Roll ‘em boys - only Hunter S. Thompson could.

It is wrong to boast, but in the beginning, my plan was perfect. - John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Upon this Rock which contains one of the most perfect turns in an essay.

These are times when what is to be said looks out of the past at you — looks out like someone at a window and you in the street as you walk along - Young Adam by Scotland’s greatest writer, Alexander Trocchi.

It seems how the world must look when you’re not looking - David Searcy, from his essay The Hudson River School, from the collection Shame and Wonder, which is truly a wonder.

The human epistemologies embedded in the six thousand spoken ways of knowing God compare with the six thousand ways a river can plunge from high country to low, or the six thousand ways dawn might break over the Atacama, the Tanami, the Gobi, or the Sonora. - Barry Lopez, Six Thousand Lessons.

These are lines I return to often, not just for their content, but for what I can learn from them. They are lines that pay attention but have also had attention paid to them, and in doing so and having so, are worth paying attention to. This is how you read like a writer, you are alive to what other people have done and are doing; how the reader is taken into a piece and guided through it. They are not simply an assortment of words. None of them contain similes.

I try and teach this, knowing I don’t have enough time really to teach it to the degree I want to, but immediately, the students’ writing becomes better even if my coffee making skills don’t.

When I get back from buying coffee, I send a friend an article with the headline AI has been in 3 literary scandals this week. And it’s only Wednesday. Under it I write, thank god AI’s doing my job for me. They miss the joke, and reply ‘the girl smiled like a sunrise over a sink’ with, even you couldn’t. The girl smiled like a sunrise over a sink is a line so devoid of meaning that it verges on genius. I really don’t possess the imagination to write a simile that bad. I have developed a bad habit with another friend where we send things written by AI that people we know pass of as their own. There’s a tiny chance this is a bitchy thing to do, but as Charli XCX pointed out, there’s a difference between being a bitch and being bitchy; at this stage of the apocalypse you have to take your pleasures where you can find them.

There is a certain voice AI generated writing has that has a knack of appearing to say something while saying nothing at all. It is smooth writing, so smooth both the eye and the mind have nothing to snag on. It feels like drinking too much diet coke, in that you feel both sick and thirsty afterwards but in no way satisfied. It creates the apparition of being something while containing nothing at all. I find this oddly compelling in the way I find the reasons people would use it the same; it is as though we are now utterly content with the idea of appearing adept at a thing while having no desire at all to learn how to do the thing, which is not only to miss the point of being an artist but to entirely circumnavigate the satisfaction the work of the line creates.

A line is worried, wrestled, honed into being. Last week I showed students some of my recent work, where I reworked a line until it became something I was satisfied with at the time. The wrestling of this line is explained and illustrated perfectly in Ted Hughes’ The Evolution of ‘Sheep in Fog’, where he takes the reader through the development of Sylvia Plath’s poem Sheep in Fog, or Fog Sheep as she called earlier versions. It is a beautiful thing to see this poem take focus and shape, to witness the artistic choices she made and the precision she made them with. This care and attention doesn’t happen if you simply type write a poem about sheep in fog into Chat GPT like I did this morning. The results aren’t bad, I’m not a poet, they’re better than I could do but there’s no depth to it. It simply sounds like something that already exists in the world, in part because it’s been trained by something that already does exist in the world. Which brings us to the idea of influence and how much we all sound like something that already exists - which is too much to go into here - of course we do, but we can through the care and attention we pay to our work, sound like something that has something valuable to say, unlike AI writing that’s designed to be turned into pseudo-intellectual soundbites gaining traction on whatever social platform they’re shared on.

Last year, I saw Irish poet, Padraig O Tuama at Southwark Cathedral, there he said, a made thing is always naïve because it’s just been born. I think of this a lot, not only is this naivety to be expected, it is not to be avoided or to be afraid of. The immediacy of the naivety lessens with the reworking of the piece, with the distillation and crystallisation of thought behind a line whereas bad writing conceals the lack of thought behind a line. It cannot withstand any interrogation. Take the girl smiled like a sunrise over a sink - this line is so bad because there’s no interrogation of the thought behind it, no one has asked what exactly a sunrise over a sink might look like, and how that might translate to a smile. Maybe what makes this line so extraordinarily surprising isn’t the fact it was made by AI when usually only people can write this badly, usually AI smooths it out entirely, what makes the thing so bad is that this story was ever in the running for the Commonwealth Prize, never mind the winner.

