Last Man on The Earth

My mate Wilma went cycling once, met a bunch of Croatians on a hillside by a burger van where he stopped to eat. They crowded round him, interrogating this curious character on a bicycle. How many years? 28 he said. You have home? No, I rent a room. A few of them laughed. You have car? No license, he explained. Now they were all laughing. You have wife yes? No. No wife? I don’t even have a girlfriend. By now they were pissing themselves. No car. No home. No wife. 28?! They fell into hysterics.

A decade has passed. Wilma has the full house.

Me, I have an L-shaped sofa and a trainer collection.

*

How would you know if you were the last man on Earth?


I don’t guess you would know it. You’d just be it.


Cormac McCarthy, The Road

I woke up this year and came to a realisation. I was the last man on Earth. The last one of all my male friends to not be married, betrothed, or a dad. I mean there’s a couple left, but they have their reasons. Me? I have no good reasons. I just woke up one morning and this was the state of affairs. Picking my way through a life of no compromise, supermarket shop for one, Netflix n chill for one, bedtime story for one.

How do I feel.



Fine, replied his denial.

Put Columbo on the case and he’d sniff something out. Coming to the end of a period of getting over someone, I suppose. A necessary time for being alone, build yourself back up into a normal human. My problem is these periods tended to extend themselves. They’d go on for years. Which came down to being too okay on my jax I think.

Putting myself out there felt like something I ought to do, never something I went towards. I might meet someone randomly and wake up thinking about them then maybe I’d try and coax them into a date. But my brain didn’t work the other way round. I couldn’t decide to date, book some sweet joint, and try and lure someone into the back of a van.

Love, the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

Robert Frost

*

There are two ways to buy a jumper.

One. You wake up one morning and decide you need a jumper. You hit Oxford Street, initiate your jumper-crawl. Six shops later, with that horrible film of sweat only trying on clothes can pour out of you, you mull over your options in some high street sushi joint. You spring for the best of the six.

Two. You’re walking home after work, picking your way through those cobbled streets of Soho. You glance in at a shop window. A jumper. Staring back at you. You shrug, go in. Do you have that in XL? Last one in sale, your lucky day says the guy. You try it on. Boom. And yet making your way home that evening, you had no intention of buying anything. You might say the jumper came to you.

Am I too old for the jumper theory.

Closing in on 40. Not sure time is on my side. Can I afford to wait, do I go and buy the best one I can find. Maybe I’ll spend the next five years mulling it over. Because I’m a man, and I can? Does that sound fair.

And while I do I watch the furrowed brow of my mother, who’d love another grandchild or two, the barking of my old man who insists the only thing that can save me now is a kid. I think of mates who tell me quite seriously I’m missing out, I’d be a great dad. I’d like to be. Last time I checked I didn’t have a womb.

Only once in the last five years did I feel the unmistakable lifeforce to want to go and meet someone. And I walked into a pub on a winter’s evening and stumbled over my words but she was patient and it happened. If it hadn’t, I would’ve met someone in the coming months, I’m sure. That type of energy was pouring out of me.

I don’t feel that now.

How happy are my contemporaries. How hard are long-term relationships. How much do they let in existential angst, the longing to have done things differently. There I was complaining about some crap, and as Bobbie eluded her mother’s grasp and beelined for the dryer in the park loos for the fifth time in two minutes, Florence looked at me and said Mingo, don’t take for granted how much unknown there is in your life right now.

Jung warned that we are all living out a myth, yet we don’t know which one. Be mindful yours is not a tragedy, he said. What if I never meet anyone. What if I never have kids. The sweet empty life of no compromise. Would it be so bad.

In the depth of my solitude I admit I’d like to talk to someone about toothpaste. I’d like to show them something I read in a book. Ask them what they think. I’d like to go together and pick out some earthenware at Ikea. Try on a different brand of Y-fronts and watch them frown. Wake up knowing that what to do that day was a decision for two. I finally dig sleeping on my own, I tell myself. But sometimes the bed feels big. Sometimes the pillow I wake up holding could use a heartbeat.

*

The other day, on the side of a bus I see an ad. ‘Thursday’. A new anti-dating app dating thing, a whole night of single people. Rebound Week. It piques my interest. A night where you go into a room and know everyone else in there is after the same thing, walks by the canal and romcoms on a Sunday afternoon.

I set up a profile, go along to Nikki’s in Shoreditch, garms none too shabby, iPad in hand. It smells of bleach and broken promises. Seeing a few girls over by the bar I inhale the biting wind of destiny. Simone, she says. I’m with someone. I thought this was a single’s night. She scowls. I feel someone shine a flashlight in my face, could be the feds. About to do a runner I look again and see a mirror, the flashlight is a strobe bouncing off the top of my head.

I never made it to Thursday. Once it became clear I had to set up a profile to attend the night, I realised it was just like any other dating app I’d had the good fortune to avoid thus far. Plus who was gonna spring for a shiny domed 38 yr old with with an iPad sticking out of his pocket.

*

A Bangladeshi once explained to me from the front seat of his taxi how we have it wrong in the West. You think of love love love. Arranged marriage. It is the best way, he said. You have trust, respect, admiration. You build a partnership over time. Perhaps growing into love is a better way to do it after all. Join up with someone, work shit out. I heard someone say once that love is not a feeling, but an action. If you start with mad passion, at some point the comedown is gonna take you out.

What is left over when being in love has burned away.

The right place.

Something I’d stuck in my scrapbook years ago, the kind of thing you’d find on some cheesy Instagram story, had stayed with me. I liked it a lot. It seemed to be the kernel.

The grail.

Expend your energy on you, doing good shit, read good stuff, send your mother messages at the right times, go for dawn runs, smile at the dude by M&S who had a longer night than you, estimable people do estimable things, go out and have fun now and again, don’t beat yourself up about it, be the guy in the mirror you high Five, trying on the new shirt that looks fresh because the person wearing it thinks he’s worth something.

Make a habit of it.

And then imperceptibly, along some distant day into the future, perhaps something or someone will come round a corner.

And you’ll be ready.

Or more likely, because coal without tremendous pressure remains coal, in five years time when you’re still single you can hit up Thursday because iPads will be smaller in 2028 and no-one will give a crap.

Time Travel Technology and the Beatles

I was late to the party, now I don’t want to leave.

I was home, must’ve been 9ish. Weeknight, early April. Lighting was tight, the mathmos mood lamp glowed softly from the table-top. I decided on a whim to put Revolver on, it’d been years. On came Taxman. One twoooo threeee fuoooorr. Daaa da bom-ttsch daa dah dah. Something happened. On it went, Eleanor Rigby, I’m Only Sleeping, Here There Everywhere, She Said She Said.

It took me over, flooding me.

I flipped the record in a haze. By the time the fugue-guitar of And Your Bird Can Sing hit my earhole I was possessed. Standing there in the centre of the room, swaying, eyes the size of tennis balls, holding a can of beer my Revolver-shot brain was incapable of registering.

Apart from Kiss Me Kate and story tapes we had one cassette in the car growing up. Some say Revolver is the greatest album of all time; no bad music education for my bro and I, sat in the back of a Vauxhall hatchback cruising country lanes watching the 80s give way to the 90s. We knew it by heart.

Classics aside, my Beatles knowledge stopped there. What had I been doing. Before the night was out I’d got through Sgt. Pepper’s twice, ordered Rubber Soul on vinyl, and read the Wikipedia entry, all 15,892 words of it. For the last 33 days I have listened to nothing else. Not a single tune. I can’t manage to.

*

The late spring of 2022, as the jasmine snuck through the open window filling the flat, will be always now my Beatles days. I figured one of two things. My friends were on holiday, or they no longer liked me, for that month of April all I did was sit on the floor with my back to the radiator listening through, album by album. Learning the different sides, the progression of songs, the story lines, seeking out podcasts in the day for context, once I had an album sussed, I’d move onto another.

I began to time travel.

It was the sixties, poster of Paul on my wall, inhaling Beatlemania, waiting for any mention of them in newspapers, on the radio. Fanzines in the post. New Musical Express. May 26th, 1967, the day Sgt. Pepper’s dropped. Queueing at Her Majesty’s Voice.

Cycling home, shutting the door. Putting the needle on, listening to the whole thing through, once, twice, a third time. Hearing the orchestra crescendo of A Day In The Life.

Feeling my world shift on its axis.

Jump forward 55 years, same thing different date, Rubber Soul, Magical Mystery Tour, Abbey Rd, Let It Be, complete attention, feeling my brain flip, arm hair stand on end, tracing the story of this musical miracle, thinking about Rick Rubin’s line.

That they managed all that in 7 years is proof of the existence of God.

What was most nuts was imagining how me back in the 60s would consume music. All the waiting. Waiting on news, sitting alone, with a pal, going over the same album, start to finish, again and again, listening parties, writing my name on the record, taking it to someone’s house, getting it back at the end of the night, the walk back, smiling, songs sounding out in my mind.

Imagine having that experience, I thought, the anticipation, the expectation, the wonder, the space to think, the revery. The dance of wanting something and having to wait for it. Sat back against the radiator, grinning. Do we get that anymore. Do we know how to wait, I wondered. Does our culture let us wait for things.

A guy called Johan Hari wrote a book this year called Stolen Focus, about a generation of people who can no longer concentrate on anything. Dwindling attention spans, he said, weren’t just down to willpower, it was an all-out assault on our senses by big-tech and beyond. To serve their own means by matrixing us up to the mainframe, feasting on our attention.

What emerged was the internet as a kind of God, where attention was worship, at the deftest click of a button. What hope did we have, in the face of what a 2003 David Foster Wallace termed ‘too much good stuff’.

My time-travelling did one thing above any. Journeying back, imagining what it would be like to hear these songs for the first time, I filled in the gaps around me, and lived that life, a life of pauses, of boredom, of room to think and feel and wait. What did that kind of space open up for me. What did life, in 2022, without any of that space, wall me off from.

THE BOX

Johan Hari said another thing. Without the help of a box he wouldn’t have been able to write his book. Every morning he put his phone inside a perspex box and set the timer for four hours. The lid locked, for that time he had uninterrupted access to whatever he was writing. No texts, no emails, no temptation.

It came in the post, sat on the table for a few days unopened. On a monsoon-April morning landlocked at home I thought fuck it, opened it, stuck the batteries in, and unplugging my wifi lead from the wall I put it in, setting the timer for 3 hours. Looking at it there on the table, I didn’t think much. Only how it wasn’t going to win any design awards any time soon.

I set about trying to write. When my attention waned, it searched for a rabbit hole and found nothing. I pottered. Made a coffee. Stared out of the window. And out of boredom I simply began to write again. What was this strange sorcery. On it went, for hours. And as it did a peace began to descend. One I hadn’t felt for ages.

It became my ally. I’d have it on most days, five hours or more. The difference in forcing myself not to look at bullshit, and having no access to it, was cavernous. Obliging me to work in a way my willpower couldn’t get me to. Without this itch to scratch my brain began to calm. One day, for want of anything else to do, I sat in front of a lily for ten minutes, waiting to see if it would open, and it felt meaningful, just me and some flora, vibing out.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

Emily Dickinson

Foster Wallace described the moment when we finally find ourselves alone, and the dread that comes with that, that comes to us when we have to be quiet. It seems significant we don’t want things to be quiet anymore, he said.

At the same time there is another part of us that is the opposite. That is hungry for silence and quiet, and thinking very hard about the same thing for maybe half an hour or more, rather than just thirty seconds. Of standing and looking at the branches of a tree, or listening to the birds. And this part of us doesn’t get fed. And what happens is this thing makes itself felt in our bodies, as a kind of dread, deep inside us.

*

I didn’t want to write something tired on how the internet is bad. More a story about imaging what life was like before we had to field this all-out attack on our attention. Memes, emojis, dissemination of information, zoom meetings, google earth, Conspiracy Keanu, the world would be a poorer place without it all.

I once heard an advertising CEO say before a throng of students (of which I was one) how life was fundamentally richer now online than off. That is a mad statement. That is Bladerunner bullshit. Nothing I read or watch on the internet can make me as happy as long meandering conversations or looking into someone’s eyes or cycling for hours to sit by a stream and eat Emmental.

When things get smarter and more shiny we run towards them without thinking what we might be leaving behind. My Beatles odyssey made me deeply jealous of 60s kids growing up with all that space to sit in. It made me worried I was losing touch with emotions I could only access by switching off. Because they would only come inside the space that pause granted me.

Music is not in the notes, said Debussy, but in the silence between them. Memory, saudade, the Brazilian word for deep longing and nostalgia. To want, to really want something. To think about it til it drove me nuts. Could I really plumb those depths with constant interruption from another update on some pointless evanescent newsfeed.

*

We’re going have to develop some real machinery inside our guts to turn off pure unalloyed pleasure. Because the technology is just going to get better and better, and it’s going to get easier and easier, and more convenient and more pleasurable to sit alone, with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. And that’s fine in low doses. But if it’s the basic main-staple of our diet, and I say this in a very meaningful way, we’re going to die.

David Foster Wallace, 1998

*

After working my way through both sides of the White Album and listening to Abbey Rd til the needle bled, I felt the ardent fire of my Beatles days begin to dim. Listening to new music was difficult, there was no harder act to follow. Revolver remained my favourite, just. My mate Tommy told me not to worry, that before long I would be back there. I would have another Beatles moment. It would all be as new as ever.

Sitting there against my radiator one night I tried to put it all into context, and I ca-…

Fuck it.


enough

STOP.



THIS MADNESS.



YOU.



YOU ARE GOING TO DIE.



PUT THE DEVICE DOWN.



THROW THAT SHIT OUT THE WINDOW.



LOOK THEM IN THE EYE.



TELL THEM.



RUN.



TO THE WOODS.



GO.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.



GO TO THE WOODS.

Flat White

A story about doing good or maybe its opposite.

A flat white is one part espresso to four parts milk to one part foam. These days you go into a self-respecting coffee shop and order a cappuccino and the place comes to a standstill. I wouldn’t call the Costa at the end of my road self-respecting really, they have no strong opinions on what you want to drink.

I remember the day I worked out that ordering a cortado in a Costa was the same as getting a flat white. A cortado should be more like a macchiato but the high street coffee chains always go big on sizing. Every time I did this I was saving 45p, I worked out getting one of these four mornings a week for ten years was 936 quid in my pocket. Whatever was running through my mind that morning as I sat down in the corner seat I can’t tell you a tiny part of it wasn’t thumbing imaginary banknotes.

When he first walked through the door what I saw were his eyes, the whites of them. In each one two pupils floated like black pins on a white board. I thought he must have lost something, left his wallet behind or something. But as I kept watching I saw that inside him was a terrible fear and his eyes were burning from it. As if he was running for his life from something, or worse he had lost something he didn’t know how to look for and it was burning him alive.

The guy with the apron on scooted around the counter and ushered him out of the glass door and he accepted this without protest as if it had happened before. On the other side of the glass I watched him shuffle off down the street. For a few months this was the last I saw of him.

And then one afternoon of grey November from behind I saw a figure, trousers legs flailing, limping down the road, I recognised him from his gait and his powerful arched shoulders. Where was he off to I thought, what propulsion drove him forwards. A month later in the churchyard one day he looked up at me from a bench as I walked by. Again I saw burning, a pleading from some place within him that had been lost for who knows how long, singed into position by some force.

The next time I saw him I found it hard to believe he was still alive. It was a year later. He had looked so gaunt and so close to breaking point I couldn’t imagine where he had spent all this time, how he had survived the cold. He was asking for money like he always was. People were moving away alarmed, it was his eyes maybe or the sheen on his skin that in spite of the cold reflected the light of the dim day. He was in another place altogether, the touching point between this world and his came only from the repetitive sounds clawing their way from his throat. How could someone be that far from safety I thought.

Three months later we went on a night out to this underground bar just opened down some steps off the pedestrianised stretch of the main road. It was Valentine’s Day. I remember because this guy in there smelling of cigarettes high-fived me and told me for Valentine’s Day he had given his girl two orgasms. The place was trying to be cool but was cooler than that in a different way altogether. It was no bigger than a small off-license, low lighting, low ceiling, that type of thing going on where as soon as you walked across the threshold you were like sweet.

Just by the entrance the bar ran along a wall lined with a select group of spirits, behind which a couple of guys and a girl were busy tending, all smiles and eye contact. We sat on high stools next to a group of three and after reading the cocktail list my girlfriend went for a Tahini Martini, Vodka, Crème de Chataigne, tahini, vanilla custard and charcoal powder, weirdest thing on the menu as per. They had this Belgian beer on tap and I chose one of those.

By then we were already on our way, we’d been drinking up the road at this wine shop with a chef at the end of a long table making small plates. They had the balance right and the wines and all of it, everyone in there was laughing and looked alive. After four or five glasses we were headed home and happened upon the bar by chance, she gave me a tug on the arm, persuading me, we went in.

Right next to the bar was the dance floor, no bigger than a service box on a tennis court, around which were a couple of alcoves. The DJ was in a pink velour onesie taking herself too seriously, eyes fixed on her setup, acknowledging no-one, but the tunes were sweet and we took our drinks over, my girlfriend another martini and me an Isle of Dogs. Scotch, Vermouth, cranberry and lemon zest, eight minutes in the making but you could taste the seconds.

I remember thinking how fun it was to be out with her, just us, dancing, laughing at each other, needing no-one, the kind of scene I knew in the moment if I wasn’t in I’d be staring at from some corner thinking it was all I wanted. My girlfriend dances a bit like water moves and mostly I’d find myself stood still just gawping. Like I would forget she was mine or for the time being she liked me, eyes locked-on gazing at her lines silhouetted against the lights, shapes weaving and gliding in the gloaming. It was our third Valentine’s and down there in that dark room holding her close sipping the scotch feeling the music reverberate in me, was a moment to bottle and put away to sip from when the grey days drew in.

Eventually we grew tired and not a little drunk and decided to call it a night. We got our coats, nodded to the bartenders in thanks and walked up the stairs to street level. The February night kissed our cheeks and we grabbed each other for comfort. A few feet down the road the DJ was sitting on a bench in a big fur coat in a group of four smoking under a streetlamp looking like the opening scene to a music video. Recalling her antipathy behind the booth made me a little upset in my drunkenness, I never liked people who are unfriendly or who reject friendliness, never really understood how you wouldn’t grow out of trying to look cool.

It was either very late or a strange kind of Friday, but for the group in the music video and us beginning our meander home the street was empty.

Then I saw him.

A shadow moving in the darkness, stumbling towards us. I knew immediately without looking, his presence was unmistakable. His powerful upper body stretched out to a sinew beneath his shirt, the sheen on his skin, his eyes aflame. As I watched him from the corner of my eye approach the bench I wondered again how he was alive. What had he been doing all this time, walking the streets without rest. All this time I had slept and woken, drunk and laughed, embraced, sat alone, all this time where had he been. How far down a wrong road had he wandered.

Love is not the fabric of everything, the voice had said. Beauty is the fabric of everything. Our reaction to seeing the beauty is love. The primary force of the world is not conjured of itself. When we start witnessing the beauty the love will come.

The crew waved him away like a bug. He tried again, and again they said no. No more than a pestilence to avoid, a fly the wrong side of a window to swat. In it raged, coursing over the barrier walls, surging onto the land to wipe it clean. I disengaged from my girlfriend and walked over to the blue lights of the Nationwide with my card in hand, stuck it in the machine and started pressing buttons. I entered ten and waited for the bank note. Still the floodwater continued to pile over the barrier, stressing the concrete to its limit. My card reinserted, I scanned the figures and hit a hundred. As I had anticipated by this time he was on my shoulder but I felt no tension in him. He only waited, perhaps it was hope, maybe my countenance towards him showed neither fear nor disgust and he could sense it.

I folded the notes over and motioned to his right hand which he held out as I placed them inside, closing my other hand over his the way you might tip a man in a hotel bar. He took them without looking down, staying stock-still, staring at me. As I looked into his eyes I saw something descend, as the fire continued to ebb another force rose up to take its place but what that was I didn’t know, whatever thing was coming in seemed to be washing another away, like a wave receding, something like a fear subsiding.

Adam, he said. No family, none mate. Just me yea yea yea around here. A few years a few years mate. He spoke hurriedly and excitedly. He was so grateful, bursting to express his gratitude. I can’t believe it, he kept saying. Over and over. I told him I had seen him about many times I tried to tell him somehow that he wasn’t a ghost that I noticed him always and that I thought of him but in my drunkenness it came out a bit shit. What good was it going to do. Was it going to make him feel better. Was he was even listening. Are you okay, I said finally. I tried looking into his eyes kindly. He kept saying thank you. What about drugs. You can tell me, I don’t care. No drugs mate. None of that. None of that. Then he held out his arms to me and we embraced. I felt his strength and sinew and parched muscle and I felt a warmth and I don’t know if just to hold someone meant a whole lot to him, was it just gratitude. I hoped it did. I felt something good from holding him. For a couple of seconds we stood there in the lamp lit pedestrianized street in each others arms, as the crew on the bench smoked, as my girlfriend a few doors down wandered the street answering a message, and a siren in the distance hung on the wind, all was still.

What have you done. Listen.

Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.

He took the notes in his hand. Taking no care to conceal them he roamed down the road clasping the wad of cash like a tennis ball, looking back at me shouting thank you I can’t believe it thank you. Put them in your pocket I shouted smiling.

I re-joined my girlfriend and we walked back home. I didn’t feel much like telling her what had happened. In the end what came out was some garbled point about hating the way people could be so ignored. She listened as she always did to the end without judgement, thinking the words through, and another whump from the scotch hit my brain trailing my thoughts towards a void and we fell into silence. Not an unhappy one. A wordless contented kind of peace.

