If you live in Paris, you might.

In that case, you will pronounce it like what a whale does when it gives birth. Or what Bostonians do to a turkey at Thanksgiving.

Cahhhhve.

It’s kind of a basement but French people will tell you, actually, a basement is a “sous-sol” (literally: under-soil), a place that can also serve as living quarters.

La cave is something else entirely. It’s the cellar, the larder, the storage place. It’s where you keep your extra bits and pieces, dry goods, wine bottles perhaps.

In Paris, my sister says, the caves must be full of treasures. Ski boots and escalade equipment from early attempts up Mont Blanc, maybe. Ancient film reels from the ’30s, rows of dusty vintages. Perhaps a lost Manet, or two.

It’s where people keep all the forgotten, lost bits of themselves.

If you want to go in search of lost time in Paris, you could do worse than starting in a cave.

My sister’s building has a cave, shared by the building’s occupants. You descend into the cave via a coffin-size lift with a folding accordion door.

It’s pretty creepy down there, especially when you have to go alone. A cave full of lost time is a scary thing.

I’ve just come back from Paris. Actually, I’ve been twice this month and stayed with my sister both times.

My sister is my artistic bellwether. I can generally tell my latest piece is a stinker if I don’t hear from her the morning it goes out.

Usually: silence. She’s a busy woman and much, much cooler than me (she has tats and, as I say, lives in Paris).

But I know I’m onto a winner if I get a message with a one-liner quote from the latest piece, a "lol” or (every once in awhile): “loved it”.

Those good ones have usually been fermenting in drafts and notes for awhile. Sometimes, they just need time to acquire the right flavour and come together.

In fact, the Notes app on my phone is like my own personal little cave. It’s where I keep the lost, forgotten bits of myself. It’s full of treasures, and plenty of stinkers too. Many of the recent ones are Paris-flavoured, so it makes sense to share them here.

They may impart the flavour of the thing, but not the real time in Paris.

I’ve never read Proust (time is short and À la recherche du temps perdu is long) but I’m familiar with the key bits: the flavour of the tea-dipped madeleine as an entrée to memory; his bed-bound boyhood illness; the sea of images, swimming on the walls of his bedroom cave.

If I had to come up with a Proustian equivalent childhood-memory taste-trigger, it would be cheese Doritos and an ice-cold orange soda. Perhaps we were less discerning in upstate New York in the 1990s than Paris in the 1880s.

But I digress.

If you think about the past, light falls on certain images in the memory cave and the rest floats in shadow.

I’ve written this before, even (especially?) in Paris. Writers are lamplighters, the lampiers, shining little cones of brightness in the depthless black.

If art is a lamp-lit cone into the past, the disconnected images can never be more than a simulacrum of lost times.

And of course, the only way to experience Paris is to … experience Paris.

—

In Paris, I suddenly feel certain I am a person who might wear floaty skirts and little strappy sandals in day-to-day life, completely forgetting that I live in the UK.

My sister buys me delicious breads and cheeses that cloud the senses. She takes me to brocantes—that’s flea markets, to you—that only the locals know. I browse rows of impossibly chic cast-off clothes and imagine I might be the kind of woman who wears orange palazzo pants, with thigh-high slits, or hand-embroidered Italian loafers. For just a second, I toy with the new Jill who smokes a Gauloise (or is it a Gitanes?) and gazes disdainfully at my clown self from behind chic, dark glasses.

A slang word for “junk” in French, I learn, is “bazaar”.

My son finds a mini-crossbow that he must have. It fires bottle corks. My sister gives me a wink, wanders off and presents it to him as we’re leaving.

They try it out and she accidentally shoots it across the brocante.

“I lost one of the corks.”

“That’s ok.” He is sanguine. “You guys get through a lot of wine.”

—

Speaking of clowns, we went to an actual circus in Paris. It was kind of by accident, in a kids’ amusement park.

The first act was a male juggler, in tight trousers. Not several degrees removed from “dishy”.

I raised eyebrows at my sister.

“One for the mums.”

Next up was a pole dancer. You think I’m joking but I’m not. She wore a smoking hot bikini and looked strong enough to rip me limb from pathetic non-pole-dancing limb. She pulled splits and planks, Superwomaning and shimmying up and down the pole in nought but glitter and a smile.

I turned wordlessly to my sister.

“One for the dads.” She nodded, sagely.

—

We ate lunch in a perfect brasserie, the kind with one or two daily specials, where you can get a great steak at lunchtime and a lengthy wine menu.

We ordered a café gourmand (literally: ‘greedy coffee’), which is basically the greatest contribution ever made to the world of desserts: an espresso and a selection of doll-house versions of many desserts. Tiny creme brûlée, diminutive brownie, pocket-sized rice pudding.

“What’s this?” I poked one of the offerings.

“It’s compost.” That’s my son. He’s just been given a tour of the dessert menu by my sister.

“I think you mean compôte.”

The older gentleman at the next table folded his paper and whistled for his dog, which had been cavorting happily on the other side of the restaurant while its owner dined.

The man got up with a nod to the waitress.

She held up his half-finished bottle of wine as he turned to exit, and a cork.

“À demain?”

“À demain.”

He must live nearby, in an apartment above this narrow street. This is his living room, and his dining room combined.

—

Books are more interesting than people.

No, that’s not what I mean.

Books are like the best bits of people. You get all the insights without the annoying habits of the real world. You develop fondness for inhabitants of the written world who would, in real life, get right up your nose.

Just think about Proust. He was insufferable and all about self-promotion, writing up his own reviews and paying for their publication, via third parties. If he was on Substack today, you know he’d be the one shamelessly self-promoting and paying a Substack luminary to get featured in their latest round-up.

Another reason I haven’t bothered to read Proust yet.

Also, that guy in the restaurant with the dog? Probably an entitled swine.

And me? You might imagine from the above snapshots that I’m likeable. I’m not, trust me. I have a strong tendency towards prickly suspicion. It’s not endearing. It would take very little to tip me over from awkward-defensive to completely-detestable.

There was a girl at school who picked up on this once.

It was the night we finished exams. At a bonfire party on the beach in south Dublin, she cornered me, with another girl.

Now, context: both of these girls intentionally cultivated ‘misfit’. I wasn’t in their gang, nor was I one of the vapid, popular pretties.

I was a bit… hard to place.

Well, this girl cornered me, with a pal and, bolstered by a few drinks, annihilated me.

“Why are you such a bitch?”

“Wh-what?” I was a bit shit-faced and half-smiling, thinking she might be joking.

She was not joking. Her eyes were cold, blue. Her nostrils flared slightly, scenting blood.

“No, really.” Mock scientific interest. “Like, it’s a really interesting question. Why are you such a complete and total bitch? Why do you think that is? Do you think it’s something in you or what?”

I was 17.

—

Getting the train back from Paris, I had an awkward encounter as we were waiting to board.

For reasons I can’t quite fathom, everyone stands to one side of the departures lounge in the Eurostar terminal at Gare du Nord, even if the train hasn’t been called yet. What this means is you can join the line but not be quite sure it is a line for the right train. You can’t be sure that you won’t, given a momentary lapse in attention, be swept away to the wrong train.

“I’m not sure if this is for the 11:12 train,” I muttered to my son.

“It is.” Said the woman behind me, authoritatively.

I turned to thank her and was dumbstruck. I knew her.

“Thanks… er… I know you.” Brain-mouth instant connection. Why am I like this.

She looked at me without any cognition, zero expression. It was definitely her.

Now that I’d started, I had to finish.

“…Is your name Jennifer?”

Well, it was her: the terrifying female partner from the law firm where I trained, now the head of the whole department.

Speaking of intelligent women, perceived as fearsome and detestable.

When we were trainees, everyone knew that the seat with Jennifer was the seat to avoid. You would be worked all night and well into the next day. You would be tasked with keeping track of endless documents. You would be the one in the office on Sundays.

There were rumours she once stapled a trainee’s tie to his folder, threw a book at another’s head.

It was a truth universally acknowledged that she had for breakfast each day one lightly-roasted and totally exhausted trainee lawyer.

When I qualified, I was seated with her associate, a woman a few years older than I, who had just returned from maternity leave. She had a neat bob, a perpetual sniffle and an absolutely relentless capacity to absorb work and churn out lawyerly copy at 3am.

A career as Jennifer’s lieutenant had turned her into an automaton—with a crappy immune system.

We had a mild exchange of pleasantries—what a funny coincidence this was, updates on the team and do please give my best to so-and-so.

She was nice. It was a pleasant moment. She’s not an irredeemable bitch: she’s just smart as hell, and ruthless at succeeding in her arena.

She wanted to do it. So she did.

I was left to ponder having escaped her team. I, it turns out, did not want it.

Now, all I can think of is the lost time: the hours, and days, and years of my life spent churning out pointless, forgotten documents for pointless, forgotten deals.

Thinking about, resenting all that lost time, makes me feel small, angry and mean.

When I left that firm it felt like escaping a dark cave.

—

In the lift at work, there’s a screen that rotates “interesting facts of the day”.

Once it said that there were 319.6 billion emails sent every day in 2021.

Almost 320 billion a day. Imagine that. 40 emails for every person on the planet.

Imagine all the treasures in those emails, and the stinkers.

Imagine all those crowded, empty hours and the empty, forgotten words, slipping soundlessly into the past.

Sometimes, sitting with my headphones on a call in the office, I imagine the building undergoing some calamity, not hearing the pop-pop of machine gun fire, still talking at the top of my lungs about interest rates or some such nonsense.

Like the proverbial toad in the pot, warming slowly, until I’m sludge.

Slowly forgetting everything that I’ve forgotten.

—

The past is crowded with lost hours. I have this sense of the world filling up behind me with wasted time, people I knew, things once familiar—but ultimately without any substance.

It’s a kind of claustrophobia. Like the kind you might get underground, in a cave.

Heading home, it feels incredible to flee from a crowded past into a quiet, unknown future.

—

No one gets more annoyed at your failure to be fulfilled by your job than other people who have allowed their dreams to lapse.

People acquire the capacity for careless evil when they stop caring, when the art in them dies.

Nobody is as angry as someone who let their dreams die—when faced with someone who hasn’t.

It’s because they turn to contemplate the riches of their own caves, and find there’s nothing much there—except bile, old emails and lost time.

I don’t want to become one of those quiet, angry people.

“ … and they will read our diaries to find out what we were … ”

Joel and I had a fight the other day about AI. Not a debate: a fight.

I’m reading Bleak House at the moment — a novel about a protracted argument — so this seems appropriate. At least the Jarndyces were rowing over a pot of gold. We had a fight about AI. What a thing to fight about. What dorks.

I’m kidding, of course. Joel is my thought partner. With him, I think externally.

But the thing is we really do disagree about AI.

I don’t… like AI. I don’t trust it. I have yet to be impressed with its output, apart from in language translation. Everything I read from ChatGPT sounds like plausible word-murals that run on and on, sentence after plausible sentence, without telling me anything. “Blah-di-bla is an important cultural phenomenon because… so-and-so is one of the most important historical figures of the 20th century… It was a time of great social change …”

Yawn af.

I am generic, benign narrator. Hear me roar whimper something bland and inoffensive into the conventional wisdom echo chamber.

And the photo or video garbage? Joel showed me an Internet thing (believe the kids call them “memes”) of a slip-on fake finger above a six-fingered hand.

“Wear extra fingers,” it says. “Photo and video evidence will be inadmissible as it will appear to be AI-generated.”

Ha-fucking-ha.

It was supposed to be a joke. I tried to laugh. But it wasn’t funny. I could hardly breathe.

You can deep-fake me doing bad things. I can do bad things, whenever I want, and just claim it’s a deep-fake.

You’ll never know what’s real and what’s not. No one will. Maybe it won’t even matter, because the fake stuff will be more real to more people than the real stuff.

Now, Joel loves AI. ChatGPT is basically a third member of our relationship. He asks it everything: what to cook, where to eat, how to say “green beans” in French. We’ve talked about this before. We differ big time. He thinks, one day, AI will be conscious and function just like us. I don’t. Which of us is right?

Joel was raised in a homeschooling Christian family and is now the most dedicated atheist you’ll ever meet. He thinks we (humans) are nothing more than an intricate web of clicking machine parts. We perceive and think and exist and have sex and fart and blink and close our eyes to be transported elsewhere only because each atom in each cell is oiled just right and talks to all the other oily parts just so and they all click and whir in harmony, until one day — pfffft, bang — they don’t.

And we blink out, like a pixel on your flatscreen. Never to exist again.

I am a rational person. I can parse a sentence and flip a document like a pancake. But I can’t explain why this doesn’t sit right with me.

A collection of machine parts? Surely I am more than my machine parts.

I had laser eye surgery about 12 years ago. It was the kind of laser surgery where they tell you to lie back, keep you wide awake and do all the surgery on the surface of your eye, no cornea-cutting.

Numb to my, well, eyeballs, I watched what looked like panes of glass or translucent ice being pushed across the surface of my eye. It was exactly like lying at the bottom of a swimming pool, watching disturbances ruffle the surface.

Those machine parts of my eyeball had nothing to do with me. I was way behind-beneath-inside them.

Do I believe in God? No. Do I believe in “souls”? Probably not.

I believe when this run of consciousness is run, we’re done. Whatever we’ve put out there, whatever we’ve worked on, for better or worse gets added to humanity’s great sandpile.

That — right there, whatever’s left behind — is the something of me that sits apart from the oily machine.

“Take what it is you do. That’s how you’ll be remembered when your travelling days are through.”

Do I believe ChatGPT can contribute to the sandpile? No.

That’s what we were arguing about. It was about art.

“Is ChatGPT art?” he asked. Not talking about its output, mind, but ChatGPT itself.

Joel said yes, thinking of the code that produces it.

I said no, ChatGPT is a tool. It may be well-crafted, the code even written in aesthetically pleasing ways — but it has been created with an optimisation metric in mind. It’s optimising, improving, helping us do something. That makes it, fundamentally, a tool, not art.

Shout me down. Go ahead. “Tools can be art. Craftspeople are artists, etc.”

Well, sure.

But a tool performs a function — art is the extra. Hell, it’s right there in the name: exTRA.

Art is the feeling, not the function: the emotion layered on top of the function.

ChatGPT can process all the novels ever written — and it can process all the secondary literature that’s ever been written about those novels. It can tell me who exactly Mr George is in Bleak House and why he seems to know Esther (no spoilers please, I’m neck deep).

But until the woman nursing the dead baby makes ChatGPT feel something, it has no capacity for art. It can’t add anything exTRA.

We could argue the point until the cows jump out of Guernica and come home, until Jarndyce v Jarndyce is resolved.

Where ChatGPT is a conventional wisdom echo chamber, art challenges conventional wisdom. They are diametrically opposed.

Art communicates a feeling, an emotion. It shakes you out of convention, makes you feel what you wouldn’t otherwise feel. Tools can do that, sure, but if you use them to cut wood, eat your breakfast or answer a question about green beans, they are — primarily, at root — tools, not art.

What about a novel? A novel is pure art. A (good) novel doesn’t pretend it has any job to do — it puts you behind the eyes of others and makes you feel. It is all exTRA: time-wasting, inefficient. Women’s books, goes the traditional perception: un-serious books without a serious purpose.

“As long as there’s a world we’ve got to sing those folks the truth.”

The only truth is everyone’s truth: not some condensed, consolidated bland approximation — but the noisy mess of everyone’s contradictory truths at once.

Plus a little exTRA on top.

Which is why ChatGPT will never be art. It’s why all of the essays telling me who so-and-so was and about places X, Y and Z with no individual perspective are bland as fuck and boring to read (not that I read them — straight to unsubscribe).

As ever, Lauren Hough said it already:

So, actually, maybe I do believe in souls after all.

Just don’t tell my atheist boyfriend.

On an entirely different note, here’s an awkward old offering from the annals you might have missed. On this day last year:

I got an unexpected email the other day.

It reminded me that deliverance arrives in unexpected ways, at unexpected times.

Let me explain.

Earlier this week, deliverance came at the dentist’s. About three months ago, I went for a long overdue check-up and the dentist did an X-ray.

“Oh, you have a cavity. You’ll need a filling.”

I was surprised. I’d made it to the ripe old age of 38 without ever once having my teeth drilled. This was my first ever cavity.

“Are you sure?” I was dismayed.

“Yes.” She pointed to a dark patch on one of my premolars. “Right there.”

She booked me in for a filling a week later. I went home and flossed, in that totally pointless way we all do after a dentist visit — and a large piece of something green came out of the gap where she said I had a hole.

I went downstairs, brandishing my tooth-gunk, and told Joel.

“So?”

“So, I don’t think it was a cavity. I think it was just some crap stuck in my teeth.”

“So...?”

“She’s booked me in for a filling next week. I’ve never had a filling before. I’m scared.”

“Tell her. Tell her you went home and flossed and there was something there and it might have been what she saw on the X ray.”

So, when I went back for my filling, I told her. She was sceptical as fuck.

We looked at the X ray together. There was definitely a dark patch.

I pleaded my case. Was she sure it was a cavity? Like, absolutely sure? Could it be the food? Just, because, you know, my teeth have always been pretty good…

Even I was rolling eyes listening to myself. She must hear this all the time. You can’t negotiate with dental decay, I could hear her thinking.

But, it was 7pm on a weekday. She looked at her watch.

“Ok, if you’re reluctant, let’s just monitor it. We’ll book you in for a check-up in three months and see if the hole’s got any bigger.”

Cut to my three-month check-up yesterday. Another X-ray, a different dentist, I braced for the bad news.

I’m sure you saw this coming. THERE WAS NOTHING THERE.

Nothing. Not a whisper of a thing. My teeth are fine.

She was going to drill my perfectly healthy tooth.

Now, I’m not really sure what the moral of this story is. Don’t trust medical professionals? Go with your gut over years of scientific training?

These are not usually messages that resonate with me nor ones I would seek to pass on.

But still. I don’t know what else to say. She would have drilled my perfectly healthy tooth — if I hadn’t questioned it.

So, maybe, what I mean is: try? Don’t just mindlessly give up. Keep your brain at least partly engaged and query things? It’s always worth a try.

I said that last week about the pub too, didn’t I. Undone by our failure to get the grant, awash in woe that threatened to lacerate me at the ankles and sweep me, bleeding from leg stumps, off my feet.

I tried to console myself that it was still worth trying. Hey, I told myself, at least I got some decent newsletters out of it.

Well, this week we had a meeting. A meeting about the pub. Hope, it turns out, has not fled. The meeting was very positive. We are, it turns out, not the only ones who want to save the pub.

Just the lesson I needed in hope.

I’ll say nowt more in case it all comes to…. well, nowt. But maybe I’ll have some good news to share about the pub soon.

I know I keep saying it but, this time, for real: watch this space.

So, good things come in triplicate, right? Deliverance from the dentist’s drill, the whisper of possible deliverance for the pub — and what’s the third?

Back to that email.

It was the kind of email that usually I wouldn’t even open. The sender was “noreply” and it was addressed “Dear Ms/Mr”. Not promising.

But the first line…

I screamed for Joel and called the number, quickly.

“Fundbüro, Wuppertal.”

“Do you speak English?”

“A little bit, yes.” In perfect English.

“I just got your email. I think you have something of mine.”

This is what the email said:

MY SUITCASE!!!! Remember?!

An incredibly efficient telephone conversation there followed, with a kind man in Nord Rhine Westphalia. He named books in my suitcase: books I assumed I’d never see again. I said yes, yes, they’re mine.

There were a few tears (mine, not his).

The upshot was the promise of a registered delivery to my home address. It cost 58 Euros.

“He is heavy,” said my new friend in Wuppertal.

I hung up the phone and turned wordlessly to Joel. He hugged me. I cried a little more.

“You know what this means, don’t you?”

