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

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

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

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

Big book energy as the new big dick energy.

Big book brandishment as a competitive act. Competitive reading.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was incredulous. “No way.”

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

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

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

“Wait, really? That was his name?”

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

“No. What a cool name.”

He was quiet for a moment and we walked on.

“I wish my name was Hurricane Milton.”

—

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

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

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At a wedding last weekend, an old friend asked me:

Why are so many Irish people great writers? Or so many great writers Irish, whichever way around you like it.

We were talking about Claire Keegan.1

I said it’s because of a deep shared history of trauma, silence—and shit weather.

It makes sense. Think about it.

Ireland is the *perfect* place to be excessively literate. It basically rains every day of the year.2 Who wants to be outside when it’s pissing down. May as well stay indoors, with a book, in front of your laptop (or, you know, your ancient lambskins and stone-ground inks).

I’m noting this from the giddy—albeit brief—heights of summer in the English countryside. I have lots of tumbling thoughts but who can be arsed to sit inside and record them. It’s sunny.

I’m writing from my hammock right now. We live in a cathedral of trees. Wood pigeons fly around the rafters and alight on the architraves. I can hear their calls, rustles and flutters. Sometimes, laying here in my hammock, in a thick stew of insects, languid summer heat, I close my eyes.

Time falls back and the heavens scroll. Houses, the whole village, melts away. There, in a high wooded valley saddling minor uplands, is me: for the briefest of moments, suspended in the fulcrum.

I expect that autumn will, as it always does, bring a surge of productivity. That’s great because this month I’m off to visit some archives. Come autumn, I expect to be flush with material. For now, it just circulates and percolates.

We are surely only decades (if that) away from live thought-streaming, as a more efficient mode of sharing the long form self. The longest form self is surely some clever behind-ear cerebral plug-in that sidesteps writer’s block and purges thoughts straight to paper, to screen, without this tedious typing interface.

In the endless drive for efficiency, this is surely only moments (historically speaking) away.

Or perhaps not.

Joel likes to talk to me about motion capture, like for characters in video games. Before I met him, I never knew they hired actual actors and actresses for this, wearing detectors, like when they filmed Andy Serkis for Gollum all those years ago.

Joel tells me mo-cap (you’re allowed to call it that if your boyfriend is a software engineer who calls it that) is hard because software doesn’t understand the impact parts of the body have on one another. Software still can’t map the physical reality of a human.

So, in motion capture, hands pass through each other if pressed or hair cuts straight through a shoulder.

3D models sieve each other.

I want to sink into and through Joel sometimes but I can’t. In this world, we remain solid and impermeable.

My hammock too holds my solid form, stops me slipping through a diamond gridwork of ropes.

So, maybe live thought-streaming is still aways off. Mapping thoughts still just a job for these typing, rattling fingers.

Thunderstorms are forecast today, to cut the heat.

Cycling into black clouds, an urgency to get home and beat the rain.

A flock of rooks jabber peevishly. I look up to them and a bug—small, black—flies straight into the juice of my eye.

I can’t stop. It’s about to rain. The bug swims around on the pool of my cornea, heightening the urgency.

Cow parsley against the black clouds tug at the sky like upturned parachutes. Sails exhaled to catch the swelling breeze.

For just a moment, it’s hard to tell what moves through what.

For just a moment, I will stay in the hammock.

I will rest in the fulcrum, stopping the quick march of the seasons, letting them trip me up, and pass through me, so I can luxuriate in them.

And now, a book review.

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro.

I’ve just finished this book. It’s a masterpiece. If you haven’t read it, go do it now.

[NB: All of my book reviews will start like this. This is because I don’t finish books that I don’t love. Life is too short to read shit books. If it hasn’t got me by page 40 (sometimes page 20 or even 10, in really dire cases), it’s gone. Also, this is a book review, so I will discuss the plot and what happens. Spoiler alert—obviously.]

Anyway, The Unconsoled.

