Author: Domingo Cullen

Overlooking a lagoon rising out of a desert of grass there is a little hill. On it sits a house. The womb of a family. I went there in August on my own. Touched base with a part of me I’d been ignoring, that had been gnawing on my insides for years. They say the happiest people in the world are those who have been released from some sort of shackle. That’s me. Thumping my chest like a bass drum.

Not scared anymore.

My father came to England at the start of the 70s, to escape a tired Peronismo but more his parents, worked in Gospel Oak as a psychoanalyst. Ten years later at a cocktail party he met my mother, proposed five times in 3 months. Two years later my bro appeared, and then me. Being called Domingo was definitely uncool until well into my 20s. I drew the long straw. My brother’s full name is Miguel Martín Tomás de Teresa de Jesús Cullen. An exile in a foreign land, no 7,000 mile stretch of water was going to stop my father, hellbent on making his children as Argentine as possible.

Every school holiday saw the four of us on a plane, my mother writing Spanish vocabulary furiously in pocket books, learning the language from scratch aged 39. In the beating English summer we spent two months out in the Pampa, jumping in puddles, huddled around fires, watching the winter course through the plains and beat against the wall of our fortress, the great trees that held us firm.

We grew up mestizo.

In a strange no man’s land. English but not quite. Not Argentine but nearly. Months of horse riding and campfires, mud and bruises, Nesquick and boredom and the endless horizon of the huge expanse waiting there like a sea. The birdsong. The electric storms. The runaway horses. The power cuts and candlelight.

You could write a book about it.

My father did.

Took him forty years.

The Estancia is the house on top of the hill. Santa Helena was built in 1881. One of the many estancias divided up in the hectares our ancestor negotiated from the indigenous Indios who reigned over that enormous territory. When he died mad and scribbling on walls after years of government house arrest, the Indians stole his body and took it back with them to the pampa.

For seven generations it has been the home of our family. The trees, the birds, the laguna, the stink of sweat and horsehair under the cincha of the recado, my whole Argentine family grew up here.

‘We were woken by the sound of the gravel being raked, and then, when our nanny Gilda opened the window, by the white glow of the maple tree. The sun, already strong, reflected the white of the gravel and the white of the tree, and gave our unassuming country morning the radiance of the sea, or snow.’

The Estancia, p.127

My father, his brother, and his sister fought over the division of the house. For a decade. It was the source of so much angustia. Recriminations, lawsuits, resentment. Feeling they had a right to what was theirs. Feeling what was theirs being taken from them. It drove a stake between them. In the Latin way, unfamiliar to my English side, of loving and hating simultaneously, best of friends and enemies. In the end my father and my tío Carlos flipped a coin for the house. It has its own name now, its own folklore. La moneda, they call it. Papa won. The land was divided three ways.

The house, up on the hill, kept watch, over this family. Through seasons, her colour morphed from green to maroon to stark grey, on moody days the wind moving through the eucalyptus drowned the call of the wood pigeon and the chimango and at her edges the endless pampa bayed to come and subsume all to its will. In the evening my father liked to walk to the palos at the end of the park, the border between us and that plain where the shore meets the sea.

‘The vast landscape was deaf to the beating of my heart, and still it urged me to follow, to disappear within it. What do they know, those who speak of stillness? I stood there with the flat vista stretching out before me, the locked door of the casco at my back, and behind it the sunset burned, its light spreading out in a semi-circular fan before me. As the horizon receded, the smells of the pampa, revived as the heat exhausted itself, returned; mint, grass, dung, the dust of the corrals. But my trapped eyes ignored them. There was no smell, no temperature, no sound, only the silent fire at my back that enlarged that empty world that was me.’

The Estancia, p.158

Jaded by the fights, Papa left the house to me.

You’ll be better at fighting off the people who want to take it from you, he said. It doesn’t make sense to Miguel and I. The house is ours. When I think about it, the house is not anyone’s. Our family is the house’s. Santa Helena owns all of us. She has done for 140 years. All of us, generations of our family that have slept in her womb, walked her corridors, treaded her steps, flushed her cisterns, even the families of sirvientes and peones, park keepers and mayordomos. She owns all of us.

*

Analia brings me breakfast in the comedor, the steam from the coffee rises up in the air of the morning, the fires crackle in each room. I am alone in Santa Helena. These fires lit for me? I write to pops, hellbent on hearing my news. He’s living your every breath, my mother says, but he doesn’t want to bother you.

No se quiere meter.

I sleep in my mother’s bedroom, watch the embers spit in the darkness I shift position and hear the brass bed jingle, the linen sheets my old man loves are scratchy. I am happy alone in this big house listening to it stretch and sigh beneath me. The next morning in the bath, I look out at the window towards the laguna and remember being small, sitting at night as the water grew cold watching the frogs on the outsides of the window still as old stones lying in wait for bugs, and their tongues. Slop. Gobble. Gulp. Heavy weight of memory.

I read a passage in the book, feel something fathoms deep move in me.

*

So that was me.

Locked for years in this scary bind with that land I somehow didn’t feel worthy of.

I had cousins aunts uncles grandparents, memories, and I felt scared. When people came back from BA and declared it the coolest place on the planet I would grin and bear it. I wasn’t a tourist. I wasn’t a porteño. I didn’t know where to fit. I felt not Argentine enough. I remember talking castellano to someone on the flight back once and she commented that my accent was strange and it killed me.

The car ride from Ezeiza to the centre of BA was blind fear. I wanted to hide. I still feel it. Round at dinner at Solís, Vivian a friend of our family, did the maths. Of course you felt fear. Think about how tense tu papa must’ve been. His relationship with papapa and mamama was so strained. I saw it all the time. You could cut the tension with a knife. He would’ve been a state, your mother would’ve been a state on his account. Imagine you two, hiding in the backseat, feeling all that. Like heading into some sort of purgatory.

