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

Roger Deakin, Waterlog

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

No time like the present.

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

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

That day, we went climbing

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, back to the razors.

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

I popped out my AirPods.

“What’s up?”

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The platform to London is the standard Saturday Cotswolds crowd.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re in my friend’s seat.”

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

An embarrassed friend piped up from behind me.

“No, it’s ok, no worries.”

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

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

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

“You’re in our seat.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“For grain?”

“No, maize.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing.

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

London seems all gyms and shiny surfaces.

You have to squint to see past, between them.

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

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

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

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

Still no wine for it though.

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

Pallas Athena! Ye olde Cock Tavern!

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

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

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

History is the past. That is its defining characteristic.

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

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

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

Invisible people-watching is one of my greatest pleasures.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mostly they probably don’t see me at all.

Mostly, I pass through London and cast no shadow.

Which is better than the alternative.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re all just drowning in ourselves.

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

Heave ho.

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

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I went to Copenhagen last weekend.

It always takes me by surprise that I’m allowed to do things like this. Drive myself to an airport—on the motorway, no less—and board a flight on my own.

Like a real adult.

The food options in Heathrow’s Terminal 2 were unpreposessing. Overpriced disappointing burgers; overpriced disappointing sushi; overpriced disappointing dumplings.

I opted for Pret which, if perpetually disappointing, is at least cheap. This is why most people eat here: it is the least you can pay to be disappointed.

A woman with a clipboard approached. Oh wait, it’s not a clipboard, it’s an iPad. Nobody carries clipboards for market surveys anymore, come on Jill. She wanted to ask me questions about the food choices. Someone is obviously wise to the limits and delimits of the current T2 food offering.

The questions were detailed.

Who made the decision about where to eat today? [I’m sitting alone so I think this is fairly obvious…

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“To me, a hike is like a six course meal with walking in-between.”

That’s Joel, halfway up a hill in Wales, around a mouthful of mushroom quiche. It’s getting colder the higher we go but he needs another calorie-fortification stop.

I’m impatient. Still many more miles to go.

Joel says I’m like a dog that needs to be walked. He’s a cat and will purr indoors for hours, in front of his computer. I get antsy and need to be taken out, frequently.

Like a dog, I lack guile. I want to romp outdoors and need only the barest encouragement to crap in a hedge.

If dogs are the dorks of the animal kingdom, that is me.

Speaking of which, I called Joel a dork the other day. He furrowed a brow.

“No one’s ever called me a dork before.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

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The road devolves.

We’ve definitely never gone this way before. It’s a single lane with a strip of grass down the middle.

It feels now as if we’ve strayed far from Mordor back to the Shire. The lane loops up and through hedges, over little hills, past barns and horses.

There’s a tree in a field we pass, an oak. It’s 800 years old, at least. It would take tens of seconds to walk around its bole, so massive is it.

I venture that maybe we’ve gone the wrong way. Joel is insistent that this route came courtesy of Apple Maps.

“It’s nice! I like it.”

“I do too, but it’s definitely a new route. It feels like we’re trying to sneak into Wales without being spotted.”

The roads are slick with rain and the sky is a navy corduroy — but I have to squint because the sun is so bright. Up ahead over the mountains, sunlight spills on a few white pillows of cloud. The rest is dark.

“What is with this fucking weather? Fifteen minutes of rain, then fifteen minutes of sun in an infinite loop. I think this would be the worst weather ever. Way worse than endless rain. You could never get cosy inside while it’s raining without the sun coming out and ruining it. And if you were outside you’d be running for cover all the time.”

“Plants would love it though.”

“Yeah but like also imagine: you’re hiking. It starts raining. You put your waterproofs on and the sun comes out. So you take your waterproofs off. Repeat, ad infinitum.”

He’s not listening.

“That turn felt familiar. I think I’ve been here before.”

I pout because he’s unmoved by my insights about variable weather.

“Maybe you’re just having flashbacks down your ancestral line.”

“No, seriously, we came this way once.”

“No, seriously, it’s just because you know this place in your bones.”

I’m teasing him because this is the kind of shit he doesn’t buy at all. Past lives, memories imbued in a place, voices in the earth. He doesn’t believe any of it. When we go, we go.

Me, I’m not so sure.

I hear it like a concatenation of voices: not angry, just untold. All the unrecorded stories. Sometimes it seems they hang about and limpet on if you’re paying attention, begging to be told.

There is a tendency to become greedy — acquisitive for perspective. What stories can I soak up from this place, like a sponge? Like an Anchorite, drinking souls like wine, in The Bone Clocks. Like Yevtushenko making his lament against destruction, the loss of untold tales.

In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.

There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.

But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.

Not people die but worlds die in them.

Last week, The Guardian Long Reads section ran a piece on what happens in your brain after clinical death: The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’ .

The piece tells how the study of “what happens to our brains when we die” was long-maligned. Spiritualists and Christian fundamentalists hijacked the near-death reports of out-of-body experiences as proof of the existence of a separate soul. The out-of-body anecdotes range from eerie to impossible: one woman awoke saying there was a shoe on a far-off window ledge of the hospital, which turned out to actually be there. Hardly a peer-reviewed finding, but weird af nonetheless.

Serious scientific funding turned up its nose at this perceived pseudo-science and research stagnated.

Now, a small group of “physicalists” are dedicated to examining, from a strictly biological perspective, what happens in your brain amidst “a dramatic storm of many neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine” when your heart stops and brain loses oxygen.

It seems there are long stretches, up to many several minutes after clinical death, when the brain is flooded with chemicals. Electrical activity fires frantically in areas related to memory, empathy and physical sensation.

Then, oxygen-starved, it slows and fades.

And we’re done.

Why then do all those untold, unheard stories still haunt me?

We passed a boarded up church. I had a good look. It struck me as the last word in forlorn.

“You don’t see that everyday. A boarded-up church.”

“I don’t know. I’ve always been pretty bored at church.”

A slow sideways look, then the guffaw. He’s so proud of his puns.

“Have you? What about when you were still religious?”

I’ve mentioned this before, haven’t I. Joel was homeschooled in a Christian fundamentalist family but is now one of the most dedicated atheists on the planet. He hasn’t a drop of spiritualism, is convinced we are nowt but nuts and bolts, programmable just like the software he designs.

He shrugs at my question. “I liked meeting people. That’s why church is so successful, because for some people it’s the only time of the week when they’re going to meet people not at work.”

“I think the word you’re looking for is community, babe.” I think about my closed village pub. I think about the lonely performative wasteland of “social” media.

I wonder if there’ll be a resurgence of interest in attending church if all the pubs shut.

Back when we were still on the motorway, near Birmingham, we passed a turn off for Wednesbury. Hang onto your boots, this gets a bit niche. Did you know there was a famous English legal case in Wednesbury — which gave birth to the absolutely brilliant concept in English law called “Wednesbury unreasonableness”? Unless you are also a lawyer (in which case: commiserations), you probably didn’t.

[Side note: Did you also know that “case spotting” — akin to trainspotting but with famous cases in English law — is a recognised leisure pursuit, amongst certain lawyers in England (not me)? It’s true. Inspired by the wacky facts in some of the groundbreaking cases, they spend their free time quietly travelling to the spot where Donoghue found that snail in her soda bottle or where the trespassers fell through the broken skylight or wherever and basking in a quiet glow, thinking of the timeless judgment of Lord Denning or whomever. Dozens, if not scores of them, will furiously outbid each other online for an original Carbolic Smoke Ball Company poster. To be very clear, this is not me. I am not one such Stockholm Syndrome prisoner fan, I just saw a sign for Wednesbury and it triggered some (violently unpleasant) memories of Finals. Anyway, I digress.]

Back to Wednesbury unreasonableness. It was, for a long time, the main test of whether a decision taken by a public body could be overturned by the courts: was that decision unreasonable?

A decision was unreasonable if it:

• gave undue relevance to irrelevant facts

• failed to give relevance to facts worthy of being considered

• was so completely absurd that no reasonable decision-maker could possibly have made it.

Pay attention to that last one, if you please.

Despite the salted caramel sugar-coated pretzel things, Joel is hungry again. It’s getting late and we are close but, near Dolwyddelan Castle, there are signs for a Roman bridge. It calls out to me, as these kind of things always do. I insist we turn off.

It isn’t around the first bend, or the second, or even the third.

I’m ready to give up but Joel is resolute. Hunger has blunted his decision-making. “Let’s just keep going, we’ll find it.”

Eventually:

“That might be it.”

A small bridge — and a sign that announces:

Weak bridge: maximum 1.8 tonnes.

“Um Joel.”

“It’s fine! This car doesn’t weigh 1.8 tonnes.”

Doesn’t it? Who ever fucking weighed it? “Um, I really don’t think we should.”

“I’m doing it.”

By what measure is this a reasonable decision? By no measure, Wednesbury be damned. He has failed to give relevance to facts worthy of being considered (the bridge is old, the car is heavy) and this is a decision so completely absurd that no reasonable decision-maker could possibly have made it.

I shut my eyes.

“Look, you’re on a 2,000 year old bridge.”

I look down. The river is low and flat. The track down to the bridge switchbacks up ahead off to the main road.

Somewhere below the churn of the river, I hear the thud of feet in leather, the soft rattle of spear and shield. Centurions marched here with nowt but killing on their brains. Like orcs.

Then we’re across it. The hungry bastard. He was right.

I turned around to look back. From this side, the sign stands out more clearly.

Maximum 18 tonnes.

Out in the hills, it is oxygen-rich. My brain floods with a heady mix of neurotransmitters. I feel slow in the city, often barely-sentient, brain dulled and depleted by lack of oxygen. Near death. Not out here in the Wild. We are skirting Weathertop and the Troll Shaws. We are in wild Wales and it’s bloody marvellous.

It’s late by the time we arrive.

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We’re late setting off because I want a run, then a shower, then I have to explain to my mum which bits of the garden she can fuck with and which bits she can’t (most of them).

Then I give her Helen’s number in case of emergencies. If there’s anyone in the village I trust to handle most emergencies, up to and including armed intruders, an outbreak of plague or a zombie apocalypse, it’s Helen.

Finally we’re off but Joel needs coffee. He functions on several a day and a shortage of milk this morning means he needs one now, urgently.

An hour’s delay later, an aborted attempt to get to Services mired in M40 Easter traffic, then a detour to a strip mall in Banbury — a town in which the only thing of note is a rhyme about riding a cock-horse — and Joel has coffee.

Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross…

We are off, swinging up the motorway towards Wales via the Black Country.

The Black Cou…

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Remember my summer blend? This is winter’s answer.

—

“It’s kind of beautiful, you know.”

“Yeah.”

Joel and I are gazing out through a rain-glazed windscreen at unmoving cars in front of us.

I look at him. “The light on the water droplets, I mean.”

“Yeah, I know. The red brake lights.”

This is one of my favourite things about Joel. He knows what I mean even when I say almost nothing.

“Ow!” Sudden noise from the backseat, and giggles.

“Meow!”

“Can you guys calm down please?” That’s Joel, not me. I’m way less patient and polite.

“She’s trying to kiss and lick me!”

“She’s just trying to wind you up.”

Another voice, from the very back:

“When do we get on the train?”

And a fourth:

“I need a sick bag.”

Then back to the first two:

“I need a wee.”

“Dad, how much longer ’til we actually get there?”1

—

You may have noticed I didn’t post last week. Or not, whatever. I’m realistic about the peripherality of this newsletter to your life.

I’ve been driving to and from the mountains in France with Joel and our children (four in total). In between that, some skiing.

For the occasion, I decided to delete the Substack app from my phone and just … take a lil break.

Of course, I didn’t take a break. I wanted to, I tried to, but I probably looked at my phone more in the last week than in all the previous weeks of 2024 put together. This is because I replaced Substack with a short but aggressive stint on Instagram. Now I’m home and have deleted the ’gram and reinstated Substack.

All about balance.

Anyway, at the beginning of the week it bothered me a bit that I wasn’t writing anything.

On a chairlift, I told Joel I felt guilty for not thinking about my book, for feeling like I had nothing to write.

“You need a break from thinking about it. That’s when things fall into place.”

“But I’m not even thinking about it a little bit!” I said.

He nodded. “Exactly. You have to take a break from thinking, even — especially — about the things you enjoy.”

I pondered this. The chair vaulted ridges. Underneath us, France was the bones of mountains, dusted in snow. Was I taking a break, not just from writing and work, but from thinking at all?

A week skiing is the best possible way to take a break from thinking. Like climbing, you can’t think about anything else when you’re doing it.

Why is that? I asked Joel.

He considered. “It’s not like walking, or hiking. Remember when we went to Wales and hiked for a week?”

“Yeah. I came back and wrote not one but two newsletters.”

He nodded again. “Exactly. That’s because there’s loads of time to think when you’re hiking. Not when you’re skiing.”

