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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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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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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“It is all falling indelibly into the past.”

Don DeLillo, Underworld

After the school run a week ago, it was a grey morning, unseasonal for July.

I directed steps down the lane towards the ford. I had no agenda, just a vague sense of peace that I needn’t rush off to log in for work like usual. It felt decadent, this untroubled time. I don’t usually walk down to the ford in the morning but it felt like the right thing to do that day.

The river is flat here and so shallow the riverbed seems almost to rise through its surface. As I watched the steady flow, I noticed something: some small creature blemishing the surface of the water.

It was the black burr of a tangled bumblebee. It swept straight towards me and I dipped a hand to pluck it out.

It was as wet as a drowned cat. Bumblebee fuzz plastered to it in clumps, one antenna bent and wrapped around its head, wings a draggled mess.

I let it crawl across my palm. The bent antenna righted itself. It really was a cold morning and the bee looked near-frozen. Gradually it stopped moving at all, thorax stopped pulsing. Spread rigid, legs splayed on my finger, I thought that’s it. The death of a bumblebee.

If I was a bumblebee what would I want to see in my last moments?

Not my skin, I thought, and found a dog rose. It crawled slowly across a blossom and fell back into my hand.

Then, long forgotten, I remembered: sugar water.

I carried him (he seemed to me a he, although perhaps I’m projecting, as the mother of a son) into my kitchen and boiled the kettle. I mixed two heaped tablespoons of sugar in hot water and then cooled it from the tap.

Gently, I dabbed a drop near his head and stepped back outside.

He lifted both antennae. With the tiny sandpaper tongue of a dog, he cleaned every scrap of sugar juice from my palm.

The effect was instant transformation: thorax pulsing, both antennae dancing.

With one quick flick, he flexed wings. They sprang apart, whirred to action.

And, in a blink, he took flight, soared twenty feet up and vanished around a corner of the roof.

This is a continuation of The Longest Day, on which I’ve temporarily lifted paywall. If you already read it, you’ll know I too have been plucked out of the river.

On a separate note, I just finished Travels with Charley, a long-deferred pleasure.

In it, there’s a great scene in the Mojave desert, where Steinbeck has two coyotes in the sights of his rifle. He aims at the heart of one, then the shoulder of the other—but in the end decides to let them live. He wrestles with his inner farm boy—they’re vermin, pests! Kill them, quick!—and puts away his rifle.

“When one man saves another’s life,” he writes “he becomes responsible for that life to the end of its existence. For, having interfered with a course of events, the saviour could not escape his responsibility.”

I owe the bee a lawnmower-free garden.

Steinbeck owed those Mojave coyotes a duty of care for the rest of their lives.

He left open two cans of dog food by the side of the road.

—

Today, it was sunny. I wanted to be outside. Joel wanted to sit inside on his laptop.

“We’ve had sunny days for thousands of years,” he said. “I’m reading about Svelte 51!”

I went for a run. At this time of year, the cow parsley is fading, desiccating to seed. It’s been replaced with pink star thistles and chicory, the “blue weed”. Plenty to keep a healthy bee busy. Meadow cranesbill, a type of wild geranium, splashes the lanes with purple and stalks of yellow agrimony—liverwort—intrude roadside.

Place agrimony under an enemy’s pillow and they’ll never wake again, says the plantlore.

So many people are already asleep, I think, no need for agrimony.

The crab apples and blackberry blossoms are fulling out, filling gaps in the hedgerows. There are massive webs of interlinked tunnels. Spiders, I think, but actually: the webs of moths, cocooned and waiting to emerge.

“Hello old friend,” I murmur to a stately oak.

—

I ended up at the posh coffee shop. It’s a place near me, the kind of spot with truffle fries and fishbowl-sized tankards of gin and tonic. There’s a languid contentment in the air. England won in the football last night. Women with thick ankles, hungover partners and blank expressions sit wondering what’s so special about the countryside anyway.

The first time I had a mental schism (that I know about) was during the pandemic. My ex-boyfriend and I were giving it one last go and he suggested we go to his mates for a BBQ. This was at a nice house on a nice street in a nice part of South London. The couple did some jobs I don’t recall—she was maybe in HR and he, a lawyer, like my ex?—and they had a small blonde child. There was a spread of olives and dips and hams on their shiny kitchen island.

It happened about an hour in, as I sat at the marble island sipping a fishbowl-sized G and T.

The three of them, the couple and my ex, morphed in front of my eyes. Their noses shrank, eyes narrowed to slits and voices to squeals. I could feel them pressing around me, all haunches, pink skin and bristly forearms. The other guy grabbed a wedge of ham and shoved it in his mouth, laughing. I watched my ex’s hand on his drink. There was something about his hands I never liked: red, stubby, perma-curved in the shape of a computer mouse. He was born in the year of the pig, I suddenly remembered, referred to his own children fondly as “piglets”.

