Readers of yore may recall that I have a thing about snow sports.

I’ve been watching a lot of the Winter Olympics and, in the super pipe events, I had a strange moment of recognition.

Of one of the coaches.

That was my first clue that the world has moved on. I’m old now. I have reached the age where I recognise the coaches—but not the athletes.

It’s Danny Kass. He’s a coach for the US snowboard teams now. Who would have guessed?

Danny Kass, if you don’t know, won silver in the Salt Lake City games in the superpipe. This was back in 2002, when snowboarding was still a fringe event, an upstart that no one was convinced was going to catch on.

Sitting on my couch, feeling really old, seeing this guy—the ultimate snowboard BRO back in the day—triggered some fond memories.

It also coincides with a gap in The Notebooks—somewhere in between that sun-laced glade with Luke in the summer of 2006 and the car crash—so away we go…

—

In January 2008, I boarded the Amtrak Lake Shore Limited out o…

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Quite a lot of hand-wringing these days over why women are so into Heated Rivalry.

The Guardian ran a piece the other day. What could women be getting out of softcore gay porn? Are they confused? Are they horny? (I mean, yes, and yes. Who isn’t?)

Indulging in no hand-wringing over here. To me, the answer’s so obvious.

Why are women into Heated Rivalry, a tale of two beautiful men playing sports and humping in hotel rooms?

Exactly the same reason men are obsessed with lesbians and everything they do.

Because this is not a world to which we have access. It is not a world to which we will ever have access.

And everyone wants to experience the lives they don’t get to live.

Onism is real: everyone wants what they can’t have. (I don’t mean onanism, that is a different thing, though not irrelevant in the context).

Basically? Heated Rivalry is fascinating, in the same way reading and voyeuring the lives of others that we never get to experience is fascinating.

Also it is very, very hot.

—

Had a …

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Or tights.

Give me a break. I’ve been writing my book for the last 18 months, not shlepping to the office. I’ve worn a sports bra since, well … I don’t remember how it feels to leave the house not wearing a sports bra.

Underwire? What is this grief?

And tights? Maniacal cackle.

On examination, every single pair in my drawer had either holes, runs, bobbles or a charming combination of the three.

I haven’t cared, not for months.

But on the eve of The Meeting, I cared.

Sigh. Sometimes, if there is a stressful situation, it feels like everything else will fall into place, if you can just sort out the outfit.

I’m not the only one who feels that way.

A great thinker once said that sartorial streamlining gives one a sense of control in a world full of chaos.

Cher Horowitz.

That’s why, the day before The Meeting, I hauled buns to London where I felt con…

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It’s been so long since I wrote an essay I’m not sure I remember how.

At least, that’s what I told myself before I remembered this is what I do. Words string themselves together in my head. The trick is getting them down fast enough.

Pin down the words, and you can re-examine them later. Spot the patterns.

Come on now, one word in front of the other. Baby words.

It’s all just a mish-mosh unless you find meaning in the madness.

It’s getting colder, the seasons are changing. A full moon has just been and gone.

Telephone wires bristle thick with rooks. They settle and disperse, like leaves flung skyward.

People too, settle and disperse. Keep it moving. Faces cycle in and out: colleagues, neighbours, friends.

Around here, I find meaning in a long walk, or a long cycle, or a good book.

Books on my shelves have the timeless air of trees. They frame my life unmoving, a constant source of joy.

They will outlive me, the books and the trees.

My neighbour—from last year’s moon walk—told me he shares bo…

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“When it happens, it’ll happen overnight.”

“Yep, it’ll come for you while you sleep, old age. The clocks will strike midnight, your hair will scroll to silver and your tits will fall into your shoes.”

“One day, you’ll wake up old.”

Sage nodding. Ice baths and HRT. Turmeric. Kefir.

“Fun fact. You’re already in your 40th year, did you know?” That’s my carpenter friend, who (apart from this comment) I really rate. “It’s true. You’re about to enter your forty-first year. Think about it: you turn one after your first year, two after your second year, and so on…”

He’s right, damn him.

Pensive, I climbed into the river this evening to trim my bush.

Minds out the gutter.

We were thinking about moving. It was a proxy for restlessness and the constant need to change it up, make it better.

Spotting when you’re happy is a lost art, don’t you think?

Constant dissatisfaction is lucrative. That is why we are all cultivated to be dissatisfied, all the time.

Knowing when you’re happy is the hardest thing.

I d…

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“I went to Wales because the place is stiff with magic …”

Roger Deakin, Waterlog

You know it’s going to be a good weekend when it starts with whiskey at 2am. I don’t even like whiskey but there never was a time like the present.

No time like the present.

That phrase was turning in my head a few weeks ago, when I sat up in bed and said “fuck this, I’ve got a month left in my thirties. I want to go on an adventure every day.”

Joel, still half asleep, murmured something irresolute, but not unwilling.

That day, we went climbing

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A friend sent me a Guardian article a few days ago about how loads of Americans—specifically: young, wealthy, tech-y Americans—are moving to the Cotswolds to escape Trump.

The rationale is it offers the chance to live in the quaint English countryside where there is no risk of water shortages, wildfires or demented, roving bands of preppers (at least in the short term).

I showed this to Joel and, with a lofty air, suggested that my newsletter probably helped to popularise the Cotswolds for that particular demographic.

“Come on babe. That’s exactly the slice of America that’s on Substack. I’ve definitely played a role here.”

He suggested gently that I may have overestimated my reach and significance.