I didn’t walk back that way for five days. I took the long way to the shops the other side of the park. I found it hard to look around me, like there were eyes trained on me. For the first few days I saw no beauty anywhere. Just a vision of a body lying alone, cold and still and forgotten. The weeks drew on, the cortisol that had charred me dry as I had lain awake that morning in the dark, staring at the ceiling as the grey light clawed its way sadly through the shitty blinds of the enormous window and across it as my girlfriend lay sleeping next to me, began to subside. But the embers continued to burn, as if a flame somewhere had been extinguished and the heat had been transferred and taken its place to burn in me.

Ten years it’ll take me to save 936 quid on coffee. I worked it out on my laptop calculator. The calculator won’t tell me what a hundred and ten pounds did to him. It didn’t save him, I know that. The last thing it did was save him. I sit in the Costa by the window sometimes and drink my drink, the 45p saving one, and no longer thumb imaginary bank notes and I look out across the road and I hope to see him wander by.

Today Was A Good Day

I wake up with the dream swimming in my head. The girl’s face. The way she looked at me. I feel some hero complex, I must’ve saved her from a situation. I scrutch back in bed, stretch, feel dappled light through eyelids, one of those nights when some sorcery went to work, magic dust sprinkled over a sleeping body, the dawn through the blinds bathes the room in orange.

Today could be top 5.

Just waking up in tha morning gotta thank God
I dunno but today seems kinda odd

Ice Cube

I make lemon water, sit on the sofa in the white Ralphy dressing gown someone left on the back of the bedroom door, and do breathing exercises, Ram Dass’ voice comes through the speakers. Love your dark thoughts. On the breath-hold I get to the unthinking place, outside of time, outside of anything. When I told someone once how all I felt was gratitude, they said don’t take it for granted, feeling that way is a state of grace, the best of all luxuries.

I turn the boiler off and get in the shower.

One minute. Soap. Another minute. At the end I kneel, shivering on the mat, ice-cream headache, my whole body tenses and I feel something go through me. Hunched on the shower floor I think of Primo Levi in a Polish winter, I don’t know why, memory association thing. Something like gratitude, that I can get warm again. The ten minutes after a cold shower is spectacular, I flick the Rancilio Silva, it pours out a double espresso that would raise eyebrows in downtown Bologna.

No barkin from tha dog, no smog
And ma moma cooked the breakfast with no hog

I hit the streets.

Little I know bubbles up a kid-like raw excitement like cycling London at high speed listening to tunes. From Hackney to Kings Cross I know the lights and lines and movement of traffic like I was stumbling mid-dream to the loo, balls-pond, northchurch, ritchie, copenhagen, the street names tag-team one another, the blossoms sway and move in time with the motion of the wheels, the first time a child feels real freedom is on a bike they say. At an intersection it all gets too much and I shriek out, a pedestrian starts, gives me a look like I just ruined their morning.

I cross the smooth paving stones of the fountain square outside St Martins, remember my tutor Bobby and that time we chatted gas on the pavement the day I passed my entrance exam, he said let’s keep going, let’s walk to Brighton, now, me and you.

Ten minutes before opening I get to the library, the queue snakes a little through the redbrick courtyard. A girl ahead of me with headphones on in a black hoodie flowing-over with curls glances round. Want to time travel, get a bike. Want to fall in love, go to the library. I get in there, clock the bag checkers with a grin, take the shallow steps two by two, find my favourite spot, 1st floor desk.

Looking in my mirror, not a jacker in sight
And everything is alright

The girl with the curls is on the same desk, three down. She is a cross between Jessica Chastain and some girl off XVideos, with hints of my mother. She glances at me, I die a little. I wonder what strange forces play in the dance of attraction and think I will get no writing done. I can feel her presence, I change how I’m sitting, I steal a glance over the top of my laptop and the strip lighting bounces off her eyes and they are grey-green and full of my future. I hit the loo, splash my face with water.

Alfie sends through some theory of evolution. My days are permeated by these texts from him. He has two kids a wife on the way and runs a company and still finds the energy for this stuff. The most generous gift you give anyone is your time, said the postcard on the revolving stand in the crappy gift-shop one December.

My parents call.

They are on LOUDSPEAKER in the CAR yes COMING BACK FROM THE COUNTRY. I walk the wide-open spaces of the library, they shout over each other, I repeat myself, they interrupt, I tell them my book is getting good, Rochester asked Jane to marry him. HAS THE FIRE HAPPENED YET. What. I tell my dad to do one. HAS HE GONE BLIND. I tell my mother worse. I hang up.

I think about throwing my book in the recycle bin. And yet no plot-ruining or intensely annoying parenting, not even the aggressive library barrista with the tattoos who takes himself too seriously can get to me today, the day and I are having a moment, the girl with the curls exists, the world is full of possibility.

The gratitude I’d spoken of comes knocking. Perhaps it is a by-product of feeling out the darkness, that free from any sort of emotional baggage the world unravels into a temporary heaven, and you want to thank someone for something. I think about my parents, who they are, if I really know them, how long they’ll be around, I feel the urge to make them proud. You don’t understand how proud they are, someone said to me once.

It’s ironic, I had the brew, she had the chronic
The Lakers beat the Supersonics

The girl smiles at me, lingeringly. What in the world is going on. We get talking in the queue for the water fountain. She is French-Persian. She says she sees me here a lot. She wants me to write something for her. Let’s go to Paris, now, I say. She looks at me, bores through my irises into my soul and finds something there. Wait, I’ll get my things, she says.

Obviously no day is this good. These love affairs happen in my head most days at the library. A day like today is when you act on this shit bro. Ice Cube didn’t rap about a daydream, he rapped about a day. Do not love the idea of life more than you love life itself, said the poet. Still, to feel all this, to be in such a mood and sit in it, to feel the world pour down its magic on you, is a moment.

Even saw the lights of the Goodyear Blimp
And it read Ice Cube’s a pimp (yeah)

I write well, on and off til about 2pm.

When I don’t write well my life is a cul de sac and I don’t know what I’m doing with it. When I’m too pleased with what I’ve written I know I’ll read it tomorrow and delete most of it. Somewhere in the middle is the sweet spot. Finding words to make sentences to give form to wandering thoughts does something strange, it quietens the existential dread, fires up my adrenal glands, gets me high off my own supply.

I leave the hush of the library, cycle by the enormous plane of Bloomsbury Square my father’s favourite, hit the stoop outside Monmouth, tap a macchiato and a Vichy Catalan, the condensation coats the bottle. My bro comes and hangs. Tells me stories, married life, dad things, we crack up hard about the dumbest stuff, references so obscure they could be another language, a seam of the past only a sibling can tap.

Back in Hackney I pick Ab up and we hit the courts. He starts whispering fast, the way he does when I know he’s in trouble. The girl flicked glue at me, I told her to stop, she didn’t, I told her your mum can’t pay the bills, she went to the teacher and I got a blue form. I tell him some improvised fable about fairness and turning the other cheek, he isn’t listening. So what’s going on with your lovelife, I change the subject. He stops still, punches me on the arm, gives me a massive grin.

Back at home I crack a can in the tub.

A good day ey.

Some strange unknown force, opening its arms to let you in, a benevolent Spirit, allowing the good in everything to enter you. No regret for the past, no fear of the future. A champagne glass overflowing with the froth of the unknown. Today we run down the road high-fiving everything that moves.

Some basic maths tells me if this is how the world presents itself when I feel like this, it is the state of the world always. I only see it when my mood lets me, but it must be there all the time. The Spirit of the unformed future, dancing and laughing in the air, beckoning the better angels of my nature forth to meet it. I sink under the water and watch the bubbles rise up to the surface. I think of the girl with the curls. She stands for something. I try to work out what.

Today was like one of those fly dreams
Didn’t even see a berry flashing those high beams

In the evening I go to a concert.

I stopped buying 2 tickets a few months back. Across the street from the venue I stand at the bar. The solo-sharpener. A moment. ‘Eating Honey, thought Pooh, was a very good thing to do, but there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were.’ I think how feeling superbly happy on your jax is a super power.

At the gig I stand at the back, watching through the sea of heads, slip out before the end. In a light drizzle, I cycle the streets homeward. I lean back and open wide to catch it on my tongue. Two billion years ago it rained non-stop for a million years. Millions of raindrops in the ocean. An ocean made of rain drops. A life made of days. A collection of days.

I get back, put tunes on, eat hummus. Ten years ago a good day would have been more spectacular. More illicit substances, probably some incarceration. More like Ice Cube in fact. But a good day now exists inside me, rather than exteriorly. Less highs, more like a contented removal of lows, a calm.

Don’t isolate yourself darling, says my mother. I’ll be fine, I think. I am getting where I need to be. If I do my bit, things will come towards me. Doing enough to keep the gnawing voice of conscience at bay. Do that, and days like these might come along. Today is the girl in the red dress. If I do my bit, now and again she will walk on by.

I lie in bed buzzing.

I recognise the many separate beings swimming inside me.

The old man by the fire in his slippers. The achiever telling me to aim higher. The zen master wanting to be still. The child wanting the womb. The hedonist wants to drinks five beers and text Taz. The loner wants to text her. The wise man wants for nothing, knows what I already have is all I really need. Me, right now, at the back end of today, wants to hit his knees and give thanks. To something or somebody.

To You
All-knowing all-seeing
I lift up my heart will you show me the way
On my knees make more of these
Gotta say it was a good day.

The Secrets of Not Doing Shit

My therapist stares at me.

I love the company of addicts. They’re the most interesting people I meet. I can smell an addict the second they walk into a room. I look at him sheepishly. And me? He looks back. No, I think you’ve got addictive qualities. You’re impulsive and compulsive. But you’re not a career addict. I can’t smell you. Having said that, he goes on, casting a wary eye on me as he so often does, you need to be mindful.

*

Each morning I wake up and put a little notch on the side of my fridge. It’s the no-fap revolution, I explain to my old man. His eyebrows raise a couple of mms and he reigns them in, creasing into laughter.

Another one of your experiments.

I continue, unfazed. It’s the ultimate in restraint. Zen-mastery over my libido. My record is 44 days, right now I’m on three, but I’m feeling good, this could be a long streak, it’s about laser-like control over your mind. I look over and my father is shuffling out of the room.

The experiment in question is one I wrestle with most days. The longer I go without nutting the happier I am. I don’t enjoy the aftermath at all, all it does is highlight every way my life is going badly. I enjoy the curtain coming down I suppose, but there is no applause. Just someone in the corner trying to start a slow-clap and getting nowhere.

Directly after copulation the devil’s laughter is heard.

Schopenhauer

I don’t have a problem with it, I have a problem with myself, after it. It makes me feel sordid. My life is better when I’m abstaining. When I’m on a long streak I feel like the man. Reddit threads declare if you get past six months you start giving off this energy, women can sense it, they just react.

My father is wary of these life-hacks. He has lived long enough to know there is more to life than trying to cunningly short-circuit it. I kind of agree. When someone tells me how listening to audiobooks on 4x the speed means they read up to five books a week, I also feel an urge to shuffle out of a room.

But these experiments I was telling my dad about, ones I have at various times over the last decade been up to my eyeballs in, are conspicuous by something else. Instead of making my life easier, they do the opposite. They make it harder.

*

I didn’t drink for eight months. It made me make friends with myself. Depriving myself of the respite of a drink, left me with no option but to sit there in a sober state and get to know me.

I didn’t eat for three days. It changed how I understood food, how much of it I needed to stay alive. 36 hours into a water-fast was one of the best drugs on the planet.

I didn’t look at the news for a month. If nukes were incoming my mother was bound to text, asides from that the world would keep spinning. I became more present in my surroundings, more calm, more at peace.

I didn’t take a warm shower for a year. Turning off my boiler in the dead of winter and stepping in the shower was a horror-show, but getting out was otherworldly. There was no mood a cold shower couldn’t snap me out of.

Reigning my left wrist in for 44 days was proof that succumbing to the whim of my impulses was a dead-end street. Ejaculate brought me no closer to enlightenment.

The Greeks called them Gods. Lust, greed, rage. Psychological forces that could take us over and submit us to their will. The Buddhists spoke of Hungry Ghosts that follow us around, tapping on our shoulder, demanding we feed them. I thought of my therapist’s line.

You’re not a career addict, you have addictive qualities.

You’re impulsive, compulsive.

A question leered at me. When did I ever tell myself no. When did I ever feel hunger and wait. When did I ever feel my attention wain and not sink into a quagmire of YouTube. When did I lie in bed alone feeling commotion in my loins and open a good book.

I was totally at the whim of my impulses. These prohibitions were a part of me going bro sort your shit out. What would life be like if you didn’t succumb immediately to your reptilian brain. The part that was always trying to get somewhere, get away from somewhere, the next drink, the next click, the next bit of input that would get me where I needed to be as the drooling beast of impulse growled at my door, what next, what next, what did I need to achieve comfort.

Cavemen spent their entire lives waiting. When they happened across some berries on an idle morning something lit up in inside them, a dopamine receptor. We evolved to release dopamine every time the reward-centre of our brain was activated. It served a function, a dangled carrot designed to keep us motivated to stay alive.

The problem with dopamine is that we have hacked the algorithm, now every little thing in modern culture is designed to trigger it, so at the merest touch of a button our dopamine receptors light up. My parents spent 3/4 of their lives without internet and my mother now walks around with an iPad strapped to her forehead while my father spends his waking hours salivating in anticipation of a new Netfleex Especial.

What hope do Gen Z have.

It feels like somewhere down the line we lost our ability to just sit. What we did most days for hundreds of thousands of years. That’s what being a person is, said Louis CK, to sit there doing nothing. That’s what the phones are taking away.

I lack the peace of simple things.
I am never wholly in place.
I find no peace or grace.

Wendell Berry

*

In 2018 I attended a rip-off TM (transcendental meditation) course in Islington run by a dodgy guy called Neil. I didn’t know it then, but it turned out to be priceless. By meditating most days I learnt something I’d never understood, the difference between my perception and reality, the idea that thoughts were just stories my brain was telling me. Like a cloud moving across the sun, I could watch a negative thought enter my head and depart. I didn’t have to grab hold of it, I could just witness it.

These impulses were the same. If I trained myself not to answer when they came knocking, hunger departed, attention refocused, lust ebbed away. By forcing my dopamine-addicted brain to go cold turkey I could recode the algorithms, in a world doing its best to distract me I could take back control. It compounded. Before I knew it, I was on the autobahn to full-monk and I was loving it.

One night I showed a mate the side of my fridge. Just have a wank you twat, he said. I mean he was right. Where did it end. The problem with control is that it can go too far, you can tip over into full Patrick Bateman. Nobody wants to live like that.

*

Luckily something happened last year.

After many months of lockdown the world began to exhale. A spirit of mischief took hold of the capital. People went crazy. Some of my most professional friends were doing their best Toni Montana impressions most weekends.

Having spent half the year sober as a judge, I followed suit. Who was I to miss out on all the fun. Slowly but surely the discipline I’d built up, the monk-like mastery, to sit in my negative thoughts without distraction, began to subside.

Towards the end of the year, bouncing off the walls having more fun than I knew what to do with, I ignored the signs that slowly and imperceptibly I was moving away from my centre, from the anchor that kept me tethered. The hungry ghosts came knocking, and I began to grow unhappy.

Sat in my meditation chair one morning something landed up top, and I went over to get it down in my book before it disappeared.

You have a wise emotional centre. That is what sobriety touches base with. You grow to know it, and you befriend it, in turn you befriend yourself. You understand what life, your life, is without this external stimulus. You grow to know how to survive with just you. Without the need for these things. But they creep back in, because that is our disposition, to mind-alter, and before you know it, because these things are so good, you start relying on them for kicks, to get you through things. Next drink. Next smash-up. And we forget this centering, the link with our wise self grows faint, inaudible. Only by austerity do we learn we have power over it, to not be slave to the next impulse, the next thought that careens through our head.

By that point it was all a bit late, and as winter descended I fell into a depression. But perhaps that was the learning. To show me what was bound to happen if I didn’t take the right care of myself.

*

And so…

Buddhist monks denied themselves the worldly pleasures on a path to enlightenment. My reason for these experiments, for getting my monk-on, was to stop myself from going nuts, in a world tailor-made to make my life as easy as possible, to remember that going without whatever I needed might not be such a bad idea.

When the hungry ghosts grew loud, these austerities rebooted me, like a rehab for my bad habits, an anchor tethering me to something deeper. In a world as relentless as ours, spiritual practice could be the life raft I didn’t know I needed. Reminding me that life might consist not so much in changing the outside world but in changing how I thought about it.

Writing this I had a lightbulb moment.

Put your money where your mouth is. A 3 day water-fast, get you in the mood. Gain peace of mind, clarity, stimulate all sorts of processes in your digestive system. I cleared my fridge out, got into a zen headspace. 28 hours in, at 2am my hunger did a drum solo of my stomach and crawling Nam style to the fridge I engulfed the only thing left in it, half a block of parmesan with five spoonfuls of heather honey.

*

It occurred to me once that life is an escalator, comprised of two gears. Active and passive. You either walk up, or you stand there and let it take you. Two modes of being. You move life forward, or you let life happen. A good life, I thought, must consist of being in the active gear, striding up two steps at a time.

What if there is a third gear. One that lets the escalator take you, not because you are at a low ebb and life has you by the balls, but out of choice. To pause, remove yourself from the maelstrom, take a deep breath in and stand there, surveying the world around you as it moves on by.

There is a definitely a fourth gear. Probably the most accurate.

The one where life kicks your ass.

But I suppose in the end, gets you where you need to be.

Making Rainbows Out of Something Painful

Hello again.

It’s been a while. What do you want from me. What will you take from me, this time. I know something I didn’t know before. You aren’t me. You are only happening to me. I will twiddle my thumbs and you will pass. This is what I’ve learnt. You are happening to me. But you aren’t me.

I am more than you.

*

I looked down at my cactus, once green and plump, now purple and shrivelled. Was this some sort of winter hibernation mechanism, I wondered. It looked more like it was dying. All the life sucked out of it. It looked like I felt, purple and dry and far from life.

I mustered the energy to hit the plant shop, wondering if they’d refund me, I didn’t do much wrong, I told myself. Holding the cactus up to show the girl at the counter, she looked at me aghast, like I was some sort of plant molester. What did you do to it? I stared back blankly. Your cactus is dying, she said flatly. I walked back from the shop under the cloud of my own mood, thinking how on top of my life being a total dead-end no-show, I was a murderer.

For close to two months I’ve felt like this. Unlike my cactus, I don’t quite have the energy to die. I just feel inanimate, unplugged from the wall. But I must be coming out of it, I haven’t been able to write for weeks, and now here I am, tapping something out, thinking maybe my only option is to write my way out of this.

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.

David Foster Wallace

My friend Alfie gave me a little picture book once, I Had A Black Dog it was called. About a man and his depression. It showed the depressed person being accompanied by the symbol of his mood, a black dog. It was very moving and accurate.

Inside he’d written ‘I’m always here brother’ and then below ‘… watching.’ I went to the window and looked out anxiously, I was taking no chances. My isolation was real. Isolation, I have come to know, is a prerequisite when you feel depressed. Seeing nobody is something you gradually slip into, that then becomes the portcullis to your fortress.

I flicked through the pages of the book and understood something. If I covered over the dog with my hand, all that was left was the man looking miserable. This is what it feels like, I thought. Just somebody alone, under the weight of a force pushing down on them, without reason, day after day after day.

The episodes I have suffered on and off from since I was 22, never had specific reasons for them. No-one had died, no bad breakup, just a feeling that would come out of leftfield and smother me for a couple of months, until like a cloud it would pass on. My therapist thought it was endogenous, that it came from within me, my mother disagreed, if you were busy and charged with responsibilities this wouldn’t happen, her eyes would burn across the table.

Both parties have a point.

Over time, my understanding of depression is more or less this. Highly sensitive people have pores that are always open, to information coming into them from all angles. Sensitive people, a poet once said, are constantly being beaten up by things insensitive people can’t see. It means the world is always informing you. Which when you are on top of things is unbelievably wonderful. But when your shield is down, it’s too much. And it doesn’t stop.

Perhaps, I wondered, depression is a way of shutting you down until you can recover. Like what the ground does in winter. A state of relief until the business of regrowth begins. Like what my cactus was doing. Oh no wait, my cactus was dying.

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.

Emily Dickinson

I’d felt a mood shift in January, thought it was just a classic January blip. I stopped myself falling a number of times before I did. But it was persistent and it kept on at me, tap tap tapping at my temple. At some point I must’ve laid down my arms, and it hit me like a truck.

There is a downward slope to depression before you hit the bottom. Things begin to lose their meaning, their point. You almost relish the first stages, a tired middle finger up to the world. I stopped writing. Stopped exercising. When your things to do list comprises of ‘WRITE BOOK’, and you read the stuff you’ve written and your addled brain proclaims it’s garbage, things begin to snowball.

Time started to flow strangely. My short-term memory went. Dreams got freaky. Anxiety ramped up. I wanted to sleep, a lot. Waking hours were mean and unforgiving. Depression strips you of the ability to give or receive joy. I stopped making plans. What use would I be in company. I stopped listening to music. What right did I have to feel the joy music might elicit. This is how a depressed brain talks to you.

Instead, I listened to information. More aptly put, I blanketed myself in background noise.

Is there no way out of the mind?

Sylvia Plath

Years ago I would pass a man on Euston Rd who spent all day lying on a bench listening to a tiny transistor radio blaring out at full volume, talking to himself manically. My mother would leave the radio on all night sometimes to keep her company during bouts of insomnia. These worrying signs told me I had joined the party. I’d listen to the radio long into the night. I couldn’t be in my head. It was one of two things, raging or on mute, a cocktail of unfeeling and too much feeling. Certain of one thing, no good would ever come.

