What Is To Come

1. We do not know what is to come. We know it doesn’t look immediately good, or at all good if nothing changes – I mean! our free time is increasingly gobbled up by our all-connected devices, which harvest our thoughts and our data to strengthen the wealth and power of international companies! our wages are weak against our cost of living, with employment rights potentially being weakened further after our exit from the EU, so we do whatever we can to get whatever we can! we are encouraged to spend our leisure time side-hustling and girl-bossing because it a) gets us extra and b) reduces our time to think freely, so it’s encouraged as a positive thing by those who benefit from this! we volunteer to be sold to, constantly, relentlessly, as a hobby and a citizen, and those ever-growing companies are delighted because the more we want, the bigger their profit, and the more we want, the less we’ll fight for everything they take from us in return! inequality is rising! divisions are growing! we are all, in the words of Mitchell & Webb, looking like the baddies! – but the fact is this. Something has to change. 

It is literally not sustainable; either we go, or dramatic change must come; unfettered capitalism cannot maintain itself when soil is barren and air is unbreathable, I think; things will be bumpy, at the very least, and all we can do is hold on tight to what we believe makes humanity worth battling for. Art, and humour, and story, and discovery, and creation, and sharing, and forgiveness, and responsibility: community and togetherness, if you like, or privacy and peace, if you prefer. And of course those things have historically been used in dark ways sometimes! Of course everything has a middle path! And this isn’t even a recent thing, more a tipping point we’re at right now; in Matthew Sweet’s 2001 book, Inventing the Victorians, he talks of the Victorian era as a time when “crudely speaking, work patterns shifted from those following the rhythms established by families and communities to those timetabled by managements keen to optimise the productivity of their workforces. At the same time, traditional leisure pursuits were being undermined… There was a switch from locally-generated activities and community-based entertainments to increasingly officialised ones: national cricket and football leagues, public swimming baths dance clubs, museums, exhibitions, arcade games, ticket-only entertainment events.” I know, right. I know. So it’s not as if all Olden Days were a utopia – we’ve made progress in so many ways, and that’s the progress we’ve got to keep fighting for, that general direction of so many things, but we have to find a new way of fighting that isn’t going to end with the whole world blind. 

And it is necessary to remind ourselves somehow, somehow, that our children don’t need iPads as a human right, and maybe we’re all doing ourselves more favours if we remember that adults also need to go for walks, or make bread from scratch, or listen to something positive on the radio as a group, or discover more about our local trees or birds, or learn to sing a song together, or make a zine, because not everything has to have a goal of building a career or becoming a giant success or being acclaimed, sometimes just doing something quietly is great, and yes, I also know that some people don’t have the time to do those things, the freedom, or the headspace but my god, what are we doing propping up a society where almost everyone I know logs several hours a day on their phone, minimum, but we don’t have time to make eye contact and volunteer and actively be with people, rather than just tapping our screen and being “connected”. What is it we truly need? 

A v gloomy recent Salon piece which, honestly, I can’t even link to here because it set off heavy panic in me, did at least end with some useful suggestions, about actively being with people, and attending marches and writing and creating, because staying online basically just makes us all melt down, and who is a better consumer than a panicking, deeply unhappy one? “Action is the answer”, it said, because those people and organisations that like complacency and an easily controlled populace rely on our inaction. 

So please, please, please. I want so much better for the future of humanity. Please share the actions we can take. Please put your devices away and give yourself the gift of a life unlogged. Please work together for change. 

2. Most of this all came about because January was spent without a TV, but with plenty of books, running, radio plays and puzzles (both jigsaw and -book versions) instead. I was struck as I always am in these instances, how much better I feel when I’m not mindlessly, automatically slumped in front of a screen, how valuable and rich my hours seem, how many more thoughts I have, how much more varied my input is, yet how much calmer my brain is. (Having said that, I did miss my usual Mad Men January watch, because it is the best television ever made, and also because the crippling January depression I usually get didn’t come this year; and I do still want to give everyone access to the Watchmen TV series, which I watched at the end of last year and haven’t been able to stop thinking about, and I have also been to the cinema four times since the start of the year, and also stayed up one night watching all of Adam Driver’s SNL sketches on my phone which yes, is very much a cheat, and no, I don’t regret it.) I understand the gross lolling privilege of my position recommending bread and Radio 4 as the cure for all ills, but I suppose my point is that we should have the freedom to choose those things if we want them, and I believe our economy, our society, and our deliberately addictive technology undermines both the chance to make those choices, and the ability to make them. 

3. Some podcast recommendations: 

• Two excellent episodes of Desert Island Discs: Daniel Kahneman (who said his passion for economics developed from listening to his mother gossip, and understanding the power of narrative) and Lemn Sissay (I think I’ve recommended this elsewhere, but it keeps popping into my brain and I love it) 
• This episode of Heavyweight, which generally always makes me cry, but this tale of soul mates divided — or not? — is, somehow, both devastating and utterly beautiful and warming. But really, every episode is brilliant. 
• While I disagree with lots of what he says, this episode of Seth Godin’s Akimbo is quite interesting, on the Gift Economy as an alternative to the Private Property Economy. 
• I love Jenny Slate’s description of her twenties as a ‘surprise second adolescence’ in this episode of the sadly defunct The Cut on Tuesdays. That’s so accurate, and it’s staggering looking back that as twenty-somethings we are just let loose in the world to work and breed and live alone and vote and everything. We don’t know anything! I’ve been thinking so much about how we find the balance between fresh, new, innovative ideas to kick against defunct traditions, and ceding an ear to experience and wisdom. Old people aren’t always wise, I know, and young people aren’t always inventing the newness they think they are, but I see more and more the importance of experience and the dangers of binning something because it comes in a particular package. (I know I am entering middle age because I’ve started rolling my eyes at some of the drums I see teens and twenty-somethings banging. Please don’t invite me to your parties, I wish I was more fun.) 

4. Next time, I promise: recipes for sourdough starter and a sourdough loaf, and a blood orange cake that will blow your mind. 

Over the summer, my quite-old-but-not-that-old phone ate all my text messages and became almost thrillingly unreliable. Ever since then, I pick it up not with the usual subconscious rat-excitement, but with something like dread — it’s so clearly an addiction to something which, beyond podcasts and the camera, offers me far more hassle than pleasure or use, as is the way with anything one becomes addicted to. (Oh, and maps, occasionally.)

I absolutely loathe it, and once I’ve submitted this current big project, my next fairly dull task will be to try and wean myself off it almost entirely. Keep it in the office, plug the landline in somewhere more accessible and use that more, not have to check before I leave one room and walk into another than my phone is in my hand. God, it’s horrible. (Yes, also, music on the phone, also good. Christ.)

I realised the other night that my own anxiety and weariness comes from a sense that absolutely every choice I make these days feels like a battle for my soul. (Ugh, and the period-tracking app is useful. UGH.) It doesn’t feel like merely existing, it feels like living, heavy with some kind of extra-gravitational moral weight: did I turn off the lights/should I turn on the heating/is this food environmentally damaging/can I recycle this/are the children growing up to be vocal about the right things/but not so vocal that they increase division in society/it feels right to keep them off the internet/but will they be prepared when they are free-range on there/it’s great they’re all keen readers/but modern popular children’s books are almost universally awful. This isn’t parenting, or being an adult. This is living in an era where we are facing mass extinction either through climate change or mass conflict, fuelled and fired by those agencies which benefit from conflict and fear: arms manufacturers, politicians, media companies, product-makers, internet figures fashioning themselves into products.

If you are the product, what does that do to your soul? If your daily life, your family, children, friends and colleagues are the backdrop and the context for your self, sold and packaged to consumers or employers, do you gain more than you lose? If your most passionate conversations and throwaway jokes are all equally public, equally up for scrutiny, how does that ensure a fair life for you? If everything you ever say can come back and bite you — my primary reason to wish all children and teens weren’t ever allowed to say or write or do anything on a screen — how does that shape your life?

If you are a female MP, trying hard to improve lives around you, do you deserve to get hundreds upon hundreds of messages describing brutal sexual assault and violence against you and your family? You’re a public figure! That’s the price! If you’re a beauty journalist, having months of harassment and bullying by vicious internet trolls, how do you find the strength to speak up in a moving instagram video?