Scoffing (I never do this), I allowed that the smash TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Cotswolds epic Rivals, and its heaving bucolic shagging on tennis courts and al fresco under shady oaks by trickling burns, may have had something to do with it. But, doubling down on my role as trendsetter, I pointed out that I am in fact an American in the Cotswolds, coming up on four years now. Ahead of the curve, what?

So, for my American readers, as a fellow American, if you’re planning to relocate to middle England, allow me to share with you some nuggets of wisdom that I have gleaned from my time on these blessed shores.

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This morning I nearly spilled a full cup of coffee on my laptop.

Reflexes and dexterity aren’t what they once were. Forty looms large.

Joel took delivery of replacement razors for his shaving implement. After years of being, shall we say, pogonotrophically challenged, he now needs to shave every day.

Puberty finally harpooned him at the ripe old age of 32.

I told him if he starts growing chest hair, it’s game over, so watch this space.

Anyway, back to the razors.

I was at my desk, AirPods in, and sensed a disturbance in the hallway. Joel was flapping around looking for something.

I popped out my AirPods.

“What’s up?”

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The platform to London is the standard Saturday Cotswolds crowd.

Stout men in cricket club gilets with their teenage sons, also wearing gilets.

A chic femme d’un certain âge in ankle-length mink coat and leopard print ballet pumps, clutching a Louis Vuitton carrier.

A guy with a nose ring and neck tats, drinking a can of cider, complaining to his missus about his teenage sons.

“My music is like the Sound of Music compared to what they listen to.” Said around a swig of Bulmers.

There’s a kerfuffle. A line of people held up behind a pregnant woman.

She politely, and in a British “I’m-sorry-there-must-be-some-mistake” kind of way, pointed out that someone—a white middle-aged male someone—was in her seat.

He didn’t move. Put on his glasses, asked to see her ticket.

Only when it was established beyond a shadow of a doubt to the entire carriage that he was definitely in her seat did he grudgingly shift to a seat opposite me.

After a minute, I realised he was staring at me with frank hostility.

“You’re in my friend’s seat.”

“Sorry, what?” I was confused. There was no sign of a friend.

An embarrassed friend piped up from behind me.

“No, it’s ok, no worries.”

Well, let me tell you, I hopped up like that seat was on goddamn fire.

Pierced chap told me he was getting off at the next stop, so I was able to sit down again in his seat pretty much straight away.

Along came a couple, towing much luggage. They barely looked at the chap with glasses as they thrust their tickets at him.

“You’re in our seat.”

He got up grumbling and had to stand the whole dang way from Oxford to Paddington.

Perfect outward composure. In my head, Nelson from The Simpsons. Ha. Ha.

Behind me, a man down for the day from the Welsh borders described to a Canadian woman how their community was trying to hold accountable the chicken farmers that polluted the Wye river catchment area.

I’ve been there recently. The valley walls are laced with shit, fathoms deep. You can’t get near the river. It’s a shit-mire; a veritable swamp of sewage.

“It’s a long drawn out process,” he told her. “Well, anything involving lawyers is, isn’t it.” This wasn’t a question. “Only the lawyers make the money.”

She told him Canada has lots of polluted rivers too. It’s 40% woodland, she discoursed, and has lots of plains.

“For grain?”

“No, maize.”

I thought of cornfields across Manitoba, a nuclear waste of frozen husks in winter.

Trundling into West London, the new blocks of flats are west-lit plate-glass.

Balconies overlook rail lines: a view like Auschwitz. If you can watch whatever you want on a screen, who cares what’s outside your window?

Everyone searching for the best, most comfortable view of mayhem.

In the Paddington concourse, more people than I encounter in a month.

It’s overwhelming how different they all are but still so … London. London is like a carpet, or an outfit. It smothers. The fibres stick to you, embed themselves, and after awhile you are more London than anything else.

All these frictionless people passing over and through each other like water, slipping soundlessly into trains and off, through barriers and up escalators, staring at their phones.

Do you remember when tech was still textural? Chunky phones that whirred and clicked and beeped. Now the aim is frictionless: friction is failure.

Me? I like a little friction, a reassuring judder.

The bus in London vibrates like an orgasm in my shoulders. It’s really very pleasing.

I stopped at my favourite ramen spot. There was a queue but they seated me immediately at a lonesome sole perch because there was only one of me.

An unimpressed woman in the queue gave me daggers, which I had no choice but to return.

You can do nothing but insult people who are determined to be offended.

When I tried to buy wine at a wine shop, there was a bell for security. It rang and rang but the door didn’t open.

Inside, crowds of people chatted with the staff, browsed the shelves and merrily purchased wine without issue. Pressing nose to the glass, I tried to catch someone’s eye. Anyone?

Nothing.

I pinched myself to make sure I’m real—still here!—and carried on.

London seems all gyms and shiny surfaces.

You have to squint to see past, between them.

Like Lincoln’s Inn Fields where, since reading Bleak House, I can’t wander without picturing Tulkinghorn’s dimly-lit marble-filled corridors.

Today I felt a bit like the mad old bag waiting for the Jarndyce verdict. Release the birds! Lead me away to the attic.

A muffled scream from the LSE halls: somebody writing their dissertation hit a wall.

So many old houses of forgotten men. Dr Johnson, on the left. No time to join the crowds for Sir John Soane’s house—next time, Sir John!—I’ve a gathering to attend.

Still no wine for it though.

The Last Judgment pub off Chancery Lane looks inviting but no time, no time.

Pallas Athena! Ye olde Cock Tavern!

The sun is threatening to peak out. London seems a brighter, more blue-skies country than Oxfordshire. Imagine then how grey and flat is the Oxfordshire countryside.

A sign on a construction site announced “History is a work in progress”.