Alone in BA I walk the long corridors of Esmeralda and hear the wood creak underfoot and think of them all. The ghosts still there in that huge empty apartment. Mercedes my aunt said it terrified her to sleep there alone. But I don’t feel afraid. If mamama walked in to talk to me I would love it. Through the open door is the room where her and papapa died.

Every room full of the past.

When I was 28, one winter’s morning papa and I went rowing on the laguna. It was windy, twice we rescued his panama from the water. Half way to the gallinero, I broke down. Que pasa! he said. I can’t do this. Do what. I can’t do it all, I said in tears. I can’t teach Ruben about trees. I can’t talk to Analia about flowers and oeuf cocotte and borders, I can’t be their shrink and their confidant, I can’t give them orders, I can’t teach them about history, I can’t tell them what branches to prune, I can’t carve lakes out of the earth, I can’t make decisions about cows, I can’t earn their respect, their fear, their love.

I don’t know how.

Whatever you’re crying about, whatever you think it is, it’s not that, he said. It’s something else. Francamente, he said half-laughing.

Back in Blighty, scared as I was, I confronted none of it, and my relationship with that earth, that house, fell into shadow. It gnawed at me every day. The source of my biggest fear. An enormous black presence I chose to avert my gaze from. Papa would get sad, why do you not go there. I thought to tell him, but it was so hard. It felt like my failing. I didn’t tell anyone anything much back then.

He must have thought I didn’t care.

Why don’t you ever invite us out, my friends would clamour. I told myself it was another world, they wouldn’t get it. Now I realise it’s because I knew they would sense my weakness. It sounds silly and yet it had wormed its way inside me, it was fixed there like a simple pin. I didn’t even question it.

Matt went out there with Miguel once, we went for dinner on his return. What are you doing, he cried. Go you idiot. You have such a beautiful family out there, waiting for you. All they want to do is see you.

*

In February this year I awoke with the mother of all hangovers. Went to get a coffee and my card got declined. It came flooding back. Fuck. Alfie and I had got loose, extremely loose, gone deep about Argentina for hours. Your fear is your guide was our motto. We were shouting it by the end. Not before I’d booked a one way ticket to Argentina, club class, leaving in three days. I rang up BA, got a refund, and fell into a six week depression.

But somewhere on a rusted track wheels had clanked into motion.

After a post-covid summer of love, I booked a ticket. Followed my gut. I don’t quite know why, something inside told me I couldn’t not. My uncle was ill. The end of winter was approaching. Days of cold sun slowly lengthening, the sea of grass, fires lit, the birds. I made my way across the ocean.

I spent three weeks there. Three weeks of something exploding in slow motion, something freeing itself. With my cousin Francisco we went to Santa Helena. He left, I sat in the comedor alone. On the terrace. To Kakel with Fede, riding back, the smells of tierra and junco, the horse’s sweat under the recado, five years it’s been and feels like yesterday, I say to him. Literally, I did this yesterday. With Ivan to the far flung territories. Without papa I felt an envoy, in some small way like a patroncito. That I could fill this hole after all.

There is part of my old man that is so consumed by that place he can’t give it up. Mi casa, he calls it. And then when he’s tired and bored of the endless task of it all, he says I’m doing this all for you. Tu casa. You don’t have to be your dad! Mariano our administrator cried out in the comedor one evening. You do it your way. You have to be you.

When I was sad and anxious I thought I must clean my hands of it, I can’t bear for it to be there, the whole weight of this family, the responsibility of it all on me, thousands of miles away drinking craft beer in Hackney, that house, the womb that carries us all, lying empty. The fear would take me. The same fear I now had to go towards. As I felt the spirit of my grandmother accompany me to the loo I thought what madness. What am I even thinking. What would she think.

Back to the bath.

Sitting there looking out at the windows recalling the frogs. Reading what papa had written 50 years before. I realised I was the last, not the last, the latest link in the chain. And I had no right to break it, because if I did it would shatter into a million pieces, who knew what else might break with it. Like Muir said, tug on anything at all and you take the entire universe with you.

‘We stretch like those tiny frogs that stick to the glass of windows at night in the estancia; and when immobile resemble straw coloured moths, but wet and translucent, craving rain with protuberant eyes and trembling throats, taking aim at the insect dazzled by the light of the room we are watching from, the diminutive frogs let loose another long and avid tongue to swallow the insect with a shaking of its whole body. But they are still hungry. Because they never tire of being hungry.’

La Estancia, p. 396

In all endings are my beginnings, all time is eternally present. The same frogs stuck to the windows of our past. Of my father’s. The same ones mamama would’ve seen, and otramama before her. We move our fingers back along the chain, feeling it like Braille, like the rosary. Link after link after link.

*

I went rowing with Fede as the sun was falling.

A funny thing not feeling afraid. You don’t feel it leave, you just notice it isn’t there anymore. As if like dust it has evanesced onto the wind. Rising into the enormous sky, carried on the streams that keep the storks floating like suspended stars.

We shall not cease from exploration, said Eliot, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know that place for the first time. I think I understand it now.

You change. And the world around you changes. You reshape it, remould it, banishing the ghosts of the past, and see it as it is, untangled from the weight of old memory. The memory is there still, but lighter. And you pile new memory on top. The happiest people in the world are those who have been released from some sort of shackle. Always in a state of becoming.

I can’t be who I’m not. I must be who I am.

Around us the world whizzes on.

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 26^th, 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.

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.

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, 1^st 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.

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.

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.