“That’s true, I don’t think at all when I ski.”

He lifted the restraining bar. “Skiing isn’t about thinking. It’s about staying alive.”

—

I thought about this later (off the slopes, of course). While it seems a touch grandiose — particularly in the context of resort skiing — there is something in it.

When you are doing something in which an error, a miscalculation, a lapse of attention could kill you, your mind tends not to wander. When you could pick your turn wrong and hit rocks, trees or spin over a cliff, you think about nothing else. You pay attention to what you’re doing from moment to moment. You could, at best, do yourself some serious damage; at worst, you’re dead. Death is a real and constant possibility, that suggests itself over and over in the mind, when you confront the sheer scale of the mountains.

This is how it feels when you must survive. You are calm, you do what you have to do, from moment to moment.

The difference is, in the moments of greatest horror, the mind detaches itself.

In contrast, when I ski, I fully inhabit my body and am joyful, even as I contemplate the moment-to-moment decisions needed to survive. I don’t feel gripped, thinking to myself pay attention, don’t fuck this up, you might die if you blow out at 65 mph. I feel calm, zen, completely self-obliterated. I don’t think about anything when I’m skiing apart from how happy I am to be skiing. It’s the closest I come to perfect existential bliss.

At the moment when the danger is greatest, I’m least aware of how fast I’m moving and how high the stakes are. I inhabit myself fully.

But other survival situations require complete disembodiment.

—

I read Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmuss recently. Despite the hype — it was mediocre at best — two lines stood out for me:

That had to be a special brand of bravery, for a child to endure the worst, and despite every law in the universe and all evidence to the contrary, decide the next day might be better.

And this one:

These days he was an obstetrician. He already knew how tough women could be.

In the French Alps, the rocks have been scoured for hundreds of millions of years. What remains are the strongest bits of the mountains.

The shapes they make are beautiful, even after the violence of wind and snow.

—

Another interruption from the backseat. They’re playing Minecraft (I know, I know, my principles, the window, etc.)

Minecraft is, from what I can gather, a survival game. I listen to them for a little while.

“Ok, make a bomb squad. Blow up the dam and start again.”

“No, gather those cows. Then I get milk, diamonds and a bucket of water.”

“Grab the controls.”

—

Death perception.

That was how I pronounced “depth perception” as a kid. I didn’t realise what it was until I was an adult.

I still haven’t acquired it. I have no depth perception. Joel talks about it often. Usually right after I’ve whacked my head into yet another open car door/ kitchen cabinet/ tree branch.

It’s so bad that, if he knows my trajectory will take me past a place that’s proven hazardous before, he will warn me.

“Careful babe, the garage door/ car / wardrobe is open.”

“Mind your head when you stand up.”

“Careful of your head.”

“Watch your head!”

The only place, he says, where my depth perception appears to function normally — rather, acutely well — is when I’m on skis.

We tried to figure out why this might be. On skis, I make split-second assessments of multiple moving variables (usually: other slower-moving people). I map slope, terrain, tree placement and snow quality with rapid-fire precision. I don’t crash into things when I ski.

I go very, very fast and I still don’t crash into things.

I’ve tried (failed) to write before about a small part of what skiing means to me.

I say failed because then it was all wrapped up in complicated feelings about a boy. That’s nonsense. I don’t love skiing because of any boy.

I love skiing because it sets me free. Skiing was the first time I was ever out of the house as a kid, away from my family for extended hours, before I was school age. Skiing was my window into the bigger world, my first perceived hint of greater depths out there.

No wonder my depth perception on skis is on point.

Skiing is like flying, I’ve said it before. When I ski, I ski with wings. Sometimes, on a lofty stretch of mountain, I spread my fingers like feathers at the tips of a kite’s wing.

At 3,500m above sea level, cruising with pinions flexed, I perceive, as from a great distance above, my own death. I float high, detached from the chaos beneath.

This is a response to great trauma too. You perceive it from above, as from a great height, with only a calm measured consideration of how to survive moment to moment.

I remember thinking like this as a very small child. I remember thinking that I could get my father arrested and he would go to prison. I remember thinking that I would have nowhere to live. I would lose my home and who knows what would happen to me and my sister. Maybe I would lose her too.

I considered the options with cool detachment. Survival was at stake.

—

Underneath the chairlift, the snow stands out in creamy ridges, exactly like sand in a retreating tide.

It’s amazing it can still look so much like water, even in its solid form: the same way sand can look like waves.

It’s wind, made visible: the imprint on whatever is left behind, by whatever has gone before.

Why is my depth perception on skis so good? It’s because my life depends on it. My life doesn’t depend on not banging into the kitchen cabinets.

Maybe that’s always the case though. Our lives always depend on it, and death is a constant shadow. We are always moving pretty fast, and the stakes? Super high.

Taking the time to notice a moment is all we have.

—

The next day, I’m in a long line of women waiting for the toilet. There is no corresponding line of men; of course there isn’t. Everyone knows men take less time to piss than women — closing cubicle door, disrobing and sitting down takes more time than simply whipping your dick out and pissing at a wall. Male and female toilets occupy the same floor space but in that floor space you can pack two urinals for every single stall. Eight men can piss for every four women.

Hence: the line.

It never fails to enrage me. We have been to the fucking moon but we can’t work out how to design equitable toiletry for men and women?2

It happened again at a lodge on the slopes where we stopped for lunch. There was a men’s toilet and a women’s toilet. The line for the women’s went out the door and down the stairs. Meanwhile, Joel bounced in and out of the loo in the time it took me to advance a single step.

“This is really unfair,” he pointed out. Thank you, Captain Obvious, I thought, I love you.

“How many stalls are in the women’s?” He went on.

“Four.”

“You know there are six in the men’s? Two stalls and four urinals.”

“Are you shitting me?” An unfortunate turn of phrase for the occasion.

“No. I just counted.”

“Right. That’s fucked. I’m going to say something.”

I grabbed an officious looking chap I’d seen bustling around in tight jeans and a sneer.

“Excuse me, are you the manager?”

He examined me as he might something stuck to his shoe. “Yes.”

“Look at this line of women, please. Can you explain to me why you have four toilets for women to pee in and six for men?”

“Um, no-ooo, it’s not true. Actually we only have two for men.”

I resisted the urge to poke him in the eye and call him a shit head.

Joel pounced. “You’re wrong. There are six toilets in the men’s. I’ll show you.”

He led the man-ager up the stairs past the silent line of women into the (sparsely-inhabited) men’s toilet.

The manager pointed triumphantly at the two stalls.

“There, one, two!”

Joel turned him around and pointed at the urinals.

“… three, four, five, six.”

The manager looked mulish. “Those … are not toilets.”

Joel gaped. “There’s people peeing in them!”

“Yes, but they are not toilets.”

“What the hell are they then? Sinks? Ice cream dispensers? You better stop all those guys peeing in them.”

Back downstairs the manager had to contend with me again.

“Now, please explain to this whole line of women why they have to wait for four toilets when the men have six. Frankly, I think you should apologise.”

Well, spoiler: he did not apologise. And I am probably no longer welcome to eat my lunch slopeside at Chinal Donat chalet in Orelle.3

But that’s ok. I’m pretty sure it’s actually illegal to offer women fewer toilets than men under EU legislation.

Call me a Karen if you want, I give zero fucks. I will die on the hill of equitable toiletry for men and women.

I will lodge a formal complaint with the fucking European Commission representative working on gender equality.

I will scream into an endless void of unfairness.

—

This really was a holiday that showcased a range of male entitlement. I’m sorry to all my male readers, I know hashtag notallmen — I am in love with a man so I really do know this — but it did seem to be a theme of the trip.

Case in point: there was some kind of convention of adolescent Scandinavian males happening in Val Thorens while we were there. Is it a Norwegian university ski trip? Is it some kind of Swedish youth political group? Who can say. Not I, because I don’t speak Norwegian (I’m pretty sure it was Norwegian).

Now, I’ve never had a bad word to say about Scandis before this trip, but let me tell you without exaggeration that the mountains were overrun with hordes of screaming, puking, pissing-in-the-elevators, tall blonde assholes.

Unfortunately, there were some staying in the room next to us, who felt entitled to throw ragers until 1am. These were full-on ragers, with speakers thumping music through the walls, chant-singing à la Chelsea supporters at Stamford Bridge and extravagant table-banging.

Some time past midnight, all four kids awake, I had enough and knocked on their door. Knocked doesn’t really cover it. Open hand tensed hard as I could. My forearm throbbed with the impact but I was so angry I didn’t even feel it.

A terrified looking young woman cracked open the door, with big eyes.

“Are you kidding me with this? I’ve got four children trying to sleep next door.”

“Oh sorry, sorry….”

The next night, same thing. But a guy at the door: older than me, short, balding, belligerent.

He cut me off.

“Look, you’re the one who chose to stay in a party hotel with your children.”

I gaped at him. “A party hotel? You don’t get to decide it’s a party hotel because you want to have a party. This is a family hotel. There’s a kids’ play area downstairs. There’s a ‘children’s corner’. You know what there’s not? A drunk middle-aged asshole corner.”

The next morning, 7am getting four tired kids ready for ski lessons, I sent my sister a picture of the mountains.

“It’s so early.” She yawn-emoji-ed back to me.

“Ski time!”

“I still can’t believe you take holidays where you have to set alarms.”

She had a point. I turned red-eyed to Joel.

“Tell the kids they can go be as loud as they want in the hallway right now. Let’s unleash the children on them.”

You think that’s noise motherfucker, watch this.

—

After our run-in with the protector of men’s rights to extra toilets at Chinal Donat, we chose a different hut to stop at for lunch the next day.

The food looked great. There was a vat of onion gravy and I asked for extra.

The chef:

“You haven’t even tried it yet, how do you know it’s good?!”

“Because we’re in France.”

The next day we went back and a girl was serving.

The chef watched the girl ladle an extra dollop of sauce on my plate.

“Doucement,” he scolded her … softly.

She explained I’d asked for more and waved the ladle in my direction. He looked up and I waved. Hiiiii, me again.

He grinned, rolled his eyes and waved me on.

After lunch, I went to their toilets. There was no queue.

This is why:

—

In the gondola later, I’m listening to three people chat and trying to figure out what language they’re speaking. It sounds like Russian but in the same lukewarm way that Portuguese kind of sounds like Russian.

“What language are you guys speaking?”

“Russian.”

Nailed it, I think to myself.

We chatted to them on the way up. Two of them came from Moscow and said they had to transit through Istanbul to get here to the mountains.

The third guy works in London for a “hedge fund” (his words, not mine). The two from Moscow told me they used to work for big international banks and consulting firms in Moscow — but now, post-Ukraine, they work for the Russian equivalents.

Needs must, I thought.

They asked if I’d ever been to Moscow and I said yes and told them all about the time in 2007 when a policeman took my passport and tried to blackmail me for $160 to get it back.

They looked at each other.

“Wow, you were lucky to get it back. The police, they were so desperate then. But that was a long time ago. It wouldn’t happen now.”

“Why not?”

“Now it’s much more under control. They wouldn’t dare.”

The police — and all the Russian security services — are probably much better paid now, I thought to myself.

We talked more about my Trans-Siberian trip. When I mentioned how much I liked Irkutsk on the edge of Siberia, they gaped like it was the moon.

“Only foreigners do crazy shit like this, sit on a train for four days. We Russians, we don’t do that. Why do that if you don’t need to?”

—

Back at the hotel, there’s one of those coffee pod machine things. I’m an elder millennial and unfamiliar with this kind of contraption. As I grappled with it, the lid fell in to the water tank.

Fuck.

I stared at it for a moment. How hot is that water? There’s no way to tell. Maybe it’s cool. Or maybe it’s about to melt that plastic lid.

I’ll just grab it.

As soon as I reach towards it, the thing springs to life. Like a blender or a garbage disposal, when you dislodge a chicken bone.

—

Later that evening, Joel is loading the car. As soon as we set off, the boys in the backseat try to outdo each other’s effluence.

“Fart sauna!”

“Fart fondue.”

“It’s because of all that hot garlic cheese.”

“It smells really eggy.”

“I haven’t had eggs today.”

“You’ve just admitted it was you.”

Joel and I opened the window and soldiered on.

—

On the drive back, we stopped at a rest area. There was, of course, an enormous line for the women’s toilets. It was so long that it snaked out the door of the loo, into the concourse of the rest stop, past the Paul boulangerie and ended just inside the sliding doors at the entrance. It was 100 women deep. Just looking at it, I knew it would be a half-hour wait, at least.

We had a train to catch.

I told Joel to take all the kids into the men’s, which was clear, and stepped back outside.

Thirty seconds later, I am squatting for a covert piss in the wooded area behind this rest stop, near Reims. Champagne country, but I’ve never felt less champagne in my life.

I finished in record time and returned inside.

