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

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

Of one of the coaches.

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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He had it easy.

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

Ready to cheat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It made him oddly selfless.

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

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

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

2018.

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Before that drink with Gabriel, I had to make it from the mountains to the city.

Back then, I didn’t drive and had time on my hands, a precious gift. I was on no one’s schedule, no boss to satisfy, no hours to bill.

Just hours to kill.

The train was cheap: for a seat in coach, just 200 bucks. I would read and knit. I would see the unknown, possibly mythical, states. Utah! Nebraska!

The train was an adventure.

Plus, I fucking hate to fly.

Rashly, I booked the cross-country ticket and, rashly, informed room mates I was leaving. That evening, Tyler lit the grill and we sat out back, watching stars lift out of the pine trees.

I told Sally the next day. Sally worked up at the ski mountain with me, in the gift shop.

She always said she could never understand why I wanted to work outside, in the snow and cold. I said I could never understand why she wanted to sit inside, in the mountains.

“I’m leaving,” I announced.

We were sitting in my room, knitting companionably. She thought I meant leaving as in leaving to walk up to the General Store to get something for dinner.

“Ok,” she said. “I’ll go with you.”

“Wait, what?” I was confused for a second.

“Yeah, just come get me in like 15 minutes. I’m gonna go masturbate and then we can go.”

Ah.

I explained I meant “leave” as in “leave June Lake, for good”.

She shrugged. “You still need dinner, right? Come get me in like 15 minutes, we’ll go get food.”

15 minutes wasn’t enough time, it turned out, because when I went to get her, she hadn’t quite finished yet.

—

That was the first time I did the cross-country Amtrak. I liked it so much I did it again, another three times.

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Sometimes I get the hankering.

You know the one: the hankering to fuck off into the sunset.

And disappear, because it’s all too hard and I’d rather be moving. I’d rather be on a train, in the passenger seat of a car, heading north and driving into mountains.

I’d rather be living a different life.

Away from all the people who love me, because it’s just easier to be alone sometimes isn’t it.

The antithesis of a room of one’s own is the family home.

I can’t disappear anymore, not like I used to: just pack my bag and be gone. That’s fine. We’re having building work done on the house. I’m a home owner these days, that’s all very interesting. When you own a house, it’s your final refuge, the place you get to keep the pointless tchotchkes and the boxes of drawings from when you were 5 (in the attic, so someone else will have to deal with them in years to come).

Being a homeowner means worrying about the mould and the damp and the crooked slate tile and whether that angle on the driveway is right and what to plant on a south-facing slope. It means I can’t just pack up my 35L pack (or the 60L if I really mean business) and disappear—sleeping bag liner, water bottle, books, notebook, camera, climbing shoes, three pairs of underpants and various technical pieces of clothing rolled into bologna slices.

My neighbour disappeared today. He doesn’t have kids, or a mortgage that I know about. He drove away in a Land Rover kitted out with a handmade wooden shelf in the back to sleep on.

As he was leaving, he hailed me.

“Hey, can I get your take on this? Does this look like a car with a mountain bike in it? Want to keep the thieves at bay.”

I had a look. There was a roof rack, with nothing on it but engine oil.

“No.” I said. “It looks like, if you had a mountain bike, it would be up on the roof rack. Is there a mountain bike?”

There was a mountain bike but it was cunningly hidden, in the car. He was pleased with my take.

And it was all I could do to restrain myself from climbing up in his passenger seat and saying, Jared, take me with you.

He’s going north, you see, to Scotland, to climb all summer and go to festivals in remote Scottish locations and do drugs probably and have sex under the stars.

Take me with you, I whisper.

—

When I get this feeling, there’s only one thing for it. Back to The Notebooks. Wring them out. There’s just so much in them, you see. Where were we? August 2008 right? Round about the time I was due for a scene shift.

—

I swear I’m getting back to August 2008 but first, some important business: it’s my birthday today and Joel’s getting me a new bike.

My old bike is a rusty three speed I inherited from an ex. It’s pretty slow and not very functional (kind of like the ex, come to think of it). That crappy bike was the most useful thing I got out of that relationship by a country mile. It’s definitely time for an upgrade, for my country miles.

We went to the shop to try to work out what size I am.

I told the lady in the shop I’m 5’10” and she wheeled out a bike that looked a bit small to my eyes.

Joel thought so too:

“I think that’s a bit small for her.”

“No, well, if she’s 5’10” she’s right on the edge. Could be this size or a bigger one.”

“I think the bigger one.”

“Hmmm. Have you got long legs?” She asked me.

“Yes.” It’s true. Most of my height is leg.

Joel chimed in. “Yeah, she’s got long arms and long legs but a short torso. Like a spider.”

Like a spider.

Like a spider.

That’s what he actually said. My boyfriend who loves me thinks of me fondly as a … spider.

I can’t say I think of myself as a spider. I don’t mind spiders, already mentioned I’m the member of this household perma-tasked with trapping-spider-in-cup-and-liberating-outside. But is it my spirit animal? Do I hard-identify with a spider? Not really.

I have an ex who did.

Actually, ex is a stretch. Older brother of a childhood friend I slept with once is more accurate.

He was an artist and his parents owned several floors of a building in TriBeCa. I guess they bought it back in the sixties when you could pick up old warehouses in lower Manhattan for a song and a dance. He lived in one of those enormous loft spaces with windows twenty feet high, decorated with his own art, somewhere below Canal Street.

I’d lost touch with Gabriel and his sister, Hetty, when we moved to Ireland when I was 12. I remembered he was attractive though. As a kid, he would rampage through Hetty’s room when we were getting changed. He’d come out to the pool and horse around with us in the deep end, pulling me under and pushing me off the side, then falling in on top of me.

Even when I was eleven, it was kind of sexy.

There was something about him. He was the one who told me later how much he identified with spiders, spinning their webs. He said it was an artist thing. I wouldn’t understand.

He was in the same grade as Luke (remember Luke?). Boy, was eighth grade full of cute guys. I wanted them all, didn’t even know what I wanted, just wanted to rub my face on them. But where Luke was knowable—popular, friendly, cool—Gabriel was unknowable. A dark self-regard and cleverness: he was clever, in the same, awkward way I was.

Luke was on another planet, the light-filled planet of cool people who knew how to joke around and talk to other people. Gabriel was dark, sarcastic and weird, like me.

So, like I said, we lost touch for years. It only happened again because of Facebook. Let me explain.

Have you ever read Slaughterhouse-Five? If you haven’t, let me suggest you put this down and go do so right now, as a much better use of your time.

Not for the plot (although this would be worth it too) but for the way Vonnegut tells a story: non-chronologically and dreamlike.

“All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist…. It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever… we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.”

Dreams are flashes to different times in a life. They could be flashbacks, or flash forwards.

If you’re seeing it in a dream, that’s because it has happened or it will happen.

