1. The last swim I have before the Easter holidays is in the snow. We are in the water when we notice flakes falling from the grey sky, and we run home in thickening torrents, so cold that the flakes on me don’t melt even once inside the house. A few days later I am in Rome with the housemates, shamelessly weeping in the streets at the beauty of the light, the buildings, of being abroad again after so long. I read Four Seasons in Rome on the way over and the first night, and spend our remaining time there repeating Anthony Doerr’s facts and experience like catechisms; I find a great deal of truth in the book, from the dizzying ‘too-muchness’ of Rome to the finding of small reasons to live. After five days there, I feel almost immune to the ubiquitous historical beauty, but after five days at home I am desperate to go back, to see the thousand and one things I missed this time around.

When we get home, spring has arrived, and suddenly layers are lifted from river dips as the days pass — gloves and hats and extra jumpers, and although every single swim is worth it, this is the time of year that is an extra gift, a treatment of light and birdsong. At Beltane, walkers greet us, and someone tells us a Morris man is dancing Beltane in, further upriver. As we tip into summer, the water-bites begin, but it’s a small price to pay for hearing a cuckoo call its name to us each morning from the riverbank.

2. Another book I enjoyed among the churches and gelatos of Rome was Shirley Jackson’s second memoir about playing mother to her family, Raising Demons. I loved her first for its humour and observations about parenthood that still ring true today, and I loved this one for the way her writing about those same topics (getting a new puppy, moving house, her youngest child starting nursery school, introducing the children to the gentle hobby she enjoyed as a child) rang far more as the writer we know: creepy, haunting, weird, unnerving. Every chapter was still lighthearted, yet underneath it all was the weirdness that haunted her whole life, and when I read more afterwards about the family’s real life — the local woman who would regularly empty her rubbish into their front hedge, the swastikas the family would find soaped onto their windows — the more I thought, Yes, that’s what’s underneath these stories. There is a shadow beneath every ray of light in delicate balance here.

I watched Fresh recently, before we discussed it in our film club. I know I have to get out of the habit of using every film with a female protagonist as a stick with which to beat Promising Young Woman, but there were such useful parallels between these two films that I couldn’t avoid it. A wiser, more horror-watching member of our group said that he tries to understand the horror filmmaker’s worldview to comprehend where a film is going and what it’s saying; whether it’s purely nihilistic, or offers redemption. This was exactly what I’d been trying (and failing) to say in my comparison of Fresh and PYW: that both are horrifying, frightening, haunting, violent, grim commentaries on the objectification and destruction of women. But while PYW offers no other convincing tone — the ‘romance’ in the film which is meant to offer emotional connection begins with Carey Mulligan deliberately spitting into Bo Burnham’s coffee, which he then drinks, a lighthearted touch which made me want to turn the film off and lie in a field listening to birds — Fresh offers a clear pleasure in life: friendship, nights out, in-jokes, lunch-break burritos, moments of shared recognition with other women. There is a contrast in Fresh, a space between the darkest moments and the lightest, a chance to see the shape of things in both shadow and light, that currently is my best understanding of what authenticity might be.  

Spending the last year occasionally grieving the instant disappearance of my most recent novel, I have thought a lot about authenticity. Why does some art bring us to tears, to laughter, to delight, while other art makes us repulsed or turned-off; and other still fail to register at all? Why did Yellowjackets and Breaking Bad make me exhausted and bored and angry at their silliness, but Severance and Mad Men make me want to weep at every moment in awe and enjoyment? Why do the latter two make me think about capitalism and sex, countries and identity, internalised grief and externalised anger, small gestures and the price of forgetting, while the former two just make me imagine a writer’s room full of self-congratulation? What is the gap between them?

Fresh and PYW made me understand one possibility — that the film and TV and literature I enjoy offer contrasts between nihilism and optimism, but the others offer only one. Promising Young Woman and Breaking Bad are set in worlds where there is no real pleasure to be had — love is a debt that hangs around your neck until it destroys you, good times will only ever make you feel worse, laughter is the shit that hurts the most in the end. And things that were once comforting to me, action franchises and gentle reality competitions, currently make my brain ooze out of my ears with boredom. It is all light there, with no shadow at all. Is it contrasts, then? Or is authenticity just feeding the need for something that feels new?