Many people try and fail to read it, let alone love it. My friend who recommended it said some people really hate it. It makes them angry.

I can understand why. It is a stressful read.

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The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied.

- Stephen King, The Gunslinger

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I’m really angry about the pub. Not sad-angry. Not cute-angry. Not quick-temper angry.

Rage-angry.

Slow-building, simmering, volcanic-caldera-when-the-gates-of-hellfire-open-and-weep-brimstone angry.

Everywhere I turn, I’m told: let go, relax, release your anger. Be at peace.

Accept your own futility.

And I get angrier.

It’s been awhile since I offered an update on the pub, hasn’t it?

That’s because I have no update to offer on the pub.

The pub is silent, the pub is still closed. It is coming up to a year of no pub.

What happens to an old building like this when it lies empty? It rots, slowly. Rainwater erodes slates and the kitchen roof folds in on itself. The building’s caretakers do nothing. Customers go elsewhere and forget it.

The world moves on.

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Sleep shall neither night nor day hang upon his pent-house lid.

He shall live a man forbid.

Come with me on my commute to London this morning.

I get up early, while it’s still dark. My new watch buzzes me awake at the wrist without waking Joel.

I’m trying to minimise how much I use my phone. The watch is an experiment in digital minimalism — except it’s a digital watch, so all I’m really doing is shifting attention from one device to another.

Joel spends a lot of time on his phone. To him, it’s a useful tool that helps him focus on the things he’s most interested in.

“It’s amazing we can store all of this stuff on stones. Smart phones are just smart stones.” He says, quoting Jobs.

To me, it’s a distraction glass, pluming out smoke and mirrors, conjuring up empty tasks that get in the way of fruitfulness.

It hurts my cramped, rigid hand to hold it for so many hours of the day. I imagine in a few years there will be som…

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

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

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

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

But the thing is we really do disagree about AI.

I don’t… like AI. I don’t trust it.1 I have yet to be impressed with its output, apart from in language translation. Everything I read from ChatGPT sounds like plausible word-murals that run on and on, sentence after plausible sentence, without telling me anything. “Blah-di-bla is an important cultural phenomenon because… so-and-so is one of the most important historical figures of the 20th century… It was a time of great social change …”

Yawn af.

I am generic, benign narrator. Hear me roar whimper something bland and inoffensive into the conventional wisdom echo chamber.2

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

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

Ha-fucking-ha.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Take what it is you do. That’s how you’ll be remembered when your travelling days are through.”3

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plus a little exTRA on top.

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

As ever, said it already:

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

Just don’t tell my atheist boyfriend.

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

Well done on surviving the merriment.1

It’s a time for waxing nostalgic. Indulge me.

On this day last year, I had eight subscribers.

Five of them were closely related to me or lived with me (Joel). Two were irl friends. Only one was a person I’ve never met (they know who they who they are 🙋🏻‍♀️ thanks for being here so long 🙏).

Now, I realise that my last few posts have been mildly … critical of Substack. That’s ok. All great relationships are a bit love-hate. We only hate if we care? We criticise if we love?

These are the justifications for an abusive relationship?

Anyway.

My point is I have to thank for almost 800 of you out there in Internet land finding my word-parcels and liking them enough to keep receiving them this year.

That is lovely. It fills me with gratitude and incredulity in equal measures.

Thank you for being here.

And thanks . I’m grateful for the space and the control and the autonomy you afford me — even as I harangue you for your failings l…

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

The Wren in the Furze, The Chieftains

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

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

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

I said: it’s because you’re not Irish, and winked at my son. If you are even a bit Irish, this music speaks to your soul.1

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

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

I still missed things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there’s no escaping the darkness.

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

Then we’ll all be going on our way.

It’s funny because in between the stars you can see millions more.

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

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

Still.

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

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

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

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

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

See if you can spot them.

—

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

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

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

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

The seabass is so fresh it makes our mouths sticky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

Or maybe not.