The queue hadn’t moved. For a moment, I was elated and almost urged the other women to follow suit. Vive la revolution!

But then a voice of caution in my head. I anticipate robust French disapproval.

Often, there’s no one so invested to keep women in line as other women.

—

On the motorway, late, somewhere in west London in the driving rain. All four kids are asleep in the backseat but I’m awake in solidarity with Joel, who is still driving. Not far to go now.

We’re in the middle lane, and a semi-trailer is sweeping in — fast — from a slip road. The car on the inside lane sees the truck merging towards it but doesn’t see us. We are right next to it, in its blind spot.

In an instant, I see the merging truck, the car sliding into our lane, red lights in the driving rain— and scream.

Then the moment is over and Joel has us in the next lane, out of the way of the car, the semi, the almost-collision at 70mph.

—

The morning after we arrive home, the river is up and thrusting aggressively through the garden. I gather it’s been raining a lot while we’ve been gone.

Winter is on the turn to spring.

This garden is not perfect, far from it. I don’t believe in “landscaping” or decorative borders or lawns. I mostly let things grow where bounty strikes, with neither rhyme nor reason, for the most part.

I do the rounds. The snowdrops are past their best now and on a drooping downturn. I rip out nettles and a particularly aggressive bramble, eight inches of root welded to the earth like an iron spike. The hellebore are blooming, alongside clustered yellow globules of Oregon grape. Periwinkle is spreading unchecked along the garden wall. Wood avens and columbine pop up everywhere, to my delight.

I haven’t seen a crocus yet but the daffodils are threatening to split into bloom.

Questions abound that the spring may answer. Last autumn I dug up an ash sapling that was coming up in the wrong spot, too close to the house. I accidentally broke off a chunk of the root ball in transplanting and worried all winter I’d killed it.

But he’s pulled through the winter, still here and now burgeoning with those dark velvet beads of leaves-to-be so peculiar to ash trees.

Even the wisteria that I carted from London carries wispy buds. So far, it’s refused to bloom out here in Oxfordshire — stubbornly pining for Deliveroo, museums and all night buses — but fingers crossed, this might be her year.

My son comes out, to help throw sticks in the river.

Where are all my crocuses (croci)? Pulling up some ivy that’s gone too far this time, I spot familiar candy-striped green and white crocus shoots. They’ve been nibbled to a nubbin, to nothing.

We spy a nest in our hedge. It’s quite small. My son says with authority that it probably belongs to a robin.

I ask if he knows what colour the robin’s eggs are and he says no. I tell him they’re bright blue, the colour of the sky.

He thinks about this for a long moment. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why does a robin have a red chest but blue eggs?”

I have no more answers. Sometimes things just … don’t make sense, or line up as we expect. Newsletters too.

All we have are the moments, to moments.

Joel and I had a rare childfree weekend and went to Snowdonia.

On the drive up, we listened to an episode of No Such Thing As A Fish. There was a bit in it about Formula 1 drivers losing twenty metres of road every time they blink.

Imagine if you lost twenty metres of road every time you blinked. Imagine how much you’d miss.

Turns out, because of this, Formula 1 drivers all end up doing their blinks at the same time, on the same long straight stretch of the track. They blink at the same time, when there’s something they can afford to miss.

I do that too. I’ll think to myself: I can afford to miss this train ride, this meeting, this boring lunch.

Blink. Gone.

Other times, I’ll blink and another year has passed. There’s so much I’ve missed. Do I remember each school run in October, how the sky looked last Tuesday or how many disappointing bacon rolls I’ve eaten in Pret over the course of my life (way too many)?

Nope. I’ve blinked. They’re gone.

Our brains fill in the gaps where we blink, at the edges of our vision. Our Generative AI brains generate made-up filler, all around the edges, where we can’t quite see.

just pointed out the dangers of ceding control of all that liminal brain space — putting our brains in the hands of our tech bro overlords., in this brilliant piece I restacked, told us to “make experiences offline”.

She said:

“It is a lot more difficult for the elite to capture you when you are not a set of user data but a real breathing, sweating, thinking person, taking up space in a room with your thick legs.”

That’s why the times when I put my phone down, go outside and ringfence my sweaty self are the times my brain doesn’t blink. Those are the times that remain inked and clear, vibrant and alive.

This weekend in Wales was one such time. This weekend, I took up space offline. I made experiences. I exercised my thick legs.

It remains so clear I can chart a single 24-hour stretch almost to the hour. To the minute.

Don’t believe me? See for yourself:

5pm

Packing, we mentioned to each other all the things we should remember to bring: pillows, towels, camp chairs.

Of course, we forgot them all.

We stopped at a Homebase on the way to buy pillows. I’m not sleeping in the back of Joel’s car without a pillow.

When we got to Snowdonia, we went into the Cotswolds in Betwys-y-Coed and spent a happy hour perving over outdoor kit. We do this every time we go to Snowdonia now, as a matter of ritual. Touch all the things, consider the ergonomics of down and Primaloft, natural and synthetic fibres. Various weights of merino. Boot tread. Locking carabiners.

It’s dork paradise.

Joel bought an expensive camp stove, and I a lightweight towel robe. In each case: items we definitely wanted but definitely didn’t need.

The towel robe was the last one in stock.

Joel made a face and grumbled.

“I want one of those.”

6pm

In the shop, picking up a few car-camping essentials (milk, coffee, hot chocolate), we got chatting to the guy behind the till. He was wearing a technical beanie and a light down jacket. He looked fit and healthy, like he runs up Snowdon each morning, for a lark.

He scanned our instant hot chocolate and said, conversationally:

“I don’t eat sugar. Gave it up a year ago.”

“Oh. Right.” I’m not sure whether to congratulate or commiserate.

“Was giving me headaches and that.”

“I gave up coffee for a bit.” Joel joined in. “But then I stopped.”

“Stopped coffee?”

“No. Stopped giving it up.”

“Yeah mate, I feel you. I couldn’t give up coffee. Sugar is fine but not coffee.”

I told them I need sugar and coffee, both, at all times.

That was pretty much the end of the conversation.

7pm

At our campsite, we put the milk outside the car, in front of the tire, to keep it cool.

About twenty minutes later, we forgot it was there and drove off for dinner.

Joel remembered a couple minutes later.

“Fuck.”

“What?”

“The milk.”

“What about it?”

“It was in front of the tire.”

“Did we run over it?”

“I don’t know. We wouldn’t know because we wouldn’t have felt it. Fuck. We need more milk.”

“It might be fine.”

“It might be. Maybe we missed it. But also maybe there’s a squashed carton of milk on the side of the road, flat as a pancake.”

“Hmmm.” I’m picturing this. “Yeah. I don’t know.”

“Impossible to know. It’s Schrödinger’s milk.”

“Ok, well, let’s just get more.”

“Yeah.” He’s quiet for a bit.

Then:

“Let’s go to a different shop. We can’t go back to Mr I-Never-Eat-Sugar and tell him we ran over our milk.”

8pm

We went for pizza. There was a box of rolled-up blankets for customers sitting outside. We took two each, one to sit on and one to wrap round legs.

It was one of those places where you make your order at the window, take your ticket and wait for your number to be called.

I watched the process in action and it was something else. British people at the pizza window were incredible.

Someone’s number would get called: 74, your pizza is ready.

They would spring up from the waiting benches, bound in the direction of the window … and then stop, about five feet short.

There, they would hover.

Now, imagine this in America. You can’t, right?

In America, your number gets called and you go straight to the window, brandishing your ticket. You don’t hesitate, you don’t prevaricate. You collect your fucking pizza. If no one’s there, you stick your head in through the hatch: yoo-hoo, number 74, you just called me, hello?

But not here, not in the UK. Here, even with the ticket number that’s just been called, people seemed strangely… unempowered to stride to the window and claim their rightful pizza.

Instead, they would wait for the woman to call their number again. Wait until she looked up and leaned out questioningly to all the people waiting, repeating: number 74?

Then — only then! — would they advance hesitantly, with a shy, courting smile, and apologetically accept the pizza they’d already paid for.

I pointed this out to Joel. “I don’t get it. It’s like: your ticket’s just been called, it’s ok. You can go to the window and claim it. It’s yours. What are they all waiting for?”

“I don’t know.” He considered it. “I think maybe we’re just a very insecure nation.”

After we finished eating, he bounded off to fill our water bottles.

I stood to join him.

He watched as I dropped my blankets back into the box. I thought to myself: he’s so British and polite, I bet he folded his.

We walked back to the car, quiet.

Then, he said:

“I rolled my blankets back up.”

9pm

Back at our campsite on the lake under Snowdon, stepping out of the car feels like stepping into the inkiest of blacks — but, after a minute, my eyes adjust and I can see so much.

The car is parked just off the main road, a very minor two-lane affair that skirts the lake beside the highest mountain in Wales. It’s quiet and peaceful.

The moon is up and almost full; the clouded sky, a patchwork of greys. I pick my way down to the edge of the lake. After a moment, free from the artificial lights of the car, the outlines of a cliff appear and the lights of several other camps strung along the far shore of the lake opposite.

There’s a tawny owl calling from our end of the lake. Hoo-hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo. After awhile, it’s answered by another, much further off. [hoo-hoo-hoo hoo-hoo]

Taking up my phone to write down a thought instantly blots out the rest of the world. The cliff, the sky, the lake: gone.

My phone is like one giant brain-blink.

I called to Joel, still up by the car, fiddling with the posh new camp stove.

“It’s so bright tonight. There’s so much light.”

“Mmm.”

In the car on the way up, we toyed with all the different things you can express with mmms in various tones: surprise, incredulity, delight, acquiescence, querulousness, demurral. Try it sometime. There’s an incredible amount you can communicate with just that one consonant, falling, rising or falling-rising.

Or flat. I added inattentiveness to the list.

After while, the far-off owl faded completely. The one near our campsite persisted, calling to his friend, for a very long time without an answer.

1am

The car turned itself on.

“Joel, what the fuck was that?”

“Mmm? Oh, it’s working. Cool. I scheduled the heating to come on.”

He rolled around for a moment.

“I need a wee.”

A lengthy process of dressing to go stand by the car and have a wee ensued.

By the time he got back, I needed a wee too.

“I’m going for a wee.”

“Don’t go on the grass. I just went there.”

“Ok, don’t look.”

I went around the corner of the car and started.

“Someone’s coming.”

“What?” I looked up and saw headlights, sweeping around the bend.

Now, pause a moment here.

It’s 1am, on one of the most remote roads in the country. Someone, perhaps a whole car full of someones, is coming past at the precise moment I squat down for a wee roadside.

I panicked and half rose, wetting my ankles.

“What the fuck? Joel, what do I do?”

“Hide.” He closed the car door.

I clamped down as hard as I could and hoisted trousers, crouching awkwardly beside the car. The lights flashed past and I wondered briefly if they can see me, a dark figure trying to hide by a parked car. I wondered if they will raise the alarm. Police searchlights and megaphones danced through my mind.

When the coast was clear, I tried to resume my piss but the moment was gone.

Back in the car, Joel was incredulous. He handed me a water bottle to rinse my piss-soaked feet.

“I can’t believe your luck.”

“Yeah, I know. Thanks.”

“No, really. There hasn’t been a car pass us for hours.”

“No. There hasn’t.”

“There probably won’t be another one again for hours.”

“Nope.”

“It’s like they waited for you.”

“Indeed.”

We laid down and he was quiet for several long minutes.

Then he started laughing.

“Honestly, every minute that goes by without another car just makes it funnier.”

“Stop it.”

“Think about it. In a six-hour window from 12am til 6am, I wonder what the odds are of a car going past at the exact moment you chose to piss.”

“Please stop.”

“I’m going to work it out.” He pulled out his phone. “Say you divide it into 30-second time slots…”

After some complex calculations, he determined the odds were roughly 750 to 1.

8am

The next morning, there still hasn’t been a car.

“Time for a swim.”

Read more

I need to wrap up last week’s visit to the Louvre and I find the only way to do that is to consider a visit to another museum almost twenty years ago, in Russia.

The museum in question is of course The Hermitage in St Petersburg and, if I am to write about the Dutch art1 I saw and loved at the Louvre last week, I must remember where it was that I first fell in love with this type of art — and that place was The Hermitage.

Before I can do that though, I need to share a few things I’ve come across this week that made me think about how we capture the past and how we consume the past as captured by others.

One was noticing just how easy it is to freeze the past into an idea; a cartoonish version of what it actually was. Another was writing on Notes that there is no untangling; only more tangling. That the story is not about what happened. It’s about what the narrator makes of what happened.

The truth is I don’t remember much of what happened. I suspect most people don’t. I consult The Notebooks often, as an aide-memoire; otherwise it would all be gone, like so much wordsmoke.

