The Spring Without Humans

So. How was it for you? 

Have you found the words yet? I don't even mean the right words, but good enough ones to wrap your mind around the contour of the experience, to tentatively feel its jagged edges, roughly intuiting its dimensions?

I haven't. Embarrassing, I know.

When you are known in your circle for your love of scribbling, people assume you spend your life perched over experience with your pen in the air, poised to write it all down. 

"Are you writing about it? You must write about it, surely !"  people advised, asked, admonished or cooed, sounding baffled when I confessed that I haven't, I couldn't.  Because what is 'it', in this case? How can you write about it if you can't name it? There are no words yet. 

Okay, here are some words, if you insist . Not the definitive account for all times, not the official Covid Chronicle of this spring without humans, but some scattered impressions of what it has been like for me.

Let's deal with the big ticket item first. Once singing Italians on balconies gave way to clapping Brits on doorsteps constant, large scale, unrelenting death stopped being tragic and grotesque and became strangely normalised, becalmed, discussed in reasonable BBC-like cadences, anaesthetised if you will, ventilated with facts which turned out to be mostly lies, which in turns generated fortifying, morale-rousing indignation. 

It's as if, and I am fully aware of how crazy this will sound, but bear with me, it's as if actual people stopped dying once they were dying in their thousands. They were counted, not named, then weighted not counted, and then they disappeared not just from the drone-patrolled streets and squares, the empty stadiums, shopping malls and theatres, the goat infested high streets and dolphin ridden canals but from the news itself, slipping like sand grains through the fingers of my comprehension, leaving a burnt residue, an aftertaste of sadness.

Only one death became suddenly and disconcertingly real. My father's passing more than a year ago was, in pandemic-shaped retrospect, idyllically peaceful. We held his hand to the last. There was a huge, lovely funeral. People could hug and everything. But I find I can't stop thinking, dreaming and crying about him.

Compared to many, to most, I've had a lovely indoor holiday, unmarred by illness or scarcity or real fear. Yet the lack of agency engendered by the lock-down leaked a soporific poison into my mind and body. 

I slept well, mostly, but dreaded waking up to another empty, sunny day of lavish pink blossoms exploding unobserved by human eyes. It felt to me at times as if my husband and I had already died and were starring in our own version of The Good Place, against a backdrop of pastel coloured nothingness without end. What was the point again? 

I suffered acute bouts of productivity envy : all that bread baking and language learning, all that creativity unleashed - people shooting whole films on their phones, recording symphonies with remote orchestras, launching lip syncing comedy careers... Meanwhile I sat stupefied on my stoop each morning in mismatched pyjamas, sun on my face, a cooling coffee and a browning banana by my side, listening to bird song and sirens, more birdsong and more sirens while no planes flew overhead. 

I got sick of staring at fuzzy people on screens. I felt a ghost in other people's machine on video calls where my greying hair and proliferating chins distracted me from the conversation. Audio calls and texts felt less fraught, less dangerously intimate. I wanted to be in touch, to feel connected but with no homeschooling of non-existent children to contend with and no job to go to I had less and less to say. I could not read more than a page or two of any novel I started - although I listened to a few while walking obsessively in the park - and if i could no longer read or write or take pleasure in my friends who was I really? Where was I? When would I get myself back?

As my world shrunk to my square I got to know my neighbours really well.  I'd always vaguely known them and mostly vaguely liked them but in truth they were a blur in the busyness of my life in the beforetimes. 

Now, after months of ordering and distributing the shopping of several elderly residents I've come to actually love them with the love you can only feel when you come to know someone by the quality and rhythm of their most personal purchases, the only choices we each had left. 

They ran the full gamut of western styles of consumption, from the bachelor surviving on sliced white bread and canned tuna to the health conscious hemp oil and kefir aficionado, to the flour obsessed couple next door whose asks became more and more war time-like as the weeks passed. Powdered mustard, anyone? Tinned beetroot? 

Disconcertingly, no one over-seventy seemed to ever need toilet paper, of which there was a lively Whatsapp trade in the early stages among the under-forty with children. The most vulnerable seemed, by and large, the least afraid, serenely weeding, digging and planting for Britain in their tiny back gardens with their radios on. 

No longer in a hurry, I was the one dropping by at their doorstep hoping for a chat, jumping at the chance to dispose of their recyclables, collect their medicines and help them organise octogenarian socially distanced birthdays. 

I don't know what the future holds. No shit, right? But seriously, I have no sense of what I'll do, who I'll be for the rest of my life. This much I know in my bones: this thing we are going through and hopefully emerging from, this thing there are no proper words for yet will not have been a momentary pause, a punctuation mark. It will turn out to be the end of a whole chapter, the start perhaps of a whole new book. 

I can't simply pick up from where I left off and carry on, because I myself was in limbo, in transition, when everything stopped and the past now seems too remote to have ever been real and the future impossible to imagine. 

All I know is that I do want to wake up most mornings these days, and hope to soon find out. 