—

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

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

He redeemed himself slightly at Europcar in Milan airport, after a nail-biting two hour flight.1 I was on the verge of signing on the dotted line when he pointed out we were, colloquially, getting fucked in the ass with the price. Checking prices of cars online, he found us a deal for less than half at Hertz.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a little stressful.

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every love leaves us a little wounded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No I don’t have it, take!!”

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

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

Close one.

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

And so, after a rest, he went again.

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

—

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

Here it is.

Joel backed me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conformulate.

Essentially, the message is this:

Talk less.

Smile more. 2

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And also the times I haven’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So can we all.

—

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

I said “tavolo trente-cuatro”3 with confidence and she responded just as confidently “yes!”

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

—

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

“Have you seen them?”

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

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

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

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

Joel looks dismissive.

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

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

We went down to the lobby.

“My AirPods are in Savona.”

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

I trudged outside to Joel.

“She doesn’t know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

He eventually leaves and I watch his buzzings on FindMy.

After ten minutes, I message: all ok?

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

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

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

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

“No way, I’m getting them back!”

He emerged five minutes later, holding my AirPods.

—

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

At the gig, we played festival bingo:

✔️ Someone sleeping in public

✔️ Someone vomming

✔️ Someone crying

✔️ Public urination

✔️ A massive blazing row

✔️ A silly hat

✔️ Matching shirt and shorts tropical-print combo

✔️ Sequins

✔️ Rainbow

✔️ Someone eating something filthy

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

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

—

All my life to fill one pure cup of love.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We put up with a lot to love each other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wordsmoke.

It cropped up recently in the context of the words that get written in exams, of which nothing is remembered or recorded. So too, in the context of things we say and forget, that vanish into thin air, like wordsmoke.

Treading the online froth, I think about it often. All those smoking words, impossible to grasp and insubstantial as air.

Life Litter is a newsletter about the things we leave behind: the detritus left in the wake of a life lived.

I often feel this boils down to just so much wordsmoke. As writers, we tend to imbue our every fart and utterance with undue significance — but really it’s all just wordsmoke, and most of it dissipates quickly upon release.

Things only have the significance we ascribe them and things only achieve significance when we look at them, when we write about them, when we crystallise a quotidian occurrence - something that would otherwise be gone. You can see the shape of it only briefly and indistinctly in the wordsmoke.

Recently, contacted me about a collaboration. He is a gifted musician and wanted to set some of my spoken words to music.

He has written on the merits of spoken word and how singing is not a prerequisite to lyrics, here:

Washed Memoir in Real Time

New Wave

There's a new wave coming and it’s coming from somewhere, but we’re not sure. There’s a new wave coming. Maybe, it’s coming from the north and it’s making it’s way down. Maybe, it’s coming from the south and it’s making it’s way up to the United States of America. Maybe, it’s coming from across the ocean and maybe it keeps circling around us. There’s a …

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3 years ago · 2 likes · 3 comments · MITER

What he says in that piece, the central point to me, is “what you are saying is more important than how well you are saying it.”

As someone who can’t sing or hear notes, and appreciates music chiefly for the lyrics, this resonates.

My favourite music is always the tune with the lyrics that mean something, that say something unusual or unexpected. I want tunes that implant image after lyrical image into my head.

It’s also why (you may have noticed) each of the installations in The Notebooks has a musical pairing, like wine and cheese. Words and music go together. They are the ultimate pairing that makes a good meal. Done right, the pairing nourishes. The music makes the words something more; a fuller meal.

I am several long steps beyond honoured that thinks my words are worth his talented efforts. I don’t know much about music but I know when a tune bangs, and this bangs. He’s got a gift for making music that picks you up, sweeps you along and doesn’t let you go until it’s over.

So, what is the piece he chose to set to music?

Well, it’s Wordsmoke, of course.

Please enjoy.