I wiped my nose. “I get my notebook back with all my drawings! My books! And that damn ski jacket I already replaced..”

“Nope.” He shook his head. “It means he probably saw your dildo.”

So, two months after losing it off a train somewhere in the vast, unknown workings of the German rail network, my suitcase is rolling its way back into my life from who-the-fuck-knows-Wuppertal.

It hasn’t arrived yet — so there’s no knowing what’s still in it — but I’ll keep you posted.

Frankly, as long as the dildo is still there, Wuppertal can keep the rest.

“Oh please give us something for the little bird’s wake …”

The Wren in the Furze, The Chieftains

There’s certain music that speaks of my childhood, and of Christmas.

The Chieftains’ album The Bells of Dublin is the perfect Venn diagram overlap of the two.

Have you ever heard the album? Go have a listen. I made Joel listen to it this weekend. It’s very… below-decks-on-the-Titanic. He liked it, but with a bit of a shrug.

I said: it’s because you’re not Irish, and winked at my son. If you are even a bit Irish, this music speaks to your soul.

The music is beautiful but with a dark belly to it, the kind that you only hear when you pay attention, when you listen to the words.

I always listened to the words when I was little. I always paid attention.

I still missed things.

There’s a home video from when I was about three or four. My sister is little, still a baby. My dad is dancing me around the living room to the Chieftains. My sister plucks at his leg and he lifts us both up. It’s a classic warm family moment, captured on film.

No one would ever know anything is amiss, even if they paid attention. It’s right there on video, evidenced for all: happy family.

You never know what’s real and what’s not.

I struggle to parse what’s real and what’s not, especially when I peer back.

The music I loved though, I know it’s real.

It’s music made to put a spring in your heel.

That’s in the song called The Wren in the Furze.

I remember my dad told me it was about the birds having a competition to see who could fly the highest and be crowned king of all the birds. The tiny wren hid in the feathers of the eagle and just when the eagle had flown as high as it possibly could and all the other birds had fallen away down below, the wren popped up out of its feathers and flew just that little bit higher.

But the air was too rarefied up there. The wren plummeted down into the furze, dead before it hit the ground.

“The wren, oh, the wren, he’s the king of all birds. On St. Stephen’s Day, he got caught in the furze.”

The Wren Boys were the musicians, going door to door on Stephen’s Day (that’s Boxing Day, in England, the day after Christmas) singing the song about the wren, begging for a penny or a big lump of pudding or some Christmas cake.

“A fistful o’goose or a hot cup o’tay. And then we’ll all be going on our way.”

My dad never told me there’s an even darker story here.

Tradition had it that, before they went round singing, the Wren Boys would hunt down a real wren and tie it to a pitchfork. A druidic cultural hangover, this mid-winter sacrifice of the wren, the bird that sings when the days are shortest.

In Wales, they tell the story of a woman long ago who led the men down to the river where they all drowned. She turned into a wren and flew away, but is still hunted this time of year.

“So it’s up with the kettle and it’s down with the pan, won’t you give us a penny for to bury the wren.”

The words of the song made me sad when I was little: the poor wren.

I knew without knowing. There was more darkness in that song than I could perceive.

Mixed in with the lyrics are nonsense words. In jazz, it’s called scatting. In Irish, lilting — or port a'bhéil: mouth music, tunes from the mouth.

There’s a deep thrumming heartbeat of a bodhrán. The piping call of a flute answers it.

This song is music made to put a spring in your heel.

It’s a load of nonsense wrapped around a good story. At its core is a dark, frightening truth.

It can be made into a thing of beauty, this dark, nonsense life. Like all good tunes.

But there’s no escaping the darkness.

All we can do is sing a little mouth music when the days are shortest.

Then we’ll all be going on our way.

My suitcase, pinched off a train somewhere between Paris and Vienna.

Did it contain items that will cost me thousands to replace? Yes. Are they of even limited commercial value to anyone else? Probably not, apart from a Patagonia jacket (eBay onsell value: circa 200 bucks). Was there anything irreplaceable in it? Not really — apart from my sketch notebook, containing the originals of this Venn diagram, this Venn diagram, this map of Oxford and many other drawings besides.

Do I realise that this is a hard-core first world problem and I need to just shut the fuck up and make my peace with it?

Yep, thanks, already have. It’s gone, let’s move on.

Now, it might be the lost suitcase but Vienna instantly disagreed with me.

Like when you eat something rancid and have a big bacterial vomit, the first few hours left a lingering bitterness.

It was 5:57pm when I alighted from the train, sans suitcase, and 6pm on the nose when I tried to get into a still-bustling pharmacy in the train station.

A woman marched to close the door on me.

“Please. I just need a toothbrush.”

“No! We are closed!” She moved in front of the door, barring entry, affronted to her core that I presumed to enter the pharmacy at 6pm and 20 seconds.

“Please.” I tried one more time. “I lost my bag and I have nothing.”

She would not be moved, physically or emotionally. The whole establishment watched with mild interest.

“No, the pharmacy is closed now! You must leave.”

So I grabbed her shoulders and brought her face to my knee with a crunch.

Not really.

I just glared at her for a long moment to let her know she won’t ever be getting into my pharmacy after hours and stalked off, to a night of dental decay.

Straight to the hotel, rather than eat on the way, I ended up getting off a stop early in a strangely deserted neighbourhood.

Several men gave me appraising up-and-downs. I whispered to myself “still got it”.

Later, I realised that quiet neighbourhood was the red light district. I also realised I hadn’t been propositioned and wasn’t quite sure how to take that.

At the hotel: did they have any rooms with tubs? Did they fuck.

I begged the kind lad on reception to please give me a room on the quiet side. The noisy side faced the Prater — which appears on maps as an expansive, tranquil parkland when you book the hotel — but is, in reality, a neon-lit acres-wide amusement park, echoing with the thunder of rollercoasters and screams.

I tapped to unlock my room on the quiet side. A blast of cold air smacked me in the face.

The balcony door was wide open. The room was dark.

A masked chainsaw-wielding lunatic lurched gently from the curtains.

Quickly, I stepped back to the hallway and closed the door. I had to exert extra force against the steady breeze coming in off the balcony.

I went back down to reception.

An older Italian couple were checking in.

“And we booked the breakfast, right?”

“Yes I recommend you to go upstairs and let staff know.”

“But we booked it?”

“Yes, you booked it, but to reserve a table, it is best to let them know.”

“Ok.”

“So we take payment ahead of time. That will be 366 Euro.”

Ten minutes of faffing with different cards and tapping and not authorised and insert here and maybe try this card and urgent conversations in Italian between husband and wife.

I felt my life force draining away.

Finally, they paid.

“Ok, and we paid for breakfast too right?”

“Yes, but please let them know upstairs.”

“Oh, upstairs?”

“Yes, you have to let them know upstairs.”

“For breakfast?”

“Yes.”

Eventually they exhausted their repository of inane questions and shuffled off.

I explained the situation.

The kind chap switched me to a different room, one without lunatics behind ominously swaying curtains. In the meantime, I asked for a dinner recommendation and, without hesitation, he recommended a place five minutes walk away.

“Best Viennese food in town! You will eat so much and sleep for 12 hours!”

“Great! That sounds perfect.”

They were full.

So, I ended up at a Chechen restaurant where they served me meat-stuffed dumplings in carrot sauce and cherry-coloured tea in little glasses, with a basket of sugar-dusted fried pastry.

It was unexpectedly lovely and just when I was thinking maybe I’ve been a bit hard on Vienna and really it’s quite alright, it was time to pay.

Cash only.

—

The next evening, I went to the opera.

Not the real opera — let’s not get carried away. Even if I had access to my full wardrobe, I don’t have anything suitable for the Vienna National Opera House. Get real.

No, the one I went to is the Volksoper or People’s Opera. It’s a couple stops away from the frothy centre of the Inner Ring, in a neighbourhood where the best food option I could find was a Vegan burger place.

In any case, I was in no way prepared for even the quiet grandeur of the People’s Opera. Bag still AWOL, no shops or pharmacies open on a Sunday, no deodorant to be had. I was easily the stinkiest and most raggedy person there by a country mile. I’ve never felt more country in my life.

No big deal, just me: the scruffiest, most unwashed person in the Vienna Volksoper.

The lady checking tickets gave me a bollocking for having a backpack with me. It was too big. It must be checked in the cloakroom.

She would not be moved. I sensed a theme.

I tried to explain that I had lost my suitcase and all my other worldly possessions. This small backpack contained everything I had left — my wallet, passport and laptop — and, if I lost it too, the consequences were unthinkable. I would be reduced to roaming the streets of Vienna for the rest of my days. Can you imagine. Nothing. She had nothing. She lost everything. Every single thing. She lives in Vienna now, in a box. She’ll find her way home, someday.

I point blank refused to check it and, when she turned away, sneaked upstairs and hid my backpack under my seat. Anytime the upper level steward came near, I shifted my leg in front of it, lest she give me yet another bollocking (so many bollockings and it was only day 2!)

Anyway the dancing was fine. It was opening night for this modern ballet production: contortions, costumes, some nice music. Nothing overtly memorable.

Except this:

You know that scene in The Sound of Music, at the end of the Salzburg folk festival when they’re announcing the runners up, third prize and then second prize, ahead of the Von Trapp Family Singers? Remember how each act takes an *inconceivably* long time on stage bowing to the audience and to themselves and shaking hands and accepting plaudits and the applause just goes on and on? And on?

Now, I always thought that was for comedic and dramatic effect: to make it more plausible that the Von Trapp Family Singers had time to slip out and go hide in the Abbey, behind those elaborate gates, while Sister Berthe and Sister Margaretta steal the distributor caps from the Nazis’ cars. (Great movie, fight me.)

Well, I’m here to tell you that this is not dramatic embellishment. This is, absolutely, true to life, drawn from reality, accurate as fuck.

The Austrians really *really* like a curtain call. Boy oh boy, do they like it.

I’m telling you this, so you’ll be forewarned and forearmed, as I was not. Clapping goes on for a minimum of ten minutes. Really, a full ten minutes, at least. Count that out and try clapping the whole time, without pause. Your hands will be ringing — throbbing painfully — as were mine.

Each performer, on their own and then in every possible permutation and combination of twos, threes, fours, fives, sevens, comes forward (multiple times) for their own bow and wave. Then the whole line, together. Twice.

You think I’m exaggerating but I’m not. Go to the opera in Vienna, I dare you.

Then, just when I thought they must be done — surely, they must be done now! — someone ran off and fetched someone in the wings: a director or choreographer.

And they ran forward for their own little bow.

Then that person joined the line and they all had another bow together. Then, someone else was fetched from the wings, and the process repeated, I kid you not, about four more times.

Through it all: radiant, ecstatic, unwavering applause.

I was weary. I’ve never felt like more of a foreigner and had to stop myself trying to catch a neighbour’s eye to have a shared moment of disbelief at how completely farcical the whole thing was.

But I dared not.

They take it really seriously and, well, this is Austria. Someone might just step up behind me and take me out with a silencer, for lack of applause stamina, and offences against the dictat on opera bag size.

—

Day 3 found me searching out a Viennese coffee house. I read lies good things about Cafe Jelinek, seit 1910, and set off there in the rain. It’s at the far end of tatty Mariahilferstrasse, down a couple side streets, so finding it was no mean feat.

When I walked in, the two women working there looked me over — and continued what they were doing. No flicker of acknowledgement, nothing. I hovered dripping wet in an an awkward space, next to the coffee bar, in between some tables.

There were plenty of empty spots so I pointed to one, questioning, preparatory to sitting down.

One of the women gave me a hand up, now wait just a second there pal, kind of motion.

And continued what she was doing. For the next ten minutes.

Now, under usual circumstances, I’d have taken this as my cue to fuck off. Things can only go downhill from here. But it’s pissing down and not understanding the language or why she might be making me stand there made me hesitate.

I was still standing there when a customer brushed past me to pay. The woman behind the counter turned to her and they conversed in rapid, enthusiastic German.

She paid, turned smiling to leave and noticed me still standing there, with what I can only assume was a superlatively pissed-off and incredulous look on my face.

In perfect English (everyone in Vienna speaks perfect English):

“Are you ok? Can I help you find something?”

“I’m just waiting for them to pay some attention to me and let me sit down.”

The woman behind the counter looked at me like I pooped in her strudel and found me a seat.

The food was overpriced — twenty quid for ham, cheese and crap bread — but at least I learned a powerful lesson. If they won’t seat you in Vienna, you should take the hint and fuck off.

Then it came time to pay:

“Cash only.”

Of course the ATM she directed me to was broken — of course it was! You can’t make this shit up! — so I hiked to a bank up on Mariahilferstrasse. I toyed with the idea of doing a runner without paying. Visions of jackbooted firing squads swam before my eyes.

I hastened back to the cafe, where I counted out exactly 23 Euro and 80 cents and not a penny more.

—

Day 4 and I’ve been directed to the Augustine Reading Room in a wing of the National Library, which has the manuscripts I want to see.

When I walked in, the guy behind the counter gave me a look that said: dream on.

“Did you make an appointment?”

“No.” My hopefulness was sweet. “The woman behind the main desk said I didn’t need to.”

“You need to make an appointment.”

I persisted. My persistence was adorable, as if I didn’t know by then that you can’t argue with a rule in Vienna.

“But, you see, I made the order. I showed the woman behind the desk my order and she said it was ordered. She said to just come here to view it.”

“They are students behind the desk there.” Scoffing at me, at them, at anyone who doesn’t know the rules. “They don’t know anything. You must make an appointment.”

There’s just no arguing with this kind of rule-stating. It can’t be overcome. It’s inflexible, a fundamental law of physics, like gravity.

Compliance is the only option.

“Ok, how do I make an appointment?”

“You must email the curators.”

“How long does that take?”

“Usually three days.”

I’m leaving the day after tomorrow. This is terrible news.

So I emailed the curator, explained the situation, explained what I wanted to view and why — and, within an hour, had a cheerful response from a lovely woman telling me that I could view the requested manuscript the next day.

All I have to do is show the guy behind the desk her email.

To celebrate, I treated myself to a petits-four and coffee in Cafe Central, where Freud and Trotsky whiled away their days. It is every inch the splendid Vienna coffee house. The waiter was friendly, the cakes were great and I could feel myself warming to Vienna, by inches and degrees.

Speaking of inches, on the way back to my room later, I spotted this penis terrarium built into a wall, which made me like Vienna even more.

Who needs luggage when you have a penis terrarium.

—

Last day in Vienna and, after a return to the Reading Room to finally (finally!) see those documents, I decided to give my cross-eyes a break and gorge at the Kunsthistoriches Museum.

Now, I’m not much of one for Hapsburg gilt or naked Renaissance flesh, but the Kunsthistorisches has the largest collection of Bruegel the Elder in the world. You may recall, I am a sucker for Flemish art in general — and for Bruegel the Elder in particular.

I always find myself drawn to the backgrounds in his paintings. I’ve written about the concept of wimmelbilderbuch before: the world in a painting, every corner filled with detail, scenes within scenes within scenes. All of my favourite art is like this, and my favourite books too. The little scenes spied far off: people carrying things over bridges, carting firewood (a big theme in these pre-central heating, frozen Central Europe days), people playing, fighting, dancing. Stories of how people just lived everyday. I could — I did — stare at them for hours: Babel, Peasant Wedding, Hunters in the Snow, Children’s Games, The Fight between Carnival and Lent (my new favourite, detail at the top of this piece, with a fish-pig joust). Avercamp does wimmelbilderbuch too, and Teniers, but nobody does it like Papa Bruegel.

Later, I left the Kunsthistorisches feeling like Vienna and I might have got off on the wrong foot.

This city doesn’t give itself up easily. Just ask Napoleon or the Ottomans.

I realised that, if I’m ever to start trying to get a handle on sprawling, sumptuous and utterly unmanageable Vienna, I need to learn the rules.

I need some context, detail and a hell of a lot of background.

—

An addendum from the return journey:

This piece covers, cumulatively, about an hour and a half of what I got up to on a five day research trip to Vienna (not counting a day of travel on either side).

Yes, I lost my suitcase on a German train. There was also a German train strike. In a country as efficient and well-organised as Germany, this struck me as unfortunate. What are the odds of a German train strike on the one day — ever, in history — on which I have to travel from a country on one side of Germany to a country on the other side of Germany, through Germany?

Incredible.

That, plus the theft of my suitcase, leaves me feeling charitably indisposed towards the entire German rail network. Needs a small measure of improvement, I would say.

Incidentally, what needs no improvement — and the undisputed high point of my return trip — was the police report I made in Munich about the theft of my suitcase.

Now, you may not be aware of this, but let me tell you: the police in Munich are incredibly attractive. I know, I know: problematic, let’s be professionals. Perving over German figures of martial authority: not a done thing. I know.

But, seriously: wow. Five stars, would recommend.

He asked for an itemised list of what was in the bag and I named a couple of big-ticket items. It occurred to me that, in anticipation of a solo week in Vienna, the suitcase also contained my best dildo and charger.

I left that off the itemised list.

Anyway, here I am on the Eurostar on the way back to London (hour and a half delay, nice!) to meet Joel, who just came off a 14-hour journey of his own, back from a conference in the States.

I had planned to go with him up until a few weeks ago but some internal urgency compelled me to put my story first. To go to Vienna alone and spend a week immersed in that story. Way better than sitting around coffee shops outside a conference centre in San Diego.

Now, I need to take stock of my trip, write up notes and begin a lengthy process of — actually — writing this story. It will be a matter of months, if not years, so please be patient. If you’re interested, I’ve set up a log of the journey. You can check it out under Log 📊 on the Litter homepage.

There’s more still to research — endless questions. I won’t say more about the research but I will say that, as in a wimmelbilderbuch painting, nature abhors a vacuum. My horror vacui leads me to fill in gaps, where no information exists.

After all, isn’t that what fiction is?

NEXT ➡️

“My heart in hiding …”

— The Windhover, Gerard Manley Hopkins

I went for a walk today.

It’s been a long Covid-y week and it felt great to pull on my boots and head up the hill in front of my house.

I’ve got a few thoughts rolling in my head and I’m wondering if the walk will make any of them any clearer.

Reader, I leave that to you to judge.

One of the things I kept thinking about was an interview I read in last month’s The Atlantic with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI.

One bit really stuck for me:

So, OpenAI is working on artificial bodies for artificial intelligence.

This, to get around the issue of AI only being able to recycle what we feed it.

Altman wants to release AI into the world to have its own experiences and generate its own insights about those experiences, just like we do.

Right now, the problem he has is that AIs are incapacitated. They are just … standing still.

I wonder why they are bothering to give AI its own body. There are enough bodies already moving around this world. I think about how everyone’s phones cumulatively build up a picture of an event, seen from a hundred sets of eyes. I think about Apple Health telling the truth of our lives, tracking our heart beats at the precise moment we saw that picture of our ex.

Joel also told me there’s something called Life Streaming, where people stream their life, wear something that records everything so they can play it back. It captures conversations and moments: a dash cam of your life. I think back to times we’ve argued and how I’ve wanted to film him so he can see what I see. What an invasion that would be. Will life streamers need to procure my consent before dash camming the experience of meeting me? What kind of consent will I need to give for an AI bot to draw conclusions about me when I pass it on the street?

Today was the first morning of frost. Crimson clover was splashed about in reckless abundance and inedible red haws, everywhere. There were rosehips in the hedges and still some purple blackberries on the north facing slopes. It was a bad year for berries, no sun. I know you’re not supposed to eat blackberries after Michaelmas but I decided to risk it. I pulled a couple and they were delicious, perfect.

A bot wouldn’t know, I thought to myself, how good the berries are right now. Or would it?

I saw a butterfly alight on a leaf in the hedge near me and stopped. Edged closer. What insights would a bot have here? I noticed the central dark patch and the spots around its edge. How the velvet of its thorax had texture and rippled like bioluminesce, as if underwater.

