How are you? I wish I had something more incisive to greet you with, but the speed with which everything occurs means it would be irrelevant, distasteful or a viral punchline a few hours later. 

I have been to the cinema for the first time in six months, and continued my regular habit exactly where I’d left it by attending a first-thing-in-the-morning screening of Tenet with only one other person in the cinema, sitting miles away and also on their own (the only way to watch a film, I say). Fucking Tenet, though. I mean, I have really missed going to the cinema, partly because I love films and partly because there’s such a small-scale decadence to occasionally going there solo at 10am on a Tuesday morning, and those tiny pleasures (which, of course, are currently no longer tiny) are just the things to keep me going.

But the film. Oh god, the film. I wish… I wish I could collate my thoughts into something which doesn’t just rapidly descend into a frustrated scream. I wish success didn’t mean people couldn’t say no to you. I wish I liked Nolan’s Batman films, for a start, since so many seem to get so much from them (see also: Breaking Bad, Killing Eve and Line of Duty), but I’ve always found them silly, really dumbly written, and badly made — I can’t hear much of the dialogue, and the action sequences are frequently shot with so many cuts and movement that’s it’s impossible to follow, something George Miller could teach him about so beautifully — and they’re so bloody solemn. Gotham is a grim place, but there’s a boring pomposity in fetishing that one-note grimness, and Nolan has it nailed. Having a character genuinely laugh at something doesn’t render your film light-weight; it creates contrast, and human engagement, something these serious (but sci-fi)/serious (but fantasy)/serious (but adult man dresses in a cape) films too often lack, as if a strained, one-note way of speaking will cancel out the frivolous, actually enjoyable genre aspect of the film. 

That lack of humanity is shared by Tenet. After a certain point, I simply don’t care. Is the nuke going to explode before Batman can something something something? *shrugs* Will the Tenet team manage to stop some sort of bad thing happening? Yes? No? Don’t mind, fine either way. Is Tenet nice to look at? Yes, but in a sort of “Christ, are we still holding up billionaire oligarch lifestyles as an aspirational thing at the moment?” very pre-2020 mood. Does it make sense? No, but that alone doesn’t mean it isn’t good — some great films, and some great Nolan films, take several goes to fully enjoy, and some are more enjoyable with every watch. Do I give a single fig about the outcome of the film or for any character after 20 minutes? Nope.

One major issue is that Nolan has made Inception, a masterpiece of film-making meta-commentary. How, once you’ve watched Cobb and Ariadne discuss the leaping-about way of conversations in films/dreams (stopping and starting in completely new locations) can you take the same thing seriously between Neil (Neil. Neil.) and The Protagonist? (I would like to see how many women read this screenplay along the way and just gave a small, inner sigh at the main character being named ‘The Protagonist’.) As their boring expositional chats chop between pavement and public transport and plaza, one can’t help remembering how well Nolan previously pointed this out, yet has reverted to that self-conscious device to no benefit at all. It’s like he’s never seen his own films.

Similarly, the much-lauded aeroplane scene is completely without the necessary ingredient of tension because we’ve already been shown what happens, not just in other films but in this one, about fifteen minutes before. It’s like Bill & Ted promising they’d do whatever it was they needed right now, but in the future, and their momentary problem being solved by a loose sense of timey-wimey future self-ness. There’s nothing at stake at the airport, and between us being shown what happens and the scene beginning, nothing has happened for us to even hope the mission isn’t completed. It felt like the criminally underused Himesh Patel was in an instructional video for fuss-free plane-borrowing; compare it to the similar scene in Casino Royale (perhaps the only modern Bond film worth bothering with) and the flatness and mechanical nature of Tenet is all too apparent. The twists of the film, such as they are, are likewise foreseeable for even the least Pauline Kael among us. Who could it be under the mask? WHO COULD IT POSSIBLY BE? 

The Prestige, an earlier film of Nolan’s, is such a contrast to this that I’m stunned I didn’t watch it the moment I came home to clear my brain out. It’s smart, logical, moving, tense, engaging, and if there are plot holes (probably) I didn’t care because a) I really, really cared about what happened to each person, each of whom spoke and behaved like humans, not AI script-bots, and b) it gave this household a v useful shorthand nickname for anyone who wanted something one day but completely inexplicably changed their mind or denied it the next. I recommend it. I do not recommend Tenet. 

Of course, I feel guilty for caring so much about this, and writing about some fucking multi-squillion-dollar film with everything else happening. I am feeling extremely, crushingly ineffectual presently, and have completely come off all social media which from time to time would remind me of the efficacy of protest, of letter-writing and petition-signing and contacting one’s MP, so change feels hopeless and November’s blows seem inevitable. I am trying to knit my mind back together before then with small acts of body-work: cooking and running, drawing and swimming. I worry that I will drown in guilt and fear if I stop for a moment. It is pathetic, but I am still breathing, for now. 