Washed Memoir in Real Time

Wordsmoke

Listen now (5 mins) | Art Corner Reading The Notebooks is like viewing a reality-based existential scavenger hunt. You’re inside the mind of Jill as she triangulates herself, her characters and her memories. Sure, reading the installments out of order contributes to my particular need to go back and find references, but that’s part of the fun. There are callbacks and little paths…

Listen now

3 years ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · MITER and Jill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please enjoy.

Today’s audio menu 🎧

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening.

And if you have a favourite that I haven’t done audio for yet, drop me a line and that’ll be in the next round.12

2

For anyone new on the scene who is wondering what the crap Life Litter is, I’ve put together this handy infographic — replete with outer space stickers pilfered from my son’s arts and crafts drawer — to explain.

This infographic was born in a really boring presentation at work. You might be able to spot the corporate-speak bubbles at the centre: “People & Culture”, “Strategy”, “Risk Management”, etc. Excuse me while I dry-heave over the buffet of corn chip sandwiches and other sad offerings of corporate parsimony.

Anyway, my mind (understandably) wandered and, conscious of not wasting my finite time on this planet, I adapted the graphic for Litter. I’ll probably add it to my About page in due course. My favourite bits are in the top-left (writing as map) and top-right (a pertinent quote from the novel Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel).

This week I wanted to write about Joel — my Joel, this Joel —’s new job and going to see Hamnet, the play. As you may have picked up from previous posts, he’s a software engineer of very respectable pedigree and his new job has something to do with SEO.

I wasn’t initially clear how those two things were connected but it turns out what connects them is a little-known phrase in Aldous Huxley’s 1954 book The Doors of Perception.

The phrase is this:

The consciousness of having read all the books.

I jotted this down years ago and it stuck with me, albeit now divorced from context.

A brief recap: Doors of Perception is Huxley’s famous (less famous than Brave New World but still famous) book documenting his (and his wife’s) mescaline trips and what it did to alter (heighten?) their perceptions of consciousness. I seem to recall he used this particular phrase semi-mockingly, referring to people hyper-aware of their own cleverness — their consciousness of having read all the books — in juxtaposition to his own earthier mescaline-paved path to enlightenment.

I remember a party in Uni in the depths of winter 2004 in a ratty basement off the Cowley Road. People were huddled outside the back door, smoking and stamping their feet, shouting, arguing, roaring with laughter. When I asked what had happened, it turned out that someone’s new boyfriend had committed a massive social transgression.

“He corrected Tim’s grammar. We threw him out”.

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Here it is:

It also comes in another, sultrier variety:

There is so much wrong with this ad.

Let me break it down.

First of all, I don’t even know what it wants from me. Is it a job offer? Is it offering me its services (whatsoever they might be)? Who knows. I assume the ambiguity is intended to annoy, to piss people off, to engender some response (even negative) in order to stall the endless scrolling.

We’re such an enigma, you don’t even know what we are! Here is a picture of a self-sure woman, too beautiful and clever for her own good. Quick, why don’t you stop and hate/perve/puzzle on her for a second! Oh, while I have your attention, check out our stupid company that summarises books for you so you never have to long-read anything ever again. Doesn’t that sound awful? Now why don’t you go write a Substack about how annoying this ad and our company is, thereby obliquely affording us even more indirect publicity (we know your readers will google us, thanks for the stats).

See? I am so annoyed at myself for taking the bait.

Read more

I was planning to write this week’s newsletter about something entirely different so this took me a bit by surprise.

But it is Valentine’s Day, after all, and I am in love, after all. Objects of love are, as is custom, worth an ode or a sonnet, or at least, a card.

I can’t write in iambic pentameter so this Substack is as close as I’ll ever get to Sonnet 18.

A sonnet wouldn’t really cover it though. Joel is worth an essay, or three. And even as an essay, he’s a hard read, a human Ulysses. Maybe all the best people are hard reads.

Or maybe everyone is a hard read but I just can’t be bothered to read most of them.

Whereas I would read Joel all day long. I find him endlessly appealing.

We met on Bumble. I say met. I mean swipe-matched. I liked his face immediately; liked the rest of his pictures in the swipe (jumping off a waterfall; smiling with his whole face).