I was reminded of something I read once about butterflies. There are some rare butterflies that display asymmetry; one wing, the long-tailed male pattern and the other, the shorter-tailed female mosaic. It’s called bilateral gynandromorphy; half-male, half-female.

Now, bilateral gynandromorphs are vanishingly rare: that rare phenomenon wherein some butterflies exhibit asymmetry in their wings, a mixing of male and female.

This is another thing I was thinking about on my walk: gender roles, in all their much-contested nonsense. I work full-time, as does Joel. For me, it’s never been an option not to. I had to feed my baby and give him a home. My job is a means to an end: the only end worthwhile enough to tempt me into corporate hallways.

Would I rather have stayed home with my baby? Yes. One million times, yes. I appreciate this is not the case for all women, some of whom long to return to work. I’m not trying to speak for all women.

I can only speak for myself, and imperfectly at that.

Would I rather have stayed home with my baby, when he was a baby? Yes. Are there other women who would rather chew their arms off than stay home? Also, yes.

We are all different.

Now that I’ve made it through the hell flames of early motherhood, that cuts such a swathe through the working female populace, I feel a great responsibility to keep at it.

But, to whom do I feel that responsibility, I wonder?

—

I listened to a guy at the sushi counter in London recently talking to a much younger colleague — an intern, I think. Talking to is wrong: he talked at, or over, her all through lunch. An uninterrupted stream of empty-speak about hitting numbers and clients and certain contacts being gold and inviting them to the Oktoberfest event tonight because they’re untapped gold and this is the way to hit those big sales numbers.

Wide eyed, she said: “I don’t know how Rachel does it.”

The implication is clear: Rachel is obviously older, obviously juggling children and home stuff.

“Well,” significant look from him. “With a lot of help from her friends.”

“Oh really?” I cottoned on to her then. She isn’t being wide-eyed. She’s driving in the knife: the silly, little, turkey-voting-for-Thanksgiving bitch.

He is lofty, instructive.

“Her days are numbered. There comes a time, you know, managing a team and being a revenue generating team, when some people are just spread a bit too thin. I try and steer clear of the politics of it all, you know, but that’s just how things are.”

He pauses for a bite of sashimi.

“But don’t worry. You don’t need to worry about that for a long time.”

—

I’ve just had Covid (or something identical to it; lateral flows inconclusive) and didn’t work last week. It gave me a lot of time to think.

A lot of things I’ve read here on Substack have also made me think: Jason at Weirdo Poetry wrote this gorgeous poem 2 and someone else wrote something beautiful about how finite our time is.

I am so conscious of time slipping away at this time of year. The wind gets chillier, strips leaves from trees. My shelves of books sit glimmering; I want to gorge on them. I don’t have time. I want to cook and organise the house and get my papers in order and transcribe The Notebooks and I want to write, write, write. There’s a book, or several, that beckon from my brainfolds.

Cicero said if you have a garden and a library, that’s all you need.

And someone to pay the mortgage, I think.

—

I’ve taken a step closer, slowly, to the butterfly. She’s not moving but I know if I go within arms reach she’ll be gone so I stay just beyond and look. She opens her wings and gives herself generously to my eyes.

I stand for a long time. Every so often she shifts a little as if to show me a different angle, a new magnificence to her. I notice the ends of her antennae are bright white and glow as if imbibing electric impulses from the air.

A spider abseils into my face and is off again to the hedge, having looped a web string to me and back.

I wonder how long I would have to stand here to be overcome entirely by cobwebs.

Having stood so long, it’s hard to leave. I’m wary of disturbing her if I turn now. I consider stepping delicately off, slowly, as I would from the locked eyes of a tiger. Just a photo, I think, to remember the moment and get my phone out.

I take a picture and she snaps her wings shut, as if affronted.

And she’s gone.

I feel a great loss and remind myself it’s just a butterfly. And she’s fine. But the feeling lingers. It’s getting cold and I wonder how long she has left.

She is my days slipping away, the days I am paid to waste. She is my baby son, gone forever.

She is me too, long gone and replaced with a bot in this field. A hundred years from now, a bot stands in my place having whatever thoughts it is a bot might have.

At the top of the field I hang a right to loop back home and there’s a red kite hawk circling lazily. It seems to follow my progress, circling with me along the top of the field. I realise after awhile it’s looking to see what I flush out with my tramping steps: what little creatures flee my path.

My son once asked me why don’t our skeletons grow wings?

I wonder if the AI bots Sam Altman is working on will have wings.

In the British Museum a couple weeks ago, I banged on to Joel about how much I love museums because it lets you see how things used to be.

He looked at these Assyrian murals.

“Hey look — they used to be able to fly!”

I think I did too.

I imagine days of no work: a walk like this to clear the mind and hours to spin my thoughts together.

Maybe marshalling thoughts could be a more revolutionary act than confounding gender stereotypes in a corporate world.

A season feels like it’s drawing to a close. A new season beckons.

I’ve stood still for a long time. But it’s not too late to move.

⬅️ ⬅️ READ FROM THE BEGINNING

I grew up on skis. Let me explain.

In upstate New York, the temperature falls below freezing in November and usually doesn’t re-emerge until March.

We had a thermometer outside the kitchen window. Winter mornings, I would check it. Minus 10 or 20 was pretty normal. I remember it being minus 40 sometimes.

On those days, you had to make sure your neck warmer was tucked up under goggles and gloves under jackets at the wrists, so not an inch of skin was exposed. A frost ring would form at your mouth and nose through the layers of fleece.

Snow days, when the plough couldn’t dust the roads fast enough ahead of the school buses, were routine. When it snowed, the snow stayed for months.

It’s cold in winter.

In places like this, with snow and hills, skiing is commonplace. Now, I’m not saying skiing is a cheap and accessible sport. It’s not. Even with snow and hills, skiing remains intransigently a sport for the privileged.

What I am trying to say though is that it is a less rarefied sport in the US than the UK. There’s no snow in the UK, not really, and no hills either, come to think of it. That means that only the very wealthiest can afford regular excursions to the Alps.

But, in the US, when I was a kid, skiing was the kind of thing you might do on weekends or after-school, instead of football (read: soccer) or karate. You might be lucky enough to get lessons and a season pass at the local slope. Or you might beg your mom for twenty bucks for a day’s lift pass and borrow a friend’s skis.

Or you might just find an icy hill and build a booter to ride over and over again with your buddies, sharing beers and snowboards.

If you live in a hilly place, covered in snow, you will find ways to play in it.

When you are old enough, if it means that much to you, you will pack up your truck with your dog and your snowboard and head west, to try the real mountains in Colorado, and beyond.

I grew up in this kind of a place.

That’s why skiing for me is like breathing, like walking. I’ve done it for as long as I can remember.

Actually, that’s not strictly true. I can remember things that happened before I learned to ski.

I remember the morning my sister was born. I remember everyone rushing around, I remember being told to go get dressed. I was two. They didn’t know that my mom still dressed me every day. I remember sitting, angry, alone and confused, on the floor in front of my closet not knowing how to get dressed and trying to take something off a hanger but I couldn’t reach it. Then being rushed out the door, still in my pyjamas to go to the hospital to see my mom and the baby. I remember wanting my mom so much and not being able to have her because the baby. I remember someone being angry at me for wanting her.

I remember the scary goat in the back garden. I couldn’t set foot within the circumference of her permitted range of movement. I’m reliably informed we got rid of the goat before my sister was born.

I remember lying in my stroller for a nap in the back garden. Waking mesmerised by the lacework of leaves and light overhead. There was a bird feeder, busy with red cardinals and yellow and black chickadees. I remember sudden pain, falling out the back of the stroller. My mom said I was less than a year old when that happened.

I remember other things too, other pains.

I definitely remember that first day of skiing. I was three. Not wanting to go, the biting cold, the heavy boots, the heavier skis. Trying to lift each leg to sidestep up the red carpet. It was an actual strip of carpet in those days and we had to walk sideways up it. We were so hardcore. Kids today with their motorised “magic carpets” don’t know they’re born, I swear.

The instructors were like aliens, in huge goggles and neck warmers, impossible to see and harder to understand.

“Make a wedge. Wedge, wedge, wedge.”

This was before everyone realised it would be easier to teach kids to make a pizza slice with their skis than a foundational tool of mechanical engineering.

I remember hating it, then not hating it, then gliding and staying upright, then loving it.

I couldn’t get enough.

I was flying!

Flying free and fast.

That feeling has never left me, and shows no signs of leaving still. Skiing is my happy place. Floating up through trees to the top of a mountain, flying down, repeating. The whole mountain bending and arcing beneath me. The smell of snow and pines and wood fires. It is a moving meditation. It is my home. When I ski, I ski with wings.

And I was fast. I am fast. Last winter in Italy, Joel clocked me cruising at 63 mph. It didn’t even feel fast. I’ve definitely gone faster.

The thing is, because it gets so cold in upstate New York, you don’t so much ski snow as compacted ice. I grew up skiing on expansive blue sheets of ice as the accepted norm and I’d liken it to skiing on slippery concrete. If you can ski the ice faces of upstate New York, in minus 40, you are well-seasoned to ski comfortably in most other places (except maybe, you know, Antarctica). As for powder, what is this Elysium?

As a kid, I finished all the levels of ski school by the time I was ten. Parallel turns, slaloms, tuck jumps, 360s — I was done.

Once, I woke up and it was snowing. It wasn’t a snow day though; the ploughs had been through. My mom said to pretend I was sick and stay in bed. She packed my little sister off to school and the two of us went skiing.

If it was winter and I wasn’t in school, odds are I was skiing. I would just lap the same three runs at our tiny local hill over and over again. Faster and faster. Probably hundreds of times a week.

I won first place in the race at the end of ski school. The next fastest kid was awarded fourth place, because there was that much of a margin between my time and hers. I remember her shiny expensive racing helmet and the red, angry face of her dad, struggling to congratulate me. I didn’t wear a helmet or have tight racing trousers. I had a pom pom hat.

Did I want to race? I did, but we were moving to Ireland soon, what was the point of starting racing now.

This is all context.

When I started in Oxford, I’d barely skied in years. After moving to Ireland at 12, I probably only went a handful of times in my teens. Ireland is even flatter and has even less snow than the UK.

Once, age 14, on a visit back to my hometown in the States, I’d gone back to the slope where I’d learned to ski. I knew those runs like my own face, like a face I’d forgotten I had.

Night skiing, under the orange floodlights, I remember hearing a guy whoop behind me, a snowboarder, followed closely by a girl in turquoise, a skier.

It was Luke (remember him?), followed by his then-girlfriend, the most popular, blonde and impossibly beautiful girl in my old grade. Watching the two of them, so sure about who they were on territory that should have been mine, was like a hot knife in the gut. I still wanted Luke, still, the same wanting from when I was 11, when he had blue hair and a lunch tray in the cafeteria.

Later that evening, he rode the chairlift up with me, just once. I don’t remember what we said. I remember looking across at him, just once on that one chairlift ride, to see him smiling and joking. I don’t remember a word he said to me, just remember staring in wonder at how close and beautiful his face was. Remember thinking he was so cool.

I caused a lot of drama on that trip by kissing someone else, a someone with a girlfriend. Spoiler: I knew he had a girlfriend. I knew her too, I was staying with her. I just … didn’t care. Because 14 year olds are selfish. Because 14 year old me was selfish. Because I couldn’t have what I really wanted. And what 14 year old relationship is sacred enough not to sabotage, if it will be sabotaged, by another 14 year old?

But I digress.

At Oxford, years later, scrounging for extra-curricular activities, I heard there was a ski club. I heard it was venerable, one of the oldest sporting clubs in the country. And the annual Varsity ski races with Cambridge? Older than the Winter Olympics. I thought maybe I should join and gamely signed up.

Had I ever raced before? Nope, but I was willing to give it a go.

What I hadn’t appreciated is quite how… posh… skiing is in the UK.

Like I said, in the States, it’s a bit more makeshift, a bit more just a backdrop to living in a hilly, snowy place. In the UK, it is the territory of only the most privileged elite; the people in the UK who are good enough to race may not have grown up on the slopes, but they had chalets, multiple trips a season and private instructors since they could walk.

In Oxford, I was on the same ski team as (I shit you not): an Austrian baroness, an Italian countess and an exclusive selection of persons with various levels of title and entitlement.

Remember the person I wrote about with the seventeen iPhones and six iPads or whatever? Guess where I knew them from? Yep, ski club.

Anyway, so I learned how to race (we trained on the dry slope in High Wycombe, which has long since burned down or been burned for the insurance or whatever) and I ended up on the team competing against Cambridge at the Varsity Races in Tignes.

Cambridge beat us that year — they had a girl who grew up in Switzerland, which trumps upstate New York every time, as it turns out — but I was still the fastest girl on the Oxford team. Which pissed off the Italian countess whose fastest time I snatched no end.

Not bad for a gal from upstate New York who grew up skiing the little 500 ft slope a few minutes from her house.

Did you see the map at the top? That’s the spot.

Anyone, even by UK standards, would call it a hill but for locals it goes by the much more elevated name of Willard Mountain and, in my head, it will always be that.

Really though, it’s just a hill in upstate New York, five minutes from the Vermont border. I hesitate to say that area is mountainous, even though technically we are in the Appalachians, one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world. While they might technically be mountains, these rounded-off nubs are really just big hills now, offering only the softest whispers of their vertiginous past.

The hills fold in on each other and enrobe roads, quiet roads, little two-lane affairs that pootle in an unhurried fashion from town to Revolutionary War-era town.

This is the upstate New York where Continental Army troops circulated after losing control of Manhattan; the woods from which guerrilla raids on British supply lines were carried out. In our woods alone, there was the site of an old schoolhouse, a Prohibition-era distillery and countless stone walls that used to mark out fields that have been swallowed up by the woods when settlers abandoned New England’s rocky steeps for acres of flat, loamy goodness in the Midwest. Old Fort Ticonderoga is just upriver. Schuylerville — the home of the Schuyler sisters made famous by Lin Manuel Miranda — is the next town over, fifteen minutes from the house where I spent my childhood. It’s a hotbed of monied Hamilton enthusiasts now, snapping up and renovating the shit out of their 250 year old clapboard homes.

But when I was a kid, it all felt very far from the bright centre of the universe. That was obviously Manhattan, where we’d go on weekends to visit my Grandma by the ocean in Brooklyn and lie with our heads back looking out the dome of the rear windshield to see straight up the ribs of the World Trade Centre. We’d cross the Verrazano to visit cousins in Staten Island and peer down across the air to tankers and cargo ships ploughing the denim of the harbour like toys.

I said to my mom once “we’re so high” and she said there was a famous scene in a movie where someone jumped off that bridge. She was somber but I didn’t understand why jumping off a bridge into water would be a bad thing: it sounded like fun. I saw the older boys do it down by the river from our local covered bridge. It was fun. She explained terminal velocity to me. Hitting water from up high is like hitting concrete: bones shatter instantly.

Mountains shatter too. They get pushed up to impossible heights — and eventually stop growing. Tectonic plates shift and the world moves on. New mountains grow elsewhere and old mountains settle, erode and wear down smooth, until their triangles become domes.

In the northern bit of the Appalachians where I grew up, there might be the occasional sharp peak, promontory or steep ravine — but mostly the landscape is soft. Everything is shrouded in dense mixed foliage. At this time of year, in October, it’s on the turn to butter, crimson and burnt orange.

There aren’t many impressive mountains but there is at least one (small) rocky cliff, above a particular cabin in the woods.

I climbed up there barefoot once with another barefoot person, barely remembered.

It was Luke.

It was July 2006.

Remember? Right after Finals, here I was back in my hometown. Right before that train ride.

“You should just move up here and live with me for the next month until I go out to Colorado … It’s quiet and you can just hang out with me and write … ”

We’re sitting on a promontory, a rock face that rises up above the trees behind his cabin and looks out over the green humps of the Adirondacks. We walked up to it through the delicate humid mould of mid-summer and, at times, his hand guides sweaty on my back, even though we both grew up in these same woods, climbed the same trees, walked the same trails.

“What would I write about?”

But that’s not what I mean. I mean, how would I write? How could I be bothered? How would I do anything else when he’s right there, open, available, leaning his face towards me? I look at the veins in his arms and wonder how I would ever do anything but stay here, live in his shack and share his bed forever. 

“I don’t know, maybe just about what it’s like living in a shack in the woods... ”

He is pulling me around to face him just by the suggestion in my mind that I could. The sun is hazy and the leaves ripple like strings of green silver dollars. Everything is golden, sunlight on hair and skin; his brows, dark lines. He’s 23 and I am 21 and neither of us have ever been better than that moment.

This is how it feels, right at the centre of things.

He is so beautiful, so strong.  I want to draw the lines of his face into my mind forever but it’s too hazy.

I kiss him and wish never to be anywhere else, never to write another word.

—

These woods change so much throughout the year. In spring, they smell like mud and crocuses. In summer, they’re bathed in the green light of elms, ash, maples.

And in winter, the ground is frozen.

People change so much too.

Sometimes, they are soft and fertile; other times, cold and frozen.

—

➡️ NEXT

Song-match this piece with: Future Islands, Back in the tall grass.

Here’s the Notebooks playlist on Spotify:

When I lived by the river in London, I used to go mudlarking – a bit obsessively – along the Thames foreshore.

Mudlarking is kind of amateur archaeology, basically looking for cool things in the mud and pebbles along the riverbank. The detritus of 2,000 years since Roman ‘Londinium’ is plastered in the mud; things that people dropped centuries ago, off boats, off jetties, intentionally or accidentally, getting into boats fleeing the Great Fire of London in 1666. Romans, Saxons, Tudors, Victorians, you name it.

From my mudlarking days, I have a very impressive collection of pottery through the ages, countless clay pipes (the cigarettes of former times) — and even an ammonite fossil.

This is all true.

Years ago, I lived in Wapping and then Rotherhithe with my husband and young son.

Wapping is a gentle curve and Rotherhithe a sharp spur of land that stick out into the Thames in east London, before the great bend at Limehouse, around the Isle of Dogs down to Greenwich.

I took up mudlarking — with one eye on the past — when I saw the end of my marriage approaching.

At the time, I worked long hours and had a small child. Those places had the inestimable value of being close to work. I used to walk down the river each morning — and, in the evening, ran home to put my son to bed, before returning to the office.

That stretch of river is positively dense with humanity.

Captain Kidd was tarred and feathered here, left to rot and be overcome by the tides. Turner’s mistress ran a public house off Wapping Green. Captain Cook married a local girl.

Beyond the lights of Tower Bridge, past the ruins of Edward III’s fourteenth century moated hunting palace, there’s a teetering house next to the Angel pub from which Princess Margaret was reputed to have conducted a steamy affair with a naval officer back in the ‘60s.

Old frigates were dismantled and stripped down here. At low tide, you can walk on carpets of ancient nails that held together keels and hulls.

Once, I found in the mud a bowl, shattered but still intact.

Did some cuckold throw it at his cheating wife, who ducked, so it sailed out the window into the soft mud?

I pulled from the silt as many pieces as I could find — slicing my thumb severely enough to warrant a tetanus booster — and spent hours trying to piece them back together again, in a heroic but ultimately pointless effort at kintsugi.

It’s quiet under the old warehouses now. They’re all multi-million pound flats, owned by bankers.

—

One day, at a pub along the river, I met a man who was having a quiet pint, with an array of clay pipes laid out in front of him.

“What are those?”

“Cigarettes, of the old days.” He told me they’re everywhere, down on the foreshore, because people would chuck them away all the time, like cigarette butts.

As soon as he said that, I couldn’t unsee them. I couldn’t step more than a metre on any city beach without coming up with a handful.