But. What if the source of that latter bullying seems to be — unless the source mentioned was not correct, unless something else is going on, which is of course more than possible, because nothing can be trusted on the internet — fairly calm critiques of your working practices both on- and offline? What if the trolls who have attacked your children in fact only mentioned them once, in the context of you promising never to use them in your social media? What if those board users were asking questions about your transparency and correct use of Ad and Gifted tags, and only when you set the internet against them does that board start screen-grabbing your own systematic and extremely public bullying (sometimes over long, long months) of other women in the media, attacking their looks, abilities, work and parenting? What if all your friends suddenly start deleting their old tweets (as you have already done) because your accusations have shone a bright light on a forum that at worst, matches tonally exactly the conversations you and media friends have on twitter, and at best are supportive spaces discussing dementia, cancer, cleansing routines, and their own experiences of bullying and unpleasantness at the hands of blue-tickers?

How does that make those female MPs feel? How does that make the women and men, boys and girls who have been harassed, doxxed, bullied and intimidated feel? I wonder what that does to your soul, when every mistake is so public? 

Running to the river now is in the dark; even when we climb out we do so by torch light. I hope you can all find something like this for yourselves, something calm and quiet and personal and fulfilling.

I come home and peel off my cold wet clothes, and look forward to more moments without my phone. 

1. I really, really loved this essay on introducing hope back into a nihilist world. It captures my own struggles with the messiness of everything – if this, then that, so which is worse? – and how everyone seems to be struggling with genuine, literal existential crises. But hope! And weight-lifting! I’ve been doing weights since the start of the summer and every time I lift it’s like a fucking joy injection. If you can start lifting heavy stuff, I massively recommend it. 

2. I want to post a link to the Pop Culture Happy Hour review of Todd Phillips’ Joker film, but I also want to be a better person than that, so I won’t. But Ready or Not is great fun, so maybe watch that instead! 

3. Here are some excellent children’s books series, if you want them: The Dark is Rising series, His Dark Materials, The Murder Most Unladylike books, The Sinclair’s Mysteries, the Tiffany Aching books… is that it? Always looking for more suggestions if you have them, please. 

4. Next time I get an invoice paid I am 400% getting this for the pup. The cold is mean to these feeble, speedy hounds. She is extreme excite. 

The river was cold this morning, although my leggings are thick enough that I didn’t realise until I was rib-deep, by which point I had to start swimming as hard as I could back and forth across the river while the others got in just to keep the blood flowing to my hands. Neoprene gloves and socks will be needed soon, sooner than we’d all hoped, I think. But I don’t mind that cold yet, when we pay that to enjoy silent herons overhead, a still dawn, and ducks beside us, unseeing of their company until a dog runs by on the bank and they flap away, naark naark naark. 

I found a chunk of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy when I was tidying my room recently, and he foresaw so much of our current cultural situation – TV and film and music and books as comfort, as trash, as distraction, as manipulation – that I am forcing myself to be a tougher reader, viewer, listener. I can’t bewail the kids liking Pokemon (fucking Pokemon) (…*Pokemonnnn*) but then watch only those things that make me feel safe and amused, never challenged or horrified or upset. I mean, as with everything, it is grey areas, and middle grounds, but I can’t live forever in a Michael Schur-flavoured cloud of good faith and optimism, however vital I believe those to be. I also need to absorb and contain those truths which are less pleasant, because that’s what all of us need to face right now, to be able to think about, and talk about, the hard work we can do to right those wrongs. 

Speaking of which, this excellent old episode of Desert Island Discs was repeated on my feed recently, with Judith Kerr. Her story is devastating for what she escaped, for how narrow the escape was, for her remembrance of all those who weren’t as lucky, for her gratitude and positivity after everything. I tried to sing along to her choice of Bud Flanagan’s Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr Hitler as I made a packed lunch for school this morning, but I started crying halfway through. How are the children not used to my collapsing weeps, yet? It’s a wonderful episode, though, with wonderful music. And (I think) I want to know what makes a country fall to fascism and what makes a country fight it, and welcome in refugees with genuine open arms, not imprisonment of children and exploitation of adults; what makes our better impulses stronger than our worst ones. 

And speaking of that (and Michael Schur, actually), as part of my ‘making myself read things when even the headline terrifies me’ campaign this is very good: “The End of the Roman Empire Wasn’t That Bad”, in which James Fallows discusses how when governments fail to function as they should, community government often picks up the slack, helping people around them on a day-to-day basis to access homes, education, healthcare. One interviewer “suggested the situation was like people fleeing the world of Veep — bleak humor on top of genuine bleakness — for a non-preposterous version of Parks and Recreation.” So that’s nice? 

Finally, speaking of things that make me feel safe and amused, I got up this morning with actual intercostal pain from how much I laughed at Stath Lets Flats most recent episode last night. (I had tried to watch the series before and hadn’t even lasted through the first episode. We watched the whole of the first series in a couple of nights this summer at my second attempt, and my GOD it’s brilliant.) If you watch them all, and don’t find the closing line of ‘A Battle of Our Lives’ funny enough to make you laugh through the whole credits, and then again every time you remember it, then please find something that does because it’s such a great feeling. 

1. The Uses of Literacy here – staggeringly, written in 1957 and as searing as ever. Perhaps writing something about it in October will be my reward for meeting my big September deadlines.  

2. Sue Lawley talks to Judith Kerr on Desert Island Discs here. 

3. “The End of the Roman Empire Wasn’t That Bad” here, which is genuinely worth reading before you gather your spirits about you and sashay into helping people locally, however you can. 

4. Stath Lets Flats, which, truly, is the gift that keeps on giving (and this review, while it does describe many of the best jokes, also captures much of what makes the programme so very, very excellent.) CLAP, YOU BLOODY EGGS

This week’s wonderful & worthwhile things:

[All links repeated at the end]

1. Our kitchen ceiling caved in, due to a major leak from the bathroom. But there’s nothing like children dancing around in helpful excitement to make a small catastrophe feel like a minor adventure. (It’s only when a secondary leak floods the initial repair that I cry.)

2. The courgette seeds we planted have become fat leaves on dark stalks, budding again and again. I’m currently debating whether I need to cancel all trips away from the house, so I can be here to care for the tiny kitchen garden of sprouting herbs and craning, fur-bedded vegetables. I feel like a god. I started with a bag of soil & seed compost, an old tupperware box, and seeds; accessible to lots of people, I hope, and I cannot recommend it enough. 

3. It’s difficult to measure love, and it’s irresponsible to discount the effects of our parents’ inherited trauma. I can safely say, however, that I have never once felt loved by my mother. I disliked her through my childhood and teens with the kind of gut-instinct a child has for grinding quotidian injustice, then found a peace with her in my twenties. Friends with similar parents had said over and over, ‘It’s just about accepting that they’ll never be who we need. We just have to decide whether we want to have a relationship with who they actually are.’ And I did, so we saw each other frequently, and I swallowed that sense of always being manipulated and unheard. (When I told her news of my job redundancy, or my pregnancies, or my cavernoma, I was cut off each time with more pressing anecdotes of her own. It was almost funny, in the way family jokes are, except for all those times when it wasn’t.)

Last summer, four years since the cancer treatment and death of my father — appointments and notes and visits, my efforts to ensure distant family were kept informed about each change in condition, each suggestion from the care team — I had a similar nerve-wracking few weeks with my mother, this time in a French hospital. This time I couldn’t visit, but found myself the initial point of contact, responsible at first for telling her neighbours, siblings, and my sisters, as well as calling her and the hospital each day for updates. Some weeks after her return, I received a typed letter informing me that I was subsequently being removed as one of her executors (my sisters though would remain) as well as having my power of attorney revoked. I have never uncovered why. She didn’t contact me on my birthday, nor on Christmas Day (I, like all children in these circumstances, still contacted her on her birthday and at Christmas. We always want to prove that we’re better than they’ve told us). All of this wormed inside my brain, constantly, painfully, until sudden clarity hit: Jackasses Gonna Jackass. (Before I was declared the Most Terrible Person, my sister held the title; before her, my father; before him, my uncle; before him, probably me again. This realisation also helped.) 