And sometimes, you dream it and make it so.

What I’m trying to say is this: sometimes I have crazy sex-dreams about people I’ve never met. Maybe people I only know tangentially or by association. Isn’t that wild? I wake up and wonder why. Is it a lost memory? A throwback to a forgotten life?

Or is it a harbinger of things (forgive me) to come?

Which came first: the sex or the sex-dream?

Sometime in the summer of 2008, shortly after the car crash, I had a vivid sex-dream about Gabriel. It was weird because I hadn’t seen him since we were kids, hadn’t thought about him in years.

My first thought on waking was, huh, that was hot. I wonder what he’s up to now.

Well, reader, you’ve guessed where this is going. Thanks to newly ubiquitous Facebook, in summer 2008 it was a matter of a click or two. As if by magic, suddenly we were messaging. It was a matter of moments to find him, “friend” him and, no intense leap of imagination later, to fuck him.

Wow, long time, good to hear from you, what are you up to.

I’m living in California now but going to be passing through NYC for about 48 hours in a few days, off the Amtrak from Sanfran.

Drink?

—

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I grew up on skis. Let me explain.

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

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

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

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

It’s cold in winter.

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

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

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

Or you might just find an icy hill and build a booter1 to ride over and over again with your buddies, sharing beers and snowboards.

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

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

I grew up in this kind of a place.

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

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

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

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

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

I remember other things too, other pains.

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

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

“Make a wedge. Wedge, wedge, wedge.”

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

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

I couldn’t get enough.

I was flying!

Flying free and fast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is all context.

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

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

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

It was Luke2 (remember him?), followed by his then-girlfriend, the most popular, blonde and impossibly beautiful girl in my old grade. Watching the two of them, so sure about who they were on territory that should have been mine, was like a hot knife in the gut. I still wanted Luke, still, the same wanting from when I was 11, when he had blue hair and a lunch tray in the cafeteria.

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

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

But I digress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I said to my mom once “we’re so high” and she said there was a famous scene in a movie where someone jumped off that bridge.3 She was somber but I didn’t understand why jumping off a bridge into water would be a bad thing: it sounded like fun. I saw the older boys do it down by the river from our local covered bridge. It was fun. She explained terminal velocity to me. Hitting water from up high is like hitting concrete: bones shatter instantly.

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

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

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

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

It was Luke.

It was July 2006.

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

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

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

“What would I write about?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

And in winter, the ground is frozen.

People change so much too.

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

—

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

Here’s the Notebooks playlist on Spotify:

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Welcome back to The Notebooks. If you missed the last, this is where we were.

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

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

Song-match this piece with: Join The Dots by Roots Manuva (although actually — listen to the whole perfect album: Run Come Save Me).

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

Now re-opening The Notebooks to sometime in 2011….

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—

Sometimes, to tell a story, you must tell it out of order.

Between December 2010 and December 2012, I lived in Thailand, in a town in the northwest of the country called Mae Sot. It is pretty wild, on the border with Myanmar (Burma).

There’s a bridge over the river at the border — and a heavily-armed checkpoint on both sides.

This was about a year and a half after I finished my Masters, adrift, searching through the dying days of autumn 2010 for a job, any job, in the post-crisis wreckage. I was 25 and had worked lots of places — ski school, a coffee shop, an outdoors gear shop, renovating a William Morris-inspired wooden bungalow in Seattle, you name it — but I’d never had what you might call a real job, an office job.

Or anything close to it.

Then I got a bite after sharing a writing sample from my thesis — about literacy in first encounters with pre-Columbian cultures1 — with some guys who worked for an obscure human rights NGO on the Burma border. They liked my vaguely legal background (despite having never worked as a lawyer) and my ability to edit a sentence. They hired me — my first ever desk job — and I escaped New York winter for Mae Sot.

Mae Sot is quietly famous in the NGO world. It’s a well-known posting for public health and humanitarian workers, for migration experts, for malaria researchers, for UNHCR officials, for visiting diplomats, politicians and journalists.

Everyone there is hunting for the right by-line or soundbite or photo op or metric for their next donor report.

There are seven official refugee camps nearby — or nine, depending on who you ask. There are migrant schools, makeshift hospitals, political prisoner assistance programs — and NGOs, both local and international.

The local ones — including the one I worked for — operated with limited resources, in utmost secrecy, through networks of undercover field researchers across the border.2

Mae Sot is a Petri dish of the aid economy. It is a place where you must know the difference between a refugee, an IDP and a migrant worker — and how your programme supports one or the other. Where you must know what “subaltern” means and how to use it in daily parlance without sounding like a twat.3

Where you must be able to spot a sex tourist at fifty paces.

Over the border in Burma, where the real prize is teak or gold or rubies, various armed groups vie for control of patches of territory, cloaked in the language of self-determination or moral superiority.

The town is awash in money, most of it dirty.

—

But this part of the tale picks up after I’d already been living out there for many months.

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

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

Song-match this piece with: All I Really Want, Alanis Morissette.

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

Now re-opening The Notebooks to June 2006….

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It is a truth universally ignored that a single woman in possession of a large hangover must be in want of a string of small disasters.

I checked Facebook as soon as I got back to my room. Nothing from last night yet — but I know there will be. Tags, pokes, amusing photos from the nunnery. New in-jokes from the party in Cowley that I’m not party to.

I sighed. Post-Geoff, I felt bleary and fuzzy. A one night stand like getting erased, rubbed out. Perforated, edges unclear; spilling out through holes and oozing into others. Unsure where they stop and I begin.

Out of toothpaste too and damned if I’m going to meet everyone for breakfast without brushing him off my teeth first.

Glasses on. I usually wear contacts — putting them in making me more awake, sharpening everything — but this morning I just threw on my glasses and ran out of college towards Tesco.

Read more

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

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

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

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

Now re-opening The Notebooks to June 2006….

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He responded immediately.

Ping, went my little pink Nokia flip phone.

ye u

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

ye

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

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

jst walking bk frm Jericho

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

Come round

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

Where

He named a college, then:

4.7

He wasn’t being cryptic. 4.7 = room 7 on staircase 41 in his college.

Which is not my college.

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

I won’t be able to get in.

Ye u will jst tell the porter

Ignoring the red flag of his certainty that the porter will sort entry for late night female callers, I pitched up ten minutes later at his college lodge2. The night porter was embarrassed for me. Shoeless, filthy and still wearing Matty’s coat that smelled a bit like wee.

I pulled myself up and tried to maintain a scrap of dignity, waving my Bod card3 at him.

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

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

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

“Geoff. With a G.”

“Surname?”

No fucking clue.

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

He made the call.

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

Not everyone.

“No sir.”

A stern look. “Off you go then.”

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

“What is that smell?”

“What.”

“The smell.”

“I dunno. Come here.” He kissed me and tasted like vomit. I looked across his room. The sink4 was full of vomit.