Much of it is indeed like a cartoon; scenes and images stick out in bright outlines. Key stories that get recounted. This is just in the nature of how it feels to look back and describe something that happened, whether you’re in the front row seat at a coveted event or singing along to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros in a pick up truck in the sun.

These images become part of us when we say: this is who I was. This is what happened.

Read more

The thing about the Louvre, or any good museum, is that it’s just like a mountain: you climb it a slightly different way each time.

I’ve been to the Louvre before but, every time I go, I see different things. No two people arriving there follow the same path nor see the same things.

They give you a map but you can’t just follow a map through the Louvre. You have to give up any hope of a plan and go where your curiosity takes you. Interest yourself in what passes before you. Take turns that feel right. Near East? Decorative arts? Northern Europe? Sure! Nothing is uninteresting.

If I tell you the things I thought worth seeing the other day in the Louvre, you might not agree, or you might (probably would) find something else equally (or more) interesting and provocative. In each piece, is a world that is mostly lost but still offers up some truth of itself.

The engraving on a gold plate gives a detailed glimpse of a 15th century Italian war camp: barrels, tents, stacks of hay. Soldiers asleep with folded arms; others tending horses under a line of crenellated battlements.

A person sat and etched this. Were they cold, hot? Tired, short-sighted, hungry? Art is truth, and the art in the Louvre speaks to me of the true way things used to be. It offers glimpses of lost worlds from other’s eyes; it speaks of forgotten griefs and the weight of all those who have gone before.

I am reminded of one of my favourite poems.

Here I am again on the Eurostar. This time, to collect my son, who has spent a week with family in Paris. (And spoiler: no Killian Sundermann on the street this time, more’s the pity).

The Eurostar is a violence. It flings you out of London at 147mph, a bullet fired out the barrel of tunnels beneath east London, into the sunshine salt flats past City Airport and Rainham steel works. There, puddles of estuarine silver chequerboard the flats. Motorways arch above and below, cutting gorges in the chalk, and the train weaves too quickly around pylons, rubbish piles and overpasses; under cranes, container ships and lines of geese.

The estuary presents the rubbish of earlier ages for picking. The train picks up speed at Tilbury, the place to go for mudlark hunting of old Codd-neck bottles, Victorian dolls and pottery sherds. Surely this is some mistake, we’re going too fast. Substations, dirt bike tracks, winding streams and decaying boats — then, incongruous, the pretty promontory of Rochester flashes past, a great Dickensian lump presiding over the marshes.

There are razor wire fences here too, of the kind that conjure images of torn flesh and flaying leg muscles. These proliferate as we near the entrance of the tunnel to Europe.

This isn’t a corner of the country I enjoy. I know it’s rather trendy these days but Kent to me has always felt very far away and going in the wrong direction: an area that is passed over, like a truck stop. A way station to somewhere else.

A guy squeezes in the turnstile behind me going into the Metro on the other side. He gives a conspiratorial and pleading look and I quell my disapproval. What must it be like to struggle to buy a Metro ticket.

In Paris, evidence of the wet summer abounds. There are tubs in the station catching drips, inexplicably packed with astroturf, which gives them the look of bursting into bloom in the unseasonal damp.

When I arrived at my sister’s, my son exploded into the living room brandishing his passport.

“Grandma left this on the kitchen table for you.”

“Ok, put it on my bed.”

Then my sister and I drank a bottle of wine and I fell into a wine-snooze atop the bedclothes.

A bit of a panic the next evening.

“Where’s his passport?”

Rummaging through bag, sheets, piles of clothes deposited at some stage from bed to floor. It’s not there.

“Do you know where his passport is?”

My sister’s partner remembers. “Your mom left it on the table.”

“It’s not there. He put it on my bed. But it’s not there either.”

He’s asleep, I can’t ask him. I close my eyes and take a moment. If I was my eight year old son, what would I have done with it?

And then I know.

I lift my pillow.

And there it is.

He’s posted it to me from yesterday, like the tooth fairy, under my pillow. It sparkles with a little magic as I uncover it.

The next morning he pulls up four plastic animal figurines after a rummage in a charity shop. A unicorn, stegosaurus, alligator and stag: one for each of the kids.

My sister turns one in her hand.

“They’ll last longer than any of us.”

Things last a long time in Paris; even longer in a museum. Tacked to walls across Paris are placards marking spots of historical interest — all in French so I often can’t be bothered to puzzle them out, though they usually look interesting.

I passed one that mentioned Les Lampiers — the lamplighters — and thought of all the little missives we send out online, lighting cones of brightness in the depthless black. I wonder how long their light will last.

Trekking through the Louvre, little lamps shine everywhere. Any lit tunnel you choose to peer down will reveal an unknown world.

Unexpected treasures will be discovered, as from a charity shop or underneath a pillow.

Here are the worlds that were incrementally more revealed to me after a visit to the Louvre.

These Assyrian inlay figures cut from large mother-of-pearl shells would have been mounted and strung together into different scenes. They appeal to me as story-telling tools, like puppets, or paper dolls. There are even odd pieces of spare costumery — jackets and cloaks — to dress up the different characters. Like the faces on a Where’s Wally page, these little figures are individuals; they have personality, still fresh across millennia.

I saw this basalt column in a fairly quiet gallery. No one was looking at it. I would have walked past it myself but something about its size — over 7 feet high with two carved figures at the top and these dense markings all over it — called me over.

When I saw the label, I got very excited.

“This is a big deal,” I told my son. “This is Hammurabi’s code, the first recorded legal system.”

As soon as I said it (possibly too loudly), twenty to thirty people swarmed us, surrounding the column, and started taking pictures of it with great enthusiasm.

We had to retreat. But not before I took this picture of the first “if X then Y” codex — “If so-and-so breaks your arm, you may break his” — and the inception of eye-for-an-eye justice.

That gold plate I mentioned of a battle camp? Here it is. Can you see the face in the centre, between the two crosses, looking straight at us? Capped, bearded, looking right out from five hundred years ago. I imagine it’s a self-portrait of the artist, tired, hungry and unsure of his salvation; an onlooker amidst so much horror.

This mysterious object was labelled as a “crapaudine” in French. Allow me to share that I spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time trundling down rabbit-holes on Google, chasing that word down. It translates directly as “toad”, which was intriguing but unhelpful. Wikipedia redirected to something I’d never heard of called a toadstone, which crops up in As You Like It and the writings of Pliny the Elder and used to be worn as an amulet in medieval times. A mythical stone believed to be cut from the brain of a living toad, but actually: the fossilised teeth of a pre-historic flatfish.

Anyway, this chunky item has nothing to do with toads or teeth.

Read more

SPLAT.

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

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

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

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

All that good luck baked in.

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

What are these things anyway?

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

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

Improbability seems better, more accurate.

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

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

But things only have the meaning we ascribe to them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Um tanks he’s performing too?”

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

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

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

Why am I like this.

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

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

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

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

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

Magical.

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

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

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

This is why:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next morning, I had the day to myself.

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

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

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

He looked very familiar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what happened? Well, I walked past them.

Then I stopped. Turned around and started following them.

Because, of course I did.

Another five steps and they stopped too.

Fuck.

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

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

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

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

He, bless him, handled it without immediate alarm.

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

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

Just a mute reddening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I stop. Backtrack. I must have missed it.

Count again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now.

I have so many questions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re welcome.

Jet lagged, you’re a bit paranoid, easily confused and keep losing the thread of conversations. Everything takes longer than it should. The world feels like it’s moving very slowly and you are moving slowly through it. Your mouth is parched; eyes, dry and squinty. Sometimes you see things that aren’t really there. All you want to do is lie down.

Don’t believe me? Check this out.

See? The only difference is that everything is hilarious when you’re stoned. Nothing is hilarious when you’re jet lagged. Everything hurts.

You may be wondering — or possibly have already deduced — why I’m able to be so specific about this. I’ll tell you. It’s because Joel and I got really stoned in Williamsburg1.

This is yet another big difference I noticed stateside. Weed is now legal. You may have already picked up on this from some of the roadside signs I mentioned in previous pieces. Clearly, things have changed. There are signs in Hindi and Korean on the subway. The hot dog carts sell Mexican fare as standard.

And weed is legal. Things are great.

Anyway, another similarity between jet lag and being high is, shall we say, a certain narrative unreliability. My recall of events, places and conversations is …. limited.

If I was to trace on a map our progress across Williamsburg the day we got stoned, it would start out, firm and sure, at the corner coffee shop on the lower east side of Manhattan where we met my oldest and dearest friend Constantine — and it would finish, firm and sure, some twelve hours later back at our hotel in Tribeca.

In between, things would be … hazy.

Like this:

So, in an effort to chart a lost afternoon, here will now follow my account of our visit to Williamsburg — and then, Joel’s. A Doors of Perception for the digital age, if you will.

Whether reading both causes the afternoon to fall more sharply into relief will be a question that only the reader can answer.

Jill’s afternoon:

The gummies2 kicked in just as we finished crossing the Williamsburg bridge and turned up Bedford Avenue. By the time we got to McCarren Park, we were pretty incoherent.

It took us a long time to sit down on a patch of grass. Constantine was wearing a silk skirt and we discussed at length whether there might be dog shit there and then sat down anyway.

Sitting smoking a spliff, Joel remarked that taking a deep breath felt better than normal.

Constantine flicked a hot rock onto her silk skirt and we all looked in sorrow at the little black O. Then I panicked I’d lost my phone and checked all my pockets and my bag and my jacket. Eventually, Constantine said it’s right there, under your thigh. And there it was.

She was talking pretty much without stopping. I marvelled at her ability to form thoughts into words and sentences.

“How did the first person survive? It’s kind of amazing if you think about it.”

There were three or four conversations going on at once but I couldn’t chart them all because they weren’t really conversations. We just kept looking at each other and laughing.

The “conversation” moved on to whether we had accidentally got dog shit on the aluminium foil the spliff was wrapped in or whether the foil was already dirty before.

The task fell to me to determine the truth of the matter. I was touching the foil, examining it and sniffing it when a woman appeared next to us.

“Excuse me have you lost a phone?”

I stared at her, mouth slightly open, how did she KNOW?!

But then I realised she meant a different phone, not mine, and she was pointing under the tree next to us, where a black phone was lying on the grass.

I closed my mouth slightly and shook my head, waving my phone at her by way of communicating “nope, here it is”.

Words being well beyond me at this point.

She looked the three of us over and, taking her child’s hand, walked away.

We debated eating at a restaurant called Allswell and Constantine asked me about five times if all’s well for us to eat at Allswell. Eventually, we decided to go somewhere else.

After we crossed the road, Joel told me he didn’t remember crossing the road. Did we check both ways?

The waitress asked if we wanted to sit inside or outside and we were too stoned to make a decision so she put us outside. The people next to us got served their main course as we sat down.

Joel was too stoned to pick up the menu. He asked me what I was going to eat. I told him a BLT.

The people next to us got served their main course again.

A guy with a ponytail left the restaurant and Joel asked me what I was going to eat.

“Are you serious? You just asked me that.”

“You didn’t answer.”

“Yes I did. I said a BLT.”

“Oh right. A BLT.”

The guy with the ponytail left the restaurant again.

When our food arrived, Joel said it all tasted like peanut butter.

He was holding his sandwich and fiddling with the lettuce.

I said I’m going to the toilet and he said “oh, you’ll love it.” I had no idea what he was talking about and worried why I didn’t understand.

Waiting in line for the toilet, it was going really slow. What is it about this toilet taking everyone so long? It’s like the black hole of toilets. Outside the toilet, under the kitchen hatch, there was a food waste bin, filth trickling out of its mouth and down the sides. My mind skittered ahead to tonight, after lights out, when the roaches will descend.

There was a beep. My phone pinged. It was my mom asking where do I want to meet to pick my son up? I considered this with some alarm — I’m not really in a fit state for parenting — and eventually settled on telling her to come out to Williamsburg. I figured that will take the longest time and maybe we will be less stoned by then.

It’s a big maybe.

I typed out a response, laboriously. Every time I touched the keyboard it was like jumping into a swimming pool with my thumb, the screen rippling when I touched a key.

“I just told them to come here.”

Joel put his head on the table.

“You told them to come here?”

“It’s ok, they’re ages away. They’re still in Yonkers.”

Constantine sipped her drink and considered this. Then she leaned in conspiratorially.

“You mean yonks?”

“No, Yonkers.”

She sipped her drink again, still considering this.

“She’s in actual Yonkers? Or you mean, like, she’s yonkers away?”

“No, actual Yonkers. The place.”

“Oh right.”

Joel’s afternoon:

There are three or four conversations going on at once.

1. Where will we eat? “Allswell” is an option, which is hilarious.

2. Did a dog shit where we sat, right before we sat there? It’s okay to sit.

3. Constantine’s sitting in a silk dress. The dress got a hole in it from the embers.

4. Jill lost her phone and started panicking. It’s right there. She searches her pockets and rummages through her bag, eventually finding it on her coat.