As my children grow older, my anger returns. As they grow past milestones I remember from my own childhood — the age I was when calmly told to choose what I was going to be hit with after some behavioural infraction; the age I was when she stormily cut my hair from past my shoulders to a boy’s dull, savage chop (I wept throughout — my father tried to intervene — she insisted afterwards that it was what I wanted); the many, many ages when she consistently told my embarrassed visiting friends to ignore me as I was ‘just showing off’ – such a trivial slight! such a shaping of my feelings about keeping her away from people I valued! –; the years and years where I wrestled with my unfathomable unhappiness in this nice, middle-class home where I was bought presents and taken on holidays — it seems horribly simple to avoid these things. Don’t humiliate your child. Don’t terrify them. Don’t constantly repeat the witless truism that you ‘love them, but don’t like them.’

I find it easy to admit making a mistake. I apologise freely and with thoughtfulness to my children, my partner, friends, because I am not perfect, because we are all human. Part of growing up is the difficult realisation that your parents are human too, and they make mistakes. But sometimes it’s even harder to accept that you really haven’t done anything wrong – at four, at seven, at 10, at 37 – and that you, like everyone else, deserve better. 

Anyway, when I vanish down a Lucille Bluth-flavoured hole of anger and hurt, I remember that exercise helps everything. And it does! Do treat yourself to some, if you can. Also, I read this book while camping recently and it is wonderful. Dodie Smith writes with such understatement that I could read her books twenty times and come away with something different each go.

4. This programme (part 1 of 2) about Jeremy Hardy is so utterly wonderful. It also contains clips of brilliant Linda Smith and Humphrey Lyttleton, and I realise I spend vast portions of my time watching, listening to, or writing comedy because it’s how I understand, process, and communicate my own feelings to the world. (If that’s not turning your lemons into lemonade, I don’t know what is.) 

5. I finally order prescription sunglasses, after years of balancing normal sunglasses over my spectacles, on the pollenous days I can’t hack contact lenses. Continuing my Squash And A Squeeze philosophy of life, it feels like a gift, delighting me at least six times a day.

6. Although repetition has somewhat rendered athletic ads featuring everyday girls and women a cynical trope, there’s nothing like watching a large group of girls play a sport they love. The variety of body shapes, the support they offer one another, and the sheer enjoyment of it. Really, don’t all joys boil down to enjoying our bodies while we can? 

7. The day is bright today, and I took the dog on a longer walk than usual; watching that dog trying to run out a greyhound was hilarious, the sleek fool. At the time, I was listening to this episode of The Cut on Tuesday, on the topic of Spring Horniness and the weird trash we get hot over, which contains the immortal line “The bud is breaking through. But the soil that nurtured the bud was all fucked up, and now the flower is weird.” Also, the final line of the episode made me do an actual out-loud bark of laughter. 

8. It’s several years old now, but I love how both Bad Neighbours 2 and this review scratch an itch in completely different ways. I love the film for everything it undoes of the first one, plus the sheer charm of Efron and furious optimism of Chloë Grace Moretz; also, Rose Byrne, who might be one of the most underrated comedic actresses of our time. But the review offers something else, and sates the library-card-carrying part of my brain that wants to read a thousand think pieces on Magic Mike XXL and Parks & Rec and The Windsors. I hope you enjoy both.

1. When Jeremy Hardy Spoke to the Nation here

2. The Cut on Tuesday – I Want to Put My Mouth on That here 

3. Little White Lies review of Bad Neighbours 2 here 

I’ve spent the last few months entirely off social media, months that I’ve been instead using for reading, writing a screenplay, grieving a pal, listening to podcasts, going outside, walking, hanging out with my friends and family, picking apples, going for runs, writing cards, writing lists.

It’s been bliss.

Here are some thoughts that have begun to coalesce in my mind during that time:

1. Instagram seems like the least hostile social media app, going by who I follow, but when I’ve opened it recently I’ve felt like my disgruntled old white dad™ complaining about The Youth. “But why are you taking a photograph of your food? Your blanket? Your train journey? Who cares about it? Why can’t you just enjoy your holiday? Who are you writing this to?” 

2. I think one of the reason it bothers me is that so many of the people I follow who talk about anxiety and mental health issues are also the most prolific posters, particularly of selfies. I wonder if we’ll look back on this era of internet-use and marvel that it wasn’t obvious, a direct correlation between filming/photographing yourself and waiting for comments and likes, and anxiety and mental health issues. 

3. In the first episode of Morality in the 21st Century, the much-discussed and critiqued author Jordan Peterson talks to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks about how we now put far too much emphasis on Happiness, way beyond Responsibility. How fulfilment and the pleasure of life comes from accepting and handling responsibility, not chasing constant ‘happiness and rights’. Peterson also says kids shouldn’t be told they are perfect and that they should love themselves unconditionally because self-esteem is so important, but instead that they are full of potential, and have a responsibility to tap into that infinite potential to grow into the best possible version of themselves within and against the problems and issues they’ll come up against. I dig this. 

4. I try to raise our kids to be like Paddington. Open-hearted, hopeful, adventurous, curious, moral, questioning, kind. I don’t know if it’ll work. But it helps to have a plan. 

5. I want to side with my generation and younger. My optimism says that young people have fresh ideas, open minds, new ways of understanding old bigotries are no longer acceptable. Young people shouldn’t be dictated to about what is and isn’t acceptable by older generations who don’t understand and haven’t grown up with technology in the same way. But for all that optimism, I realise I’ve thrown out the idea of Wisdom. If anyone older than us says anything we don’t agree with, it’s way easier to say, “OMG the 1800s called and want their ideology back.” But maybe they know something. Maybe it is super rude and disconnected for a family to sit together on a sofa all on separate tablets and phones. Maybe it’s not acceptable for everyone to have their phones out on the table when they’re out for dinner. Maybe we should be able to unplug and walk outside in the fresh air without having to take seventeen pictures of it, select our favourite, caption it, publish it, then check and respond to comments. Maybe living a life through images and captions isn’t how our human brains work best. 

6. (Maybe it also makes you a little bit boring.) 

7. I still grieve for Twitter — even though even glimpsing four tweets on my feed now makes my heart pound and race at the sheer teeth-bared ferocity of it — but I miss the memes and the humour, the people I met there and the opinions I discovered. I love that it gives previously silenced people a vital platform. That’s so important. I can’t say that enough. That’s SO important. 

8. But! Of course, but! Having a platform for everyone means that everyone has a platform. And actually, I feel that’s less good. But I don’t know how to fix that, or run it better. Gatekeepers aren’t the answer. Moral responsibility? “Do I need to post this?” Does it make the world better? Is calling someone trash when they’ve done something ‘wrong’ the right way to live? Do you ever worry that one day it’ll be you? 

9. I do, loads. The more that people are deleted for their errors — a word, a tweet, a joke, a routine, a casting decision, a drunken error — jesus christ, when I think of all my drunken errors and jokes and god, all my mistakes, my god — the more I wonder how anyone dares use social media. (I will shortly be crowd-funding my family’s move to a signal-less home on a hill in beautiful Wales.)

10. This makes me feel like all the people we used to loathe and make fun of, in my Twitter days. Just don’t be human garbage! The rules aren’t hard! But they really, really are. 

11. Do you remember when we disagreed with things and said to people or companies, “Do you think you might -” or “Please could you consider -”? It feels — and I haven’t crunched the numbers! I don’t know if this is nonsense! I hope it is! — that we go full-throttle straight to SIGN THIS PETITION TO GET THIS SHUT DOWN. I like it more when we talk about things. We all need to be challenged.  

12. This is an excellent programme on the vital importance of Dialogue. While I’ve been offline I’m been meeting so many people to just chat and hang out and it turns out it’s great. We should do that more. (*extremely high pitched suggestion voice* And maybe not put that we did it on social media??)

