of, but is instead elevated far above. Much as there will be millions of pounds spent on the coronation of this new monarch, who is already themselves spectacularly rich beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, that could perhaps be spent on resources or infrastructure or even just dinner for people in a country that now has over six thousand food banks and “independent food aid providers” serving two and a half million visitors from households who can’t afford to eat, part of the fifth of the nation that lives in poverty. That fifth includes about four million children.

I might be a party pooper if I suggest that at least two hundred and twenty eight years of useful time was lost lining up to pass by a dead person who never knew or thought about most of those visitors. Or that the estimated hundred million spent on the coronation could fund so many more useful things, especially after so much time and money and energy was also spent on lavish Golden, Diamond and then Platinum Jubilees events in succession, each busted out like clockwork to confer even more status. But police in England have been threatening or even arresting people for things as simple as statements of objection or holding up blank pieces of paper, so perhaps I shouldn’t do that. The monarchy is an institution and a tradition and an icon and living history and it brings people together.

In worship.

Tomorrow’s coronation is not funny because it is an act of worship and deference toward those with inherited money and status. It is a celebration of privilege. It further endorses a centuries old system of rulership that has been minimised or discontinued in so many other places. It will again place one family above the rest of a nation, simply because of birth and succession, and consume an enormous amount of time, energy, money and resources as it does so. And I don’t dislike it just because it is a display of pomp and ceremony that descends into the borderline comic, or because it is boring, or because it takes attention away from so many systemic inequalities or overlooks so much royal advantage and special treatment. I dislike it because it is a state sanctioned act of validation and sycophancy in a country that cannot move forward, and it serves only to help England disappear even further up its own arse like a scatological Ouroboros.

In Tom Clancy’s 1987 novel Patriot Games, a team of terrorists attempt to kidnap Charles and his then wife, Diana. At the climax of the story, Charles joins the fight against them and Clancy has the man who was famously flummoxed by the act of signing documents talk about flying fighter jets and dryly utter the line “I am adept with light weapons.” In reality, Charles crash-landed his plane seven years after this book was written, as part of a flight crew found negligent in their duties.