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

“Yeah, so what? The scout5 will be round in the morning. Come here. Don’t be a dick.”

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

“Ow.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Stop. Ow.”

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

Still this same life.

Coming back, feeling like Princess Grace of Monaco.

“All set….”

The stench-filled room was quiet.

“… Geoff?”

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

I laid down and fell asleep pretty quickly too.

—

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

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

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

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

3. Stan. Years later, just saying his name in my head enough to feel the need to underline it with unnecessary force. Stan was a medic6. A boy, really, like a kid in a candy shop. Anyone with half a brain could see he was not boyfriend-material. I thought he was a worthy challenge, I guess, and he said he fell in love with my skinny ankles. Then he hurt me, over and over again, until I hurt him too. He is a doctor now, living in Australia or New Zealand or somewhere else equally far away from which he can’t return because he messed up his tax returns and owes HMRC several thousand pounds in back taxes. I heard he married an Australian woman whose ankles thickened after childbirth.

   Karma’s a bitch.

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

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

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

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

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

All this, while Zuck was feverishly coding the prototype.

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

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

I am a package of information about myself. I am a short-form self.7

Sell me things: sub-par, short-form things with no shelf-life and no substance. Everyone in Oxford: I am an Alpha8. I like theatre or sports or drum and bass. Give me matching friends, and matching stuff.

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

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

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

The gentle thunk of toads plopping into the river.

Corncrakes calling, and cut hay.

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

No messages. Everyone still asleep or … busy.

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

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

“Still wearing that coat.”

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

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

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

And he lapsed into quiescence.

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

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

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

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

These are not appealing choices.

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

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

My phone pinged.

It was Matty.

Breakfast? Ya tart.

—

➡️ NEXT

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

—

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

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

Song-match this piece with: Mumford and Sons, Little Lion Man. You can listen to the extra audio note in the audio recording if you want to know why.

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

Now re-opening The Notebooks to June 2006….

Remember how good it feels sometimes to be really shit-faced?

Just drunk and unshackled and on the cusp of 21 and free of exams and light as Prosecco bubbles, squirted all over you on Merton Street?

Feeling your whole life ahead of you. You can be whatever you want.

Imagining, with incalculable hubris: I am one of the chosen.

Two drunk guys push each other. They spin apart. One of them retreats ten feet and then retreats another twenty feet and yells “motherfucker” at the other, who is also retreating. His retainer or something plastic in his mouth falls out into the street. He walks out in front of a Thames Valley Police car to retrieve it. The cop cruises past uninterested. They’re out in force tonight, like the drunks.

There are flashing blue lights on Magdalen Bridge — someone drunk in the river, still in suit and bowtie, voluntarily, it seems — and there’s a press of people outside the Half Moon at the top of St Clements. Some still in sub-fusc (I’ll get to that in a minute) but bowties hanging loose now and stockings laddered. Cowley is a shit show, packs of roaming lads and half-dressed hags.

The light is that perfect late evening June light where the sun has set but the glow seems to have diffused out and got stuck in the leaves. It refracts dreamily off the Cotswolds stone, oolitic limestone quarried locally since the fourteenth century. The hollow of Oxford lies on a former seabed and all the stones were first laid down as carpets of shells in shallow interglacial seas. They retain a luminous opalescent quality. It’s still oddly bright, but in a purplish way.

The sky is usually low in Oxfordshire, a uniform dull grey under permanent cloud cover, but today the sky was high and blue. You’d never know we’re in the Midlands.

It was a nice day to be finishing Finals.

I’m not sure where more specifically than that we are now. We’ve roamed widely tonight and now we’re somewhere out of the city a bit, out past Jericho, a pub by the river that is done with us and really wants us to leave now.

Kind of like the whole of Oxford, really, come to think of it.

Read more

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

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

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

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

Now re-opening The Notebooks to June 2006….

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

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

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

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

If zen is the obliteration of the self, literacy may be its highest form of expression.

Hear me out.

Reading, you can obliterate yourself. It’s why I read what other people have to say about things that have happened to them. The more rich and varied perspectives I consume, the more I obliterate myself and my own limitations.

The anodyne is seldom recorded and, weirdly, I have always wanted more of the humdrum. I want to see life in all its quotidian blandness from another set of eyes. An obsession with historical fiction in my young adult phase, as if I could read my way into knowing what it felt like to be on the Mayflower, in Ancient Rome, a starlet in 40s Hollywood or a child in wall-building China. This has always been one of my bugbears when it comes to fantasy or a piece of fiction with cool world-building. Like, let me see more of what’s it’s really like, how it works. Spare me the dramatic narrative, the denouement. I want to spy on the humdrum and marvel at the everyday. I want to see what the post office looks like in Cicero’s Rome or what a casual lunch looked like in Gilgamesh’s Mesopotamia. I want to know what the markets along the Bosphorus smelled like two thousand years ago and what kind of shitters they had on Viking ships.

A prolific Substacker wrote recently about reading (most) books as a waste of time. Don’t want to read books? Think it’s a waste of time? Prefer to stay trapped behind one set of eyes only? Please. Spare me this parochial prisoner’s outlook. You need to zen out, mate. Get off the rat wheel and stop yearning for neat, tidy parcels of information that can be drunk like a smoothie, without moving from your desk, in the most efficient manner possible. Maybe step away from the non-fiction.

What about writing? Is that zen? Surely that’s not obliteration of the self. If anything, it’s the opposite: relentless naval-gazing. This may explain the impression I get that it’s narcissistic for a woman to write about herself (particularly outside the true life context of overcoming some gruelling adversity, learning tough life lessons, etc). As an aside, I have seldom seen men who write about themselves accused of the same narcissism (or, if they are, they are lionised anyway; ref Hemingway).

So, narcissistic. Unimaginative, I grant you, but narcissistic? I am necessarily hemmed in by one body and one perspective on the things that have happened to me. If I write about it, does that make me a narcissist? I would submit that the obliteration of the self in fact lies in writing about one’s self without ego or artifice. Presenting the experience of a life lived as a detached narrative, without any attempt to inflate, alter or enhance.

Simply put: these are all the things I did.

But, like I’ve written before, writing the truth about one’s own life — particularly when that life is a woman’s life — has its challenges. People seem to be much more comfortable with writers of fiction. Maybe fictionalising your life is the zen high-water mark; the real obliteration of the self into an invented self.

Who can say.

I aim for fiction, and sometimes fall short, lacking imagination, constrained to my one body and definitely not zen-like enough.

And, anyway, things can’t ever be recorded with complete fidelity.

—

Robert Macfarlane has written how walking the same piece of land makes it intensely familiar to you. Walking it barefoot makes it even more familiar.

The land I just wrote about in Town and Country, I could walk that, map it with my soles, barefoot, backwards and blindfolded.