My marriage fell to pieces. I took up mudlarking on that great foreshore, littered with the remnants of thousands of lives.

What is it that Lara Maiklem says? Mudlarking is time travel.

Crunching underfoot, you can hear the screams, the crying baby and the shattered crockery with every step. Rare amidst the fragments, perhaps a wedding ring.

It wasn’t just time travel for me; it was invisibility. Mudlarking was a commitment to erasing my significance in the immensity of time. I trawled the Thames foreshore, turning interesting stones, blowing sand from clay pipes. Magpie-ing any bright sherds of pottery, the occasional chunk of Roman amphorae.

Finding old shoes, broken bottles — and, once, this rubber wall-mounted dildo.

Another day, I turned with my toe an unusually smooth wattled orb — and was greeted with concentric spiral staircase ridges inside.

It was an ammonite. They died out with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Holding it now, it’s still cold and heavy in the hand: bright red where a corner chipped away in the churn at Rotherhithe beach. Half a mile from Tower Bridge, and 65 million years in the tides.

I tramped the foreshore like a woman possessed, tracking the tide and waiting for it to be on the turn, to leave, to be on the way out, always looking to see what was left behind.

The suffering I unleashed?

Two millenia of Londoners and their cares made it seem so paltry.

What was it in the cosmic span of London’s pain.

It wouldn’t last.

—

After that, I lived for a time with the man I left my husband for.

Eventually I left him too.

He told me he joined a Marxist book club, when he realised his own marriage was falling apart. Taking up a hobby was something to do, to fill the hours until middle years.

Eventually it became clear that we had nothing in common — as if “Marxist book club” couldn’t have already told me that.

He spouted gibberish at me one evening in the car about the violence of JK Rowling; called me a TERF when I ventured that maybe it was fair enough to have women-only swim hours in public pools in east London. He, a corporate lawyer, told me I was “complicit” in not yearning for a violent revolution. Castigated me for a lack of idealistic zeal when I said maybe men are more prone to idealistic fervours. That maybe women ultimately care more about protecting our babies than political philosophy.

When he moved out, I packed up all the stuff he’d left behind — and came across his notes from the book club. Neat little black Moleskines: title, author, terse comments. Bullet points and underlines.

Page after pointless page.

I added it to the pile of stuff for him to collect, next to his work folders and bags of protein powder.

—

You may have noticed, I have a bit of an obsession with the things we leave behind.

If I think about the word “leave”, it feels inherently contradictory.

It means leave out, or leave in. It means to take leave, to leave off: to be released. It’s a Janus word, a hydra with two heads facing in opposite directions.

It means leave it behind because it doesn’t matter, or keep it safe because it does (“leave it alone”).

If something’s left, it’s gone — or it’s still there. If I leave something, I get rid of it — or I retain it.

It’s the things that go away, and those that remain.

Like Janus, it’s got one eye on the past — what’s already left — and another on the future — what will be left, and endure.

The reason for this contronymic confusion is that the word “leave” has a confused etymology: it comes from two very different Proto-Indo-European roots, with two very different meanings.

One is ‘leip’: to stick, adhere, continue, persevere.

Joining ‘leip’ (which gave birth to ‘life’ and ‘lively’) and ‘men’ (a root which lives on in ‘immanent’) we get remain. Things that are left are remaining. They continue and persevere.

The other Proto-Indo-European root is ‘sleg’: to be slack or languid, to loosen, to leave off. Things that have left have slackened, shuffled off, gone loose.

They are gone.

—

I lost my sunglasses last weekend in Paris.

They were brand new and not cheap. One minute they were on the table at a wine bar, where we drank with my sister and her family, while the children climbed lamp posts. The next minute I was emerging from the Metro a few stops away, a little bit shit-faced, searching pockets, patting my head and they were gone. They were not, it turned out after a quick call, still on the table at the wine bar. They were not, we discovered, in any of our bags.

They were not, to be clear, on my face — which has happened before, more than once, when I’ve been looking for them.

They were just … gone.

Now, I don’t really care about my sunglasses. They’re just sunglasses. I wore a sun hat instead.

The loss of my sunglasses is not a big deal to anyone, apart from me — and even then, only in the most self-interested navel-gazing kind of way.

But.

As this is an essay about the things we leave behind, and what that means to me, it seems appropriate that I … left something behind.

My sister offered some consolation:

“They weren’t even that nice anyway.”

Like all the unimportant shit we leave behind.

—

While I was in Paris, I read Buried by Professor Alice Roberts, about what we leave behind in graves. Cheerful! It’s a detailed examination of what we can glean from remains: some friable bone shards, a jaw, skull, teeth. Maybe the metal buckle of a long-disintegrated belt or the iron cross-bar of a shield or chest plate.

We all leave behind a bone inventory.

Mandible, clavicle, tibia, fibula — all present and accounted for.

But we are more than a list of things: there’s always a bit more.

Maybe a garden is the thing we leave behind. In the village, one of my friend’s dads did just that: left a garden, full of fruiting trees. An apple tree takes years to fruit. Those trees are forty feet high and laden with fruit. They are venerable.

That is a legacy to leave behind.

Robert Macfarlane wrote — was it in The Wild Places? I can’t remember — about the artist up in Scotland who wanted to entomb a skeleton inside a rock. He wanted to echo an intact human down through the ages.

But that isn’t how it works.

When we go the bits of us that are left get recycled, reused, reimagined. Our bone inventory loosens.

Maybe we are eternalities, with brief excursions in different bodies.

Maybe we are just momentary agglomerations of loosely oiled neurons; pithy monkeys.

—

I gravitate to things — weird things, in unexpected places — and might not know why. Sometimes they feel like a thread that I know but have lost, a long time ago.

It feels hard to pick it back up again in a life, like I only follow it for a short time then lose it and spend the next life trying to pick it back up again.

Like a dream memory, it floats just out of reach.

Certain things strike me uncannily familiar and I can’t explain why. As a child, the placename “Rangoon” held a particular fascination. Standing before Starry Night in the Musee d’Orsay last week — an old couple dwarfed by the night sky — I wept like a baby. Sitting on my haunches in the mud of the Thames, I can hear whispers of past footfalls and old grievances. Can I tell you why? No, because I don’t know.

Why do certain things hit? I have no idea.

I have no idea why I like a spritely pixie wood-elf kind of chap with high cheekbones.

Maybe my particles know. The first time I held Joel, my particles sang.

Maybe my particles remembered his particles.

—

Breath, diesel, skin cells.

These are some of the things friends and I mused might be stuck to those beams above our heads in Gare du Nord train station last weekend in Paris.

Remember those beams? Here’s a new picture if you can’t recall:

Most of us leave nothing behind but this: some fumes and dust adhered to the metal frameworks of the Gare du Nord.

—

My line manager told me she qualified as a lawyer in a magic circle firm just before the financial crisis. They sent her on secondment to one of the banks in crisis.

She said every day she’d go to the photocopier and there’d be a new CV on it.

Nothing left behind of all those bank employees in 2008 — except CVs on printers.

—

Back in those days when I lived by the river and spent all my free hours in the Thames mud, I had a job where I had to work on mine financing.

That meant drafting all the finance documents for a company to develop and run a mine. In that case, it was a copper mine in an African jurisdiction.

It’s a matter of public record that I worked on this deal. The law firm I worked for at the time bragged copiously about it in its public-facing literature.

I was a junior lawyer on the deal at that time. There was also a senior lawyer and the partner. I stayed up nights and missed bedtimes and wrote emails during birthday parties.

This particular mine was being refinanced; it had gone through many previous cycles of financings.

Some people joked it was cursed.

About a week after the deal closed, the partner broke his back in a freak accident. The senior broke her leg. And I broke my ankle in a climbing incident I’ve previously described.

Coincidence?

Or a curse from a really angry demi-god somewhere in the sub-Saharan veld?

Who can say.

I left the firm shortly after this. Their next project was going to involve some “green field” development in South America. Green field means brand new. It means taking a green field and making it brown. In South America, a “green field” mine project is about the worst kind of egregious offence against the planet you can imagine.

I wanted no part in it.

What I want to leave behind isn’t some gaping wound in the Venezuelan highlands.

I want to leave behind something — bone shards, fumes in Gare du Nord, anything at all — but a brown field.

—

On the way home after Paris, spinning down country lanes, we passed through shafts of light made solid where the dust particles and mist lay heaviest.

In our wake: the liquid motion of a grass verge in the car’s slipstream.

On the bike to the coffee shop this morning, the passage was softer. Unseen animals folded into the hedges at my approach. All I heard was the sound of the folding, like pages, as I passed.

On the school run, I moved gastropods off the road so they didn’t become little sun-baked snail pancakes.

—

These days, I try to be very careful about what I leave behind.

And what I don’t.

—

**Did you spot this was a Cryptic Crossword clue?

That’s something Joel’s sister said last week, when we were camping in Wales.

Joel has three kids from his previous marriage. I have one. Together, we have none. Sometimes, I grieve for those children we’ll never have. Mostly, I think we’ve probably got our hands full enough already.

Still.

I grieve for the life I’ll never have; the love I’ll never have; the family I’ll never have. Sometimes the grief feels violent enough to eviscerate me.

It hits a high water mark this time of year and threatens to pull me under. We’re in the dog days of summer now. If you’re a parent you’ll know what that means: fractious children, a filthy house, the trappings of half-unpacked holidays and sand everywhere.

The noise of children is unrelenting. Existential dread is high.

It’s the time of year when you feel the tragedy of parenting; feel yourself being sucked dry, chained to the whims of ungrateful little beings. Wasted and husk-like, alongside the spent fields.

This post is a summer mash-up. There are some stars, some disparate things. In between, you can see many more.

See if you can spot them.

—

Camping in Wales, Joel’s brother-in-law caught a sea bass and we cooked it in the van.

The van belongs to Ishtar, a friend. He’s a grocery delivery driver and also a climber. He lives in his van, sometimes with his son who is two.

He told me he has a good parenting relationship with his ex-wife. His son is bright and names letters of the alphabet: chatty, secure and precocious as anything.

While we ate with our fingers, Ish told us stories about the little old ladies he worries might be trying to kidnap him when he delivers their groceries, like that ad about Carlsberg export drivers in rural Denmark.

The seabass is so fresh it makes our mouths sticky.

“They all want you to put the deliveries in the kitchen. ‘Oh, you’re a fine specimen.’ Or down in the basement. I’m like, I’m not going down those stairs, I’ll never come back out. I did go down into one. She said ‘My freezer’s down in the basement.’ She looked pretty frail and I thought I can push her over if I need to. Anyway, down I went to the freezer in the basement and opened it up and it was all pizzas. And I thought I’m safe.”

We wondered briefly why his delivery route is all old ladies.

“It’s pretty rural and mostly they don’t drive. They don’t have accidents. Except my grandma, she does. Drives really slowly into hedges and that. Then she tells me ‘oh John with the tractor come and pulled me out’. ”

Ish walked one hundred and twenty-eight miles barefoot to protest climate change. His arches collapsed and he had to strap his feet together for the last stretch.

He’s admiring Joel’s brother-in-law’s feet.

“You’ve got lovely feet. Lovely big toes, all spaced out. Look at them! They’re so evenly spaced and uniform. I don’t know if it’s climbing shoes or what but my little toe doesn’t spread. Not like those people who grow up barefoot. Their toes are all lovely and spread out.”

—

Twenty-four hours later, we are on a climbing holiday. It comes on the back of the camping holiday in Wales, which was spent in the company of seven (yes, you read that right, seven) children — and so was rather strenuous.

It’s no surprise to anyone that a blended family presents challenges. It is no small matter to parent, let alone to parent someone else’s child. If you’re struggling to understand, imagine being woken up at 6am — by someone else’s child. Imagine someone else’s child getting poop (theirs, probably) on the toilet seat. Imagine them dipping a smeary spoon into your meal; touching ketchup-y hands all over your taps and door handles.

Add to that how hard it is to hear someone you love chastise someone you made. Add an uncooperative ex, who doesn’t do their fair share of parenting. Add the normal resentments over who loaded the dishwasher and how many times you’ve cooked this week.

Congratulations. You’re maybe one-thousandth of the way towards understanding what’s difficult about blending families and co-parenting.

A climbing holiday is also a strenuous holiday. Maybe someday I’ll take a holiday that feels like a holiday: something with sun loungers and cocktails and nothing much to do all day but luxuriate in a warm, shaded and breezy location.

Or maybe not.

—

The climbing holiday started at 4am the morning after we arrived back from the camping holiday. We dropped Joel’s kids back with their mum and drove home to unpack, do laundry and repack our bags in time to snatch about two hours of restful slumber before the 4am alarm.

Suffice to say, I was not in the most sanguine frame of mind when, about halfway to Gatwick, it transpired that Joel had forgotten not only his driver’s licence, but his entire fucking wallet.

He redeemed himself slightly at Europcar in Milan airport, after a nail-biting two hour flight. I was on the verge of signing on the dotted line when he pointed out we were, colloquially, getting fucked in the ass with the price. Checking prices of cars online, he found us a deal for less than half at Hertz.

So it was that I found myself being given control of a rental car in Milan airport, the sole designated driver, less than a year after getting my licence. On Italian roads, and more pertinently, with Italian drivers — and, if you don’t know, let me tell you without hyperbole that Italian drivers are the worst in the world.

It’s a wonder that, driving Italian roads, you don’t pass wreck after smoking wreck, and pile after heaped pile of dismembered roadside corpses.

The car was terrible: basically, just a moped engine with some slinky branding. It was a manual, which would be fine, but everybody was driving on the right, which was NOT fine because I drive on the left.

My left hand scrabbled the door, over and over again, grasping fruitlessly for the gear stick as I merged into about twelve lanes of fuming Italian traffic. I tried to indicate and the wipers swished in the sunshine.

Joel alerted me to a motorcycle overtaking me on the left, just as someone ahead of me came to a full stop. Without skipping a beat, they flung backwards towards me in reverse.

“There’s a motorcycle to the left. Careful, that guy is overtaking you. So is that guy. Pedestrians walking two abreast in the shade over there. Go left at this roundabout. No, the other way, third exit.”

It’s a little stressful.

And the kicker of course was that, as the sole designated driver, a drink to calm the nerves was not an option.

—

Then, we’re at a crag and I’m watching butterflies. Two butterflies swirl around each other as if caught in an updraft. My hands are a paste-y mix of chalk and sweat, my feet about two sizes bigger than usual in the heat, in tiny climbing shoes.

Oleander and centaury line the dirt track — an old Roman road into the Alps —we followed out here. Columbine sprouts from the smallest gaps in the rock. We passed giant pitcher plants along the road and blackberries, lemon trees, grapes on the vine, all dusty in the sun. The air is heavy with the scent of bougainvillea, rhododendron and the sweet fug of wasp-misted fig trees. The wasps are the size of hummingbirds.

Climbing is an intellectual adventure. Each move is a collection of mental assessments of balance and weight; strength and swing. You’re only safe when you’ve made your clip and, even then, only until you start to climb past it. Once past your last clip, you’re in the unknown: exposed and fully reliant on your partner to catch you.

That’s the other thing: climbing is a sport for two. Unless you’re Alex Honnold, you really want someone climbing with you, spotting you if you’re bouldering or belaying you if you’re on a rope. Your life is in their hands if you take a fall. There is a climb here called “Maturi e Contenti”, which without checking Google Translate, I’m comfortable to translate as “mature and content”.

That is a good description of how you want to be when you’re climbing.

I went climbing once with an ex-boyfriend. As the day progressed, I could tell he was getting a bit pissed off that I was climbing better than him. On the last climb of the day, a difficult boulder problem that I thought I might try in a swell of confidence, I came off about halfway.

Now, bouldering you use a crash pad, which is like a big mattress to catch your falls. Your partner should spot you, guide your fall to the mat.

They should arrest your momentum and hold you, to keep you safe until you stop falling.

That day, my ex was spotting me and he caught my shoulders as I landed on the mat. And then immediately let go of me.

Still full of dynamic movement from the fall, I spun sideways off the mat. My foot turned. I fell heavily sideways onto unstable rocky ground and felt something snap.

I broke my ankle that day because he wasn’t with me, every step of the way. My ankle has never been the same since, and never will be.

Every love leaves us a little wounded.

Today, Joel lead-climbed his first tough climb outside. To the non-climbers, that means he climbed, tied into a rope, from the ground up to a bolted anchor 20m above the ground and then lowered off it. I was on the other end of the rope at the bottom.

Along the way, he clipped six bolts, which means he attached his rope to a piece of gear called a quickdraw, which was clipped into a specially-placed loop of metal glued into the rock. That means if he was to fall at any point, he would fall to the bolt below him plus the amount of rope above the bolt when he fell (plus a little extra for rope stretch). This is in contrast to climbing on a rope that is already attached to the anchor above (called top-roping, seconding or following) — where there is little risk of falling any great distance at all.

When you are below, on the bottom end of the rope, belaying someone who is lead-climbing, you have to pay close attention. You have to be right there with them, watching how high up above their last bolt they are, assessing how secure they look or how likely to fall they might be, making sure they haven’t inadvertently got a leg behind the rope (which might flip them if they fell suddenly), making sure you have let out enough rope for them to clip but not so much that they will deck if they fall. You have to be ready to brace, to pull in rope if there’s an excess or feed out rope quickly if they need extra.

Joel started to climb and the route went up into a roof, the inside of a cave that curved sharply above his head and flared out. There were big holds (amusingly called jugs) but he was almost horizontal to the ground. He made the first two clips and rested on the rope. We talked briefly about the next clip. It was right at the crux (the most difficult move). To make it, he would need to hang on one arm, clip a quickdraw to the bolt with his other arm and then pull up enough extra rope to make the clip. All while still hanging from one arm in a near horizontal position.

Trust me, this isn’t easy unless you are very, very strong.

The problem was that, if he fell after pulling up extra rope but before making the clip, he would effectively hit the ground (or at least land on me below). It was my job to watch him and make sure that didn’t happen. Any extra rope needed to be taken back in immediately, if he started to look squirrelly.

He moved up to the lip of the roof and, hanging on his right arm, put the quickdraw in the bolt. He pulled up the rope to clip, and just as I was celebrating internally thinking he’s made it, he dropped the extra rope and said:

“No I don’t have it, take!!”

‘Take’ means ‘take in rope’ and is climber code for ‘I’m about to fall’.

I whipped the extra rope back in and he fell, safely.

Close one.

“I couldn’t make it. It’s so pumpy on the arms. But at least the draw is in now. Next time.”

And so, after a rest, he went again.

This time, he made the clip, heaved himself over the lip and finished the rest of the climb with ease.

—

While we were on holiday in Italy, I published a note on Substack.

Here it is.

Joel backed me.

He’s the one who told me to publish what I feared might be too controversial a note.

Do it, he said. No one cares about reading wishy-washy mealy-mouthed insincere pleasantries all day. Just say what you feel.

That’s not being unkind: it’s being honest.

It strikes me as the peak of insincerity to advocate for “kindness”. Telling someone to be kind is a way of telling them to pipe down, to conform, to avoid causing trouble. It’s what people above tell people below to keep them in line, to maintain their perch, to quell criticism.

It’s insincere because this world isn’t kind — and, this being Substack, this being a writer, means giving your innermost thoughts a goodbye kiss and sending them out to be bludgeoned. Picked through, ransacked, ignored. Or, maybe just maybe, every once in awhile, adored.

*That* once in awhile makes it worth it. It’s how I feel when I alight on something I love too: gold.

It’s why I would rather have one genuine “this resonated” than fifty platitudinous empty hearts. Spare me your faux-kindness; honesty is the only kindness I care about on Substack.

I write what I like to read. If I say I like your writing, you can rest assured: I really do. You don’t need to wonder if it’s because someone paid me or I got told it’s important to be kind or because I’ve got my eye on getting you to like my ‘stack, follow and subscribe. That is my solemn Substack vow.