My cynicism-filter is also at its finest mesh, because it cannot cope with the reality of our leaders and the UK’s political discourse: only small-fry stuff gets through, the Sali Hugheses and Jack Monroes, small-time fantasists who manipulate and virtue-signal to build lives of back-slapping consumerist celebration and Twitter Power Leader Boards. I’ve listened again to The Purity Spiral, and also to Desperately Seeking Sympathy, and wondered how many intelligent, kind-hearted people waste time supporting these innocent, victimised mini-Trumps just because they use the right buzzwords and also appear to hate the Tories. 

I wish I could give you some of the lights in my heart that keep me going — the occasional pure moon-eating delight of the people I live with — but here are more feasible treats instead.

1. Mike Birbiglia’s podcast Working It Out is a treasure, particularly the first episode with Ira Glass, which I think everyone who works in a creative field will listen to and wish they had an Ira Glass to critique their work. I like the idea of documenting works in progress, and not carrying any shame when things don’t work yet.
2. The Rose Matafeo episode of The Horne Section podcast, because I love her and I love stupid and brilliant songs. Several housemates have discovered Taskmaster too, which makes this a nice bridge.
3. Sarah & Duck, the BBC programme for tiny children. We never really used kids’ TV when they were little, but this now functions as a salve for when we’ve watched something truly terrifying like Poirot or a Marvel film, and besides the fact that Duck is absolutely fucking hilarious, the animation is staggeringly beautiful. The Islamic geometric patterns of the garden hedge; the soft blue-green hum of the “glow” section of the library, filled with lamps and luminescent books; the motes of dust caught in the sun-rays of Scarf Lady’s window. It’s a balm. 
4. Thanks to two housemates becoming great cooks over lockdown, I’ve rediscovered lots of my cookbooks and found 2015’s Simply Nigella to be a real corker. The rice with sprouts, chilli and pineapple, the drunken noodles and the Thai noodles with cinnamon and prawn are worth the entry fee alone. It’s quite chicken- and pomegranate seed-heavy, but even if you don’t like those, it’s extremely nice to be eating something that isn’t on our usual five-meal rota (and is also extremely delicious).
5. I was solo for some of the summer, and managed to watch a few excellent films, including BlacKkKlansman, The Peanut Butter Falcon and Love & Friendship. Cannot recommend these highly enough (*whispers* particularly the latter because it’s as painfully sharp as Austen should be, and we’d made the mistake of watching Emma. and I’m still so cross I’m not sure I’m ready to discuss everything that was wrong with it publicly yet).
6. I read Esther Williams’ memoir, The Million Dollar Mermaid. Perfect for anyone who loves that period of Hollywood, and full of juicy (as well as some pretty traumatic) episodes from the swimmer and actress’s amazing life. To give you a sense of it, chapter one is called “Esther Williams, Cary Grant, and LSD”. Super good. 

I hope you all keep well, pals x

I’ve recently been doing some day-job work for a book about humanity’s future. Boy oh boy, did I need to do some very, very slow deep breathing and distant staring out of windows while reading that. It’s an amazing book, but sometimes my frustration and terror, at not only where we’ve got ourselves, but also where we are positioning ourselves for our next tomorrows, are very, very enormous. This book offers hope in the form of creativity within science which I think is a good possibility, practically speaking, but I wonder if we need more stories first, to tip our global, political and social focus. Stories to remind people of the hardships which have gone before when we’ve handed over control to those ruled by greed, fear, and hatred; stories to remind people that we all have a better time if we just try to share the fucking cake and not try to punch anyone who would also like some, please. Fewer stories about the shoes/vase/pillow/hat/protein powder/lipstick/sofa/storage solution to finally fill you with happiness. And I say that as someone who loves things, who very much wants rings and sunglasses, dog coats and plates, face creams and t-shirts and spatulas. But we just fucking can’t have everything we want, because – honestly, if we haven’t understood that yet, then what really is there to say? 

Is self-sacrifice the only flavour of tale that can change behaviour? Does it take someone losing something major, or risking something major, before people can feel or behave differently, rather than bubble-shaped lecturing bullshit like this? This was a remarkable episode of the excellent This is Criminal, covering the utterly inspiring and staggering career of Chicago TV reporter Russ Ewing, a man who endangered himself repeatedly to bring dignity and protection to black men and women surrendering to the corrupt police force of the 70s, 80s and 90s. Do we need more of these stories? Are enough people still willing to stand up for something, when they might be torn down for something completely different? 

