The Sam Binnie Diaries

As various of us in the house attempt to improve our various levels of various languages, I was caught by this opening to an old Edward Said piece in the LRB: 

“All families invent their parents and children, give each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language. There was always something wrong with how I was invented and meant to fit in with the world of my parents and four sisters. Whether this was because I constantly misread my part or because of some deep flaw in my being I could not tell for most of my early life.”

Poor me, poor me, far too long-past still aware of my other-ness in my family, play on, tiny violins. (But he goes on to describe his timidity and total lack of will, where my own problem was being pure will, nothing but impulse and urge, need and taste, a tiny Achilleus, with a terrible enraged terror that mushroomed when things went against me. Poor everyone.) The linguistics of his family, his mother in particular, make me think about how strange and difficult it must have been for my own mother to have raised us in something other than her mother tongue. Although, to use that term seems wrong, because her mother also had to raise her children in a different language, different from the one in which she was raised. Three languages in three generations, two women moving on, fleeing something dreadful or dreaming of something better. Or both. 

Did my grandmother still count in her native language, muttering under her breath in the numbers that were her first pattern? Did she wake up with a start after falling asleep on a soft armchair and speak a few words of her childhood tongue? 

I’ve just finished Be Funny or Die, which is not only appropriately hilarious to the title, and brilliant on the format and language of jokes, but also wonderful on the structure and language of writing, of speaking, of sharing things with those in or out of your group. Among the housemates here, we revel in all the family shorthand and slang, a mixture of quotes and references, mispronunciations which have stuck, strange, slanted semi-deliberate malapropisms which describe the thing better than the real terms, nicknames, in-jokes, loan words from half-learnt languages and grandmother-tongues, songs, jingles, hymns, and hyper-specific labels from the wittiest member of the extended family which are somehow so precise they can be used verbatim for entirely different occasions. I wonder how it feels to have a totally different language twenty or thirty years in to a life, so that childhood references handed down from parents and grandparents are words your own children can’t understand. Do the French have a Just William? Does Spanish have an equivalent of ‘Give him a nod, Mr Pip’? 

Perhaps the greatest thing we can find is that shared language, a steaming soup-vat of memories that have made us laugh, or that recognise with a spark a previous moment twisted through the current one. The patterns that we perceive aren’t ever new, not really, although the surprise of discovery and realisation in each joke is what makes us laugh, and bonds us together in ways essentially unchanged since language began. 

Several thousand years ago, Homer (poet, not Simpson) became rather famous for his two epic works, and several thousand years later, Christopher Nolan decided to film one. (A hill on which I shall, if not die, then happily debate for hours: The Prestige is Nolan’s only great film, and his Batman films are some baffling exercise in global gaslighting because they are… really awful. Solemnity is not the same as truthfulness; nihilism is not the same as realism; grey is not the same as sophisticated. In fact, don’t get me started on one current Oscar-bait hit, a film which mistakes ‘GCSE-Drama-rehearsal-shouting-over-one-another-plus-a-lot-of-gut-screaming’ for powerful realism. If you can’t be bothered to show even the slightest hint of umbilical cord or placenta in any of the three births you feature, you are no more an emotionally realistic film director than the makers of the Coca-Cola Christmas campaigns.) But The Odyssey’s trailer doesn’t bode well. 

This YouTube critic says that the Odyssey is the more colourful adventure story compared to the haunting monotony of the Iliad, but I still remember my A-Level Classics teacher’s surprise when our class of a dozen girls voted the Iliad their favourite of the two. The poem is full of sun-baked pain and love — between Achilleus and Patroklos, between Hektor and Andromache — and human spite and pettiness and power-play and grief, of smug Odysseus and swaggering oaf Agamemnon, of pragmatic and weary Priam and shocked, traumatised Chryseis and Briseis, traded like casino chips, of the terrible looming tragedy of war and the moments of humanity, a father lifting his child in the sun, a soldier weeping for his lost love, then driven into a terrible berserker fury. The Odyssey, on the other hand, was some fork-tongued anecdotalist taking ten years to get back to his family, some of which was bad luck on his part, sure, but a healthy chunk of the decade was him playing house with a beautiful woman and mentally practising the Bronze Age equivalent of ‘sorry, my phone battery was dead and the trains got cancelled’ to the wife at home being hungrily circled by a bunch of axe-wielding psychos who were pretty open about being after her money and her absent husband’s throne. Forgive us if, even at the tender age of seventeen, we weren’t convinced by that shit. (Also, when Matt Damon Nolan-ishly growled in the trailer, ‘After years of war, no one could stand between my men and home,’ one housemate said in a cheerful tone, ‘Well! It’ll be interesting to see if anything does get in the way of his men getting home!’ and I was glad beyond words to live with people who have read the Odyssey and know how to use irony just to please ourselves. Be funny, indeed.) 

I’ve wondered more than ever this year about why, in our bookclub, the older the book is the more likely we are to all like it. There’s something about modern publishing, particularly the ‘publish everything and see what sells’ model (plus staff cuts and time pressures), that means more books than ever are coming out without sufficient gatekeeping.

Gatekeeping, like most words, doesn’t sway one way or another in objective moral terms. While the majority of people would agree that gatekeeping groups from culture, science, access to healthcare, housing, etc. is a bad idea for all of us, gatekeeping as a quality-sieve also seems to have gone out of the window. Has your TV show got a great single hook? Does your author have a big following online? Will your film get a great response on social media? Great, let’s sign you up! 

And so: we are offered more and more of less and less. Thoughtful books, films, and TV still exist, but they are harder to find. Brainrot culture is given an intellectual gloss by our chattering classes, often in essays far more interesting and insightful than the source, and we can all feel good for not looking down on things that are boring, stupid, or under-cooked. 

I was talking to a housemate the other day about a book we’d both read, and they said that the voice of the narrator was so much less interesting than the voice of the book, and I suddenly knew exactly what they meant. New books now still have so much potential: identity questioning, grief, love, madness, the trivial becoming huge, the huge becoming trivial, dread, rage, joy, bliss. Yet so many of the narrative voices sound exactly the same: slightly removed, slightly self-aware, 2010-levels of blue-tick twitter wit, the ‘correct’ feelings on the big things, and the correct-incorrect feelings on the small things (messy men and women who hate kids, fuck up at their meaningless jobs, can’t cook, but impulse shop and drunk-message and know they spend too long on their phone but hahaha here’s another chapter where they stay up all night on it anyway). On one hand, I’ve read books I’ve loved with those characters (if you didn’t enjoy anything about Bridget Jones’s Diary and High Fidelity in the the 90s, then I probably can’t do anything about that); on the other, these were fresh voices at the time. We hadn’t heard a Bridget or a Rob, at that stage, just as we hadn’t seen a Fleabag or a Bojack in the mid-2010s, and their voices, whether you liked them or not, felt like a person: recognisable, familiar, but individual. 

Another housemate berated me for taking this kind of line — how unfair to compare something published yesterday with an I Capture the Castle (which has survived more than 75 years) or a Talented Mr Ripley (70 years old) or an Excellent Women (72 years). It’s survivor bias to hold up books that were published a lifetime ago to fresh young titles that haven’t yet proved themselves, of course. But I picked up Jonny Sweet’s recent debut novel for my summer holiday, and was struck immediately by the narrator having an actual voice. He didn’t speak exactly like his friends or other characters in the book, and his internal and external voice both reflected who he was and gave us a deeper understanding of him beyond his own. Although a juicy one-line pitch of a concept, the narrative voice made me actively enjoy reading the book, and gave me an opportunity to develop empathy for the pitch-black protagonist, in a way that reading 400 pages of plot-driven bluesky chat just doesn’t. Another recent title, a new novel from an award-winning author that’s out next year, is so odd, so uniquely formatted and conceived, with such an obscure heart to it and such an individual voice, that I want to sing from the rooftops about how brilliant and energising it is to read. In fact, I want to read it again already. 

I realise that I’m craving competence, not correctness. I want to see odd things done bravely and intelligently, whether or not they succeed. I want to enjoy the creations from people of experience and thoughtfulness, whether or not I agree with them; I want the normalisation of reasoned debate to return, to plead with experts that we haven’t actually had enough, that we like knowing that smart people are still producing smart things. 

The evil, evil algorithm fed me this video essay the other day, Why Are Movies About Research So Addictive? , which captures so well the joy of watching capable people do their jobs really, really well. Is there something in the whirling collective anxiety, terror and horror flavouring all public discourse that is the grieving not only for community, but also for competence? Don’t we all miss knowing that if something needs to be done, we can rely on skilled people to do it? That we don’t have to ride an emotional rollercoaster of corruption, fraudsters, scammers or Sludge?

Don’t we want to know that our nurses and doctors are well-rested and able to take care of us? That our teachers aren’t so burnt out that they can still be experts in their fields, able to educate well the generations soon to enter our workplaces and voting booths? That our politicians have had meaningful jobs before they take up political service, and can have the time and freedom to make good decisions for their constituents? That journalists have the support and experience to dig out and publish major news stories? That those building houses and sewage systems and schools and hospitals know what they’re doing, and can do it well and safely? Don’t we all long to live with some sort of trust in the infrastructure of our society? 

Of many of the films Willems mentions in his video, I either watch them fairly regularly or have watched them relatively recently, but I rewatched Shattered Glass for the first time since its release in 2003, and was struck by how much I’d then seen Peter Sarsgaard’s character, Chuck Lane, as the grey-area antagonist of the film, rather than its hero. He’s a heads-down committed journalist, unfazed by Stephen Glass’s wheedling ‘Are you mad at me?’ whenever challenged about a mistake. While the rest of the team in the film just want to be kind to the harmless, pleasing Glass, Lane wants objective facts, understanding better than his whole editorial staff that journalism should not, cannot, be built on vibes, but only on expertise, objectivity, critical thinking, and slow, careful research and analysis. As Sarsgaard says to Chloe Sevigny’s character after Glass’s fabrications have come to light, ‘He handed us fiction after fiction, and we printed them all as fact. Just because we found him… entertaining. It’s indefensible, don’t you know that?’ (In echo, I found the new Superman film to be almost unwatchable, despite the wonderful cast and the great intentions. I don’t need Superman to be the missing final David Lynch film, but don’t we deserve that it makes basic narrative sense? That there is a sense of someone doing good other than just endlessly saying he is? That goodness can be wonderfully interesting to portray? That this bastion of goodness in the face of large- and small-scale badness could be more than merely… entertaining? Or is this just my Barbie battle all over again?)

There’s space for all sorts of culture, high, low, for me, not for me, books for when you’re ill and TV for when you’re cripplingly depressed. Everyone should find something they need when they open a book or sit in front of a screen, and thanks to AI everyone can have the exact flavour of slop they type into the prompt box. Hurray. 

But right now, being entertaining isn’t enough. I want thoughtfulness, I want weirdness, I want individuality. I want culture that makes me question myself, and everything around me. I want experts to make those bits of culture better, and I want to hope that there is the space, and the funding, and the experience, for creators and audiences to get more than they want. In a time of AI, misinformation, authoritarianism, and a Bradbury-esque screen-based attention-grab, I want us to get exactly what we need. 

In other news:

If you still have any gooseberries, make this tart

Marvel at the beauty of the outfits of the cast on this, particularly Claude’s — I want everything in his wardrobe  

The year has kept me from nihilism, at least as I look immediately around and behind. Ahead, I’ve been feeling alarm, until I watched this (long, be warned, by Instagram standards) video from Martha Beck, an author who by any measure I should back away from with my fingers in my ears — she’s a life coach, she’s published a book involving the word ‘starlight’, she’s got her own podcast. But she also worded exactly the growing feeling I’ve had for the last five or ten years in such a neat and clear way: that our insistence on individualism and prioritising wealth as a marker of ‘success’, or indeed ‘goodness’, is damaging us beyond words, and that if we make the mental shift away from ego and towards collective thinking, we’ll thrive en masse. 