And — this is crucial — if I like your writing, I want MORE of it. Not less.

Which is why it amuses me when prominent Substackers tell us to write less, to go quietly. Write a set number of words (sub 1000). Conform to the formula.

Conformulate.

Essentially, the message is this:

Talk less.

Smile more.

Seriously? Who do they think they are? Aaron Burr, sir?

I thought this was Substack, the home of great writing. Not Substack, the home of generic platitudes and formulaic writing-by-numbers….

—

Awakened late in the hotel, head full of the Notes turmoil, I laid back down and tried to re-enter my dream.

It was a particularly vivid one in which waves surged around a bay and an unmoored tanker smashed into boats, churning the sea to planks and the boats to pulp.

It reminded me of The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, that heavy teak Nazi yacht smashing around Providence in a hurricane.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this book because I was asked to write about it for a popular book review Substack. When I expressed enthusiasm and said sure, I was sent a questionnaire (!) to fill in, asking me to pitch for the honour.

I’ll be very honest: I couldn’t be arsed to fill it in and decided I’d rather share my thoughts here on my own platform anyway. I am not a fan of middlemen. The beauty of Substack to me is the ability to speak directly to an audience.

Anyway, The Shipping News is a book of quiet genius, often overlooked in the canon of Pulitzer winners — because, well, female author? It tells of Quoyle, an unlucky man mistreated by life — failed marriage, physically unappealing, slow of wit — who returns to his father’s home island of Newfoundland with his children and a maiden (read: lesbian) aunt. There, he flexes his writing muscles and eventually rises to editorship of a local paper, writing the shipping news. He includes a profile of an interesting boat each week. No prizes for guessing which yacht was called ‘Tough Baby’.

Each chapter of The Shipping News opens with a diagram and description of a sailors’ knot, from the Ashley Book of Knots — for all those ways we tie ourselves to others (unintentionally or otherwise).

There’s a murder, a tremendous storm and a near-drowning. There’s seal flipper pie. There’s a trailer-rocking wild shindig of a party with the most grotesque bath-soap-rime-ringed chip barrel you’ll ever find.

There’s love, both wild and quiet. The old axiom about the four women in the life of a man: the maid in the meadow, the demon lover, the stout-hearted woman and the tall, quiet woman. I think of all the times in my life I’ve worn those various guises.

And also the times I haven’t.

Newfoundland is a weird place, by all accounts. A place of interior pine forests and small coves, where the easiest way to move from town to town is by boat. As the book makes clear, the place has a reputation for backwoods incest and sexual abuse. My parents lived there briefly in the early 1980s.

Not even a childhood home is safe, tethered to the rocks by steel wire. As in The Shipping News, it can still come loose in a storm, slip board by board into the sea.

But houses can be rebuilt, and new lives can be started.

The Shipping News is a book about second chances for flawed imperfect humans, and the improbability of love without pain.

Joel and I both needed a second chance. Both of us flawed humans, with our failed marriages, trailing children — flawed, febrile children that we love fiercely, just like Quoyle and his bawling, squalling daughters in The Shipping News.

Ultimately it is a hope-filled book. What speaks more strongly to you: second-chance love or misfortunes paving the way to success? No need to choose: The Shipping News has both.

All the ways in which misfortunes, mischances and wrong turns accrete into the life you really want.

If there can be hope for Quoyle, if Quoyle can blend families, find a rewarding career outside the city as a writer, full of family and love and redemption, so too can I.

So can we all.

—

Out to dinner on our last night in Italy, I went up to pay.

I said “tavolo trente-cuatro” with confidence and she responded just as confidently “yes!”

And I laughed because I’m sure her English is better than my Italian and she said to me in Italian “no, that’s the only thing I can say”. And I said in English “well, ‘tavolo trente cuatro’ is the only thing I can say in Italian” and she laughed and laughed and I said “I see you” and we both laughed more and Joel said what’s so funny and I explained to him and when I finished explaining to Joel, she nodded at him and said “my sister” and we both laughed some more.

—

As we’re packing up, I noticed my AirPods are missing. They were on my bedside table, I’m sure of it, and now they’re not.

“Have you seen them?”

“No. These are mine.” He waved his near my phone and it flashed up: Not Your AirPods. “Check FindMy.”

I opened FindMy and it gave a location for my AirPods, twenty miles away in Savona.

“Savona? What the fuck? We’re not in Savona. I’ve never even been to Savona.”

We drove past Savona on that hairy drive down the Italian motorway from Milan.

Joel looks dismissive.

“It’s probably malfunctioning or low on battery, I’m sure it’s just in your bag.”

But then it pings up, 8 minutes ago: Savona. A very specific location in a very specific apartment building, unmoving.

We went down to the lobby.

“My AirPods are in Savona.”

The elderly Italian woman at the concierge has no idea how to help me and, to be honest, I’m not sure what I want from her either.

I trudged outside to Joel.

“She doesn’t know.”

We looked again at FindMy. Still in that same apartment building.

“Let’s go to Savona and see if we can find them.”

“Oh Joel, no, let’s just leave them, it could be dangerous. I don’t want you getting shot or stabbed, this is Italy. What about the mafia?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, the mafia don’t steal AirPods.”

In Savona, I parked illegally (it’s ok, calm down, this is Italy) and Joel got out FindMy again. Sure enough, there they still are, in a nearby apartment building.

We bickered quietly. I am inclined to come with him. He wants me to wait in the car with my son.

He eventually leaves and I watch his buzzings on FindMy.

After ten minutes, I message: all ok?

He doesn’t respond. I call. He doesn’t answer. I call again, and again, and again. No response.

I am on the verge of springing from the car when he calls me back.

“It’s ok, I found them. They’re in this apartment, I can hear them pinging when I play sound on FindMy but the girl won’t give them to me. She says they’re not hers and she’s just a guest and the guy won’t be back until 3pm.”

“Tell her we’ll call the police.” I am a bit hysterical. “No, no, it’s not worth it, Joel, just leave.”

“No way, I’m getting them back!”

He emerged five minutes later, holding my AirPods.

—

When we arrived back home, we had about ten hours before Joel’s folks came to babysit for us, while we went to see The Yeah Yeah Yeahs play at All Points East on Friday night.

At the gig, we played festival bingo:

✔️ Someone sleeping in public

✔️ Someone vomming

✔️ Someone crying

✔️ Public urination

✔️ A massive blazing row

✔️ A silly hat

✔️ Matching shirt and shorts tropical-print combo

✔️ Sequins

✔️ Rainbow

✔️ Someone eating something filthy

The rain poured during the warm-up act. I was drenched but euphoric when Karen O finally came onstage, to the arcing sounds of Spitting Off The Edge Of The World.

When she left us the next day, Joel’s mom hugged him tight. “You have a beautiful family,” she said.

—

All my life to fill one pure cup of love.

That’s something George Appletree said to me last week, in Italian, in the middle of my Notes firestorm.

When we were walking to a climb in Italy, Joel said to me:

Paths are like rivers. Where people cut the corner, it makes the path. Like a river. They’re not predefined things; they exist where things flow over them. And if you didn’t walk it, in ten years it would disappear. Like a dry riverbed.

I think a relationship is a path you walk. You re-forge the path over and over again.

Sometimes, you stop and rest together in the shade. Sometimes, you beat back the brambles, which threaten to overtake.

The thing you’re waiting for never happens. Instead, lots of other things do.

I don’t have the family I expected. Something else happened instead.

We put up with a lot to love each other.

Joel could have every other week child-free, exploring the world. I could have only one child to care for, instead of an extra three sometimes.

We sacrifice a lot to walk this path together. It is not an easy path.

We may not have made children together. We may not fit everyone’s notion of family.

But, when the chips are down, he is there for me. Lost AirPods, a cheaper car rental, an Italian road navigator. Advocating for truth and authenticity when it counts.

And I, for him, ten feet above the last clip, with precarious footing and an excess of rope. I don’t let him fall.

What’s a forgotten driver’s licence and a poop-smeared toilet seat really, in the grand scheme of things?

Here’s Joel after his lead climb. He was stoked.

My weekly excursion to London means one thing: a nice lunch.

I live in the countryside now, so I think about this city lunch for days and plan it well in advance. Caribbean jerk chicken and Ethiopian curries used to be quotidian; now they are the stuff of dreams.

This week, I fancied sushi so went to the conveyor belt place near my office in Liverpool Street and had fun getting inspired by whatever passed before me. Scallop? Yes. Little pearly pink shrimp? Please. I was, to a certain extent, at the chef’s mercy. Whatever they felt like making went up on the belt and that was what I built my lunch on.

There’s an even more extreme version of this in the Japanese cuisine world. It’s called “omakase” and, translated literally, it means “I leave it up to you”.

As in: “I (the customer) leave it up to you (the chef) to delight me”. Chef’s choice, catch of the day, whatever you want to call it.

I was reminded of this again because we hosted a little BBQ at our house on Saturday. If you live in the UK you may, depending on your generosity of spirit, be smirking or commiserating (Saturday was a bit torrential).

After a bit of back-and-forth about rain-checking we decided to plough ahead. Friends arrived and, rain lashing the windows, we huddled around my dining table as I started measuring the Pimms.

Now, I’m not much of a Pimms traditionalist but I know the ratio: three parts lemonade to one part Pimms. My “part” of choice is a coffee mug, any coffee mug will do. On Saturday, I grabbed an old green one with I ❤️ NY on it (cheap for £1 from a London charity shop years ago) and started filling it.

As I stood at the table, my friend’s daughter aged 10, saw the mug and started questioning me about NY. Is that where I was from? What was it like?

I started to say it was a really big city and I wasn’t really from there, I was from the woods four hours north of there, but got no further. The ceramic handle of the mug, which I had been in the process of tilting with a full measure of Pimms, unexpectedly shattered and the severed edge I had been gripping a moment before plunged into the back of my thumb joint. The rest of the mug spun away to oblivion* (oblivion being a ruined jug of Pimms).

Cue a little bit of flapping (me), some level-headedness (others) and lots of bleeding (me again).

Eventually, I was restored to the table, a makeshift toilet-paper-and-Sellotape splint immobilising my thumb. Someone else sorted out the Pimms and Joel, on BBQ duty out in the rain, spent the rest of the day filling my plate with assorted yummy things he thought I might like.

Omakase, home BBQ style. I left it up to him.

Today, I hope you won’t mind leaving it up to me.

I’m guessing that won’t be a problem since, every time we sign up to a Substack, we cede control and let the chef (writer) choose our dinner, so to speak.

In a way, both the creation and the imbibing are a form of omakase. I get dished up whatever Substack serves and, in turn, I write about whatever my day serves. On it, I build thoughts into sentences and sentences into essays, like ingredients into meals. It’s a sushi kind of life, this. I like to pick. Have a little taste of this and that. An omakase board rather than a 40 lb spit roast. Masters of their trade, I honour and admire them — but that is not me. I can’t dive into anything too deep. I am a Fox, not a Hedgehog (this is from the 1953 Isaiah Berlin essay — and, originally, Archilochus: “a fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”). So many little ideas to riff on. Too many menu items to choose from. I’d rather try them all, than choose one and eat that forever.

The peerless Thomas J Bevan wrote recently about diegetic sounds — the background noises to life — and how we lose them when we turn on noise-cancelling headphones and curate our own inner soundtrack (podcasts, playlists or whatever). I think of the diegetic sounds of my day in London — the calls I listen to in the office, the conversations I overhear at the sushi conveyor belt or on commuter trains. They feed me just as much as my meals; often, more so. Heavily do I rely on the fertile soil of train conversations and the serendipitous pitter-patter chat of passers-by. Without them, I would be parched; my centrifugal writer’s organ, stunted.

Did you know in some parts of the world, they call conveyor belt sushi a “sushi train”? How perfect is that, for this all-you-can-eat sushi buffet life.

Now, without further ado, here follows a chef’s selection of a few of my previous Substack pieces. A sampling that I hope will delight, as any good omakase chef.

The written pieces aren’t new — but the audio recording for each of them is.

The rationale for audio-recording archive pieces now is I’ve been told by two different people this week — shout-out to Taegan MacLean and Richard Brown MBE, thank you — that my audio is A Good Thing. I plan to record the whole archive eventually but, in the meantime, you can find new audio for the chef-selected pieces, below.

So: Welcome to Jill’s Bistro. I’ve taken the liberty of ordering for you.

Please enjoy.

Today’s audio menu 🎧

🥂 Aperitif: Fancy Tuna — saving the good bits, leaving the rest.

🥮 Petits-fours: Four times I was awkward this week — lessons in taking compliments and keeping your phone charged at all times.

🍢 Amuse-bouche: Think of the most awkward encounter you can — no, he’s not my son.

🍜 Tit soup: Tits at Oxford and Harvard — stewed over this for awhile.

🥟 Starter: Smart phones stole my brain — where The Notebooks all started.

🐟 Fish course: Pebbles in the river and the people who get in our way — a reminder of how awful people sometimes serve a greater purpose.

🍱 Main course: Reading all the books — because what could be a heartier, more satisfying main meal?

🍭 Dessert: Snowdonia and Hay-on-Wye — hay-flavoured mountain ices for pudding, and some buried treasure (a well-hidden audio out-take).

🧀 Cheese course: Love Letter — warning: contains cheese.

🍸 Drinks: Transatlantic litany of gins — flavours from afar to cleanse the palate.

Thanks for listening.

And if you have a favourite that I haven’t done audio for yet, drop me a line and that’ll be in the next round.

SPLAT.

A perfect dollop of white bird shit landed on my thigh.

The taxi driver turned around with a beatific smile and waggled his brows in an impressed kind of way. “That’s very good luck, you know.”

He did not have any wet wipes or napkins, it transpired, and neither did I.

I turned and looked out the window. A Korean fried chicken chain shop flashed past. The bird shit rounded my thigh and edged the seat. By the time I got to my destination, it had dried.

All that good luck baked in.

Now, I can’t calculate the odds of getting shat on by a bird while in the middle of the backseat in moving traffic. I imagine they’re vanishingly small. Certainly, if it was something you yearned for (for the dose of luck?), you wouldn’t be able to engineer it, wander into it fortuitously. These things just happen. The more you try to pin them down, the more they wriggle free, like this:

What are these things anyway?

They’re not coincidences. Coincidence means something good. Coincidences are pleasant, lucky. And there’s no word for a bad coincidence; it doesn’t exist. (I’m trying and failing to come up with one. Maloccurence? Misincidence? Malign-cidence?)

But what about when it’s neutral, neither good nor bad just … unlikely?

Improbability seems better, more accurate.

The only way for these improbabilities to alight momentarily on your brow (or your thigh) is to move through life, expecting nothing extraordinary and, every once in awhile, something might happen.

Getting shat on by a bird may be as wildly fortunate, or as wildly unfortunate, as you like. I understand why this Burmese taxi driver said it was lucky. All anyone wants in that moment is to feel special; to feel like this wild improbability carries with it weight and meaning.

But things only have the meaning we ascribe to them.

I’ve been thinking about improbabilities because I was in Paris this weekend and something wildly improbable happened. That thing was almost as improbable as getting shat on by a bird while sitting inside a taxi.

You might remember a while ago I wrote about going to see a comedian in London that Joel and I are a bit obsessed with. I wrote about it in A tale of two awkwardnesses. His name is Killian Sundermann and he’s brilliant, a German-Irish guy who nails cultural idiosyncrasy. For me (a weird US-Ireland hybrid transplanted to Oxfordshire), he captures the lunacy of the Irish but also what it feels like to observe a culture without ever really feeling properly part of it.

If you need a reminder, here’s what I wrote about going to see Killian Sundermann in London and how awkward I was when I met him at the interval:

I turned to him and said something that was supposed to be appreciative and complimentary but in hindsight was just plain old psychotic.

“We love you, we came just to see you.”

He smiled in a terrified sort of way. Then he gestured at the lad standing next to him.

“Um tanks he’s performing too?”

I had no idea who the guy standing next to him was and my abiding awkwardness prevented me from being able to stop the words flying (truthfully) out of my mouth.

“Nope! Just you.” With emphasis. “Just. You.”

Accompanied by a terrifying point of the finger, as if I might have duct tape and handcuffs in my pocket.

Why am I like this.

It’s a bit painful to read (and to recall, if I’m honest).

This is because, reader, I’m not cool. No one has ever said about me “there goes Jill, she’s pretty cool”. I have never been cool, and presumably at this advanced age of 38, never will be.

But that’s ok, I’ve made my peace with it. I learned recently that “weird” comes from the old English “wyrd”, an Anglo-Saxon personification of fate or destiny that means, essentially: unearthly, supernatural, magical. Like the wyrd sisters in Macbeth.

Isn’t that brilliant? I’m not weird, I’m magical!

Also, I’m self-conscious, stilted and have to work extraordinarily hard to convey “normal” in human interactions. More often than not, I fail.

Magical.

Speaking of which, I’m writing this from the floor of the Gare du Nord Eurostar terminal in Paris. A homeless man just came past and asked for the last inch of my Orangina. I said sure even though I was still thirsty.

It occurs to me this quest for fluid is also an exercise in probabilities. For every ten people he approaches for the dregs of their drink, maybe one says yes. One hundred questions, one full bottle of fluid.

Since we’re here, have you ever looked up in Gare du Nord? Try it, next time you’re in Paris. If you’re expecting lofty vaults, soaring panels of stained glass — be warned. This is not why I’m telling you to look up.

This is why:

Don’t know what I’m talking about? Hard to tell, isn’t it. Let’s zoom in.

Now you see it, right? Those poles are coated — furry — with grime. Like bread mould, or the intricate, three-dimensional structures of ice adhering to metal.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And I’m telling you, so heavy with filth are these poles that walking underneath you expect it to drip on you.

Probably every once in awhile, it does drip. And, probably even less frequently — but still, every once in a while — those drips land on someone sitting underneath, maybe someone feverishly tapping keyboard keys while their Eurostar back to London is delayed.

These improbabilities accrete over a lifetime. Every once in awhile, you will be the person the drip lands on.

Now, I didn’t get dripped on in Gare du Nord. That’s not the improbability I want to write about.

I arrived without incident on Friday night. I love taking the Eurostar from London, sweeping from city to city. Out on the Thames estuary leaving London, it’s bright and flat. Canary Wharf recedes in a haze of lofty triangles and the Thames curves, sinuous and broad, under the metal bridge at Dartford.

In Paris, as ever, I’m struck by (i) how fucking backwards the Metro ticketing system is, with its ridiculous tiny paper tickets, and (ii) how perfect the light is on a summery Friday evening. I convinced my sister (who lives here) and her friend to get drunk with me, first on the street at a wine bar in the 5th and then around her kitchen table until 3am.

The next morning, I had the day to myself.

A whole day! Nothing to do but wander, pleasing myself, through Paris. Quelling the nausea that threatened to overtake me in 36 degree heat.

I treated myself to an extended lunch at my favourite spot in the Latin Quarter and, hangover still rising, lingered for a couple hours. Eventually, when it became clear they had had enough of me, I extricated myself from seat and moved slowly down the street, parting crowds like an ocean liner.

I turned a corner and a couple was walking towards me. He was wearing a bright yellow T-shirt and looked familiar. I looked again.

He looked very familiar.

It was none other than the aforementioned comedian Killian Sundermann, the one I wrote about meeting back in March, walking along this street in Paris with his girlfriend. I shit you not.

Now. Take a moment with the odds here. In the whole of Paris, in the course of any one of the 60 minutes in any one of the 24 hours in the course of a single day in which I might unwittingly be in Paris at the same time as Killian Sundermann, here we were walking down the same street. Me, being enough of a fan that I not only followed him on Insta, had not only been to one of his gigs in London but had actually written a fucking Substack about the experience and, in particular, how awkward I had been when I met him.