13. These apps are engineered by the top engineers to be addictive. It doesn’t mean they fulfil you. 

14. I, like most late-twentieth-century babies, went through an anti-religion phase. Now, most of the religious people I know are the ones I feel best after seeing. Their quiet charity. Their humility. Their morals. It’s not a sword they use to strike people, it’s an umbrella they offer to hold over those who want it. It’s pretty nice. (And I’d love to discuss with people who have greater expertise than me about whether the fact that almost all religions across the last few thousand years have said vanity/self-indulgence are Not Good Things is suggestive that maybe we should avoid those for our greater benefit, or whether those taboos have been tools of oppression. Both? Probably. I would like to learn more, though.) 

15. Getting paid and credited for your work is important — god knows, I try to make my living in a field where anyone who speaks English is convinced they can do it NO YOU CANNOT — but entering an Instagram space where everyone, always, bangs their own drum is so tiresome. I know I can unfollow them. But how much can that behaviour be repeated and normalised before we forget it’s not the way to shape a pleasant society? And yes, I am also a bitter writer who is not yet rolling in my own Scrooge McDuck coin vault so that’s probably part of it. I don’t even remember the original question asked here, but I think about paragraphs 11 & 12 of the answer all the time. When did ‘building your brand’ replace being an actual person? And I know I’m on thin ice here, I can already hear the retorts, and yes, I am 187 years old, thank you for asking. 

16. I am so, so, so worried about the planet. Everything else kind of feels like small fry, in a way. Please stop encouraging people to buy so much shit. It might be your living but we are literally, literally destroying the only place we have to live. I just don’t get why this isn’t the only thing we are all working on, all the time. (I mean, I get why, but also, WHY?) That Morality podcast I mentioned earlier has an interesting discussion on the value of capitalism that utterly fails to reference the fairly pressing point of “it’s basically ending humanity with its poisoning of water, air and land”. 

17. If I’m not writing, I want to spend my time making things with my hands. This podcast posits that the thing that makes humans happiest to hold is a wooden object. Fuck you, Apple designers! Lol. Anyway, I could believe it. I want to carve wood for a useful purpose and make things from clay and repair things with beautiful stitches and fix objects so they are useful and gorgeous. 

18. Picking and forming teams seems dangerous. It means the other teams are your enemy. That they can’t understand you, that you don’t get them, and that ultimately you aren’t on the same side. 

19. Someone disagreeing with you is not your enemy. It is not a weakness nor an act of aggression to say, “I’m not sure about this. I feel this way at the moment, but I’d like to know more.”  

20. I think if we talk a lot about Fear and Hate and Catastrophe it’s hard to see around those words to what we can do as individual people, rather than being stuck on one side or another of them. It doesn’t mean we ignore those issues: maybe we just try to listen to people we disagree with more. 

21. When I was young, books and films and culture told me that you know less as you get older, not more. Ha! Boy, did they have that wrong! I learned more every day! 

22. Up to a point. Now I know almost nothing, except that at the moment I believe Paddington to be a suitable role-model for my kids, and that there is almost never a clear right answer to anything. 

23. I don’t know how much of this is right. 

Here are the podcasts I’ve mentioned: 

Hidden Brain, Our Better Nature 

Morality in the 21st Century, episode 1

Hidden Brain, The Cassandra Curse 

The Persistence of Analogue 

Double-Talk - I’m really sorry, this isn’t available to download. Darn it. But if you meet me in a caff you can listen to it on my headphones. It’s worth it for the price of a £1.80 latte. 

January does as January does, and transforms me into a desiccated, misanthropic husk. Body and brain are torn between usual hormonal Hulk rage and something deeper, a throbbing growl against everyone I look at. My body is under enormous muscular tension as I continually hold back from screaming into the face of anyone foolish enough to try to talk to me; unfollowing people on Instagram helps; watching a lot of TV helps too, for a while, and then I am struck by the fact that I will never write anything this good, even when I’m watching the worst thing on Netflix, and that the only thing I have ever wanted to do is not something I’ll ever do well. 

I sit in the car in a school car park with two children in the back, waiting for a third, and try to cry, until one of the passengers asks what a kazoo is and my startlingly accurate impression halts my momentum. Another moment later, though, and I soundlessly succeed, and it is briefly satisfying.

Porridge has got into my brain, or reality, or both — my usual unearned confidence and optimism about my ability to develop as a writer has evaporated. I think of the writers I love, and realise that my writing is sludge, mediocre and thin-soup readable at best, boring and self-indulgent at worst. (The concept of #selfcare is making my blood fucking boil at the moment, in a larger-picture-way, but I have the creeping horrors that my writing is the literary equivalent of a Instagram make-sure-you’re-looking-after-you post.) I am jealous, but still happy, for those brilliant writers in my life who have found success; the fellow-mediocre — and worse — writers who have found the same just make me endlessly, crushingly sad. I miss the friends and family I do not see enough, and am having a teen-like grieving period for the fact that everything comes to an end. All of this is written horribly, clumsily. Even the dog has moved her regular lapdog position to the hot air vent in the floor, just to get away from my mood.  

But one of the children asks me how much it costs to get one’s ears pierced, and when I guess twenty pounds they say, ‘Twenty pounds! You should get an ear pierce and a hair cut and a sarcasm removal for that!’; and one child gives me a huge hug when they see me crying in the kitchen; and it is so nice when my roommate comes home at the end of the day; and I have some nice work on; and my mother is back from a six-week trip tomorrow; and even if I can’t write a good book, I have so very many to read. Some seed of optimism remains for the start of Spring. 

All links mentioned are clustered at the end, if you’d like to read/listen to them too.

I’ve never been one for the middle road, in habits, emotions or tendencies, but if there’s one thing 2016 has taught me — I hope — it’s that it’s possible for me. At last. I’ve been more willing, as I’ve grown fractionally older, to welcome the change of heart that time and experience bring; I’ve been more likely to say, ‘Well, this is how I feel at the moment, but who knows,’ rather than, ‘No! Never! Impossible!’ Only there have been some hold-outs from this: some political groups, some voting histories, some educational choices, anti-freedom groups, hate groups. Thankfully, they could all be bundled up in my mind as Big Bads, so I didn’t need to ever fear that I could be wrong about any of them: and if someone had expressed those choices, even once, even in error or misunderstanding or drunkenness or foolishness, or ever been associated with anyone who’d expressed those choices, then great! Into the barrel of doom with them, and good riddance!

I have loved so much of social media, so much of the quickness of thought to make the jokes, dark or otherwise, because that’s how I see the world. The kindness, too: those people who tap a “xxx” or a digital embrace to someone suffering. I’ve been at both ends of that, and it feels good.

2016, however, and everything we’re seeing unfold from that and the last few years before it, has made me wonder at the meaningfulness of these interactions. Other people than me have written about this, probably better than me, and research can show whatever we want it to (also known as ‘2016’s catchphrase’) but some gut instinct in me has hollered louder and louder than social media does nothing, for me, in quite a major way. I’m sure anyone who’s reading this can give me some counter arguments — friendships, business contacts, social and political movements — but there is a hollowness to my life on there. On here, I suppose I should say. Having been mostly off it for several months now, I can see with greater clarity that the time I spend with friends and family on sofas and bar stools and around kitchen tables, without photos, or hashtags, or tagging, or comments, just ephemeral conversation and moments that are gone forever: these times have been better for me, and have filled some deeper need.

And of course social media can be an educational, fascinating place. It’s hilarious to suggest otherwise. So congratulations and a big shiny medal to me if I now understand that Black Lives Matter, or grasp the violence that faces the average transgender man or woman, or see that even the most supportive, feminist man occasionally uses language and jokes that chip away at the average woman. Those fights are easy to understand and easier to engage in. 

But – and here’s the tricky bit – how much time did I give, really, to thinking about why someone would support and vote and fight and hurt people for beliefs opposite to mine? It’s not comfortable to defend these people, to acknowledge that they are human and have family they love and interests they believe to be best. It’s not easy to say, in my circles, But What About Straight White Men, when we’ve had such a bloody great time turning them into the butt of every smart, knowing, accurate, deserved joke. But the number of people I know on social media who are actively trying to make the world better (could count on two hands) rather than just spitting into someone’s online soup (thousands) is worth my consideration, if I’m spending hours a day with them. And the things we’ve hated in those hours! We hate this film. This politician is trash. That TV programme is shit — look at this gif about it! The readers of those newspapers are just a dumpster fire of burning garbage.