I never walked barefoot anywhere in Oxford, except maybe once or twice walking home from a club, blistered and briefly shoeless. Despite its reputation for leafy quads, lush riverbanks and whispering meadows, Oxford isn’t a great place for walking barefoot. Lots of broken glass, smeared take-away remains and a really surprising amount of vomit that I have, at times, bolstered. Like the first night of Fresher’s week, splattering bright pink vodka cranberry all over the side of the Bodleian library, while my new friends looked on with glee.

Wondering how many generations of previous students had vomited just there in that exact same spot lent the occasion a touch of consequence.

Anyway, even though I seldom walked Oxford barefoot, with my French manicured toes, I can still map it.

Here it is:

Now, this Oxford has a few (many) gaps. Where’s the covered market? Where’s the High Street? Where are the famous colleges (Magdalen, Balliol)? Where is the pub in which Tolkien dreamed up his maps of Middle Earth or where Clinton didn’t inhale?

Who cares.

This map shows where a hungry student could get a square meal for a fiver (Hassan’s). It indicates clearly that the good nightclubs (the Zodiac and the Pleasuredome at Brookes) were out Cowley way and the shit nightclubs (aptly named Filth and the one above the Sainsbury’s in the old shopping centre) were out Botley way. It includes the prison library. It even shows where a dorky Harry Potter fan asked a 14 year old Emma Watson for her autograph on a McDonalds napkin one wintry night.

Maps are a representation of the world that, by definition, omits things. They don’t show everything; they can’t show everything. A map that showed everything would be as big as the world it mapped and would overlay it perfectly.

This is a map of Oxford circa June 2006, just as I was finishing Finals. It shows the things that were important to me then and omits the things that were unimportant.

I used mind maps a lot when I was studying for Finals. I’ve written before about what Finals entailed, how many essays we had to write. There were nine lever arch folders on the shelf above my desk when I studied for Finals, each about three or four inches thick. Each lever file was filled with single sheets of paper. Each single sheet of paper represented a single case, read in the library, with painstakingly hand-written notes listing out the facts, issues and judgments. The ratio decidendi — the reason for the decision — at the bottom was the summary, the single line summarising it all. The whole case condensed to a single page, then to a single line. 

A particularly knotty case could be 250 pages long — or it could be a couple pages. You couldn’t tell looking at the reading list how long each case would be until you got to the top floor of the college library and found the right journal. It was easy then to find the case you wanted because it was the darkly thumbed chunk of that journal — the only momentous judgment reported in October 1874 or whatever. More often than not, the key passages would already be underlined, starred, annotated by one hundred previous generations of college lawyers. That saved a lot of work. I loved the margin notes, always wondered who wrote them, what students before me looked like and thought like. All young men, of course, but that didn’t matter because I was raised on a diet of girls and boys are the same and anything boys can do girls can do and here I was at Oxford, universally male for a thousand years before me so wasn’t it true that we were all the same. I was the same as all those boys before me doodling in the margins of the English Law journals.

I always wondered if some generous philanthropist might take it upon themselves to replace and update the law journals with a brand spanking new set — or worse, just get rid of the hard copies completely and buy all the students a shiny log-in to a database with every case digitised. They would, at a stroke, wipe out the collective accreted work of thousands of Oxford law students over a hundred years.

Those darkly-thumbed mark-ups were like a crucial map through the case; how lost I would have been without them.

That was because we had to read every. single. case. And there could be thirty, forty, sixty cases to read each week. Multiplied by eight weeks of term. By the time Finals rolled around, that equalled about four thick inches of single sheeted case files.

I always found it so easy to read the cases though. The long elegiac verses of judges, kings of law, rolled off the page and hummed through my ears. Some of the facts were wild. Ever heard of R v Brown 1993? If not, your life is about to become measurably richer. And the decisions. Have you ever read a judge’s decision? Unless you’ve ever been a defendant, possibly not. Drawing on the greatest command of words and wit in the English language, the whole thousand-year history of English law from the Domesday book onwards is an exercise in finding the right thing that’s already been said before and saying it in a new way. Trust me, these people are masters of the written word.

In preparation for Finals, the only way to condense those enormous files of cases was a series of mind maps. This case -> another case -> another case. The whole map of Contract law flowered in my head, a series of one word reminders of crucial case to crucial case; the development of what precisely would serve to frustrate a contract; what to vitiate it, make it as if it never existed.

Here’s one of my mind maps from Finals:

Ok, not really. But you know what I mean.

Being a student in Oxford for me was a lot about words, and also about maps. It seems appropriate to write it in words and tell it with a map.

And anyway, writing is mapping too. Writing and maps go so well together. In the same way you can’t make a map with every detail, you can’t write everything that ever happened.

It would be as big as a life.

It’s why we don’t write about every single step of the way. It would be so boring if we did. Can you imagine?

Then I opened the dishwasher and I picked up the colander and hung it up on the rack, then I grabbed a few mugs and lined them up on the shelf. The dishwasher was still pretty full so I couldn’t load it yet. I wanted to finish loading it quickly so I could watch the last episode of Succession. I moved on to the cutlery drawer.

See? Flatlining just writing it.

You can’t cover everything.

Writing is wordsmoke; it creates a hazy shape and may impart a flavour, an aroma of a thing. But it is a simulacrum and will never be the thing itself.

Instead, we “select the data points that are consequential.”1

“Do you think in words?” Joel asked me recently.

“Do I think in words?” I am incredulous at the question. “Does the Pope shit in the woods? Of course I think in words. Have we met?”

He explained that some people think in words, others in pictures. He said he thinks in concepts and associations between concepts. Like a graph.

I can’t even imagine how that would look, let alone how I might try to think in a graph.

I think in words. My whole being is prismatic through words. I think in words, I play in words, I live through words.

There’s a game we play in the car with license plates. In the UK, license plates have a few letters for the area it’s from, a couple of numbers for the year and a few more random letters. The game we play is that you take the last two letters on the plate (the random ones) and have to come up with an 11-letter word that begins with the first and ends in the second. In the UK, everyone apart from the King needs a licence plate, so that’s a lot of random letter combinations to play with.

I think it’s really fun. And it’s not that hard.

Here’s one:

MR. Easy. That becomes “masturbator”.

Here’s another:

RD. Even easier. Reticulated. Reenervated. Rejuvenated. I could go on. There are so many “re” prefix words in the past tense.

Last one:

PC. Trickier. Mostly because of all the “photo” and “phil” plus “ic” words that go way longer than eleven letters. But eventually, I light on paranthetic (how I feel about some discrete stages of my life that can be boxed up separately) or peripatetic (a good descriptor for some of those stages).

I do this pretty quickly. Joel is not as good at it as I am. Words don’t work so well in a mind graph, I guess.

What can I say? Words are my life: they are how I make my living today. They are how I think about my life that’s been and my life to come.