I feel too old to give any credence at all to anything remotely hippyish (unless you couch it as witch-based, then I, like any middle-aged woman who daily sees more than a handful of trees, am fully in), but the inverse makes our current position even clearer, like this Thread which says, ‘2024 isn’t “a weird time in history”, we’re living through the inevitable conclusion to doing everything wrong’ which, yes, is exactly the feeling I’ve had, that almost all of us are having day by day. 

So far, our attitude has been: Privatise everything, give more money than is possible to spend in a lifetime to a handful of people, ensure politics becomes a circle-jerk of super wealthy individuals protecting other wealthy individuals, or, at best, good-hearted individuals only able to make the most short-term of decisions because politics is cripplingly partisan and no one is able, practically, financially, politically, legally, narratively, to make any longterm plans that might pinch this week but will help us all a year or more down the road. Make our environment worse, make our poorest poorer, make our health services barely functional, make every news story about how This Group is to blame; normalise violent porn and telling children that the distress they feel about this weirdo world is because their bodies are sinful, or wrong, or broken; remove art and poetry and serendipity from people’s lives, tell them every hobby should be monetised as a side-hustle, or maybe just remove the chance for hobbies at all because they probably should be working multiple jobs to afford just to eat and pay rent; remove Third Spaces and tell people that connections should be on their phones, not in person; teach us all that women and men are enemies, all the time, and we should be afraid of each other, in different ways, and remind us that enemies have nothing in common; make tech addictive, and use it to terrify people so we’re too anxious to come off it but we’re also scared constantly at everything we’re shown on there; make wanting more things all the time so important that we pay beautiful randos online to tell us that we want this thing now, and aren’t they our friends so can’t we trust them? Make war the most profitable business in the world, and make young men and women kill each other, plus kill old men and women, plus children, because business is great, isn’t it, and it helps shore up our valuable economies, even though it destroys lives and countries and land and water and generations. (I mean, we know all this stuff, don’t we? This is not groundbreaking Human Existence content.) 

As someone said on twitter several years ago, ‘The modern condition is mostly trying to do things on your own that people have historically achieved with a large support network and wondering why you’re tired all the time.’ Quite. Or a more recent summary of AI: ‘No one has satisfactorily answered the fundamental question of why I should bother reading something you couldn’t be bothered to write’, or on the terrible, terrible existence of crypto, from a few years ago: ‘Cryptocurrency is literally like an eight-year-old’s concept of an evil businessman. He just plugs his pollution machine in and gets money for it. It doesn’t make anything, it just. Pollutes. And makes money. Like a fucking Captain Planet villain’. 

We don’t, as we’ve established, want to give art and culture over to AI so we can work more hours in a shitwork job enabling global enshittification; we want to work fewer hours and still be able to make art, or enjoy it, or share it, or laugh with our friends, or make a meal together, or dance in public without worrying that our gullible volunteer Stasi won’t film us and make us the Internet’s character of the day. (Do you know that’s real? That hordes of youth won’t go out to clubs/discos/parties because they’ve seen how people can be filmed anywhere, everywhere, by anyone, and turned into an online figure forever? If you read that in a book thirty years ago that would definitely have been a dystopian novel, wouldn’t it? But we’ve just let it become normal somehow, like live-tweeting strangers’ conversations as if we’re breaking the news on an International political scandal, rather than just chipping away at our collective humanity for the sake of a thumbs-up from an internet @-sign?) Also, did you know that Pokemon Go, that fun way to take our Covid walks, was actually a tool for geomapping the entire planet, especially paths that cars couldn’t get to or inside buildings, of which a cleverly placed Pokegym could lure players into getting full images? Tech is great! And not at all sinister in almost every Neo-capitalist manifestation! Tech is for the people, and in no way purely for increasingly the profits of the shareholders and normalising the collapse in personal privacy and security! You are a person with a spirit and a legacy, not just a data-heap with a face they’ve scanned for later use! We’ll send you a personal discount code to prove it! 

Which is all to say: I think we need a shift, and I see, thank god, that feeling everywhere. In Martha Beck’s video, in this jokey post from Cassie Wilson, with her “Outs” for 2024 including cancelling at the last minute, AI dating apps, celebrity gossip, “I asked ChatGPT to—”, binge watching, and her “Ins” for 2025 including craft nights, flirting, familial lore, dusting your room, and going outside before 3pm every day. We’re beginning to recognise, little by little but also more and more, that we all feel shit because this world isn’t built for our needs. We need challenge, and quietness; we need collective celebrations and collective action; we need to recognise our biological connection to Nature and what our psychological disconnection from humanity feels like, when we sit on screens all day, and we need to stop being trained to find violence and malicious error in evveerrrrythiiiing. Isn’t that called getting past your teens? We need movement and music — I went to a Taylor Swift gig this summer and my god, I finally get religion, I would join her cult in a heartbeat, and I know cults are by their nature bad and no person is perfect and should be worshipped and no one individual should have the pressure of being worshipped but at the same time thousands of people singing together, dancing together, in special clothes we’d chosen for this occasion, I get it, I get it, I kept weeping for weeks afterwards every time I remembered certain moments and I see how humans love this stuff when it’s the thing that clicks for you — and we need to do things we don’t want to do for the benefit of the greater good. 

I see this shift, these new questions, in the feed the terrible internet has curated for me. In an interesting episode of Search Engine on ayahuasca and the ego we’re currently not only driven by, but encouraged to foster until it’s big and strong like a spoiled toddler, and in Strong Message Here, where Armando Iannucci and Helen Lewis discuss how ‘everyone shouting in the Twitter town square means you end up with a wrestling heel as president’, and also how when words mean absolutely everything, when words can be ‘literal violence’, you end up losing sight of real reality, with sunlight and caring responsibilities and laundry and meals and how much money you get in your bank account for doing a full week’s work, and in The Rest is Entertainment, when Marina Hyde observes how the three biggest entertainment products at the moment are Traitors, Squid Game, and Beast Games, and how they’re essentially the same thing: a programme about betrayal, about being the worst person you can be in order to win against hundreds (or thousands) of others in a terrible, hopeless, anything-for-the-win society. No collective betterment, no improving of the many, no realist narrative, just disconnection in order to sell more product. It makes me think of that dull crushing modern mantra, ‘You’re born alone, you die alone.’ One may or may not technically die alone, but we 3,000,000% do not get born alone. Every single one of us is carried by a woman for nine months, who nourishes us and keeps us safe before giving birth to us in various methods ranging from a bit sore and achy to actually lethal, and if she’s made it through then she’ll continue to feed and care for us for months, years more, just like she was birthed by mothers before her, mother before mother before mother, all the way back to the start of the human race. In the same way that we don’t make it on our own further down the line either: we drive down roads others built wearing clothes others made, drinking water others have piped to our homes, taking medicine others have created, walking down streets others keep clean, using computers others have designed and manufactured, eating food others grew and packaged and delivered. There is not a single thing we do that is untouched by the hand of someone else, and to pretend otherwise is so egotistical it’s either wilful blindness or actual mental illness. 

As always, it comes back to Mad Men. Slight spoilers, but it’s been ten years and really you should have at least started by now: in the series finale, Don Draper, handsome, brilliant, wealthy, successful, realises that he is nothing. After taking himself off and experiencing essentially a breakdown/breakthrough, he telephones the people who mean the most to him: his ex-wife and mother of his children, his equally brilliant protégée, and his daughter, as wilful and sharp-minded as he’s ever been. He’s not calling them as service animals, to care for him as they perhaps had always seemed to do at distant points in his past; he’s calling for connection, to try and remind himself that they are the best thing about his life, that his money, career skill and looks count for nothing if he can’t connect again with the people who know him best. The episode is called, of course, Person to Person, and it ends with the clearest possible portrayal that it’s the most humble person to person connections we have to choose, ultimately, if we want to find happiness. 

I think of all the things I don’t like perhaps much more than I ought to do, and the things I do like maybe more than I ought as well — perhaps I should be creating more and appreciating/envying less — but I do know that for all the popular things I don’t like (Breaking Bad, E.T., Gladiator, most John Hughes films, Ghostbusters (except the Melissa McCarthy one), cosmetic surgery, putting your life on social media) my tastes are hardly art-house niche; I don’t spend my Saturday nights being the sole member of the audience at a drag interpretation of Brecht’s least-known play in a room above a pub, so my likes almost certainly overlap with yours somewhere. In fact, if you take the most die hard super-fan of Breaking Bad, Ridley Scott and botox, I bet there’s still more than a handful of things that we have in common, because generally people like loads of stuff, it’s just that the internet likes to make us feel otherwise. I like most food, for instance! I like to hear about the history of most sports, even thought I’ll never be a sports fan, so tell me about your team and the long-running rivalry they’ve got with whoever! Tell me about how you built something! Let’s talk about the best colours there are! Let me make you some soup, and we can debate the greatest soups we’ve each had! Describe your favourite Breaking Bad episode to me, because I’ll probably even like that! 

If you want to enjoy any of the things I’ve enjoyed this year that aren’t soup-chat or favourite colours, here you go: rewatching the whole of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was incredible. Despite Whedon’s best attempts to really fuck it up for all of us, it remains staggeringly good in the main, and even the worst bits (the boyfriends, fat-shaming) are valuable lessons for teen girls; The Body makes me in awe of the writers, in capturing not just grief, but the weirdness of death, so well. Rewatching Spaced, too; you never know how deeply something will embed in your consciousness, but I can still recite vast swathes along with it (and you can imagine how much my housemates love that). The Rehearsal was amazing, weird and unexpected; I had to beg my fellow watchers to stick with it but they were glad they did, and I still think about it regularly. 

Paul Mescal performed the triumvirate for me, between Aftersun (beautiful, quietly devastating), All of Us Strangers (beautiful, loudly devastating, will reshape your brain into a wondrous flower) and this musical number from SNL, the highlight of the year for the only one of my housemates to have watched both Wicked and Gladiator. The Fall Guy was great cinema, fun and funny and the mid-tier film they don’t make anymore (and probably won’t make anymore, goddammit), A Quiet Place: Day One was far better than it had any right to be, thanks to Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn; Heretic likewise, with Hugh Grant grinning and sighing ruefully and having the greatest time of his life in this slight, immensely fun horror film. 

In older films, I watched Laurence of Arabia for the first time and was silenced for several hours after by its beauty and power; Cabaret will, sadly, probably never not be relevant, as well as being painful and gorgeous and bleak; Fried Green Tomatoes may always be my favourite lesbian romance film/menopause power flick; Matt Reeves’ The Batman is the first Batman film I’ve liked since 1989, and Pattinson somehow captured the broken, dissociative nature of the figure for the first time, for me. I also rewatched The Prestige for the first time in at least a decade, and wondered both at how perfect a film it is, with the constant chronological leaping (around one timeline jump per minute of movie, according to IMDb) always crystal clear, and echoes between characters and plots and subplots forming the most perfect jewel-box, but also how Nolan has become such a meandering self-indulgent filmmaker in latter years (opinion: maybe Inception was his last good film, and I had to rewatch that at home because I couldn’t hear one single word in the cinema). 