He was deeply, instantly familiar to me in an unfathomable but unmistakeable way. I knew him already, knew a lifetime of him. I remember thinking “oh, there he is!”

That’s all a cliche. It is just code for:

Basically, reader, I just really fancied him.

That hasn’t dissipated. Now, call me shallow if you like but there’s just no intellectualising attraction. It’s either there or it’s not, and if it’s not, it’s not. No matter how eligible, no matter how good on paper.

There’s a sizeable age gap, you may be interested to hear. I don’t often think about it.

Until a new acquaintance asks if he’s my son, which has recently — and I feel rather unfairly — actually happened. More than once.

Anyway, at knitting group last night (as all great stories start), we were talking about age gaps. One of the gals mentioned her “old soul” 29-year old boyfriend and said that another of her colleagues also has the same age gap, being eight years older than her partner. Yet another woman in knitting group chimed in that’s funny, her parents have the same age gap too! Her mother also older than her father.

And this was of great interest to me, also being being eight years older than Joel, who is also 29.

I have always thought there is some magic in the older woman eight year gap. Maybe it’s a magic number. There’s a certain mystique to it.

Think Harry Styles and Olivia Wilde (I know they already broke up but hot damn, they were sexy and glam together weren’t they). Also, Ann Hathaway and William Shakespeare, who will forever be a singularly flames item in my head thanks to the best sex scene in modern fiction (and yes, I know Shakespeare spent his years in London shagging assiduously outside marital bonds, but still).

And what about Emma Thompson? Her husband is the guy who played the cad in Sense and Sensibility, which blew my mind and still makes me smile. They’re still together and, I understand from a humblebrag by one of the hosts of my favourite podcast who apparently attended one of their dinner parties, still happily married.

So there’s that. Older woman, younger man, eight year gap. It works. Trust me.

But obviously there’s more to it than that. Ask me why this might be. I don’t have any clear answers.

Sitting on the kitchen floor, he is all legs sprawling studying a tub of ice cream.

“Hand-picked strawberries.”

Excuse me?

“Why do I care if the strawberries are picked by hand?”

He’s got me.

“I mean, if there’s a machine that can pick strawberries, I’d just as soon have those.”

Perhaps it’s also worth mentioning that Joel is a remarkable and lovely and ferociously intelligent human. Parenting alongside him the four children we have collectively spawned is a joy (well, it is bearable, which is really as good as it gets isn’t it). His patience truly knows no bounds, which is a good thing when there are tears because pretzels haven’t been divided *exactly* evenly or when he is summoned from bed to the loo at 6am with the bellowed “WIPE MY BUM”.

I digress. Back to Joel and his ludicrously outsized intelligence. He — and his ten, yes TEN — siblings were all homeschooled. Hampered by no more than an hour or two of formal instruction a day, Joel focused on the thing he was most interested in; the magic he could weave on his computer. There is an actual BBC documentary about one of his sisters that aired about fifteen years ago. Joel features in it only silently and tangentially — the spectral figure at a laptop in the background, studiously ignoring the camera.

When he was fifteen he could design web pages. By the time he was 20, he was getting headhunted on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, he’s just built an open source library that is apparently kind of a big deal. I make it sound like I know what he does. I have no idea what he does. But I know enough to know that he is very, very, very exceptionally good at it.

And without ever having a drop of formal education. He is just effortlessly, casually, an entirely self-taught genius.

I am in awe of him. Luckily, he thinks nice things about me too. He says to me: You write English like I write code. To both of us, this is praise of the highest order; he, in his language and me in mine.

I love hearing what he thinks about all the things, big and small, that cross our path every day. I love watching him optimise the shit out of every single damn thing in our lives. I’ve already mentioned the perfect way he laced my new boots, with great attention to method. You should see the caddy under our sink, the dishcloth bin (he washes them separately so they don’t make our clothes smell mouldy! A revelation!). All the places he keeps things, in our house and in his brain. The rigorous attention when he turns his mind to the perfection of a thing. He is fascinated by the power — and limits — of technology. He says the people who hail machine learning as the future of search engines this year are the same people who thought that crypto was the future of finance last year. I nod and pretend to understand.