I only got in (talking about Oxford again now) because I can write. Words fly into thoughts, thoughts to sentences, and the sentences string out and loop into one another like the arc of skis through snow.2

I remember realising I was uncommonly good at words when I was about 15. It was a year in which I did no work at all in school if I could possibly help it. This was Irish Transition Year, when you basically get to do whatever you want as you decide what you might like to do with your life. You go on lots of outdoor activity trips and do work experience and ruminate for months over subject choices. This, as a kind of chilled-out balm before the Irish Leaving Certificate (which is like English A-Levels but even more sadistic because you do at least six subjects, instead of three, and often more than six).

Anyway, I skipped school with abandon, faking sick note after sick note. A friend and I camped out at her house, eating her fridge empty and watching Jenny Jones.

Turn my Gothic Queen into a Normal Teen!

It Just Ain’t Right To Wear Clothes That Tight!

At 15, Jenny Jones was the best education I could imagine.

I still did the assigned reading though because, as you may have gathered, I like books. Our assigned reading was Brave New World, a novel I love to this day and still rate above 1984. Where 1984 is an indictment of totalitarian government, Brave New World lampoons class and affluence. Alphas with their skis and their expensive, overwrought leisure equipment; Epsilon Semi-Morons watching TikTok (or the 1920s equivalent).

I genuinely enjoyed it and wrote an essay about how much I enjoyed it.

Because of that essay, I got placed in the top set for English. Writing was easy. The sentences rolled neatly into each other and out came an essay. Another essay. And another, ad infinitum. Here’s me at 15, 16, 17 responding always with an essay on cue, a conditioned response, like Pavlov’s dog, if Pavlov’s dog wrote essays instead of salivated, each one neat as a pin, topped and tailed with references and rejoinders to the question. So easy. How could anyone find this hard?

Then a cover letter, and an essay under exam conditions at the beginning of December 2002 at a college in Oxford. The question was (and I paraphrase):

“Imagine there is a machine called the Experience Machine that you could plug into and program your entire life’s experiences, so you never need feel pain or hunger, only pleasurable pre-selected experiences. Now, write an argument in favour of abolishing the Experience Machine and an argument against its abolition.”

I started my pen off like an inky hare and got halfway through the second page before I suddenly stopped cold. My stomach plummeted. I checked the question again.

Now, spoiler: just to reassure you, I did it right.

But can you spot the obvious trap into which they were trying to lure interviewees who lacked the requisite attention to the *words*? I’ll tell you, in the footnote.3

Anyway, that’s my point. Words were what united us. Words, and our ability to use them. I was primed for a life wherein my chief value would be my ability with words.

Keep doing this, don’t I. Going adrift.

It’s just that, to properly explain July 2006, I need to explain June 2006 too.

Onwards.

Here’s your girl.

She’s sitting at her desk in staircase 21 at the back of college. It’s a Thursday night. Last night of exams. She is about to turn 21. Her toenails are French manicured, ready for a week of partying post-Finals. There are piles of flash cards and neat mind maps. A schedule of Finals pinned to the wall with blue tack, the subdued murmur from the college bar downstairs and the lights of the spired city over a shoulder out the window.

She doesn’t know who she is. She only has a vague idea who she isn’t. She knows she isn’t one of the Cool London Girls with skinny jeans and eating disorders. She isn’t into theatre, or drum and bass. Before Oxford, she’d never even heard of drum and bass. She doesn’t do coke; has never even been offered it. There are lots of classic movies she hasn’t seen until recently: A Clockwork Orange; Pulp Fiction. She’s vaguely preppy, in a confused, provincial and inauthentic way. She has started to experiment with skinny jeans (even though her heart stays with low rise bootcut) and she straightens her hair religiously. There are ragged nests of fried hair under her sink. She likes Krispy Kreme donuts, by the box, as a study aid and has, for months now, chosen a particular seat in the Law Bodleian opposite a cute guy. In fact, just yesterday she managed to talk to him for the first time and get his phone number. His name is Geoff with a G. He’s less cute up close when you talk to him — so many people are, aren’t they — but never mind.

He provisionally agreed to come out and party tomorrow night, post Finals. He told her he has his eye on an internship at JP Morgan next year in the City.

For such a smart girl, she’s really pretty dumb.

How do you make a town like Oxford your own? It belongs so completely to everyone else who has gone before, but of course, they didn’t feel like it belonged to them either.

There’s an iPod in a blue-glowing dock playing Sigur Ros and there’s a landline next to it that is ringing.

I snap back to myself. It’s Thursday 8 June 2006.

Throw down my notes. There’s no point anymore; at this stage, it’s just a comfort thing. Like a soother, a worry stone, Catholic prayer beads. Turn them in your hands and recite: “Quistclose trust …. remoteness of damages …. indirect loss”. The mind maps set off a chain reaction in my head, like a lit fuse, tripping down all the right neural pathways.

It’s Matt. Matt is my friend who also lives in staircase 21. He came dead last in the room ballot so ended up with a crappier room lower down the staircase and without the view. I assume he’s been studying too. It’s what we did. And drank.

“Let’s go to Hassan’s.”

We walked the fifty metres or so to Hassan’s. It’s the nearest kebab van, a haven of warmth and chip fat on Broad Street.

“What will you have darling?”

“Chips and cheese. And hummus.” I can’t make up my mind. “And beans and an egg on top.”

“Barbecue sauce?”

“Yes please.”

Matt is restless. “Should we look in to the champagne and strawberries evening the Law Society is putting on?”

“I can’t drink tonight. Last night. And the Law Society isn’t putting it on. It’s sponsored by Freshfields.”

“I thought it was Fieldfisher?”

“Nah, Fieldfisher did the Fresher’s week drinks in Freud’s.”

“Oh right.”

How do you make it yours? How do you define it? You don’t. You move through it and have the same experiences as everyone else. Probably you have sex with the same person as everyone else and contract the same STIs too.

Or maybe that’s just me. Because my first boyfriend had his merry way with anyone he pleased on the nights out in sticky-soled nightclubs above the big Sainsbury’s in the Westgate shopping centre. Mornings after, when he was nowhere to be found and no one meeting my eye, I would ask innocently “where’s Stan?”

And then you blink and it’s time to go. Like the lights coming on at the end of Indiana Jones but Harrison Ford hasn’t chosen his goblet yet. You haven’t quite managed to grasp the right cup yet; the one that assures you of immortality. Surely it’s somewhere around here but you’re not quite sure where. Maybe it’s in Piers Gaveston but you wouldn’t know because you weren’t cool enough to get a ticket slipped into your pidge.

We walk back to college. He’s eaten his chicken burger and is starting on chips and beans.

“Are you sure you don’t want to get a drink? Just one, calm you down?

“I’m calm. And it’s 10 already, I should get an early night.”

“Ok. Smash it. See you on the other side.”