Books-wise the only two that stand out are Love & Let Die, by John Higgs, a marvellous analysis of two great twentieth century shapes: James Bond and the Beatles, one standing for death and sex and the old ways, and the other for life, love and new possibilities. It’s funny and clever, and I listened to most of it on audiobook, read by the author, as I painted seemingly infinite walls an eye-achingly bland white this autumn, and didn’t mind at all. I’d loved British Summer Time Begins last summer, by Ysenda Maxtone Graham, so read her Terms & Conditions this summer, a wonderful history of girls’ boarding schools from 1939-79. It’s full of beauty and cruelty, friendship and injustice, larks, nature, freezing cold and terrible food, and it made me wish we could all just have a year without smartphones and see how all our children might turn out after those twelve months. 

Other things: I saw the Barbie exhibition at the Design Museum with the housemates, and seeing the Barbies I’d played with, hand-me-downs I now realise from the release dates, and a very similar house to the one I was given by my godfather, I wept and felt like a dip-dyed Marcel Proust. It was physical, this sense of time tunnelling between the Now, of forty-something women taking pictures with their iPhones, and my tall, amused housemates watching my reactions to these toys, and the Then, of holding these dolls, dressing them, their lives being my life, their clothes becoming the outfits I would generally gravitate towards even now (recent discussions with a school friend made me understand my dress-code thirty years on as half-Angela Chase, half-Rayanne Graff, but this exhibition made me realise it’s actually two thirds My So-Called Life, one third Crystal Barbie). I also went to Whitstable with friends to visit other friends, and the Whitstable friends took us to the sauna by the sea in October, and both sea and sauna were the best versions of those things I’ve ever experienced. Highly recommend, but I won’t link because maybe those host friends may not want more people in there and might refuse to take me there ever again. Finally, the podcast The 99% Invisible Breakdown: The Power Broker, hosted by two of my favourite podcast hosts, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan, who took twelve months and several hours each episode to go through the entire enormous book by Robert Caro about the man who built and shaped New York in the twentieth century. It’s funny and fascinating, and the way history repeats itself when it comes to power, those who want it, those who have it, and those who’ll do anything to stop others getting it, is worth reminding ourselves about even at the best of times, let alone at the tail end of centuries of mostly terrible political, cultural and social decisions. 

This year, between one thing and another, I’ve felt sad about my father’s death — and I am so terrible with dates, I can’t remember how long ago he died without trying to triangulate with nearby events which I also can’t remember properly, I can’t remember how old my sisters are or even when two of the housemates were born without having to do careful calculations that normally involves saying things out loud to work out which… happened… first? — but I think his death was around ten years ago, and the sadness is possibly for the first time. And it’s not grief, because I think that happened before he died, and in a few flashes where I would see him after his funeral in the supermarket, or through a doorway in my dreams; this is more a sense at how sad I am for him not to know this household now. I think how much he would have loved their creativity, their goofiness, their open-heartedness, their jokes and wit and tastes, how he would have loved singing the same songs he made us sing with our friends around the dinner table, how he would have loved teaching them about clouds and flight, about how to sight a star or name a tree. And then I think: I’m missing the father I had for about twelve scattered months through my childhood and early teens, when he wasn’t angry or depressed, waiting to drink or trying to hide his drinking, irritable or frightening or absent or manipulative, when he wasn’t alarmed and alienated by a house full of women who lived a life almost unrecognisable from his. My friend said, “Perhaps you wish he could just visit for an afternoon from the time he was at his best, just meet everyone and go for a walk in the woods and hang out for a meal and that would be it?” I didn’t want to cry, but I had to blink and press my lips together because that’s exactly what the feeling was, and I was overwhelmed to know people as brilliant as my friend, people who recognise these mad human impulses we all have. 

Speaking of brilliant people and mad impulses, October has finally, finally, after all these years, become one of my favourite months, after I’ve finally got a housemate who enjoys horror films. I was a very very late adopter, but thanks to last year's excellent October daily emails and this year's beautiful zine from the marvellous Tom Humberstone, plus the wonderfully creepy influence of another housemate’s ghosty-godmother, October means building a list of scary films through the year, to gorge throughout the month. Last year, we enjoyed The Innocents, Duel, Pontypool and The Stone Tapes, among others; this year we’ll hopefully manage Aliens, Nope, The Others, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It’s reassuring to me that there are still switches to be flicked in my brain, that there are still whole gigantic areas of culture that I’ve been completely turned off by that can suddenly, with the right fuse, become a topic I want to watch, read about, listen to podcasts on, discuss and debate and consume. In a recent book club meeting, the topic of jazz briefly came up, the perennial joke for a skippable genre. And yet — jazz? Really? There’s nothing you like about… all of jazz? Which covers everything from Big Band to Miles Davis — I mean: you can’t listen to Kind of Blue and think, “Christ, this is good music”? And of course I used to feel that way about jazz, in the same way I did about horror, and gammon-dad-joke history podcasts, and capers, and now I cannot get enough of any of them. Is this a sign of hope for humanity, somehow? 

Perhaps these new passions are really just buried seeds, blooming late in the season when they get their chance. Perhaps horror was planted when I was allowed to rent Jan Švankmajer’s Alice from our village video shop when I was a child, because it was about Alice in Wonderland and I was probably off ill from school, so did it matter if I sat for 90 minutes paralysed with terror and joy as my mind was blown apart that a film like this — a PG no less! — could exist, that children were allowed to watch in broad daylight, condoned and sponsored by their parents. Perhaps Alice and Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Cabaret and Ghostwatch and Blue Jam have swirled in my head for decades, finally settling now as insanely giddy passion for Inside and I Think You Should Leave and The Rehearsal as they drift into my view. And although I still wish every day that the internet didn’t exist beyond its 1999 form, I’m glad that not only have I enjoyed all these new things through it, but also more things that have grown from these things, like this brilliant essay by Thomas Flight on The Rehearsal, or this one on how I Think You Should Leave cured the essay-maker’s depression. Perhaps they are planting valuable seeds in someone's tender head right now.

While I ponder the art that shapes us, I’m also researching conspiracies and cults for a current job, and the excellent second series of BBC’s The Coming Storm is doing a cracking job of illustrating how even the most extreme positions and the most ridiculous actions always come with an internal logic and a cultural justification. Whether I’m on- or offline, I forget (just as we all do) that my experience is not universal, that my outlook is neither universal nor unique, and that a self-evident truth can often be seen in its obverse by someone else. If I’m sick of influencers, surely everyone is? If I think millionaires don’t need to gouge another £8 a month from their podcast listeners, surely no one will end up paying? If everyone I know can see Trump is one of the very worst options for the whole world, surely no one will really vote for him? 

Of course, everyone who enjoys thinking is mostly just — aren’t we? — trying to marry the stories that we input, with a moral core we already carry inside. But how much are we allowing ourselves to be changeable? How much can we consume content without feeling overwhelmed and deadened? How do we resist the urge to pick a side when that’s the whole shape of our culture, now? Yiyun Li writes remarkably in Harper’s Magazine about our current cultural impulse to flatten, to pick a tone and see no other, to reduce any story to moral policing and then instantly dismiss it. She writes (my ellipses): 

“There is something mind-boggling about this rush to censure. One has the urge to tell these people, Not everything is about your feelings… I admit that I worry when the younger generations use language that they have taken from public circulation without thinking it through first. Phrases like “dismantle the canon” may sound fabulous, but if you were to press the students to elaborate, you would get a string of grandiose and empty words... Thinking through — rather than just thinking — is important. A thought or an idea is never that precious. People have thoughts and ideas all the time, many of them preliminary. Sometimes people mistake their feelings for thoughts and ideas, which are in turn mistaken for absolute truths.”

(If you want to see this idea written as a slick and brilliant sitcom, can I recommend English Teacher, where teens are as dumb, selfish, short-sighted and loved as we were at that age, but now they’re living in a unique moment in history where these children are the only ones who know anything, and where if someone disagrees with them it’s literal violence and they are encouraged by adults who absolutely should know better that they have the ABSOLUTE moral high ground, no, duty, to destroy that person any way they can. It’s a nightmare piled on an apocalypse wrapped in a hilarious and empathetic script.)

Later, Li adds: 

“[W]hat afflicts literature, more than book banning, is this rapid loss of the ability to read for deeper meanings, to grasp subtlety, and to understand ambiguity. If conviction instead of clarity, the kind of clarity that arrives via muddled thinking, repeated questioning, and a tolerance for not knowing and not understanding — is the goal of reading and writing, then much is already lost.” 

I’ve felt for a long time that reading just any book isn’t enough. I mean, for someone who never reads, then reading even one book is great, that’s a win, but those people who do read, who like reading: do we have a moral responsibility to explore new ideas, to find ambiguity, to push into more difficult works and reach those characters in the 70 percent after which Li’s essay is named? Not into violence or degradation or misery, which is what normally ends up being labelled “Important Art”, but into the 70 percent who most accurately reflect life, the perfect, breath-taking middle-of-the-road stories and characters, from Barbara Pym's novels, or the non-fiction of Shirley Jackson or David Sedaris, or I Capture the Castle, or High Fidelity, or Rebecca West’s trilogy, wildly overnamed The Saga of the Century when it is the most perfectly written collection of devastatingly quotidian moments which will change you forever: porridge, a music lesson, a death, a marriage. 

We’re told so much that we ought to be great that we’ve forgotten the real goal is just to be good. Whenever you can, be a good neighbour, a good friend, a good partner, a good colleague, a good parent. Make good jokes, bake good tarts, share good clothes, accept that the vast majority of us will be average, and actually if we can do everything we can to drag the average up to ‘pretty decent’, then that’s something, isn't it?

Otherwise, is this hell? Right now, are we in hell? All the vital systems we’re literally forced to use to function in society are fairly insecure in one way or another, so we can no longer trust our conversations, our secrets, our finances, our data, all of which are chopped up and sold to corporations who have more protections than we do. In a world of increasing gloom, from weather and war to biodiversity and food supplies, the rich accelerate off into the billions while the poor, in almost every country, struggle to feed their children and keep their homes free from mould and bugs, despite jobs they took loans to qualify for and are still paying off; the health system in the UK is collapsing, as is the justice system, as is journalism, as is reasoned debate, as is education, and safeguarding, and libraries, and public access to outdoor spaces, and equal access to music and sport and theatre and nature and dance — all the things that AI cannot replicate, that generations before have known make our lives better and can be enjoyed by groups from every background, that bring people together and make us bonded. Of course those things would be ground down to dust, to become inaccessible, because if one wants to, at worst, don a tinfoil hat, or at best, read the news and some history books and listen to a few thoughtful people piping up, our lives are shaped by aggressive consumerist capitalism these days, so why on earth would multi-national conglomerates want us hanging out, often for free, and getting to know our neighbours so we understand they’re generally pretty much like us and we don’t have to buy something online from 6,000 miles away to kick-in our self-care that we require because someone rang our doorbell/spoke to us in a shop/disagreed with us online, when division and destruction is so much more profitable for those multi-nationals? I mean, really. Is this hell? 

I think: 2024 will be the year I give up hope. It is so hard, it is so endless, it is so pointless and thankless and exhausting, and it feels clear that maybe it’s just more sensible to give up on hope. Friends and family have died this year; others have moved away, or plan to next year; there is depletion, there is disappointment, there is parting after parting after parting. Love sometimes just feels like a preparation for more loss. Culture is dumb, and getting dumber; intellectualism is a piñata to be beaten by the Extremely Online until the correct phrases fall out and the intellectual stops existing in any meaningful way; no one meaningful seems to care about the climate catastrophe; democracy is collapsing; more war, more division, more fear. 