He wonders what would happen if Siri could really find your iPhone. It’s on the floor. Under the couch, to the left of the discarded pair of socks. No, now it’s crawling towards you. Your iPhone just sprouted arms and legs, it’s crawling towards you!

There’s a little river (a stream, really) in our back garden. He said to me once that you can sit and watch the river like you can sit and watch a fire.

I watch him and I think being in love is a little like that too.

It’s like lying by the river, with a really good, long book, that you just don’t want to stop reading.

Are you a gamer?

Full disclosure: I’m not and never have been.

Aside from a brief phase of being obsessed with an idiotic jumping coyote game called Crash Bandicoot when I was 15 (in which obsession I was apparently not alone), gaming has always left me with a deeply unsatisfied feeling.

You know the one. It’s the same feeling you get from clickbait or scrolling social media. The next thing will be something good, no, the next, no, the next, keep going.

Etc, ad infinitum.

As a kid, I encountered it in Inspector Gadget and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cartoons (The bad guy always gets away at the end! There’s never any satisfying resolution!) or those awful Choose Your Own Adventure books that took you round and round in unsatisfying circles and never seemed to go anywhere.

Gaming has always struck me as being like that. Primarily a drip feed thing: repetitive, hypnotic, addictive. It’s for the junkies with the itchy trigger finger. Keep scrolling for likes, keep shooting the zombies. The only computer game that ever kept me engaged was Kings Quest VI when I was nine, an adventure quest the precise details of which escape me now but I remember there was a labyrinth and a minotaur and a boatman across the River Styx and riddles to be solved. I played it for hours and hours in 1994 on a grey desktop monitor with dial-up internet. [Side note: I recently learned that it now enjoys cult status among gamers].

Anyway, apart from King’s Quest, there was nothing. I remember cruising totally uninterested past the early days of Mario Bros. Arresting TV commercials that ended with “Sega!” are all that really stick in the mind.

So, with the greatest will in the world, I concluded gaming is just not my thing. And while I appreciate that things have moved on considerably since 1994, I’ve never yet been tempted to reconsider my assessment.

Until now.

This is why.

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I went to go see A Christmas Carol by Dickens. The RSC are putting it on in Stratford-upon-Avon at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (slight mixing of the genres there but never mind).

I’d never been to Stratford and you may recall I just passed my driving test, so any excuse to drive across the Cotswolds on a Tuesday night. You may also recall that the driving test examiner, Examiner Ben, fucked up my pass certificate and issued me with the wrong category of licence - an automatic, instead of the manual I was most justly due, having sat the test in a manual car.

But that’s all sorted now. I achieved the impossible and got a man in a position of power to admit fault, apologise (!) and undo his error. It’s all water under the Driving Test Centre now so let’s move on. I passed my test, got my licence and ticked off the new year’s resolution I made for myself this year.

Now I’m in the market for a new one.

Anyway, the production is stunning. There’s a scene when Marley first appears - rises f…

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Last week a wonderful thing happened.

I passed my driving test.

It finally happened. Something I have wanted since I was 17, and yearned for pretty much consistently in the twenty intervening years. I got into a car with an examiner, checked my mirrors, kept my shit together and drove more or less safely for more or less forty minutes.

Before last week, my driving history was, shall we say, chequered.

I failed my test twice in Dublin in my old manual teal blue 1997 Seat Ibiza (RIP ol’ gal, flights of angels). The first fail was fair - I had probably only been driving a month and a half and pulled out in front of a truck. The second fail, something about observation in my left mirrors. Whatever.