   

The new Christmas feel-good factor: weaponising grief for profit

  There’s an advert for a new Apple iPad being shown in cinemas at the moment which delivers an unwarranted, and to my mind cruel, blow to the plexus to anyone who’s been recently bereaved. If that includes you I urge you to get off your seat and leave for the duration if you don’t want to spend the first ten minutes of whatever jolly Christmas film you are there to see stifling sobs into your scarf and wiping snot with your bare hands.

  It starts innocently enough - long minutes tracking the journey of a family of four across America (planes, trains, automobiles) to visit Grandpa. The iPad makes a few appearances along the way, being put to the traditional use of quieting the two squabbling little girls at various points by the weary parents. So far, so cliched. But this iPad is magic, you see, this iPad is different.

  We get to Grandpa’s. Something is not right - cue sad music. The house is cold, uninviting. The old man is grumpy and unsmiling. It turns out Grandma has recently died and Mum/Daughter is there to help Grandpa clear her closets and make sure he's eating right. The two little girls squabble on, to the irritation of all.

  Left alone with old family pictures and ancient video cassettes the girls get working on a project. On Christmas morning they unpack the iPad anew for Grandpa and their handiwork, it is revealed, consists of a childish PowerPoint charting the story of the young grandparents, the growing family, Grandma’s demise and so forth ending with a comforting picture of the family still together at Christmas, at least with the aid of a digital collage. See, Grandma is still here, smiling among us, it’s still us. When the old man’s scowl dissolves into tears so will you.

  Adverts have always made us cry to make us buy. But normal psychological manipulation tends to weaponise more positive human emotions, such as joy. Newborns gurgling, lovers getting together, friends reuniting. It’s still cheap, it’s still not great but it feels less exploitative somehow.

  Using imagined grief (a sentiment presumably still only tangential to the lives of your core customer demographic of young, busy, exasperated parents) to sell tablets strikes me as low for two reasons. The first is that you can throw money at just about anything else but not at grief. Retail therapy might help in a romantic breakup (although that's never been my experience), it can distract you from your mid-life crisis. But shiny new ‘stuff’ can’t assuage the howling sadness caused by the loss of a loved one.

  The second objection is more specific to the product in question. The ad pretends to be about love, showing and sharing love with the aid of clever technology. But Grandma, you see, is still dead. Grandpa is still all alone. Once your leave taking your expensive iPad with you he won’t even be left with the image of his family, complete with smiling Grandma, stuck to his fridge, to look at every so often.

  And all because your insufferably spoilt children can’t be fagged to do an actual collage, using paper, scissors and glue like normal humans. Or maybe they would. But where’s the profit for Apple in that? 

  And since you can only bring down capitalism from within (if at all) I look forward to seeing the actor playing Grandad being hired by Ryan Raynolds for a new Aviation Gin ad. The camera pans away from his dejected face to reveal him sitting in an untrendy bar, drinking himself to death surrounded by his elderly friends. "Drink up mate, have another one". And the pay off line. "Forget those fucking children!". That's an advert I'd toast to.

Justify your existence internally

Recently, on a not particularly busy day, while processing the usual 150 to 200 emails that flow into my inbox daily, I was inspired to click on one bearing the subject line: Justify your existence internally. 

  I was in a philosophical mood that day, contemplating as I had been doing the pointlessness of life in general and the senseless wasting of my own particular life within the four walls of that particular office. Could the email be the key of some spiritual revelation, something, anything, that would encourage me to live with myself for another day? It turned out to be, of course, the title of a seminar on internal communications.

  It figures.

  The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place, as G B Shaw is widely believed to have observed one hundred year before Twitter was even invented. But even absent the cacophony of social media George Bernard would only have had to spend a couple of hours inside any office to come to his conclusion.  

  Meetings. Meetings about meetings. Pre-meetings, meetings’ agendas and meetings’ minutes. Hours, days of meetings. Short reports, memos, grids and lists. Meeting notes. Relaying meetings to those who weren’t there, email threads, whispered gossip about what happened and who said what. Box-ticking, form-filling, feedback and postmortems to dissect how all of that went.

  No decision is ever reached during a meeting, you understand. The first you hear about a decision is two months after it was taken by someone in authority without consulting anyone and you only find out when you get locked out by the new security system or the website colour scheme turns acid green.

  By then, it is absolutely inappropriate to bring it up in a meeting. That’s not what meetings are for. They are not about the past and they are emphatically not about making things work better going forward. Or foreseeing and mitigating real problems. Or averting possible crises.

  Meetings are about meetings.

  At the end of my working life I’ll be lucky if 20 pc of my time will have been devoted to accomplishing the actual tasks I’ve been nominally paid to do. By the time it’s all over (praise be to god) I will have spent almost 80 pc of my time as a scribe, a compiler of grids and assembler of notes as well as ‘meat in the room’ for endless meetings that won’t result in any change, unless it’s for the worse, due to the total breakdown of communication that is the after effect and the leitmotif of the business of meetings.

  I’m not even angry about this, no longer scandalised or disappointed. I’m simply exhausted. Talked out, minuted out, post-noted and over-listed. Meetings, town halls, memos and complex email threads with an ever-changing cast of 12 people in CC is how the office pond life – that layer of mid-to -top level management whose job titles are completely impenetrable and whose salary level is a daily slap in the face to the rest of the workforce - justifies its existence internally.