But the frustrating truth of course is that hopelessness is even harder than hope. Existing in hope may be exhausting. It is bloody, it is muscular and effortful, it requires seeing the best of people even when they don’t display it, it means loving people when they don’t want our love and believing with gritted teeth in the joys we can share, in clever thinking, in engaged discussion, in growth and development, in change and forgiveness. Hope is this dumb semi-accidental tumblr poem that captures the sheer stubbornness you have to develop to keep hope alive. I’ve done hopelessness and it’s awful, crushing and enfeebling and dull beyond words. It’s not smart to be hopeless: it’s boring, and I don't want it. Death is inevitable, but there's still time. Anyway! Here are my highlights from 2023. 

SKETCHES: 

Much as I don’t want to exist in a youtube bubble — listen to albums, not singles! — sometimes a single sketch says everything you need to. Mostly old, but all brilliant, this year we've enjoyed multiple rewatches of Key & Peele’s Text Confusion sketch, Armstrong & Miller’s physics expert, Mitchell & Webb’s ever-apt Baddies, and not a sketch, but Dave’s explanation of the financial crash in Happy Endings has made ‘let me back up’ an ever-present phrase in most of our household anecdotes. From what Dan McCoy calls ‘the worst show I’ve watched every episode of’, we regularly review Papyrus, Amazon Echo Silver, Dear Sister, Christmas Morning, Amazon Go, Enhancement Drug, and Traffic Altercation; almost any Weekend Update segment with Michael Longfellow, Andrew Dismukes or Marcello Hernández, or any sketch with Bowen Yang; most Please Don’t Destroy sketches, not least Three Sad Virgins, Ramen Order, Wellness, and Self Defense. Going mostly cold-turkey on Inside and Bo Burnham generally means that while I have regained some sanity, it gives the housemates fewer opportunities to sing The Chicken, which is a stone-cold ballad banger. 

TV: 

TV-wise, we’ve been spoiled by the final series of Succession, a masterpiece examination of corruption, the American Dream, and family trauma. Loved it. In the most opposite possible way, I rewatched Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen, also a masterpiece examination of corruption, the American Dream, and family trauma, but with extra mini-squid, cloned servants, masked police, and President Robert Redford. Although it’s four years old now, I’m sure there are still people who haven’t seen it — please do, really. There are no weak links in the entire thing, it’s imaginative and sharp as a razor, taking the original comic and lifting it to a searing present-day examination of white supremacy and racial exploitation, power and technology. 

I also rewatched both Community and Happy Endings, this time with the housemates, and I’m so glad that they now say baggle, rooof stoooof, and Max's ‘Here we go!’. I’m also into my fourth rewatch of Mythic Quest, the Pandemic episode of which might go into my memorial time capsule for the way it captured both the best and worst moments of Covid lockdown.  For new television, I loved Extraordinary, a British and female-led look at the superhero genre; The Greatest Show Never Made, a moving, hilarious, and enraging documentary about very early reality TV and the bonds we can make when we come together; Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, an Agatha Christie adaptation that appreciates we don’t necessarily want our escapist Golden Age plots filmed like Fincher’s Zodiac, and Gregg Wallace: The British Miracle Meat, a Swiftian satire that we collectively watched four times in twelve hours. That’s gravy, baby. 

In films, I’ve had a mostly duff year at the cinema bar three highlights: Past Lives, with the luminously beautiful Greta Lee and Teo Yoo, John Wick 4, an extreme action flick I absolutely should not even have liked but which gave me a bubble of joy in my chest that still hasn’t subsided, nine months on, and best of all, Bottoms, a film which should be available on prescription. You know when you love someone, then share some art with them and they love it just as much as you do? It might be the best feeling in the world, and certainly made me ask how different my life might have been had I been taken to see a lesbian high school fight club comedy by authority figures when I was a teen. It’s so weird, and uncomfortable, and over the top, and the time period isn’t clear, and the humour is grotesque. It’s also the most female-gaze-y film I think I’ve ever seen, and takes the idea of ‘female existence as a horror film’ — my constant theory — and shows how we can make all the real horrors of a girl’s existence — abuse, stalking, exploitation, the threat of male violence, a porn-drenched culture, the patriarchy — and turn it into a joyful, vivid, sexy, howl-from-the-sunroof-of-a-speeding-car celebration of girls and women in union. Fuck, it’s so great. 

At home, we’ve had a glut of horror joys thanks to my pal Tom Humberstone’s Grave Offerings, a daily newsletter sent throughout October that has got one housemate fully into the delights of a good horror film. Besides The Innocents, Alien, A Quiet Place, and the staggeringly underrated Pontypool, we also took in Duel, which I hadn’t seen since watching it with my father when I was a youngish child. Like almost everything you leave untouched for thirty years, it was completely different to how I remembered it, and I watched it now as a brilliant essay on the traumas of David Mann’s time in Vietnam. Tom’s essay on Duel in particular is fantastic, and will change forever how you see a ‘shark film’. 

More fuel to my ‘female existence as a horror film’ theory were Happening, Petite Maman, Mustang, and Spencer. I was put off Spencer for a long time since I’ve never had any interest in Diana or her marriage, but this film was more like The Others than The Crown, and has a haunting lushness that stayed with me. Mustang continues to be among my favourite films of the twenty-first century, and I genuinely believe it should be compulsory viewing in schools.  The counters to my theory seem to be films with a tipping-point of women; Little Women, Steel Magnolias, Fried Green Tomatoes. We watched the latter at the start of the year, and for all its flaws I’m still struggling to stop saying, ‘You ain’t nothing but a bee charmer, Idgie Threadgoode.’ 

In books, January saw me reading the second of Tim Key’s lockdown books, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush. The first was hilarious and crushing, reminding me of the weirdness and loneliness of the first lockdown; this second work made me cry again, for the desperate hopefulness of beginning to reconnect with loved ones, with strangers, with life. Do you remember how special we found going to a coffee shop again? 

I’d forgotten how foolproof Nick Hornby’s recommendations in the Believer are,  and so finally got round to reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow when I saw he'd praised it, having pooh-poohed it myself due to its massive success. I read it in less than twenty-four hours and didn’t stop sobbing for at least that long, pressing it into several people’s hands until they agreed to read it too, if I’d stop hiccupping at them. If I’ve read it, I’m certain you have by now. 

I managed only a few children’s books this year — my favourite by far was When You Reach Me, pressed into my hands by a housemate with the same fever I’d passed on Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. I don’t know how famous it is, but without spoiling anything it’s a wonderful primer for budding fans of early-Christopher Nolan (of which I’m sure there are tonnes). 

I’d read a phonebook if David Sedaris wrote it, so I was delighted to have his first volume of diaries to go back to in the winter months; at the other end of the year I read another sharp-eyed look at human connection, in the form of A Glass of Blessings. What would I do without Pym and Sedaris, I wonder? Finally, I got Elton John’s memoir, Me, for Christmas and finished it pronto. He’s rather wonderfully both a total nightmare and the most generous, self-aware, loving, creative, and amusing character I’ve enjoyed for a long time. Like all good music books, I want to go back and hear his entire back catalogue from the very beginning. 

When it comes to food and drink, I’m discovering the delights of non-alcoholic gin and negronis. I haven’t really drunk alcohol for years, but I do miss that grown-up taste of something sour and special. I recently rediscovered how easy moules marinière are, and if I can afford the shelled delights through the winter I may make it again for Imbolc. 

Time to find balance again. The windows clatter in their frames as the autumn wind starts up, and I’m trying to hoard enough handicrafts and uplifting media to keep me going though the darkening evenings. The usual SAD was working overtime at the start of this year for a good few months (I wasn't even well enough to do my annual Mad Men binge-watch), so I’m trying to do all those boring things that actually make us feel better: knitting and jigsaws, short but brilliant books, as little processed sugar as I can manage, decent sleep patterns. Is it worse when those things work, or when they don't?

I’ve wondered here before about the loss we’ve self-inflicted by sprinting away from organised religion. Of course it makes sense, when you look at the wider picture — (particularly Western) religions have caused indescribable amounts of bloodshed, destruction and suffering. And yet! What have we lost, in our hurry to show how clever we are to not fall for dogma, mantras, herd mentality, cults, and arbitrary nonsense of in-people and out-people? We’ve certainly lost group singing and group rituals, two hulking great parts of social union that crop up in every single civilisation, two things that offer comfort and structure, joy and togetherness. But! At least in our current hyper-individualist society we’ve freed ourselves from dogma, mantras, herd mentality, cults, and arbitrary nonsense of in-people and out-people, right? PHEW. I mean: PHEW. P H E W. In totally unrelated thoughts, remember that brief window in modern times when men didn’t have an excuse to publicly hate and berate women when we asked for dignity, safety, and equality, when a sizeable swathe didn’t casually drop slurs into conversation with the safe knowledge that surely no sensible, decent woman would disagree with him? Remember that? No, me neither. 

Great things: This article from the Drift on Jack Antonoff is so, so excellent. Thoughtful, intelligent, informed and with a clear argument, it’s exactly what I want to read but so often find myself reading Twitter-rants disguised as legitimate articles instead. This: “If there were a producer who fully belonged to this moment, he would need to be something like a non-brand brand, paradoxically recognizable for his ability to produce stylishly forgettable content... Ubiquitous and ignorable, critically acclaimed and terminally unhip, memeable but unshakably serious, such a figure would fully express the essence of a seemingly essenceless moment.” And this: “Get too close to Antonoff, and his sound vanishes into a series of unremarkable elements; zoom out too far, and it evanesces into generality.” Just marvellous.

This episode of 60 Songs that Explain the ‘90s is also fantastic, with host Rob Harvilla describing one old Celine Dion song as “like drinking rosé from a fire hose.” Like all great music writers, Harvilla is never snobbish about any of the music, and speaks so well about each song's context and influence that I want to listen to everything ever recorded by every act. 

The After Party is a wonderful programme, made comforting and delightful by the presence of Sam Richardson (sadly not in Baby Show mode) but raised to heart-stopping bliss with John Cho. How is that beautiful man 51? Or rather, why do we not know better how beautiful 51-year-olds look? Anyway, full-blown limerence is occurring, even when he’s doing ridiculous dances and absurd speeches; his episode still breaks my heart and I’m here to watch your travel show, Ulysses. 

I gulped down The Devil’s Candy, Julie Salamon’s incredible account of the making of Brian De Palma’s The Bonfire of the Vanities in 1990. The access she was given to everyone from the top execs to the (predictably mistreated) interns makes this a jaw-dropping look at the decisions that turn an idea into a finished film, and one doesn’t get the sense things have improved in the industry in the last thirty years. 

Can I recommend, on a tired, dark evening, having fish finger wraps? It’s hardly rocket science — cooked fish fingers in wraps with tonnes of crunchy lettuce, and a huge spoon of quick tartare sauce (on very tired, dark evenings, I just chop gherkins and put them, several spoons of drained capers, and any onion stub lying around, finely chopped into a bowl of mayonnaise) (or even use stuff from a jar, I don't care). It’s salty and crunchy and warm, costs little and requires almost no thought. 

Home to pick a posy for the table. I must not fall asleep as soon as I sit down. I fall asleep instantly.

2. This spring has been wonderful. Besides the puffs from the willows along the river, the chestnut trees drip sap onto the pavements so our shoes click with every pace, and the ducklings, goslings and cygnets gather around their beady-eyed parents. Dragonflies and damselflies drone over the river. Huge poppies have grown in the chaos of the garden, I assume where I threw the seeds from pavement poppies last summer, and bees roll around among the stamens like playing puppies. I drive past the supermarket and see several people tending to a horse in the neighbouring scrubland.  

3. Have you finished Succession yet? This final series has been my favourite yet, for possibly obvious reasons — my stress levels were lower than my enjoyment levels for the very first time, so I could fully savour exactly how brilliant every single aspect is. Cast, crew, production, script — everything is perfect, and yet how hard to communicate why a programme about the world’s worst people is not just watchable but probably the best TV this year. This Vanity Fair clip with the director of the scene on Connor’s wedding boat is excellent and describes so well how TV like this is a kind of alchemy.