I got aggressively into football, tactics, fixture lists, I’d do intense calculations with the league table. I got into Rodeo. Learnt the names of the rankest bulls, the top bull-riders. Anything to deflect my brain from talking to me, reminding me how dead-end things were. Somewhere I had read the word enthusiasm meant ‘to be filled with God’s spirit’. In the silence between the radio’s pauses came the news God’s spirit had left the building.

From time to time I would self-medicate, get drunk and the rest, and for some hours it would bring me out of my stupor and I would message people and that involvement once again in the world was positive. But even if I felt back to normal for an afternoon, it wouldn’t last, the feelings weren’t coming from inside the mainframe.

Once in the throes of a depression, my experience has been I must wait for it to subside, however long that may be. Getting drunk or high was an artifice, the shift back to life was far deeper and more fundamental and would take much longer, and when it came there would be no going back. I was wary of false dawns, they seemed like news too good to be believed.

*

It doesn’t thrill me to write all this.

It brings it out from inside me. It makes it real. It is uncomfortable. When I was feeling rubbish I would gravitate towards accounts of other people feeling the same. A tennis player admitting to darkness and drug abuse, a 19th century Russian author hunting without a gun for fear of what he might do alone in the woods, Fleabag staring into the middle-distance saying she just wanted to cry all the time.

These people existing was a balm, their stories were company.

There was another thing. Meditation had taught me there is a place that exists beyond thought, outside the mind, where we are more than just the whirring of our brains. Thinking maps the contours of the world around us, by way of thoughts that appear like magic tricks inside our heads, but they really are just stories we tell ourselves. With daily practice I could access a place outside my ‘thinking brain’, a place of calm, of un-thought. Where I noticed the separation of perception and reality. Depression being an illness of thought, this was useful information.

Over the course of last year something else happened. A newly formed relationship with myself that was kind and accepting and didn’t, as past episodes had, make me the obvious culprit for my low mood, had brought me to a place of peace, and so even when I was bad, I was dimly aware, as never before, of a glittering place I might have access to once this thing ran out of steam.

When I could tap into the un-thinking control panel, it reminded me my brain was doing its best to trick me, it was sick, it fibbed, and lied, turned down the contrast and desaturated the colour on everything. But it was just thought. Thoughts that were happening to me.

They say the real work of depression exists outside of it. In doing the things that stop you from falling so hard. In learning how to contain low mood states before they become two month-long leering monsters.

My mother was right. If there is a place one absolutely must be at 8am every morning, contractually, to take your mind off the inevitable discomfort of being alive, perhaps one wouldn’t fall as far. A lifestyle of casual freelancing and mustering the courage to write a book did not provide this type of flotation device.

But knocking, it had come.

And there was another type of thinking too. One which asked: what are these states setting into motion? Depression is a lady dressed in black, wrote Jung. Invite her in, tell her to sit a while, ask her what she has to say. I wondered what this process might be stirring in me, whether this was a seasonal thing (in the literal manner of seasons), a sort of great breathing in, before a breathing out. It is not so far-fetched. Apocalypse is the Ancient Greek word for revelation.

Five years ago was the first time I wrote about depression, a cat out of the bag moment. It felt scary, but people responded to it in a way I had not anticipated. In it I stuck Matt Haig’s 10th ‘reason to stay alive’, a list he wrote to his suicidal younger self to stop him from jumping off a cliff.

You forgot number 11, said Jules. It’s not what the world has to give to you, it’s what you have to give to the world. He went on to list some things the world would not have, should Domingo choose to not be in it.

He was right. Although we might deny it, we are more involved in life than we think, more connected. When you remove yourself from things, in your isolation you tell yourself at least you’re doing no harm, that the world goes on the same. But it doesn’t. It is stripped of your energy. Your life force. The question you might ask, the joke you might send, the shoulder you offer, the ear you lend, the smile, the nod, the thank you, the tiny little sparks of energy you put out into the world that change it.

When I am down I am a non-existent family member, a shit friend, a ghostly neighbour, and whatever this process might be regenerating in me, the world loses access to me, the enormous humming organism loses a tiny microscopic thing. Which is not nothing. And that is sad. You could argue it is my obligation to try and stay undepressed. Not for my wellbeing, for all you fools, for the world around me. Worst of all, while one is there, alone, taking time out from life, depression is taking time out of you.

Money in tha bank, sneakers on ma feet.

Asaviour ft Jehst

One day, a week or so into March, staring out of the window a feeling something like a sadness flooded through me, and I got my jacket and went out, even though the world was scary and all eyes felt on me and the thought of bumping into my neighbour was terrifying. I surprised myself.

Walking back from the shops I realised I was done with it. I was sick of the sickness. A month ago that emotion would’ve floored me, but I was over that part. I was on the way back, even if faintly, even if I felt shit and my skin felt like tracing paper, I couldn’t go back to inanimateness. And this feeling I was feeling, at least I could feel that I felt it, which meant there must be someone living inside there.

The sunlight poured through the flat, exposing the dirt and dust I had not been able to see. When you’re ready for the light, you take stock of the work that has to be done. I heard a rustle, God’s spirit re-entering the building.

*

For four days straight spring has graced us with twelve degree sunshine. The magnolia is hitching up her skirt, the sky is a piercing blue the colour of a Davidoff Cool Water ad. I’m listening to tunes again, walking to the shops. I look at the mural under the overground bridge and smile. For me? Guys you shouldn’t have.

On a Saturday after rain we go shoot hoops, Ab gets 3 in a row and proclaims through the morning air THASS WHAT AM TALKIN BOUT. We cross town and catch Encanto at the Picturehouse. I well up three times and am close to breaking point once. I do my best to hold it in, thinking I’ll scare him. But it is back in the building, the life force is flooding in, I can feel it, I haven’t cried in months.

One morning I return to the plant shop, the poor cactus I murdered needs replacing. I walk back down Dalston Lane with a little bonsai pine. I like it a lot, makes me want to tend to it, channel my inner Mr Miyagi.

In a mood a few years back, I’d mustered the energy to go see a friend. Making our way down the hill I said to him, I suppose even people who have their lives most together think their shit is a mess. Mate, he said, seriously, nobody thinks you have your life together. We cracked up hard, in the depths of that pain something could still get in. Guy said something else I still remember. It’s okay to feel sad. It’s just dumb to feel sad about feeling sad.

Being the depression guy doesn’t sit very well with me, I want to be more than that. Some of history’s coolest cats are lifelong depressives, and we know about them because they did great things, in spite of their malaise. In the end I decided to write this because it would’ve helped me to read it. And also I’ve discovered, writing has this strange way of saving me. It reminds me to not forget what I have learned, to hold onto it, to keep it safe.

You are happening to me. You are not me.

I am more than you.

Thanks fam. I needed that.

This Is How You Lose Her

It was one of the old Greek guys.

Back in the day, he said, we’d been cut in two, and our lot was to spend the rest of our lives in search of our other halves, the ones needed to make us whole again. That was it. As I lay there in the foetal position on the cold floor of my flat in a pool of tears, I felt cut down the middle. I hadn’t felt that kind of emotional pain in years. I thought I was too old for this shit.

Ever since Ross and Rachel popularised the break and it hit the mainstream, people have needed space to ‘work on their shit’.

I asked my mother what they used to do back in her day and she was like well they didn’t exist in quite the same way really. More a grave conversation followed by much lingering by the phone or the post box. So not that different, I proclaimed. I should think we were better at waiting, she said.

You know when you’ve stayed at home to receive a package of great importance and you’re waiting for the door bell to go so you can get on with your day and a message bleeps on your phone informing you that Guan tried but you weren’t home and Sorry we missed you! And you’re like Guan I’m here you tool, literally the only reason I’m here is to wait for you. All you have to do is ring the doorbell.

It felt like that.

Just me, sat there in limbo, waiting for this person, and the rational part of my brain reminding me that no matter how long I waited, nobody was going to come.

*

It wasn’t my idea. I went along with it because I loved her. And I was probably terrified of being alone. Nodded my head in earnest understanding of how space could be a sharpener, a great motivator, how we’d come back together stronger.

Lying there with a damp cheek stuck to the floorboard, I thought this is a first. I’d done the breaking but never the being broken and not that it was anything to be proud of but at the very least it came with agency. I typed something scathing meant to wound her and before I could hit send the phone slipped from my salty fingers.

Walking in the park with a friend one morning, it was pointed out in some ways a break could be harder than a break-up. With a door slammed in my face there was no option but to shuffle off. But a door half-open was confusing because the other side of it was hope, and yet through it the cold hot doubt of unknowing whipped me in the face like a harsh November wind.

One morning I got her dress out of the drawer under the bed and cried into it. I looked down at the little patch of damp and hoped the salt would linger there, so if one day she came back and retrieved it, to put it on rather than fold it into a box to take away, she would see the little salty residue and sense my tears and realise what she’d done.

It took me two weeks and four days not to cry. Strange rasping cries, tantrum-like, the sobs of someone who’d given up on language. But tears brought calm, like my brain was pouring water from my tear ducts to heal me, less a symbol of my sadness than a balm for it.

Then one day they stopped. I tried and nothing. I tried harder and they came, but reticently. And I had a thought. If I wasn’t crying, was this some sign of progress? I didn’t want this at all. I wanted to be half-broken and spluttering, because at least that meant being close to her.

I’d wake in the night half asleep to go for a pee and it would flood back and I would stand there alone in the dark, steadying myself with a forearm against the wall, disbelieving. But the ache got lighter. Some days I’d kick through leaves and feel my eyes stinging and think wow I’m not getting over this at all, and realise it was just my new nivea cool kick hydro-intense arctic freeze moisturiser.

One night I scanned her recently played on Spotify.

Were they songs of heartbreak or defiance, songs of missing a lost-love or moving on. I looked for Single Ladies and saw no sign of it. As I sat there in the dark trying to decipher what Idioteque by Radiohead had to say about the current state of our relationship I decided this was one of the worst ideas I’d ever had and resolved not to do it again.

Some days I’d just wait by my phone and stare at it, and a voice in me would be like bro… she’s not going to text. Think of something else. I stopped drinking. I was no match for the floodwaters of even a slight hangover. I’d get nailed on non-alcoholic beer and pass out and dawn would rouse me, clear of head and peace of mind.

Just off C_____ street, the road that swoops down through Barnsbury towards Kings Cross, is M_____ street, the one that bears her name. In the past every time I cycled to the library I would blow the sign a kiss or whoop in its direction, or if we were mid-fight I might scowl. But I looked the other way now, took a different route. Now I think of it this whole time was enveloped in a veil, a dreamlike veil, which made none of it feel real at all. The only thing that punctured it was an inkling of a recurring thought that came back again and again.

This is how you lose her.

When you’ve moped yourself to sleep, talked yourself out, bored your friends into metronomic muted nodding, paid your Colombian cleaner overtime because she gives you better advice than your therapist, when you’ve blasted Take A Look At Me Now so many times a neighbour slides a note quietly under your door, when your journal is an endless jumble of smudged repetition, there comes a moment when rather than dwelling on the fact that you are single, you have to get on with the business of being it.

And unannounced, it sneaked up on me. The same thought that weeks before had been so terrible now, although faintly, began to whisper its allure. The I made my family disappear Home Alone raised eyebrow moment.

It’s only me now.

Pause.

It’s only me now.

It came flooding back.

The intense selfishness. The sweet lack of compromise. All those years I’d been single and jolly enough and too scared to give myself to anyone. When I had no need to look for the other half of myself, because who needed anyone else to be happy, certainly not me, so fond of the lie that I was whole and complete as I was.

I would relearn to be alone. I’d been an expert once, all I had to do was retrace my steps. I would remember the hopeful mornings. The expectant nights out. I would run nothing by anybody, cycle as fast as I wanted without watching to see who was keeping up, I would make coffees for one, revel in film nights for one. And the 3am plods to the loo, pillows suffocated with cuddles, swallowed whole by Sundays of clawing loneliness. Slowly the wound that ran down one side of me would begin to scar.

Still I missed having the person you could tell the stuff to. I’d learnt to file a fingernail, switched up my Y-fronts, put onions in the ragù. No one else cared about this stuff. And the idle intimacies. The nicknames and in-jokes and interlinking fingers. The sounds of her sleeping. One day I went to the barber just so someone would touch my head. I picked up a conker from the pavement and whispered something into it and put it on a shelf.

But I was working on my shit.

That part was true. The weeks in the calendar I’d looked at with the fear of God in my heart back when each quarter hour crawled past were gathering pace. What did it mean about the depth of my feeling a month before if I didn’t feel it now. What did it mean for us, if she no longer had the power to glue my salty cheek to the floor for an afternoon. I felt far stronger but also further away from her. Something scared me. My severed other half, the one that had been cut from me, what if it didn’t fit anymore.

Again unannounced, morning came one day and I felt a shifting of the search coordinates. All those years of being single, selling myself the lie of being whole and complete as I was, I wasn’t all the way wrong. The dawn brought a realisation, that my search to find my other half was off the mark, because I’d been looking in the wrong place.

The last few days I’d felt a peculiar presence behind my left shoulder, like a warmth which became more and more felt with each day. That morning sat on the sofa in my white towelling dressing gown feeling the light pour through the big school windows caking the long wall and glinting off the frames, I was like shit.

What if my other half wasn’t her.

What if this other half, the one I’d been searching for all this time, this elusive other half I’d lead myself to believe was someone else, what if this other half was not actually another person at all, what if it was something along the lines of…

me.

What if all this time my other half was the one I’d jettisoned a forgotten lifetime ago, the half of me I’d never known, the me I’d struggled in vain my whole life to love. I didn’t even know I was in half, I always figured the cruel master of the horrid voices was the whole of me. Sitting there with my head rocked back, I wondered if the fear of rejection, the mistrust of being adored, the not being enough, it was all the cry of pain of someone who’d been torn in two, crying out for the half of them they didn’t know they were without. Of course I couldn’t find me, I didn’t even know there was a search on.

And this process I was living, perhaps the defining growth-spurt of my adult life, was me joining up with the me I could be brave enough to love. Coming into one another’s view, this new half stared back at me. It took you a while, I said to me. Here I am. Here you are. I’m sorry you were so sad for so long.

So what was this then.

Was this being whole.

What did this mean for her. Where did she sit in all this. Like so many things that demystified themselves over the course of that strange October it became clear that whatever happened between me and her didn’t matter so much. This Rocky fight-training montage I was in the midst of was not a means to get her back. Rather, it was getting me to my finest self, preparing me for any outcome, and tattered heart to one side I was the best I’d been in years. I got it now, her half was not the half I needed to be whole.

Often the wash of sadness would return, I’d lean on the kitchen island and shudder and spy my face in the mirror cracked and wet. Her chocolate on the newsagent shelf, the pavement where we danced one Christmas after cocktails, that dumb fucking song she always lost her shit to. I imagine it was because I was doing well, and the part of me that was bereft was fed up with being ignored and was clawing its way back to the surface. But it was a gift too. A reminder of how deep she was inside me and the sadness was a little whisper in my ear.

Her photos were everywhere, in frames around the flat, in journals, on my noticeboard. Nothing could be more sad than removing them, putting them in boxes, replacing them with something new, wiping the walls of her memory, and I was sure that nothing so sad could be allowed in life, and wondered if I should take them down.

The days drew on.

The way I thought of her now was a little different. Back on the floor of my flat all those weeks ago I couldn’t imagine a world with her not in it, and the pain of separation did feel like something being torn from me. But pain had become something else and I felt stronger and more upright. I loved her, and that meant being in love with her path I suppose. I was no kidnapper. It was quite simple, if she wanted to come back she would and if she didn’t what could I do. Looking down at the leaf wet and starfished against the cobble, I felt my heart hold its middle finger vehemently up to my head.

Love + love = pain.

The mathematics of love spew out some strange answers. I suppose lovers can get so enmeshed in each other they might not see how it is strangling them, and flying instead towards love like some holy grail they attach themselves to another like a grotesque Frankenstein creature without watching to see if the stitches take.

Would I take this love I’d made and pour it into something new. Or take the other road, of those so burnt by love they turn their backs on it, losing sight of all intimacies out of a hardened heart, walking in limbo with steps that echo like old memories, preferring to die than to suffer but never dying.

Who knows.

Weird that something so painful is revealing itself, annoyingly, to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. Perhaps her and me figured out we were missing a part of ourselves and thought we’d take time out to relocate it. Perhaps along some distant day into the future, we’ll come back together as whole complete beings and fall into a tentacled embrace, and perhaps we won’t. But one thing is for sure, I feel less alone I think.

November, 2020

The Best Is Yet to Come

On the ferry on the way back across the channel in early October, five hours into the crossing, three to go, four sizeable snacks down, having slept, read, and stared out across the sea until it blurred into a wash of water-colour grey, I bought a ticket to the on-ferry cinema and sat in front of A Quiet Place Part II, a film in which psychopathic aliens maraud around taking out the human population one by one.

I was the only one in there.

As must befit most people watching A Quiet Place Part II, my mind began to wander. Back to the week that was, where I’d put my bike on a plane to Toulouse, cycled from south-west France up to the Bréton coast over 8 days, and spent a tearful evening staring out to sea.

As the heroine tiptoed around trying to avert the attention of the ‘Death Angels’ who, it turns out, were blind, but hunted sound, hence the name, A Quiet Place, I was on my bike, cycling along unnamed lanes, past hedgerows whose leaves were beginning to turn, into the outskirts of a village, an aggregate of the countless villages I passed through, and holding these images in mind I tried to work out what I had done, what its worth was.

Just to do it, for now, seemed to be the point.

Go to the Czech Republic, says Alfie, birds are insane. France is my shit bro. France would be phat if it didn’t have so many French people in it. He isn’t wrong. They are no Italians. But among the slippery Gascons and the moody Ligériens the people of the countryside, of the Dordogne and Anjou and Vienne, moulded by their soil and fed by their earth, are more often than not up for a chat when some smelly-looking dude arrives out of breath and red in the cheek, carrying a house on a bicycle.

Tout-seul? Mais vous êtes courageux!

They all concur.

I don’t feel brave. Up in the Andes or lost in the Wyoming desert, a gnawing terror in me might masquerade as bravery, but you can have no delusions of survival when you’re 250m away from a croissant beurre at all times. A pigeon-chested self-reliance is what I feel, a self-sufficiency, an adrenaline that comes with not knowing where the hell the next fifteen minutes is going to deposit me. Most of all I feel free, tied to nothing.

I pedal on.

The country moves gradually from in front of me, past my periphery and into my rear view, breezily or painfully slowly, through pouring rain and thin October sun, through muted mornings and the orange bonfire of late afternoon, a conveyor belt of information, fields and farmyards and the smell of manure, empty village squares, pine forests and vineyards, leering factories, markets, old stone bridges over rivers, train lines, iron crosses in the middle of fields, dogs hurling themselves at fences at me, stooped old men turning with their whole bodies to watch as I pass. Outside, sucking all that good oxygen in, ten eleven twelve hours a day, alive.

High up on a hill at Hautefort I see the château Louis XIII built for his mistress. I cycle through Montignac where the 17,000yr old paintings at Lascaux of the aurochs and bison are. The Romanesque abbeys at Moissac, and at Clauné overlooking the Loire, the beating of small wings echo across the vaulted ceiling. I light two candles for loved ones and pray. I see old shuttered-up houses floating on lawns of purple flowers. On the old converted train line I pass by crumbling station platforms and imagine the men and women with their trunks sitting on some idle afternoon in wait.

I fly down descents whooping like a fool, tiptoe through enormous empty churches, small-talk with French men the age of old oaks outside boulangeries, sit on stoops dicing up saussicon with my fold-up knife like I’m Rambo, two glasses of wine down at dinner I stare goggle-eyed into space, glowing, scrawling in my notebook the account of the day passed.

Some days are hard, cold and wet and I feel old, but campsite-showered, endorphin-dazed, feet up, munching my way methodically through the below, my worries take their leave and carry off and up pulled by the wind.

Baguette a l’ancienne
Saucisson au vin rouge
Morbier
Avocado (deux)
Mackeraux à la méxicaine
Taboulé à l’orientale
Coca Cola (ice cold can of)
Yaourt au noix de coco
Pear (mushed in pannier, more like a smoothie)
Suchard le rocher lait praline

In my tent the nights are long and I sleep 4 hours at most and freeze my arse off just before dawn, but I am happiest of all in there. So close to the ground, feeling the world sigh and stretch under me. The raw pleasure in the simplicity.

At Saint-Savin in Vienne, I meet Alice and Kaas from Amsterdam, a middle-aged couple on a campervan European tour. Earlier I’d seen them walking round the village, we get talking. Kaas is shaking his head. I think I know what you’re about to say. How sad it is? He nods. It is… how do you say… bankrupt? All around France we see the same, he continues. Beautiful villages, all empty, the life has moved on, there are no people anymore.

As the sun was falling I’d walked the same empty lanes lined by fine facades, shuttered up, shop windows with no stock, the long square next to the abbey, a closed hotel, the planes dropping their leaves. Why it had taken me so long to notice. There wasn’t a soul anywhere. I tried to imagine the village in its pomp, the voices, the clamouring, disputes and gossip. And now only the rustle of the wind pushing the leaves through the square, the distant figure of an old lady with a plastic bag rounding a corner, out of sight.

Just south of Fougères in Normandy, I fly downhill past a little hamlet and glance two figures, old men, standing outside a house, watching the road. I whirr past them in a blur, I am moving, in an instant they are gone. 40 yards down the road, without looking back, I raise my hand and wave. Turning my head to look, I see them both, arms aloft, following my path as I disappear round a bend.

In an old abandoned farmhouse off the side of the road, I wandered through its empty rooms hearing my bike shoes clank against the old stone floor, and I thought of something. This is the story of us, we move in, we stay a while, we leave. If you zoom out far enough all of time is a tide moving in and out, in and out. Forest becoming sea, mountain to desert, aeon.