So this is what I’ve concluded, after much thinking and reading and listening: that there are two issues here. Two things that tie my feelings about social media and my feelings about what’s on social media together: firstly, nuance, and secondly, opportunity versus morality.

Nuance, as Jon Ronson (a man who’s had his share of online kickings) says on the Guys We’ve Fucked podcast*, is wildly unfashionable now. Pick a side! Quickly! Don’t worry about circumstance, or history, or mis-readings, or context! Just go go go get our boots on and pile in! My online bubble that I’ve been happy to cosy up in seems the same: straight white guys: be quiet. Leave voters: racists. Republicans: racist misogynist climate-change deniers who should also be quiet. It doesn’t matter why they feel that way. Let’s just remind them as forcibly as we can that they are hateful humans we don’t want to dirty our hands with, and that’ll teach them a lesson they’ll never forget! After seeing our scorching memes, they’ll be thinking like we do in no time! Except: they are actual people. Everyone’s frightened of something, and whether or not I agree with the veracity of the source of that fear, they’re still feeling afraid. They still have goals, which I may or may not agree with, but those goals won’t change if I tell them their goals are trash. In an episode of the Invisibilia podcast* called Flip the Script, Hanna Rosin visits Aarhus to talk to the police who decided to stop prosecuting young Muslim men travelling to Syria to fight for Isis, and instead engaged with them, offering them care and support, employment and housing. They made them feel like they were welcome in Denmark, that this was their home, and in 2015, even when traffic was spiking from Europe, only one individual left Aarhus to fight. In the programme, Jamal, a young Danish muslim, says of his feelings before this positive intervention received him, ‘I thought: they call me terrorist? I will give them a terrorist.’ Treat those we disagree with as racists, as misogynists, as bigots, as fascists, and guess how they’ll be tempted to behave. (Side note: It’s also really worth listening to the Adam Buxton conversations* with Richard Ayoade, Iain Lee and Jon Ronson (again!) talking from various different angles about kindness, nuance, context, and how it feels to be a Woody Allen fan these days. Also, there’s a stand-up routine by Louis CK – helloooo, problematic public figure – which also covers nicely the idea of correctly using The Right Terms but having not great goals with it, and being pummelled for using Incorrect Language but wanting to communicate positive ideas. I can’t link to it as it autoplayed on Netflix while I was painting the hall, but the thought was pretty smart.)

As Oliver Burkeman said in his This Column Will Change Your Life piece*, it’s moderation that’s key to a better world, not battling for victory. No one really ever wins a war. As This American Life’s podcast* on Reconsideration showed, it’s giving people a chance to be listened to that offers that chance to change minds, not shouting them down with facts that will only make them dig their heels in harder. Anger is a vital political tool, but my anger too often feels like hatred, or disdain, or dismissal. It serves no purpose. It’s a toxic, pixelled sledgehammer. It makes the world worse. I’ve really been doing a shitty job at making things nicer, guys. 

Secondly: opportunity versus morality. As part of my feminist beliefs, I’ve been pro-Instagram; why should some dude tell me what I can and can’t photograph? If people like my lunch pic, what’s wrong with that? If I look great and want to record and share it, what the hell is your problem? Only suddenly, as I’ve been using it less and less, Instagram looks so lonely to me. I think of the humans at the end of Wall-E, tapping their screens and never looking up, and that’s how it feels: I like the sunset someone else has photographed while I’m missing it because I’m looking at my phone. And even if I’m snapping it myself to share — what am I missing by not just looking at the damn thing, and letting it pass through me, a beautiful gift to warm my soul? Do I really believe the tech ads about how much better a father’s night in the woods is with his kid because he brought their tablet along? I know the feeling in me when I pick up my phone to take a picture of something with the intention of sharing it, and it feels like a greasy, dizzy dilution. For me, it’s not about the over-curation of our perfect online lives, but about the inability to live in my offline life without outside approval. I’m not having real fun until 20, 50, 1000 people have liked it too! 

And putting that smartphone opportunity up against my moral code: just because we can do something, should we? If I can live-tweet a couple arguing on a train journey, does that make it not nightmarishly intrusive? If I Instagram a photo of someone in a terrible outfit, does that make me a warrior for underprivileged rights? If I pause every lunch with friends to take photos to post online for others to view and like or not like, am I connecting more, or less? Am I making the world a more claustrophobic, judgemental, short-sighted place if I collude in this weird global surveillance?

And god knows, I’m a hypocrite. I’ve been mean as mean can be, online and off-, about people whose political views I disagree with. I’ve Instagrammed my Christmas day lunches, my children’s artwork, my brunches with friends, my views from a train. But why have I interrupted the flow of conversation or silence before the play started to post a picture of the theatre stage and ceiling? Why have I unintentionally asked my family to hold off from eating because I wanted a picture of the meal I’ve just made? Why did I stop thinking about whatever I was thinking about just to snap an image of the sky? I’ve thought and thought and can’t get any further than Because other people might like it. Which is, to me, right now, at this moment, fathomlessly sad. (But who knows how I’ll feel next week, a year from now, twenty years from now?)

Have some ideas on social media changed me? Of course. People and articles have educated me hugely in ways that have hopefully made me a better person. But do those new, positive and instructive ideas warrant staying on social media? Not at the moment. Twitter is a thousand people shouting apocalypse at me, Facebook is an algorithmic sink and Instagram is an endless time-suck scroll of kids I’m not playing with, art I’m not making, trips I’m not taking, food I’m not cooking, homes I’m not helping people into, chances I’m not helping others receive, political aspirations I’m not supporting because I’m just swiping my finger along this screen tap tap tap swipe tap swipe tap swipe swipe swipe…

But right now, I’m trying to make changes. I’m off twitter, I’ve deleted my Facebook profile, I’ve turned my Instagram to private and am slowly weaning myself off it (I still hit like at what I’m seeing, but the (v good, v scary) Moment app is also making me realise how much of my day — my life — is lost to tapping a heart icon on a flat screen next to a photograph someone else has taken that ultimately means nothing to me as pixels on a screen). The cards, notes, emails and texts I’ve sent and received over the last month or two have made me realise how much more valuable these quiet interactions are to me at the moment. I think about the adults I’d like our kids to grow up into: outward-facing, forward-looking, clear-eyed, generous with their time, generous with their thoughts, independent, handy (all the way from cooking and cleaning, through to crafting and mending and building), confident, kind. And it doesn’t matter that I’m thinking of it in terms of my kids: like those men we laugh at for only finding feminism once they have a daughter (who cares why they found it! they found it! they’re engaging!) it’s not about whether or not I have children. It’s about which adults we want to share the world with. Adults we might disagree with, but whom we could hopefully rely on for respectful conversation, thoughtfulnesss, retreat on either side, apologies, space for error, learning, growth, change.

I’m not saying we should forgive anyone who asks for it — only maybe I am, because what does the alternative produce? And I’m not saying we should love everyone in the world, no matter what they’ve done in the past or continue to do in the future — only I guess, I suppose, perhaps, maybe I actually am, because hating people feels shit, does nothing, and makes the world boring and hate-filled and dead. We’ve tried that! We’ve tried telling men/cis/white women/privileged feminists/baby boomers/Tories/right-wingers/Brexit supporters/homophobes/transphobes/racists/abusers/Cameron that they’re just a crapsack, nothing but a punchline, should get pushed off their soapbox or fixie or 4x4 or youtube channel into the fiery pits of hell! We’ve let the warmth of righteous indignation warm us at night and not minded the language we use against our enemies because look at the way they’ve treated us! Look at the terrible things they’ve done! So we hurl insults and craft jokes and smash bridges with our pixel sledgehammers and wait for the likes and retweets and thumbs up and YEAH comments to flood in, and if they do then our point is proved, good work, and if they don’t then maybe we up it a bit more next time.