History is a work in progress? No, it’s not. That’s just a bald justification for your shoddy conservation efforts.

History is the past. That is its defining characteristic.

I congratulated myself on my cleverness but the Chester Cheese pub, with its newly-updated list of monarchs during its tenure, immediately reminded me this isn’t true. It’s all a work in progress.

A group of paparazzi brush past, cartoons of themselves with tripods and lenses.

I turned the tables and snapped them when they weren’t looking.

Invisible people-watching is one of my greatest pleasures.

At a crowded, but not too crowded, bar in Shoreditch before the hour of dinner later, with glass of red, perched between small tables, I was neither seen nor could I quite overhear.

Conversations smattered about me without leaving a trace. The music was indeterminate but bouncy, rhythmic.

There was a man, an unappealing man, waiting at the bar and casting little glances sideways about. The woman he was waiting for, an unappealing woman, arrived and they chatted uneasily for a moment.

After a moment, they were buoyant. Much eye contact suggested they will both be naked later. I felt happy for them.

Unlike the couple at the next table. They hate each other. Or rather, she hates him.

Fastidious in a white jumper, she is determined to be displeased, casts him venomous looks that ask why they are here in this shithole bar that is neither impressive nor exclusive nor expensive.

On the way home later, after dinner with friends, back in Paddington, I didn’t want to rub elbows while I waited for the last train, wanted to find somewhere I could sit alone.

Not an easy task in central London, let alone on Saturday evening in a mainline rail station, but eventually I found it: a magical bench on its own in a very quiet corner.

There was no one around. How was this possible? Not a single human for 100 feet in any direction. I realised I was probably the only person in central London experiencing this level of isolation right now.

A Japanese man cast a furtive glance around and sat on his own lonely bench on the other side of this abandoned concourse.

A preoccupied-looking chap passed me silently going the other way on the escalator, shoulders hunched and fists jammed in pockets.

A tiny, older gentleman, bowlegged and flat-capped, with something of the air of country Ireland about him, scurried past, eyes down.

Sometimes I look at people alone and wonder if they’re real, try to check if they cast a shadow.

I wonder if other people look at me and do the same: that woman over there frantically thumbing her phone, with a battered take out bag of noodles. Is she deranged? Is she a ghost?

Mostly they probably don’t see me at all.

Mostly, I pass through London and cast no shadow.

Which is better than the alternative.

At dinner, the waitress at the Italian restaurant sounded Italian so I asked her are you really Italian or is it just for the restaurant and she laughed and said no, really Italian, from a small village in the mountains near Milan and I said, how lovely, that’s where I want to live and she said I prefer London because it’s awake twenty four hours, not like Milan.

“In Milan, everything is closed and there are no people around when you need to go home, so it’s scary.” She paused. “As a woman, it’s scary,” she said again, as if I might have missed the point. “Trying to go home alone is hard if you work in hospitality in Milan.”

She went to get our drinks and I thought: trying to be left alone is hard, hospitality, Milan or otherwise.

Don’t you know what it’s like, navigating this world in fear.

Don’t you know what it’s like when, on a late night train, even a crowded train, the toilet floods and there’s a flock of drunk men at the door laughing and, when you look over in good humour to see what the commotion is about, some man takes umbrage at you for being too pretty or too curious or having too much personality or presence or whatever and says “she’s giving me evils” as if you and he have some intricate, interpersonal beef and you have to look away and pretend you have no ears because drunk angry men can turn violent in a heartbeat and don’t you know it, so you say nothing and hope his attention gets drawn to someone else and it does, one of his companions, a very drunk girl, who at one point threatens to vomit and he jokes yeah over there (pointing at you) fuck off, and your ears burn but you keep knitting because you got your knitting out to be unthreatening and grandmotherly but also because knitting needles are sharp as fuck and if you come near me, motherfucker, I’m putting one of them in your eyeball.

“Fuck you. Lick my asshole,” mutters the drunk girl, whose head is drowsing on his shoulder.

He helps her up and off the train. “Well, if you’re offering. I mean, I’d give it a go.”

We’re all just drowning in ourselves.

If an essay is an attempt to bail out a sinking ship, these words are a bucket of floodwater, slopped overboard.

Heave ho.

I have an ex-boyfriend who read Proust as an act of self-aggrandisement. All several thousand pages of Lost Time. He went in search thereof.

A busy man, he liked to imagine himself a secret lord of leisure, with nothing but hours to spend reading Proust in the bath.

He took from this, I think, the satisfaction that reading Proust in his scant leisure hours signified that he was in fact a man of culture and learning, despite his mind-numbing day job.

It was a currency: big book energy, on dates and in chit-chat outside conference rooms, as a cultured stand-in for big dick energy.

Big book energy as the new big dick energy.

Big book brandishment as a competitive act. Competitive reading.

It’s rife online. Have you read Infinite Jest? Don’t even look at me sideways if you haven’t.

I’ve read all the big books: my dick is HUGE.

Did you get all the way through Don DeLillo’s Underworld?

How about the dense 300 or so pages of woman-slaughter at the heart of 2666? Did you …

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He had it easy.

I was primed. It was like Rob had warmed me up: pre-heated to the right temperature.

Ready to cheat.

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Joel and I were talking about fashion today.

Neither of us is particularly (or even remotely) fashionable.

To underline this point, I was wearing at the time a ski headband of battered fleece that used to belong to my mom.

We were having an uncharacteristic fancy coffee in a local place that is known to be a bit “slebby” and chic.

I commented on a girl wearing platform trainers and trackie Bs with a side-stripe (I think they were tearaways, be still my heart, curdle my fear).