So I move through a country leaving little pieces of me strewn here and there. A tiny mark, a smile, a wave, I see it scatter. On we move, onto the next, but something minuscule has been altered. On and on, into the unformed future. An audio recording of a distant morning, voices lost in time, an old photo of lives since past, the beating of a butterfly’s wing.

One day on the road I feel a presence behind me.

T’es chargé comme un mule! comes a voice.

This is Ginot from La Réunion. 53 yrs old, twice-divorced, ‘on a tous besoin de la liberté’ he laughs. We cycle side by side for 15km. Nine days alone, sans internet?! he shouts through the wind. Ca me fait du bien! When I get tired I stop, s’il pleut un hôtel, sinon un camping, I figure something out, I like not knowing! We reach the top of a hill, around us stretch the windswept fields of the Loire, a cold afternoon light. Tu m’as donné des idées! he says. I smile and we spud. He holds my shoulder and looks at me. N’oublies pas, les meilleurs jours de ta vie sont encore à venir. The wind picks up, I shake my head. J’ai pas compris! He moves off a little, and turns.

Remember…

your best days are yet to come.

When I went away, I wrote in my journal the thing I wanted most from my journey was gratitude. For the myriad things in my life, for the upcoming adventure, the hit of freedom only the bike can give, before autumn and the battening down of hatches.

I got a big whiff of gratitude. But as the week went on, out on the road day after day, another feeling came over me. That nobody would ever come close to finding out what I had seen, smelt, heard, or most of all felt, at that particular time of year, as the sun shallow on the Meridian threw its light on those winding innumerable roads. I felt like the guardian of a secret nobody cared to discover. Which was exciting, but also made my insides ache from some sadness. But sadness was somehow not the right response. Was it the need to share it with somebody, I wondered. Or the need to just understand it. If I could unlock its kernel, its meaning, it wouldn’t be sad, it would be a treasure of my own making, locked in the vault of memory, mine to keep.

On the last night, looking out to sea in the dark by the grey stone of Saint-Malo, I cry in fits, same thing that’s been happening for months. Not sad, just overwhelmed by it all. There will come a time when a church will be a church, an avenue of oaks dripping wet just that, the waves washing against the beach of Brittany as they have since time immemorial, a time when these things don’t bubble this raw emotion up in me and make me sob like someone died. When that happens I think I will have lost something.

Be more like a machine and less like a flower, she said to me once.

More like a machine. Less like a flower.

Back in Hackney, in the Boots queue, holding a packet of electric toothbrush heads, my mask feels the force of a sigh. After all that, here we are again. 9 days I was away. The first two in London aren’t good. It makes sense I suppose, I’m not back at all. My physical self might be, shuffling along in this queue for the pharmacist, but I am far away, out on a country lane lined by hedgerows with their turning leaves, in the middle of a nameless field.

This Is The Story of A Holiday

Walking through Stanstead at 5.27am one morning, bleary-eyed and dehydrated, I surveyed the carnage around me. Men bent-double over pints of lager, a girl with sad eyes and bad makeup offering samples of skin cream to nobody, a four year old with hair the colour of maple leaves lost in the drone of wheelie suitcases clutching the straps of her pink backpack, so overwhelmed by the amount of human energy on show I wanted to pick her up and run. Why do people go on holiday I thought.

What are they escaping from.

It isn’t until about two days into my holiday, a few years later, sitting on soft cushions heated by the sun, experiencing DFS-advert comfort as the soup of hot air from the Sirocco pushes salt and the barking of dogs and some sentences in dialect towards me, and I stare out at the expanse of water and mull over a beer, an extremely cold beer, a Messina Cristalli Di Sale, and imagine the taste of the first sip fizzing and cooling my mouth, it isn’t until then that it dawns on me something I don’t think about very much, that a holiday can be a monumental experience, because this is fantastic.

I walk languidly from the terrace into the dark cool of the kitchen and take a bottle from the fridge, I crack it and hit it, it does more than my imagination had prepared me for. If someone handed me a pale ale from some microbrewery in Clapton right now I’d throw it at their forehead and insult their career trajectory. This is the beer for me. I am an islander now. One of the Filicudari.

The mountain in the middle of the sea they call it. A mass of volcanic rock rising out of the Tyrrhenian to the north east of Sicily, Filicudi is one of the 7 Isole Eolie ruled over in myth by Aeolus the divine keeper of the winds, who Homer told, helped Odysseus on his way by granting him a favourable gust. An island far from war, far from time, watched over by the sun, wrote Roland Zoss in 1973. The same sun watches over me. I look out over the water from my heated cushion and raise the bottle and toast.

It heats up quickly and I drink it fast, record-trouncing temperatures are igniting hillsides across the Mediterranean, Syracuse records 48 degrees on Wednesday, the Italians are too refined for stubby holders. Thousands emigrated to Australia from these islands between the wars, one of them could’ve brought a stubby holder back by now. The drink of the Filicudari is Malvasia, a sweet straw wine grown on the vines of Lipari.

Two days before I spent the morning in bed, overwhelmed by my new environment. Was it too long in lockdown, was it my old age, was I hormonal, bed seemed safer, I wasn’t ready for this strange world outside the window. I woke at eight but stayed put til eleven, hiding under sheets, until a grudging acceptance came that spending a week there would be a bad use of my time. I ventured out. Cool dark high-ceilinged rooms, sheathes of light, through a doorway a slender ankle.

Raymond is a man of class and continental allure. The incarnation of a sea breeze, inhabiter of past lives, he keeps a fine collection of linen shirts and an Amex open to new experience. On the phone across the ocean to plumbers, electricians, plasterers, stone-cutters, painters, engineers and foremen he speaks of mastic, light-switches, second coats, architraves, shower handles, Sky installation, and dust. His mother calls and he reassures her that move-in day is imminent. Mate if I did even one of those things in a calendar year for my parents they’d never recover. It’s a cultural thing bro, he explains, children look after their parents in India, it’s expected.

One of the nice things about being with people our age is studying how they’ve set up their lives, taking the things you admire and using them for inspiration. Most of all I dig Raymond’s adventure. Every year he spends months in different continents making new friends of all ages and creeds. I think how much new experience this gives him, how good to break habit and repetition and I am envious. I feel boring, it makes me want to be braver, to go and see new things. This adventure had led him, by word of mouth, to rent a villa on Filicudi for a month, most islanders we meet gawp and exclaim wat aryu doin eyur in Filicudi!

I feel like a celebrity groupie.

We go and swim and the big boulders of the Tyrrhenian are smooth and slick and comforting, the water is warm and the salt is tasty and I starfish on the surface and try to zoom out and imagine this strange spot in the endless ocean and I think wow what the hell where am I. And then a strong understanding of how much my brain needed reminding, of things outside London and lockdown and the repetition of days and unlearning love, and this reality I had begun to unquestion, now floating in the sea, warm and content, was jogging my mind from, and I didn’t know how much I needed it til then.

We lunch at Gramd Hotel Sirena, spadina, tono, patate al forno, caponata, the sea salt coats my skin, panna cotta, espresso, Raymond points out the waitress. There’s something about her, he says. I look and there is. Back up to the villa, one by one we take on the steep and endless steps that climb the hill and drench us in sweat. The heat of the afternoon demands focus on nothing, I read the Neapolitan novels, a present from my cousin Clara, watch out, she says, they’re like crack, once you start you won’t stop.

At night we walk down to the port. Esta que arde like papa always says. The place is full of human energy, young and beautiful Italians, loud, gesticulating, music and cries, smoke, the sound of beer bottles against stone, queues leading to a stall selling fritti, the fading light and out to sea the boats that Raymond says have tripled in number wait. I feel nervous and awkward. I find any communication hard and am sensitive to even the mildest input. It was like this when I was small, I remember, an urgency to run from uncomfortable situations, to be alone. I don’t know why I feel it now again.

Raymond is an absolute babe magnet.

Some girl beelines towards him on the port and her friend drags her back by the hair. The guy who rents him a boat wants to take him to dinner. The mother and daughter who run the only shop in town giggle as he picks cheeses from the counter. It comes naturally to me man… he shrugs smilingly. A lady stops him in the street. She asks in shock… ma sei tu Rajan? A day later we are on her boat. Her husband Rino captains it with a tired, kind smile and two Italian women lie on the white seats, we swim off the rocks, eat lentils and drink wine, our host persuades Raymond to buy a house on the hill, it’s for sale, she will take him round it tomorrow.

The very top of the island is Fossa delle Felci, says Patricia. It is a beautiful walk. Back on the terrace I inspect my back, it is the colour of a Puglian tomato. Gisella, an islander, is doing her weekly clean. Roh-ger? She says. Rah-jan. I teach her the annunciation. An Indian name, I explain. Si Indio. Sempre con el telefonino. I ask her the name of the little purple flowers, to which she replies Bougainvillea. Bellisima ma fragile, she says looking down a little sadly at the petals on the terrace floor. A little bit of wind and they all fall. I turn and show her my back. Bougainvillea I say. She laughs.

In 1971 the islanders gathered at the port carrying with them the statue of their patron saint San Bartolo, brought down the hill from the church, to set sail for neighbouring Lipari in protest at the government’s decision to exile 18 reputed Mafiosi to the island under house arrest. 270 of them, pretty much the entire population, left. Leading the Mafiosi to complain, we’d rather be in prison, at least there we’d have company.

We go back to the restaurant the next day. Alberto the manager sits at one of the tables doing numbers on a pad. He looks up at Raymond, and starts yelling. Look at this man! A face like that and never a reservation! The waitress smiles at me for the first time and I fist-pump madly under the table. The happiest I’ve been all year.

That afternoon on a bookshelf I find a map of the island’s trails. The peculiar sensitivity I’m feeling is eager for my own company, Raymond is busy with builders so I take the map and walk up into the hills. All around me I see rocks, from the shore up to the sky, terraced walls, piled up as far as the eye can see. I read in a book they are called Lenza. Torn from the mountainside, cleared of stones and levelled they were little gardens, in their thousands, where the islanders grew barley, vegetables, and fruit in the abundances the volcanic earth provided for them.

That evening we head into town spruced up and smoothed out, into the thick din of revelry, on the sloping flagstones the kids play out an unending game of football, running between the revellers spilling their drinks, politely apologising, running on. We climb the four steps to the restaurant importantly. Completo, Alberto grimaces. I smile at the waitress and she looks through me without a flicker of recognition. It took men and women hundreds of years to build the Lenza and I can’t get her attention for longer than one lunchtime, I watch her glide around the tables, bow-legged and insouciant. All of a sudden from within the kitchen the cook starts shouting. He is Gisella’s husband! Raymond will come to dinner! He will cook him whatever he desires!

Thus the week lilts onward in the manner of the boats moving around their anchor, we fall from the clutches of one day into another. We are on holiday. We swim in the sea, sleep late, drink beer with no hangover, we eat fish, read, sit in the shade, cool off in the shower. Some mornings before the sun gets too fierce I run down to the port, and glimpse the island stirring. The cacti and the cocoa-coloured earth and the wine-coloured sea.

One afternoon I walk to the cemetery. Either side of an avenue of firs the tombs bear the names of Filicudari families. Zanga, Zagami, Rando, Paina. Qui sono i resti del forte onesto e laborioso Gaetano Taranto. I look back past the gate to the sea and hear the wind rise, it moves through the trees below and comes up past the gate and a branch sways and my face just cracks.

All I have been feeling lately, this overflow of senses, something like the pain of everything and our struggling on in spite of it, over and over again, and in this sacred place among generations of islanders resting here warmed by their sun and cooled by their sea, some glimpse of the endless repetition of things, the beauty despite the sorrow, a sign of what to hold onto, to be grateful for the miracle, to be involved in the grandeur. I think I have never felt so open, like I am touching the edges of something bigger and it will not always be like this so I must not let it disappear.

That night we eat chocolate mushrooms and listen to tunes in the dark and dance and chat breeze and end up lying on our backs on the terrace looking up at the stars, taking turns with the music. We see a dozen shooting stars at least. They leave a trail of sparks and stardust behind them. UFOs bro. Raymond laughs, tells me to shut up. Laugh all you want, one day they’ll be in charge. Probably already are. The stars are innumerable, we stare up and gawp, what a sky, what an evening, the mosquitos cut it short.

The next morning is my last and I rouse myself at six, fail in my efforts to get a slumbering Indian out of bed and pick my way up the hillside through the morning light. Up and up, along the path built from sacks of earth leftover from the building of the pier, levelled because the men carrying the statue of San Bartolo from the church would trip on uneven steps. I get above the clouds.

Over the years the children would race each other up here until the crack of a rock against one of the boulders at the summit would echo across the hillside and denote a victor. How strange and deep a week can be, even one where I don’t feel that good, I breathe in the morning, leave a little stone on top of the pile, blow a kiss to the sea and pray.

Down in the port for a last ice-cold Messina, I thank Raymond for having me, for bringing me to this strange place with his invention and his nose for new experience. I look over at the restaurant and see her. What if told her I’m leaving tomorrow, but if she goes for a drink with me I’ll stay. Pretty good opening line, no? Raymond smiles. I can’t quite work out what his smile means. A few days later, back in London I realise what it meant. Fine, said the smile, you’re never going to do it are you.

On Sunday walks down through Rotherhithe my mate Matt’s voice would boom out along the river path. It’s not a dress rehearsal! It was one of his favourites. This is it. Real life. We have to take our chances, make our luck. La oportunidad la pintan calva. Imagine, wrote Viktor Frankl, that you have lived already what you are about to do, and are aware you have done it wrong, but have a chance to go back and put it right. This, he said, is how one should live the present.

Go out into the world.

Come towards Me, said the voice.

What a way to live, I think. Still, I don’t ask her. Fear of being shot down I suppose. Not enough swagger in me. At the end of the aisle, out past the pews, the sea gets on with her business.

On the way back on the ferry I look through the cloudy glass at the Thyrennian, calm and with the sun on it, like silk. How long life is, I think, feeling heavy, and I must live every second of it. But it is full of an unformed magic, and all the feeling it contains I want to seek it out and write it down where I can, bottle it. The translucent skin, it callouses over, my brother tells me, sitting on the floor of his new flat. Give it some form, I think, not its perfect form, a refraction of a moment. So you can hold onto something that is always trying to leave, before it does its thing and disappears into the past.

Go Hard or Goatee

In the manner of the rain that has, of late, lashed unceasingly against the dank grey pavements of the city, navigating the puddles and potholes of my days I found a singular repetitive thought drumming against the roof of my brain. What the hell to do with my hairstyle.

I wasn’t drowning in options.

Having drawn the follicular short-straw and watched my forehead increase alarmingly in size over the last few years, it was a toss up between the backward combover flaunted by the Turkish guy in my Local 7 Eleven…

and Uncle Fester.

I tended towards the latter, simply because it was easier and cleaner and I’m a sucker for control and at times when I let it all hang out I’d catch my reflection and see patches where my hair wouldn’t grow and feel old and vagrant.

But the Fester option also came with problems, most notably the ‘head doubling as flashlight’ syndrome. The amount of light bouncing off the top of my melon was a source of contention. Useful for directing pals to my whereabouts on heaving dancefloors, but I was taking driving lessons, what if my dome was deemed hazardous to oncoming traffic by the DVLA.

Could I tan the shine out of me.

Seems not.

I mulled over the Coolio vibe.

Out of nowhere one sticky evening of early summer, scanning Netflix for some mindless flatscreen daydream to wallow in for a couple of hours, an answer arrived.

The message came loud and clear. I was focusing my energies in the wrong hemisphere. I went to the bathroom, steadied myself and summoned a deep intake of breath. With a deft swivel of the Braun series 9 titanium-coated beard-sculptor, a door to a new room in my soul creaked open. I walked tentatively through.

I had entered an unchartered realm.


The realm of the goatee.

I dusted off the loose stubble, splashed my face with water, towelled myself down, and focussing in once more I surveyed my reflection in the mirror. Staring back at me was someone I had never met before. I took some more photos.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one who was happy about it.

But something alarmed me. I’d had my fair share of questionable hairstyles over the years, but this was different. Never before had I, in under a minute of fairly unconcentrated coiffuring, revolutionised the way I looked at myself, how I perceived my own identity. There was something about the goatee that changed the interior of my being, deep down inside me. That took my 37 year old script, ripped it to shreds and flipped it on its head. That brought out a long forgotten darkness from my soul, something I knew I wasn’t going to be able to come back from. Lurking within its angles and symmetry, was something absolutely terrifying.

What was it exactly. It’s not like I was the first to test-drive this particular style. There was Brent.

But then there were some cool cats too. Brad, Leonardo, Pacino. I was in esteemed company. These guys were the epitome of class and continental allure.

In fact, these guys begged an all important question. If you don’t have a goatee, who the hell even are you. What had taken me so long?



And still my reflection terrified me. I wondered if it was the no hair plus goatee combination. Did a decent mane up-top adroitly balance out the sheer ridiculousness of having a goatee. What could be more intense than a goatee. What even is a goatee. An M25 for your lips, a holiday home for your chin. Pronounced and yet peculiarly isolated. The thing about stubble is that if you don’t shave stubble just happens. But a goatee is a whole new level of care and deliberateness. With my Uncle Fester flex, would going full Walter White draw too much attention to the rug doing a rodeo of my molars.

Or was I just doing that thing fat people do to give themselves a jawline.

Questions poured down like the falling rain. Five hours in my crisis was hotting up, and on the verge of shaving it off I got a text from my mates inviting me round for a casual last-minute dinner. In the name of banter I kept it to show them, fishing out some festival Raybans to complete the look.

When I got there something unexpected happened. They said hello, we shot the breeze, and they passed no comment on my getup whatsoever. And when, after a second glass of wine I gingerly removed my shades and asked if there was anything peculiar about my appearance, they said simply ‘oh yes look, it suits you mingo, you look good’. I upturned the table, said something disparaging about both their mothers and got the hell out of there.

Walking back home in the fading light I caught my reflection in a car window and flinched. And I understood. At last it made sense what this darkness stomping around in a sealed-off wing of my soul was up to. Whatever the goatee was, was the opposite of who I wanted to be. And in the space of a few hours, like a broken mirror, it had fractured my identity.

I wanted to be a good person, to put good into the world, to connect with people, hold doors open, smile at strangers. Looking like this, I couldn’t do those things. I didn’t feel sensitive and polite and accommodating, with an especially hairy vagina for a mouth I felt the opposite. And were I to try and be the first things, looking like I did, I would come across as a weirdo. Real cross the street to the opposite pavement vibes.

So I took an iron to the wrinkles of my malaise and got rid. But not, as my man Myles suggested, without going full Danny Trejo.

More like it.

The cool thing about trying to be as cool as Danny Trejo is accepting you’re going to die from uncoolness in the attempt. The extended handlebar ejected me instantly from the realms of the deeply tenuous beard-style, straight to looking like a knob. And this was breathing space. I felt superb.

I tried on a shirt I hadn’t worn in years.

Hit up the library.

Busted around the supermarket.

Around me audible gasps and bottled selfies soundtracked my day, I was the man and everyone knew it. In a post-covid world my handlebar was flipping the script, I could tell strangers just wanted to be near me. On a solo trip to the cinema, killing time with some peanut m&ms before they opened the auditorium, I lensed a killer selfie.

And from the corner of the screen my world came crashing down.

What’s with the screw face, I asked the kid who’d just photo-bombed me.



You look like a twat, he said.

I took his word for it, went home and fell asleep for a week. So came to an end my saga with the goatee and the extended handlebar. Both bad looks, in different ways. The goatee didn’t work for me, its legitimacy rendered it confusing. On the strained expressions of the folk I encountered was writ the question: are you for real? The goatee was awful, too forced, too laboured, too deliberate. It made me feel strange. Even stranger that the only two people who commented on it said it actually suited me. That was the terrifying thing. And then it took a ten year old in a cinema to affirm that I actually looked like a twat.

If there’s a moral to this nonsense, it’s think twice before you get out the beard trimmer in an inquisitive state of mind. But more accurately, as a wise man once said, you’ll stop caring what people think about you when you realise how seldom they do.

I Gotta Go See About A Girl

Your heart is in your mouth, you wonder why you bother, all the ways in which the next few hours will go wrong present themselves in a seamless highlight reel, an instinct rises above your fear and you keep moving, you’re locked in, you realise life is this, life is being in the game, this nervous energy is a sign from your gut you are alive, on you walk, you see the figure, the unsuspecting date, anxious, expectant, because your text-game is on point, of someone you now won’t live up to, who you’ve hoodwinked into spending the evening with.

First dates are terrifying.

They always scared me shitless. You wouldn’t know it though. When the lengthening shadows of my twilight years draw in, and I sit there by the fire with my patchwork memories, some less reliable, too smoothed over, too benevolent to the home truths of my past, I will cast my mind back and think, you know what, I’m not the last guy in the world you’d want to go on a first date with. Not at all. I gave it some unique flavour.

Meet me in Piccadilly, under the statue of Eros, I’d say. Baller starter move. With a knowing grin the God of Love would point his arrow directly down at us as we ambled up Regent St and hooked a left onto Heddon St. Having complimented the lady on her attire, I’d drop some casual knowledge about an obscure David Bowie album cover, and we’d proceed up the pedestrianised boulevard. If it was winter time I might make some passing remark about the chill in the air. She would concur.

I’d then stop, look her straight in the eye.

Cold?

It’s about to get a whole lot colder.

Emanating from the shadows, a neon haze would move across our periphery and reveal its source. An establishment dripping icicles of class, charisma, clean-lines and sophistication.

In both temperature and atmosphere the Ice Bar is indisputably cool. Upon entry one is handed a thermal cloak and gloves before passing into a sub-zero chamber, whereupon a ticket grants you a complimentary spirit cocktail. They play very loud EDM, and you sit on ice stools and drink your drinks and slowly get colder until your tumblers – also made of ice – begin to melt and your twenty minute time slot comes to an end.