Without wanting to do any disservice to his celebrity, I am reasonably confident that I was one of the biggest Killian Sundermann fans in Paris that day and probably one of only a handful of people who would recognise him in the street.

Now, I don’t know about you but I think that’s pretty fucking weird. Weird, as in magic, but also just fucking weird. Like, almost weird enough to make me believe in some unseen omni-presence with a really cracking sense of humour.

They walked past me without incident. I texted Joel “I just fucking walked past Killian Sundermann. I am not joking”. (He responded immediately “what?” which I ignored because I was busy having a meltdown in realtime.)

Was I going to let this moment pass me by on a street in Paris. Was I fuck.

So what happened? Well, I walked past them.

Then I stopped. Turned around and started following them.

Because, of course I did.

Another five steps and they stopped too.

Fuck.

I had no choice but to walk past them, literally stepping in the road to go around them.

I walked past them about twenty feet and stopped again, no idea what to do. This was not where I meant to be. I meant to follow them for a bit while I figured out a plan, a cool approach, a redemption of sorts. I did not mean to be here, in their path again, where they are about to pass me, for the second time, on the same street, in the space of about 45 seconds.

Then, he was passing. There wasn’t enough time to think this through.

“Hi, I’m sorry, I love you. I went to your gig in London.”

He, bless him, handled it without immediate alarm.

“Ah that’s nice, thanks. Do you live here?”

“No, I’m just visiting.” Nothing further, didn’t say where from, in no way behaved like a normal friendly human.

Just a mute reddening.

“Ah that’s nice.” He was still smiling, bless him. “Yeah, so are we.” Indicating his girlfriend whose back was retreating up the street, oblivious to the carnage unfolding behind her.

I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Now that I’d started this, I just wanted it to be over as soon as possible.

“Please can I have a selfie.” I blamed it on Joel. “My boyfriend will never believe I saw you.”

He posed next to me, somehow wrapping an arm around my waist without actually touching me.

So. That was that. Did I tell him I wrote a Substack about meeting him before? That I had been so awkward that I had felt the need to record it for posterity forever? Did I mention that, of all the colossal improbabilities that might befall me that day, I felt this was one of the weirdest?

Nope. I just mumbled “thank you so much” and ran away.

Sitting on the floor of the Eurostar terminal just now, trying to get back to London, I am still thinking about the unlikelihood of this encounter. It is staggering. I am trying and failing to extract meaning from it. So utterly improbable that I should see Killian Sundermann on my random walk through Paris. So unlikely. Have I perhaps squandered some universe-bestowed opportunity? Should I have done something more momentous? Should I have tried to, I don’t know, hang out with him and his girlfriend? Maybe we could have been pals.

They called my train and I realised these were the unproductive thoughts of a psychopath so proceeded in some disquietude through customs.

Boarding the train, I glanced at my ticket. I am in coach 9, seat 19.

The queue to get on moves slowly and an American man behind me nearly falls in the gap.

Seat 19. Looking for it, I am counting seats. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 ….. 21, 22, 23.

I stop. Backtrack. I must have missed it.

Count again.

There’s 18. There’s 21. But there are no seats 19 or 20. They are missing, just not there. Completely, inexplicably unaccounted for.

I laugh out loud because it’s just brilliant, so typical. I’m already anticipating writing it down. The time I got assigned a seat that didn’t exist! What are the odds!

Catch the eye of someone already ensconced in their rightful seat.

“There’s no 19.” I said in a winking tone. Laughing, and inviting everyone to wonder and laugh with me.

Wow, haha, hilarious. Weird. One woman says “you have to run at it” which is just bloody brilliant. It’s like platform 9 and 3/4 quarters! It’s like the missing 19th story in Wayside School!

There is just no seat 19. What witchcraft is this?

Right.

Another minute of standing pointlessly in the aisle where seat 19 ought to be, I went to the dining car next door. The French-Vietnamese guy who works there was stacking drinks looking nonchalant and very Gallic.

“Do you know why there’s no seat 19? I’ve been assigned seat 19 — but it’s definitely not there.”

“Oh, how strange.” He’s surprisingly engaged and kind and helpful, despite being French. “Let me have a look.” He moves to his iPad, starts to plug in figures. “Can I see your ticket?”

I hand my phone over. He zooms in. “It’s because your seat is 31.”

“What?” I look, and it’s true. For some reason, when I look at it, the bit that says ‘Coach 9’ stacked directly above the 1 in 31 creates a convincing optical illusion of 19.

There is no seat 19. But it doesn’t matter because I definitely haven’t been assigned it.

I took my seat quietly at number 31. Everyone is merry at my return. “Ah found it have you?”

Now.

I have so many questions.

Why is there no seat 19 in coach 9? Of all the numbers to trim, why 19 and 20, smack bang in the middle of the run of numbers. Why not just, you know, take a few off the end and make the seat numbers lower?

Why, of all the possible seat numbers I could have misread, why did I light on basically the only seat in coach 9 that didn’t exist?

Why, of all the streets in Paris, did my wanderings cross me with the only famous person I’ve ever written about meeting and being awkward with? Why was the name of that post, about an encounter in London, written back in March, called ‘A Tale of Two Awkwardnesses’, a riff on Dickens’ two cities? Why indeed, if not in anticipation of a second installation from Paris.

And, finally, why do these kind of things happen to me, with impossible regularity, over and over and over again?

I know the answer to that last one, at least.

It’s so I can recount them, and ascribe meaning to them — weird, magical and totally improbable — right here for you.

You’re welcome.

If you’re coming in fresh, The Notebooks is a piece of long form writing, based on a true story, served in weekly instalments. You can read it yourself or listen to me read it in the VoiceOver.

Pieces in The Notebooks may have a song-matching, like wine and cheese.

Song-match this piece with: L.E.S Artistes, Santigold.

Not your quick-release serotonin fix, The Notebooks are in it for the long haul.

Now re-opening The Notebooks to June 2006….

He responded immediately.

Ping, went my little pink Nokia flip phone.

ye u

Is this English? Who cares. Never was there a human so unwilling to use fully-formed sentences as a post-Finals student.

ye

I would never usually write like this but mimicking him to be cool.

Then I followed it up with a double-text, instantly undoing the cool.

jst walking bk frm Jericho

Actually I’m well back from Jericho by this point, crossing Broad Street, almost back at college and my soft bed. Barefoot. But not quite ready for the night to be over. Not when Christine and Matt have already hot-footed it back to college and Tim, Patrick and Rich have gone off to Cowley with the cooler cohort, and some coke.

Come round

Now? My hesitation was momentary and easily dispensed with. He’s hot, I convinced myself. He’s a catch. JP Morgan. I think he went to Eton. Geoff with a G.

Where

He named a college, then:

4.7

He wasn’t being cryptic. 4.7 = room 7 on staircase 4 in his college.

Which is not my college.

This posed a hurdle. I reverted to full words for clarity’s sake.

I won’t be able to get in.

Ye u will jst tell the porter

Ignoring the red flag of his certainty that the porter will sort entry for late night female callers, I pitched up ten minutes later at his college lodge. The night porter was embarrassed for me. Shoeless, filthy and still wearing Matty’s coat that smelled a bit like wee.

I pulled myself up and tried to maintain a scrap of dignity, waving my Bod card at him.

“I’m here to see Geoff. With a G. I just need to, um, give him his coat back.”

The night porter’s face doesn’t move. He has literally heard every single thing, already, just this evening.

“I’ll ring his extension, my dear, to make sure he’s expecting you. What’s his name?”

“Geoff. With a G.”

“Surname?”

No fucking clue.

“It’s staircase 4 room 7.” I ignored the question and hoped for the best. No fucking way I am texting this guy to ask his surname. “Geoff.” I can’t stop the words flying out. “With a G.”

He made the call.

“Alright darling, go ahead. Just don’t let me catch you causing a nuisance now. It’s 4:30 and everyone is sleeping.”

Not everyone.

“No sir.”

A stern look. “Off you go then.”

Geoff with a G was shirtless and really shit-faced. His room smelled horrific.

“What is that smell?”

“What.”

“The smell.”

“I dunno. Come here.” He kissed me and tasted like vomit. I looked across his room. The sink was full of vomit.

I broke away. “Your sink is full of sick.”

“Yeah, so what? The scout will be round in the morning. Come here. Don’t be a dick.”

Speaking of which, he was absolutely on board and I was still too drunk to remember it was not the best time of the month for him to be hammering away at me.

“Ow.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Stop. Ow.”

I scrambled out from under him and ducked to the loo. Extracted a long-forgotten tampon from this morning’s pre-exam rush, which felt like another day (which it was) and another life (which it wasn’t).

Still this same life.

Coming back, feeling like Princess Grace of Monaco.

“All set….”

The stench-filled room was quiet.

“… Geoff?”

He was asleep. In sleep, he was better looking. The nastiness around the eyes and corners of the mouth was gone.

I laid down and fell asleep pretty quickly too.

—

Now. What went before Geoff? Nothing illustrious, I assure you.

Let’s see if I can remember them all….

* Generic older guy in school. An intermittent course of making out in taxis from the pubs home and one New Year’s Eve when my parents were out, an awkward convo and the morning after pill. He’s now the CFO of some food tech company or something similarly shiny and private equity-backed and boring.

* Generic older guy in college. All the credentials, posh, handsome and tall, plus a girlfriend in Brookes that no one ever saw but that he was happy to cheat on. Until one night he asked me out for a glass of wine and I blew him off for….

* Stan. Years later, just saying his name in my head enough to feel the need to underline it with unnecessary force. Stan was a medic. A boy, really, like a kid in a candy shop. Anyone with half a brain could see he was not boyfriend-material. I thought he was a worthy challenge, I guess, and he said he fell in love with my skinny ankles. Then he hurt me, over and over again, until I hurt him too. He is a doctor now, living in Australia or New Zealand or somewhere else equally far away from which he can’t return because he messed up his tax returns and owes HMRC several thousand pounds in back taxes. I heard he married an Australian woman whose ankles thickened after childbirth.

Karma’s a bitch.

There were more: the rebound, the one in Dublin, the friend with benefits, the one from the ski trip, the friend of a friend from a different college. Then Geoff with a G. It’s so easy to remember them all with Facebook. Facebook is like Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With tent.

Speaking of which, do you remember when you got Facebook? I found a Guardian article that says Facebook arrived at British universities in October 2005. This is just wrong. It must be wrong because I got it in May 2005. It says so right there on my profile page: ‘Joined May 2005’, next to a little memento mori clock icon (because, why? They own my time on this planet, and house its definitive record?)

How did it happen? I remember walking into Patrick and Rich’s room one day and they were like “have you heard of this thing some people are getting” and I put in my Oxford domain email address and boom, I had it too.

A profile to fill in, with the same quiet pleasure I used to get as a child filling in credit applications that pitched up in the post. Filling out fields on Facebook was like a credit application for a particular kind of life. Something so satisfying about filling in those fields; about looking at a piece of paper — or a blue and white Facebook profile page — and saying “this is me”. I’ve encapsulated my essence, here it is: a quote from Anchorman and my favourite movie: Reservoir Dogs. (A lie!! What woman’s favourite movie is Reservoir Dogs?! I barely like it. Who was I kidding? Who was I trying to be?)

It was still called thefacebook in those days and still sported “brought to you by Zuckerberg and Saverin” on the masthead. I remember logging in one day to find they had dropped the definite article and become just plain old Facebook. I remember when they hit a million users and invited us all to celebrate with them, which means I must have been one of those first million. A strange thought: I wonder if we’ll have reunions in years to come (Zuck-sponsored, of course). I remember Christmas pre-Facebook, only a few months after I started university, missing all my new friends (and my new boyfriend), wishing desperately that I had some way of keeping in regular touch with them over the break. Treasuring the few texts we exchanged, feeling like we were all so far apart.

All this, while Zuck was feverishly coding the prototype.

Because what did we do before Facebook? We called each other on the phone every once in awhile. In a brief temporal interregnum, after mobile phones but before we had Internet on them, we texted. Text messages were the way station to Facebook messages, and then to WhatsApp chats. Less and less meaningful, our interactions boiled down from a conversation, to an emoji, to a reaction GIF. Not friendships but Facebook friends; not friends, but “contacts” or “connections”. Membership in WhatsApp group chats, and the ability to chime in with the right soundbyte at the right time, paramount.

Everyone reduced to a cipher, a stereotype, a readily-digestible digital representation of their real human self. This is the type of person I am. These are the things I like. Smooth out my inconvenient edges, let me make myself explicit.

I am a package of information about myself. I am a short-form self.

Sell me things: sub-par, short-form things with no shelf-life and no substance. Everyone in Oxford: I am an Alpha. I like theatre or sports or drum and bass. Give me matching friends, and matching stuff.

But, already I notice a palling of stuff. Things are … less good. More uniform, smoother, of wider appeal, but less good: things everyone likes but no one loves. Things that break and have to be replaced. Things that are made to be replaced.

With less variation comes less potential for unexpected brilliance. Everything is ok, just a bit bland and same-y.

But not outside. Outside things are still complex and suffused with brilliance. If I go out to the University Parks and take my shoes off, blades of grass between toes and closed eyes, I’m home.

The gentle thunk of toads plopping into the river.

Corncrakes calling, and cut hay.

The shade of ferns, taller than me, under a tulip tree down by the stream.

Then, I hear tourist crowds along Parks Road and remember myself, remember I have an essay to write. Slip shoes on and walk strips of concrete between libraries. Wonder what kind of life is out there for me, on other walkways. Will they be concrete too? I have no imagination for those other ways; just a nagging sense that this library life is incompatible with the life I really want.

A raft of contradictions: I want to be outside when it’s sunny. I want to smell trees and dirt. But I want the trappings of success. I want nice things, a nice house, nice holidays. I want a Chloe handbag, covet Kate Moss’s style.

—

When I wake up, Geoff with a G is pissing in the sink. On top of the vomit.

I pretended to be asleep and waited while he got back in bed. I barely breathed and, after a minute, he was back asleep.

I shot a look at my phone. It was 8:47.

No messages. Everyone still asleep or … busy.

Fuck this. I levered myself up without waking him and grabbed my shoes and Matty’s coat.

As I exited back through the porter’s lodge, the same night porter was still on duty. He winked at me.

“Still wearing that coat.”

“Oh I got confused. It’s … someone else’s.”

“Someone else’s? Christ darlin’ you don’t mess about.”

I fixed him with a stare that said: don’t fuck with me. I just finished Finals at Oxford.

And he lapsed into quiescence.

I left this college, smelling of sick and piss, soles of my feet filthy below French-manicured toes, heels in hand and shoulder-robing a large male coat.

Passing the Exam Schools where yesterday morning I sat and wrote some of the most serious sentences written that day in the UK.

High Street was bright and quiet, spattered with Saturday morning’s half-dried vomit and red carnations strewn on the cobbles. The occasional bus for London or Heathrow thundered past.

I wonder what kind of a life I’m building. One where I fuck bankers and walk home on vomity streets. One where I marry one and watch TV alone late into the evenings, while he’s still out working, or post-working. One where I become a brilliant lawyer, working alone myself, travelling on first class flights down metal tubes, sleeping in metal tubes, with joyless packaged soaps and crisp sheets, and eventually die and get put in another metal tube.

These are not appealing choices.

It feels like those Choose Your Own Adventure books but a variation called Choose Your Own Life, in which certain tracks and paths lead to known outcomes. I can see that, if I take a training contract in the City, in ten years I will be living a life of bland corporate anonymity. All the tracks are manmade, concrete. They’ve been pre-prepared and have few surprises. There is no wilderness, there are no trackless voids.

Walking back up Catte Street past the Rad Cam, whirling motes of light spun in the early morning air. Possibilities shifted in and out of focus.

My phone pinged.

It was Matty.

Breakfast? Ya tart.

—

➡️ NEXT

*All names are made up and any likeness to a real person, dead or alive, is coincidence.

—

If you’re coming in fresh, The Notebooks is a piece of long form writing, based on a true story, served in weekly instalments. You can read it yourself or listen to me read it (audio linked above).

Pieces in The Notebooks may have a song-matching, like wine and cheese.

Song-match this piece with: The Coral, Dreaming of You.

Not your quick-release serotonin fix, The Notebooks are in it for the long haul.

Now re-opening The Notebooks to June 2006….

I said this was going to be a High Fidelity mash-up, so let’s talk about fidelity.

Fidelity to the truth? Nah, this is fiction. It’s an exploration of a past, in many ways resembling my own, but it could be anybody’s. Anybody defined (involuntarily) by financial crisis and the new millenium; by weighty expectations, failures and what often (universally?) felt like the wrong choices.

I read Zen and the Art of Archery last week (frankly: don’t bother) and learned from it this one thing: zen aims for the obliteration of the self.

Did you know that? I didn’t. In the context of writing, it is interesting to me.

If zen is the obliteration of the self, literacy may be its highest form of expression.

Hear me out.

Reading, you can obliterate yourself. It’s why I read what other people have to say about things that have happened to them. The more rich and varied perspectives I consume, the more I obliterate myself and my own limitations.

The anodyne is seldom recorded and, weirdly, I have always wanted more of the humdrum. I want to see life in all its quotidian blandness from another set of eyes. An obsession with historical fiction in my young adult phase, as if I could read my way into knowing what it felt like to be on the Mayflower, in Ancient Rome, a starlet in 40s Hollywood or a child in wall-building China. This has always been one of my bugbears when it comes to fantasy or a piece of fiction with cool world-building. Like, let me see more of what’s it’s really like, how it works. Spare me the dramatic narrative, the denouement. I want to spy on the humdrum and marvel at the everyday. I want to see what the post office looks like in Cicero’s Rome or what a casual lunch looked like in Gilgamesh’s Mesopotamia. I want to know what the markets along the Bosphorus smelled like two thousand years ago and what kind of shitters they had on Viking ships.

A prolific Substacker wrote recently about reading (most) books as a waste of time. Don’t want to read books? Think it’s a waste of time? Prefer to stay trapped behind one set of eyes only? Please. Spare me this parochial prisoner’s outlook. You need to zen out, mate. Get off the rat wheel and stop yearning for neat, tidy parcels of information that can be drunk like a smoothie, without moving from your desk, in the most efficient manner possible. Maybe step away from the non-fiction.

What about writing? Is that zen? Surely that’s not obliteration of the self. If anything, it’s the opposite: relentless naval-gazing. This may explain the impression I get that it’s narcissistic for a woman to write about herself (particularly outside the true life context of overcoming some gruelling adversity, learning tough life lessons, etc). As an aside, I have seldom seen men who write about themselves accused of the same narcissism (or, if they are, they are lionised anyway; ref Hemingway).

So, narcissistic. Unimaginative, I grant you, but narcissistic? I am necessarily hemmed in by one body and one perspective on the things that have happened to me. If I write about it, does that make me a narcissist? I would submit that the obliteration of the self in fact lies in writing about one’s self without ego or artifice. Presenting the experience of a life lived as a detached narrative, without any attempt to inflate, alter or enhance.

Simply put: these are all the things I did.

But, like I’ve written before, writing the truth about one’s own life — particularly when that life is a woman’s life — has its challenges. People seem to be much more comfortable with writers of fiction. Maybe fictionalising your life is the zen high-water mark; the real obliteration of the self into an invented self.

Who can say.

I aim for fiction, and sometimes fall short, lacking imagination, constrained to my one body and definitely not zen-like enough.

And, anyway, things can’t ever be recorded with complete fidelity.

—

Robert Macfarlane has written how walking the same piece of land makes it intensely familiar to you. Walking it barefoot makes it even more familiar.

The land I just wrote about in Town and Country, I could walk that, map it with my soles, barefoot, backwards and blindfolded.