Basically the outfit I lived in when I was 13.

Ah, those dark pre-millennium, post Spice World years. You know the ones.

Tony Blair was God, Di was dead. Texting ‘hello’ on chunky Nokias went like this: gh-de-jkl-jkl-mno. Everyone had a favourite member of Boyzone (mine was Stephen, who turned out to be not inclined to women, again be still my heart).

We were talking about fashion being cyclical.

I was looking at this woman wearing Spice Girls trainers and hypothesising that, if kids now (and by …

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⬅️⬅️Read T H E N O T E B O O K S from the start here.

The thing you have to understand about Rob is that he wasn’t a real person.

Not saying he didn’t exist. He definitely existed (insofar as any of us do).

I mean he wasn’t a real person you could really know. He didn’t express real opinions or preferences.

Sure, he knew what was desirable or what his friends might want or what someone in his position ought to have.

But Rob himself? He existed at the Venn centre of everyone else.

Even in our most intimate moments, and in our most private messages, it was as if he was performing for some unseen audience.

What I’m trying to say is that Rob was cool in a way I’ve never been cool.

He was too social a creature to be ruled by his own unfiltered desires.

It made him oddly selfless.

If the essence of cool is never letting them see you sweat, never letting them get an in on you, never letting them know what you really think, Rob was the coolest motherfucker on the planet.

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Where were we? Oh yes, the train from Sanfran to New York. September 2008.

Sorry. That’s not the story I feel like telling at the moment. I’ll get there. But you know I like to tell it backward. So let’s skip forward. Ten years, give or take.

2018.

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“Do you want to go for a moonwalk?”

This isn’t the kind of offer I usually get down the pub of a Friday evening.

“Sorry, what?” It’s my mate from the pub committee who I’ve mentioned before: musician, carpenter and procurer of hessian sacks.

“Moonwalk. Full moon walk. Light of the moon, stroll in the woods, you know? Bright enough to go without headlamps. You up for it?”

Said in the tone of “come away, o human child”.

Am I up for it? Does the Pope shit in the woods?

Never have I needed a full moon walk more.

Said in the tone of “for the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”

_

Meet at the pub for a swift sharpener.

That’s the group chat message on the night of the walk. For an instant, images of spiky birds and pencil sharpeners flit in and out of my synapses.

Then I get it. Swift, as in fast. Sharpener, as in beverage to sharpen the occasion of it all.

One of my walking companions has a hip flask of whiskey. I’ve never…

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A friend once teased me that wherever I lived I thought it the best place in the world.

We worked together and I often banged on at him about the amazing places I had lived in London. Wapping, with its potted histories of pirates, riverside hangings and sunken jetties. Rotherhithe’s foreshore, peppered with ancient beads, coins and clay pipes. West Norwood too, where I wanted to know everything about the hidden River Effra, the old Great North Woods and the brooding cemetery on my doorstep.

Writers mythologise our internal narratives: that’s what we do. We mythologise wherever we happen to be and whomever we happen to be there with.

I know I’ve done this everywhere. I also know I was wrong about everywhere but Oxford.

Marvellous as all those places were, nowhere tops Oxford.

It’s a funny thing: there’s a long tradition of having to pretend to be bored and unimpressed with the majesty of Oxford when you’re a student. Being awestruck is for the tourists, not for those who hurry unseeing to…

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The colour of the sky was opal grey, upturned like an oyster shell.

It’s because of Hurricane Milton, I told my son as we walked to school. Away over in the Gulf of Mexico, it changes the tone of the sky even here on the other side of the Atlantic.

He was incredulous. “No way.”

“It’s true. It really is that big. Here, look at this video of NASA flying over Hurricane Milton. Look how massive it is.”

He watched the video. I brushed some hair off his forehead.

“That was your great-grandpa’s name, you know. My grandpa.”

“Wait, really? That was his name?”

“Yes, grandma’s dad. The one who fought in WWII and landed in Normandy. Your great-grandpa. Didn’t you know that was his name?”

“No. What a cool name.”

He was quiet for a moment and we walked on.

“I wish my name was Hurricane Milton.”

—

Driving through the village later, I detoured past the pub.

I don’t do this often. The state of the world—a particular upcoming election—le…

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On the flight to Sarajevo, a man with two bags of crisps sat next to me.

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At some point on your road, you have to turn and start walking back towards yourself.

Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black

The world is a fractal of nightlit streets packed with tables and happy drinkers.

Or at least, Vienna is.

The Viennese appear to have quietly unlocked the secret of the good life. I defy anyone to walk up Spittelberggasse on a soft summer evening, through gentle crowds smiling and conversing, without concluding the world is fundamentally a good and kind place, and the Viennese good and kind people.

The bats come out of the belfry and swoop around the square. It’s not really a square, more a pocket of cobbles wedged between busier streets. At dusk on a summer’s evening, the night is full of clinking platters and the murmur of conversation.

It’s warm enough to sit out without any kind of wrapping. A cool drink tastes even better than it usually does.

Somebody on a top floor is playing Ode to Joy. They are muddling through but the puddled sounds that leak to the street are pleasing.

—

Who can eat a whole pork schnitzel, I wondered to myself. The thing was as big as the plate, even bigger than that: it dangled over the sides.

The phone rang. It was my son, doing his duty. Yes, they had fun at the beach. No, he doesn’t know which one. Margate, I heard my ex-husband say in the background. Margate, my son informed me.

“Oh Margate! Lovely.” I pretended not to have heard the first response. “What are you doing for dinner?”

“Dad’s making me salmon and curry and rice and an egg.”

“Any vegetables?”