He once jokingly told me that he wasn’t much of one for tidying. This was in the early days, before I saw it coming. He said the person in a relationship with the lower threshold for messiness should do the tidying. I shouldn’t be punished, he expostulated, just because I have a higher threshold for messiness.

I recognise it now as casual Twitter misogyny, some pearl of wisdom he’d scraped off some dubious online shore. Back then I just laughed and said, haha, I have a high threshold for messiness too.

Mine was much lower, turned out, than his. Surprise, surprise.

Anyway, they all stood there, laughing at something I don’t remember. I fled my body for a moment and sat on the glass roof above that kitchen island, looking down at myself with naked disgust.

This latest schism bears little resemblance to that one, save that it too involves a shedding of the parts that no longer serve. Then it was about how I spent my love. Now, it’s about how I spend my time.

The two are not unrelated.

What we spend time on, when time is so precious, is the highest expression of love.

_

Thoughts about how I spend my days are high on my mind. I suddenly have a lot more time.

When I was little, I thought my idea of heaven would be that you get to watch back a video of your whole life when you die and see everything again. You would only get to revisit what you had done in waking life so you better make it count. All those floats down the river on July 4th, all those hours playing with friends and in swimming pools and eating ice cream on a hot day.

Later, as a young woman, I still thought I’d get to live it all again: epic climbs in the High Sierras, powder days in deep snow, smoking weed under the stars. Train rides in China. All those hours of great sex, the butterflies, the early kisses, the orgasms. The better life you had lived, the more cool shit you had done, the better heaven would be.

Recently, I’ve been reconsidering. I don’t need to see some of my days again. Some things I don’t feel the need to watch back. I see them enough, when I don’t want to. Perhaps that’s what the fast-forward button was invented for.

Instead I’ve been thinking that maybe heaven would be my own personal archivist. Someone to come along a few weeks before my death, maybe with a tape recorder and a clipboard and a filing cabinet, and help me go through the Notebooks, pin relevant things together, date them, number pages in sequential order. It would give me a great deal of peace to put things in order before I go.

Jesus, calm down, I can hear you thinking. Melodramatic, what? You’re in your thirties.

This is true. All being well, I hope to be around for many more years—but the future is never guaranteed, is it.

Much misery is occasioned by worrying that no one will care about putting the detritus of your life in order. No one will care to make sense of it. Shoeboxes of notes and diaries will be spat on, hawked into the trash2.

A personal archivist is a pipe dream.3

When all the infinite depths and chasms of the mind blink out, all that’s left are the senseless scraps.

That’s what this newsletter is about, really. The question of what we leave behind perplexes me. I’ve written before how so often in life it feels like trying to grasp a long-forgotten thread. Call it whatever you want: collective consciousness; a past life. I don’t know either.

There’s no one sitting in the clouds with a projector screen and a tape reel, waiting to show me my highlights.

If a human lifespan is, from birth to death, a bridge through time, the only way to span beyond is to leave something behind.

The only way those moments come again is to write them down, read them back.

That’s why I write about my travels and my good days, in Vienna, Paris and Copenhagen. I write them so I can read them in years to come and live those days again. If the certainty that I have something to leave behind feels like misplaced confidence, well, nothing humans haven’t been doing for millennia.

Now feels like a good time to re-introduce my self, in all this life with all this litter.

I’ll try to keep it brief but I am not skilled at reducing myself to a byte4.

I’m Jill. I write about the things that happen to me, to give shape to the fluid mish-mash of life.

What am I interested in?

I’m interested in the past, and how we all write our stories, even if we don’t write them down. I feel like a parishioner of the past and often wonder am I its prisoner or its product. How much of it (or any of it?) is mine?

I’m interested in the grey matter around the edges of black and white. Often, I think the only truth is everyone’s conflicting truths at once.

I’m interested in the real world where things don’t line up or ascribe to definitions; the uncoded and uncode-able world where, no matter how many times you run it, the test won’t pass. I’m also interested in people who think only in Yes or No: those God-complex mouse-jigglers5 who think, if you burrow “deep enough in the shit to see the texture patterns”6, the real world can be coded like a computer programme.

Here’s the crux: if it can be, it already is.

So we may as well get out there and enjoy it instead of sitting inside, trying to replicate it again.

What’s changing?

Going forward, I’m going to be publishing more paid-only content.

I write a lot and edit pieces together like stitched cloth. I work hard at it. If you like what you get, if you read my pieces every week, or if you maybe open them more than once or maybe even just think about a line afterwards, please upgrade to paid.