I asked a Russian once if the atmosphere of the Ice Bar reminded her of the Moscow winters of her youth and she shot me a look I imagine her compatriots reserve strictly for leering through the Ukrainian border fence. Another girl found the whole thing so distasteful she insisted we leave half way through our allocated slot, which at £18 a head was a blow to both my wallet and my self esteem. But I couldn’t blame her. The place was awful, full of Italian tourist families taking selfies, the drinks were bad, the music was shit, it was freezing.

But it was also kind of the point.

The Ice Bar was something to laugh at. Something to do together that was kind of interactive, that involved a couple of drinks but was less neutral than the pub, that was weird enough for us to feel connected in spite of. I remember once to my horror a fully booked Ice Bar meant the pub was the only other option, and it was far more intimidating. As if over a pint there would be nowhere to hide. When you were as nervous as I was, the ice bar was a diffusion technique, an expert way to…

break the ice.

And strangely the real world seemed a lot more manageable once back in normal clothes amid a normal temperature, like the two of you had only just met but had already been through the ringer, and walking back across Regent St into the beating heart of Soho, it felt like you were meant to be together.

My mate Chuckles once proffered some advice. Bro, he said, on a first date always book a restaurant in the vicinity, and if things are going well covertly beeline for the joint in question and just at the moment you’re walking past be like… I know this great place, and duck in. It’s a classy move.

The restaurant was Hix on Brewer St, it had these beautiful bar stools, and sitting side by side one felt both closer and yet under less scrutiny. Life has taught us, wrote St Exupéry, that love does not consist of gazing into one another’s eyes but looking together in the same direction. I would quote this around the time we took our seats. Hix also had a bar downstairs and once dinner was done we could keep the vibe going by drinking extremely strong cocktails til closing around 1am. I’d then see them off in a cab, giving the crucial double-tap on the roof once the lady was sitting comfortably.

I must have done this first date five or six times.

Did I feel bad repeating the same formula? Every date was different, and my thinking was the smoother the logistics ran the better for both of us. I don’t think I repeated any of the same punchlines or got any names mixed up. I remember one girl asked me 3 questions in six hours, which I deemed reason enough not to go on a second, and another, an architect, asked me so many questions I made my excuses and hit the gents to compose myself. But I don’t think my company ever deemed the date a disaster.

As the years drew on, as the doorman at the Ice bar started recognising me and their weekly newsletter peddling subzero deals cascaded into my inbox, as my mates relentlessly ripped the piss, seasons changed and rearranged and one day the Ice bar went under, and even Hix started emptying, eventually closing its doors for good. So came to an end the chapter of my first dates. I also somehow got a girlfriend, which removed those evenings from the equation in the best way possible.


*

And so one morning, many years later and just a few ago I found myself on long-forgotten once familiar ground, feeling my way around the edges of a first date once more. There was nobody in my sights, only a strong instinct in me to want to meet someone. I was coming out of a period of unease and as tended to happen on the upswing, the heady mead of life was re-entering my body and I felt alive and happy.

In the intervening years the landscape of dating had changed. Introductions through friends were an option, but most had found one another by then, and the pickings were slim. These days, meeting someone involved the small task of swiping right on a glowing interface. That, or you went old school. The I gotta go see about a girl technique. Walking up to someone in a public place, facing the firing line of ultimate rejection, asking for a number.

One afternoon, sat in a bar opposite my house sipping a non-alcoholic IPA I heard a voice, and peering in its direction as nonchalant as I could manage, I saw her. Sharp intake of breath. She was unreal. Pouring sweat for half an hour I worked through a plan of action, something self-deprecating but not too creepy that would justify interrupting her and her friend mid-flow. I decided to bust home and put something cooler on.

Walking back across the road fifteen minutes later to seize my destiny with clammy hands, she was nowhere to be seen. But something had clicked into motion.

A few days passed, it was the week before Christmas, I was meeting a mate and his fiancée to hit their local for dinner. And in there, across the floor, was this girl, waiting tables. She was something else. I couldn’t keep from following her with my eyes, tracing her, the way she walked, how she carried herself, interacting with the revellers, gliding around the room. I spent two hours boring my friends talking tactics, and as the place was emptying, they went to wait outside and I made my move.

I’d written down my number on a napkin. I went over to her, motioning to pay, and looking up at me quizzically, she pointed to the bit of paper I was clutching with a peculiar agitation. The receipt? Nn-no, I stuttered, it’s on the table. And as we walked over a pall of terror drew across my mind, I grew faint, and lost it. In a last attempt to salvage some coolness I threw out a couple of insights about Christmas being a busy period, she frowned and half-nodded, and tumbling like a redwood onto a forest floor of regret, I flat-lined, paid and left. From the corner of my eye I could make out my mates’ faces pressed against the window, front row seats to the spectacle of my failure.

I pussied out, I said under my breath as I got outside, and without so much as a sideways glance blurted Happy Christmas, got on my bike and cycled home, dejected and full of defeat. But I didn’t make it. Half way across Well St Common, moving between the shadows cast by the beams of lamplight I heard the beating of enormous wings. In front of me an Angel hovered, stopping me in my tracks. I dropped my bike to the tarmac and stared. Be brave, came the voice of calm, if you do not have courage nothing good will ever come.

I went back.

Many months later my girlfriend told me it was the coming back that got her. If you’d asked straight out I don’t think I would’ve given you my number, she smiled.


*

I went back to the park the other day and saw the spot where I’d thrown my bike down. How weird I thought, a two and a half year relationship could’ve been snuffed out forever, vanishing into non-existence then and there in the space of ten seconds, on the basis of one decision. We weren’t even supposed to be in the pub that night. Louise had planned on cooking but was pooped after a long day, so the plan changed.

How arbitrary life is. I might’ve married this girl and I was two split-decisions away from never meeting her. How many opportunities pass us by, within metres and minutes of us. How alive is every day, every single one, singing with potential, a swirling moat of magic lying in wait, for our courage, ready for us to reach out and meet it without fear with arms outstretched.

The feeling I felt cycling back that night with her number, the feeling that made me want to shriek at the sky, having gone towards the thing I feared the most and made it, whatever the feeling was, I must go towards it again. I wondered how many new discoveries, interactions, ways of seeing and being in the world, every morning might bring about, with the vision of that feeling in my heart. The spirit of the unformed future, circling above us giggling and pirouetting in the air. What we call fate, said Rilke, does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us.

I gotta go see about a girl.

Am I enthusiastic. Am I terrified. I don’t know. I know that I like myself more these days. I have less reason to hide, behind a thermal cloak and some loud EDM.

The other day, on a train, someone tells me how great her last few Tinder dates have been. I thought the opposite was normally true, I ask. Well yeah, if you want something serious I’d steer well clear of them, you’ll be disappointed. But for meeting new people and cool conversations they’re great. My phone can’t get on dating apps, I say. You’re fine. Stick to the going up to strangers getting numbers game. You did it once already, she says. You can go again.

Riding The Waves of The Multiverse

I made it onto the nation’s airwaves the other day.

I had some things to say that needed saying. In my moment of glory I glossed over coronavirus and the size of Chris Witty’s collar, avoided mention of the Oprah interview and went straight for the jugular. Talked about the most important thing I could think of. Mark (if that’s your real name bro) had called in saying he thought this was LBC’s most boring phone-in ever, and I was having none of it.

Psychedelic substances are the talk of the town.

Micro-dosing tech wizards in California, Ayahuasca ceremonies in East Anglia, psilocybin clinical trials for the treatment of addiction and depression, the psychedelic revolution that was shut down in the 60s has come back for round two. But what exactly are these things. And why do they even exist. For my money, psychedelics pose the most important questions of all, ones we simply have no answer to.



*

Peterson looks deadly seriously at his interviewer:

What we don’t understand about psychedelics is a very thick book. They bend the structure of reality. I have no idea what they do. They could be anything. They are unbelievably strange. What they reveal to me is how little we know about everything, and that’s a terrifying thing.

Something to be investigated further?

With great risk.

A couple shroomz on a hill at sunset, what’s so terrifying about that bruh. In small doses psychedelics can bring on a feeling of calm and connectedness, can amplify colour and sound, can give you hysterics, some profound and beautiful insights, none of which would seem overly terrifying. But you could call this tickling the feet of the sleeping giant. Those most familiar with these substances, the tribes of the Amazon, the Gnostics, the Ancient Egyptians among others, deemed them to be anything but recreational, and to be taken only in very specific circumstances.

The crux of it all, is the size of the dose.

In high doses, psychedelics bring about effects in the brain and changes in consciousness so grandiose and total that they are deemed by their subjects as among the top three most meaningful experiences of their lives. They are experiences that can bring about extreme self-realisation, can heal past trauma and alter the course of lives. But these experiences can also be extremely challenging, and if not taken in the right circumstances are so powerful they can be dangerous. Put simply, the brain does not know what to do with them.

What they put us in touch with is the mystery. Their effect has been described as drawing back the curtain, so we can experience what lies ‘beyond the veil’.

In the famous words of William Blake:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.

On the walls of caverns from Indonesia to Périgord lying in long forgotten darkness for millennia, prehistoric cave-art show the presence of shamanic transformation, of therianthropic half-men half-beasts, and point to mounting evidence that mankind’s relationship with these substances goes back to the dawn of man itself.

From the Amazonian Tribes who knew inexplicably to combine a leaf with a vine from 150,000 plant species in order to make the Ayahuasca brew and when asked how, they replied simply ‘the plants told us’. To the Bwiti people from Gabon who ingest the Iboga root and use it to contact the dead. To the Vedic texts from ancient India and their talk of Soma, a drink made from the Amanita Muscaria mushroom, to the Mayans and their veneration of psilocybin and the mushroom stones carved in their honour.

In Ancient Greece, Eleusis was known as the light of the ancient world. ‘Athens has given nothing to the world more excellent or divine than the Eleusinian mysteries’, wrote Cicero. Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, they all went down into the great subterranean hall, the Telestrion, to drink from a brew called the Kykeon, and reported experiences that transformed their lives and removed their fear of death.

Used the world over by different cultures throughout time, pyschedelics are now known to have been responsible for the birth of religions and profound leaps in cultural evolution. Some posit the Book of Revelation is an account of one long psilocybin trip. There is even mention of mushrooms in the Bible . I dug it out and found in Exodus 16:12 a description of man-na.

In the morning ye shall be filled with bread; and ye shall know that I am The Lord your God. And when the dew that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground. And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, it is man-na: for they wist not it was. And Moses said unto them, this is the bread which the Lord hath given you to eat.


*

They are a tool, said the shaman, when I asked him what the hell it all meant. But what does it mean, I kept saying. The previous evening I’d drunk Ayahuasca for the first time and was sitting in a cabin in a wood in Holland with questions teeming inside me that I wanted answers to.

They are an endless library, he said. On thousands of journeys, every time a different book is presented to me. Sometimes I am shown the womb, sometimes an electron moving around a proton, sometimes the outer reaches of the universe, sometimes the dark corners of my past. They are a tool to help us live better.

But his explanation didn’t cut it. This wasn’t answering my question. The world made enough sense as it was, without these mysterious plants or fungi hanging around positing enormous question-marks about the make-up of everything. Why did they exist at all. A tool? If you want to get to an island and you’re not Michael Phelps, odds on you’re going to need a boat to get there. But this didn’t tell me what the hell the island was doing there. According to him these things enabled us to garner learning to help us orient ourselves in the world. Fine, but where did this learning come from. What on earth was this place.

Was it even on earth at all.

The neurochemistry is in.

Psychedelics light up something in the brain called the Default Mode Network. When this is switched on, multiple brain regions are able to interact with each other simultaneously. Brain scans show that most of our neural activity is expended in containment rather than letting things run free. Aldous Huxley called the brain a ‘reducing valve’ and psychedelics ‘gratuitous graces’ provided by nature to allow us to bypass it, in order to see what our brains prevent us from seeing in our normal waking lives.

But it’s still the brain though, barks a defiant Dawkins, when asked what psychedelics reveal about the nature of consciousness.

Fifteen years of DMT research would suggest otherwise. Rick Strassman a psychiatric professor at the University of New Mexico administered dimethyltryptamine to volunteers in clinical trials over a fifteen year period and grew so uncomfortable with his findings he brought the trials to a close. The volunteers all reported the same experience. Being shot out of their bodies like a rocket into worlds of such intense detail that words fall short of describing them, where they encountered entities, some of whom were happy they had been found.

This has given rise to the idea that, contrary to what Dawkins believes, consciousness might reside outside our brains, and that we are more like receivers tuning into a radio frequency. ‘We have absolutely no proof consciousness is generated in the brain: this is the great lesson of psychedelics,’ wrote the Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof. What if these medicines allow us to access dimensions we are normally unable to reach, tuning us into new frequencies, permitting us to see beyond the veil of our bandwidth.

Rather than being aware of their hallucinating brain, the DMT subjects reported their experiences to be ‘more real than reality itself’. Their accounts were mystifyingly similar, as if they were all journeying to the same place. But Strassman grew disenchanted with his inability to prove scientifically what these accounts seemed to be revealing, and in the end could only conclude he was in the presence of what he called a spiritual phenomenon.

Whatever room these substances swing a creaking door open to, there is no assurance the human brain can deal with what lurks therein. Maybe evolution has kept the door locked for a reason. In a letter to a friend on the subject of mescaline, Carl Jung warned of Goethe’s poem Der Zauberlehrling the sorcerer’s apprentice, who knew how to summon the ghosts but not how to get rid of them. What one has seen, one cannot then unsee. Jung insisted on being on our guard against ‘wisdom we have not earned’.

This is why Peterson spoke of great risk, and why psychedelics must come with a warning. There is no knowing what resides in the dark corners of the world, what forces are at play there, and what exposure to these things might do to a mind unprepared for it. The interviewer furrows his brow…

Maybe a way to get in touch with the dark side?

Yes… or for the dark side to get in touch with you.

But native cultures saw them as sacred medicines for good reason.

Imagine your mind is a snow-covered hill, wrote a Dutch scientist, and your thoughts are sleds moving down the hillside. The older you get the deeper the grooves in the snow become, until you reach a point where all your thoughts end up following these pre-set grooves all the way down. Psychedelics are a fresh dump of powder. All of a sudden the sleds are able to run free, to move where they want, this way and that, finding all sorts of new ways down, just as the mind can think in new ways denied to it for years, sometimes a whole lifetime.

My experience with Ayahuasca showed me myself in a way I had never seen. I was shown myself walking into a pub, and from a corner incognito I sat and studied myself interacting with people. This was how others saw me, I realised, as I was, rather than through the lens of my relentless self-criticism. I was curious, engaged, quick to laugh, vulnerable, I was alright, I thought. I’m alright.

I often forget that vision and version of myself, floundering in the muck of bad days and regret when I am no friend to myself, but somewhere in me is the understanding that what I saw was the truth, and I must hold onto it. To not forget what was shown to me and to uphold it as an antidote in the unforgiving hours of muted afternoons. If I look hard enough the idol within me is still flickering.

The shaman was right after all. The question I was asking, what does it all mean, had no answer. Once back from these journeys of the mind, the only reality we inhabit is the shared reality in front of our faces, and the learning and self-knowledge can be put into practice only right here, right now. In this way, they can only be tools.

And still the question remains. Why should plants have this kind of intelligence, why should they contain messenger molecules capable of interacting with the human brain to cause such extreme life changing journeys of thought and perception. Could the earth know we are in danger and be trying to get a message to us, the problematic apes, to say wake up.

The modern day shamans of the Amazon believe our world has severed its connection to spirit. That despite our intelligence and civilisation, we are missing out on ancient signals from the earth, messages from the natural world that we are no longer picking up, as if the earth is speaking to us. What if, in the 10,000 years of history and culture and the dawn of modern man, our connection to spirit has been cut. And our unhappiness, our neurosis, our sickness, have moved in to take its place. This might explain the residue left over, why we now sit with our spiritual yearnings and our nostalgia for a paradise lost.

Could the answer lie in a return to the past, to the Shamanic traditions of the Amazon that have been preserved by the jungle itself, ready for us to find again this lost way of seeing, and recover once more our connection to spirit, to the divine inside us.

The Swiss Chemist Albert Hoffman who discovered LSD and lived til the age of 102, would take tiny quantities of acid and go wandering around his garden in the early morning. In conversations with his friend Stanislav Grof, he said:

I see the hand of God there. If they think this is just the work of atoms, they don’t know what they are talking about.

If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. These substances, whatever they are, bring about a sense of connection to the universe far beyond the narrow band of our consciousness. Allowing us to peer deeply into ourselves, demanding our humility to acknowledge how little we understand, beckoning to us to reach with arms outstretched to touch the transcendent, as we behold the miracle and mystery of all things.

Not Stomach Enough for Mains

The above, a direct quote from an anonymous but no less reliable source, was simply par for the course from the fanbase back in the noughties.



What with Craig David’s fall from grace and 9/11, the decade was an odd time for everyone. Bringing much needed solace to dwindling attention spans, before it got all opinion-piecey, dropthebeatonit was just a bunch of random nonsense.

A lot of people preferred it.

Like a B-rate instagram without the brunch photos. It felt wrong to let all that superb content die, so here’s the cream of the crop in a new section called…

short-form crudités for the dipping

Think inspirational quotes, character assassination, incredible gifs, thought-pieces on mate’s mums, pop-culture references, regular hits of dopamine, but without the social anxiety or product placement.

And the chicken game.

All of this just the other side of an evanescent click.

Chronicles of A Butcherer pt 2

As the Beast from the East 2.0 raged outside the window on Tuesday night I sat on the sofa and watched a film about two people having all the memories of their past relationship erased. A relationship that began by chance on a train rolling through Long Island on a similarly freezing morning of winter.

The first line of the film goes:

Random thoughts for Valentine’s Day 2004. Today is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap.

I sent myself a card on Thursday.

I drew a big question mark and shaded it in with gold pen and wondered if it would come in time. I could open it on the day, I thought, as I dip a soldier into my egg while ignoring the empty half of the double eggcup on the table in front of me. Right now it’s Friday, and as I write the card I sent myself will be winding its way through the postal system, on its way back to me.

When I was alone once upon a time I grew to be afraid of Sundays. Something happened on an Easter Sunday a few years back that left its mark on me, a sort of dark presence in my mind serving as a reminder to fear loneliness and keep a watch out for it. If weekends were a time to spend together with someone doing nothing very much, I figured, Sundays spent alone were the saddest days of all.

Later, in the hangover of an especially big fight when I reckoned the relationship must be doomed, the memory of that Sunday would rear its head and I would think… no, anything but that. It haunted me, that memory, like a restless spirit in a sealed-off wing of my mind. I read on MedicineNet that loneliness was processed in the same part of the brain as physical pain, and wondered if anyone had ever got PTSD from spending, against their best efforts, a Sunday on their own.

But I can count on one hand how many times I’ve felt that type of loneliness. I think I must be very lucky. And sat here in front of my egg, on the one day in the calendar made to make single people feel like shit, that has chosen to fall on, of all days, a Sunday, I’m doing alright I tell you.

A mate of mine once told me how his flatmate, on the five-minute walk from the tube back to the flat, would call up for a chat, and my mate would put the phone down on him. I heard this story and thought how I was so unlike this it almost made me envious. The three times a year I answered my phone I’d be greeted by stunned silence on the other end of the line. I was the uncontactable. I never initiated, never asked for help, I loved to head out into the city on my bike with no real plan, to cruise and amble and overdose on artisan coffee. Like a badge of honour, I thought my self-sufficiency my greatest virtue.

But deep down I just wanted to be found. I fantasised about someone coming round the corner and spying me locked into a staring contest with a Georgian façade, or walking past me on a bench in a walled garden sipping a cortado. What a cool guy, so solitary and mysterious. But it never worked out that way. You’re like that Instagram saying, someone told me once. What saying, I’m not even on Instagram. The saying that goes the only thing more attention-seeking than being on instagram is… She waited. Not being on instagr-… Bingo.

There is a strange maths to feeling alone.

I’ve cycled the span of continents for months on end and never felt alone. And been in a room with ten close friends and felt isolated. I’ve shared beds with people and felt more alone than ever, at times I probably even felt alone with her. When I was honest and felt heard, when I said the things that were in my head and felt listened to, my sense of isolation would depart. But anything short of that didn’t feel like connection, and being in company but not connected seemed like a pretty bad combination.

I’ve stared out at a wood under the influence of an ancient Amazonian medicine and been more sure than I can put in words about the interconnectivity of all things, before me the ferns and grasses and trees in the dark were glowing and ebbing and their energy and mine were touching. And when I think of that wood even now I don’t see a memory of a hallucination, I see something like proof we might have lost a way of seeing.

But yes loneliness.

That Sunday, the Easter one, the ghostly one. Newly on my own, consciously-uncoupled, self-partnered, whatever you want to call it, I feared the re-emergence of that shadow. With all that was going on in the world in this strangest of years, human separation was real and everyone was feeling it. I came close to hugging my Albanian plumber the other day, a man who wanted children more than anything in the world, who had taught his nephews and nieces how to walk and how to speak. But they are lies, he said. They are not mine. A man without children is like a tree without branches, he went on, reaching for a spanner.

One Sunday of bitter cold in the middle of January, the feeling began to rear its head and I got scared. And in the uncanny way she has, some instinct in her that has saved my ass a few times when I most needed it, leaving her food-poisoned husband in bed, armed with two kids and the spirit of a one man army, Chloe honked outside the window and we drove to Highgate cemetery. As Kit hunted for ghosts in the shadows behind the big grave stones and Nell’s little legs gave chase I saw an inscription by the entrance to a catacomb and realised how things were endlessly repeating themselves, that all things had been and were and would continue to be. To decompose to reconstruct.