I never walked barefoot anywhere in Oxford, except maybe once or twice walking home from a club, blistered and briefly shoeless. Despite its reputation for leafy quads, lush riverbanks and whispering meadows, Oxford isn’t a great place for walking barefoot. Lots of broken glass, smeared take-away remains and a really surprising amount of vomit that I have, at times, bolstered. Like the first night of Fresher’s week, splattering bright pink vodka cranberry all over the side of the Bodleian library, while my new friends looked on with glee.

Wondering how many generations of previous students had vomited just there in that exact same spot lent the occasion a touch of consequence.

Anyway, even though I seldom walked Oxford barefoot, with my French manicured toes, I can still map it.

Here it is:

Now, this Oxford has a few (many) gaps. Where’s the covered market? Where’s the High Street? Where are the famous colleges (Magdalen, Balliol)? Where is the pub in which Tolkien dreamed up his maps of Middle Earth or where Clinton didn’t inhale?

Who cares.

This map shows where a hungry student could get a square meal for a fiver (Hassan’s). It indicates clearly that the good nightclubs (the Zodiac and the Pleasuredome at Brookes) were out Cowley way and the shit nightclubs (aptly named Filth and the one above the Sainsbury’s in the old shopping centre) were out Botley way. It includes the prison library. It even shows where a dorky Harry Potter fan asked a 14 year old Emma Watson for her autograph on a McDonalds napkin one wintry night.

Maps are a representation of the world that, by definition, omits things. They don’t show everything; they can’t show everything. A map that showed everything would be as big as the world it mapped and would overlay it perfectly.

This is a map of Oxford circa June 2006, just as I was finishing Finals. It shows the things that were important to me then and omits the things that were unimportant.

I used mind maps a lot when I was studying for Finals. I’ve written before about what Finals entailed, how many essays we had to write. There were nine lever arch folders on the shelf above my desk when I studied for Finals, each about three or four inches thick. Each lever file was filled with single sheets of paper. Each single sheet of paper represented a single case, read in the library, with painstakingly hand-written notes listing out the facts, issues and judgments. The ratio decidendi — the reason for the decision — at the bottom was the summary, the single line summarising it all. The whole case condensed to a single page, then to a single line. 

A particularly knotty case could be 250 pages long — or it could be a couple pages. You couldn’t tell looking at the reading list how long each case would be until you got to the top floor of the college library and found the right journal. It was easy then to find the case you wanted because it was the darkly thumbed chunk of that journal — the only momentous judgment reported in October 1874 or whatever. More often than not, the key passages would already be underlined, starred, annotated by one hundred previous generations of college lawyers. That saved a lot of work. I loved the margin notes, always wondered who wrote them, what students before me looked like and thought like. All young men, of course, but that didn’t matter because I was raised on a diet of girls and boys are the same and anything boys can do girls can do and here I was at Oxford, universally male for a thousand years before me so wasn’t it true that we were all the same. I was the same as all those boys before me doodling in the margins of the English Law journals.

I always wondered if some generous philanthropist might take it upon themselves to replace and update the law journals with a brand spanking new set — or worse, just get rid of the hard copies completely and buy all the students a shiny log-in to a database with every case digitised. They would, at a stroke, wipe out the collective accreted work of thousands of Oxford law students over a hundred years.

Those darkly-thumbed mark-ups were like a crucial map through the case; how lost I would have been without them.

That was because we had to read every. single. case. And there could be thirty, forty, sixty cases to read each week. Multiplied by eight weeks of term. By the time Finals rolled around, that equalled about four thick inches of single sheeted case files.

I always found it so easy to read the cases though. The long elegiac verses of judges, kings of law, rolled off the page and hummed through my ears. Some of the facts were wild. Ever heard of R v Brown 1993? If not, your life is about to become measurably richer. And the decisions. Have you ever read a judge’s decision? Unless you’ve ever been a defendant, possibly not. Drawing on the greatest command of words and wit in the English language, the whole thousand-year history of English law from the Domesday book onwards is an exercise in finding the right thing that’s already been said before and saying it in a new way. Trust me, these people are masters of the written word.

In preparation for Finals, the only way to condense those enormous files of cases was a series of mind maps. This case -> another case -> another case. The whole map of Contract law flowered in my head, a series of one word reminders of crucial case to crucial case; the development of what precisely would serve to frustrate a contract; what to vitiate it, make it as if it never existed.

Here’s one of my mind maps from Finals:

Ok, not really. But you know what I mean.

Being a student in Oxford for me was a lot about words, and also about maps. It seems appropriate to write it in words and tell it with a map.

And anyway, writing is mapping too. Writing and maps go so well together. In the same way you can’t make a map with every detail, you can’t write everything that ever happened.

It would be as big as a life.

It’s why we don’t write about every single step of the way. It would be so boring if we did. Can you imagine?

Then I opened the dishwasher and I picked up the colander and hung it up on the rack, then I grabbed a few mugs and lined them up on the shelf. The dishwasher was still pretty full so I couldn’t load it yet. I wanted to finish loading it quickly so I could watch the last episode of Succession. I moved on to the cutlery drawer.

See? Flatlining just writing it.

You can’t cover everything.

Writing is wordsmoke; it creates a hazy shape and may impart a flavour, an aroma of a thing. But it is a simulacrum and will never be the thing itself.

Instead, we “select the data points that are consequential.”

“Do you think in words?” Joel asked me recently.

“Do I think in words?” I am incredulous at the question. “Does the Pope shit in the woods? Of course I think in words. Have we met?”

He explained that some people think in words, others in pictures. He said he thinks in concepts and associations between concepts. Like a graph.

I can’t even imagine how that would look, let alone how I might try to think in a graph.

I think in words. My whole being is prismatic through words. I think in words, I play in words, I live through words.

There’s a game we play in the car with license plates. In the UK, license plates have a few letters for the area it’s from, a couple of numbers for the year and a few more random letters. The game we play is that you take the last two letters on the plate (the random ones) and have to come up with an 11-letter word that begins with the first and ends in the second. In the UK, everyone apart from the King needs a licence plate, so that’s a lot of random letter combinations to play with.

I think it’s really fun. And it’s not that hard.

Here’s one:

MR. Easy. That becomes “masturbator”.

Here’s another:

RD. Even easier. Reticulated. Reenervated. Rejuvenated. I could go on. There are so many “re” prefix words in the past tense.

Last one:

PC. Trickier. Mostly because of all the “photo” and “phil” plus “ic” words that go way longer than eleven letters. But eventually, I light on paranthetic (how I feel about some discrete stages of my life that can be boxed up separately) or peripatetic (a good descriptor for some of those stages).

I do this pretty quickly. Joel is not as good at it as I am. Words don’t work so well in a mind graph, I guess.

What can I say? Words are my life: they are how I make my living today. They are how I think about my life that’s been and my life to come.

I only got in (talking about Oxford again now) because I can write. Words fly into thoughts, thoughts to sentences, and the sentences string out and loop into one another like the arc of skis through snow.

I remember realising I was uncommonly good at words when I was about 15. It was a year in which I did no work at all in school if I could possibly help it. This was Irish Transition Year, when you basically get to do whatever you want as you decide what you might like to do with your life. You go on lots of outdoor activity trips and do work experience and ruminate for months over subject choices. This, as a kind of chilled-out balm before the Irish Leaving Certificate (which is like English A-Levels but even more sadistic because you do at least six subjects, instead of three, and often more than six).

Anyway, I skipped school with abandon, faking sick note after sick note. A friend and I camped out at her house, eating her fridge empty and watching Jenny Jones.

Turn my Gothic Queen into a Normal Teen!

It Just Ain’t Right To Wear Clothes That Tight!

At 15, Jenny Jones was the best education I could imagine.

I still did the assigned reading though because, as you may have gathered, I like books. Our assigned reading was Brave New World, a novel I love to this day and still rate above 1984. Where 1984 is an indictment of totalitarian government, Brave New World lampoons class and affluence. Alphas with their skis and their expensive, overwrought leisure equipment; Epsilon Semi-Morons watching TikTok (or the 1920s equivalent).

I genuinely enjoyed it and wrote an essay about how much I enjoyed it.

Because of that essay, I got placed in the top set for English. Writing was easy. The sentences rolled neatly into each other and out came an essay. Another essay. And another, ad infinitum. Here’s me at 15, 16, 17 responding always with an essay on cue, a conditioned response, like Pavlov’s dog, if Pavlov’s dog wrote essays instead of salivated, each one neat as a pin, topped and tailed with references and rejoinders to the question. So easy. How could anyone find this hard?

Then a cover letter, and an essay under exam conditions at the beginning of December 2002 at a college in Oxford. The question was (and I paraphrase):

“Imagine there is a machine called the Experience Machine that you could plug into and program your entire life’s experiences, so you never need feel pain or hunger, only pleasurable pre-selected experiences. Now, write an argument in favour of abolishing the Experience Machine and an argument against its abolition.”

I started my pen off like an inky hare and got halfway through the second page before I suddenly stopped cold. My stomach plummeted. I checked the question again.

Now, spoiler: just to reassure you, I did it right.

But can you spot the obvious trap into which they were trying to lure interviewees who lacked the requisite attention to the *words*? I’ll tell you, in the footnote.

Anyway, that’s my point. Words were what united us. Words, and our ability to use them. I was primed for a life wherein my chief value would be my ability with words.

Keep doing this, don’t I. Going adrift.

It’s just that, to properly explain July 2006, I need to explain June 2006 too.

Onwards.

Here’s your girl.

She’s sitting at her desk in staircase 21 at the back of college. It’s a Thursday night. Last night of exams. She is about to turn 21. Her toenails are French manicured, ready for a week of partying post-Finals. There are piles of flash cards and neat mind maps. A schedule of Finals pinned to the wall with blue tack, the subdued murmur from the college bar downstairs and the lights of the spired city over a shoulder out the window.

She doesn’t know who she is. She only has a vague idea who she isn’t. She knows she isn’t one of the Cool London Girls with skinny jeans and eating disorders. She isn’t into theatre, or drum and bass. Before Oxford, she’d never even heard of drum and bass. She doesn’t do coke; has never even been offered it. There are lots of classic movies she hasn’t seen until recently: A Clockwork Orange; Pulp Fiction. She’s vaguely preppy, in a confused, provincial and inauthentic way. She has started to experiment with skinny jeans (even though her heart stays with low rise bootcut) and she straightens her hair religiously. There are ragged nests of fried hair under her sink. She likes Krispy Kreme donuts, by the box, as a study aid and has, for months now, chosen a particular seat in the Law Bodleian opposite a cute guy. In fact, just yesterday she managed to talk to him for the first time and get his phone number. His name is Geoff with a G. He’s less cute up close when you talk to him — so many people are, aren’t they — but never mind.

He provisionally agreed to come out and party tomorrow night, post Finals. He told her he has his eye on an internship at JP Morgan next year in the City.

For such a smart girl, she’s really pretty dumb.

How do you make a town like Oxford your own? It belongs so completely to everyone else who has gone before, but of course, they didn’t feel like it belonged to them either.

There’s an iPod in a blue-glowing dock playing Sigur Ros and there’s a landline next to it that is ringing.

I snap back to myself. It’s Thursday 8 June 2006.

Throw down my notes. There’s no point anymore; at this stage, it’s just a comfort thing. Like a soother, a worry stone, Catholic prayer beads. Turn them in your hands and recite: “Quistclose trust …. remoteness of damages …. indirect loss”. The mind maps set off a chain reaction in my head, like a lit fuse, tripping down all the right neural pathways.

It’s Matt. Matt is my friend who also lives in staircase 21. He came dead last in the room ballot so ended up with a crappier room lower down the staircase and without the view. I assume he’s been studying too. It’s what we did. And drank.

“Let’s go to Hassan’s.”

We walked the fifty metres or so to Hassan’s. It’s the nearest kebab van, a haven of warmth and chip fat on Broad Street.

“What will you have darling?”

“Chips and cheese. And hummus.” I can’t make up my mind. “And beans and an egg on top.”

“Barbecue sauce?”

“Yes please.”

Matt is restless. “Should we look in to the champagne and strawberries evening the Law Society is putting on?”

“I can’t drink tonight. Last night. And the Law Society isn’t putting it on. It’s sponsored by Freshfields.”

“I thought it was Fieldfisher?”

“Nah, Fieldfisher did the Fresher’s week drinks in Freud’s.”

“Oh right.”

How do you make it yours? How do you define it? You don’t. You move through it and have the same experiences as everyone else. Probably you have sex with the same person as everyone else and contract the same STIs too.

Or maybe that’s just me. Because my first boyfriend had his merry way with anyone he pleased on the nights out in sticky-soled nightclubs above the big Sainsbury’s in the Westgate shopping centre. Mornings after, when he was nowhere to be found and no one meeting my eye, I would ask innocently “where’s Stan?”

And then you blink and it’s time to go. Like the lights coming on at the end of Indiana Jones but Harrison Ford hasn’t chosen his goblet yet. You haven’t quite managed to grasp the right cup yet; the one that assures you of immortality. Surely it’s somewhere around here but you’re not quite sure where. Maybe it’s in Piers Gaveston but you wouldn’t know because you weren’t cool enough to get a ticket slipped into your pidge.

We walk back to college. He’s eaten his chicken burger and is starting on chips and beans.

“Are you sure you don’t want to get a drink? Just one, calm you down?

“I’m calm. And it’s 10 already, I should get an early night.”

“Ok. Smash it. See you on the other side.”

That reminds me.

“Hey — don’t forget what I said about tomorrow. You promised. No eggs, no ketchup. Flour is fine but don’t get it in my hair.”

He rolled his eyes and grinned.

“Come on, you promised. I want to go out tomorrow night and I don’t want to spend my first free hour post-exams blowdrying my hair. Please Matty, you promised.”

“Jesus, fine, I’ll try not to get it in your hair. You know Tim wants to smash an egg on your head though. I can’t be held responsible for him.”

➡️ NEXT

*All names are made up and any likeness to a real person, dead or alive, is coincidence.

If you’re coming in fresh, The Notebooks is a piece of long form writing, based on a true story, served in weekly instalments.

Pieces in The Notebooks may have a song-matching, like wine and cheese.

Song-match this piece with: Avett Brothers, Famous Flower of Manhattan.

Not your quick-release serotonin fix, The Notebooks are in it for the long haul.

Now re-opening The Notebooks to July 2006….

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Did you grow up in the country?

I did and I think there’s a big difference between country folk and city folk. I don’t mean where you live now, I mean where you grew up.

I’ll try to explain the difference.

I heard a woman yesterday on a street at dusk near Hyde Park in London:

“I don’t know which direction to go!”

Her friend turned her around, laughing.

“Not that way! Looks like a forest over that way.” It was the edge of Hyde Park.

They turned back onto a busy London road. “Let’s go this way, there are more lights.”

There were also these two schoolboys I overheard on a train in London once.

“Cows are dangerous, you know.”

“I know, it’s true. Cows kill people.”

“They do. I’ve been lucky. I was in a field of cows once.”

“I think you could probably outmanoeuvre a cow though.”

“I don’t know. What if it came running at you?”

“Yeah, no, not in the open. But, like, in a forested area. I bet you could outmanoeuvre it in a forested area.”

“Yeah, or maybe near a forested area because then you could run into the forested area?”

“That would be risky though. Maybe just don’t get yourself in that situation. Don’t aggravate cows.”

I wonder if one of these boys in Westminster School uniform will grow up to be the kind of man I see driving a pristine Land Rover down the middle of the lane, afraid of scratching his car on a blade of grass.

What I’m trying to say is this:

If you grow up in the city, it shapes how you see the world, just like it shapes how you see the world if you grow up in the country.

“A country girl can’t be made out of anybody here.”

(The Avett Brothers, Famous Flower of Manhattan)

It’s quite hard to pin down what I mean by “country”, especially for readers in the UK. In the UK, the “country” could mean a leafy part of Surrey, perhaps adjacent to a field, maybe frequented by the occasional wandering deer — but no more than fifteen minutes from a mainline rail station that will get you in to central London in half an hour.

That is not what I mean by country.

Country to me means long grass, so tall you can hide in it for hours and, when you run through it, your legs get wet all over from spit bugs.

It means spending all summer barefoot, never once touching concrete, and knowing which patches of grass need to be jumped because they hide red ant nests.

It means knowing which apple tree is the easiest to climb and which has the best apples (not the same tree, obviously). It means knowing which banks of the pond are the steepest and hardest to climb out of.

It means knowing where there is edible watercress, where the leeches congregate and where a sofa-sized polypore is threatening to engulf a neighbouring tree.

It means knowing where there are blackberries and where each trail in the woods goes.

It means the sound of cicadas at night and nothing else at all, because there are no neighbours, no motorways, no busy flight paths, no sidewalks and no street lights — not for miles and miles and miles.

There isn’t much in the UK that I would call country really; it certainly doesn’t start until you get past commuter distance to London and by then you’ve already entered commuter distance to Birmingham, and then Manchester after that, and so on, until you hit the sea. Sure, there are some remote bits. Scotland, absolutely. Some parts of Wales, yes. Shropshire, maybe, and Yorkshire and bits of central Devon and Dorset too.

The thing is though that most people in the UK tend to cluster; they live in little villages huddled together as if for warmth, even when the fields extend in all directions. The only people who live unhuddled in the country in the UK tend to be vastly wealthy and live in palatial manor houses on thousands of acres of land that were often the product of dubious enclosures and the colonisation of the common land since the Industrial Revolution.

They hang the man and flog the womanWho steals the goose from off the commonYet let the greater villain looseThat steals the common from the goose.

So goes a famous 18th century English countryside rhyme about the theft of the old common land that you may have heard before. The enclosures may be why everyone is so huddled, never mind that the country was already pretty diminutive to begin with.

Come to think of it, the vast tracts of available land in the States that allow people to grow up in the kind of rural idyll I described above were also stolen, also (mostly) since the 18th century.

Where I grew up, getting leeches stuck to my feet in the NY-Vermont borderlands between the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks, was Mohawk country.

Many parts of the local forests, high lands, creeks, marshes, and fields around Saratoga Springs are old familiar places for Mohawk, Mohican, Oneida, Abenaki, and other Native families from around the Northeast who have long ancestral memories of being here. The oldest evidence of Native homesites and travelling camps dates back at least 9,000 years.

(Bruchac, M. (2007). Native Artisans and Trade in the Saratoga Region. The Saratoga Native American Festival Program, 27-28. UPenn archive.)

9,000 years. Imagine how well you’d know the ant nests and blackberries in a patch of earth after 9,000 years.

But I digress.

The point is that I think it’s pretty formative, whether you grow up on concrete or in suburban grass or jumping ant nests in a field.

I remember going to visit cousins in the city and being floored by the riches of having a corner store within *walking* distance of the house — but also mystified by the fences separating one patch of earth from an identical patch in the neighbour’s yard. Touching gravel in a playground and being struck by how artificial it felt — chalky, dusty, chemically-treated — not at all like the soft mud and rocks at home.

I moved to the suburbs when I was twelve — a trauma from which I never fully recovered — and made friends who had grown up in Dublin semi-detacheds or in UN compounds in Nairobi. They all knew how to ride the bus and walk to a McDonalds. I didn’t. I learned, sure, and I can fake urban acclimation with the best of them but still today I am deeply uneasy in a crowd. Still today I can name most of the trees (although I’m not so good with an English hedgerow as I am with an Appalachian hill).

I am, and always will be, a country girl.

And, being a country girl, I am partial to a country boy. That is just the way it is. Don’t @me.

I’m not the only one to have noticed there is something a bit different about country folk.

That long loping stride all country men have…

Roald Dahl, Danny the Champion of the World

It’s in the walk.

I can tell from your giant step you’ve been walking through the cotton fields.

