It’s been a while, and due to the river’s flooding and my recent dull minor illness I haven’t been in the river for almost a month, although we have celebrated the equinoxes and solstice and everything in-between since the Yule I also missed last year. The river keeps flowing, we mostly keep dipping, and I continue to feel enormous gratitude for it all. 

This year, between one thing and another, I’ve felt sad about my father’s death — and I am so terrible with dates, I can’t remember how long ago he died without trying to triangulate with nearby events which I also can’t remember properly, I can’t remember how old my sisters are or even when two of the housemates were born without having to do careful calculations that normally involves saying things out loud to work out which… happened… first? — but I think his death was around ten years ago, and the sadness is possibly for the first time. And it’s not grief, because I think that happened before he died, and in a few flashes where I would see him after his funeral in the supermarket, or through a doorway in my dreams; this is more a sense at how sad I am for him not to know this household now. I think how much he would have loved their creativity, their goofiness, their open-heartedness, their jokes and wit and tastes, how he would have loved singing the same songs he made us sing with our friends around the dinner table, how he would have loved teaching them about clouds and flight, about how to sight a star or name a tree. And then I think: I’m missing the father I had for about twelve scattered months through my childhood and early teens, when he wasn’t angry or depressed, waiting to drink or trying to hide his drinking, irritable or frightening or absent or manipulative, when he wasn’t alarmed and alienated by a house full of women who lived a life almost unrecognisable from his. My friend said, “Perhaps you wish he could just visit for an afternoon from the time he was at his best, just meet everyone and go for a walk in the woods and hang out for a meal and that would be it?” I didn’t want to cry, but I had to blink and press my lips together because that’s exactly what the feeling was, and I was overwhelmed to know people as brilliant as my friend, people who recognise these mad human impulses we all have. 

Speaking of brilliant people and mad impulses, October has finally, finally, after all these years, become one of my favourite months, after I’ve finally got a housemate who enjoys horror films. I was a very very late adopter, but thanks to last year's excellent October daily emails and this year's beautiful zine from the marvellous Tom Humberstone, plus the wonderfully creepy influence of another housemate’s ghosty-godmother, October means building a list of scary films through the year, to gorge throughout the month. Last year, we enjoyed The Innocents, Duel, Pontypool and The Stone Tapes, among others; this year we’ll hopefully manage Aliens, Nope, The Others, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It’s reassuring to me that there are still switches to be flicked in my brain, that there are still whole gigantic areas of culture that I’ve been completely turned off by that can suddenly, with the right fuse, become a topic I want to watch, read about, listen to podcasts on, discuss and debate and consume. In a recent book club meeting, the topic of jazz briefly came up, the perennial joke for a skippable genre. And yet — jazz? Really? There’s nothing you like about… all of jazz? Which covers everything from Big Band to Miles Davis — I mean: you can’t listen to Kind of Blue and think, “Christ, this is good music”? And of course I used to feel that way about jazz, in the same way I did about horror, and gammon-dad-joke history podcasts, and capers, and now I cannot get enough of any of them. Is this a sign of hope for humanity, somehow? 

Perhaps these new passions are really just buried seeds, blooming late in the season when they get their chance. Perhaps horror was planted when I was allowed to rent Jan Švankmajer’s Alice from our village video shop when I was a child, because it was about Alice in Wonderland and I was probably off ill from school, so did it matter if I sat for 90 minutes paralysed with terror and joy as my mind was blown apart that a film like this — a PG no less! — could exist, that children were allowed to watch in broad daylight, condoned and sponsored by their parents. Perhaps Alice and Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Cabaret and Ghostwatch and Blue Jam have swirled in my head for decades, finally settling now as insanely giddy passion for Inside and I Think You Should Leave and The Rehearsal as they drift into my view. And although I still wish every day that the internet didn’t exist beyond its 1999 form, I’m glad that not only have I enjoyed all these new things through it, but also more things that have grown from these things, like this brilliant essay by Thomas Flight on The Rehearsal, or this one on how I Think You Should Leave cured the essay-maker’s depression. Perhaps they are planting valuable seeds in someone's tender head right now.

While I ponder the art that shapes us, I’m also researching conspiracies and cults for a current job, and the excellent second series of BBC’s The Coming Storm is doing a cracking job of illustrating how even the most extreme positions and the most ridiculous actions always come with an internal logic and a cultural justification. Whether I’m on- or offline, I forget (just as we all do) that my experience is not universal, that my outlook is neither universal nor unique, and that a self-evident truth can often be seen in its obverse by someone else. If I’m sick of influencers, surely everyone is? If I think millionaires don’t need to gouge another £8 a month from their podcast listeners, surely no one will end up paying? If everyone I know can see Trump is one of the very worst options for the whole world, surely no one will really vote for him? 