And so the weeks of lockdown in the unreality of 2021 stretched out, seeming themselves to endlessly repeat, and spring lay in hiding somewhere around the next corner. Up at my desk I spent most of my days alone, trying to write and edit and write again, with arms outstretched to claw back the confidence in me that kept wishing to float away. Reading things, walking to the shops, not too much YouTube, not feeling lonely, not really, not like I’d feared.

Through the wall one morning animated voices arguing grew louder and I remembered how lockdown was driving couples insane and thought of Papa’s line of Kafka’s I’d searched in vain for that went something like, given how strange and complex we all are it is a wonder we have the courage to reach out and touch each other with the tips of our fingers. One day when the stars have disappeared we might miss having someone to argue with.

I wasn’t lonely. But I did feel alone, in my head. I missed her presence, her quiet grace and unfailing interest in the things I had to say. Someone there to listen to your show and tell, and show and tell their stuff back to you. A new tune, some factoid, the branches silhouetted in the changing dawn beside St John’s. It is a strange thing being cast out into the world again alone, you realise how their presence is a veil that cloaks your world, and when it goes there is a sucking out of air, an atmospheric shift like the sudden change in the weather before rain.

Relearning how to be alone could be nothing but a good thing I thought. All the cool stuff I found out about the world happened mostly when I was alone. Like the stencil on the wall by the canal said, the quieter you are the more you can hear, and the memories and realisations, the piecing together of things in order to make sense of them, came to me almost always when I was quiet. I’d got this far. As the light of the afternoon dimmed outside the window I reached over to turn on the desk lamp and saw again as usual, the answers were all around me.

In On Solitude Montaigne spoke of keeping ‘a room at the back of the shop to establish our principal solitude’, to get used to nothing but ourselves so when the people and things we loved were taken from us it was not a new experience to be without them. The soul can turn in on herself, he said, she can keep herself company. Thinking about it hard, I thought before that I feared loneliness, but I realised what I feared was fear itself. And this was a non-starter, a fairytale, if it hadn’t happened then it didn’t exist. I devised to do my best to make other people feel less lonely.


*

On Saturday a card came for me. I recognised the writing on the envelope, it was familiar. Someone sent me a Valentine after all, I smiled. I decided not to open it until the big day and to make a ceremony of it, and early Sunday morning, cracking into the egg I took the envelope and tore it open. Written in gold lettering were the words, hey buddy. And below it an enormous question mark coloured in gold pen. I wondered who it could be.

Royal Mail had made a special Valentine’s stamp to mark the day with a romantic proposal. I like you. Do you like me? The Beast from the East 2.0 was upping sticks at last and heading home across the continent, and outside the window the sky was cranky and muted. I looked at the card and the big gold question mark and wondered might lie in store for me today, this Sunday of all days.

Chronicles of A Butcherer pt 1

When I was a kid I knew I’d grow up to be a butcherer. Butcherers lived alone, my mother explained. They didn’t need the company of anyone, least of all girls. They never married and just went about their way, doing whatever they wanted whenever they pleased. The sweet empty life of no compromise. I wanted to be a butcherer, of that there was no doubt. No darling, a bachelor, my mother went on. But I wasn’t listening. My mind was made up. I was going to be a butcherer for as long as I lived.

*

And now my childhood dreams have come true. I sit here in the encroaching dark with the hairstyle of a 68yr old, the mental age of a 17yr old, nearing my 40th birthday as the draft creeps under the sash of the old school window and I wonder how it came to this.

Trouble is, I’d got to a stage in my life where I was quite happy to not be a butcherer. I’d found somebody I could not be a butcherer with. And for a clutter of reasons it hadn’t worked out, and circumstances had conspired to return me to the state my eight year old self so coveted. The door to butchererdom had creaked open and I had walked through it, and the cold stone floor had echoed under my footsteps.

When you’ve spent years taking on the world with somebody you feel confident enough to bounce the more mundane things in life off such as the interesting thing about tarmac is, when that intimacy is taken away over night it’s scary. You can go on a socially distanced walk with a friend and laugh a little but then you really are back to being alone. You go to the shops and buy food for one and you turn a film off twelve minutes in because you can’t focus, and you sit there on the sofa and the aloneness of your existence washes over you. You turn to where she used to sit and an emoji cushion with hearts for eyes stares back at you.

I don’t know if I was heartbroken. I must’ve been. I felt underwater. Kind of in denial, kind of angry, stoic around mid-morning, a mess walking to the loo half asleep in the night as the fact of my aloneness tapped me on the shoulder once more. I didn’t want to be a butcherer. It was the last thing I wanted to be.

One morning with my cheek squashed against the trackpad I channelled all I’d learnt in November’s touch-typing free trial and hit why are breajups so gucking shiiit into the search bar. The next morning, on the hunt for some Ultimate Fighting Championship highlights to drown in, I saw the YouTube algorithms had gone to work and staring me in the face was this:

I was in shock.

Brad Browning aka Breakup Brad had five golden rules to get my ex back. Who was this guy. He called himself ‘the No. 1 YouTube expert on getting back together with your ex’. This was unbelievable. I told Brad to slow the hell down and ran to get a pencil.

According to Brad there were five golden rules:

1. Don’t let your ex see your emotions.

I had a think. Well… we weren’t exactly in contact, so I calculated she was unaware of the aggressive blubbing I was doing into my emoji cushion. Check.


2. Don’t be obvious with your attempts to get him or her back.

I was on this too. In the three months of our trial-break period I’d formulated some pretty ugly texts but stayed cool and never sent them. Ch-check.


3. Get out, be social, and stay busy.

I was not doing this. But then again no-one was, we were in the middle of a pandemic. Uncheck.


4. Get help from an expert.

You know it, Brad. What next? This is where Brad recommended I sign up to his online course for a cool $127 and he’d agree to throw in his Ex Factor Guide for ‘just’ $47.

5. There wasn’t even a number 5.

I had to admit I felt shortchanged. If this was YouTube’s ‘No. 1 get back together with your ex’ coach there must be a load of still-single people out there. As my back to square oneness sunk in once more, something appeared in the corner of my screen.

Who was this guy.

What the hell. Six minutes from Coach Alex on why ‘silence makes your ex come back to you’. This guy was rocking the tee and blazer combo and his facial hair was tight. He even had a french accent, this guy blew Breakup Brad clean out the water.


Two minutes in and struggling to understand a single word coming out of Coach Alex’s mouth I admitted defeat. Something about how yoomen naduwr meant silence was bound to pique my ex’s interest. I held out to see if he mentioned where his blazer was from and scanned the comments.

Damn son.

I needed to get inside the mind of a woman. What was she feeling. My search intensified. Coach Stephan appeared to have been burnt badly in his time, the only thing he recommend was getting the hell away from them.

Next up was heartbreak, one year later. Worth a shot. It basically entailed a girl watching a video of her heartbroken self a year earlier sitting in a car and crying. 2,212,279 people had watched this. I’d be damned if I was going to add myself to that list.

But I felt her pain.

My feeling of shittiness was actually neurological withdrawal. I read that the pain of a breakup actually starves your brain of dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin, the same circuitry as an addict coming off cocaine. Just looking at old photos was enough to light up my dorsal posterior insula, the same thing that occurred during physical pain. I ditched the photos and got all Pride & Prejudice and took to gazing out the window at the falling rain with some embroidery.

It wasn’t easy. I’d imagined a future with this person but they needed time. And the pain I was going through was probably a result of how bound up with them I had become. Which wasn’t healthy. After the initial break period where we’d been in contact every couple of weeks we were now embarking on indefinite no contact. It was new territory. I’d tell myself I was doing alright but I was sleeping like shit and having awful dreams.

Enter Coach Lee.

Coach Lee didn’t mess about.

Coach Lee was all about the No Contact phase. It was the phase where each partner ‘truly has the space and time to work out his or her feelings’. But what the hell did ‘no contact’ even mean. A no contact phase with no time-limit was just an inventive way of saying we’re done. If you’re not in touch ad infinitum, you’re not in a ‘No Contact phase’, you’re just not in contact.

As comforting as staring at Coach Lee’s haircut was, he made me realise these relationship coaches were just feeding off people’s need to believe whatever they had wasn’t over. That by watching their videos you might wreak psychological havoc on your ex’s mindset and lure them back. But it was all bullshit, all just a reason to keep clicking on another video and earning them another buck.

I needed some truth. One day I came across this guy.

This guy had something about him. The upper-arm definition, the five day shadow, the ambient piano music he chose to back his videos with. More than anything he made me think he was talking to me.

The reason I believed him was that he told me what all the other relationship coaches put together hadn’t been able to. That a break was something to simply walk away from. His audience seemed to agree.

(sorry to hear that Lenka)

But this dude was powerful.

His parting shot topped it all. A quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Very nice.

But hold on. I was being encouraged not to wait for anybody, but it also occurred to me that I wasn’t a girl. I then wondered why every single person in the comments section was female, and why the sold-out theatres Matthew Hussey gave his inspirational relationship advice to didn’t have a man anywhere near them.

Shit.

I had one last pot-shot.

That was a week ago. No-one got back to me. Turned out after a relationship with Cuban megastar Camilla Cabello, Matthew got done for credit card fraud.


*

And so came to an end my dalliance with YouTube relationship coaches. None really the wiser. The pain was still there. Some days were good, some days not so great. Some friends listened, some friends were full of advice, projecting past heartbreaks onto me for their own catharsis.

But being single wasn’t so bad. I could fart in bed, watch the football without guilt, I could go on four hour YouTube binges. I did all that when I was with her. Maybe that’s why she left me.

Despite what Breakup Brad and Coach Lee would have me believe, complex problems came with no simple solutions. I wasn’t going to find answers in a six minute YouTube video. I’d rather go biblical and disappear into a cave or seek out the ends of the earth to arrive back at the river like Siddhartha.

It was kind of simple. I couldn’t make someone be with me. Or even lure them into being with me. It didn’t make any sense. If I loved her that meant loving her independently of me, it meant loving her life and wherever that might take her. Sometimes I think love is like a little bird that is never yours. One day you might hold it briefly in the hollow of your hand and whisper something to it before letting go and watching it fly off never to be seen again.

Some days I think that. But most days I think love is like a fart. If you have to force it, it’s probably shit.

Quitting The Booze Never Looked This Good

The greatest cure I ever found for a drinking habit is for something godawful to happen. You can try any number of things, but a crisis is key. It could be someone dying, bankruptcy, watching your labrador get flattened by a Toyota Yaris, any of the stuff that makes people turn to the booze. That’s where you want to be. In my case it was a broken heart. But any kind of severe upheaval is on the money.

What will then happen is you turn to the booze with a reckless abandon. A couple of weeks of hard drinking is bang-on. The booze will drown out the voices, will numb you from your predicament. You’ll wake up a mess and mood-alter as soon as the chance presents itself, you’ll hunt down company, hit the pub with people you don’t even like. Distraction of any sort, so long as you don’t have to sit for a second in the pain of the present.

When your veins begin to pulse with alcohol, and your head is the kind of thick fog familiar to the characters of Bleak House, one morning after another night on the sauce your world will collapse. The adrenaline of your new situation will have run dry, and you will walk for three hours through a park in tears listening to old therapy sessions on an iPod trying to find any kernel of wisdom to save you from your pain, but the emotional depths will overwhelm you and you will discover a new type of despair. This is exactly where you need to be.

Rock-bottom.


The moment of clarity.

A place I found myself in the last week of September. Saturated in feelings I had processed none of, since all I could process was the alcohol I had saturated myself in. And the answer came: stop running. And I surrendered. It was extremely logical and obvious and remarkable in its simplicity. Enough. The booze wasn’t working.


*

I tried to stop drinking four years ago. An excess of excess had made me seek change, but after two months I’d jumped off the wagon to save myself from sobriety. The clarity that being sober revealed was terrifying. I had stared into the abyss and as Nietzsche warned the abyss had begun to stare back. With nothing to distract myself with or lose myself in, the mirror had shown me what I wasn’t ready for, and it had scared the life out of me.


But this was different. There was a voice in me now demanding I get my shit together. Not because it could be good for me, but because if I didn’t I was on the road to somewhere much darker. This time round I wasn’t so much stumbling towards an ideal, it was more like I was running from hell.


I just couldn’t repeat that walk through the park again, my head on the verge of eruption, at the edges of my sanity. I yearned for clarity. For clean clear lakes of Perrier, waterfalls of San Pellegrino, I wanted early nights and rooster crows, white towelling dressing gowns and Nescafé Gold Blend.


I wanted to sit in my feelings and let the pain hit me like a truck. Instead of running, I would go into the darkness to find what still shone. The move into sobriety was as uneventful as dew disappearing on a morning of spring. There was no ceremonial last drink, no sacrifice. Only a feeling of sanctuary.

Besides, it was only a girl.

I flew into non-alcoholic beer research. Turns out I had options. In the intervening four years since my last attempt, great leaps had been made and most pubs had at least one of these badboys on offer. Peculiarly thin at first, the more you drank the less you noticed the lack of kick. It was very placeboey. More than anything you could sit there with a pint full of some amber liquid and nod earnestly and feel like one of the fucking guys.


But when the call came for same again an interesting thing happened. Forcing another enormous container of liquid down me was just non-sensical. I wasn’t exactly thirsty. And yet the whole pub was doing it without a second thought. And I understood we love drinking not for the tannins and playful notes or the hops and the citrusy twang, we love drinking for what it does. Remove alcohol from the equation and you have nothing. You have Ribena. We drink for one reason.

To open a door into the unknown and walk through it.

I tried to unpick my drinking habit. First came the how. I was never an eight-pint man, or a half bottle of Malbec on a Monday night brother. I was a crafty at midday on a Saturday guy. A solo sharpener at the bar on a Thursday kinda cat. I lived for the ‘moment’, the first couple sips. The dance with the doorman of the unknown. I drank more than some and less than others. Pretty vanilla, with a dash of Cointreau.


The why was a different story. I remember recognising a period in my life when the role of alcohol changed. Like it began to mean something different. It went from exciting to calming, from a place of fun to a place of refuge. Not all the time, but still a shift. As if I was no longer excited by the fairground ride, I just wanted to be on it. A place I could sit in, that turned off the voice yabbering in my ear about all the ways my life was not as it should be.

But it also meant I stayed on the ring-road of my problems. When things got overwhelming I’d hit the pub with a bro. And what awaited was distraction and hangover. Did I have a problem with drink. The hangover made me think I had a problem with me.


Hangovers for sensitive people are a first class ticket to Dante’s 7th circle. I’d come to where I’d left off two and a half days before, stripped of all confidence, picking my self-worth up off the floor. Hell was empty and my doorbell was ringing. My conception of myself evaporated. My friends didn’t like me. I couldn’t write for shit. I was no writer at all, I was a twat with a blog.


Imagine somebody gave you a pill and said swallow this and the pill made you feel exactly like a bad hangover. Nothing in the world would be worth this feeling, you’d think. The blanket negativity, the nausea, the delusion and insecurity. And yet we double-drop that pill most weekends, because all we see is the effect and not the cause, all we feel is the edge that needs taking off.


That’s what walking through the park was, fifteen of those pills at once. A beer-addled brain walloped by the news that the person I loved most in the world needed space from me. But that morning in the park saved me. Without it, I wouldn’t be where I am now.

Domingo T-800. Cybernetic organism.


Living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.

I’ve done more DIY in the last two months than the rest of my life put together, I walk into Leyland and everybody knows my name. I’m a drill-bit away from building an orphanage in the jungles of Nicaragua. I repainted bedrooms, cleared out cupboards I’d forgotten existed, took down a couple of 1000 piece jigsaws. I lost 6 kilos. Which considering I switched vices and started smashing a family pack of peanut m&ms most nights, is impressive.

More than anything the clarity brought momentum. I’d bed down at half nine and rise before dawn and there was no drop-off. Only incremental steps and a feeling of same-same or better than yesterday. I was a better human, a better friend, brother, son, bit of cheeky banter for everyone. I think there was just no regret, which meant no mean self-talk, maybe I even liked myself a little. Above all no energy spent clawing my way back up to the surface, every morning began above water and from there I flew.

Hemingway drank to make other people more interesting. But watching people get all slurry and affectionate is a beautiful thing. There is a smugness in the containment, in spending two hours in a pub and cycling home knowing you can smash a whole page of Sudoku. I had my wild nights in. When you absolutely positively feel the urge to drink yourself into oblivion and show up for your niece’s third birthday the following day.

Accept no substitutes.

PINE TRAIL PALE ALE 0.5%


*


Sadly nothing is as good as it seems.

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alchohol, morphine or idealism.

Jung

As the weeks have rolled on I’ve grown wary of this addiction to clarity. The more I avoid the hangover, the bigger its spectre becomes, the less I want to go near it. But I don’t want to live like that, always in control. How boring never to toast a pint in the sunshine, or swill an Umbrian red on your tongue on a pine-covered hill.


I don’t know if this whole thing is even about alcohol. I’d reached a point in my life where I couldn’t keep running from myself, I’d received a thump to the heart, and not drinking was my ticket out of there. And it has grown roots in me, I feel like a tree that cannot be bent by the wind. Jung said too the most intense conflicts, once overcome, leave a security and a calm that cannot be easily disturbed. But without conflict there can be no change.


So I guess life grabbed me by the balls and shook change out of me. That’s what happened. It was so necessary it was actually the easiest thing in the world. I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t happening or claim I wasn’t ready. It was time.

Going off the booze was symbolic of something bigger. Like I was finally looking out for myself. Not just me now. But me tomorrow, me next week, me in a year’s time. Earlier this week I took her photos down. I was dreading it but strangely enough it brought peace. To die to something, so in its place something can grow again anew.


And what ever happened to gratitude. For the quantum miracles that have occurred over billions of years to even get me here, with oxygen, with memories, with side one of Billy Joel River of Dreams, about to eat some tacos.

So that’s me.

Heart a little tattered but the best I’ve been in decades. Sadness might come and tap me on the shoulder now and then, and I have the strength to welcome it in and sit with it a while. Resolute and sound. How strange one of the worst things I can remember happening saved me. That in the darkness some things begin to shine with a light from another source. But we have to go where we least want to, down into the depths, and find an ember there on which to blow to cause the spark to light up once again inside us.


Some time in the new year, once the first buds of spring have tiptoed outside, I will cycle to a pub and stand at the bar with a mate and order a pint. A real one. With pleasure and no regret.


But I have some things I need to do. And now the booze, like another thing in my life, will have to wait. Gladiator’s mate at the end of Gladiator says it best. As he buries the little statues of his family in the sands of the Colloseum, he looks to the sky and speaks to his friend.

Now we are free. I will see you again.

But not yet.

Not yet.

Freezing All News Intake During A Pandemic

Monday October 19th was a day like no other. Similar you could say, but uniquely different. As the morning news filtered onto the interfaces lighting up the screens and dinging the notifications, the nation roused itself to smell the coffee.

Covid vaccines were forecast for the end of the year. Trump’s health was improving. Michael Gove had declared the door to the Brexit trade deal ‘ajar’, and Britney had set pulses racing with a sexy dance on instagram in a red halter top.

In the shower around 7.19am, I made the decision to stop watching listening or clicking on any news for a month. The Stoic deprivation thing was part of it. But it was more that I was going mad. My life had become a metronomic clickfest of newsfeed incontinence relieved by snatches of sleeping and eating.

BBC News Guardian FT BBC Sport ESPN Grazia YouTube BBC News Guardian FT Heat BBC Spo… Refresh consume excrete refresh consume excrete.

It was another thing too. The day before, I’d gone online and noticed every one of the two dozen articles on the homepage I was blinking at was about something terrible. Death, crime, poverty, scandal, corruption, racism, climate catastrophe, deadly virus.

Hand an extraterrestrial the morning paper and it’d be like these cats have fucked this place up good I’m out. It was the grimness of the headlines more than anything that made me stop to wonder if this relentless checking and informing and updating was doing my mood any favours at all.

In his book Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker writes how contrary to what the media would have us believe, progress throughout the world in the last 150 years has been close to miraculous. Deaths in war have plummeted, extreme poverty has halved in three decades, the world has seen a mass decrease in starvation, domestic violence and child abuse are down, life expectancy is way up, there is 90% global literacy rate in under 25’s, and the world is a safer place.

But journalism tends to cover what goes wrong rather than what goes right, what happens rather than what doesn’t. Bad things, Pinker points out, are sudden and dramatic and occur on an idle Tuesday in May. An attack, a riot, a bomb blast. Good things are things that don’t happen, such as children not starving, terrorism not taking place, nations not being at war.

Knowing full well that humans are evolutionarily tilted towards negative information, the mainstream media goes fishing. So in ignorance of all the good in the world, we read of Sarin gas attacks and police brutality, spiralling infection rates and Kim Kardashian’s butt-reduction, now brought to us in real-time by a new army of video journalists, basically anyone with a smartphone.

I stepped out of the shower, somewhat purified, and got busy. I deleted the news apps on my tablet and set up some site blockers on my computer. Not owning a smartphone meant time in the street was free from temptation.

Leaving the flat that morning I felt the lightness that comes with the instinct of being kind to oneself. Outside all was as it had been. The traffic lurched and gargled, the last leaves trembled, the lollypop man on the crossing by the school smiled.

My first encounters were positive. Friends nodded in understanding, said they’d thought of doing the same, the lady at the checkout gave a look of earnest commiseration. It’s all the same so dreary day after day yer doin a good thing.

But mid-morning at my desk when the site-blockers barred my way I was taken aback. What the hell was I supposed to do, how was I going to know things. The infection-rate. Had London gone into Tier 3. Was Donald on the mend. Keeping up to speed could be deemed more critical now, than say, on Jubilee Weekend.