I looked down at my pork schnitzel and potato salad. It’s marked by a lack of green.

What hypocrites we are with our children.

—

Arriving earlier this morning to Vienna, I couldn’t check in to my hotel yet and took refuge in the Kunsthistorisches museum. Locked in the sinus-misery of a horrific headcold, I dozed on the cracked leather sofas in the soaring hallways and ogled the Bruegel room, again.

Bruegel and his cosmic, universal landscapes—the world in a painting. He painted the hardships of individuals, real people, living in quiet anonymity. He did it matter-of-factly, without pathos, condescension or ridicule; without politics, without ideology, without any message beyond this:

The dignity of existence needs no justification.

His great achievement was to be a realist and a humanist, not an idealist.

But humans get ideas and will always try to own the story. Babel is a cautionary tale, the museum’s footnotes tell me, not just of hubris but of the failures of reason, technology and engineering.

It’s Musk on a dwindling-value mountain of Ai-generated content! It’s unwearable Ai wearables!

It’s people who become obsessed with an idea and embroil themselves in pointless undertakings.

Like writers, I think.

I fancy myself a humanist but as with everything in life how far is this imagined self from reality? Actually, I loathe people all the time. I so often sit in judgement of ordinary grotesque humans, harmlessly staring at phones, eating piles of ice cream. I am a hypocrite.

Having eaten, the restaurant suddenly becomes so much less adorable, less appealing. Before the meal, I’m enchanted by the candle, the encroaching greenery and the subdued murmur from the next table. With waistband stretched, I notice the cigarette smoke.

I look down and realise I’ve finished the schnitzel, my capacity to consume grossly underestimated. My real and imagined selves not keeping pace.

I’m here to research real people, to write a novel about them. How much of them is me? How much of the story I’m chasing is self-projection, like a dream in which you inhabit all characters simultaneously? Does it matter? If the truth is not recorded, nor remembered by a living soul, who can say my version is wrong? Who owns the past?

—

As I crossed heroes square in front of the Hitler balcony, it happened.

Hurrying to keep an appointment at the archives, I glanced up briefly. The Viennese city council (or whatever it’s called) doesn’t know what to do with the balcony these days, the one that straddles the entrance to the National Library. Afraid to open it to the public, lest it become an unwelcome shrine: hallowed ground for Hitler enthusiasts.

Everyone tries to claim the past as their own, put their own words into the dead’s mouths and own the story.

The words Justitia regnorum fundamentum are inscribed above the gate at the entrance to the Hofburg.

Justice is the foundation of kingdoms, it says.

Generations of leaders and emperors in this city sought to claim their right to rule on the basis of justice. Hitler marched under these words.

Own the story of the past and you own justice.

What is it Rachel Cusk says about justice? It’s about “petty individualism”.

Yes.

But what could be less petty than righting an identifiable wrong against an actual person? Would you rather give justice to an idea? Ideas don’t bleed or cry; they don’t require justice to be meted out in their name.

My pack shifted on shoulders, feet thudded the grass in front of the Hofburg. I cut a shortcut diagonally across towards the Burgtor, the heroes gate.

Then, I heard it.

My footsteps pounded on, echoing after I stopped.

Thud, thud, thud: the quick march of thousands of stamping feet, right here.

I looked up at the Hitler balcony and felt afraid of it, of its power. Like the roving searchlight of the eye of Mordor.

The past lives in all of us, if we care to let it in.

_

In the archives, the document I am looking at is smeared with greasy, greedy fingers from eighty years ago.

A perfect fingerprint reminds me: I was here, I did this. A human did this.

I suppose I must be a humanist but humans are so insufferable.

It’s so hot in this attic room of the museum archives. My iPhone blinks, warning me it is dangerously overheated and needs to cool down. I know how you feel, mate.

The kind woman in charge of the archives turns on a fan for me and I spend the rest of my time there trying to carefully position litmus paper, airplane sheafs of the lightest tissue weight, so they don’t snow globe through the room.

—

Sometimes a stroke of luck hits in an unexpected way.

I couldn’t get a hotel room in Vienna on the last night of my trip. It’s the Taylor Swift concert, they shake their heads at me, didn’t you know? It will be over £500 to keep my room an extra night. That is double what I paid for the previous two nights together.

I declined and tried to figure out how I can make it home without having to do the dreaded all-night-on-a-train-floor again in reverse. I tried to imagine what it might feel like to have to sleep on the floor of the train—again—in undimmed lights, with this headcold and my period to boot.

You brought this on yourself, babe. That’s Joel’s voice, in my ear, reminding me that I did in fact bring this all on myself by refusing to fly like a normal person.

The new plan is this: train to Munich from Vienna, plus a night in Munich (significantly cheaper than Vienna), then onwards to Paris.

So, I booked the hotel in Munich and the onward connection from Munich to Paris and then… I dithered. Do I really need to do the Vienna-Munich booking now? I don’t know how long the archives will take. Maybe I’ll be ready to leave earlier. It seems silly to book it now when there’s probably no risk of it selling out, right? Trains to Munich run regularly and surely I can just buy that train ticket tomorrow to suit my schedule?

Reader, you will be delighted to hear that I ignored this moronic, inner voice.

I booked myself on the 5pm out of Vienna.

A good thing too because less than an hour after that, Taylor Swift got cancelled (her concerts in Vienna, I mean, not herself) and everyone and their mother (literally: many mothers and many daughters) wanted to leave Vienna.

The hordes wishing to exit Vienna were biblical.

Luckily, I had a seat booked.

—

The next day, hot winds whipped through the city.