That reminds me.

“Hey — don’t forget what I said about tomorrow. You promised. No eggs, no ketchup. Flour is fine but don’t get it in my hair.”

He rolled his eyes and grinned.

“Come on, you promised. I want to go out tomorrow night and I don’t want to spend my first free hour post-exams blowdrying my hair. Please Matty, you promised.”

“Jesus, fine, I’ll try not to get it in your hair. You know Tim wants to smash an egg on your head though. I can’t be held responsible for him.”

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

If you’re coming in fresh, The Notebooks is a piece of long form writing, based on a true story, served in weekly instalments.

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

Song-match this piece with: Avett Brothers, Famous Flower of Manhattan.

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

Now re-opening The Notebooks to July 2006….

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Did you grow up in the country?

I did and I think there’s a big difference between country folk and city folk. I don’t mean where you live now, I mean where you grew up.

I’ll try to explain the difference.

I heard a woman yesterday on a street at dusk near Hyde Park in London:

“I don’t know which direction to go!”

Her friend turned her around, laughing.

“Not that way! Looks like a forest over that way.” It was the edge of Hyde Park.

They turned back onto a busy London road. “Let’s go this way, there are more lights.”

There were also these two schoolboys I overheard on a train in London once.

“Cows are dangerous, you know.”

“I know, it’s true. Cows kill people.” 1

“They do. I’ve been lucky. I was in a field of cows once.”

“I think you could probably outmanoeuvre a cow though.”

“I don’t know. What if it came running at you?”

“Yeah, no, not in the open. But, like, in a forested area. I bet you could outmanoeuvre it in a forested area.”

“Yeah, or maybe near a forested area because then you could run into the forested area?”

“That would be risky though. Maybe just don’t get yourself in that situation. Don’t aggravate cows.”

I wonder if one of these boys in Westminster School uniform will grow up to be the kind of man I see driving a pristine Land Rover down the middle of the lane, afraid of scratching his car on a blade of grass.

What I’m trying to say is this:

If you grow up in the city, it shapes how you see the world, just like it shapes how you see the world if you grow up in the country.

“A country girl can’t be made out of anybody here.”

(The Avett Brothers, Famous Flower of Manhattan)

It’s quite hard to pin down what I mean by “country”, especially for readers in the UK. In the UK, the “country” could mean a leafy part of Surrey, perhaps adjacent to a field, maybe frequented by the occasional wandering deer — but no more than fifteen minutes from a mainline rail station that will get you in to central London in half an hour.

That is not what I mean by country.

Country to me means long grass, so tall you can hide in it for hours and, when you run through it, your legs get wet all over from spit bugs.

It means spending all summer barefoot, never once touching concrete, and knowing which patches of grass need to be jumped because they hide red ant nests.

It means knowing which apple tree is the easiest to climb and which has the best apples (not the same tree, obviously). It means knowing which banks of the pond are the steepest and hardest to climb out of.

It means knowing where there is edible watercress, where the leeches congregate and where a sofa-sized polypore is threatening to engulf a neighbouring tree.

It means knowing where there are blackberries and where each trail in the woods goes.

It means the sound of cicadas at night and nothing else at all, because there are no neighbours, no motorways, no busy flight paths, no sidewalks and no street lights — not for miles and miles and miles.

There isn’t much in the UK that I would call country really; it certainly doesn’t start until you get past commuter distance to London and by then you’ve already entered commuter distance to Birmingham, and then Manchester after that, and so on, until you hit the sea. Sure, there are some remote bits. Scotland, absolutely. Some parts of Wales, yes. Shropshire, maybe, and Yorkshire and bits of central Devon and Dorset too.

The thing is though that most people in the UK tend to cluster; they live in little villages huddled together as if for warmth, even when the fields extend in all directions. The only people who live unhuddled in the country in the UK tend to be vastly wealthy and live in palatial manor houses on thousands of acres of land that were often the product of dubious enclosures and the colonisation of the common land since the Industrial Revolution.

They hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
Yet let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.

So goes a famous 18th century English countryside rhyme about the theft of the old common land that you may have heard before. The enclosures may be why everyone is so huddled, never mind that the country was already pretty diminutive to begin with.

Come to think of it, the vast tracts of available land in the States that allow people to grow up in the kind of rural idyll I described above were also stolen, also (mostly) since the 18th century.

Where I grew up, getting leeches stuck to my feet in the NY-Vermont borderlands between the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks, was Mohawk country.

Many parts of the local forests, high lands, creeks, marshes, and fields around Saratoga Springs are old familiar places for Mohawk, Mohican, Oneida, Abenaki, and other Native families from around the Northeast who have long ancestral memories of being here. The oldest evidence of Native homesites and travelling camps dates back at least 9,000 years.

(Bruchac, M. (2007). Native Artisans and Trade in the Saratoga Region. The Saratoga Native American Festival Program, 27-28. UPenn archive.)

9,000 years. Imagine how well you’d know the ant nests and blackberries in a patch of earth after 9,000 years.

But I digress.

The point is that I think it’s pretty formative, whether you grow up on concrete or in suburban grass or jumping ant nests in a field.

I remember going to visit cousins in the city and being floored by the riches of having a corner store within *walking* distance of the house — but also mystified by the fences separating one patch of earth from an identical patch in the neighbour’s yard. Touching gravel in a playground and being struck by how artificial it felt — chalky, dusty, chemically-treated — not at all like the soft mud and rocks at home.

I moved to the suburbs when I was twelve — a trauma from which I never fully recovered — and made friends who had grown up in Dublin semi-detacheds or in UN compounds in Nairobi. They all knew how to ride the bus and walk to a McDonalds. I didn’t. I learned, sure, and I can fake urban acclimation with the best of them but still today I am deeply uneasy in a crowd. Still today I can name most of the trees (although I’m not so good with an English hedgerow as I am with an Appalachian hill).

I am, and always will be, a country girl.

And, being a country girl, I am partial to a country boy. That is just the way it is. Don’t @me.

I’m not the only one to have noticed there is something a bit different about country folk.

That long loping stride all country men have…

Roald Dahl, Danny the Champion of the World

It’s in the walk.

I can tell from your giant step you’ve been walking through the cotton fields.

Old Crow Medicine Show, Down Home Girl

This is why it makes sense to me that my first memories of Luke* are all of him walking. I remember passing him once in a deserted school hallway, nervous and excited to be alone in a hallway with him even though we just walked past each other and he barely looked at me. I remember him walking across the cafeteria, two years ahead of me — always in 8th grade in my head, to my dorky 6th. More clearly than kissing him in 2006, I remember his face in 1996.

I was 11 then, a raging bag of hormones, raging that he wasn’t on my school bus route because the school bus was the only way to get to know or even speak briefly to the older kids. Everyone from kindergarten up through 12th grade was on those buses — but only if they lived on your arbitrarily drawn route. He wasn’t on mine.