What if I emerged from my flat 28 days later and the streets were empty, the shops boarded up, just a harsh wind beneath a birdless sky, and the world was unrecognisbale. What if we were top of the league with two games in hand.

I began to sniff out clues for signs of the pandemic, the sirens in the air, the number of masks, the degree of crestfallen countenances. I glimpsed a news board one night cycling through central with the words Isis in Vienna written large on it. In the back of a taxi I heard something muffled about Macron addressing his people. From the bowels of my laptop a video emerged of a concerned-looking Boris behind his wooden lectern and I closed it down immeditely.

I perfected an appropriate level of concern facial expression, a grin and bear it brow-furrow, and a shrug of humorous resignation, hoping that would cover all the bases. So if I got chatting to a stranger they wouldn’t clock I had absolutely no fucking idea what they were on about.

The churning news cycle was a conversation I had been left out of and I felt dumber for it. But also calmer, like I was the guardian of my own secret, of the things going on around me. Instead of drawing in on myself, I felt pushed outward. Like a great gulp of mountain air.

I noticed time more, there were now pauses between things. I could break from a task without going all bbcsporguardiayoutubeholebleughh, I would sit there, stare in the fridge, do some jigsaw. My brain began to refocus, my attention span spread its wings.

Outside there were sounds, strange shifts in air currents, winter’s creep, the harsh brick of St John’s against my hand. I found allies in the things headlines meant nothing to, the building cat, the enormous planes of London fields, the wide-eyes staring out from prams. I began to feel a little as they were always, present in my surroundings.

On the off-chance I might leave the house one day and get tased and airlifted to a bunker by the World Police, I told my mother to text if Boris and his stooges went full-Wuhan. I forgot about the US election entirely. I was on a roll. What else could I give up that required being on my own in the flat with decent wifi.

Two and a half weeks in, the country went into nationwide lockdown. The same day the election results came in. I’d gone down to Devon with a friend, a US politics obsessive. As he relayed the headlines from his smartphone in real-time, I heard an exotic language that needed careful enunciating back to me. Jow-Bye-Dun you say. But a short sharp hit of news was thrilling. I felt part of the crew again.

Was it unethical, was it my duty to keep informed. If news and politics were part of the culture I lived in and I wasn’t engaging in that culture, was I abusing the freedom I took for granted to live in a democracy. What about the men and women affected by job losses and insufficient furloughs, was my no-news experiment mocking them. 

When every government decision had a direct impact on mortgage payments, covering rent and buying food, was taking time off from the headlines nothing more than proof of privilege. Or would the world spin on regardless, whether I kept up to date or not.

With all the fun happening the other side of some forcefield, I began to relish my separation. It wasn’t that I’d found something new, more that I’d got back something I’d lost. I was a 90s kid with a pre-internet brain and I was unlearning habits that were so normalised I’d stopped noticing how unbelievably weird they were. 

It turned out that this compulsion that had swallowed up two hours of my day, easy, I didn’t miss at all. The moments that filled me up I still had access to, an autumn walk, a book’s depth, a talk with a friend. I literally felt cleaner, and understood what the word detox implied. The removal of some poison.

With only the world in front of my face for company, I decided to write my own headlines. I smiled at everyone like a moron, even through a mask, held-up supermarket checkouts with platitudes, sprained my elbow holding doors open, fist-bumped the lollypop man, left a tin of biscuits for the dry-cleaner, engaged in pretty much every tiny human interaction I could, and saw goodness come my way.

Eventually it came around.

Twenty seven days in, on the eve of my reinitiation, I felt twitchy. Had Trump died. Were Tottenham top of the league. Was the pandemic now a scamdemic, was everything still a mess. I deactivated the site blockers and began to click and refresh and click some more, and somehow nothing had changed at all.

A new president, the pandemic still there or thereabouts, Spurs second on goal difference. But nothing much had happened. Not really. Just ever-changing details in an unrelenting cycle destined to endlessly repeat itself. 

I’d been here before. I found myself very aware of how this was merely the latest iteration of a sequence which would change tomorrow and the day after and if I checked now or next week it wouldn’t change the core of me. I didn’t have to know. I had stepped off the edge of something.

Straight away the headlines brought a sinking feeling, and I picked up a book, ashamed of my denial, dimly aware it would be impossible to keep ignoring the news, and wary of the slow-spiral that would inevitably lead me back to where I’d started, a lump of media-gorged non-attention.

Sitting with my feet up one night watching The Fellowship Of The Ring, an answer came. Exhausted and emotional, Frodo looks into the foreboding dark of Moria and sighs. I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened. Turning, Gandalf fixes his eyes kindly on the little hobbit and murmurs. So do all who live to see such times. 

But that is not for us to decide.

The news cycle was the stark evidence of a suffering world. 2020 was a year like no other. I wish none of this had happened. So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for us to decide. The news was going to keep happening whether I read about it or not. Pretending it didn’t exist wasn’t the answer, and relentlessly checking it wasn’t either. 

There was another news cycle going on all around me that the media couldn’t report on, tiny miracles beyond the pixelated glare bouncing off my retina that required my attention. The myriad pockets of time in my day, the little windows of pause. How would I spend them, what would I make of them. How would I remember them. All I had to decide was what to do with the time that was given to me.

In Filth It Will Be Found

This is the trouble with it all. By the time you realise there’s a problem, it’s too late. It has its tentacles wrapped around you so tight you can’t breathe. And you wonder how the hell you got here.


I remember it clearly. The moment I found myself, slowly and deliberately, wiping down the inside of the bin-liner. Bro, said my brain loud and clear, this is a bin-liner. It’s for rubbish. You don’t have to clean it. But it was fresh in that morning, what was I going to do, look at the ragù coating its insides for the next three days. I couldn’t handle that. Again my brain waded in.

Mate it’s a fucking bin-liner.

It was the moment that made me reassess things. To take a step back and a deep breath in and wonder what wrong turns had brought me to this place. As I stood there on that idle Thursday limply holding the sponge-cloth, staring down at the ragù juice smearing the inside of the bin, a question began to form in my head.

How the hell did you end up here.

Hitler was an extremely orderly person, obsessed with cleanliness. When he came to power he embarked on a campaign to ‘beautify the factories’, planting flowers outside and ridding them of vermin with an insecticide. After the factories came the mental hospitals, the gypsies, and the rest.


His disgust was such that in recorded conversations he would refer to the people he exterminated as insects and rats and parasites. The insecticide was called Zyklon; its sister Zyklon B was used in the concentration camps. Disgust is a very strong emotion.


The thing I feared most as a child was a J-cloth. The way the crumbs festered inside the folds by the sink, damp and rank and cold. I hated them. I hated ash trays. The touch of leather gloves. A photo exists somewhere of me aged five posing four feet away from my brother and two cousins. It was the gloves. I couldn’t even spell my own name and here in the grains of an old photograph is evidence of an OCD in full swing.

I could fold my school uniform with eyes closed. I had a special money bank that divided coins up into little trays and I would sit there Gollum-like counting them in the corner. My favourite shop wasn’t Hamleys, it was Ryman. At boarding school mates would move my books off their axis to bait me and I would laugh along like it was no big deal, and as soon as they left I’d realign them.


Ask my exes about my prowess in the bedroom. I can make a bed to within an inch of its life, I have palms like sheet irons. 64% of the students at art school were dyslexic and I had an identity crisis because I could spell and owned a sodastream and knew where everything was in my backpack at all times.


Maybe I evolved the necessary order to combat my brother’s chaos. We lived together in our twenties and had some run-ins about fairy liquid and who should pay what for the cleaner. When I came back one night to find he’d stripped my bed and was in flagrante making use of my sheets in the next door room, I took it as a compliment. All I could think as I lay there on the cold bare mattress was what kind of spin cycle to use the next morning.

Look I’m not exactly Howard Hughes.

My flat isn’t the White Cube gallery. I own things and keep them on surfaces. I don’t oblige you to take your shoes off at the door. Spill something on the carpet and I won’t start hyper-ventilating. I have this thing where I’ll make the bed and throw something on it in a haphazard manner. A strewn jumper here, a tossed scarf there. It’s laid back and spontaneous.


But is it necessary to jump gibbon-like from the shower to the bath-matt to not spill a drop of water on the floor. What’s my problem. What chaos in me requires this round the clock vigil, keeping the fires of order burning to ward off the dark, fighting past trauma with Mr Muscle Advanced Power Kitchen. Being a clean freak isn’t exactly fun. Making beds, sweeping up crumbs, trying to mask it all with a casually flung scarf.

Carl Jung often cited an alchemical text which read in sterquiliniis invenitur. Translated from the Latin it meant ‘in filth it will be found’. Jung believed the darkest parts of our subconscious were hidden from us – The Shadow – and the path to actualisation was into this darkness. What we most need to seek, he said, can be found where we least want to look.


As I stood there sponge-cloth in hand, watching the ragù drip down the inside of the bin, I wondered what lurked in my Shadow self, and how much it had a hold on me. Around me dust particles floated glinting in the sun’s light and something spoke. Go towards the filth.


It was deeper than I’d imagined. I learnt my control was about fear, and I was scared shitless. In the same way my brother didn’t really see mess, I saw mess where it wasn’t really there, in the same way I saw threat where it wasn’t really there. And what I feared most of all were my own emotions, waiting in the shadows to swallow me whole.


When I went to the same restaurant over and over again, I wasn’t dripping the assured cool of a man who knew what he liked. I was suppressing the fear of encountering a new menu. Going to the same coffee shop. Watching the same film. Mapping the same territory. All of it was part of the same safety net. Fear of the unknown and a world out to get me, finding peace in what I already knew because it couldn’t hurt me.

Perhaps acute clean-freakery comes down to calm. Wipe the surfaces, sweep the crumbs, plump the cushions, charge the appliances, quiet the chaos in your heart with order as you wall yourself off from the world, as the control you require squeezes tighter and tighter until you’re strangling yourself with the hose of your own hoover.


*

The Taoists had something to say about all this. The yin yang symbol meant dualism, how contrary forces were in fact complimentary. They thought the line to tread was between order and chaos. Between the known and the unknown, the mapped and the unmapped. Not too much of one nor too much of the other. Chaos needed ordering and order required some messing up.


According to them, your outside environment and your internal equilibrium were the same thing. You were the spotless kitchen counter and the teeming bathroom closet. There was no distinction between the two. Physicians of Traditional Chinese Medicine would pay a visit and observe the state of your home before diagnosing you.

I feel like my life could do with a light sprinkling of chaos.

I could leave some mugs in the sink I suppose, drip more water on the floor. So when my cleaner comes she actually has something to do. But when duster in hand she tells me of Colombian white magic and how we live out prewritten destinies and helps me understand the mind of women, I’m happy. Escúchalas, Domingo, no hace más falta que escuchar niño.


Speaking to myself and fellow order-obsessives, watch what happens when you break the code. When you take a risk and open a new door and begin to map the unmapped, and find something out about yourself and the world.


Before you know it you’re sat outside the coffee shop you walked past everyday and never went into wiping the froth of a cappuccino off your top lip feeling like a fucking Conquistador. Order brings calm but who wants calm, calm waters good sailors do not make.


Children know the secrets of filth. Every day they seize a new world, a new chance to go exploring and run amuck. We want kids as filthy as we can find them. For their microbiome to be as rich as possible. In filth it will be found, they know it somehow, we knew it once too.

And so they ran roll-sleeve seekers, bounding, squelching puddle-jumpers swilling, woods the woods, hunters, earth-fingered, buzzard bees mud-knees, trudge sludge slip hands earth-return nails stick stack hoot roots worm root trickle fall the muddied hurry beating heart aching heart hurry!

The beauty! The beauty!

Beauty And Awe And Psychedelics And Monkeys

So there I was the other night, deep in a YouTube hole, feeling its algorithms clank and churn and some video loaded and began to play and it changed the course of my evening. It seemed pretty inauspicious, just a bunch of people taking turns to look at a painting. But as I watched something strange happened.


Fifteen seconds in the hairs on my arm began to stand on end, a minute later my eyes were wet with tears, and by the end my face had cracked into some sort of cubist jumble. With salty cheeks I gathered myself and wondered what the hell was going on.

The eyes of these people were trained on the Salvator Mundi, a painting of seismic historical importance once thought lost, but after cleaning and restoration, newly attributed to Leonardo de Vinci.

The hype was real.

It was sold at auction by Christie’s New York, and for two weeks prior people queued in the rain the length of entire blocks to catch a glimpse of it. The painting the size of a lunch tray went for £450m, the most expensive artwork ever sold. Then disappeared.


I watched the video a few more times to try and recapture the emotion I’d felt, which came easily, and resolved to get to the bottom of this thing. What had I reacted to, what was it. Awe in the face of supreme beauty? Why would that move me to tears. Why do we have a strange physiological reaction to beauty.

Where does awe come from. What purpose does it serve.


*

Eight million years ago a group of chimpanzees making their way through the African savanna stooped to pick up a mushroom. They found more and ate a bunch and again strange things started to happen.


The stoned ape theory claims that chimps experimenting with different food groups led them to psychedelic psilocybin mushrooms, which upon ingestion began to radically alter their behaviour. Over millions of years the mushroom trips led to heightened vision, the invention of language, harnessing of fire, and some argue the inexplicable doubling of the human brain size.

Scientists don’t really buy the stoned ape theory. But an early hominid getting high is still meaningful, in that it must’ve been the first instance of the elevation of the animal brain into the realms of the transcendent. The first time a living thing might’ve been aware of something far bigger than itself, and felt awe.


Scientists now think psychedelics were behind all prehistoric cave art. Without doubt the psychedelic experience has been responsible for the birth of religions and profound leaps in cultural evolution.


When Picasso clambered out of Lascaux cave in 1949 after seeing the bulls and lions and rhinoceros that had lain undiscovered in their darkness for 17,000 years, he exclaimed in wonder at his ancestors… we have invented nothing.

But what do psychedelics have to do with looking in awe at a Leonardo.

Turns out the neurochemistry in the brain is identical. When the brain experiences awe, the default mode network, the part which allows multiple brain regions to interact with each other simultaneously, gets cranked up.


The brain switches its focus to the right hemisphere, the part responsible for imagination and intuition, and what results is a feeling of deep connection to the world. Awe has been called ‘the perception that is bigger than us’. On psychedelics, the same part of the brain is activated.


Early humans eating a bunch of mushrooms and staring at the heavens would’ve encountered mystical experiences completely outside their daily remit of hunting and gathering and finding shelter. Inspiring them to create representations of what they saw on the walls of caves.

But why.


Why do we have a capacity for awe and mystical experience.

Why did watching a bunch of people in New York be so affected by a painting make all the hairs on my neck stand on end, piloerection, the same thing that happens to a cat when it sees a particularly big dog, and reduce me to a blubbering wreck. How did it improve my life.

Victor Frankl, the neurologist who wrote Man’s Search For Meaning about his time in the concentration camps, thought awe was about meaning. Beyond personal responsibility, he thought we could face up to the demands of existence through a loving dedication to beauty.

‘Imagine you are sitting in a concert hall and listening to your favourite symphony, and your favourite bars of the symphony resound in your ears, and you are so moved by the music that it sends shivers down your spine, and now imagine it would be possible for someone to ask you in this moment whether your life has meaning. I believe you would only be able to give one answer, and it would go something like ‘it would have been worth it to have lived for this moment alone!”


*

The splashes of beauty around us, thought Frankl, were there to pit against the one constant in life the Buddha spoke of, the fact of our suffering. That what touches us deeply might lift us out of our drudgery for a brief moment to remind us that all is not so hopelessly lost, if only we look hard enough.

Best of all he loved the fall
The leaves yellow on cottonwoods
Leaves floating on trout streams
And above the hills
The high blue windless skies

The unexpected smile from the bus driver. The floated echo of the empty church. The smell of the air after new rain, the lick of condensation on the pint glass, the Jack Wilshere goal against Norwich someone uploaded to Pornhub.


*

Maybe the question is not why we have the capacity for awe, but why we walk around so blind to beauty. There are those who see too much beauty, who grapple all their lives with it. They look and look and look and report back on what they have seen.


Artists remind us that everything however small or insignificant is worthy of infinite attention. Their lesson is this. All that there is, can be found exactly where you are, always. We are everything, and everything is us, and so the finite becomes infinite. The psychedelic lesson is the same.

What Blake meant when he wrote:

To see the World in a Grain of Sand
And Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

Being in a permanent awe-addled state might be slightly inconvenient, given that we would forget to eat and probably starve. So the brain has a prefrontal cortex. The linear, logical, problem-solving part of the brain, the 18 stone bouncer manning the doors of perception, hellbent on sleep and food and survival.


Working overtime while the larger parts of our brain remain mostly dormant. Freezing out the default mode network from making its connections. Fencing us off from the sublime because we could not reside there. Perhaps in the end, awe is the transcendent slipping through the cracks.


‘It was an April day’ wrote Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD by chance and dedicated his life to the study of it, ‘and going out into the garden I saw it had been raining during the night. I had the feeling that I saw the earth and the beauty of nature as it had been when it was created, at the first day of creation. What an experience! I was reborn, seeing nature in quite a new light.

Go to the meadows, go to the garden, go to the woods. Open your eyes!’


*

Eight million years ago a hungry chimp ate a mushroom and pulled back the veil and got the party started, and here we are. Strange living things carrying inside us a bizarre capacity for mystical experience. Nature, psychedelic plants, meditation, outstanding works of art and literature and music, love, from inside them the unknown shines out, sparking an ember inside us.

Pushing us out to meet something bigger than ourselves. A sense of connection to the universe that is normally far beyond the narrow band of our consciousness. But is there all around us, always, if we keep our eyes open wide and learn how to look.

A portal to the divine.


Or perhaps the Divine reaching down to brush us with the tip of a finger.

The Small Print of A Three Day Water Fast

Bad tempered clouds were moving across the sky as I woke on the morning of Monday 27th July. The sun looked more like a search-light in a sandstorm. Right kind of weather, I figured. A calm determination was in me, an end-of-an-episode Hannibal kind of calm, confident my plans would come together.

I went to the fridge, opened it and swore. It had taken four seconds to forget, and a split-second for it to dawn on me the next few days were going to get extremely weird. I looked over at the coffee machine in the muted light of the morning. Fuck am I supposed to do now, I wondered.

I made myself the only breakfast available, sodastreamed some tap water, took it over to the sofa, sat down and drank it in one. It was unsatisfying. As I felt my stomach drum its cutlery on the table I growled and went back for a refill.


*

A three day water fast means consuming nothing but water for three days.

In the strange way one is drawn to things and one doesn’t really know why, I found myself reading about water fasts recently, and a blend of curiosity and boredom and spending a fair bit of time alone in my flat, I thought it was as good a time as any to try it out.



Fasting is nothing new. There is evidence that our digestive systems are better evolved for a delayed eating pattern than for 3 square meals a day. Hunter-gatherers would eat only when they could find food, which meant going without for up to 36 hours. And we were them for far longer than we’ve had supermarkets, which supports the claim that eating whatever we want whenever we want isn’t altogether what our guts are crying out for.

*

12 hours in


The first few hours of Monday passed uneventfully. Traditionally when fasting for religious purposes Christians would use mealtimes to pray. Instead of breakfast I took a bath, gave myself a haircut, sunk another glass of water and sat down at my desk. I did this semi-successfully until around lunchtime.


I jazzed up my lunch with some ice cubes and read for a while. Around 3pm I started to get extremely cold, and an hour later my head started to pound, badly. Unable to focus on writing I cut my losses and finished the Notebook.

I then pulled out a jigsaw I’d been ignoring for five years and made a start on it. Which was confusing, since I hadn’t gone near a jigsaw since I was twelve. Still freezing I had another bath and psyched myself up for dinner. Two glasses of tap water, sodastreamed.


I called it a night around nine in the throes of a biting headache. As I lay in bed I noticed something strange: I hadn’t felt hungry all day. Which was also confusing, as if the mere fact of being mentally prepared to go without food had made the hunger I assumed was inevitable dissipate into thin air.


What did this mean. That all those times I’d had a hunger meltdown and been a twat about it, all along I was making a scene about nothing? I was staring at proof that the human body, at least my human body, could go without food for way longer than I thought possible without even a squeak.

36 hours in

I slept badly and woke up very cold with my head still pounding. I caught myself in the mirror on the way to the bathroom and thought, of all the birthdays I would remember this was definitely going to be the weirdest.


In the Bible fasting was meant to be a thing between you and God, and it encouraged keeping the fact of your fasting to yourself. I liked this idea, so I fielded a couple of birthday calls from my family without letting on how bad I felt or what I was up to, and took a pint of water over to the sofa lacking the energy to do anything more productive with my morning than this.

The funny thing was that on a normal day by around lunch time I’d be getting pissed and probably quite aggressive that I hadn’t eaten. But because food wasn’t an option the need to fill my stomach never materialised. It didn’t even enter my head. It was as if food was something I felt only a vague sort of indifference to.


At the same time a kind of excitement was bubbling in me, a kick that came from depriving myself in the aim of some higher goal, testing limits never hitherto tested, striding head first into unchartered realms, just me and my buddy H20.


It didn’t last. At three I went for a walk around the hood in a terrible mood. I was knackered and my first hunger pang in 44 hours had blindsided me. It depressed me to think in my state most of the high street was now off-limits, and depressed me even more to realise my life pretty much revolved around buying shit.


I got home, found an article endorsing black coffee during a fast, ignored the fifty others I’d read which didn’t, and flicked the switch on my coffee machine. I dropped a Solpadeine into a glass to attend to my headache and sat back and sang myself happy birthday.

45 hours in

Perhaps it was the caffeine or the sweet lick of codeine in the painkiller, but half an hour passed and I felt the mists beginning to clear. The coffee had gone down like a sunset at Cafe del Mar and as I sat back my headache began to retreat and a light but palpable energy began to surge quietly through me.