After the archives, I thought a lot about my story. I stood in front of particular buildings and wondered. One woman pointed out the right rooms to me. Yes, it was the whole floor, but now there’s nothing there.

A story told in scraps and threads. It emerges only where the stitching’s come loose: there’s nothing there.

I think the fabric of the world becomes less certain, the sureness of reality less sure, when we perceive ourselves to be morally culpable, to have failed in some significant and unrecoverable way.

It is strange then that the most evil among us seem to be the most certain, the least troubled by this shimmering quality to reality. Either they do not consider themselves culpable or, noting the uncertainty, are untroubled by it. Which fuels the evil because: if nothing is real, what does it matter if you commit atrocities?

On the way to the station, I walked past the solemn facade of the Kunsthistorisches. In the closed museum, I thought of all those people carousing, playing, dancing, dying. Do paintings get lonely? All of them doomed to do whatever they are doing forever, to a darkened empty room, when all the unseeing crowds have gone.

It’s been punishingly hot but this afternoon feels like the heat will break in rain. Black clouds mass over the Parliament and the strange man poised at the top of City Hall looks as if he’s about to jump.1 There’s a breeze that hits my clammy skin, raising goosebumps. That’s possibly the residual effects of the headcold rather than any comment on the chilliness of the breeze.

I’m so tired. Return journey, here we go again. Performing a circle, going back this time through Paris via Salzburg and Munich.

—

At the station, the rain started and spattered me under the platform awning.

A woman turned and addressed me in German.

“Entschuldigung bitte…”

I cut her off apologising that I don’t speak German.

She persisted—and actually, I could help, turns out.

“Salzburg?”

“Yes! Yes. This is for the train to Salzburg. I’m waiting for it too.”

Feeling disproportionately pleased with myself—maybe I am getting better at this!—I boarded the train that appeared at the allotted time.

“No,” the stewardess on board informed me. “This is not the section of the train for Salzburg. They will attach more carriages.” She looked more closely at me and sensed my weariness. “In the next seconds, the train will come,” she said with a pitying look.

I got off and walked back to where I was.

5:01 ticked past. It became clear to me that Austrians, unlike their mountainous Swiss neighbours, do not have the same slavish attachment to the clock.

Finally, the train pulled up. We lurked at the doors waiting for them to open—but what’s this? A newcomer—a tall, strapping white man—seems to think he may be entitled to board first.

Not so fast, Hans, I thought and positioned my backpack in his way.

Me first, mate. I need a wee.

That yellow stucco so particular to Vienna apartment buildings flashed past and was gone. We were back in deep countryside.

The conductor came by to check my ticket. We were late.

“Will we be late to Salzburg?”

“Yes, definitely.”

“What happens if I miss my train?”

“You will get the next train.”

Occasionally, and particularly in places I’ve never heard of, like St Polten in central Austria, I’m struck by the weight of humanity. I look at the houses, their windows, and am reminded of all the various lives being lived, all the other eyeballs behind which minds hide, each with their own churning memories and thoughts and concerns.

Sometimes, it weakens me, makes me wonder why do I bother, why are my thoughts any more worth recording?

They’re not.

It’s just that I bother to record them and most people don’t. That’s the trick.

Other times, I insert myself in the landscape, imagine myself living there. Hi, I live here in Amstetten. This is my enormous local garden centre on the edge of town.

The food situation started to interest me. The announcement said the restaurant was in coach 30 so I trundled that way but the train ended at the bottom of coach 31.

I stood there for a moment. An elderly woman with a sour face was watching so I performed cartoon befuddlement for her—where, oh, where is the restaurant, woe is me—and turned to her with a half smile, preparatory to asking for help.

She looked away quickly.

Bitch, I thought.

I’ll get her. I waited until she sneaked a look back to see what I was up to now. I immediately locked eyes and smiled sweetly.

“Essen?”

Gotcha.

She gave me a cold look and jerked a thumb over the shoulder back the way I’ve come. Right.

Rural Austria has the same mechanised agricultural feel of an upstate New York. Cornfields, silos, diesel pumps and wind socks. Tractor yards and marching pylons. It almost made me feel at home until I spied a bright yellow four-storey traditional farmhouse and remembered I have never been at home here.

The girl in front of me was watching a video on her phone. It was a TikTok woman applying make-up in a process involving at least seventeen steps. I’m not sure when it got so complex. Cleanse, tone, moisturise: what else can there be?

But then I remembered there’s money to be made at every step so of course there are more steps now. There are probably whole rooms full of people out there dreaming up new stages: Exfoli-magnify. Depillopop. Thirst trap incubation. Etc. Someone pay me, this shit is gold.

In Linz, I became viscerally jealous of all the lucky bastards waiting on the opposite platform for the train back to Vienna.

Especially this colour-coordinated, super stylish dude:

Even his bike was orange.

Imagine getting back to the streets of Vienna, with your bike, in time to sit out at a bar in an ancient churchyard. I reminded myself it was raining in Vienna and that I will go back, soon.

Vienna gets in.

I thought again of that box in the archives and how important it feels to me: how it contains multitudes and layers and humans captured forever in a few lines of impenetrable handwriting. How even people I love dearly can summon only minimal enthusiasm for a dusty box of documents.

I wondered again why this story has me so tight in its grips.

I have a quiet horror of turning into one of those earnest middle-aged female researchers with thermos flask and busy notebook.

That’s not me, I want to squeal. I’m on a sexy quest for my novel. This isn’t boring, it’s HOT.

—

The conductor on the train from Salzburg to Munich rebuked a foreign passenger.