4. A brief sojourn to a foreign city, where the cathedral left me chilled but a record store was so exactly like the ones from my teens that I welled up and had to be pulled away. How do smells cut through all barriers and transform us so completely to our previous selves? I wanted to stay for hours and flick through every single album, and end up buying four, two I’d love immediately and two I’d hate, but would stick with because albums are never cheap, and the two that were harder work would become my favourites and stick deep in my brain forever. I thought myself too cool to be a Feeder fan at the time, but watching this video now I want to weep at how normal we all looked then, how clunky and average and awkward, how anyone who grew up in the 90s would recognise those bedrooms, that wallpaper, those lampshades, and how humans are so dumb to grieve things we didn’t even want at the time. 

But sometimes, for brief moments, like when you are standing at the stove making lemon and courgette risotto and listening to Head Like a Hole at full volume, your teen self and the adult self you thought you might be meld perfectly and all is well with the world. 

5. We read this book in bookclub recently, and I was struck at how we all struggled to verbalise our feelings about it. Was it good? Bad? Confusing? Funny? Unsettling? It was all and none, the live example of imagining a colour you’d never seen before. I was reminded of these two videos the algorithms had fed me, on Outsider Music and how audiences misunderstood the film of American Psycho when it first came out. Weirdness is so challenging, so aching and unsettling and new to brains which generally thrive on conformity and predictability. In the latter video, the film’s director Mary Herron says, ‘I have to always remind myself, sometimes I don’t get it, you know, when I first see something… particularly if it’s unfamiliar, it can be quite… there’s something uncomfortable or disturbing or it seems boring or like it does’t work, and it’s also because you’re just not attuned to it yet and it’s just sometimes you take time.’ Like those albums as a teen, the best, weirdest, most brain-engaging stuff often takes much longer to chew, but it’s almost always worth it.

6. (We also watched Mustang, which I recommend to literally everyone, although it does nothing to disprove my theory that all good woman- and girl-based films are secretly also horror films. But it’s brilliant, so please watch it if you haven’t already.)

After reading this I tried to do a morning run in the style of Chris Evans/Captain America, and shaved just over 25 seconds off each km. Worth trying if only for the challenge of trying to run with a totally static head. 

Even as a gigantic Taylor Swift fan, I was glad to read that a housemate and I are not alone in wondering why her videos are so, so bad. To be clear, her best songs are mind-blowingly good, and she’s responsible for the first new Christmas song angle in several decades and it’s a stone cold banger, and I applaud a woman who is so good at the main part of her job that she’s allowed to do whatever she likes for the rest of it. (But I also like great songs to have the videos they deserve.) I shall just be forced to continue playing the albums on repeat with no visuals, alas. 

Continuing Reality’s current irritating trend to tip towards dystopia, anti-abortion activists are piping up all over the world to remove women’s rights and increase women’s trauma, murder, suicide, death, unsafe abortions, and even the quitting rates of experienced Ob-Gyn practitioners. We watched Happening for our recent book & film club, and the consensus was with my theory that women’s lives on film are generally horror films. The sense of helplessness, of begging everyone for help, of friends and medics turning her away, her body not her own, even the women in her life controlling her behaviours and actions, her future disappearing week by week as the calendar counts along. Rotten Tomatoes describes this as putting ‘a personal face on an impossibly difficult choice’, which, honestly can get to fuck. The entire point of the film is that this intelligent, ambitious young woman knows exactly what choice she wants to make, but no one will help her. It’s fantastic, laser-focused and framed as if the viewer is in the cloud around her head that is slowly suffocating her, and it is terrifying. I can’t recommend it enough. 

When all else fails, at least the equinox means we can all stop feeling quite so much like this. Christ, I love them. Did you know you can delete money from your bank account? 

And nearly Yule, and the days will lengthen again. Joys!

Quelle année, hein? Between my current obsessions of existentialism v nihilism, the bread recipe I’ve recently started using, the programmes on cults and scammers my algorithms keep feeding me, and the historical cycles that suggest we’re in for a rough ride shortly (but boy oh boy will some things be a lot better afterwards), I have some 2022 delights to share.

BOOKS

January brought two gorgeous graphic novels into my life: Alison Bechdel’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength, which was just what was needed in a Run Every Day January that ended up with me having a post-Covid relapse (fool); and Tom Humberstone’s Suzanne (full disclosure: Tom is a pal and I was sent the book to write the blurb). It made me cheer with delight at its skill and wit, celebrating the sheer guts of a woman carving her way through a man’s sport.

Children’s books were all re-reads: Rumer Godden’s The Doll’s House (terrible suspense clothed in sweet white lace), Louis Sachar’s Holes (racism and the prison-industrial complex dressed as a kid’s adventure romp); and the original Hunger Games trilogy, reread to discuss with a housemate (which mostly descends to me sobbing as we attempt to talk about certain characters). I’m almost sorry the series was so popular, because popularity always begets countless knockoffs that end up damaging the reputation of the original, but Collins’ books really are very good. Katniss is a brilliantly unreliable narrator, and the world built around oppression, division, figureheads, purges, the 1% and the violence they’ll use to keep inequality in place, is something we may all become re-familiar with soon enough.

I’ve covered most of the non-fiction here before, but a quick recap. Blurb Your Enthusiasm, funny and niche and brilliant, buy it for everyone you know who loves books; Four Seasons in Rome, particularly if you go to Rome; and Raising Demons, whether you are, in fact, raising your own demons, or just want a peek behind the curtain at the home life of the Shirley Jackson, Horror genius. Two I’ve recommended repeatedly in person, if not pressed copies into hands: Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence, a comfortingly slim work by a GP, telling us everything we know but never pay attention to: that illness should be followed by recovery, recuperation, and convalescence, that medication isn’t everything, that we are healed not just by pills or operations, but by fresh air, natural light, trees, small, good meals, and time. An almost impossible prescription, but a truth we’ve forgotten about over the last 100 years. Finally, Foolproof, out in February, which I read for work a few months ago and have not stopped talking about. How do we combat the hysterical tone of conspiracies and cults online? How do we save ourselves and our loved ones from internet misinformation? What hope is there? Loads, if Sander van der Linden has his way, which is how I like it.

Fiction, I shall try to be quick because there are so many, but all of these had impeccable writing, tight, sharp and bright, and reminded me why I love reading (and especially why I love reading for my job, which leads me across genres). Young Mungo, beautiful and devastating; Piranesi, dreamy, like an adult Diana Wynne Jones novel; They, dystopian and wonderfully creepy; The Housekeepers, which I would have given my eyeteeth to write the screenplay for, a visually luscious Victorian Ocean’s 11; Lord of the Flies, a reminder to reread those masterpieces we think we remember; The Marriage Portrait, razor-sharp writing and a rarely seen autistic girl in literature; The Birds & Other Stories, because you can’t ever go wrong with Daphne du Maurier and her subtle undermining of the patriarchy; The Weather in the Streets, funny, brutal and dry as a bone on not knowing what you want from life and messing up attempts to get it; The Vet’s Daughter — why are we not reading Barbara Comyns every day?; Foster, tiny and jewel-like; Really Good, Actually, and I beg you not to look at the author quotes and just read it, because it deserves to be loved — a High Fidelity for 2023, if that appeals, and a bleak but hilarious look at the myth of self-care if that appeals more; My Turn to Make the Tea, funny and insightful, and I love a book without a real plot; finally The Colony, which may have recency bias as the last full book I read, but the writing is flawless, even if it made me think again about the responsibility creators have to the lives they give their characters.

FILMS

Family films, if you want something lighter over the sofa season: Bill & Ted Face the Music was watched when I was extremely hormonal and I wept with joy throughout — who knows what the quality is on another day, but I loved it right then. The Man in the White Suit is a remarkable (and funny) commentary on invention and capitalism; Charade has both Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, so really what more do you need; My Cousin Vinny has a comical Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei, and is great for a Sunday afternoon. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is gorgeous and, as they say, iconic (’Hey! They said you were stupid’); Good Morning is gentle, stunningly shot, and makes me wish I had someone making me delicious rice every day. We had a weekend of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which started with mostly heckling but ended in my usual copious weeping. January will see me reread the marvellous books, and I’m sorry that I always used to (wrongly) agree with Paul Merton’s comments on the first book here. Animated with fresh artistry away from the bland Pixar mould, The Mitchells vs. the Machines deserved its rewatch (DEREGULATE TAPIOCA); wonderful Raiders of the Lost Ark suddenly awoke me to the fact that watching it weekly as a child meant my wedding dress was a straight mash-up of Marian’s two frocks; Little Women is perfect and I don’t regret my three cinema trips to watch it (or the many subsequent small screen viewings this year).

Four documentaries to watch: Some Kind of Heaven, which, like Mad Men, is both a celebration and a searing condemnation of the American Way. Speaking of which, Boys State: watch it, take some time to cool off, then google what they’re all up to now. The Princess is an excellent look at the building and destruction of a public icon, made up only of contemporary clips; Crip Camp is a loudhailer calling us to recognise the work and joys of disability campaigners, and to remember those human rights battles still truly needing to be fought.

I got into horror this year! Fresh and Men and Nope and The Black Phone! They’re good! They actually made me feel better about the world! 

Two cinema highlights: Jackass Forever, dumb and joyful, and Don’t Worry Darling, smarter, hotter, and more interesting than the coverage would have you believe. Pugh is a marvel and Styles does exactly what he’s meant to.

TV

Looking at them now, I understand why these five were my top picks and I gave up watching more gloomy TV after an episode or two. Slow Horses and Severance and Mythic Quest on Apple, The Witchfinder on iPlayer, and The Bear on Disney+, all wildly different genres but all containing, essentially, an existential view on humanity and the value of connection. Plus spies etc! Don't read anything about them, but if you have access, just watch a couple of episodes and see what you think. They have inspired and hooked me through the year.

FOOD

Speaking of The Bear, there is a recipe which has become an almost weekly treat here and is a direct lift from the programme, but I’ll only share it with you once you’ve watched all episodes. My god it’s good. This is the bread I’ve started making (the third one in the video), and reliably (to crib the great Jeffrey Steingarten) ‘the bread is more than good enough to eat, and some days it is so good that we eat nothing else’. Pre-Rome, I also discovered this focaccia recipe which is embarrassingly simple and tasty.

I don’t want to abandon my sourdough starter, though, so I use the dough for pizza bases, rolled out into long ovals (approx 100g per person) and topped with olive oil, fresh corn (sliced from the cob, briefly fried), mozzarella and jalapeños and cooked, then topped again with sour cream, crumbled feta, coriander and lime juice. White pizza heaven. 

This French Onion Pasta is a great filling evening meal in the cold months, as is this amazing chicken and pumpkin tray bake from Diana Henry. We occasionally leave out the chicken for vegetarian or budgetary purposes, and it’s still delicious; if you don’t make the sage butter (or forget it in the fridge), this is really good with a side bowl of 50/50 mayo and sriracha.

Gwyneth P’s Polenta & Roasted Tomatoes is unbelievably quick, and feels like a hearty but not heavy meal whenever it’s dark outside — in summer I actually managed to grow the tomatoes myself, for the first time ever (banana skin juice appears to be the secret).