Old Crow Medicine Show, Down Home Girl

This is why it makes sense to me that my first memories of Luke* are all of him walking. I remember passing him once in a deserted school hallway, nervous and excited to be alone in a hallway with him even though we just walked past each other and he barely looked at me. I remember him walking across the cafeteria, two years ahead of me — always in 8th grade in my head, to my dorky 6th. More clearly than kissing him in 2006, I remember his face in 1996.

I was 11 then, a raging bag of hormones, raging that he wasn’t on my school bus route because the school bus was the only way to get to know or even speak briefly to the older kids. Everyone from kindergarten up through 12th grade was on those buses — but only if they lived on your arbitrarily drawn route. He wasn’t on mine.

He had an earring at 13 and I remember the day in fall ’96 or early ’97 when he came to school with blue hair — because, grunge — and always the baggiest jeans with a silver keychain in the pocket and the slightly squinty-eyed, high-cheekboned, always a little tanned face that age 11 I just thought exquisite. More than a bit Native American — Cherokee, he later told me — incongruous with light brown hair, lightened by a life outdoors. Only a few images are burned into my mind, of the boy at thirteen, and the man at twenty-three. In the cafeteria, which was the only time I ever had occasion to see him; the baggy skater pants he wore; that day he died his hair bright blue. Those images never change since I don’t have the real-life counterpart to write over the old story. So I watch them over and over again. He carries his lunch tray to the same spot, he jokes with friends in the same cafeteria lunch line forever. He smiles at me from across a bar somewhere in upstate New York, forever. 

That’s going much further back than I meant. I only meant to go back to July 2006.

Why does it matter? Because all the pieces matter.

In July 2006, the girl with the mosquito bites and the hard-soled calluses was almost dead.

Before she went back home, she was a different person entirely and had almost forgotten what it felt like to walk barefoot in the woods.

She didn’t walk barefoot anywhere. She had French manicured toes.

➡️ NEXT

*All names are made up and any likeness to a real person, dead or alive, is coincidence.

On a hot afternoon in late July 2006 on an Amtrak train between Albany and Penn Station, I was sitting behind a woman watching a movie on a laptop. She had a blanket over her despite the heat.

After a little while, I became aware that she was masturbating under it. I know. Right there on the train. It was really weird. I had seen men masturbate in public — most notably, the man with a hood over his face who wanked at me and a friend in our school uniforms through the train station railings when we were 15 — but never a woman.

But this was unmistakeable. The blanket was moving up and down and, let’s be clear, I’m pretty familiar with the act in question.

So I got up and went to find the conductor. I found him in the gap between the carriages and told him a woman was masturbating under a blanket in the next car.

His uniform was rumpled and his face sweaty in the hot afternoon. He looked me up and down.

Did you like it? He asked.

Now.

Stick with me, because there’s a point to be made here.

Kathleen Jamie has written — beautifully, pithily — about the Lone Enraptured Male genre of nature writing exemplified by Robert Macfarlane. I would extend it to include travel writing more broadly (see for example Paul Theroux, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Bill Bryson, the list goes on). The Lone Enraptured Male is everywhere.

There aren’t so many Lone Enraptured Females. And that is because, mostly, the Lone Enraptured Female doesn’t exist. She isn’t alone — or if she is, she isn’t enraptured. She is rapt, scared, smiling for her life.

Just like I smiled at that disgusting train conductor.

It might also be because women are more inured to people-pleasing, and people don’t like to be written about. It interferes with their perceptions of themselves, to read about how they might be perceived by others. We don’t want to upset anyone and there are things people don’t want to read about themselves.

Who dropped the ball; who let us down. Who’s into pegging. Who cheated on who and exactly how.

It must be why people who write like this travel a lot. Because it’s easier to write about an encounter with someone you met in a market in Istanbul — a superficial, general encounter — instead of a messy intimate encounter with a person who remains in your life.

So we avoid the messier bits, the bits that might offend.

What then to say about yourself where it necessarily intersects with others?

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” Muriel Rukeyser

I’m obviously not the first to wrestle with this. In self-portraiture, how to do battle with self-censorship? How do we quantify a life?

I have 25 T-shirts that I keep carefully folded in a drawer but almost never wear. They carry sentimental weight, like the polyester sporty tee branded with the name of the gym where I did yoga when I lived in Thailand or the June Mountain ‘07/’08 season employee long-sleeved T-shirt that I will sleep in, until one of us falls apart.

But T-shirts can only tell us so much.

Is it how many pairs of shoes I have? I’m not sure. Maybe ten or twelve? Plus four pairs of climbing shoes and a pair of ski boots.

Is it my secret number? It’s 28. I think it’s 28. I hope it’s 28. Maybe it’s 29. I can’t really be sure.

It’s hard to write the kind of history I’m after. Which is no more and no less than the truth of a life, give or take.

“Does it change the way the world feels?” I ask him. “Knowing that 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second, that countless such particles perforate our brains and hearts? Does it change the way you feel about matter - about what matters? Are you surprised we don’t fall through each surface of our world at every touch, push through it with every touch?”

Christopher nods. He thinks.

“At the weekends,” Christopher says, “when I’m out for a walk with my wife, along the cliff tops near here, on a sunny day, I know our bodies are wide-meshed nets, and that the cliffs we’re walking on are nets too, and sometimes it seems, yes, as miraculous as if in our everyday world we suddenly found ourselves walking on water, or air.

And I wonder what it must be like, sometimes, not to know that.”

(From Robert Macfarlane, Underland)

I’m feeling like the cards of life got shuffled and re-dealt and this is a good life. That is as miraculous as walking on water, or air.

But it could have been another way. There were so many improbabilities.

Come with me as I squint into memorial recesses. The old life slides out of focus and the new one sharpens.

It’s early 2010, the middle of the recession.

I’ve just finished a Masters in London. I did it by default because it was the only one that let me defer twice.

I needed to defer twice because I was fannying around California, on trains across Asia and then back to California again.

And I was fannying around there because, as I’ve already explained in an earlier piece about a fancy dinner, I failed to get a first in Finals and, because of that, my postgrad plans changed pretty abruptly. So, after Uni, I sprayed applications around at alternative grad schools and flew as far as I could, to Seattle.

That was November 2006. While my mates were making progress on Their Careers In The City Of London and partying and being bright young things, I was riding a Greyhound bus down the West Coast.

One of my friends in London posted on Facebook: “Saoirse Davison now lives in a house with 5 iPods, 2 MacBooks, 2 iPhones, 1 iPad... and one iPhone4”.

I had no phone and I slept on the floor in Sacramento central bus station, hugging my backpack and waiting for the bus to Reno.

I spent that first winter in Mammoth Lakes, CA, manning the chairlift to get a free ski pass and doing minimum-wage evening jobs — bussing tables in a Mexican and behind the counter in a Chinese take-away — because they afforded the most ski time. I ate cold spring rolls and refried beans. I skied every single day.

I spent the summer in Seattle renovating an arts-and-crafts bungalow in a newly-trendy neighbourhood. Then I flew to Riga and took trains (and eventually buses) to St. Petersburg, Moscow, Irkutsk, Ulaanbatar, Beijing, Pingyao, Xi’an, Chengdu, remote Sichuan, remoter Yunnan, and then down through Laos and Thailand.

I ended up back in California again.

At Burning Man in August 2008, the theme was The American Dream. I covered my $300 ticket by volunteering stints at the central coffee shop. A customer heard I didn’t have a Playa name yet and dubbed me “Cloud”. He said it was for my soft cloud of hair, which I liked because my hair has been my life’s albatross. When I was ten, kids at school used to call me “Bush” — so Cloud was a definite improvement. I drank balché and tried MDMA for the first (and only) time. I rode a bike (this bike), topless with painted tits. I climbed big sculptures high above Black Rock City.

The Man burned and, next month, Lehman imploded. A mate at Barclays Capital back in London got fired in spectacular fashion after losing 250 million in one day. The girl on the front page of the Times — the poster-girl for the Crash in London — carrying her sad little box of possessions out of — somewhere, was it Goldman? — I recognised her. I knew her from from The Bridge, a student nightclub in Oxford. She had been in my year.

When I finally started my twice-deferred Masters course in London in October 2008, days after Lehman, the tutor at the introduction said:

“This is the fullest intake we’ve ever had. There must be something about a financial crisis that just pulls people back in to acadaemia.”

Everyone in the room chuckled. Fresh from California and Burning Man, I remember laughing nervously and thinking: what financial crisis?

So February 2010 found me post-Masters, not gainfully employed, no career, no plan. Working for minimum wage as a sales assistant in the Snow and Rock branch in Covent Garden and living in my boyfriend’s mother’s house in North London on the same street in Muswell Hill as a house engagingly nicknamed The Murder House, for obvious reasons.

That should just about bring you up to speed.

It’s February 2010. I am restless.

London feels like a bad fit, like a dead end. My boyfriend doesn’t understand but I feel…. restless.

California is calling and I want to go back.

But, wait.

Stop.

That is skipping ahead. That is skipping way, way ahead.

We need to go back more.

We need to go all the way back to that hot afternoon in July 2006, a week before I got my Finals results and just after I had fallen in love — for the first time.

—

➡️ NEXT

⬅️ PREVIOUS

I often hear people ask what would you tell your younger self? What wisdom would you impart?

I’m not at all sure this is the right way round.

Growing older strikes me as an act of forgetting, so why should I have more answers now, the older I am? I don’t even know where my keys are.

I actually think it’s my younger self that has all the answers. She was a master of juking the system. I find myself outwitted by the system, effortlessly outmanoeuvred and so deeply enmeshed I wonder if it’s not too late to escape.

I’ve always known that my younger self has the answers, because she has written prolifically to her future selves. That is, to me. I have written ahead, to myself.

When I was 16, I wrote to my 26 year old self.

When I was 27, to my 37 year old self (because I didn’t find the 26 year old letter til I was 27).

The most recent, written a few months ago to my 47 year old self.

The writing-letters-to-our-younger-selves thing in contrast strikes me as hubristic, and a bit depressing. Hubristic because, again, I am not convinced I have more answers than my younger self. And depressing because, even if I were to write to her, my younger self is gleaning nothing from it, trust me. She’s already long gone.

At least my 47 year old self might get something from last year’s letter to her (which is a stern kick-in-the-butt and a call to action so let’s see if she listens).

Also, and maybe this is the key point, I’m really not convinced I’m getting older and wiser.

And, for this, I blame my phone.

I know. Another technophobe! How thrilling! How original!

It’s true though. I have a very unhappy relationship with my phone. Last year I tried to get rid of her and go back to the Nokia I had when I was 14 (the one with Snake!). That lasted about three hours, and an SMS that, despite being only about four sentences long, had to be sent in three different texts. Now sending 1/3….. now sending 2/3…

Back to the iPhone then, with not a small amount of resentment.

To take you back, just by way of context, I was very late to the smart phone party. While everyone else was cruising around on Twitter and Tinder as the ‘10s dawned, I had an old flip phone — calls and SMS only. It was bright pink and super basic. I cycled through different numbers, networks and SIM cards on it, across at least three continents. It did the job it had to do and never once did I wish for it to do anything else.

When I moved to Burma in 2013, I needed a new phone, which had to be compatible with my new (to me) Myanmar Telecoms SIM card. Those were the only SIM cards that were then permitted on Myanmar’s frayed, ancient and tremendously overstretched network. No one had a “handphone” (as they were charmingly called) except for the military and the odd foreigner (mainly, me) and those grubby SIM cards were a rare, precious currency. Mine cost me $250 — a bargain I was assured, the price had been two thousand a mere six months earlier — and, to acquire it, I had to taxi with an actual SIM card broker to a far-flung alleyway near Shwedagon pagoda and hand over a stack of crisp starched US dollar notes.

But that’s a tale for another time. I bought the cheapest phone I could find to go with my very expensive SIM card and that Huawei was my first “smart” phone. While there was nothing very smart about it, it was the first time I had a phone with a built-in camera and that felt wildly revolutionary at the time — goodbye digital camera! Goodbye constantly deleting photos to make space! — but way less revolutionary when you see the grainy thumbnails it produced and also, Burma in 2013 was not a particularly useful place to have a smart phone. There was no 3G, wifi was almost universally non-existent and Uber and Deliveroo may as well have been on Jupiter.

It wasn’t until 2015, after my son was born, that I moved back to London and my sister gave me an old iPhone she had kicking around.

Lo, suddenly I became a smart phone user.

My god, was it useful. I could read one-handed while feeding a child. I could order take-out. Answer emails. Scour Rightmove. Find my way around London via the most optimal possible route, updated live in real time. What did I do before this?! How did I navigate from one side of London to another with just a mental tube map? How did I eat?!?

But, with great power comes great carelessness.

Because why remember anything or write it down when I can just google it?

Why not keep 300 tabs open in case I ever need to refer back to anything ever again!

Now which tab was that thing on?

Never mind, I’ll just google it again.

Hang on, I have a notification. I’ll just respond to this message.

[Breaking news on the New York Times].

[Uber surge].

[Your screen time is up 870% from last week].

What was I googling?

See? My mind became lazy. This is why older me has no more answers. My mental tube map is long gone. I can barely remember which line Finsbury Park is on. (I lie. Victoria. And maybe Piccadilly?)

I'm allergic to modern life. I hate my phone. I am aware that this is the anti-tech-backlash-Luddite tale of our time and it is hardly ground-breaking.

But still.

I refuse to concede that Insta has determined what my story is.

I will not bow to the hubris of thinking I (older, wiser) have all the answers now (even though I *literally* do have all the answers, right now, on Google, at my fingertips).

Luckily, I have a colossal stack of things I wrote down before smart phones stole my brain. A gift, from my younger self.

The Notebooks is me, mining them for her wisdom.

Anyway, that’s the plan. To mine the morsels from my pre-phone brain.

If I can remember it.

I’ll just make a note on my phone.

➡️ NEXT

*All names of people are made up and any likeness to a real person, dead or alive, is coincidence.

I’ve been racking my brains trying to work out what theme(s) unite my posts here because everybody likes a theme, a structure, a story.

What I have landed on is that most of my posts seem to be about me being awkward, in various interactions with other people.

So many of them. It’s quite humbling, really.

Why are my encounters so awkward? I’m not really sure.

I’ve been told my resting bitch face would curdle milk. I learned it from the b****es at the all girls school in Dublin I went to between the ages 12-15. One of them poked me with a pencil so hard through my school shirt that there is still a lump of graphite visible in my arm twenty five years on. I never really trusted girls after that and I didn’t understand boys. I certainly didn’t know how to talk to either of them.

I marvel at people who engage effortlessly with others. For me, it is a conscious and exhausting effort.

They say it takes ten thousand hours of study or practice to become expert at something.

I have spent many, many times that trying to work out how to blend seamlessly into social interactions. I applied myself to it, as others apply themselves to learning a new craft or skill, and still I lack the unpractised ease of people around me. Through trial and (much) error, I have achieved passable decency.

But trust me, there is still a vast amount of room for more error.

Just yesterday we went to Joel’s family for Sunday lunch. Joel’s sister hugged me and said my hair looked nice. I responded fast and in one breath “thanks it’s a bit hard and crunchy”.

Because, reader, I am super fucking awkward.

I can’t just accept a kind compliment from a well-meaning person without vocalising all the things I am thinking that they are definitely not thinking.

That is part of the reason why so many posts are about me being awkward, in many different situations and with many different people. And it’s why I’m dubbing this bit of Life Litter “Awkward Encounters”. The aim is that it will carry with it news of my Awkward Encounter of the Week (or several, when there are just too many to choose from). You can find them all on the dedicated Awkward Encounters section of my page.

As a (somewhat related) aside, I’m reading a book by Ruth Ozeki at the moment and, in it, there’s a brilliant passage about needing other people to make sense of the world, not living in a barren human desert.

“It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama, power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness.”

See? I need the Awkward Encounters (even though they are often so very awkward). They are just how I make sense of the world.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Non-human nature writing can be great and there is some excellent stuff out there. Robert Macfarlane, Roger Deakin. But (for me) the best bits in their books always have the human element. Robert Macfarlane’s nearly getting lost on the Broomway. His recounting the ancient custom of gannet slaughter on frozen beshitted Sula Sgeir off Scotland. Roger Deakin going off to hang out with biologists in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in search of the ancestor of the malus domestica or ancient wild walnut groves.

Pretty much the only pure nature writing I can think of that I’ve really enjoyed is Nan Shepherd. She writes about the mountain, the water, the rocks (a chapter on each, no less). But again it’s the human experience of it that are the bits I most remember; the feeling of jumping in cold water, resting a cheek on moss. When I post updates about my garden on Insta, I mostly lose followers. When I post about my kitchen cabinets, people pull up chairs in droves.

And Richard Powers wrote a whole 600-page novel about how, fundamentally, we want to read stories about ourselves, not about trees.

Nobody cares what you wrote unless you wrote about them.

Or unless what you wrote about is relevant to them, even obliquely as a member of the same species.

So, without further ado, here is the inaugural instalment of Awkward Encounters.

This week there were almost too many to choose from so I shall instead recount the story of me going to see a new play in Oxford from Complicite theatre called Drive your plow over the bones of the dead.

The first half was a good solid long hour and I was gagging for a beverage at the intermission. My mate went off to the loo and I queued up to pay for my tea.

As I was queueing, I spotted the woman who follows me on Insta (who I follow back) and who (I think?) works for the production company that produces this play. Her Insta is how I heard about it and thought, ooh Oxford, that’s near me, I’ll go. And bring a friend, which I duly did.

I said hi as she was walking past and she said hey! In that slightly panicked way British people have when you address them unexpectedly and they don’t immediately know who you are. Then she twigged and we did a very awkward 45 second dance of how we don’t really know each other except on Insta and how she originally followed me on Insta because I used to live near her in London. But now I don’t.

Then the man behind the till, who had thinning blue hair and a large thick non-blue beard, asked me to pay for my tea and I remembered that my phone was dead.

Insta-pal immediately seized the opportunity to vanish, liberating us both from the awkwardest of encounters, as I tried to explain to non-blue beard that I’ll have to wait for my mate to reappear from the loos so she can tap for me.

He looked at me like I suggested he wait while I take a dump on the counter instead. I went to the end of the bar and hovered there, too afraid to even remove my teabag from the ill-gotten tea.

A much older woman came up. She was coddling her teabag around in a rich and unashamed way that suggested she had already paid for it.

“Are you enjoying it?” She was direct. Very un-British.

“It’s ok.” Diplomatically and discreetly non-American and noncommittal in my response. “You?”

“No.”

Taken aback. This is unusually forthright for a British person. “Oh right. Why?”

“Well.” Spoken as an exhalation, an entire sentence, and a condemnation. “It’s just the same thing Complicite has done a million times before. It’s been done to death. Nothing new.”

I pointed out that it’s probably new to all the Gen Z-ers in our midst. I also admitted that, while I didn’t really like it either, if her biggest complaint is that it’s just like the ones that have gone before, I probably wouldn’t have liked those either. And I certainly wouldn’t have come to yet another one.

She moved swiftly away.

I was still standing there waiting for my mate to reappear and non-blue beard eventually took pity on me.

“Are you still brewing that? Take out the tea bag and just drink it, for heaven’s sake!”

I panicked and grabbed the tea bag and burnt my fingers a little bit and also got tea everywhere and started drinking it.

He regaled me with a tale of dropping his phone in Liverpool Street on the way to catch a flight to Morocco. All his flight details and cards and everything were on his smashed phone.

I feigned horror, as I knew I was supposed to. “So what did you do?”

“Well, I had printed out hard copies of my tickets and I had all my cards in my wallet too. So I was fine.”

I took his point and made no response.

He moved down the bar to attend to paying customers.

Chastened, I drank my tea alone, pondering with some awe my unflagging awkwardness until Helen returned at length from the toilet queue to rescue me.

And thus did yet another chronicle of my awkwardness write itself — and Awkward Encounters was born.