“This is an Austrian train. You have a Bavaria regional ticket. It is not valid. You must get off at the next stop—Traunstein in five minutes—and you get the next train, the blue one. Your ticket works for that train.”

I looked to each side, at mist-shrouded fields under a setting sun. I am so certain I too will be ordered off in Traunstein, sent off into those dark fields.

I zoomed in on my barcode and prayed. By the time he reached me, I was certain my minutes on board were numbered.

But my ticket was good. He passed with a smile.

I closed my eyes and, against the green fields in Bavaria, outlined I see fallen bodies when they said run for it, run for target practice for the boys. Won’t run? A shot point blank, close range, and then to the others, quietly, now RUN.

Picked off one by one, as they run.

I squeezed my eyes to clear my head. Why do empty fields and boxes of documents and patches of city grass under a balcony speak to me like this? Why does historical fiction feel so much like communing with the very-present dead?

—

Midnight in Munich, at a hotel next to the station, I passed quickly into unknowing and just as quickly out of it. My alarm went at 6am, an uncomfortable hour, and I packed up the three items of personal effects I unpacked last night. Put back on the same clothes from yesterday.

No shower. I’m a treat.

It’s a six minute waltz to the station. My train was there already.

I had a seat in first class because that is all Trainline would allow me to book. Probably some private-equity-backed expenditure-optimising algorithmic tweak, effectively committing fraud by telling me that no second class seats were available and I must book first class. Right.

Anyway, first class means big seats and quiet. I got to my seat and it was a table, spot of luck with my laptop. I put my bag on the rack and took my allotted seat.

Some parts of land have, throughout history, served as focal points of conflict. I’m thinking of the Rhineland, because that’s where I’m chundering through as I write, but consider many other conflicts in the world right now: Israel-Palestine, Russia in Ukraine, even the Myanmar army in ethnic border areas. If it is a gross simplification to characterise these as contests for space (for control, for more, to pacify), it is also not entirely wrong. Boundaries are contested where various “nations” (and I use this only in the loosest sense of the term to mean a self-identifying unit) seek to chip away at the space of those outside the unit.

We covet what is not ours. We always want more. Humans encroaching or seeking to encroach on the space of others is often a matter of survival.

Space is finite. Turf wars are as old as humanity.

The reason I mention this is that I was subject to some very minor turf wars of my own in this train. The only turf I have to defend on a train is my own personal space. I will defend it to the death.

A woman came along with two small children.

Now, I know this woman. I dare say I have been this woman, so absorbed in the insane task of parenting small humans that you lose the ability to recognise that not everyone gives two shits about how hard things are for you. You display an entitled need to avoid even minor inconveniences which, in a child-encumbered state, feel like pure insult on top of injury.

Along she came, down to her seats, which did not have a table. She decided she wanted my table, and approached.

Now, let’s be clear: this is a hostile act of overt aggression. It’s Hitler marching into the Sudetenland. I see what you are doing: you are strong-arming me for Lebensraum.

We know what’s about to happen. You’re going to force me to share this long journey with you and your kids. This is a power move and, I’ll be honest, I know it well, having employed it myself in turn. Sure, you’re technically entitled to come along and surround me at the table—but it’s a dick move, designed to sweep me away, shift me off to my rightful place in a piddly two-seater without a table.

Like I said, I’m a parent myself and I get it. This isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve pulled this move.

But it’s a dick move and we all know it is.

I stood to get my AirPods from my bag—I’m going to need them!—and along came another woman at the luggage rack as I was fiddling with some small personal items.

“Can I put my luggage here?” She pointed at my bag.

“Sorry, what?” I visibly scrambled for words and comprehension. “But … my bag is there.”

Seriously, what is happening? Have I wandered into a Reddit thread of “Am I the Asshole?” (Let’s be clear: we are all the Asshole.) Have I transgressed a rule about where bags must go? Or is she, like the woman with kids, just… intent on occupying my space here in the Rhineland with perfect entitlement?

I can’t work it out. This never happens to me. I’m a solid five foot ten and have been told I have an intimidating don’t-fuck-with-me resting bitch face. Why are all these women suddenly trying to dominate me? Is it the mom shorts? Is it the obviously unshowered state I’m in? Is it the rest of this train journey, which has so comprehensively wiped me out that I give the impression I have no fight left?

Who can say.

I declined to move my bag. There were other places she could put hers and I’m not Chamberlain, fuck appeasement.

Inspired by my own boldness, I returned to my seat and coughed violently, before disclosing that I have a terrible cold.

The woman with children decided not to sit with me after all.

An elderly woman opposite gave me a quiet, conspiratorial smile, like: I get it, honey. I realised it was because she didn’t want the kids near her either and was delighted I had driven them away.

Look. Don’t judge me. The thing is, when you make it out the other side of toddlerhood with your own kids, the prospect of putting up with someone else’s for any length of time becomes insupportable.

Especially on a long train journey. Sometimes a gal just needs to sit at a table on her own in first class. I defy you not to want the same on five hours sleep and a sinus headache.

In bright sunshine as we streamed towards Karlsruhe, hunting stands studded the fields.

The woman who asked me to move my bag started doing squats in the aisle.

I turned attention to more pressing matters. Where’s the fucking coffee on this fucking train.

The kids I didn’t sit with shouted and cried in neat repeating patterns all the way to Paris.

Thank God for noise cancelling.

In Paris, the promise of my sister’s empty apartment, quiet and comfortable and familiar, beckons. They are away in the States and left the key. I will pootle around. I will go to the Louvre. I will buy cheese.

I will water their plants and imagine that every pocket of greenery I see on terraces and balcons is the effort of visiting houseguests. I will raid my sister’s closet for something to wear. (Just kidding, Jax!)