Scones have seen us year-round: wild garlic scones in late spring, bramble scones in late summer, cheese scones after autumn walks — what is the winter equivalent? Fig and mature cheddar? I may experiment. Otherwise, Benjamina Ebuehi’s Pecan & Burnt Honey Cake has become an enormous favourite for dessert. Perfect on the day, and even better after a night in the fridge, it’s worth buying her (excellent) book for alone. Nigel Slater’s rice pudding gets a fair few outings too, although I still think his numbers are way off (I times everything by 1.5, except the rice which I take from 80g to 200g).

1. On comedy and its importance, David Mitchell on an old episode of Rob Brydon’s podcast (around 40 mins) says: ‘In our culture, there is a notion that acting something [not comic] is more significant and more important than comedy, comedy is trivial… I will die on the hill that something with jokes is better than something without jokes. You say things more powerfully, and more entertainingly, through comedy... Sitcoms: every other art form is about things changing, about moments of change and transformation, which is incredibly self-important, because… the general experience of human existence for millennia has been unchanging drudgery and a sense that that spark in our soul, that thing that makes us different, is being frittered away having a boring or dissatisfying lifestyle. There is only one art form that addresses that human experience, and it is the sitcom. Films are about change, novels are about change; sitcoms are about continuity.’ It reminds me too of the famous Ursula Le Guin quote, about the ‘bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid’. 

2. Speaking of unremitting drudgery, I do also ponder constantly the same handful of questions over and over again (apologies for the large handful): 

Has social media made us genuinely more connected to people? Why do digital natives have off-the-charts poor mental health and self-harm? If sexuality has been liberated from all those tired old confines, why do women and girls suffer — physically, emotionally, sexually — from pornography being one of the most consumed forms of media, and normalised enough that otherwise-inclusive, teen-friendly sitcoms like Brooklyn 99 joke about it in every episode? Why hasn’t identity politics widened the sense of ‘what is acceptable’ to create a beautiful unicorn world, but instead done a wonderful job of putting up unscalable walls between social groups and between individuals? Why hasn’t our constantly connected society built stronger bonds between the people with whom we spend our physical and communal space, with the result of improved support for the most vulnerable in that space? Have computerised and contactless payments improved our personal debt levels or spending habits, or just invited us to walk into a world of financial controls that benefit only the few? Why do we accept that technology has failed to liberate us from work, and that most people you know check their work emails for many more hours than those companies pay them? How does capitalism work when we have no more resources and no money to buy the things we don’t need? What is the government plan for when we’ve run out of nurses and doctors? With all the information at our fingertips, are we more engaged with local, immediate politics, or have media owners and politicians convinced us that it’s all too much, they’re all as bad as each other, there’s no point, voting is a triviality and haven’t you got something more fun/enraging/colourful/terrifying to look at? 

(Some of these I have my own answers to, others I have no idea.) 

When we need, viscerally, a better world, one in which we can breathe and live and co-exist, are we treating our brains well enough to engage with discussion, debate, changing our mind, admitting our errors, finding a compromise, abandoning our ideas of moral purity and opening ourselves up through community contact, crafts and culture, fearlessness and vulnerability, being outdoors and feeling the balance of nature that exists beyond the world of our tiny screens?

Three things addressed all these perfectly: firstly, and perhaps most bleakly, this twitter thread someone sent me about terrorist and murderer Ted Kaczynski. Didn’t we all have that phase as teenagers of thinking, ‘I mean, apart from the monstrousness of the unnecessary deaths he caused… has he… got a point?’ Turns out middle age takes me back there. Secondly, and more hopefully, this extract in the Atlantic about Russian troll farms deliberately tearing apart US society, and the signs that these same tools can stitch it back together. Thirdly, this fantastic book, out early next year, which not only continues the story of why we are all so fractured, but also what we can do about it, and the simple mental vaccines we can self-administer and encourage schools and groups to share, to inoculate us against the horseshit and idiocy that turns much of the internet into a cesspit. It’s OK! We can do it! But we probably need to make better choices about how we spend each moment of the day! And also maybe a global revolution of some sort! But I’ll leave that to the better planners!

3. One day, one day, I will stop fixating on why I dislike Promising Young Woman. One day. In the meantime, and after watching Don’t Worry Darling with a film-fan housemate, I think I have a little more of it: that PYW is everything I loathe about modern life.

She’s damaged, so inflicts that pain on others; she’s hurt, so her pain is the greatest; her nightly plan of — what, revenge? — will essentially radicalise even more dudes into hating women and believing we are all liars and manipulators; she abuses other women; her suffering is somehow heroic, rather than boring and self-indulgent; she deprioritises the feelings of others (her parents, her friend’s mother, her colleague) because ‘trauma’ is fine to have as your sole personality trait and honestly fuck everyone else; and more than anything, I loathe that her plan is to hate as hard as she can before actually, men carry on doing what they were doing and there are zero consequences. Compare PYW to Don’t Worry Darling (criminally underrated and almost deliberately misunderstood by reviewers), or Fresh, or Men, or Melancholia, or Shirkers, or Shiva Baby, or, of course, Under the Skin, and its flatness, its disconnection, its cynicism, start not to seem like thoughtful reflections of the protagonist’s injured mental state, but an early 21st-century glossy belief in those choices as the only ones to convey importance. Christ, I fucking hate social media. 

4. This rice pudding recipe is mind-blowing, if you don’t mind the increased faff compared to Nigel Slater’s (I can’t find that one online, but drop me a line and I’ll send it to you). Also, I assume there’s a typo in the Olive recipe; I’ve made it twice and taken the 450g of butter down to 200g, and even that’s too much. Go for 180g and give your arteries a high five if they make it through.

  I understand that life is also death, that ends bring meaning, that life is suffering, that I did not know her. But I also understand she is the best writer I have ever read, I think, and when I read her essay on royal bodies nine years ago I was sitting alone in a coffee shop in Sherwood Forest Centre Parcs and I felt her sentences landing like physical blows on me, strong and clear and striking. I have loved so many different writers and books before, but I had never had such a sense of burning intelligence in words. When something happened in the world — political events, cultural, geographic, social — I would always thrill at the thought that she might write an essay touching on it. She was an utterly remarkable writer. 

I want more books as good as hers. I want more minds as intelligent as hers. I want more people with her wisdom and clarity. I want to live in a matriarchy where women in their forties and sixties and eighties and beyond can use their valuable life experience and immense skill to communicate complex, fascinating ideas in cherished essays and novels.

1. This Rosamond Lehmann book — unfortunately I had the previous Virago edition which was all mushy pinks and oranges and embracing couples, and at first glance at cover and blurb it does seem to be a rather mushy book: women and babies and love, yawn etc. But as with very many of those early twentieth-century women authors, the writing is knife-sharp, aware of everything, and covers not only women and babies and love but also Art, and grief, and friendships, and the deals we make with ourselves and the way we deal with ageing and dying parents. It really is astonishingly — and I say this like it’s a compliment, as if to exist in our own time is the greatest honour of all — but it is staggeringly modern in the depiction of the protagonist, Olivia. By which I suppose I just mean that she is an entirely three-dimensional person.

2. Speaking of blurbs, may I shill a beloved former colleague’s book? I was extremely lucky to read this a few months ago, and beset with that strange mixture of delight and acidic envy that creeps over when reading something brilliant by someone you know. It’s so intelligent, so funny, such an excellent, thoughtful and hilarious window into blurbs and bookselling and publishing, and I know that might not sound like a marvellous pitch but if anyone you know likes reading or words or books, I promise you this is the Christmas present for them. It deserves to do horribly well, at which point I shall have to stop talking to Louise. (Also, all of us blurb-writers wrote blurbs in the back! And we have our names on them! That never happens!)

3. I am almost always thinking about Mad Men at any given hour of the day. Today I am thinking about how many times Bobby Draper was recast, and how that in itself is possibly a comment about the instability of men in Matthew Weiner’s world, and how interchangeable and same-old-same-old they are, in comparison to Betty and Peggy, Joan and Sally.

4. Some good podcast episodes recently, now that I’ve finally been able to stop obsessively listening to the same programme after seven whole months. This Adam Buxton episode with John Higgs is very good — I particularly like the idea that if you take a month-old newspaper, you can suddenly see how meaningless and irrelevant most of the stories are; of course that’s essentially the old chip-wrapper maxim, but I was interested to hear someone so erudite able to verbalise my own instinct to turn away from the news. Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart’s podcast is better than I expected, and Campbell has similar advice to young people wanting to engage with the world: Read books, not newspapers, and listen to music, not the radio. If ever there was proof of that theory it’s right now, with the wall-to-wall coverage of our Prime Minister's election in which only a handful of people can cast a vote. There’s also something somewhere in those episodes, or others I’ve been listening to, about how social media feeds populism, even for us nice folks who will always be on the right side of history!, but I need to chew on it more. A lack of clear external moral codes? Rewards in our brain for when we focus on self over service? The paralysing of choice with all the potential moral potholes? Cynicism rendering democratic engagement seem futile? Not sure. More thought required. 

Two Decoder Ring episodes I enjoyed too: one on Rod McKuen, an American poet I’d never heard of, in which the presenter says, ‘I find [the poems] actively embarrassing… There is something about bad poetry that’s maybe more painful than any other bad art. It’s so open, so deeply sincere and yet so empty. It reveals the yawning banality at the centre of all our souls.’ God, yes. And yet! There is also something there about the surprise of discovering unexpected authenticity and quality at the heart of someone’s work, and also the joys of the unexpected that only hard copies of things — CDs, records, books — allow us to find. The other episode is on the Laff Box, the canned studio laughter that rarely pops on on TV comedies now. They play a YouTube clip where someone had removed the laughter from Friends episodes, and the strange stagey, humourless air it left reminded me so much of a few films I’ve watched recently that came with high praise yet felt as if they’d been made by filmmakers who hadn’t yet experienced human interaction. 

5. I am sorry I’ve only just discovered this Larkin poem, I like it very much; I find myself thinking of my father quite a lot recently, and wonder if most people feel that they don’t truly know anything of their father; back to these medium-difficulty cryptic crosswords for the summer holidays — can I recommend these? There is so little as satisfying as feeling one’s comprehension around them gradually improve.

6. In Waterstone’s behind a customer the other day, listening in only fully when they say they are a local author and the bookseller whoops with delight and tells them how much they love their book and they must come and do an event. I meet the eyes of my housemate and remember my own approaches to the same bookseller last summer, and I am so grateful my housemate has the exact same face on that I am pulling in my head. How we laughed.

I keep listening to (and watching) this Orla Gartland song, because it’s great and because she’s right, none of us are special. Gartland sings: Find the ones that get you/Stick to them like hot glue - I am filled with love for those women willing to climb out of bed in the middle of the night for swims year-round, because who knows when any swim is our last, so maybe love is all that can be a constant? Before death, other things get in the way, and none of us are getting any more nimble as we splash in and out of the water, so instead I stick like hot glue to the fact that it’s been years of this, now, and I’m still amazed to have found such serendipitously aquatic and life-savouring women.

I miss those other moments of serendipity that seem impossible in 2022, moments like pulling up beside a car at traffic lights and seeing them mouth along to the same song you’re listening to on the car radio. Do we have enough moments of connection to make up for those lost ones? Crossed telephone lines and unexpected meet-ups in another country and second-hand books that have a recognised name inked on the first page? I know I’m caught up in the nostalgia trap humans have been prey to since we became humans, so I can only wander so far down this path and still claim any self-awareness. I miss a great deal that’s gone, but I’ve tried to train myself to feel it as love, not loss: it’s love I feel for the range of books we had as children — while we’ve now got a much-improved diversity of authors, the capitalist necessities of the publishing business mean the books released now still seem to fit into three or four narrow and rigid types. Where is the skin-crawling weirdness of Oz? The everyday literary cleverness of Geraldine McCaughrean? The present-day devastation of Robert Westall? The respect for the reader’s intelligence/nerdiness of Leon Garfield? Where is the wonderfully spooky quality of Margaret Mahy, or the humour — the humour, goddammit! — of Sue Limb and Sue Townsend? Where do teenagers get wit on the page? (Obviously, all these types of books must still be being published. I just wish Waterstone’s would stop making tables of forty books that are different in title but identical in jacket, because they’ve demanded the publishers do it that way.) So I feel love for those old books, and love for the new books I haven’t discovered yet, and love for the friends I might not see these days, and love for the ease and misery of our shared teenage years as I watch how teens now have everything against them but still show up with wit and hope, cleverness and competence. A summer solstice with sun and nature, and a breakfast of brioche makes it easy to shape all those feelings into love.