It’s just me. I don’t have a team of assistants. I don’t pay an editor or a “brand consultant” (perish the thought) or a “content strategist” (NEVER). The closest I have to any of this is my long-suffering boyfriend Joel who suffers through reading all my pieces before I publish, bears my ire when he offers a pointed (correct) critique and edits my voice-over audio, because I don’t know how to do that. I don’t pay him, except in blowjobs (kidding! Kind of).

Often I feel that writing these essays saved my life—or at least saved me from a lifetime of lies.

When something saves your life, it owes you care in perpetuity for the intercession.

Please upgrade to paid and leave me the equivalent of a couple cans of dog food by the side of the road.

Subscribe now

6

Love everything about this phrase and image and concept, courtesy of the totally-not-run-of-the-mill , here:

Chris Best

Mills Baker messes with the Best

Enjoy the full conversation with my inimitable colleague Mills, 𝔄𝔯𝔠𝔥𝔢𝔱𝔯𝔬𝔫𝔢𝔰𝔰 𝔬𝔣 𝔒𝔟𝔩𝔞𝔩𝔦𝔞. Be sure to subscribe to his Substack, Sucks to Suck Shoutouts to David Cole, co-author of Sucks to Suck a.k.a. Rats from Rocks Thalia the Comedy Muse…

Listen now

2 years ago · 102 likes · 34 comments · Chris Best and Mills Baker

says the ad as I rise out of the bowels of Liverpool Street station. It’s for some green energy provider.

Money off today, it scrolls.

Greener rewards tomorrow.

I take it as a good omen.

—

There are two ambulances with flashing blues parked outside Liverpool Street station. Inside the station someone is having the worst day of their life. Out here in the sun, along the vomit-marked pavement sticky with food waste, everyone tromps past, eyes on phones.

Two girls outside the sushi place sip iced coffees and loudly compare notes on cage-training their dogs.

“At first she whined all the time.”

“Yeah, but now she’s used to it.”

Men in sunglasses and beer-stained shirts bowl past. Outside a pub, the window shutters are flung wide in the heat. There’s a nervy, febrile tension in the air. It’s 24 degrees and England are playing later.1 The drinking is in full swing in the heart of the City.

At the entrance to the office, before I revolve through the doors, a construction site is busy with clanking chains and swinging girders. Atop the metal frame, behind a wire mesh, a worker in a hard hat stands looking over the precipice.

He sees me taking a picture of him and summons a mate over and the two of them stand looking down.

I’m going to remember everything about this day, I promise myself.

This is the day I start to make a change.

My commute home last night coincided perfectly with the England v Denmark match.

I’m not a rabid football fan but I have a soft spot for the Three Lions. I think it’s their charmingly persistent inability to win a tournament. Either that or the 21-year old striker who is *extremely* easy on the eye and young enough to be my son.

Who can say.

Anyway, I streamed the match on my phone and updated the rest of the train carriage in real time when Kane scored and Denmark equalised.

The match was fraught. Denmark picked up a yellow card. It was tense. At half time, just outside of Oxford, the train manager came on the loudspeaker.

“This train is being held at a red signal. We have no further information at this time.”

Have you guessed the punchline?

There was a red signal because… all the signalmen and the train drivers and the conductors and whoever else it is that makes the trains move ineluctably forward wanted to watch the second half of the match. Obviously. Not a single train in the vicinity of Oxford station—to say nothing of the rest of the country—moved an inch between 45 and 90 minutes (plus three minutes stoppage).

The Euros shut the rail service down more comprehensively than a train strike.

Then, like clockwork, five minutes after the ref blew the final whistle of the match, the train continued on as if nothing had happened.

—

It’s a long cycle after the long train ride but still sunny at 8pm.

I love this time of year. The fields give the impression they might stay dimly lit all night. The cow parsley is too high to see over and nettles blush purple in the shade.

A long bike ride is a great way to join thoughts. I can’t stop thinking about a recent post I saw on Substack agonising over whether to choose art or growth.

Man, that post pissed me off.

I confess I didn’t get through the whole thing because it read like a sophomoric job application strained through a prism of whining entitlement but—really? Art or growth? That’s not a question.

Or rather, it’s not a question that would trouble anyone who is actually an artist. That question has a very obvious answer, if you’re an artist.

If you have to ask, you’ll never know.

The more interesting question, the one artists actually wrestle with, is this: art v Everything Else. Art v obligation. Art v the curtailment of personal freedom that necessarily attends not-art. Family. The ties that bind. Bills. Needing to put food on the table for children.

Those are the things that curtail art. Not pseudo-agony about growth stats.

If you are privileged enough not to have to worry about the important things—bills and food for children, I mean—MAKE ART. What are you waiting for? What are you agonising over? You want to “win”? You want the big number followers? I can’t fathom it. Why would you want to win by being inauthentic?2 I’d way rather lose being myself (which, incidentally, is fortunate).