Or perhaps I will just sleep. I am very, very tired.

All the way to Vienna and all the way back again.

I’m not sure yet what I got out of it.

But wait and see.

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—

End notes: This was a good trip for reading. Long train rides will do that.

This summer—more than usual—every book I read, I said to myself: how have I never read this before?! This, this is the book from which all subsequent books shall be measured.

Oh no, wait. This one.

No, actually, this one.

Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark. Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea. Most recently, because I just finished it today, Hilary Mantel’s early novel about a psychic, Beyond Black.

I don’t have any easy conclusions to draw from Beyond Black. It (like my last book review) felt autobiographical. Is it a lack of imagination in myself, I wonder, that sees the authors so clearly in their subjects? That sees Mantel as her main character Al, this slightly self-loathing woman with a sensitivity to the dead, an ear to the past and a tormented childhood?

All fiction springs from the well of the self, if it’s worth a damn. So-called “auto-fiction” is a tautological nonsense.

In her famous Reith lectures, Mantel drew parallels between the work of psychics and writers of historical fiction; refused to be drawn on whether she could have succeeded as a psychic. In Beyond Black, the term she uses often is ‘sensitives’.

In The Day is for the Living, the first of her Reith lectures2, she talked about historical novelists needing a sensitivity to what’s missing—the crack in the land of the living—to work out what it is that the dead have left to tell us.

This, I know well: the crack around the edges of the historical record, where words fade out to exhaled air.

If you close your eyes, you can see it, see the whole scene writ large in your head, clear as day. You can see the signposts, the silences given new meaning. It is as if someone whispered it to you from the cupboard, or the wallpaper, or the depths of a potted plant.

In another lecture, she pointed out the conflict inherent in this work: it is two-faced, she said, as we yearn to experience a lost life we will never know, while at the same time thanking our lucky stars that we didn’t have to live it.

Tension between what’s left and what’s been left; between the dead and the living; the past and the present: it is an illusion, this tension.

The past wasn’t some primitive rehearsal for today.

It was all just as flawed, and just as perfect, as this day.

—

As long promised (threatened?), paying subscribers now have access to my bookshelves—for the next two weeks only, after which I will close it down. The link below will take you to a searchable, digital representation of about 550 actual books3 on my actual shelves, thanks to a cool app I found called BookBuddy that lets you create a virtual replica of your own library by scanning barcodes. (No, they’re not sponsoring me but if anyone reading this works there, very welcome to…)

So, for the next two weeks only, if you’ve ever wondered what’s on my shelves, now’s your chance. Link below, for paying subs only.

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The bed was so comfortable when my alarm went, and Joel so safe and warm, that I was loathe to get out. What madness compels this? For a moment, I sank back and thought how easy it would be to cancel my tickets, change my plans, stay put and have a nice childfree week at home with Joel.

Not doing the thing is always easier than doing the thing.

Joel made me coffee and I had a quick shower, packed last minute items. Charger, toothbrush, book. Another book. Then a third. It’s ok, two of them are small. (I ended up buying another two books on the trip, and one of them was by Robert Musil so you know it ain’t small. What can I say? I travel with books.).

The train rushed me towards London on the familiar commuter line. It was an overcast morning and the light was flat, air cool after a scorching week.

I miss Joel already, I thought.

I’m reading Transit by Rachel Cusk which, thematically at least, felt appropriate for a journey. I’m on the fence with Rachel Cusk. On the one hand: closely observed and well-written. On the other: laboured, pretentious and over-engineered. Like a Michelin meal touched by too many fingers.1

“The next station is London Marylebone. All change please.”

In Marylebone, a billboard of a leaping killer whale.

Orcas are apex predators with a diverse diet.

That’s cool, I thought: informative.

Then:

Looking for apex connectivity?

It was an ad for a mobile phone package.

By a strange quirk of the underground lines, it was quicker to walk several blocks to Baker Street than muddle through connections from Marylebone.

On the pavement outside the station, it’s so hot that London smells like Bangkok: an air of lightly cooked sewage on the streets.

It’s a Monday morning and feels strange—wonderful—to be abroad in the sun with a pack, not bound for the office. Wonderful to see London ticking along as it always does. I said a silent hallelujah for not having to live here anymore.

It’s been a long time since I was a lone traveller. I’ve noticed travelling alone has become less comfortable, more anxious, as I’ve grown older. Counter-intuitively, I was less concerned as a 22-year old ingénue than I am now. Aging into this world has made me increasingly aware of the deep well of hatred some men reserve for women. I am increasingly uneasy to be out in it. Travelling alone, disconnected from the relationships that construct an easily-parsable identity (“this is my man, these my children”) I wear a fake wedding ring as a protective device: it screens me, shields me, makes me less of a riddle and enigma to casual observer. Eyes pass onwards, incurious.

Just outside an optometrist near Baker Street, there’s a rotating screen trying to capture eyes of passers-by. It flashes up famous optical illusions: what do you see: an old lady or a young lady?

Often, I want to ask passers-by the same question.

What do you see?

In my mind’s eye, still a peripatetic twenty-something but in reality, a woman pushing early middle age, with a backpack, carrying a pillow, perhaps down on her luck (if you don’t notice the backpack is Patagootch).

I paused to take a picture of the optical illusion but it was gone, replaced by new scrawling messages that invited me to come in for a free eye test. I waited a minute or so for it to reappear but it didn’t.

Eventually, I decided this would be a really stupid way to miss my train to Brussels and moved on.

—

On the train, I was starving and took myself off to the café car.

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