He had an earring at 13 and I remember the day in fall ’96 or early ’97 when he came to school with blue hair — because, grunge — and always the baggiest jeans with a silver keychain in the pocket and the slightly squinty-eyed, high-cheekboned, always a little tanned face that age 11 I just thought exquisite. More than a bit Native American — Cherokee, he later told me — incongruous with light brown hair, lightened by a life outdoors. Only a few images are burned into my mind, of the boy at thirteen, and the man at twenty-three. In the cafeteria, which was the only time I ever had occasion to see him; the baggy skater pants he wore; that day he died his hair bright blue. Those images never change since I don’t have the real-life counterpart to write over the old story. So I watch them over and over again. He carries his lunch tray to the same spot, he jokes with friends in the same cafeteria lunch line forever. He smiles at me from across a bar somewhere in upstate New York, forever. 

That’s going much further back than I meant. I only meant to go back to July 2006.

Why does it matter? Because all the pieces matter.

In July 2006, the girl with the mosquito bites and the hard-soled calluses was almost dead.

Before she went back home, she was a different person entirely and had almost forgotten what it felt like to walk barefoot in the woods.

She didn’t walk barefoot anywhere. She had French manicured toes.

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

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On a hot afternoon in late July 2006 on an Amtrak train between Albany and Penn Station, I was sitting behind a woman watching a movie on a laptop. She had a blanket over her despite the heat.

After a little while, I became aware that she was masturbating under it. I know. Right there on the train. It was really weird. I had seen men masturbate in public — most notably, the man with a hood over his face who wanked at me and a friend in our school uniforms through the train station railings when we were 15 — but never a woman.

But this was unmistakeable. The blanket was moving up and down and, let’s be clear, I’m pretty familiar with the act in question.

So I got up and went to find the conductor. I found him in the gap between the carriages and told him a woman was masturbating under a blanket in the next car.

His uniform was rumpled and his face sweaty in the hot afternoon. He looked me up and down.

Did you like it? He asked.

Now.

Stick with me, because there’s a point to be made here.

Kathleen Jamie has written — beautifully, pithily — about the Lone Enraptured Male genre of nature writing exemplified by Robert Macfarlane. I would extend it to include travel writing more broadly (see for example Paul Theroux, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Bill Bryson, the list goes on). The Lone Enraptured Male is everywhere.

There aren’t so many Lone Enraptured Females. And that is because, mostly, the Lone Enraptured Female doesn’t exist. She isn’t alone — or if she is, she isn’t enraptured. She is rapt, scared, smiling for her life.

Just like I smiled at that disgusting train conductor.

It might also be because women are more inured to people-pleasing, and people don’t like to be written about. It interferes with their perceptions of themselves, to read about how they might be perceived by others. We don’t want to upset anyone and there are things people don’t want to read about themselves.

Who dropped the ball; who let us down. Who’s into pegging. Who cheated on who and exactly how.

It must be why people who write like this travel a lot. Because it’s easier to write about an encounter with someone you met in a market in Istanbul — a superficial, general encounter — instead of a messy intimate encounter with a person who remains in your life.

So we avoid the messier bits, the bits that might offend.

What then to say about yourself where it necessarily intersects with others?

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” Muriel Rukeyser

I’m obviously not the first to wrestle with this. In self-portraiture, how to do battle with self-censorship? How do we quantify a life?

I have 25 T-shirts that I keep carefully folded in a drawer but almost never wear. They carry sentimental weight, like the polyester sporty tee branded with the name of the gym where I did yoga when I lived in Thailand or the June Mountain ‘07/’08 season employee long-sleeved T-shirt that I will sleep in, until one of us falls apart.

But T-shirts can only tell us so much.

Is it how many pairs of shoes I have? I’m not sure. Maybe ten or twelve? Plus four pairs of climbing shoes and a pair of ski boots.

Is it my secret number? It’s 28. I think it’s 28. I hope it’s 28. Maybe it’s 29. I can’t really be sure.

It’s hard to write the kind of history I’m after. Which is no more and no less than the truth of a life, give or take.

“Does it change the way the world feels?” I ask him. “Knowing that 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second, that countless such particles perforate our brains and hearts? Does it change the way you feel about matter - about what matters? Are you surprised we don’t fall through each surface of our world at every touch, push through it with every touch?”

Christopher nods. He thinks.

“At the weekends,” Christopher says, “when I’m out for a walk with my wife, along the cliff tops near here, on a sunny day, I know our bodies are wide-meshed nets, and that the cliffs we’re walking on are nets too, and sometimes it seems, yes, as miraculous as if in our everyday world we suddenly found ourselves walking on water, or air.

And I wonder what it must be like, sometimes, not to know that.”

(From Robert Macfarlane, Underland)

I’m feeling like the cards of life got shuffled and re-dealt and this is a good life. That is as miraculous as walking on water, or air.

But it could have been another way. There were so many improbabilities.

Come with me as I squint into memorial recesses. The old life slides out of focus and the new one sharpens.

It’s early 2010, the middle of the recession.

I’ve just finished a Masters in London. I did it by default because it was the only one that let me defer twice.

I needed to defer twice because I was fannying around California, on trains across Asia and then back to California again.

And I was fannying around there because, as I’ve already explained in an earlier piece about a fancy dinner, I failed to get a first in Finals and, because of that, my postgrad plans changed pretty abruptly. So, after Uni, I sprayed applications around at alternative grad schools and flew as far as I could, to Seattle.

That was November 2006. While my mates were making progress on Their Careers In The City Of London and partying and being bright young things, I was riding a Greyhound bus down the West Coast.

One of my friends in London posted on Facebook: “Saoirse Davison now lives in a house with 5 iPods, 2 MacBooks, 2 iPhones, 1 iPad... and one iPhone4”.

I had no phone and I slept on the floor in Sacramento central bus station, hugging my backpack and waiting for the bus to Reno.

I spent that first winter in Mammoth Lakes, CA, manning the chairlift to get a free ski pass and doing minimum-wage evening jobs — bussing tables in a Mexican and behind the counter in a Chinese take-away — because they afforded the most ski time. I ate cold spring rolls and refried beans. I skied every single day.

I spent the summer in Seattle renovating an arts-and-crafts bungalow in a newly-trendy neighbourhood. Then I flew to Riga and took trains (and eventually buses) to St. Petersburg, Moscow, Irkutsk, Ulaanbatar, Beijing, Pingyao, Xi’an, Chengdu, remote Sichuan, remoter Yunnan, and then down through Laos and Thailand.

I ended up back in California again.