About ten years after that in the mountains of California, I managed to pass a test in an automatic - but a well-trained monkey could have passed that test. It consisted of driving once around a block of wide American streets and returning to a massive empty parkin…

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There are block scenes that are supposed to be castles or dungeons or forests. There are blocks that look *kind* of like the block you’re looking for but not quite the same. It’s basically one of the old Where’s Wally books (or Where’s Waldo, if you’re North American like me).

Except it is not at all like Where’s Wally, and here’s why:

1. The great, really the best thing about Where’s Wally was never the finding of Wally (or his hat or his dog or the dog’s bone or whatever). It was all the fun little vignettes that your eyes tripped over in the search. The Viking woman pouring hot soup down her flirting husband’s neck. The Roman being chased by a dog. The chaos about to befall unwitting villagers/Gladiators/pharaohs of all shapes and sizes. The Minecraft book tries to offer the same theme — find a thing! — but is entirely without the intermediary magic of the finding.

2. Where’s Wally was — is — a masterful example of a Wimmelbilderbuch, like a Bosch or a Breughel. A ‘teeming picture book’ where things aren’t black and white, where the good guys are flawed and where you even feel sorry for the bad guys (like the smirking ‘bad’ gladiator about to run into the lion’s mouth, RIP). In Minecraft, the zombies are always zombies and you never feel sorry for them.

3. Where’s Wally was — is — packed with colour and difference. It showcases the chaotic inflorescence of human existence, the abundant spectrum of human experience. Love, misery, fighting, fun — but in cartoons for kids that overlap and interact with each other in surprising and unpredictable ways. In Minecraft, everything is made out of blocks. There are square trees. Everything is reducible, algorithmic. It’s Where’s Wally, stripped of life and shape and difference. As if it was put through a compressor and the computer interpreted only the basic form and, in place of variety, spat out uniformity: sheep, block of gold, enemy.

I swear that as I get older I am increasingly struck by the similarity of faces too. When I was a kid everyone stressed how unique we all are, everyone an individual, no two humans the same. But I am increasingly struck by how much the same everyone is. I will more and more frequently spot a face on the train I feel sure I’ve seen before. People will put me strongly in mind of other people.

And it’s worse when you talk to them. So rarely am I hit with a unique thought, a new idea I’ve never heard before. A witticism previously unexpressed or a point never put to me before. Making something new, not a recycled collection of old parts rehashed, seems the greatest struggle and the greatest miracle when it occurs. All day I am beset by banal observations. About the queen (“she worked so hard for this country” “she sacrificed so much” “such a strong woman” (as if there is anything but)). About one’s lunch. I listened to two guys next to me at a bench in Spitalfields discuss burgers with as much seriousness as if they were the first humans to ever consider the burger. Conclusions: burgers are better when they aren’t just boring with a bit of lettuce and tomato. (“This is an ok burger but not as good as a burger I had somewhere else once. I’m still hungry so next time I might just get two burgers.”)

I’m a lawyer so original thoughts are banned at my work too. Original thoughts while drafting? Concerning!! Find a tried-and-tested watertight precedent — or risk a judge misinterpreting/ disagreeing with your untried verbiage.

It reminds me — and this is quite an obscure reference — of a page in a Peter Spier book (another Wimmelbuch artist!) called People. The People book had a page in it with no colour. Buses all the same colour, Shop 41, Shop 42, everyone dressed the same. And the obvious message was: isn’t it WONDERFUL that we live in a world packed with colour and variety?!

I might be wrong but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the People book and Where’s Wally were both children of the 80s. Pre-KKR, pre-Barbarians at the Gate, pre-the rise of private equity, with its lust for all things uniform, quantifiable, calculable. Public companies and human services converted into private equity blocks, all with anonymous streamlined interchangeable parts. All items known, knowable, predictably performing and with a readily assigned function. Digital voices on answerphones. Tasteless burgers with a bit of lettuce and tomato.

Like the page in the People book with no variety.

Like the block-filled hellscapes of Minecraft.

This is the life we have chosen.

____

Sorry. I wish I had a perkier conclusion to draw on this doom-filled Monday.