Of course, everyone who enjoys thinking is mostly just — aren’t we? — trying to marry the stories that we input, with a moral core we already carry inside. But how much are we allowing ourselves to be changeable? How much can we consume content without feeling overwhelmed and deadened? How do we resist the urge to pick a side when that’s the whole shape of our culture, now? Yiyun Li writes remarkably in Harper’s Magazine about our current cultural impulse to flatten, to pick a tone and see no other, to reduce any story to moral policing and then instantly dismiss it. She writes (my ellipses): 

“There is something mind-boggling about this rush to censure. One has the urge to tell these people, Not everything is about your feelings… I admit that I worry when the younger generations use language that they have taken from public circulation without thinking it through first. Phrases like “dismantle the canon” may sound fabulous, but if you were to press the students to elaborate, you would get a string of grandiose and empty words... Thinking through — rather than just thinking — is important. A thought or an idea is never that precious. People have thoughts and ideas all the time, many of them preliminary. Sometimes people mistake their feelings for thoughts and ideas, which are in turn mistaken for absolute truths.”

(If you want to see this idea written as a slick and brilliant sitcom, can I recommend English Teacher, where teens are as dumb, selfish, short-sighted and loved as we were at that age, but now they’re living in a unique moment in history where these children are the only ones who know anything, and where if someone disagrees with them it’s literal violence and they are encouraged by adults who absolutely should know better that they have the ABSOLUTE moral high ground, no, duty, to destroy that person any way they can. It’s a nightmare piled on an apocalypse wrapped in a hilarious and empathetic script.)

Later, Li adds: 

“[W]hat afflicts literature, more than book banning, is this rapid loss of the ability to read for deeper meanings, to grasp subtlety, and to understand ambiguity. If conviction instead of clarity, the kind of clarity that arrives via muddled thinking, repeated questioning, and a tolerance for not knowing and not understanding — is the goal of reading and writing, then much is already lost.” 

I’ve felt for a long time that reading just any book isn’t enough. I mean, for someone who never reads, then reading even one book is great, that’s a win, but those people who do read, who like reading: do we have a moral responsibility to explore new ideas, to find ambiguity, to push into more difficult works and reach those characters in the 70 percent after which Li’s essay is named? Not into violence or degradation or misery, which is what normally ends up being labelled “Important Art”, but into the 70 percent who most accurately reflect life, the perfect, breath-taking middle-of-the-road stories and characters, from Barbara Pym's novels, or the non-fiction of Shirley Jackson or David Sedaris, or I Capture the Castle, or High Fidelity, or Rebecca West’s trilogy, wildly overnamed The Saga of the Century when it is the most perfectly written collection of devastatingly quotidian moments which will change you forever: porridge, a music lesson, a death, a marriage. 

We’re told so much that we ought to be great that we’ve forgotten the real goal is just to be good. Whenever you can, be a good neighbour, a good friend, a good partner, a good colleague, a good parent. Make good jokes, bake good tarts, share good clothes, accept that the vast majority of us will be average, and actually if we can do everything we can to drag the average up to ‘pretty decent’, then that’s something, isn't it?

Otherwise, is this hell? Right now, are we in hell? All the vital systems we’re literally forced to use to function in society are fairly insecure in one way or another, so we can no longer trust our conversations, our secrets, our finances, our data, all of which are chopped up and sold to corporations who have more protections than we do. In a world of increasing gloom, from weather and war to biodiversity and food supplies, the rich accelerate off into the billions while the poor, in almost every country, struggle to feed their children and keep their homes free from mould and bugs, despite jobs they took loans to qualify for and are still paying off; the health system in the UK is collapsing, as is the justice system, as is journalism, as is reasoned debate, as is education, and safeguarding, and libraries, and public access to outdoor spaces, and equal access to music and sport and theatre and nature and dance — all the things that AI cannot replicate, that generations before have known make our lives better and can be enjoyed by groups from every background, that bring people together and make us bonded. Of course those things would be ground down to dust, to become inaccessible, because if one wants to, at worst, don a tinfoil hat, or at best, read the news and some history books and listen to a few thoughtful people piping up, our lives are shaped by aggressive consumerist capitalism these days, so why on earth would multi-national conglomerates want us hanging out, often for free, and getting to know our neighbours so we understand they’re generally pretty much like us and we don’t have to buy something online from 6,000 miles away to kick-in our self-care that we require because someone rang our doorbell/spoke to us in a shop/disagreed with us online, when division and destruction is so much more profitable for those multi-nationals? I mean, really. Is this hell? 

On my walk this morning, I heard the 100th episode of This is Love, a podcast which is never less than excellent. This episode, ‘Valentine’, was about the host, Phoebe Judge, and the last few weeks she had with her mother as she, Valentine, was dying from pancreatic cancer. It’s so wonderful, and extremely sad, and full of love. It made me think of the weeks I had with my father as he died, and what that process looked like, and how I whispered to him that he could go when he wanted, but it felt like I was pushing him rather than releasing him, and how much I kept thinking of childbirth as he died over days and weeks. I thought of how happy I’d been on the day of his funeral, how light it felt, and I’d always thought it was seeing all the friends and family who’d come to support us (ten years on and I’m still amazed they came, how wonderful people are). But today, listening to this stranger talk about another stranger, I thought: maybe I was happy that day because I loved my father, and because I knew that, even though he could only share it on those too-rare musical, laugh-filled days, he loved me too. And maybe that’s why all of this is still worth doing.