Another interesting listen recently, on Purity Spirals – the examples within the documentary are deliberately innocuous-seeming, but the historical occurrences mentioned in this are well worth noting. It’s all well and good to pretend Cancel Culture is about speaking up and not letting Bad People Get Away With Things, but it doesn’t actually seem to be working, does it? Unless there’s a coherent moral code that your society agrees on (and of course we have neither one moral code nor one single society) then it’s just a lot of angry shouting and sharp jabbing, which – again, would love to know otherwise – doesn’t transform us into brave and self-sacrificing civil rights campaigners. But hashtag be kind isn’t an answer: it’s further gutlessness, because we’d (I’d) all rather be buying those scarves and trainers than not buying them, and then protesting outside offices and parliament, and writing piles of letters nightly to CEOs and MPs and investors, giving up time from scrolling through apps to engage critical thinking skills and hand valuable hours over to the hard work of social improvement. (The fact that I know people who do this makes it worse, of course. I have no excuse.) Abstaining from actively writing hate tweets to someone doesn’t lessen the wider destructive social effects of a) sitting on our devices all the damn time, and b) being continually fed the idea that consuming more and more is the only way to find meaning in our brief existence. And I don’t know how to unite my growing loathing of tech with the aforementioned book’s suggestion that we all need to be more science- and tech-literate to survive our future. So I’m improving at crosswords instead. 

One personal silver lining: I haven’t watched TV at all this year, barring The Great Escape during half term with one of the children – my mother-in-law and I got up at the exact same moment (when Bartlett and MacDonald board the bus) and left the room giggling with tension because neither of us can bear that bit – but now the child has learnt to mime picking something up off the floor five steps away when I say, “I can’t see a bloody thing,” which honestly is the best, and possibly only reason to reproduce. No TV has meant that I’ve read tonnes more so far, as well as enjoying all the Agatha Christie BBC radio plays I can find on youtube, and getting out for more runs and swims and all that jazz. I swam in the sea twice last week, near some seals, and fortunately survived with both hands intact. 

I promise I will write the bread recipe soon. I felt it was too hypocritical today, when I made the most beautiful loaf, with the most perfect rise, crust and crumb, and all because I forgot to put in the salt so it tastes of absolutely nothing. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. 

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

I promised to share the arancini recipe from a while ago, but of course we were all too busy eating it for me to remember what I’d done. In essence, I had some leftover squash risotto (roast the squash while you make your risotto – lots of butter in the base of the big saucepan, whatever wine is lying around, salt, etc etc, roast the squash until it’s soft and crispy at the edges), some mozzarella and a strange sudden craving. 

Beforehand, pull the mozzarella apart until you have half-thumb-sized pieces, and chop some sun-dried tomatoes. Beat an egg or two in bowl; a large couple of puffs of flour in another; a good few handfuls of breadcrumbs in a third (I just blitz some heels of bread in a food processor or equivalent). 

Coat your whole palm and a tiny bit of the base of your fingers with a large tablespoon of cold risotto. In the centre of the spread, put your thumb-sized bit of mozzarella and few snatches of dried tomato, then slowly close your fist and seal the whole thing up with pure skill. Make all the balls. 

While a big, heavy-based pan full of vegetable oil is heating up (you want the oil to be an inch or so deeper than the diameter of the balls), dip each ball in the flour, then the egg, then the breadcrumbs. When a cube of bread (leftover from the blitzing?) cooks fairly swiftly in the oil, without burning or lying there absorbing oil, you can start putting in the balls, 4 or so at a time. Turn them occasionally. It won’t take long. Five minutes? I can’t remember, but I know I had to keep from picking them up from the boiling oil with my fingers, they looked that pleasing. 

Once golden brown all over, remove not with fingers, but with a slotted spoon, then cook the remaining batches. Serve with some kind of sauce, if you like, or not, also delicious. I love it when a recipe goes as well as I’d like. 

Summer continues to be good. My 4,000% healthy obsession with this old Lip Sync video has given me a new hobby (bicep curls, just like I always dreamed as a little girl) and we’ve swum outside enough for me to be on first name terms with several herons and most of the local midges. Friends teach me about local trees and plants, and the water temperature tells me so much more about the turning seasons than any calendar. We pick brambles, and apples, cherry plums and an enormous cucumber that has suddenly appeared in the little greenhouse. I think that maybe dreading the future doesn’t mean I can’t occasionally enjoy the present. 

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I’ve been listening to: 

1. This excellent look at boredom, something that’s massively undervalued. We tech away as much discomfort as we can with TVs and phones and iPads, when actually most boredom is unspeakably valuable, both as a creative force and as a bonding tool. 

2. Have I recommended this before? I’ve listened to it so many times. To be fair, I’d listen to absolutely anything with Michael Sheen, such is his voice and his ambition to do even a bit of good. Please don’t ever tell me anything awful about him. 

3. This Criminal episode is just lovely. 

4. I hadn’t realised for how long I’d been saving this, but Debbie Reynolds (when she wasn’t being interrupted by a giddy Alec Baldwin HEM HEM) was just the damn best. Go and watch Singin’ in the Rain to remind yourself. 

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. 

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