Seriously though: what artist on the planet would choose 5,000 empty followers over making their art?

The real struggle isn’t whether to write War and Peace or clickbait. It’s compromising on things that really matter: the delicate compromise when it comes to art and family and job.

Do you know how the days drag when frustrated ideas sit untouched and that book doesn’t get any closer to written?

They drag, man.

Those days are long and slower than an unmoving train during a footie match.

I have spent ten years—every year of my son’s life—working to build a secure home and future for him. I have compromised a lot, because putting a roof over his head was more important than anything.

But, you know, we’ll be ok.

Art is not the compromise I have to make this year. Something else has to give.

And today, something did.

Happy summer solstice, pals.

Do you have a cave?

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.

⬅️ READ PREVIOUS

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.

If you make a mistake and do not correct it, this is called a mistake.

— Confucius, Analects, Chapter 30 of Book 15

Time is, frequently, not on my side. I don’t think I’m alone in this.

My ex-husband messaged me recently to ask how is it going with the divorce process.

Ah yes, I promised him I would take care of it. We’ve been separated for four years.

You read that correctly: four years. More than four years now, actually.

It is time for us to shuffle off this marital coil.

I made the online application. Paid £593 for the privilege. It’s clean, aseptic. No gunk or messiness. Simple questions. Do you want a divorce? Yes. No.

It took almost no time, in the end.

When I dropped my son with him on New Year’s Day, I told him it was all submitted. My ex-husband is a small man. I mean physically, not emotionally. He barely clears five feet and seems to be getting shorter every time I see him. I joked this morning that his almost nine-year old son, less than a head shorter than him, will soon overta…

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One minute it was there, the next minute it was gone.

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.1

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 ➡️

I’m on a train, watching the sun rise.

Actually, I’m just watching the sky whiten around the edges of navy cloud. Only in the very early morning, this reversal of sky and cloud. In an hour, each will have reassumed their accustomed colours.

I want to write this quickly so I can look out the window and sip my coffee. It’s getting light so fast.

The train is plush and empty; one of those European inter-city ones with an upstairs, wide seats and little lamps in quietly-lit carriages.

I almost didn’t get coffee. This train usually runs from a different station and no one in Gare du Nord seemed prepared to admit that, yes, there will be a train to Stuttgart. Mounting panic, coffee forgotten, I attached myself to the one person who seemed abreast of the situation: a German guy who understood the unintelligible loudspeaker and assured me, yes, there would be a train.

He was right: I’m on the train now and, yes, there is coffee. The fields to either side of the train are engulfed in fog as we head east.

I’m uneasy in this flat land; give me mountains, wrinkles and folds in the landscape. I can’t abide a yawning horizon.

—

On the train last week in London, a guy sat down opposite me in a four seater, dropping a bottle of Puglia Rossa on to the table. When I looked up at it, he threw down two bags of Percy Pigs.

“No, those aren’t for me.” He said it only half to himself, half because he knew I was watching.

Then: a bag of liquorice all-sorts.

“Those are for me.”

—

Well, this trip is for me.

That’s not true. It’s for what — and who — I want to write about.

It’s for a story that feels urgent to tell.

In this world of instant gratification, I hope you’ll bear with me. The kind of writing I want to focus on now takes time.

Luckily, this week, I have time.

This brief update is just to say I’m — probably — going to be quiet for the next ten days or so. Instead of talking and running my mouth as you know I love to do, I’m going to be listening. Specifically: I’m kickstarting research for that book I want to write. wrote recently about how it’s time for more long-form work; time to choose art over content. To this, I say: yes.

Instead of banging on in tedious self-exculpation about how much I want to write and don’t have time, I’m just going to… take some time and get on with it. No, I won’t tell you what it’s about or where I’m going. You’ll find out in due course.

That was basically all I wanted to say. Yet here I am sneaking in extra words, for the first time in the history of lawyers.

It’s time for a pause, for some research and thought. It’s time to drink my coffee and watch a frost-feathered landscape unfold before my window.

By next week, I will have reassumed my accustomed colours.

But, for now, there is a library on the other side of Europe that is calling — and I must answer.

Wish me luck.

*POST-FACTO UPDATE:

Rest of this journey detailed HERE.

Ongoing progress on my book logged HERE.

Who makes the money in your house?

That’s a real question. Think about it.

It might just be you.

It might be you and your partner (if you have one).

It might just be your partner (if you have one).

Or some other option?

Read more

“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 Atlantic1 with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI.2

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 wrote this gorgeous poem 2 and someone else wrote something beautiful about how finite our time is.3

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?4

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.

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 Maiklem1 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.2

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.3 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.4 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?