At Burning Man in August 2008, the theme was The American Dream. I covered my $300 ticket by volunteering stints at the central coffee shop. A customer heard I didn’t have a Playa name yet and dubbed me “Cloud”. He said it was for my soft cloud of hair, which I liked because my hair has been my life’s albatross. When I was ten, kids at school used to call me “Bush” — so Cloud was a definite improvement. I drank balché and tried MDMA for the first (and only) time. I rode a bike (this bike), topless with painted tits. I climbed big sculptures high above Black Rock City.

The Man burned and, next month, Lehman imploded. A mate at Barclays Capital back in London got fired in spectacular fashion after losing 250 million in one day. The girl on the front page of the Times — the poster-girl for the Crash in London — carrying her sad little box of possessions out of — somewhere, was it Goldman? — I recognised her. I knew her from from The Bridge, a student nightclub in Oxford. She had been in my year.

When I finally started my twice-deferred Masters course in London in October 2008, days after Lehman, the tutor at the introduction said:

“This is the fullest intake we’ve ever had. There must be something about a financial crisis that just pulls people back in to acadaemia.”

Everyone in the room chuckled. Fresh from California and Burning Man, I remember laughing nervously and thinking: what financial crisis?

So February 2010 found me post-Masters, not gainfully employed, no career, no plan. Working for minimum wage as a sales assistant in the Snow and Rock branch in Covent Garden and living in my boyfriend’s mother’s house in North London on the same street in Muswell Hill as a house engagingly nicknamed The Murder House, for obvious reasons.

That should just about bring you up to speed.

It’s February 2010. I am restless.

London feels like a bad fit, like a dead end. My boyfriend doesn’t understand but I feel…. restless.

California is calling and I want to go back.

But, wait.

Stop.

That is skipping ahead. That is skipping way, way ahead.

We need to go back more.

We need to go all the way back to that hot afternoon in July 2006, a week before I got my Finals results and just after I had fallen in love — for the first time.

—

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I often hear people ask what would you tell your younger self? What wisdom would you impart?

I’m not at all sure this is the right way round.

Growing older strikes me as an act of forgetting, so why should I have more answers now, the older I am? I don’t even know where my keys are.

I actually think it’s my younger self that has all the answers. She was a master of juking the system. I find myself outwitted by the system, effortlessly outmanoeuvred and so deeply enmeshed I wonder if it’s not too late to escape.

I’ve always known that my younger self has the answers, because she has written prolifically to her future selves. That is, to me. I have written ahead, to myself.

When I was 16, I wrote to my 26 year old self.

When I was 27, to my 37 year old self (because I didn’t find the 26 year old letter til I was 27).

The most recent, written a few months ago to my 47 year old self.

The writing-letters-to-our-younger-selves thing in contrast strikes me as hubristic, and a bit depressing. Hubristic because, again, I am not convinced I have more answers than my younger self. And depressing because, even if I were to write to her, my younger self is gleaning nothing from it, trust me. She’s already long gone.

At least my 47 year old self might get something from last year’s letter to her (which is a stern kick-in-the-butt and a call to action so let’s see if she listens).

Also, and maybe this is the key point, I’m really not convinced I’m getting older and wiser.

And, for this, I blame my phone.

I know. Another technophobe! How thrilling! How original!

It’s true though. I have a very unhappy relationship with my phone. Last year I tried to get rid of her and go back to the Nokia I had when I was 14 (the one with Snake!). That lasted about three hours, and an SMS that, despite being only about four sentences long, had to be sent in three different texts. Now sending 1/3….. now sending 2/3…

Back to the iPhone then, with not a small amount of resentment.

To take you back, just by way of context, I was very late to the smart phone party. While everyone else was cruising around on Twitter and Tinder as the ‘10s dawned, I had an old flip phone — calls and SMS only. It was bright pink and super basic. I cycled through different numbers, networks and SIM cards on it, across at least three continents. It did the job it had to do and never once did I wish for it to do anything else.

When I moved to Burma in 2013, I needed a new phone, which had to be compatible with my new (to me) Myanmar Telecoms SIM card. Those were the only SIM cards that were then permitted on Myanmar’s frayed, ancient and tremendously overstretched network. No one had a “handphone” (as they were charmingly called) except for the military and the odd foreigner (mainly, me) and those grubby SIM cards were a rare, precious currency. Mine cost me $2501 — a bargain I was assured, the price had been two thousand a mere six months earlier — and, to acquire it, I had to taxi with an actual SIM card broker to a far-flung alleyway near Shwedagon pagoda and hand over a stack of crisp starched US dollar notes.

But that’s a tale for another time. I bought the cheapest phone I could find to go with my very expensive SIM card and that Huawei was my first “smart” phone. While there was nothing very smart about it, it was the first time I had a phone with a built-in camera and that felt wildly revolutionary at the time — goodbye digital camera! Goodbye constantly deleting photos to make space! — but way less revolutionary when you see the grainy thumbnails it produced and also, Burma in 2013 was not a particularly useful place to have a smart phone. There was no 3G, wifi was almost universally non-existent and Uber and Deliveroo may as well have been on Jupiter.

It wasn’t until 2015, after my son was born, that I moved back to London and my sister gave me an old iPhone she had kicking around.

Lo, suddenly I became a smart phone user.

My god, was it useful. I could read one-handed while feeding a child. I could order take-out. Answer emails. Scour Rightmove. Find my way around London via the most optimal possible route, updated live in real time. What did I do before this?! How did I navigate from one side of London to another with just a mental tube map? How did I eat?!?

But, with great power comes great carelessness.

Because why remember anything or write it down when I can just google it?

Why not keep 300 tabs open in case I ever need to refer back to anything ever again!

Now which tab was that thing on?

Never mind, I’ll just google it again.

Hang on, I have a notification. I’ll just respond to this message.

[Breaking news on the New York Times].

[Uber surge].

[Your screen time is up 870% from last week].

What was I googling?

See? My mind became lazy. This is why older me has no more answers. My mental tube map is long gone. I can barely remember which line Finsbury Park is on. (I lie. Victoria. And maybe Piccadilly?)

I'm allergic to modern life. I hate my phone. I am aware that this is the anti-tech-backlash-Luddite tale of our time and it is hardly ground-breaking.

But still.

I refuse to concede that Insta has determined what my story is.

I will not bow to the hubris of thinking I (older, wiser) have all the answers now (even though I *literally* do have all the answers, right now, on Google, at my fingertips).

Luckily, I have a colossal stack of things I wrote down before smart phones stole my brain. A gift, from my younger self.

The Notebooks2 is me, mining them for her wisdom.

Anyway, that’s the plan. To mine the morsels from my pre-phone brain.

If I can remember it.

I’ll just make a note on my phone.

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

People that get in our way are like pebbles in a river. They force us to alter course and, over time, crunch through an island or forge a new path through some scrub.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez says the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love. I would build this out slightly. The invincible power that moves the world is unrequited everything; not just unrequited love but unrequited dreams, unrealised plans and unfulfilled potential. And, sometimes, the people who get in our way.

Let me explain.

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