We keep looking at each other and laughing. Everything is spinning, and I’m tuning in and out. It’s like going into a different dimension but having moments where you snap back and can interact with the world again for a few seconds. Then you go back out.

We cycle through snippets of each of the four conversations.

“Is that dog shit on the foil? You’ve got me all paranoid.”

“Is it all well with Allswell?”

“Can’t believe I almost lost my phone.”

“I burned a hole in my dress.”

“That’s the thing about rollercoasters, you can’t mess with rollercoasters.”

“Maybe we could just eat here (pointing across the road).”

“Can I have some of that hand sanitiser?”

“How are you doing? (laughing)”

Stranger: “Did anyone lose a phone? There’s a phone over here.”

“When you think about it, someone else is experiencing that in realtime.” Constantine is explaining that Jill looking for her phone was channelling the poor guy elsewhere in Brooklyn who had actually lost his phone.

“It’s called *physical* empathy. Tela… tela… telaportation.”

I’m losing it. I feel an overwhelming sense of laughter, and I feel like I’m lying down. Not actually down but in the process of laying down.

I have to capture this as it happens or I’ll forget all the details. I pull out my phone and try to type a note. This is difficult. My hands feel heavy and each tap is numb and strained.

Jill is reading the menu on her phone. “Starters, Sandwiches, Desserts…” “Sandwiches, that’s lunch-y. that’ll do”.

“A burger is a sandwich? Okay.”

“She was always a sandwich girl, was your Jill.”

We’re crossing a road, but we’re already on the other side. I don’t know how we got here or whether anyone checked both ways. I certainly didn’t. We’re heading to the restaurant at number 18.

Jill and Constantine are having a conversation but I can’t tell what it’s about. A moment ago, I thought we were in the park.

Waiter: “You eating in or out?” I say: “Out.”

We go to sit down at a table at the side of the road. I carefully put my bag down and think about my camera. I hope to god I don’t somehow lose it while stoned.

It’s so intense. I can hear every conversation and see every face.

Constantine is saying something about writing science fiction. “In the modern day, it’s time to find out who you really are. I think I’m going to make a sci-fi. About the first humans. It’s more like an old comedy. And then it’s like in the modern day. It would be like: ‘It’s time to find out who you are. You’re a direct descendent of the first humans.’ Then it’s like ‘never forget, no matter how good you are, you’re all descendants of the first humans’. ”

The couple next to us are happily served their food.

“What are you doing?” Jill says to me.

“Laughing. You two are just so funny.”

“I would just love to go somewhere and sing a song and play a guitar right now,” Constantine says.

I really need a wee. I check my bag again. Still there. I wonder how stoned the two of them are. Is it safe to leave my bag here? It would be weird to take my bag. I worry how weird it would be to take my bag.

I need to order before I go. “What are you getting?” I ask. I need to buy myself some time. I’m not sure I can process an entire menu.

“I’m kind of tempted by the BLAT.”

“What’s a BLAT?” “Avocado.” “Oh.”

“What are you getting Jill?”

“Didn’t you just ask me that?”

“Yeah, but you didn’t answer.”

“Yes she did. God, I’m really stoned.”

I stand up and walk backwards around the divider. “I’m just popping to the bathroom.” I am smiling but not sure why. It’s not funny, but I can’t help it.

“Okay.”

With some difficulty, I walk across to the building and head towards a line of people standing in a corner at the back. The bathroom door is black and dirty. It has an old diving mask (the kind with butterfly nuts) on it. Next to the bathroom door is a hatch to the kitchen where the food comes out, right above a steaming waste bin.

There are two women at the front of the queue, followed by two men and then me. And things are moving slowly.

Stand up straight and don’t say anything, they’ll never know, I tell myself.

I watch as servers dash in and out, attending to a terminal with dozens of buttons. Through the hatch, men sweat in white hats and speak in loud, unintelligible tones. It’s probably perfect English, though not to me.

After the second woman goes in, the man in front of me says to the other man:

“I hope you’ll be a bit quicker than them (indicating the two women who went first).”

“Ha, yeah, totally. Jeez!”

What a dick.

The woman came out, and the first man dashed in. We all waited in anticipation, the man in front of me getting increasingly impatient. He finally came out after about the same amount of time as the women. Even I’m shocked. Maybe he had a shit.

The other man rushes in, leaving the door half open as if to prove a point. He won’t even wash his hands, I think to myself. Minutes pass. He eventually comes out.

Now it’s my turn to perform, and let’s be clear: I’m stoned as fuck. I hold onto the handle and move my body around the door, closing it behind me. There’s no lock, but that’s alright since there’s a long queue keeping guard.

I move to the toilet and unbutton my shorts, wondering what it is that keeps people in this particular bathroom for so long. The relief is immense as I start and seem to continue forever like Tom Hanks in that movie with that one funny scene3. When I eventually stop, I realise this is the bathroom’s secret. No one stands in a line that long unless they really need it, and when they finally make it, they *really* need it.

I get back to the table and checked my bag and camera again.

“Is it okay to tell my mum we’re in Williamsburg?” Jill to me in concerned undertone. “I don’t ever remember being this stoned. I think it was mostly the gummy and then…”

Constantine: “You know what you have right now? You have a head hit and you have a body hit. From the gummy and the spliff. Head hit plus body hit.”

Jill keeps asking what I’m doing on my phone. “I’m just taking some notes because this is all very funny.”

“I want to get off.” She looks miserable. “Show me what you’re writing.”

“No.”

“What shall we do? Shall I tell my mum to come here or shall we meet her in midtown?”

“Are you getting paranoid?”

“I feel like he’s writing everything I say.”

“You’re actually the one who started the writing thing. You’re paranoid about the thing you thought. So then you created the paranoia for yourself. Joel didn’t look up and say, ‘I’M WRITING EVERYTHING YOU SAY NOW’ and then look back down. You asked him. That paranoia you have you can now release.”

The couple next to us are served their first meal again. Didn’t they just have a meal?

Constantine is explaining her perspective. “I’m looking at the guy with the red, but I’m seeing the girl with the purse. I’m looking at the world as a horse might see it.”

She stops herself. “Not a horse. A fish.”

The food arrives. I try to say “thank you”. It doesn’t sound like my voice, but fuck it. It worked.

The chips are dry, like peanut butter or a mouthful of semolina. This must be what it’s like, semolina, I mean. I spend what seems like several minutes working out which glass of water is mine. It’s on the second table next to the salad bowl.

I take a sip. The water is dry too. The tomato looks juicy, though.

The couple next to us are served their main meal. This is the third time now.

I pick up my BLAT and take a bite. It’s dry, too, but salty and feels good to eat. There’s a bit of lettuce sticking out of the side and I try to push it back in. I want it to be in alignment with the bread; can’t eat it otherwise. The whole task seems to take a number of minutes. I look across at Jill’s plate, assuming I’m falling behind and that everyone else has already finished. She’s barely started.

I’m eating chips one by one, lining each down the side of my mouth and crushing it all at once along half my teeth. The texture is great like this and I don’t mind the dryness.

It’s been an hour since we smoked.

Constantine is advising Jill. “You should get a cola. That’s actually helpful, a sugary drink.”

Jill needs the bathroom. “Just go wait in line,” I say. “You’ll really enjoy it.”

Jill’s mother is coming over, she’s texting her.

“Do you think she’ll notice?”

“I don’t know what you guys are normally like around her.”

“Well, not stoned.”

“It depends on her state of mind.”

“They only just got on the train from Yonkers,” Jill said. “So they’ll be awhile.”

“From actual Yonkers or yonkers away? Actual Yonkers. Okay.”

They won’t be here for like an hour.

“Imagine if laughter was all you had. Like, that’s all you got.”

“What’s our favorite thing we’ve consumed today?”

It’s time to pay. Do we divide it with or without the tip. Jill thinks we should add the tip first, round it to an easy number and divide that. Constantine wants to know what proportion of her part will be tip. We’re both confused as to why this information is necessary.

Constantine is talking to a friend on the phone. “We’re here now, so that’s where we are.” He turns up in a T-shirt that says: “It takes courage to enjoy it.”

Everything around us is surreal, with pops of colour. A girl with an old-fashioned film camera is shooting b-roll. There’s a man in conversation, working on a bright teal lolly. A lady walks past, delicately carrying a tiny plant pot.

Jill is quiet and looks terrified.

“You look scared. Do you want me to sit with you?”

“Yes please.”

—

So, there you have it. One afternoon, two vantage points. Have we arrived at the truth of it? Are two unreliable narrators better than one?

There are inconsistencies. Was it a silk dress or a skirt? (Skirt, I think). Was there avo on the sandwich? (There was). Did we elect to sit outside? (I think so.) Where did my phone turn up — under thigh or on coat? (In fact: on coat, under thigh).

There are other things we’ll just never know.

Was it really dog shit on the foil?

Who lost their phone?

And what were they all doing in that bathroom?

—

For Joel. Happy anniversary.

In this piece, he hits upon a quietly brilliant point: that our collective memories of a place are often…. empty.

The absence of references to Coney Island and its beach in the films and TV shows I had grown up with was more puzzling. Why did it not exist as territory of the imagination in the same way that Miami or Venice beach did? — TSDK

Here’s his piece (which features Nathan’s franks so has my heart forever).

Thus Spake Daniel Kalder

TSDK No. 32. The Possibility of a Beach Part One: Coney Island Baby

I In August of 2001, a few weeks before the death of one world and the birth of another, I visited the US for the first time. I was there at the invitation of my friend Jerry, who I had met three years earlier in the Czech Republic, when we were both in flight from our destinies. These attempts at evasion had led us to the same language school in Prague…

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3 years ago · 3 likes · Daniel Kalder

Now, it’s interesting to me how long-form multifarious understandings of places can be constructed from all of our extended takes and memories. It’s like the narrative equivalent of recording a famous event, say, the King’s coronation, from the perspective of every phone held over every head on the Mall.

Substack is kind of like those coronation videos, but it captures the internal, and often the mundane.

On that note, I’m taking a quick break from The Notebooks (don’t worry, they’ll be back) because there’s still a lot to say about my recent trip to the States.

I wanted to write about how much has changed since I was last stateside, pre-Trump. But, honestly, it’s too depressing to dwell on and I don’t trust my ten-day hot takes.1

I noticed a lot of hot differences with the UK though: the trees are bigger, the wildlife is wilder, the payment systems are antiquated2 and there are flags EVERYWHERE.

None of this is new. In fact, I’m pretty sure even the jars of marshmallow fluff and ice cream toppings in my home town’s ice cream parlour are the *exact* same ones from 1994.

Some things have stayed the same.

To wit: the crazies on the NY subway.

I’m not sure what I’m supposed to call them these days. Neurologically divergent denizens of the Metropolitan Transit Authority? My grandma used to call them headbangers (except imagine it in a rich Brooklyn patois: headbangas).

She lived pretty much her whole life in Brighton Beach — the less trendy end of the Coney Island boardwalk, down by Bay 1 — and the crazies were plentiful. As a kid, I distinctly remember her lashing out with handbag and raising her not inconsiderable voice — “the fuck outta here or I’ll call the cops” — but that may or may not be childish embellishment.

The woman on our subway last month when we went back to Coney Island could have led a masterclass on subway crazy etiquette.

First, she leaned in close to my face, gave me a conspiratorial look and said “two-five” with accompanying fingers held up. After some miming at the Subway map, I deduced she meant 25th Avenue and, consulting the map, gave her detailed instructions to alight at Avenue U (the nearest stop to 25th). She nodded fervently like she understood but didn’t move at the stop for Avenue U.

Then, when I moved back to rejoin my party, she did too.

Standing way too close, looking deep into my soul with dead eyes, she wrapped one leg around the pole and started shuffling around it. Still looking me right in the eye like she was trying to seduce me. Then, she came over to stand right in front of me again — and I mean right in front, I was inches from her T-shirt (J’adore Dior, since you asked).

She was so close, I noticed she was carrying a plastic Tupperware of what looked like raw meat. I wondered idly if she was a violent schizophrenic, perhaps preparing to knife me in the face.

We changed train carriages and I watched in horror as she started to change too but she didn't make it to our carriage before the doors closed. I kept a close eye on her from the next carriage for the rest of the journey and, not without some trepidation, alighted in Stilwell Avenue at the end of the line and fled the station.

They never change, the subway crazies.

Anyway, it’s a long old ride out to Coney Island on the Q train. This bit of Brooklyn is called “Little Odessa” because it used to be full of Russian Jews and now it’s full of Russian Orthodox. My grandma lived on the seventh floor of one of the brick apartment buildings that all look the same, all built sometime in the first half of the twentieth century. She fed birds on her fire escape and you could hear the Q train rattle below all night.