  The rest of us, with real tasks, skills, goals and deadlines are just audience, cyber witnesses, clerical courtiers, while our own, one, precious life ebbs slowly away.

  Good luck robots. Do your worst.

The Upside Down is where shame has gone to die

Stranger things are happening, people. 

Thirty years from the fall of the Berlin wall, it turns out it's possible to gaslight a nation, spread disinformation and anxiety, foment division and hatred and get people to vote for, indeed clamour for, policies which go against their own best interest without a single shot fired or protester tortured.

A willingness and facility to lie, a dormant media (more interested in politics as horse race with occasional televised gladiatorial combats than in thoroughly researching topics and preparing for interviews) and the sheer quantity of information available are all it takes to dull people's critical faculties. Throw in a visible enemy (why not immigrants, that always work!) et voila' your got yourself some tasty, freeze-dried culture war where brains should be.

Twitter, sure, FB, digital tricks and dodgy Russian money - all have contributed to transform our public landscape in a murky Upside Down where white is black and everything ends up grey, fluffy, unsubstantial, un-pin-down-able.  Some of these things are technological and new, some, like corruption, have been with us forever.

But shame is what seals the deal and our fate in this particular political junction; or rather, the absence of it. The death of shame is the water you add to the instant coffee of ideological obsession. My bastard is better than your bastard. My liar is more honourable than your liar. My Islamophobe is classier than your anti-Semite.

In the last couple of days alone we have witnessed the spectacle of the Conservative Party Press Office Twitter account disguising itself as some neutral fact-checking outfit for the duration of the leaders' ITV debate to  propagandise for Johnson, then coolly reverting to its usual title: job done! A bizarre post-propaganda move that proved too much for Twitter itself (and they do have strong stomachs that lot) but is still currently being defended by the Conservative front bench on the ground that 'Labour lies need exposing' and the truly Kafkaesque 'no-one gives a toss about social media'. 

I have myself just got involved (against my best human and comms judgement) in an exhausting twitter exchange with somebody claiming that it's Remainers' scaremongering that's driving much needed EU health professionals away, even while simultaneously claiming that there's way more EU doctors now than in 2016 but there's still shortages because of all the EU immigrants seeking treatment. 

Do people hear themselves? The lack of shame makes us deaf to reason itself.
  
Where is the line? Is there even a line anymore, as our American friends may well have asked when a self-styled pussy-grabber was elected President thanks to evangelicals' and conservative women's votes?

It takes the hapless Prince Andrew, a man so genuinely clueless, so terminally privileged, so comically un-relatable that few can be bothered to rise to his defence, to show us the faint outline of where the line now is. So here we go: when in doubt, don't accept the lavish hospitality of a convicted paedophile: it looks really bad! And if you have done (we are all human) for goodness' sake don't talk about it and hope the whole unseemly row will blow over soon. 

Of course secret, as yet undiscovered, paedophiles are still fine - we don't want to get too puritanical now. As for paedophilia itself, the jury is out of course. I mean, it depends, doesn't it, on who's doing what to whose children, in exchange for what type of incentive and whether a newspaper is about to find out. A blanket policy of revulsion and unconditional censure is, frankly, tantamount to communism.

Las Vegas - Can we stop asking why and focus on the how?

Feather dusters don't kill people. Nor do garden hoses. As a rule. That's not what they are for, anyway, and therefore they're quite clunky and inefficient as means of mass slaughter. Although, sure, a sufficiently driven and nasty human of average intelligence can use just about any tool for the purpose of killing. So yes, in that narrow sense alone, it's people who kill people.

But guns, and particulary semi-automatic weapons, are built with the sole purpose of maiming and killing. This is what they do, efficiently so. So when nearly 60 people are killed and 500 gravely injured by a single pensioner taking aim at them from a hotel window it seems reasonable to conclude that it's in fact the guns who should be the protagonists here, the salient detail, not whatever obsession, ideological delirium or personality disorder affected the human who pulled the trigger. A retired accountant with no army background. A nobody. Another angry old man -  among many other angry men, young men, middle aged ones, old ones, men of every hue and colour and background - with an inflated sense of grievance, or destinity, or of his own importance. Who gives a shit why? How is finding out why going to stop this happenig again? 

In Britain, Italy and in pretty much every other modern democracy we are replete with catankeous old men and angry young men, narcisists and wife beaters. There's no scarcity of nasty, violent, self-obsessed men (ooops, I mean people, of course!). Yet an old man would have a tough time murdering and maiming on that scale, in a matter of minutes, no matter how crazy or ideologically driven. 

So, again, it turns out that it's the availability and prevalence of guns - not immigrants, not Muslims, not even terrorists (who can thankfully be quite clumsy with explosives) that causes people to be killed in their hundreds with this regularity and inevitability. Give bad intentions, 'evil' , temporary insanity, male chauvinist pigs, you name it, a baseball bat and someone will get hurt but for a good old fashioned massacre you..... kinda need automatic weapons.