I started to feel incredible.

46 hours in

My new mood was gathering pace. I was amazed. Without so much as a pea for two days this was the best I’d felt in months. I’d read about the side-effects of fasting and wasn’t sure what to believe. But this was something else entirely.


The numbing pain in my skull that had accompanied me for the last 34 hours had gone, and been replaced by a mountain spring of good feeling. I was my old self but on an extremely good day, clear-headed, fleet of foot, eagle-eyed and razor-sharp, I was a predatory animal zeroing in on the kill.


Not knowing when or how the next meal would arrive, early humans learnt to thrive when fasting. The depleted body would release a chemical called Norepinephrine which amped up energy, alertness and focus, all things that were needed for a successful hunt. Same reason I was now absolutely smashing my jigsaw.

Meanwhile my body was going into hyper-repair mode. 48 hours in, ketosis and autophagy were happening; my body was digesting old crappy cells and producing new ones, insulin sensitivity was rocketing, blood pressure was going down, cancer suppressing genes were activating, and I could see like a hawk.

50 hours in


I lay in bed that evening rushing my tits off. Special edition endorphins were coursing through me, I was tingling and felt light as a feather, as if tiny muted explosions of energy were fizzing and popping all over my body. If this was a drug I’d buy it in a second. I listened to music in the dark for an hour and felt amazing, present and content and peaceful.


60 hours in


The last day was more of the same. I went for a walk, wrote all morning with a rare clarity and no lapse in concentration, had a wobble around three when I felt faint, and counted down the hours until dinner. I almost considered doing a fourth day but an Egg McMuffin ad appeared suddenly at the start of a video and totally screwed me over.


As the clock ticked down and I inched my way ever closer to the finish line, I felt a strange soup of mixed feelings. I was definitely up for eating something, but really only out of habit and curiosity, since even now after almost three days my body still wasn’t crying out for food. And there seemed a strange sadness about bringing this peculiar state of deprivation to an end. I can’t really explain it, but the whole process had felt both exhilarating and meaningful, and now with normality about to be resumed I was having to wave goodbye to all that.

72 hours in


Doctors recommend breaking a fast of that length with something very easy on the stomach like fruit or vegetables, or a light protein like tuna. I weighed up my options, and broke it with a beer in the bath. By the second sip I was off, I sat back in the water and breathed in deeply and felt a happiness reign supreme.

The Dynastic Egyptians were into it, the Ancient Greeks joined the party, Socrates and Plato wrote about it, every religion still practices a form of it, and as long as you have food enough in the first place to consider abstaining from, then I would say have a go. I loved it.

How did it make me feel.


It felt like an adventure, one I entered into with only the eyes of God (and my girlfriend) on me, in my own company, without changing my environment. But still like stepping into an unknown and finding something out about myself and returning with a new understanding and a story to tell.


By the end of it, seventy two hours and zero grams of food later, I’d felt mild hunger no more than twice. In a bunch of ways it was a reset button. Surviving without the things you think you need resets your understanding of what you take for granted. That maybe the certainties in your life aren’t so certain after all, and could stand some interrogation.


In all I lost about two kilos, mostly water weight. What I found most remarkable was how much my body benefitted from not eating, when for so long I’d had ingrained in me the idea that food was fuel and without it our engines splutter and die. Having said that, towards the end the mere thought of a deep red tomato sprinkled with sea salt and cracked black pepper had me drowning in a mouthful of my own drool.


It was a reminder too that to go without the things we take for granted can reset our appreciation for them. Food, a pre-Covid world, a love you suddenly get scared you might lose. The world has a funny way of revealing itself whole to us only in our rear-view. It was a lesson in noticing the things around me and paying attention to them, above all a reminder to grab hold of the things we love and hold on tight whilst proffering our whispered thanks up to the sky.

A Lifelong Love Affair With That Ice Cold Wizardry

When I am old and beaten down by my years I will raise a smile and remember the time my uncle took me to discover beer. For five days we had walked the entrails of the Swiss Alps and now, at the end of the last and most difficult day, outside a mountain hut in the shadow of the Matterhorn he announced it was about time for a drink.


The glass was set down before me and as I peered into the golden squall with eyes narrowed and watched the waterfall of tiny bubbles rising up towards the head, I was afraid. After all this was beer, and I was eleven. Never before in my life had a beer been intended solely for me.


Inured to the mountains around me I zeroed in on the glass and raised it to my lips. The liquid washed over my tongue and into my gullet and somewhere in the bowels of an undiscovered darkness a flame was lit. I took down my first ever beer in two gulps.

Later, in the lengthening shadows of my teenage years my mother would frown and shake her head as I approached the breakfast table blurry-eyed and puffy-faced from the previous night’s excesses. We come from a long line of professional alcoholics, she barked, you better bloody watch out.


I knew back then what I know now, that her fears were misguided. Because for me it was only about the moment. In the mists of an eight pint marathon, in the pause between the second and third sip of the opening drink, the moment would reveal itself. A coming together of man and beer and time immemorial. An inchoate idea of the pointless repetition of everything and the beauty of this and on account of it, a deep contentment to be alive


*

1942, an old man is sat in the hilltop village of Tricesimo having a moment. Another man approaches him with a proposal, to which he consents. Che al mi dedi di bevi, mi baste he says in old Friulian dialect. ‘Enough to drink is all the payment I need’. The man with the proposal is the owner of a brewery, the old man becomes the face of Moretti the renowned Italian beer, and the moment is fixed forever in time.

As I moved into my twenties the pint-swilling of youth died down and the quality of what I drank began to exceed the quantity. Maybe it was an understanding that the moment came fairly early on and then vanished, and that any pint past number four added no value and was an unhelpful amount of liquid to have in your system.


For six months I lived in Paris and there I learnt restraint and class. To Parisians a drink was more a footnote than the be-all of an evening, I saw how it was possible to sit with an empty glass and not have a panic attack, I found out first hand how the skulling of une pinte in ten minutes was roundly considered une folie.


But our local supermarket was well-stocked and in the aisle one evening I came face to face with the Trappist beers of Belgium. Leffe, Chimay, Grimbergen, these names produce a reverie in me like birdsong and the smell of freshly fallen rain.


I would sample a new one each week, gradually adapting my taste buds to the more nuanced flavour. And then one day came the revelation of beer and nuts together, a watershed moment that arrived like the fulfilment of some destiny. Jean-Claude Van Damme’s ‘mouvement perpétuel’.

The Sumerians started the party in 4000BC. The Cistercian monks carried the torch through the Middle Ages. In 1751 Hogarth drew ‘Beer Street’. A century later Hardy described an ale ‘full in body, yet brisk as a volcano; piquant, yet without a twang, luminous as an autumn sunset’. And at last in 2011, came a whisper on the wind, a spark to the flame of the bonfire.


Every drinker through the ages must have thought they were sampling the sublimity of beer. They were wrong. For just under a decade ago, the giant leap for mankind was taken. The honeyed hops, the fizz that crackled, the hazy condensation on the side of the glass like dew on a spring morning, the craft beer had arrived.

The pissy beers of the noughties receded into the distance and made way for the new kids. Carling, Becks and Numbers became Brewdog, Beavertown, and Sierra Nevada. The format got a makeover. The 440ml can was jettisoned in favour of 330ml, a nugget of ice-cold wizardry that fit in the palm of your hand like a daydream.

The crafty was born.

And so was my alcoholism. In my teens I envisioned being the guy who had beers chilling in his fridge at all times. But for a man obsessed with finding the moment, the invention of the crafty threw up some problems. The crack of the can, the feeling as it touched my lips, I realised I could have my moment at home, whenever I desired.


I threw out my greens and cranked the fridge to optimum beer-chilling temperature. And an idea sidled up to me silently; it was always the right time for a crafty. To celebrate, to mourn, when I was pumped, when I was blue, when things were going great, when I wanted things to go better. Was I out of control, I couldn’t tell.

I still can’t really.

A Lithuanian builder Rom, a man of deep winters and cheap vodka, taught me once the key to a hangover was a beer as soon as you woke up. Just one, no more than that. And I tried it a few times, and it worked. But it also struck me as a dangerous place to dwell. Like there was something sinister in it.


Maybe my mother was right, perhaps I should’ve been wary of alcohol. At some point for sure it stopped being an adventure, and became a place I recognised, like getting in an elevator and knowing which number to press. And the dawning realisation that if something terrible were to happen to me, I don’t know if I might not consider it a refuge.


But I’d tell you my weakness wasn’t for the alcohol. It was for the crafty. That 330ml nugget. The moment. If the can wasn’t chilled to perfection I wasn’t touching it. Hand me a normal beer and I might hand it back to you. If an off-license was fresh out of crafties I wasn’t about to pick up a few Coronas, I was leaving empty-handed. There was a method in the mania.

The world isn’t an unlikely place to want to escape from. And there is an unknown in a drink, an oxygen, a door that opens to a new room. Every time I cracked a cold one I stepped into that unknown. I tried giving it up once, but it was a lesson hard-learned.


I’ve watched the old men in France congregate in village bars at 9am for a demi. In an East End boozer one afternoon I saw six men deep in conversation, each with a drink, each sitting at their own table, shouting across the room at each other.


My uncle Carlos would wait for his family to leave the Estancia and then he would go and sit on the terrace looking out over the Pampa with a drink, and would toast their departure. He told my old man it was his favourite pastime.


*

So here we are.

A man walks into a pub and approaches the bar. It isn’t yet busy but has the feeling of a room warming up. He clocks the barlady and motions to one of the taps and smiles. She tilts the glass and flicks the tap and the hazy liquid washes down into it, he turns and with his back to the bar looks out across the room.


The night ahead promises all the excitement of the unknown, but he knows this is it. The mountain top. This is the solo-sharpener, the peace before the maelstrom, when there is no need to talk, only to stand there in some idle thought, in the moment.


One man and his beer. He takes the pint in his hand and lifts it, then lifts it further, making a motion with the glass through the air, in a toast, to someone or something only he knows. Then he drinks.

Instagram And The Masks We Wear

Piano music plays softly as a man in underwear walks through an immaculate apartment. His environment drips clean lines and control. His body is expertly developed, Mediterranean brown and muscle bound, but tastefully.

He lists off his skin routine.

Deep-pore cleanser lotion. Water-activated gel cleanser. Honey almond body scrub. Exfoliating gel scrub. A herb-mint facial mask. Aftershave lotion with little or no alcohol. Moisturiser, anti-ageing eye balm, final moisturising protective lotion.

I believe in taking care of myself, with a balanced diet and a rigorous exercise routine. In the morning if my face is a little puffy, I’ll put on an ice pack while doing my stomach crunches. I can do a thousand now.

A few decades later in an alternate reality, ambient house music plays as a man in underwear walks through an immaculate apartment dripping clean lines and control. His body is expertly developed. A voice oozes over the top of the video.

I do today what people aren’t willing to do, so I can do tomorrow what they can’t. I take a cold shower instead of coffee, it wakes me up instantly and is good for my skin.

He likes to start his day off with a win, rising at 5am to outwork his competition.

I hate running and I hate morning work-outs. I do both.

Building one brand is nearly impossible so having five is insane, he admits. To aid his concentration, he chooses from two expensive wrist watches. His laptop is cased in Italian leather. His apartment looks like a boutique hotel, he drives a super car.

The first man is a serial axe murderer with borderline personality disorder, the second is a self-proclaimed CEO of five companies who just turned 24. One of them is a fictional character, one is not. This is their morning routine.

As I sat there staring at my laptop screen watching Jose Zuniga exercise, shower and dress in slow-motion it became apparent the spirit of Patrick Bateman in 2020 was alive and well.

By the time Jose had sat down for lunch and cracked a can of zero calorie tangerine & strawberry San Pellegrino to begin working his way through a chicken caesar salad while explaining how eating clean is something he lives by because as he always likes to say, health is wealth, I began to feel physically ill.


I figured my revulsion was down to how ridiculous it all was, how staged and bland, the sociopathic narcissism of Jose’s routine. The slow-motion, the six-pack, the steam rising up from the cold shower. But looking harder I realised it was something deeper, something in me.

Jose and I were the same person.

Staring into those deep brown eyes concealed behind designer sunglasses, I saw me staring back. As he sat there at lunch outworking his competition, planning his next ‘win’, Jose was the embodiment of every time I’d been in complete control of my life. What made me feel sick was the acrid reminder of how totally empty it felt to feel that good. To be that in control.

I don’t have a six-pack or drive a super car, or have 1.3m instagram followers but my life at times has felt like a never breaking wave moving gently along a silvery shore. Times when I was on a roll and my shirt felt crisp on my skin and things were full of possibility, and I’d go into an expensive deli and sit down to eat a fresh salad and sip sparkling mineral water. And the clean lines of the deli and the crunch of the raddichio would mirror my inner peace.

And I would hate myself.

The veneer of wellbeing would float away and just below the surface I would hear the gurgle of fear and self-loathing rise up inside. Like that level of wellbeing could only make me feel dirty. And this happened without fail. As if I could never warm to my life when it was trying to convince me how well it was doing.

Being alive is a bit crap.

It’s not wrist watches and super cars and light bouncing off your abdominals. It’s a string of disappointments and regrets that come packaged together in a cloud of doom as you lie in bed at night thinking back over each wrong turn.


Most mornings I wake up wondering how I’m going to mess up or who I’ll disappoint or what thing will expose me as a fraud while I wade through a quagmire of shrunken socks and empty promises. I don’t really trust anyone who won’t admit their life is a disaster.


Nobody wants to hear how you made slow intense love to a supermodel. Keep telling people how well your life is going and they will stop relating to you. I don’t trust Jose because in my own small way I’ve been there. I cracked the San Pelli, I tasted the raddichio.


You could have a mirror in your office which says look at yourself that’s your competition but there’s still someone out there with more followers and better abs and you’ll stain your chinos and lock yourself on the shitter and some old dude with a red backpack will ruin your engagement photo.

The Taoists believed the right place to walk was the line between order and chaos. Too much of one was detrimental to a balanced life. The way they saw it chaos needed ordering and order required some messing up, but to be on one side of the divide was bad news.


I’d say my life is mainly chaos with a light sprinkling of low-calorie order. But I feel something when I’m a mess, when I’m battling with the world and my emotions. Like I’m contending with what it is to be alive, rolling my boulder up a hillside, bearing the weight of my cross. I don’t feel that when I dupe myself or whoever else into believing my life is fantastic. All I feel is smug. And then empty.


Watching Jose go about his day was a lightbulb moment. The closer I was to that type of control the more squalid I felt. The feeling of clean living, the wash of ice cold sparkling mineral water down my throat, all of it was looking outside myself. And that isn’t where salvation lies, ask Andy Dufresne.

Maybe this is less about living right and more about the masks we wear.

Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth, wrote Oscar Wilde.

But look at Instagram. I don’t see an ocean of truth on there, I feel like the truth lives on the one side of the screen that nobody sees. Odds on the person whose life looks most together is compensating for something. Turns out Jose’s apartment was a hotel lobby after all, and he’d rented his super car for the morning. We should fear the masquerade but the masked might be the most afraid of all.

Give a man too many herb-mint facial masks and watch what happens.

There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman. Some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me. Only an entity. Something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping mine and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable…

I am simply not there.

Love in The Time of Corona IV

Was that a pivotal historical moment we just went stumbling past.


*

Easter Monday

Jesus is back in the building. To howls of delight the eggs placed around the garden have been found. Mary is in the throes of a sugar comedown. A strong easter wind blows stray leaves across the valley like the pre-amble to a gun fight.

What else is happening.

Tuesday 14th April

The author of Sapiens and Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari is not so afraid of the virus as of the inner demons of humanity coming out. The biggest danger we face is people reacting to this crisis with hatred and with greed, he says. I spy the last two easter eggs in the fridge and leave one.


Like batman coming through the skylight the huge beech beside the clock tower finally joins the party. What an entrance. Funny such a big old tree should sprout such delicate little leaves, that it should take a man thirty six years to pay attention to spring.


On Sunday the death count in the UK passed 10,000. By the end of the week 5,000 more will have died. Until it affects you directly it’s just a number, some guy writes in a comment under a YouTube video.

Thursday 16th April

As I paint the window in the yard I listen to a recording of an old therapy session. Apparently I yield too much emotional ground to my father, I yell to my mother as she walks past. Yes you do! she shouts back.


A 99yr old veteran of the war who six days earlier began to walk laps of his garden to raise money for the NHS has reached 6 million quid. His daughter sets up his twitter account and tells him he has lots of new followers and he looks concerned and asks where they are.



Three more weeks of the lockdown are announced. The government of Belarus advises drinking vodka and visiting the sauna twice a week. The two days of spring that Hockney spoke of when everything seems doused in champagne bubbles have come and gone and the dregs of the bottle coat the floor like snow.

Give me something to grasp. Give me your beautiful crumbling heart.

*

Saturday 18th April

In the space just beneath the tasks of the everyday a guilt has taken up residence in me and preys on my pauses and taps on my shoulder and I cannot shake it. While I look out of the window somewhere someone is gasping for air and failing, or closed up in a flat climbing the walls, has lost all their income, is scared out of their skin. No change there, the world whispers.

Why do you care so much now.

I jiggle the bottle and remove the foil and sniff and my nose crinkles. Herd immunity. R0 values. Cytokine storms. The guilt bubbles up. Will you take the weight of the world on your shoulders.


For five nights I fight sleep. Wide awake at 3am I tread the corridor to the bathroom and through the window leering from the darkness Mary’s bike scares the shit out of me.

My mother has spent almost every day of the last three weeks tying to secure a shipment of PPE from a Chinese source for Bucks County Council. I tell her to leave it and she glares at me and says, can’t you see it’s my duty.


We make some banging anchovy and mozzarella flatbreads and toast the doubling of my cooking repertoire. My mother takes a bite and concedes she could be in downtown Bologna. A 99yr old lady from Stockport becomes the oldest person to beat coronavirus and credits marmalade for her survival.

No evidence the lockdown reduces the risk of infection.

The economy is in the gutter. 2.4 billion lost each day. An insider says the cabinet is deeply split. He may know Latin but we know the truth! rails a Boris basher. Sweden go it alone. In Guayaquil, Ecuadorian authorities distribute cardboard coffins. A teacher walks around Walthamstow labelling the trees, writing their names in chalk on the pavement below.

16,060 deaths.

Monday 20th April

Yesterday on a morning of white sunshine, we walked down the hill to the pond in the wood named after my uncle and stood at the edge of the water. Miguel and I read things we had written when he died and my mother spoke for a little while. Then she took Adrian’s ashes from the little plastic bag and flung them up and out, and the wind caught them and they flew together across the water and sparkled in the sun and we smiled.

Like we’re gonna buckle underneath the trouble.


Like any minute now the struggle’s going to finish us.

*

Wednesday 22nd April

Today is Matilda’s birthday. We get drunk on the terrace in the sun and even in the company of this strange new family she looks happy. I wake up with a rash and shooting pains down my right arm and the doctor diagnoses shingles.

What kind of loser gets shingles in a Coronavirus pandemic.

During the Black Death of the 1300s nobody had any idea why people were dying and the Institute of Medicine in Paris concluded it was down to the astrological positioning of the stars. Matilda starts calling me shingleybooboo, nullifying the effect of my antivirals.

Weekend of 24th – 25th

I’m not eating a fucking eighteen year old ball of mozzarella.


I yell across the kitchen.

It’s from the freezer darling. Are you joking this says 05-10-02My mother and I have been warring for weeks about sell by dates. As I remove the mozzarella ball from the bag it begins to pulsate and she concedes defeat. Earlier she wipes down six bags worth of click & collect with window cleaner, she is having a bad day.

An ocean and a hemisphere away my father looks out across the Pampa with a glass of Torrontés in one hand and a skull in the other. Just think, says Matilda in bed one night. Right this second all those miles away your father is somewhere, sitting in a chair alone thinking of something.

Tuesday 27th April

My brother orders a curry from Aylesbury for the fam and the first bite makes every yard of the fourteen mile round trip for the driver worth it. My shingles are killing me. Trump champions the injecting of disinfectant and his detractors go wild. Out in space an asteroid a mile wide passes within 3.9m miles of this world, silent as a shadow.

Thursday 29th April

Earlier in the week we sat in the kitchen over dinner watching a film called Eternity’s Gate about Van Gogh. Using a passage taken from one of his letters, he turns at one point to the man he is painting and says an angel is never far from those who are sad.

And illness can sometimes heal us.

When Argentina won the world cup in ’86 I was barely three and all I remember is going outside to throw loo-roll off the balcony down into the ecstatic streets of Buenos Aires. Plumes of white trailing away from my fingertips into an abyss. It was my first memory.


Tonight at eight o’clock as we beat on pans I wondered if Mary would remember these days too, hazily, like me without really understanding, when for a few months life as we knew it dropped to its knees, and wondered if the strange goings-on of 2020 would have an indelible effect on the world she was to grow up in.

Somewhere down the line for the better, perhaps.


If illness can sometimes heal.


*

Last year Kate Tempest made an album called The Book Of Traps and Lessons and played a special secret show down at the Broadway Theatre in Catford to kick it all off. I got wind of it and cycled down with a sign saying I’d buy any spares that were going.


That night she played the whole album through from start to finish, and ended with a song called People’s Faces, the high point of the album. For most of that year I’d been in the grips of a long and unrelenting episode, but magically that week of June the shackles finally came loose, the concert and that tune was a symbol of my coming back to life. That night I cycled home in the pouring rain feeling like a mountain.

Facebook just used People’s Faces for this.

Friday 1st May

So here we are, dancing in the rumbling dark.


27,000 deaths.


Yesterday evening this country got over its peak.


A new month, another new morning in a strange old dream.