(Or sometimes, I wonder if it’s all a handy distraction from the way we’re treating our planet at the moment, like gum we can replace at the corner shop once we’ve chewed all the goodness from it. That’s frightening. That’s genuinely sick-in-the-night, silent panic-attack terrifying. But we buy new phones and new phone covers and charge them up and snap a picture of ourselves with them in the mirror and grind our teeth that some dude took up too much space on the tube and Steven Moffatt can’t write women. Yes! Those things might be true! But, to play the card we all dislike the most: haven’t we got other things to worry about? Not necessarily bigger things, or better things, but fractionally more pressing things? Shouldn’t we all be hurling money as hard as we can at scientists and policy makers in the hope we can stop sawing down and burning up the only home we’ve got? Shouldn’t we be campaigning against companies who design their products with built-in obsolescence, rather than grabbing those products as fast as we can so we can use them to tweet our rage at companies who use unreliable delivery companies? And I understand that climate change isn’t a stand-alone issue — capitalism, our lifestyles, our conditioned social priorities, corporate power over government, dissolution of employment rights, exploitation of workers — all of this feeds into climate change and the terrible way we’re treating our planet. I understand this. And all of it feels slightly more pressing than how I can correctly display my individualism to people who don’t or barely know me.)

The fact remains, the basic philosophies of most major religions (if we put aside meat specifics and some potentially dodgy sex/marriage stuff) throughout human civilisation probably have a point: care for the needy; practice humility; think of others; show forgiveness; show respect; love everyone.

If the future looks scary, the answer isn’t to build the wall higher and sharpen our words. It’s so painful, and it’s so difficult, and it’s so simple. Right now, if we can take the time to type our disdain and disgust, we’re in a privileged enough position to take a deep breath, dive into life, and make a better choice.

1. *Jon Ronson on Guys We’ve Fucked

2. *Invisibilia, Flip the Script

3. *Richard Ayoade on Adam Buxton 

4. *Iain Lee on Adam Buxton

5. *Jon Ronson on Adam Buxton

6. *Oliver Burkeman, ‘Moderates are the real tough guys’ 

7. *This American Life, For Your Reconsideration

I suspect much of it is being freelance, and having no colleagues to discuss things with, or to distract me. One former colleague would probably say, ‘It’s all cyclical – these things always come around.’ But – even though I avoid TV news, don’t click on articles on my rare visits to Facebook, and limit myself to reading five tweets per Twitter visit, just to check there is still a world out there – I can’t get the headlines out of my head. ‘How to survive an Autocracy’; ‘We’re *this close* to the European far-right rise of the 1930s’; ‘Stephen Hawking gives humanity only 1,000 more years’; ‘Economic inequality has historically triggered rise in isolationism, racism and aggression’; and, my personal favourite, that long piece about how we’re just about due a massive war to wipe most of us out.  

I can’t ignore them, once they’re in. I can just about manage when I’m on my own, working, or trying to work; but when the kids are home again all I can think of is how would they survive a war/where could they be sent to be safe/would they manage without us/who would take care of them/what if they got caught in a looting incident/what if we all slowly starve to death/what if we have to hide from military forces – could the younger ones stay quiet enough for long enough/what would we pack in an emergency/will it be safe for the kids to speak out for minorities as we’ve encouraged them/how soon would we betray friends or neighbours to protect the kids and on and on and on. The smallest argument between them feels like horrible foreshadowing. It feels like there’s a vice around my chest and around my head, and constant adrenaline flooding my veins. Of course, no one wants to be those characters from between-the-wars film and literature, insisting War Will Never Come Again, but my current feelings aren’t healthy. There has to be a middle ground: being aware, but still functioning day-to-day. I understand that. 

I’d say I miss debates about student loans and NHS funding, but of course they are all teeth on this same cog. Privatisation vs nationalisation: shareholders might be able to invest more, but they demand more returns so workers earn less and less and the 1% has a larger and larger piece of pie. An unequal society never functions well for long. And there’s no comfort in knowing the sun will rise tomorrow – who knows if we’ll be there to see it? 

But what has happened so far, in actuality: Clinton had more people voting for her, but lost the election. More people supported her in that country than supported the President-Elect. This is a good thing (even if the electoral college negated that Good Thing). The Tories may have won a majority in the last general election, but so far have yet to trigger Article 50, and plenty of legal battles stand in their way. France is planning to close all coal power stations in the next seven years; more countries are producing more renewable energy. There’s some hope that major corporations will support diversity and environmental interests. And, ultimately, there’s the hope that you have to really pull apart something that’s slightly broken to have the slightest chance of fixing it properly. 

Again: I don’t know. I don’t want to ostrich my head right in the molten outer core of the Earth. I don’t want to close my eyes. Can we make a rule that a catastrophising essay can’t be written/reposted without a constructive action we can take, alongside it? My friend says I need to calm my frantic lizard brain. That’s true. Also true: across the world, feminism needs to lift *all* women up. We need to build up or reconnect with inclusive, diverse communities. Don’t just click on the ‘email my MP this petition’ box – call them, even if it’s a four-minute call. Go to their surgeries. Get your voice heard. Give your time, if you can spare any at all, to charities. And whatever you do: don’t go and watch a film about impending world wars and mass global chaos. 

Oops.

I remember sitting on my sofa one cold, dark January afternoon in 2009, watching Barack Obama being inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States of America. I squeezed my infant daughter and howled with bursting joy, tears streaming down my face, at the hope and goodness this seemed to offer us all. The world seemed brighter the next day. It felt like millions of people had all done something good at once, and that choice would make life better for millions more people.

It was wonderful.

This, now, is not so good. Despite Clinton winning the popular vote by more than 630,000, the American people now have someone noooooooot greeeeaaaaat due to move in to the White House in the next few months, someone still wholly focused on criminalising abortion and deporting immigrants. Not only that, the Republican party have control of the House and the Senate. Here in the UK, Theresa May, she of the “Go Home, Immigrants” vans is powering through the process to trigger Article 50, despite the EU Referendum being explicitly an advisory, rather than a binding, referendum, because I guess 38% of the voting public saying, ‘Yeah, let’s get the fuck out of this madhouse where an innocent man isn’t even allowed to tell a few harmless racist jokes?’ is evidence enough to ignore a sweeping majority of economists, environmentalists, business leaders, charities, party leaders, and the governor of the Bank of England etc etc. (I know, I know, that’s how democracy™ works. I know.) And the opposition ahaha opposition hahaha the opposition, Labour, are hahahah… well. Their position is best summed up here, I think. 

BUT! But. I have had a revelation. And like all my revelations, it was someone else’s first. This thread by Marco Rogers is both brilliant and accurate: we white liberals are to blame for this. And I know that blame isn’t in short supply right now, and it doesn’t do a whole lot of anything on its own, but bear with me, because this is important to accept before we begin more productive work.

Our white liberal gang learnt, eventually, that racism and misogyny and homophobia came in all shapes and sizes, could be internalised and institutional, could be your aunt and uncle at Christmas, could be the security guard following your black Twitter friend around her local department store. We listened to these stories, and we gradually, piece by piece, started to begin to be able to slightly conceive of what life is like if you aren’t white, straight, able-bodied, let alone male etc etc. Turns out: straight white people, collectively, often treat everyone else below them on the ladder of privilege pretty badly. Surprise!

But it’s hard to address police racism. It’s tricky to question why your company seems to promote only young men. It’s difficult to get parliament to answer why ethnic minorities are three times less likely to crop up as MPs than as average British citizens. But it is easy to stop visiting your racist aunt and uncle. You can go drinking with someone other than the uni friend who still makes ironic jokes about women in the kitchen. You can avoid the parents in the playground who make reference to ‘Gyppos’. It’s easy. And ahhhhhhhhhhhh, doesn’t it feel better? Isn’t it nice to be on a high-horse, unsullied by relationships with those ignorant, bigoted, Torygraph-reading stress-triggers? Ooooh, that’s good.

The trouble is, as Marco Rogers said in his brief and pithy tweets: it doesn’t actually help. In fact, it makes things worse.

If you’re engaged with gently by people you trust and respect — the People Like Us of the white world :( — and you share conversations, and anecdotes, and are shown different ideas, and asked, quietly, privately, to imagine the life of someone very different to you, and it’s pointed out to you very softly to name the last black UK party leader, or the last panel show that featured more than one ethnic minority at once, or to look at the way newspaper front pages frame and feature white middle-class people compared to working-class, or Pakistani, or gay, or disabled, or women, or eastern European, and you start to talk about immigration history in your family history, maybe — JUST MAYBE — you might start to absorb little tiny fractions of new ideas and thoughts and feelings. Maybe.