Today is not the time to have this conversation. The time was 15, 30 years ago before the US become so flooded with the bloody things that only mass confiscation, not restrictions on sales, is likely to make a substantial difference now. 

But still, going forward, you'd think it might be desirable to start mitigating against future senseless carnage as soon and as much as bloody possible, don't you? 

Yet the country that forces the likes of me to declare we are not Nazi war criminals on entry and frowns on 120ml bottles of shampoo can't have that conversation. Its politicians' hands are tied, mainly with dollars, and its media is pitifully muted on the subject, so that its citizens come to believe they do live in the best/most rational of all possible worlds, like the starving North Koreans who think it's the rest of us who are having a tough time. (This reminds me of those ridiculous US commentators spewing nonsense against 'Socialised Medicine'. Ask any European if they mind NOT having to choose between between eating and paying the morgage or getting cancer treatment. Go on, see what they say.). 

In the cacophony of bullshit platitudes about prayers and unity and resilience and the courage of first responders the NRA ayatollahs still won't release their grip on the levers of US democracy. They didn't after first graders were felled at Sandy Hook, they won't do it now. They can afford to fuel several 9/11s every year with no consequence, no censure of any kind, barely a whisper of a timid debate. Policy makers can't even collect the right statistics on gun crime.

The ultimate form of terrorism, it seems to me, is when a mature democracy reduces its own citizens to the status of living target practice for the convenience of its gun industry. It's an awfully big gamble, even by Vegas standards.

Opinions on shape of Nazis differ

This morning I heard Today's presenter John Humphrys ask BBC North American EditorJon Sopel whether there was any "factual truth, though, in the President's assertion that there was violence on the other side too".

Humphrys wasn't asking a political contributor a devil' s advocate question. He was talking to a fellow BBC journalist who, to his shame, engaged with the question.

So, to recap, your licence fee now pays for senior BBC journalists earnestly to discuss whether anti-racist protesters objecting to an armed and intimidating neo-Nazi and KKK invasion of the public space could be described as 'as violent', and therefore morally reprehensible if not morally equivalent to the Nazis themselves.

I'm no longer sure how John Humphrys would have covered the Second World War - Churchill's speeches say*, Bletchley Park*, the Resistance* - particularly under the editorship of Sarah Sands.

Reflexive neo liberal right-wingery, fueled by hatred of redistribution - oops, I meant the left - in any form, is now chasing its own tale, fouling its own patriotic foundation myth: we are better than them (enter any nationality/value here) because we fought the Nazis/at least we are not Nazis.

Fighting the Nazis is officially a dodgy pursuit not just in Trump's America but also in May's (Brexit) Britain.

*Rabble-rouser, Hackers' Central, violent extremists????

Reasons why Britain will likely be utterly screwed in these EU negotiations - No 658

The Department for Exiting the European Union, DExEU, with its Spanish Inquisition- like acronym, seems run like a cross between a masonic lodge and a (minor) Cosa Nostra family that barely survived the latest drug war and is on the run from all the other families.

A year after its creation they've only just managed to appoint a Special Adviser to the Secretary of State (David "I don't carry notes" Davis) who is also his Chief of staff, meaning David "Notebooks are for losers. It's all 'up here', so it is!!" Davis has been without either all this time. The chap in question is a Tory Brexiteer who lost his seat at the last election- we'll glide over the symbolism there.

But here's the thing: no one - or at least none of my contacts in various think-tanks, public affairs companies and Parliament - seems to know how you get in touch with people there.

Needing to invite some top mandarins from DExEU to an event I resorted to calling their press office (it was the only number provided on the website) and was told they 'they think' the email addresses follow the pattern name.surname@dexeu.gov.uk but they could not confirm. I found another number for the Department on Dods' Vacher's Guide and proceeded to be connected to the very same press officer who told me they "don't have a receptionist" and to basically stop wasting her time.

In desperation I called a number appearing on the bottom of an email (address @cabinetoffice.gov.uk) of a top DExEU civil servant who once took part in one of our events and the phone was answered by a Polish lady who announced I was speaking to the Cabinet Office. I tried to ascertain with her whether I should invite her boss with the @dexeu email address or a @cabinetoffice email address and she told me, somewhat flustered, to 'try both'. I was then passed on to a more senior colleague who said he thought the other top civil servants I was trying to reach were 'probably' at both addresses but he didn't know for sure because 'they hadn't been in touch for some time'.

Why would, after all, the office of the DExEU Director of Analysis ever wish to speak to the office of the DExEU Director of Market Access and Budget or the DExEU Director of Cross-Government Policy Coordination?

Why would you make sure there was a receptionist on duty at all times and a streamlined, coherent suite of email addresses, making it easy for MPs, stakeholders or god forbid, European apparatchiks or even expert riffraff to reach the Department by phone or email during the gigantic negotiations which are its sole reason to exist?

Once the nice Polish lady is deported they won't even have enough competent, hard working EU migrants to man the ship.

Move on, nothing to see here. Literally.

Scenes from (the end of) a Marriage

As a Brexit bill is presented to the Mother of Parliaments I'll attempt to illustrate Britain's EU divorce psychodrama for the benefit of my continental friends.