These days, Brighton Beach is pretty comprehensively Slavic. There is actual accordion music wafting from open windows and Russian and Ukrainian restaurants named “Tatiana” sell borscht up and down the boardwalk towards Bay 1.

Why are we here? For Joel, this is all about Mr. Robot — a hallowed F Society pilgrimage out to Coney Island. If you don’t know what I’m talking about (spoiler alert), Mr Robot is a four-season TV show starring Rahmi Malek as a neurodivergent software engineer (right up Joel’s alley) trying to take down (and also stop himself taking down?) Evil Corp. F Society is the secret headquarters for the take-down, cunningly hidden in a defunct arcade that used to be called FUN SOCIETY until some letters fell off.

So far, so Fight Club.

But F Society? I couldn’t wait to help him find it.

I swear when I first saw it on TV I remembered seeing it as a kid.

My grandma used to take us to Nathan’s for hotdogs in the early nineties, and to the beach, which was then littered with used needles and broken glass. It seems to have been cleaned up since, maybe passed through a sieve or something.

I know this beach well, it is in my blood.

My grandma met my grandpa on this beach, sometime in the 1930s. She told me she didn’t like him at first, didn’t think he was cute. She was sunbathing in her two-piece and he came up to talk to her and he was so hairy she thought he was wearing a jumper. (As an aside, almost a century later, I identify big time with this: I do not like a hairy man. Sorry, please don’t @me.)

But I guess he must have won her round in the end (my existence is strong evidence). I imagine he knew Brighton Beach pretty well. He grew up there, running these sun-baked streets down to the sand. He married my grandma, landed in Normandy on D-Day and then died of heart complications (which would have been manageable today) a couple years later, in his early thirties, when my mum was just a few months old.

His parents, whose paths only crossed here in Little Odessa, were both immigrants from the same corner of Belarus. My great-grandpa Isidore (what a fucking sexy name), was a quiet man with dark eyes who went swimming in the ocean year-round.

He was from Pinsk, on the Pripyat marshes between Ukrainian Lvov and eastern Poland. You’ve probably heard of Pripyat: thousands of acres of marshland and birch forest and its eponymous town. It has an abandoned Ferris wheel, moss-covered bumper cars and radioactive contamination.

Coney Island too has its own abandoned amusements. The Parachute Jump is long defunct but still looms over the boardwalk, like a sprouting metal tree. I’ve heard my grandma and grandpa did the Parachute Jump back in their day, after they met on Brighton Beach. The Parachute Jump was originally built for the 1939 World’s Fair and, despite needing to be closed on windy days, remained a popular ride into the ‘60s.

Outcompeted by the 1964 World’s Fair up in Queens, it was finally decommissioned and sold to a notorious profiteer whose family money came from the Klondike gold rush up in the Yukon: an ambitious and unsavoury German-American Bronx-born property developer named Fred Trump.

True to form, Trump Sr expended considerable efforts in the 1960s to demolish the Parachute Jump and sell it for scrap metal — but was blocked by the city, which eventually acquired the site.

Still a pointless tower of metal, these days it’s covered in LED bulbs so at least looks pretty at night.

“You guys watch Mr Robot?”

A bald, black guy sitting in front of one of the arcades called over to us. We were loitering, up and down a strip of arcades near the famous Zoltar Speaks fortune telling machine. Looking at our phones and pointing at buildings, we felt like we were close but couldn’t quite figure out which arcade was F Society.

“Yeah…”

He heard Joel’s accent and started asking the “where you from” questions. Turns out he’s the manager of the building that the F Society scenes were filmed in.

We exchanged glances. Looks like we found it.

“Yeah, everyone who comes over here looking for F Society is from another country. I don’t know why. Americans don’t watch it. I ask them, you watch it online? They say, yes I watch it in Germany, in Denmark, you know, wherever. But it’s only people in foreign countries that watch it, never Americans. I don’t know why.”

Then he said they weren’t open yet for the summer season but we were welcome to come in and look around.

Joel was giddy. It was full of arcade games. It was F Society. The building manager pointed out all the sights: that’s where the popcorn stall was, that’s where Eliot stashed the gun. That’s Mr Robot’s desk, that’s the spot where he does all his best thinking. That’s the joke stall.

I took a picture of Joel behind the stall. He was raised Christian but I’m confident this is the closest he’s ever come to a religious experience.

Then the building manager started telling us about the filming.

“They were so nice you know, the big stars, Rahmi Malek and Christian Slater. Their security guys were so big, these big, bald, black dudes. But one of the producers or managers or something, he was such a dick. One time, they were getting ready to film and they had the shot all set up and I accidentally dropped a bottle of coke and this guy, he gets really angry and goes “who’s the asshole”. So I stepped forward and was like “I’m the asshole”, real serious, not smiling or nothing. And he goes “Uh, sorry, you know, I thought it was, you know…..”. And I was like “you thought it was one of your assholes”. And he just went quiet.

So then for the rest of the day, he kept looking sideways at me and I was just like flipping the bottle and catching it, flipping it, catching it, looking right at him.

And he didn’t say nothing.”

We reminisced for awhile about Coney Island in the ’90s. I told him my grandma was from up by Bay 1 and she used to take me down here all the time.

I told him how once, when I was about four, I saw a toy pail and shovel down the steps on the beach. This was off-season, maybe November, and it was cold, not beach weather, but hey a pail’s a pail and sand’s sand. So I ran down the steps to the toys and settled down to play with them, then looked up.

About ten feet away, underneath the boardwalk, a man was standing there, grinning at me in an unhinged way. He wasn’t wearing pants.

I don’t remember that part, I only heard about it later when my grandma called the police.

“Oh yeah,” the building manager said. “That was before they filled in under the boardwalk with sand.”

He thought for a second.

“You know the history of this place, this is a mean place. They’ve got the roller coasters but this place don’t play. Al Capone got his face cut here. The projects just down the way (he pointed towards Neptune Avenue) you don’t want to go towards those projects. Trust me. You don’t want to go that way. They’ll be looking you up and down, even if you’re walking with your man (he nodded at Joel) and they’ll be like “hey ma”. And they’ll wait to see if your man says anything.

But you just gotta keep walking. Don’t say nothing.”

It’s strange writing about a place you think you know intimately, trying to square it with other people’s hot takes on it, their memories. Mr Robot and the whole F Society riff is a hot, dilapidated take on a forgotten Coney Island that has seen better days, what’s left behind after the world’s moved on.

In Coney Island, the world hasn’t moved on much. There’s still borscht, still the Parachute Jump, probably still a grandma somewhere on Brighton Beach asking her granddaughter if she wants a knish from the guy selling them from a shoulder bag. Still the fiends (but these days they doze on boardwalk benches topside, rather than lure little girls down below).

My memories are not the same as anyone else’s, but they are memories of the same place.

It reminds me again of all those videos held aloft, filming the King in his carriage to Buckingham Palace. If you could harness the cumulative data from those phones, from all our memories, if you could compile it, you could create this immersive experience, float above the crowd and see it from everyone’s perspective at once. That’s how I feel about all this writing about Brighton Beach. Can we call it back? Walk the 1990s beach in my memory, the gritty streets of 1970s Little Odessa, maybe even the 1910s when my great-grandparents first pitched up there?

We’re going to need a hell of a lot more writers. Get enough people writing their place, recording their memories.

But maybe it’s too late for the 1910s now.

The building manager was still talking. He had lots of memories.

He told us about the scene in Mr Robot where the FBI were meant to bust into F Society. All the actors, the extras for the scene, were wearing fake blue FBI jackets and had fake gun holsters. On their breaks from filming, they were going out to Dunkin Donuts for coffee, still dressed up looking like the FBI.

Pretty soon word got around and all the locals were saying to each other “shit, the FBI is raiding something down by the boardwalk”.

And then, sure enough, the actual police came busting in while they were filming to see what was going on.

The cops (the real ones) told the director and the crew “hey, if your guys need to go out to Dunkin Donuts, they better take off those jackets. We see anyone else out there in a blue jacket, we’re going to arrest them for impersonating a police officer.”

Then they turned to the building manager. “Yo, you got a blue jacket? You been going out there all dressed up?”

And he said:

“No man, I’m not even part of it. I just work here.”

—

Where were we? In the mountains in New Hampshire, getting ready for my cousin’s wedding.

The wedding is under a tent, mountainside and spectacular.

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As you may recall, we’re on a Stateside excursion.

After the flight, we landed and picked up a car from Enterprise in Boston’s Logan airport.

When we got to the lot, it was a *much* nicer car than we had paid for. I was loudly impressed and excited. Joel gave me a look to shut up in case they realised they’d fucked up and took away the nice car.

We went to get tacos at a place that the lady in Enterprise recommended, which was full of frat boys because it was Friday night.

Back in the car, Joel played with the lane-keeping and cruise control with the air of a boy on Christmas morning.

“Look! It doesn’t even need me to do anything. It’s just staying in the lines. Isn’t that cool?”

It beeped at him, which was the car’s way of telling him to put his hands back on the wheel. The lanes split and the car juddered from side to side, unsure which lane to keep.

“I mean, it’s not perfect. But it’s pretty cool.”

We cleared Boston and headed north towards New Hampshire. My son fell asleep immediately in the backseat.

The roadside became wooded pretty quickly. I forgot how big the woods are here, and each tree too. The trees are so much bigger than the spindles in the UK. Here, the trees loom. Each tree is 100ft or more.

I asked him what he thought of the States so far.

“Everyone seems so happy.”

I agreed. It’s noticeable, how much happier people seem, at least on face value, compared to the UK.

“I like all the signs too.” He means a strip mall we’re passing.

Fireworks!

Hydroponics!

Eastern Cannabis company!

The strip malls of northern Massachusetts give way to more thinly spaced gas stations in Live Free or Die New Hampshire.

Brake for moose!

Hundreds of collisions!

Home of the first snowmobile - Ossippee, NH

Driving over here is a bit of a mystery. The signs are confusing and hieroglyphic, as if the author had only a passing grasp of word order.

Hidden

Drive

Right

Bridge ices before road.

The speed limit too seems arcane and unconnected to the shape or quality of the road.

Joel is doing 62 mph. The speed limit is 45 mph.

“Joel, the speed limit is 45 here. You need to slow down.”

“Come on, look at this road. It’s HUGE and it’s empty. There’s no one here. In the UK, this would definitely be 60. There’s no way this road is 45. 45 is insane.”

“It may be insane, but it’s still the speed limit. I just saw a sign.”

“I don’t get it. The roads are so wide but the speed limits are so low. It’s just stupid. Especially for such a big country. How does anyone get anywhere? That must be why they all fly.”

We flash past two police cars at the right hand side.

“We’re about to get pulled over. Jesus fucking Christ.”

Blue lights behind us and, all of the sudden, we are in a movie. It’s all so familiar, and so scary.

The cop comes up to Joel’s window, with a flashlight, exactly like in every movie you’ve ever seen where this kind of thing happens. I wonder if I am Thelma or Louise and who gets Brad Pitt in the motel.

“Evening folks. You were doing 62 mph back there in a 45 zone. Where you headed?”

I tell him where we’re going and why (cousin’s wedding). I use my best American accent and smile my whitest contritest smile. Joel hands over his UK licence, tucked inside the international permit. I tell the cop I told him to slow down. Joel gives me a death stare.

The cop disappears back to his car. Joel and I bicker quietly but with passion.

Eventually, the cop returns and gives Joel back his licence and permit.

“Ok, just take it easy on these roads, buddy. We’ve got bear, elk and moose up here.”

I realise he is letting us off and also momentarily find it sweet that he is worried about the wildlife.

Then:

“If you hit one of those, it’s not a good day for the car.”

Ah. I see. He is worried about the car.

-

The next morning, we walk into breakfast and hug everyone and my mom says “I have a tick”.

“What?”

“Yeah I went for a walk this morning in the woods and I have a tick now. Want to see?”

“Um no.”

She is trying to roll up her trousers to show me but can’t get them up high enough above the tick.

“Ok I’m going to go find a tick removal kit.”

She comes back after ten minutes as we’re perusing the breakfast menu. She is holding a white envelope.

“It’s out. Wanna see?”

No.

“It’s dead now.”

Still no.

My son of course does want to see and pauses his pancakes to go have a look at the dead tick in the envelope.

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Today started with a 7am alarm and a 30-second cuddle as a loin-girding effort.

Then, a last check to make sure everything was packed (it wasn’t), a frantic assessment whether all perishable items had been removed from fridge (they hadn’t) and all bin and food waste safely excreted outdoors (also, no).

Then there was a mad dash to drop three kids at school on time (fail) and make sure the other one had a robust sick bag (pass).

And then we were off to London Heathrow’s Terminal 5, which has upscaled considerably since the day — almost nine years ago, to the day — when I took a pregnancy test in the bathroom opposite Boots and discovered, yep, I was pregnant. (Side note: The resulting child is the one vomiting extravagantly en route to the airport.)