On the other hand, if you’re constantly told you’re racist, and misogynist, and homophobic, and all the other tropes and memes that might well be totally true, but whatever, because would you listen? Would you google that meme to even get the facts hidden in it? Would you engage thoughtfully and with an open mind to your Facebook pages filled with friends and relatives spitting bile and fury? And I get it, I really do. I feel that bile and fury, and I burn inside with the injustice of the world, but still. It’s our fault.

Because it’s not the job of those who are suffering to comfort those stamping them down. It’s not the job of the people who systematically or individually get paid less, arrested more, are offered fewer opportunities, and receive more physical and verbal abuse, to educate the white Western world about how shittily we behave almost all the time. It’s our job. To talk to our friends, our neighbours, our family, those people we’ve fenced ourselves off from because they say things we morally disagree with — we need to start talking again. Our echo chambers do nothing. It makes us feel good, but it doesn’t actually change minds. We need to rebuild our communities, and make them inclusive, this time. Of everybody. ♫We, white liberals, don’t get to walk away from this♫

And — side note — every journo publishing a piece about how we’re heading into WW3 and all its attendant horrors: we might WELL be, yes, god, probably, but do you know what fear does? It paralyses. It makes us unable to think properly, to make sensible, long-term decisions, it makes it harder to put others first, it makes our brains freeze and nothing gets changed. Instead of focusing on the echoes of the 1930s, why don’t we put our heads together to work out how we can do things differently! Talk to our neighbours about what we’re scared of! Let them talk about what they’re scared of! Even if it’s nonsense! Build up a relationship! I know it’s draining but it’s a hell of a lot better than strengthening our bubbles and calling out ‘Hope you minorities are ok out there!’ while we raise solidarity fists through the walls!

And — new but related side note — I love Twitter, I love it, but I also think that for the last year or so, it’s not the greatest place in the world in which to hang out. It’s wonderful for raising awareness of big, sweeping issues like #BlackLivesMatter, and for trivial, wonderful, hilarious things like the Olympics opening ceremony, and Eurovision — my god, Eurovision on Twitter is everything good in the world — but Twitter is 140 characters per tweet. Even if you link tweets together, you’re still standing on a street corner with a megaphone. Which sometimes is great! Sometimes that’s what those situations demand! But in terms of nuance, and debate, and subtlety, and learning something completely contradictory to your previous beliefs, it’s not ideal. It’s the same behaviour that makes me want to weep when I watch PMQs, or Question Time, or even just the news these days. Stop shouting just to show you’re cleverest! Stop confusing one-liners with communication! Stop trying to win this conversation! And again: I’m guilty of all of this. Retweeting articles that made me furious. Laughing at bigots. Unfollowing or blocking Tories in my timeline. And in my life.

It doesn’t actually make sense.

I don’t know. I’m exhausted, and frightened, and angry, and my hope sometimes feels like naivety, but come on, guys: passing around articles about the awfulness of our enemies doesn’t seem to be working for anyone, does it? If you’re in a position of privilege, at any level, use your spider senses and admit that with that great privilege comes great responsibility. And maybe it’s time to accept ours.

I’ve been genuinely successful in distracting myself from the US election for the most part – I’m off twitter, away from the frantic TV news-cycle, trying to concentrate on work I need to do. But someone on Instagram captions their pic that they’re flying home from the US this evening, leaving without knowing who has won, and landing in the UK tomorrow to the news of the next president. I wonder whether my dad (who captained commercial US routes frequently) would have made an announcement mid-flight, as soon as he knew. I wonder whether it would cause a riot on board. I wonder when we’ll all remember it generally suits more of us across this small planet if we support kindness and generosity rather than the promise of lower taxes and no damn strangers in town. 

Taking vast swathes of the summer off means various work tasks and deadlines have piled up, and I only get to bed at 5.30am. My alarm wakes me two hours later, where one child is standing fully dressed for school, teeth brushed, book in hand, and reporting that the other two are downstairs just finishing their breakfasts now. I feel that I am a terrible parent who has also done something terribly right. Comme ci, comme ça. 

By noon I have fallen asleep on my laptop on the living room floor, halfway through a freelance job. The doorbell is ringing. My friend is at the door, travelled from far distant lands, and come to take me to lunch in his mother’s borrowed soft-top, glinting outside in the sudden sun. We head out of town, towards a pub where they bring us tiny salted fish and roasted dates, pigeon and scallops and venison and fondant potatoes. We have bloody Marys, cherry soufflés, and I discover he hasn’t ever read The Secret History, or Prep, or I Capture the Castle, or even the Dark is Rising series, and I am filled with a great joy that those discoveries are lined up before him. 

Back in the car, he says we can go anywhere but Ikea. I pick a vague direction, then we follow signs to any village whose name takes our fancy. There are tiny post-office-and-general-stores; dusty-looking pubs with men outside smoking and frowning at us; new builds like old cottages; old cottages like melting stone, which have crept so close to the road I worry they’ll keep flowing, blocking off those higher up the road altogether; chip shops full of children on their way home from school; lichened gates to weedy country house drives; a woman brushing horses in a field; an old stone cross, all passing, slide slide slide, no slowing, no stopping, no reasons. 

We sing Christmas carols (I do the descant, when I can remember it; he does the bass, when he can) and I let the wind knot my hair and whip away our laughter. We scream at each other when we choose a bad song. We both feel sick from too much food, too much laughter, hairpin turns in a car which is part sun-lounger, part 3D-ride. I cannot stop laughing. 

We drive straight to school to collect the elder two, and their faces as the roof slides back makes me hope they’ll remember this, how much they love it (for once, not Will they remember me, which is a nice break from my usual morbidity). For our final performance, the two of us sing In the Bleak Midwinter to the two of them, silent in the back of the car, dazzled by the sun and the car and the two adults who haven’t really changed since before these babies were born. 

I go for a run at the tail-end of the day, trying to run off my anger from this post-referendum collapsing tower of shit and self-interest. I make it through one song before I hear a wolf-whistle, from a someone too dim to wait until I’m further than arm’s reach. I take out one earbud, turn back to him. He is young, probably no more than twenty, with a slight, embarrassed-looking friend. They are only slightly more than my height, barely more than my build. 

What did you say? I ask, turning back towards him. He smirks, and tries to walk around me. I put my hand flat on his chest. 

What did you say to me? I ask again. Normally in these situations, my voice gets higher, my hands shake; I am utterly lacking in authority. But I have been deadened since the referendum result, bashed again and again by worsening news. The latest, that reports of racist incidents have gone up 57% since the result, makes my voice calm, low, firm. 

Get your hands off me! he shrieks, smirking. 

I’m sorry, I say, Don’t you like it? Do you feel like an object that I can just treat how I want? My hand is still planted on his chest, the tip of my fingers resting on his collarbone. 

Get your hands off me! he says again. I’m going to call the police. 

Call them. Do you want me to call them? I can call them for you, if you like. (It is full sunlight. There are at least ten people within ten metres of us. I do not feel afraid, for once.) 

I’m going to call the fucking police on you. Leave me the fuck alone! he says. He comes closer to me, almost resting his forehead against mine, almost touching the tip of his nose to mine, suddenly serious. My finger-ends dig into his collarbone as I hold my arm steady. His face hardens. I don’t care if he hits me. His friend, over my shoulder, sniggers – it feels like at him, rather than at me. The man in my face looks at his friend, and his face softens, almost embarrassed, but not at how he behaved, more that he’s found himself in this absurd situation with this ridiculous woman. 

I’m going to keep walking, he says, and you can follow me if you like, but you’re being mental. 

Am I? I say. Am I? Is it creepy? Does it make you uncomfortable? I keep pace with him for a metre or two, but my legs need to run and the children will be home soon and I’ve got bigger fish to fry than this dipshit. Fine, I say, I’m going to keep running. But I’d like you to consider just taking five seconds – five seconds, that’s all – to think about what you did, and how much women hate that, and how it’s horrid, and it’s scary. 