The build-up

You're fat and ugly and I never loved you. 

You got me under false pretenses. How was I to know that by walking to that church, having invited our families and friends, by reciting those words and exchanging those rings I would be MARRIED to you? I thought we were getting a curry, or something. 

I want out. And when I go, I'll stay gone. I've had enough of your shrill, demanding ways.

Ahead of divorce proceedings

No point dragging this out: let's come to an amicable understanding and sod the lawyers.

Of course, I'm not prepared to pay any financial settlement. I owe you nothing. NOTHING you hear? The fact that I was in mess financially before we married and my net worth has massively improved since has NOTHING to do with our partnership.

The kids

What  about our many kids, you say? I'm of course prepared to recognise and take credit for the achievements of the inventor, the award winning artist, the techie wizard and the budding entrepreneur. I might be willing to contribute towards their research grant/seed money/ university fees. But the glue-sniffing obsessive-compulsive masturbator who's been stealing from our petty cash is your problem. He can't possibly be mine. 

Divorce proceedings

The way I see it, there are are two ways of going about it: 

1) We can come to an amicable understanding in next to no time - say the length of a rumba on Strictly? This really should be a breeze because, when all is said and done, it's in your interest to give me exactly what I want as you need me much more than I need you. Or...

2) .....I'll come round in the dead of night with a Kalashnikov, kick your door in and shoot myself in the foot right in front of you. You won't like that, will you? Think of all the blood and the gore... And I'll refuse to go to hospital and I'll just limp on my bloodied stump for the rest of my life just to SHOW YOU!

Seeing other people

Look, before we met I had 'dated' most of the rest of the world, whether they liked it or not. I'll be a very hot commodity indeed when I'm back on the market. Just saying.

Your loss is my future girlfriends' gain. Yes, girlfriends, PLURAL. Take that, you frigid cow!


The recap

So, really, there's nothing to this. It's a lark. A doddle. A bit of a joke, even. Things will both exactly the same and much better than before. Or Armageddon. Depending. No way of saying. Can't be sure. But it will be your fault either way. 

By the way, I can still bang you whenever I want, right? It doesn't even count as sex if I don't fancy you (which I don't). It's basically exercise.

Sent from my iPhone

In this post-facts world I've become post-nice

Is this jokey post which is doing the rounds on social media harsh and uncouth? Probably.

 Now look at this bona fide piece of campaign literature by the Leave side -no joke this - sent to households in areas where the campaign estimates potential supporters might be.

After re-posting the first image on FB I had a polite but unsettling exchange of views with a distant acquaintance who holds very different views from mine but has never interacted with any of the serious articles I've posted on the referendum or conversations I've generated about it. The joke though, was too much. The joke, she protested, was "unbelievable smearing by pro-Remain smug elites." (She left out 'metropolitan', I assume in her eagerness to make her indignation known.) 

I then uploaded the second picture and pointed out that the Leave side "certainly seems to be appealing to people's lowest instincts AND assume they are stupid" (Free access for Turkey in 2017? No more Queen or Royal Family? Wah?). I argued that they are defining the terms of this conversation - avoiding all serious discussion about the economy or Britain's place in the wider world and making up ever more shrill scare stories and ludicrous post-facts aimed at racists with low IQ. I didn't think it was necessary to add: "I don't believe that those who want out are all racists with low IQ. But sure as hell is funny, hence the jokey post, that the Leave side treats them as such."

She replied along the lines of "you are lumping everyone in with one campaign or the other", whilst many outside the Westminster bubble, in the fabled 'real world' have switched off from both campaigns, feeling that "it's a dirty political battle with ugly messages and tactics on both sides, and so (they) rise above it by seeking out their own facts." She concluded castigating me for reposting the joke: "With so many issues at stake it's staggering that you should believe that people voting leave are all just stupid puppets."

Hmmm. "A dirty political battle with ugly messages on both sides". More a case of : if you are challenged to mud-wrestle with a pig, you both end covered in mud. 

But. But. But...

A) mud-wresting a pig doesn't turn you into pig, and 

B) the pig really enjoys it. 

A grotesquely distorted figure about the cost of EU membership is still painted in metre-long letters on the side of Boris' #blunderbus. EU immigrants (of which I've had to reluctantly acknowledge I am one, after a peaceful and productive lifetime camouflaging on these shores as an EU citizen) are collateral damage, sneered at, baited and smeared by huge sections of the national media. Turncoat would-be leaders make up their mind and formulate policy on the hoof and lie to voters with a straight face on TV, using the NHS, (an organisation beloved by the nation, but one they are savagely indifferent to as a matter of record), as the institutional equivalent of a human shield.

Yet my reasonable and intelligent FB acquaintance cannot abide a silly joke, taking the low opinion the Leave side betrays of the undecided it targets at face value. 

Look, I know this whole thing is won or lost on turnout and I don't believe that I have the power to rouse the masses either way. I reposted a silly joke. It didn't even have Hitler in it. At all. Like, in any form.  