So why? What’s the big deal with this big day?

We’re Going To America.

It’s been almost six years since I last set foot in the States (or indeed anywhere on the North American continent). I am, as you may have deduced, half-American and half-Irish. The American half is not Irish; the Irish half has nothing to do with America. I last went to America in 2017 to get aforementioned child a US passport. This was pre-Trump and I often wonder what it’s like these days.

Now, to be very clear, I’m a terrible flier. My palms become moist, my heart flips and I feel like puking more or less continuously, from take-off until landing and for several hours (days) before. This, despite the fact that I lived in Southeast Asia for over five years and used to be a veteran of the 12 hour BA flight from Heathrow to Bangkok. (I have the Avios points to prove it and, once, slept 11 out of the 12 hours and arrived in London better rested than I’d been for months).

But that was then, this is now.

Now, I’m a nervous (almost) 38 year old with a sore back and a kid and a boyfriend who is hell-bent on joking about terrorists and catastrophic mid-Atlantic descents as we queue for security checks. I remember Erica Jong (remember her?) who wrote in Fear of Flying that she was convinced that the only thing that kept the plane aloft was her concentrated attention, gripped fingernails in armrests, for every second of the flight. An even-momentary lapse of concentration would send the plane plummeting.

This resonated so strongly with me that I still think of it every time I fly. Sometimes I catch myself not paying attention and immediately hone back in. Where are we? What speed? What altitude? What’s the headwind like? I watch the moving map and the in-flight data with the assiduity of a trainee pilot.

The funny thing is I have a brain that is well-trained in logic. I know how safe flying is compared to, well, most other things. I also (hang onto your hats!) happen to know the ins and outs of aircraft finance — the vast network of covenants in place to guarantee the security of the financing bank’s investment; the rigour with which planes are maintained and tested to ensure that there isn’t the slightest whiff of a breach of covenants, which would trigger a default under the financing arrangements. I am intimately familiar with the minutiae with which this is documented: the testing times, the service levels, the maintenance qualifications, materials, quality control. I know aircrafts are some of the most intensively contracted and regulated items in existence.

I know all of this. But it doesn’t matter. Floating untethered in 36,000 feet of air I come undone. Flying is the anxious person’s kryptonite — or at least, it is mine. Salud to more chilled-out specimens amongst us who cope with equanimity, but that is just not me.

I’m on the plane right now as I type and I’ve just had a double gin which has relaxed my white knuckles long enough to bang this keyboard. See?

Yes, it’s a Gordon’s, made to Alexander Gordon’s exacting standards since 1760-whatever — but it’s also imported. Which means it was loaded onto this hell-ship back on the other side of the Atlantic, in America. Did you know that good old Gordon’s is — in America — a fancy imported drink?! Well, now you do. I bring you this information from a remote position 36,348 ft above an elevated part of the continental shelf, west of Achill Island.

But Achill Island. Have you heard of it? Have you been there? It’s weird that it has so much prominence on this map because I’ve spent a great deal of time there. It’s where a family friend has a holiday home, off in remote Dookinella (actual name of actual place), and for me it conjures the smell of peat fires, wet blown waterproofs and small houses clinging to impossible perches on the salt-battered Atlantic coast. It’s where surfers congregate in the winter months and swells pull them twenty feet up as effortlessly as a leaf in a breeze. There are weaver fish too, lurking in the sandy shallows, just under cover, ready to embed a spine in a numb un-wetsuited foot. Achill also has claims to some of the largest sea cliffs in Europe. I’ve never seen them. They are pretty inaccessible and invisible from land on the far seawards side of a steep and wild promontory. I could probably see them from this plane, if they weren’t under the consistent cloud cover that persists on the west coast of Ireland. I might even be able to see Rockall too — that nub of granite, remnant of the great south-west/north-east oriented Caledonian-Appalachian mountain ranges that were squished when the oceans of Iapetus closed to a puddle 450 million years ago and then sprawled out again into the Atlantic, carrying frozen, shit-spattered Rockall with it.

Let’s go back to flying.

Have you read Mark Vanhoenacker? He’s a British Airways pilot and he wrote Skyfaring, one of the more haunting and unique travelogues you’ll ever read. Unique because when else have you read what a pilot thinks when you thrust your piddly delicate little life into his hands above the wild North Atlantic — and haunting, because how odd to read about a thing I so loathe through the eyes of one who so loves it.

In a way, reading him has made me more sanguine about flying. Before, I just assumed pilots must all secretly be lunatics — who would do this for a living? On a daily basis? They must be insane.

And that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

But now I see. Pilots are poets too! And I can manage myself, and my copious anxiety, better.

“The sky’s below us! I can see the sky below us. Also, I can see the sky above us. Are we doing a 360 barrel?”

That’s my son, doing his bit to ease the terror.

I have another gin now. This one is a Tanqueray (fancy). And look!

How pleasingly symmetrical! Imported Gordon’s took a nostalgic journey home from the States to England. This Tanqueray, loaded in the UK, is now coming with us on a Stateside adventure.

What does it mean, all this export-import nonsense, except that flavours from afar always taste better.

Above the Atlantic, everything feels far and Gordon’s and Tanqueray both taste great.

There are no clouds today. It’s clear and I can see straight down almost 40,000 feet to white-capped navy seas as we approach Newfoundland, where it is always blustery. The shifting constellation of white marks waves; the rare unmoving patches, icebergs.

And for that, and for many, copious in-flight gins, I remain sanguine.

So, come along. Now commencing, after a six-year absence, a ten-day Odyssean return journey to the States for a family wedding, a visit to my childhood home and a spin through one of the great cities of the world. Yes, I’m prone to grandiosity — but, never mind, here we go…..

The great eye of the world blinks, and now we are somewhere else.

Mark Vanhoenacker, Skyfaring

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Now, as you may have deduced from Part 1, we just got back from Wales and, as you may also have deduced (nothing gets past you, I know), this is a two-parter.

I am reading a book on the geology of Britain called Hidden Landscapes, which goes very well with climbing mountains, like a fine wine pairing. It got me thinking about landscapes, inner and outer.

I am obsessed by the idea of what we leave behind. And, as you already know, I also wanted to write about a mountain in Wales. How are those two things connected?

Rocks and mountains are the story of crushed shells, dead brachiopods and belemnitic remains. The land outside, whatever we can see, and also what we can’t see, is always the story of what went before. Early sea creatures — trilobites, ammonites — endure for aeons in a quiet sea bed.

What isn’t there is part of the story too. Some plants and animals live in alpine places of great turmoil and erosion — marmots, say, or mountain lions — and so leave no fossil record. It is as if they never existed.

What about us?

I imagine archaeologists of the future finding the triangular shards of beer bottles and viewing them with the same wonder we reserve for arrowheads. A friend, climbing the sea cliffs along the Irish Sea, told me he found an ancient bangle stashed in a handhold. A daring theft and a cunning hiding space? I wonder if the thief slipped on the damp cliff face and so never came back to collect his booty.

Another friend told me about a house in Bath rented by a bunch of students who stapled their used condoms to the kitchen ceiling. Why the kitchen? Drippy additions to the stew add a certain umami depth of flavour? No prizes for guessing what message these students were intending to relay with the detritus they left behind. It’s not Lascaux but, clearly, the impulse to leave behind something (anything) is strong.

The tangible things endure and, in some cases (not used condoms), they call out and hint at tantalising stories we’ll never know.

It’s why I’ve always loved auctions, flea markets and second hand bookshops. The sound of all those stories in my ears like the roar of a conch shell; concentric spirals of conversation diminishing outwards around me. The discernible words to the semi-audible to the steady hum.

In America they call them estate sales, and they are exactly that: the remains of someone’s — a recently deceased someone’s — estate. Essentially, you go into the dead person’s house and have a rummage through their wardrobe, the tin of interesting rocks they once picked up on a beach in Harlech, their souvenir playing cards from Reno, that one weekend. All that is left behind is the detritus of a life lived. The memories attached to those things disperse, like grains of sand in a tide, and the detritus tells only a fragment of the story. Presumably someone has already been through and sanitised the joint, tucking away the dirty pants, chucking out the half-squeezed bottles of lube, burning any revelatory letters and journals. The saleable items are all that remain, to hint at — but reveal nothing of — what really happened that weekend in Reno.

The shoebox of priceless (to us) treasures becomes meaningless, disembodied, divorced from context the moment we die and our inner landscape vanishes.

Last week’s trip to Wales was, to me, a shoebox of priceless treasures. I felt a great pressing need to record it; to anneal it in place and time, like a great lump of granite, so it didn’t disperse.

Often on a train or in a car I’ll want to situate myself in the landscape, so I scroll out on Google Maps, follow along, spotting ridges and escarpments, turning the phone to note the direction of unseen towns. Just so I can situate myself in the land at that moment.

This I did in the car on the way back from Wales.

I told Joel I have a hankering to go to a car boot sale.

He said:

“You’re so adorable. I could never have predicted you would say that.”

“Why not? I’ve just been googling car boot sales near us all morning.”

“So Google could have predicted you’d say that. But not me.”

He’s right. Google knows. My digital footprint will live on to tell the tale that last Sunday morning I googled “car boot near me”. Maps will reveal if I travelled there; my Monzo app what (if anything) I purchased. Even my likes on the new Notes feature of Substack will reveal what I may have been thinking about at various points during the day.

A few years ago there was a great international military secrecy breach when Strava started sharing details of military bases. It turned out U.S. Marines, using Strava to track their runs, were running loops around the deck of their aircraft carrier, which was parked [?] in the Bermuda triangle or Area 51 or some other zone of utmost military secrecy. I think I speak for all of us when I say: duh, and also, LOL.

But here we are again! The residual detritus of a life lived, except these days it’s digital detritus.

It’s why I fear ours will be the age lost to history. Everything about us is electronic. Historians of some distant future will contemplate the end of the twentieth century as the end of our civilization, since that’s where written records seem to fade out. Possibly they will look at the tone and prejudices of many of those books and assume our bigotry led to the war that ended us. If only they could have seen Twitter.

Our phones keep a faithful log of all our movements, and some of our thoughts, our likes, our comments. I imagine we are probably not far off there being an app that you can sign up to and, if you wish, it will create an immutable record of all your posts online and every piece of digital content you ever created after you die. The full record of every scrap of your digital life lived. Your likes, your every movement on Google maps, your heart rate at the exact time you saw the photo of your ex on Insta. Some extroverts would probably volunteer to open theirs up: a public life that anyone could have access to — for research, for creative purposes or maybe just for entertainment.

But, even then, it still wouldn’t track our innermost workings. Apple Health tracks our sleep, our footsteps, our heart rate. But until it can start tracking our brain waves, and logging and capturing our thoughts as effortlessly as it captures our movements through Instagram (and this, Joel assures me, is still some way away), all we have are our pens. And our keyboards.

It’s still the only way to capture all the detritus around the edges that would never otherwise get recorded.

I think as AI makes inroads into traditional spheres of creativity, there will be a premium on this record of authentic human experience. It will become necessary to farm and source experiences — and our thoughts about those experiences — because AI can’t generate original content. It can only recycle and reuse what’s there already. No one else, no other human and certainly no machine, can write what I am thinking or feeling; that is unique to me and, when I go, will die with me. Substack’s value is as a repository of all that authentic humanity. All those writers busily recording their thoughts and feelings and experiences. Much as I wish to be subversive, I fear I am not contraverting tech’s reign but rather feeding it; swelling the mass of source material on which the AI algos of the future will gorge.

In lieu of any car boot sales, I told Joel I wanted to go to Hay-on-Wye. I’ve wanted to go for years to see what all the fuss was about and, after strapping on my big girl pants for Tryfan, I felt it was time for a quieter pace.

He’s pensive.

“Is it a river?”

“The Wye? Yes. Why yes! It is a river. Why?”

“Every time you say Hay-on-Wye I think of bales of hay stacked on the letter Y.”

This is not at all what I was expecting him to say.

“What?”

“Old fashioned bales, you know, the round ones. And they’re stacked on the letter Y with its arms up like in YMCA with the bales of hay stacked in between the arms.”

I have no suitable response to this, other than to wonder if Dall-E would create me an image of that. Spoiler: it couldn’t, but here is its best attempt:

So we agreed to stop at Hay-On-Wye on the way back from Wales.

Hay-on-Wye is a strange place. I feel I should love it — here are all the things I love! Books, outdoor shops, irreverence! — but I kind of … don’t love it. And I’m not sure WHY (forgive me) this is.

And that makes me uneasy.

Maybe I missed its charms or maybe it was a Sunday or maybe I just couldn’t see past all the London expats pushing thousand-pound strollers. But this felt more like a book cemetery, or possibly more charitably a book museum, rather than a celebration of books. It is a town of books, true, but books as spectacle. As commodity. Leather-bound, and oh-so-Instagrammable. Where were the stories? None of these books hinted at the stories of previous owners, their carefully curated collections. Where were the niche shops for nature writing? For twentieth century Americana? For classics of science fiction? Every bookshop I went in just seemed confused; as if someone had purchased books by the kilo and then thought: Job done. All those old orphan books reaching out, without a story to tell. It made me sad.