I can respect that, his friend says gently, and smiles at me. 

Thanks dude, I say. 

I run a better time that I’ve ever run that route before, making it home still buzzing, powered by adrenaline and the angry thought that they could have been meeting friends, and I wouldn’t have had the courage to do what I’d done if there had been eight of them, or six, or four, or if they’d looked thirty or forty or fifty, or six foot something, or mean, or drunk. I would have just run on, because I like being alive, and felt shit for the rest of my day. 

I hope his friend recounts the story to their other friends. I don’t care how badly I come across. And I hope even one of them thinks about it, even if it’s only for five seconds. 

The more concerned everyone is for me, the worse I feel, like I’m just about keeping my own sloshing supply of panic under control but every time someone offers me a top-up it threatens to spill out and flood us all away. This morning, J and I take the kids to school together, and I find myself humming the alternate version of the alphabet that I was taught at 9 years old by the teacher who did our school plays, that we were encouraged to sing when we felt anxious and mouth-dry in the moments before we stepped onstage. Stuff learnt early beds in deep. 

At the hospital, there is a similar delay to my last visit, but this time I have someone with me, and we both are laughing, and when we’re finally called in, I feel almost like a normal person might feel in this situation. 

The neurologist seems different this time, although maybe it’s just the bright blue sky behind him; the golden-blue light of the promise of better days, I think afterwards, in hyperbolic giddiness. I work through my list of questions, each answer surprising us: not that serious, low risk, long term danger minimal, until we’re just pummelling him But are sure and But what about and But how can you tell, on and on until we have to admit a beautiful defeat, and I want to cry even though I don’t seem to be able to do that anymore, goddammit. 

Afterwards, I go for a run in the cold bright day and a flock of birds turns above my head, a whole lace curtain of tattered, feathered underbelly sweeping over me, welcoming in a New Era with such cartoonish positivity that as I run, along the river, along with the sun, my upbeat new playlist in my ears, I would cry again now, if I did cry, which I still don’t, for the sheer joy of good health and good family and good hope. 

And my brain says: That’s all well and good, until we see the neurosurgeon and hear whether you’ve got to have your skull opened up. 

And I say: Who do you think you’re kidding? You had me fooled for a minute, but the verdict’s in: you’re on my team now, buddy. 

My urge is always to sleep when I feel stressed, and the urge is even stronger now I worry that any anxiety will trigger another seizure. Consciously accepting that Christmas will be ruined by having my overdue book hanging over me means that I want to take to my bed immediately. When I receive a shitty work email, cancelling a job I’d been really looking forward to, I don’t even make it off the sofa, but just wrap myself in a blanket and lie down with heavy eyes.

The babies turn it into a bedtime game, tucking me in and giving me extra cushions, fat-bash kisses smudged on my cheeks and forehead. The smallest one slaps me on top of the head and babbles a song in my ear. I think: Maybe I should commit to this. Give up writing altogether and just hang out with these guys, my mind fully on them for once. 

Then I realise I’ve been ignoring the last few minutes of their plans as I try to think of the exact words to capture their cream-cheese-and-sweet-soil scent, and think: I couldn’t give it up, even if I wanted to. 

My consultant seems angry with me — a cancelled appointment that I’d considered duplicated but he thought I’d missed; neither of us had understood the significance of results he hadn’t seen — and it takes me a while to understand what this anger’s for, right up until he softens and says, ‘I only saw your MRI this morning, and we found something.’ He beckons me around his desk and pauses, then asks, ‘What’s your background?’ and I snort, either in my head or out loud, and say, ‘Not neurology?’ and he smiles at me like I’d been trying to make him laugh, and frrrrrrrps with his mouse through the slices of my brain on the MRI before a cluster of darkness comes up, spreading through several layers, and I walk back around the desk before I fall down, and think, How is no one here with me? 

He talks slowly and calmly, and I hate him; it’s an argument I’ve had in relationships that this tone isn’t calming, it’s controlling, and I don’t need control, I need empathy and information. But he says we’re in no rush, it’s not an emergency: it’s blood vessels that have probably been that way my whole life, and they irritated a nerve and caused my summer seizure. He hesitates to use the word ‘stroke’ in our conversation, but I make him say it. 

I try to think of the questions I asked in Cancer Dad’s appointments, try to think of the information the people who I should have insisted be at this appointment with me would want to know. He mentions surgery, and uses the phrase ‘cutting it out’, which, frankly, when I’d prepared for a three-minute meeting where they’d just gently chastise me for even wasting their time by showing up, is not something I’d really anticipated. I forgive him, though, because he answers my same questions three or four times when, rather than listening, I keep looking out of the window and letting my thoughts bang against the opposite brick wing of the hospital. 

When I get back home my mother is there, playing with the baby, and she and I try to hammer this diagnosis into some kind of acceptable development. I tell her that I’m jealous of Cancer Dad for getting all the way to see his children grown up, happy, settled, with children of their own. How lucky he was. She reminds me of a summer cocktail party on their RAF base that he’d taken her to when she was pregnant with my eldest sister; how by Christmas he was the only man from that party still alive. He had plenty of tastes of early mortality, thanks very much. 

Shortly afterwards, the neurologist in the family gives me a call, all the way from Australia, and uses my favourite tone: no-nonsense, factual, conversational. He describes the blood vessel cluster as simply a kind of birthmark, and when my sister hisses in the background ‘a birthmark that could kill you’, I’m utterly reassured, knowing that she can read his body language and see the joke is OK. 

When she hears that one potential treatment is glueing the grape-cluster of vessels, my sister offers to post me a glue gun for Christmas. I’ll just have to trust my brain to behave in the meantime.

Only when I’m leaving the house, foot on the bike pedal, kissing the children before pushing down the front step and out onto the road, do I realise how little I want to do this on my own. My seizure was four weeks ago, and besides that midnight ambulance ride to the creeping, bleeping, whispering hospital - in the fresh morning light in our hospital room I say to J, “The night is dark and full of terrors,” and we laugh, like that can capture waking up to paramedics in my bedroom, or the drunk man threatening police along the hospital corridor, or my minutes-long vegetative state - I’ve felt fine, never better. But cycling away from the house, the children calling I LOVE YOOOUUU through the letterbox as they smell my fear, I am frightened. I focus on pedalling; cycling was a good idea, even if I can’t lift my eyes more than two metres in front of me, my heavy heart, my heavy head, my heavy eyes. 

At the hospital I cycle round and round looking for the bike stands, marvelling at the bloody-minded dark humour of these places: the unavoidable decay, the unstoppable entropy, the inevitable death. Toppled laundry racks, broken beds, rusting tanks. 

At the MRI unit, someone shows me where I can lock my stuff up. When she comes back in for me, I’ve somehow looped my bra strap twice round one arm with the other one wedged into my jumper sleeve, elbow-first. She says, “Apparently you can leave your bra on.” Inside the scanning room, the radiographer tells me how, even as a fan of the franchise, he nearly walked out of Terminator Genysis when they not only turned an MRI scanner off and on again (impossible, he explains, that’s weeks of refilling the helium), but also *up*. I laugh. He looks at my trainers as I lie down and says, Runner? And I say yes, because why the hell not. At the top of my head cage, there’s an angled mirror showing my feet, and the desk where the radiographer sits. I don’t understand why they give that mirror until I’m fully in the machine, and the roof and walls are inches from my face, and all I can think is Look in the mirror and breathe, just breathe, look in the mirror and breathe, and I can’t even fall asleep because if I close my eyes it feels most like being buried alive. At one point I see him take off his glasses to more closely examine something on screen - is he surprised by something? - and I wonder if I’m sick in here would they be able to get me out before I choked on it. 

Tssssss tkk tkk tkk tkk unggghhhhhhhhhhhh it goes, for twenty minutes, while I try to stop swallowing and breathing and thinking and feeling. The body temperature air being blown over my face, and the hard plastic vibrations, and my chewed-on fear: all of these make me feel like I’m back on a long-haul plane. Then it’s done, and I’m out, and if I’m talking too loud it’s only because the device is so damn deafening, despite the ear plugs and pads he gave me. I cycle home. We eat Snickers ice creams in the garden and plan tomorrow.