When we get home, spring has arrived, and suddenly layers are lifted from river dips as the days pass — gloves and hats and extra jumpers, and although every single swim is worth it, this is the time of year that is an extra gift, a treatment of light and birdsong. At Beltane, walkers greet us, and someone tells us a Morris man is dancing Beltane in, further upriver. As we tip into summer, the water-bites begin, but it’s a small price to pay for hearing a cuckoo call its name to us each morning from the riverbank.

2. Another book I enjoyed among the churches and gelatos of Rome was Shirley Jackson’s second memoir about playing mother to her family, Raising Demons. I loved her first for its humour and observations about parenthood that still ring true today, and I loved this one for the way her writing about those same topics (getting a new puppy, moving house, her youngest child starting nursery school, introducing the children to the gentle hobby she enjoyed as a child) rang far more as the writer we know: creepy, haunting, weird, unnerving. Every chapter was still lighthearted, yet underneath it all was the weirdness that haunted her whole life, and when I read more afterwards about the family’s real life — the local woman who would regularly empty her rubbish into their front hedge, the swastikas the family would find soaped onto their windows — the more I thought, Yes, that’s what’s underneath these stories. There is a shadow beneath every ray of light in delicate balance here.

I watched Fresh recently, before we discussed it in our film club. I know I have to get out of the habit of using every film with a female protagonist as a stick with which to beat Promising Young Woman, but there were such useful parallels between these two films that I couldn’t avoid it. A wiser, more horror-watching member of our group said that he tries to understand the horror filmmaker’s worldview to comprehend where a film is going and what it’s saying; whether it’s purely nihilistic, or offers redemption. This was exactly what I’d been trying (and failing) to say in my comparison of Fresh and PYW: that both are horrifying, frightening, haunting, violent, grim commentaries on the objectification and destruction of women. But while PYW offers no other convincing tone — the ‘romance’ in the film which is meant to offer emotional connection begins with Carey Mulligan deliberately spitting into Bo Burnham’s coffee, which he then drinks, a lighthearted touch which made me want to turn the film off and lie in a field listening to birds — Fresh offers a clear pleasure in life: friendship, nights out, in-jokes, lunch-break burritos, moments of shared recognition with other women. There is a contrast in Fresh, a space between the darkest moments and the lightest, a chance to see the shape of things in both shadow and light, that currently is my best understanding of what authenticity might be.  

Spending the last year occasionally grieving the instant disappearance of my most recent novel, I have thought a lot about authenticity. Why does some art bring us to tears, to laughter, to delight, while other art makes us repulsed or turned-off; and other still fail to register at all? Why did Yellowjackets and Breaking Bad make me exhausted and bored and angry at their silliness, but Severance and Mad Men make me want to weep at every moment in awe and enjoyment? Why do the latter two make me think about capitalism and sex, countries and identity, internalised grief and externalised anger, small gestures and the price of forgetting, while the former two just make me imagine a writer’s room full of self-congratulation? What is the gap between them?

Fresh and PYW made me understand one possibility — that the film and TV and literature I enjoy offer contrasts between nihilism and optimism, but the others offer only one. Promising Young Woman and Breaking Bad are set in worlds where there is no real pleasure to be had — love is a debt that hangs around your neck until it destroys you, good times will only ever make you feel worse, laughter is the shit that hurts the most in the end. And things that were once comforting to me, action franchises and gentle reality competitions, currently make my brain ooze out of my ears with boredom. It is all light there, with no shadow at all. Is it contrasts, then? Or is authenticity just feeding the need for something that feels new?

It can’t be only about original IP versus existing IP, although that helps: do we need a fascinating podcast episode turned into a full documentary turned into a fictionalised glossy drama? Does it encourage something unhealthy in us when franchises are approaching double digits? But for every TNMT and Chip ’n’ Dale, we also get a Paddington, which seemed like a disaster waiting to happen, old IP dredged up in a CGI age, yet turned out to be (particularly the sequel) an absolute masterpiece of family bonds, social responsibility, prisoner reform, and barbershop japes. But on the other other hand Everything Everywhere All at Once, for me, had as its only real positive (beside the absolute brilliance of Michelle Yeoh) the fact that it was so very novel. It was, for me, still written with the leaden hand (or rubber dick?) of self-congratulation.

Am I using authenticity to mean too many things? Do I mean intelligence? Do I mean hope? Do I mean something that wasn’t written by a social media bot? Am I saying authenticity when I just mean that I liked it? Why does Severance — a weirdo show about weirdos in a weird collective with an unknown mystery at its core — have the shape of authenticity to me, when Yellowjackets — a weirdo show about weirdos etc etc — ring so false? What does false mean? How do I verbalise that my loathing for computer games tastes the same as my hunger for authenticity; that the best-written game in the world feels like Matrix-esque shadows on a screen, sucking hours from a life that we’ll never get back, hollow at the core? I mean, I watched Titanic in the cinema four times. I have zero legs to stand on when it comes to living life at its fullest.

This weekend, in the half-sun, two books that have such similar shapes: why did Priestdaddy make me laugh so much but Your Voice in My Head felt so much more clear and true? Why do I have such a horror and embarrassment of poetry, and is the raw feeling of it something I should have aged into by now, alongside my walking holidays and learning an instrument again and caring about church architecture and being delighted to receive socks at Christmas? How does anyone find a balance between sentimentality (bad, manipulative, the realm of Pixar and Breaking Bad and Russian Doll’s second series) and humanity (good, organic, Susanna Clarke and David Sedaris and Kay Dick and Slow Horses and Russian Doll’s first series). Why did Jackass Forever give me hope for people and the strange love we can find and the strange ways we show it, and send me dancing down the street from the cinema, but Fast 9 left me in a sad mute pile, when they are arguably just two sides of the same stake-less, stunt-filled, silly family coin?

Is this like saying: What makes something taste good? We can argue that it’s butter, or salt, or sugar, or umami, but plenty of people don’t like butter or salt or sugar or umami. People don’t like roast chicken, or fresh pasta, or new bread, or pavlova, or watermelon, or many of the things I like most in the world. So am I trying to define the indefinable? Is this just snobbery? Am I just hungry?

3. I also read The Colditz Story recently, and besides the delightfulness of Pat Reid’s stubborn refusal to feel defeated or crushed by the Nazi officers keeping them under guard, one thing struck me: Reid talks about how Colditz was meant to be the absolute inescapable prison camp of prison camps, for all those officers who had previously attempted escape. But what the Nazi forces hadn’t realised was that escapes are ‘the result of cumulative knowledge’, and if you force together people who have a particularly tendency or interest in, say, escape, you pool that knowledge and that interest until it is all they can think and talk about, and it becomes the absolute focus of their lives, for better or worse. In other entirely separate thoughts, the internet is great for the overall widening of experience and interests of children and teens in their vulnerable formative years, isn’t it? Or indeed for any of us when we feel pushed out of what we perceive society to be? Hmm, authentic thoughts indeed. 

4. In this strange weather of hot grey days and clear bright days, I make this a few times, Anna Jones’s amazing corn chowder, and stir with one hand while reading this amazing book on the Sackler family. The only downside to the book I can see so far is that I find it impossible to pick up without getting this stuck in my head for several hours.

It soon became clear that I had chosen the worst book we’ve read this year for our December bookclub, but it has been cancelled out by the memory of the excellent Lolly Willowes from the month prior; I think Sylvia Townsend Warner’s brief, odd, beautiful little work may be my own book of the year. Lolly's flavour of ageing pragmatism and insistent solitude has made me think of it every day since, and recently a friend and I discovered in hushed but warmed tones how tired we each were of hearing the voices of twenty-somethings, like Lolly. Idealistic and fresh-eyed at best, mostly they seem crazy-paved with cynicism, marketed to since birth, with no concept of ‘selling out’ and only of being a strong personal brand, sure of everything, experienced of nothing; or maybe it's the social media paradox: if one's opinion seems worth broadcasting, statistically it probably isn't. Memes, quips, irony: none of it is a diet to live on. (God, what a tiresome old hypocrite I’ve become.) And of course that’s a sweeping generalisation, of course there will be barrels of humble, hungry-to-learn, helpful and open-minded twenty year olds just like we weren’t, but when one starts to feel old — not old old, but lingering now in the doorway of old and peeping in with hope and dread — perhaps one pleasure at this brief transitory moment is recognising that these young voices haven’t yet become refreshing and rejuvenating, but are currently simply not what the doctor has ordered. Would my younger counterpart despair now at my growing love of long country walks, old churches and high church C of E pomp, drying fruit, raw broccoli, slippers, bird-spotting, gardening, naps? I suppose the greater point is whether I would care about her reaction. (I would not.)

After finishing the terrible book, I started The Dark is Rising again, and was beyond delighted as I sat beneath a dog in the twilight of Midwinter’s Eve, to discover that this classic children’s novel opens at that very moment, decades before. Is the Rider Welsh? I’m sure later his accent is more Danish, but for some reason he has Michael Sheen’s face in my mind this time around.

Today we go early for celebrations, and the water is silky, and Orion hangs over us with his phallic sword dangling and Betelgeuse winking on one shoulder. The near-full moon spotlights us and I feel almost ready for the shortening days.

2. Hilary Mantel continues to be a literary god. How does she write with that clarity? How can I ever speak with her calm good sense and wit? 

3. We have two main problems at the moment, as far as I can see. a) What we’re doing (“curating” our lives; twitter spats; purity spirals; division and isolation; wanting ‘debates’ that can only be won or lost; encouraging people to buy more things; trying to buy our happiness; letting marketers tell us how we feel about the world rather than encouraging major moral lessons from throughout the ages to challenge us on our weaknesses; refusing to accept that life is suffering; asking self-care to be a plaster for everything we don’t have) and b) what we’re not doing (joining together to stand against those with more money and power; protecting the people who have even less power and voice than we do as a matter of course; learning from history; protecting nature above all else; prioritising going for walks; learning to repair things and campaigning to make things repairable; having a basic belief in human dignity for all, not just those with whom we agree; accepting that truly, we are all different and no amount of shaming or disgust will change that; working to shape our societies, culture, economies, production, food supplies and communications around improving — not just sustaining — the air, water and land, and fighting to ensure all of those new shapes protect women and children).

Individualism has morphed into something so completely self-destructive that we’ve forgotten we need nature more than anything — literally, more than anything — and we need to unionise and unite and put aside differences and work together even with people we don’t like. 

Because when there are wicked people in power, when it’s genuinely exhausting to think about all the corrupt, venal, toxic, divisive, false, and cruel things they have done since coming to power, those people love to watch everyone below pointing their fingers at one another, saying, You, You’re The Enemy, You’re The Problem, while corrupt populist leaders rub their bellies and chuckle at another promise broken, another mass death on their hands, another building site on a protected forest. Do you understand the stakes here? Do you understand that it’s actual survival? It’s not about being right any more, it’s not about besting someone in the argument. It’s about having decision makers who can not only ensure there is still food to eat and air to breathe, but that relations both within a country and between countries are built on care, and support, and compassion, and believing in human dignity. And while it sounds wishy-washy and hands-clappy it’s the schmaltzy, sentimental truth. It’s the only one, really. 