In one shop, Joel overheard two women ruminate on whether they stocked Harry Potter.

Now, I’m not trying to be highbrow. I love Harry Potter as much as we all secretly love Harry Potter. In fact, I have the first American edition of the first Harry Potter book because I am (dusts shoulders) about the same age as Harry Potter and read it when it first came out, when I was a kid.

But come on. Harry Potter will be in your local Sainsbury’s. You didn’t need to come to Hay-On-Wye for that.

As we went on, Joel said to me:

“We just passed a place selling Orgasmic Cider.”

“Wow. We should get some.”

“Wait, do you think it was just a misspelling of Organic? Like some farmer meant Organic Cider and accidentally wrote Orgasmic Cider? We’ve got Orgasmic Veg too! Come check it out. This farm is certified orgasmic. All 100% orgasmic.”

“To be fair, it’s easily done. I said it in Science class once. I meant to say “organism” but it came out as “orgasm”. The teacher laughed, and everyone else. It was awful.”

Then, in a cafe a woman behind the counter refused to sell us mushrooms and eggs with our avocado toast, not because she didn’t have any mushrooms or eggs and not because she couldn’t price them as extra items but because she said she needed to “save them because we are running low on stock”.

Now.

Excuse me. But I have worked in many a coffee shop in my time back in my California days and, if I know one thing and one thing only about food retail, it is this first and cardinal rule:

If there are customers standing in front of you that want food that you have and that you would like to sell to paying customers, then you sell it to them. You don’t save it for hypothetical future customers.

Next to me, a woman butts in and asks “excuse me, is that a hedgehog slice?”

Sorry?

“That chocolate slice thing. That’s what we call it in Australia.”

I gave up on Hay then and its Gram-worthy bookshops and its hedgehog slices.

We aimed instead for Offa’s Dyke Path, a trail I read about that follows an earthenwork wall and ditch built by a Saxon king to keep out troublesome Welsh tribes in the eighth century. I will often do this. Read about some very obscure barrow or former nunnery or old Roman road and feel a keen need to go and see it for myself. The land speaks to me with the echo of feet that have passed, and all of their stories. In London, it is a deafening roar, like the sea: bracing but maddening after a time. In the woods of upstate NY, it is a soft shurrur. Even in western Mongolia, where the land and sky stretch impossibly up and night arcs into the whale of the Milky Way leaping from horizon to horizon and the night sky is unpolluted by light and no living creature stirs for a hundred miles, I can hear it.

Lost footfalls like cymbal’s bells, tinkling in my tympanum.

So much for a change of pace. Turns out I just can’t seem to stop walking up hills.

This quickly turned out to be my favourite bit of Hay-on-Wye, as we walked out past the car park to green fields. Soon we were up on an eminence with views across to the far side of the Wye. It was nice to walk on soft grass and mud and not have to look down all the time. It was very, very nice to be able to just trust the ground was still there. The opposite of Tryfan.

I whistled four notes.

“What was that?”

“Just me, whistling tunelessly.”

“It wasn’t tuneless. I recognised it.”

“It’s nothing! It’s just what I whistle when I whistle.”

“That’s why I recognised it. It’s what you always whistle.”

“That’s what I always whistle?”

“Yes. I thought it was a tune you had stuck in your head all the time.”

“No, that’s just my internal whistle. My theme tune. My leitmotif. What was it? I don’t even know.”

“That’s wonderful. You don’t even know what it is.”

I invited him to demonstrate but he was laughing too hard to whistle for several minutes.

Then:

Doo-dee doo doo.

And thus was recorded for all time a vital component of my inner landscape: the pointless whistle.

It started to rain then and we hightailed it back to the car.

But not before formulating vague — but resolute — plans to hike all 179 miles of Offa’s Dyke path.

After Tryfan, it’s good to have a new mountain to climb, and new stories to spin.

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We just got back from Wales.

I meant to publish a different piece entirely today, not at all about my trip to Wales.

But, the truth is, I wanted to write about a mountain in Wales.

While I appreciate that climbing mountains in Wales is a fairly niche interest area, I expect the theme of being uncomfortably (dangerously?) ill-equipped for a challenging situation may resonate more widely. If not, forgive this brief excursion. I’ll get back to more typical fare shortly.

There is a mountain in Wales that just calls out to be climbed — and I’m not talking about Snowdon. If you’ve ever driven through Snowdonia, you’ve probably seen it. It’s a big bristly mass of spiky rock above Ogwen Lake and it’s called Tryfan.

The name means “three rocks” in Welsh because, well, I’m not sure why.1 There are a hell of a lot more than three rocks on it. From the road, it looks to be entirely rock, with very little grass or heather or green on it at all.

“The top is stacked with jumbled slabs of volcanic rock where ice and weather have prised apart the solid rock until the slivers look like dominoes scattered by an irritable giant. The scenery here is as wild as anything in the Highlands. … The bones of the landscape project in jagged profusion from the carcasses of these mountains. Volcanic rocks are slow to weather. The walk from Tryfan [is] one of the most exposed ridges in Britain [where] lava and ash thrown from volcanic centres on occasion erupted violently into the air.”2

Here she is:

She’s a beast and the North Ridge — that spine that rises straight from the road — is the beastiest bit of it. If you’re into climbing, it screams to be climbed.

We were talking about it in the car on the way up. We were both keen, but my enthusiasm was somewhat caveated.

Now, I’ve already mentioned that Joel is a *bit* younger than me and, even under normal circumstances, has more energy than a sugared-up cocker spaniel. When it came to the North Ridge, he was ready to climb Tryfan. Today, right now, this very minute.

I was more cautious; the wind was up and squally, rain was forecast. We didn’t know the route, we didn’t have the topo3 and there’s no phone signal on Tryfan.

When I blithely told the guy in the Cotswolds shop in Betwys-y-Coed that we were off to climb the North Ridge of Tryfan he told us he’s part of the mountain rescue team and they get called out all the time for people who take wrong turns on the North Ridge and end up in yawning gullies that peter off to airy cliff edges.

Hahaha, I hope you don’t have to come rescue us! Hahaha.

Yes. I’d be very unimpressed.

Gulp.

I become even more cautious about climbing Tryfan.

Day by day, the week ticked by and still we hadn’t done Tryfan.

Here’s what the week looked like.

Day 1 — Arrived and went right up manageable little Moel Siabod without stopping at the Air BnB. Three hours car-to-car, back just as the sun set. Clear views from the top across to Snowdon, Tryfan and most of the Welsh 3000s. Our legs were fresh and nubile as the lambs we passed on the way up. 8/10

Day 2 — As expected, horrendous weather blew in. Never mind, we were here to climb some mountains. We strapped on gaiters and waterproofs and aimed for Pen Yr Ole Wen, the seventh highest peak in Wales. No navigation, no signal and we immediately lost the path and spent an hour and a half tramping around a boggy field crossing and re-crossing a churning river before eventually finding the path up to the base of the trail. I learned later that the route we took is called Porcupine Ridge and allow me to share that it is fucking spiky and so not inappropriately named. The wind was gusting and we were on hands and knees at one point. I had a meltdown just below the summit at a cleft in the rocks that felt precarious in the wind but really wasn’t. Eventually we reached the summit plateau and descended just as slowly as we came up, getting back to the car at about 10pm.  2/10

Day 3 — Pouring rain. We set our sights lower — on Moel Hebog, a poetic name that means “the hill of the hawk” and a popular climb (usually, but not today). Today, we seemed to be the only people in Wales who had the deranged notion to climb a mountain in this weather. Cue another hour and a half in the boggy fields before finding the trail up. Feet wet to the ankles even through Goretex and gaiters, we agreed it was time to purchase a Garmin. 1/10

Day 4 — Rest day. Waited for our Garmin to arrive. Took a flat walk from Betwys-y-Coed to Swallow Falls, the longest continuous waterfall in Wales, and back. Joel built a fire for the outdoor hot tub at our Air BnB (fancy!) and we waited three hours for it to be warm enough to get in. He beat me at chess while we waited (I managed to lose despite pulling off a stunning move that saw his Queen and two knights taken). As we (finally) emerged from the house in nought but our towels to dart to the tub, Joel imagined for a moment what it would be like if the door slammed and we realised we had no keys. We checked four times to make sure we had the keys and so did not lock ourselves out of the Air BnB in the nip. 6/10

Day 5 — Climbed Cadair Idris. Bit of a cheat as we had done it before but we went fast and light and did the Minfordd path up to the summit and back in under three hours, which is pretty good going. This was intentional so we could be sure we made it back in good time to Betwys-y-Coed to pick up our new **Garmin** before Cotswolds closed. First glimpse of sun all week up at the top of Cadair Idris, with views for days. 7/10

Day 6 — Armed with the Garmin, the world was our oyster. We set out for the remote Rhinogs, which I had a hankering to explore, having heard they were (a) very ancient and beautiful and (b) totally unpeopled, compared to the other busy bits of Snowdonia. In the southern part of Snowdonia, Rhinog Fawr (big Rhinog) was our goal. It’s in the middle of the Harlech Dome, which is this great big lump of very ancient Cambrian rock and it feels old indeed.

“Slice the top off an onion and you will see the deepest layers in the centre … this is a plan of the structure of the Harlech Dome. The oldest rocks are in the middle and these are tough grits. Such beds weather into benches, or natural terraces, each with a small craggy scarp. The terraces are arranged into natural amphitheatres constructed on a gargantuan scale. Tier after tier rise up the sides of Rhinog Fawr, the mountain at the heart of [Harlech] Dome.”4

The trail starts on a packhorse route of soft worn slates called the Roman Steps (which may not be Roman but which are certainly medieval, if not earlier) before splitting off sharply to reach a lake and then up a steep gully for the summit. Sun split the clouds just as we reached the summit and we were warm enough on the descent to jump naked into the lake, with not a soul about for miles. 9/10

Day 7 — Our last day in Snowdonia. Best weather of the week, it dawned bright, sunny and very calm, a sort of miracle for North Wales in April.

Joel was positively itching for Tryfan. Would this be the day?

I remained cautious; my knee was giving me grief (I’m so old) and there was a problem with the Garmin, which is this: the Garmin comes only with a fairly inadequate basic built-in map. If you want, you know, trails and topographical details (which it turns out we did), you’re out of luck. You need to buy the topo map separately and put it on an SD card and insert that and… well, tech details.

I didn’t know the tech ins and outs of the Garmin but I was very resistant to climbing the North Ridge of Tryfan without satellite positioning on a reliable topographical map.

Joel spent hours trying to upload the right topo map to the Garmin to no avail. Frustration was high, quiet bickering was (forgive me) peaking. We were on the verge of sacking it off to go climb something else — but, just as decision time loomed, Joel realised we could download an e-copy of our old paper OS map.

And, lo, suddenly we had our satellite location on a topo map and could see our trail for the North Ridge.

It was time.

Advice for climbing Tryfan: get there early on a sunny Saturday. It took us twenty-five minutes to find somewhere to ditch the car (and it was in fact in a ditch).

More advice: come ready to climb. It’s not an easy climb. It starts steep, precisely as it means to go on, for about four hours. We skirted a large buttress and started zig-zagging up. Every four minutes or so, we stopped, checked where we were on the topo — and adjusted and re-adjusted our route.

I may not remember the route precisely because Tryfan’s North Ridge takes a lot of in-the-moment concentration and a hefty serving of balls.

At one point, I remember Joel saying to me just think how many calculations our brain is making per second. Computing estimates of physics; very good, very accurate estimates of physics. How a foot will turn. How much pressure in a knee, when and how much to let a knee give to set yourself up for the next step. We contort our bodies to optimise the centre of gravity. We scan all the possible footfalls and choose a path. The angle, the toe, the heel, precisely how we’re going to use a foot. Sometimes two steps go together like a crotchet beat. And it all happens at the rate of several steps per second, two, maybe four.

Climbing Tryfan is a symphony of footfalls and handholds.

Now to be very clear, I’m a rock climber of decently respectable pedigree. I lived in the Sierra Nevadas for a few years and I’ve climbed rocks in Thailand, Yosemite, Italy and France.  This climb was, in a spot or two, definitely pushing the limits of what felt comfortable to me without a rope.  If you’re not already a climber I do not recommend the North Ridge. There are other easier routes to the summit and the Heather Path up to the South Ridge seems to be a popular option.

But, let me tell you, topping out onto a carpet of quartz at the top of the North Ridge of Tryfan, with the summit bristling just beyond, was unforgettable. 10/10

We even managed to get the car out of the ditch without undue effort. Winning.