Am I "stooping to the level of those you find unsavoury yourself"? Possibly. (Hardly).  But, see, I'm disenfranchised in a poll which will decide my future, lumped with 'cheaters and scroungers' by screeching headlines every morning before I've even had a cup of tea.  So, yes, in this post-facts world I've become post-nice.  I'm mad as hell and I'm laughing bitterly at the silly jokes about the racist imbeciles the Leave campaign think are their secret weapon. 

Unless they are proved wrong, there will be plenty of time for tears later.

Greenwich Mean Time

When I moved to Greenwich at the start of 2000, having bought my first ever home, I was incredibly happy - for about five minutes.

I immediately set to work to write a warm, light, optimistic novel about a bunch of thirthy-somethings looking for love, meaning and fulfilment and finding it.

It was to be a counterpoise to my first novel, a desperately dark comedy of manners, about a bunch of twenty-somethings led astray by a malevolent close friend who ends up destroying their lives. 

Two years later the first draft of Point Hill was a less than jolly affair: war, ghosts, train crashes, broken families and dark secrets. It really wasn't my fault: the three protagonists came to life and seized control of the plot, stubbornly refusing to drive it towards the desired happy ending.

Many rewrites later I hit upon the realisation that although the three started off miserable, the point of this novel was not to guide them towards some universally recognisable state of happiness but to let each of them come to terms with who they were and let them go where they were headed, finding their own version of what a good or even a tolerable life might be. 

I embraced the train crash they were headed towards instead of stopping it, deus-ex-machina-like, at the last minute. I embraced it so much it became a literal plot twist. Of course I didn't know it then, as I was only young and needed to believe life would eventually pan out as it was meant to, that this is kind of what life is like. Messy, sometimes dark (way darker for my protagonists but hey, it's called fiction people!) and full of guilt, longing, rage and all sorts of other emotions without resolution, full of failings without redemption, full of sudden, undeserved, unexplainable connections and joys.

My novel is now available on Amazon, and its original setting feels somewhat historical now. This is a world before 9/11 , the war on terror and smart phones. A world where it was just about possible for a teacher (or indeed a freelance journalist) to buy a house in Greenwich, something that feels so ludicrous now that I had to resist the temptation to change that element of the plot. 

The past, in other words, is another country. But so is our individual past, come to think of it. I look of photos of me from that time, re-read diary entries and I do remember what it felt like to be so young and so frightened and so strong, brimming with creativity and anger. I remember but I can never go back. The present where I live now is my version of what a good life can be for me. I've had to let go of all other possible lives.

Four reasons why the UK referendum is a lost opportunity for real debate on Europe

The forthcoming referendum on UK membership of the EU is looming large - not so much over the public’s consciousness, not yet, but over the life of most commercial and not profit organisations alike. The former need to strategize and prepare for a possible Brexit. Many of the latter are in the same position – their causes and fields of action (from global warming to human trafficking) are directly impacted by Britain’s membership of the EU. But even those who theoretically have no connection to the membership question are having to take advice about how the Lobbying Act will affect their power to continue to campaign for their own causes during the referendum period.

That said, I would argue that the referendum is turning out to be a lost opportunity to have a serious discussion about reforms that would be helpful to the whole of Europe. I think there are four main reasons for this.

The renegotiation panto

Having commissioned a long and expensive sector by sector public audit of the balance of power between the UK and the EU, last year the government quietly buried the result of the review and no public discussion of its conclusions has been held since. The reason? Who can tell. Perhaps the £5 million it cost were considered small change even at a time of supposed austerity. But it’s worth noting that it contained not a single recommendation for powers to be ‘returned’ to the UK, in any of the 32 sectors which submitted evidence. So much for the intolerable interference of the Brussels federal super-state.

Still, having called for a new deal from Europe to put to the British people, Number 10 had to belatedly produce a list of ‘demands’, some of which seem to have been plucked out of thin air to address non-existent problems (such as benefit tourism) with unworkable solutions.

But the UK Prime Minister remains the best advocate for Britain staying in, so the theatre surrounding his renegotiation feat - a drama performed for the exclusive sake of the one third of voters who are still undecided - has pre-empted real debate on concrete measures that could reform Europe for the better. Pro-Europeans, even if political opponents, will have to pretend that what he ‘gets’ out of Brussels will constitute a radical change for the better in our relationship with the EU.

The black and white effect

The referendum currently dominates the news, its repercussions are all-encompassing, but the debate, so far, has not been, far from it. In fact the coming vote seems to be having the opposite effect, polarising the public discourse in an unhelpful black and white way. One side claims Europe is a terrible idea and thoroughly unreformable. The other side concentrates mainly on the dangers of leaving the EU, rather than what sort of Europe might be worth having.

Self-censorship vs aggressive victimhood

The dynamics of the referendum debate itself are actively muzzling many pro-Europeans, who feel that any criticism they might express about how Europe works or any vision for a better Europe will be seized by the other side, defending in the process a status quo few people actively love.