It can’t be only about original IP versus existing IP, although that helps: do we need a fascinating podcast episode turned into a full documentary turned into a fictionalised glossy drama? Does it encourage something unhealthy in us when franchises are approaching double digits? But for every TNMT and Chip ’n’ Dale, we also get a Paddington, which seemed like a disaster waiting to happen, old IP dredged up in a CGI age, yet turned out to be (particularly the sequel) an absolute masterpiece of family bonds, social responsibility, prisoner reform, and barbershop japes. But on the other other hand Everything Everywhere All at Once, for me, had as its only real positive (beside the absolute brilliance of Michelle Yeoh) the fact that it was so very novel. It was, for me, still written with the leaden hand (or rubber dick?) of self-congratulation.

Am I using authenticity to mean too many things? Do I mean intelligence? Do I mean hope? Do I mean something that wasn’t written by a social media bot? Am I saying authenticity when I just mean that I liked it? Why does Severance — a weirdo show about weirdos in a weird collective with an unknown mystery at its core — have the shape of authenticity to me, when Yellowjackets — a weirdo show about weirdos etc etc — ring so false? What does false mean? How do I verbalise that my loathing for computer games tastes the same as my hunger for authenticity; that the best-written game in the world feels like Matrix-esque shadows on a screen, sucking hours from a life that we’ll never get back, hollow at the core? I mean, I watched Titanic in the cinema four times. I have zero legs to stand on when it comes to living life at its fullest.

This weekend, in the half-sun, two books that have such similar shapes: why did Priestdaddy make me laugh so much but Your Voice in My Head felt so much more clear and true? Why do I have such a horror and embarrassment of poetry, and is the raw feeling of it something I should have aged into by now, alongside my walking holidays and learning an instrument again and caring about church architecture and being delighted to receive socks at Christmas? How does anyone find a balance between sentimentality (bad, manipulative, the realm of Pixar and Breaking Bad and Russian Doll’s second series) and humanity (good, organic, Susanna Clarke and David Sedaris and Kay Dick and Slow Horses and Russian Doll’s first series). Why did Jackass Forever give me hope for people and the strange love we can find and the strange ways we show it, and send me dancing down the street from the cinema, but Fast 9 left me in a sad mute pile, when they are arguably just two sides of the same stake-less, stunt-filled, silly family coin?

Is this like saying: What makes something taste good? We can argue that it’s butter, or salt, or sugar, or umami, but plenty of people don’t like butter or salt or sugar or umami. People don’t like roast chicken, or fresh pasta, or new bread, or pavlova, or watermelon, or many of the things I like most in the world. So am I trying to define the indefinable? Is this just snobbery? Am I just hungry?

3. I also read The Colditz Story recently, and besides the delightfulness of Pat Reid’s stubborn refusal to feel defeated or crushed by the Nazi officers keeping them under guard, one thing struck me: Reid talks about how Colditz was meant to be the absolute inescapable prison camp of prison camps, for all those officers who had previously attempted escape. But what the Nazi forces hadn’t realised was that escapes are ‘the result of cumulative knowledge’, and if you force together people who have a particularly tendency or interest in, say, escape, you pool that knowledge and that interest until it is all they can think and talk about, and it becomes the absolute focus of their lives, for better or worse. In other entirely separate thoughts, the internet is great for the overall widening of experience and interests of children and teens in their vulnerable formative years, isn’t it? Or indeed for any of us when we feel pushed out of what we perceive society to be? Hmm, authentic thoughts indeed. 

4. In this strange weather of hot grey days and clear bright days, I make this a few times, Anna Jones’s amazing corn chowder, and stir with one hand while reading this amazing book on the Sackler family. The only downside to the book I can see so far is that I find it impossible to pick up without getting this stuck in my head for several hours.

5. Charade is worth watching if you’ve suddenly realised Rome has bankrupted you and you may never again visit Paris. Plus both Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn are, of course, wonderful.