If we instead continue to believe every single day that my feelings are the most important, that my beliefs are the right ones, that I’ve got to prove those baddies there are evil and awful and wrong, then honestly, what the fuck? If we’re happy to live in a country where hostile architecture is the starting point for all public builds, where we send refugee boats away from our shores, where affiliate links are a career goal, where we haven’t stormed the Daily Mail offices with accounts of all our lovely immigrant friends and family and had a huge feast together and compared our long and tangled family trees, then come on. It’s only a race to the bottom if we all keep running. 

Because, pressingly, whatever the spark of a major global conflict — assassination, fuel shortages, hyperinflation, invasion — the kindling is almost always a populace fed pure hatred for months, for years, until they can’t even taste it anymore but are ready to spew it out again, and are ready to use another populace as the receptacle. And hatred is brewed up in silence and isolation, and in the ashes of bridges burned between disparate groups. 

And on that note, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, mainly because I don’t believe governments are generally competent enough to manage Grand Plans, but it’s annoying that technology and social trends and culture have developed in such a way that no one knocks on anyone’s door for a chat as a matter of course now, that it’s a given that a ringing phone triggers anxiety, that it’s not the norm for cups of tea with your neighbours, that we don’t know each other’s neighbourhoods, that we don’t even talk on the phone, with live words and intonation and synchronised laughter, but in text, in WhatsApp chats, in tapped out words and symbols that we know can be screen-grabbed and misinterpreted, that we know are kept, filtered and sold by the tech companies. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just a reality that every single one of us can choose to do differently. 

Sometimes exactly the right thing comes along at the right time. All of us here watched About a Boy at the weekend, a film which is so wonkily weighted and oddly rhythmed, but a perfect depiction of everything I’m banging on about here. Hugh Grant’s character likes being alone. He’s happy that way. It suits him. It’s his choice. Then, between one thing and another, he finds himself drawn into a world of a suicidal single mother, a duck-murdering young boy, more single mothers, more tricky teens, plus exes and mothers-in-law and awkward support groups. And it turns out that actually, being with people is better. Being uncomfortable often develops you as a person. Constantly prioritising only yourself produces a waxen, pointless baby. Making shared sacrifices might just be the point of being alive. Remember that to be human is to be flawed. That no one is ever completely right, and no one is ever completely wrong. That the boring stuff makes us feel good, and the glossy stuff, if all we strive for is gloss, doesn’t. 

If you want anything practical, here are the things that have really helped me over the last few years:

Writing a letter or email regularly to my MP, to CEOs of organisations, to anyone I want to communicate my strong feelings and how I’d like things to be done better. Tweeting eats your soul. It’s a horrible myth the media pretends is important. It really, really isn’t.

Inviting people to go in front of me in queues, in traffic, getting on to buses and trains. It lowers my stress levels right down.

Learning the names of my neighbours and people I meet regularly on walks and letting them learn mine. (I definitely haven’t just decided I loathe a neighbour because they cut a bird-hatching tree down in their garden on the last day of the year it was legal to do so. It’s fine.)

Joining a few political parties, and the closest thing I have to a union

Making something, anything — everything can be done with love, and learning to not get sucked into the capitalist conceit of having to make it perfect, sellable, exhibitable is a genuine gift to yourself; making a cake or a film or a coaster and not putting it on social media, letting it be ugly or serviceless and loving it anyway. I felt extremely overwhelmed the other evening, but instead of doom-scrolling I knitted a… I don’t know, something flat and woollen, and it helped to have my hands and eyes working on directionless introspective creation. 

Trying to stop hating. Every time I want to tell a negative story in my head about someone, I attempt to turn it into something positive: how unhappy that person must be, what they must be missing out on. It’s so nauseatingly Pollyanna-ish, and of course it isn’t always successful, and of course every single day brings a hundred thousand examples of cruelty and injustice and wickedness, but the alternative only makes my life feel worse, so why would I indulge that? 

Teaching myself the names of birds, trees, flowers, clouds and constellations. I’m still at the most basic levels on all of these, but the difference one feels in the world when you can name things  — let alone use them and know their stories — is a very real sort of magic. (For that reason I hope to read this book very soon.) This episode of The Cut is also good on the wonder and power of learning the names of the weeds that grow in your nearest pavement crack. 

4. Creating anything is always a gamble, isn’t it, but writing a book you actually like for once and seeing it slowly and beautifully sink to the bottom of a river never to be seen again is ever so slightly crushing. However, it turns out even Thom Yorke feels that way, so I am comforted. 

5. I’m sure I’ve mentioned plenty of these before, but if you want some suggestions of where to find joy, here are my favourites from the last year or so:

I was given Lucy Easthope’s book, When the Dust Settles, for work recently, and I was surprised and delighted to discover the most uplifting, hopeful, human and rightfully angry book I’ve read in a long time. Do yourself a favour and preorder it. I bought this other book for my own birthday, gave it to a housemate to give to me, forgot about it, and was delighted to later unwrap He Used Thought As A Wife. Laughed a lot, cried twice. Marvellous. 

Now even the youngest housemate here can recite John Finnemore sketches and sing the songs. Has also taught them various composers, gods, logical fallacies and gothic story tropes. Also v funny. Oh, Kate Beaton! Her two books (Hark! A Vagrant and Step Aside Pops) are a bit like a comic-book version of Finnemore, but swearier and sexier and utterly unsuitable for all the housemates who have read it and been educated about the Brontes, Katherine Sui Fun Cheung, Tom Longboat, Nancy Drew, Ida B. Wells, Sacagawea, and the Borgias. 

Had to give Inside a restraining order against me for the sake of us all, but Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade is a masterpiece of writing, acting, sound design and optimism. Spy is dumb action comedy polished to perfection, and Yasujirō Ozu’s Good Morning seems like the inspiration for almost all US arthouse films since 1990, and is also beautiful, funny, thoughtful, and good. 

Taylor Swift’s Evermore, like all brilliant albums, isn’t completely perfect. But most of the songs are. And Hole’s classic Live Through This is still just ideal for turning up very, very loud after a tricky day, for the enjoyment of any neighbours who may have hacked down a bird-friendly tree on the last day of February. 

Watched both series of Liam Williams’ Ladhood when I had a week off this summer, and really relished the location, the intention, and the writing. More please. 

Miles Jupp and Justin Edwards continue to be my comforting bedtime listening in In and Out of the Kitchen. Has it ruined Nigel Slater for me? Well, a bit, but no more than any of us deserved. 

I thought this would be a book I’d mumble through the first chapter of, then let get buried in my To Read pile, never to re-open. Instead, I found Whatever Happened to Margo? laugh-out-loud funny, drily written, and full of humanity. Excellent Women has made me want to read everything written by Barbara Pym, a goal I am slowly but surely working towards. 

We discovered that a large ivy-covered tree is home to a bat colony, members of which flapped silently about our heads in their haste to return before full dawn. A cuckoo was audible across the water. A starling clicked its beak and jittered up and down the branch. The housemate called me a boomer.

Of all the odd things I miss from last year, it’s the silence of the roads that is the greatest loss. At 6 o’clock in the morning there would be almost no traffic at all; now the birds are almost drowned out by the constant roar, even some distance away. Whether it’s hormones or poor emotional processing or a rational reaction to a damaged world, I feel angry at the traffic. I’m not saying it would necessarily be a 100% smooth process, but I do wish the world could be run by peri-menopausal, menopausal and post-menopausal women for a year or two. Just to see.

2. I am still obsessed with Orlando Wood’s short book Lemon (I was banging on about it back in February), and am so grateful to have so many people in my life who care about those same ideas. We’re in a left-brain cycle of culture at the moment, he explains: the left brain has a tendency to “isolate parts from the whole and to see them in the abstract… It likes to break things up into smaller parts, to categorise, and therefore favours the familiar, consistency, repeatability and predictability”. It also “prefers to see things in terms of simple and linear cause and effect. It prizes utility, power and control, and its ability to abstract and isolate things from their context enables it to manipulate the world”. What’s that you say? Wider cultural discourse and rights of individual groups, inability to have dialogues about, you say? Mmm. 

My favourite part of the book is when Wood breaks down two adverts: Heineken’s ‘Water in Majorca’ from 1985, and GoDaddy’s 2018 ‘Make Your Own Way’ ad. Remember that? No, me neither. ‘Make Your Own Way’ is full of colourful images, isolated people, or tiled with images of themselves to make a ‘conveyer belt’ effect, and clean-face words which could be applied to almost any product or company (watch it to cure your insomnia/trigger a panic attack); everything is buzzword-y, inspirational, keynote, statement, unilateral, and utterly, utterly devoid of humour, humanity, or engagement. 

One of the most striking things about Wood’s ad breakdown is that, once you’ve read it, you can’t stop noticing how in, say, three ad breaks within an hour-long programme, there might be one advert at most which doesn’t fit this left-brain pattern. Adverts for products as diverse as cars, period reusables, white goods, clothing catalogues, insurance, snack food, and supermarkets all, to some extent or another, fit the mould: bright images, little human connection, bland Instagram visuals, large slogans, spoken-wordlessness (better for the global market), a vague puff of do-gooding, and absolutely no wit at all. The only one I’ve seen recently attempting anything different is Maltesers, about a breastfeeding mother and her mother-in-law, which I admired for the milk-leak and loathed for the Hahahaha, aren’t women awful to each other?.

It’s draining to imagine the flat meetings and endless audience segmentation that enabled this ad trend: this sector engages on social media in the evenings and this demographic prefers a friendly looking home and our audience here is more about food as a pleasure. I’m loathe to break it to them, but for all that laser-focused research you are all making the same ads. And as Wood exposes so brilliantly, those ad campaigns are costing more and more to receive less and less engagement. Congrats, lads. 

3. Speaking of left- and right-brain world views, as so often happens this episode of Hidden Brain popped up serendipitously, with the wonderful host Shankar Vedantam interviewing Iain McGilchrist about his 2010 book The Master and His Emissary. It’s just over 45 minutes and is worth every second — McGilchrist is so clear and insightful about how to tell what type of brain is leading at any given time, what we lose in a left-brain society, and what we need to do about it. (I went back and checked and only then saw the book is in Lemon’s bibliography. Bliss.) 

4. For various reasons, a small toilet room here has been stuffed with balloons for the last week. It’s absolutely staggering both how not one of us thought to remove the balloons, instead bobbling through them to reach the facilities at any given hour of night or day, and also how immensely relaxing it is to go in there since they’ve been removed and humanely destroyed (I assume). It’s A Squash and a Squeeze in action, a life philosophy I cling to pretty robustly and find pays dividends. A housemate pointed out recently that whenever they are travelling in my car, they play a game to see if they can ever see another car in worse condition, and they say they never, ever can. It’s the Squash and a Squeeze philosophy that, in part, enables me to drive the dented, rusting, bubbled, scratched, lichen-furred, beloved piece of garbage I do, having previously had no driving license for almost two years after my seizure. It’s such a delight to drive any car at all. 

5. We’re rewatching Ghosts, which of course I recommend, and I suddenly realised that the Captain (Ben Willbond) is the speaker of possibly my favourite newspaper-based gag in the entire run of The Thick of It. Please watch all of Ghosts and all of The Thick of It, then perhaps The Death of Stalin? All thoroughly excellent, and the latter two contain my favourite kind of Muriel’s Wedding-type comedy, where I am tearfully wheezing with laughter one moment, then gaping with discomfited horror the next.