The outers have no such qualms: their rhetoric of loud, aggressive victimhood (taking our country back, getting rid of the Brussels yoke etc) belies a complete lack of vision for what life outside would look like. So far the media circus has focused on the minutiae of the renegotiation – no one is (yet) systematically asking hard hitting, probing questions about the kind of country Britain would be outside the EU and what relationship it will have with a presumably still unreformed EU in the throes of its worse existential crisis.

The official campaign

Finally Stronger In, the cross-party organisation that hopes to become the official campaign for In, seems strangely paralysed – poised between paranoia and inaction. The tone of its communication is negative, focusing on threats and dangers. It has alienated many natural supporters by ignoring any other pro-European groups and communities, hosting no information about them or about what the EU is or does. Its spokespeople are very much denizens of the Westminster bubble.

Theirs is a thankless, gargantuan task and I have no doubt they are doing the best they can. They might even succeed. But it all feels far from inspiring - in fact it feels a bit dismal.

Never, it seems to me, has Europe been mentioned more and explained and discussed less. It does not bode well for a process which is about to hand the British people one of the most important geopolitical decisions of the next few years.

This is an extract from a longer piece published on E!Sharp.

Life drawing for the terrified

Life drawing for the terrified was the name of one of the classes I found listed in a booklet of creative courses and assorted activities for adults.

I had picked it up hoping to find a safe and anodyne valve for me to give vent to certain urges, a methadone prescription to my heroin addiction if you like. Perhaps you could try painting, I said to myself. Yoga certainly didn’t do it. Pilates was boring, pottery-making too messy.

The title of the class made me smile. It was the hyperbole, of course:  what’s so terrifying about drawing, for heaven’s sake? But then my friend, answer me this:  what is so terrifying about writing, the secret, shameful addiction I was trying to overcome but that was still giving me the shakes?

I never joined the class. Fuck life drawing, I mean, let’s be serious. But today I want to try and answer that question, before courage fails me one more time. 

So here we go. Stop vacuuming now. You’ve already rinsed all the dishes. Sock pairing? Really? Sit down and write.

It’s time. What are you afraid of? The worst is guaranteed to happen, the hour and the day written on some cosmic stone. You will die and after a few short years no one will be alive who will remember you. No glory and no shame. Nothingness.

But there’s a here, still, and a now, still, in which your thoughts can be turned into written words, recorded, fixed for a fleeting moment, one hundred years or however long the digital storage system currently in use will last.

No papyrus for you, no faded actual words, on ancient actual paper. So, you see, there is no need for those words to be worthy of immortality. Besides, many a laundry list has unaccountably survived, emerged into our modern hands through the dark tunnels of history even as the entire contents of the library of Alexandria were lost. The stele from which the Rosetta stone came off was after all some boring administrative decree. Hardly Aristotle.

Turn off the news. Stop humming that same stupid tune in a loop (which, by the way drives your dear husband crazy). Close that fridge door. Now. If the answer is ‘Why, more cheese!’ the question is not worth asking. Sit down and write.

Do it for yourself, as you did when you were eight years old and you embarked on the first of a number of super-secret, personal diaries. Two and a half decades of it in fact. The point was not whether you had enough that was new or original or dramatic to say - the point was to record what was going through your head, what you were feeling, that being the only consciousness you were ever going to inhabit, the only self you would ever be.

When and how did it happen? Why did I start living my live unexamined? What shyness, what ghastly self-consciousness or self-loathing stopped me wanting to pay attention to that internal voice, to record its wanderings, its enchantments and its discontents?

I wrote, furiously, through my teens, twenties and early thirties, through many adventures, a deep depression and constant loneliness. In fact I wrote three book-length things that I sometimes absentmindedly call books. 

I only got round to upload one on Amazon last year, a huge act of defiance towards my current cowed, voiceless middle-aged self. I wrote and wrote and then. And then I stopped. I don’t know why.

All I remember was the notebooks were getting smaller, their covers more elaborate but the entries fewer and farther between. Then nothing. 

I stopped annotating books, storing away clever phrases from articles, cutting out pictures and filing half crumpled scraps of paper filled with doodles and urgent, single underlined words which were the secret passwords to a short story, a chapter, a diary entry, a poem which I may or may not write. 

I stopped recording dreams (an activity that, in truth, I only ever engaged in for one year and became too bewildering and anxiety-inducing to continue). I stopped noting down conversations overheard or ideas of effective ‘scenes’ between characters I already knew or had not yet invented.

Look, I’m a still a journalist, sort of. I write the occasional column. I blog, as one does, well, as everybody does, just more infrequently. I obsessively update my ‘status’ on a variety of social media platforms with all sorts of witty and profound little asides. A recent job had me penning op-eds in other people’s names. 

I do all these things, constantly, all the time, and sometimes, absentmindedly, I describe them as ‘writing’. But I don’t write anymore. I don’t know why.

The answer I seek might be a few paragraphs up. It has to do with the internal monologue, the voice (not Voices, you understand, nothing like that), and the difference between hearing it, which I can’t help, not while I’m alive and sentient, and choosing to pay attention to it, which is what the process of writing essentially is, a conscious choice.

I have often heard it said about some of my favourite writers (often by means of their own pen) that they have no choice but write. Writing is who they are, not a means to an end, but their way to exist in the world. All the great diarists share this marvellous curse, this great, consoling affliction - Joan Didion, Virginia Woolf, Hilary Mantell and many countless others I love. 

Whether they simply pour it into actual diaries (there always are diaries, they are the shadow, the footprint, the fingerprint of the writer) or into reportage, novels, plays, what's constant is the writing. Not the publishing, not the being known for or paid for it, not even the accomplishing of final products that can be given a name, a definition - my latest poem, my new short story. 

Writing is, in essence, always flow and fragment. From time to time we hack from it a more solid, denser object and call it Rosetta, or War and Peace. But don’t be fooled, the writing is an endless tune, thoughts in a loop, with no final chapter or clever resolution.

Now, the affliction I described, the having to write which makes people into writers, whether anyone notices or not, means having to pay attention to the internal voice.

My internal voice, my stream of consciousness has a mean streak in it, you see? What I finally seem to have learnt in time is to tune it out, for long stretches at a time and in fact for long as I possibly can. 

The voice, make no mistake, takes no notice of my clever wheeze, and continues to lash me mercilessly whenever it can. But I sure trained myself out of sitting in quiet rooms actively trying to listen to it.

With time and maturity and a greater awareness of the world around me, the voice has also changed - for the worse - and I have duly strengthened my self-preserving mechanism to tune it firmly out. 

The voice is not just filled with contempt at my failings. It is no longer just a grief-stricken, panicked commentary on the immensity of my disappointments, the mediocrity of my aspirations, the circularity of my setbacks, the basic the fallacy of all my choices. Mixed in with that, and with the wonder, the love and the excitement it is still faithfully chronicling, the voice increasingly drones on about the horror of the world we live in.  

Now, as I do live in this world, as I’m still here, now and not shut away in a cave, I am aware of the beheadings and the mass rapes, the hammers taken to priceless artefacts in desert cities. I know about climate change and people trafficking and the slave labour hidden in any object I see or buy. 

I often find myself talking about the slow motion collapse of the European dream, the annihilation of Syria, the pauperization of Greece. 

I shake my head at the misery of each new devastating earthquake and, as people around me start dying of awful diseases, I dutifully make donations and sign up to charities which attest to the horror of this world in all its grim glory.

I am more than aware of it, believe me, and the voice droning on and on about it, almost as the expense of anything else, doesn’t help. 

So I’m discovering that, on top of my general policy of avoidance, I’d do anything to keep that sense of revulsion and powerlessness at bay.

I'd do anything not to have to think about it any longer than for a few seconds at the time.

At first I was not good enough for the world. Now I still suck and the world is black chaos without sense or meaning, without an arc of progress or any hope of justice to soften the blow.  I must fear, at some level, that life once examined may drive me finally mad. Life drawing for the terrified, indeed.

So I hum out loud, eat another slice of cheese, drink more wine, rinse those glasses, pair those socks. I don’t want to think about it, listen to those thoughts long enough to write, to write anything.

I wish there could be a way to get it back, that nice, innocent compulsion to listen and to record, to write for the sake of writing. I wish it were so, as I’m beginning to suspect that I too define myself that way and that therefore I have lived less as my truer self in the past ten years.

I have found lasting love and better jobs in those years, I have felt much safer, better looked after, more prosperous and secure. But less like me. 

My truer self has faded to the point where only the stitches of the pattern show, the neuroses, the obsessions and the anxieties - or if you prefer my laugher, my predilections, or certain turns of phrase of mine- while all colour and shape seems gone. No amount of painting, hill walking or pottery seems likely to bring it back.

I’m 46. Everything aches. Everything, I mean it. I’m growing physically larger and larger, making cool, disdainful detachment a harder pose to pull, as I waddle, sweating and clumsy, my mother frowning back at me from every mirrored surface. 

It’s also somewhat harder to hide, aside from the virtual hiding of the not-really-writing. 

What am I waiting for? Really, what is the point of wasting any more time pretending?

Maybe the answer is to start seeing this life, this one life I have, what’s left of it, as less of a personal business and more of an objectively interesting experience, like when I was eight I suppose, and the wonder/self-consciousness ratio was at a healthier setting.

Maybe what allows those writers to take note of the voice, to feel the fear and write it down anyway, is a choice to see life not as a trial, not as a short yet endless ego-balancing , a face-saving, face-losing see-saw, the careful, exhausting recalibration of desires and dreams in the face of one’s cruel mediocrity and of the gentle passing of time. 

Maybe they manage life through a viewfinder, maybe the pen keeps the smoke and the smell at bay. Life as reportage, as unflinching, unblinking, unblushing copy, the detached, bemused account of a passionately feeling observer. Horror included, warts and all. The writing it down, the putting it ‘to paper’ as it were, an exorcism too, perhaps.

And I realise now (or perhaps I remember?) that re-writing and re-reading is what used to quieten the voice awhile. Listening back to myself as expressed ‘on paper’ silenced it, for a while, giving me a brief, but perfectly dependable and repeatable experience of completion, of what I still, absentmindedly, call happiness.