After publishing the story, Granta’s Sigrid Rausing said in relation to the possible use of AI, we don’t know yet know, and perhaps we will never know. Call me nostalgic but I really preferred Granta in the days of John Freeman. Slightly more bizarre than Rausing’s statement is the fact judges called the story’s prose, ‘precise yet richly evocative’ as if say they’d never encountered Lydia Davis or Mary Gaitskill or even Gordon Lish writing as himself. This isn’t the only red flag line, I don’t know but she had the kind of walking that made benches become men feels a little imprecise to me and possibly the wrong way round, although I do quite like white rum hot as apology for the way it’s possible to wonder what the hell is being said. Considering the author’s headshots also seem to be AI generated, I want to think this is all a joke or some way of proving a theoretical point; and if it is, it’s one I’m sad I didn’t make first.

Maybe this is what paying attention might prevent in the future, if you are alive to single lines, not simply as a way of filling space, but as a mechanism to contain thought and a vehicle to move a story forward, then you don’t become the kind of judge who calls approximations of meaning precise. Maybe it helps us draw the necessary lines between the real and the fake, and protect the very human endeavour of making art in the first place.

She sits looking down, I am so commonplace she forgets I’m there, instead she focuses on the gherkins and the film she’s watching. I know there’s no hope of getting the jar off her with anything left in it. I love watching her in the same way I love watching all children, they are fascinating for how abandoned they still are, how absorbed they can be in a single task. As I watch her, something almost uncanny happens, I realise I am looking at her face that is also not her face, or at least not her face in the present tense, but her future face. There is a time around the age of nine to ten that you will look at your own children and suddenly there is a flash of who they are growing into. I should not be surprised by this, I’ve seen it thrice before, but still it catches me unawares that she can dare to sit there wearing her thirteen year old face when she’s still four years away from it, she was only recently so small, and now here she is with the pickle jar, her long hair, putting the cake fork down and picking up tortilla chips to dip into the gherkin juice. Some children, they learn too much from their mothers.

I realise I’m not so much looking at her, but that I’m looking at time, in the same way I am every time I hold a stone in my hand. When the kids were wee they’d come home with assorted stones from the beach, and it was important each was taken seriously. I could not throw any of these stones away, the thought of something so old, so knowing, trapped in a binbag made and makes me feel unwell. All of the last year, time’s been upside down. Maybe before that too. Maybe something happened around covid times that ripped time, split it open, and we have not yet worked out how to reassemble it. Maybe it was something to do with turning blue on my birthday during the first lockdown. The ambulance. The oxygen. The necessity of really living after that. Maybe it was the first book. Or the second published seventeen months after it; the exact same unwise age gap between my books as my sons.

I think the answer lies in flight, Ted Hughes again, and I think he is right. I live in the south of England, where for the first half of the year the seasons are ahead of the rest of the country and the second half of the year, significantly behind. If I were here all the time, then maybe I’d settle into its rhythm, but I’m not. Last October, in Scotland, it looked like autumn, felt like autumn but when I came back here and the leaves were still to turn, time rewound. In Rome last May, the grass was late summer dried brown and cracked, but I came back to a riot of Lorca green, each shade different to the other; a green fizzing and screaming life, it was spring, again. I travelled recently, and the leaves weren’t out, buds still tightly furled about to burst, came back here, and the green had appeared in my absence. It made me smile as I walked home from the station in the still warm dark. For a time, this oscillation felt dislocating, it wasn’t only that I didn’t always know where I am, but that I couldn’t place when I was but now it is so deeply curious, becoming curiouser and curiouser, that I like it.

The moving between seasons has the effect of stretching time, or at least concertinaing it, as an accordion might, shrinking and growing in an almost Alice in Wonderland way. I watched Svankmajer’s Alice with my daughter last week. Why is the rabbit a rat, she said, why does he keep his pocket watch inside himself, she said, how will I ever get over the trauma of this, she said. Maybe living here, like this, creates a similar cascade of questions, maybe it discombobulates time for a time, but it’s better than wondering where it all goes, thinking it flies, when if you’re very very lucky and you learn to look at it sideways, as if sidling up to a nervous horse, it stretches itself out long for you.

I am perplexed by this woman. I don’t know where she gets so much fish from. I don’t know why she feeds the gulls, only five minutes from the sea where the pickings are rich and fresh. I don’t know how she can stand to touch so many fish with her hands so bare every day. She is always alone. She is always dressed the same. Her car is never clean. Something like sadness hangs on her, or I have hung my own on her; it is never possible to tell.

Because I am perplexed by her, I notice her every time she arrives to feed the gulls. This morning I look at her throwing handfuls of fish as I sit eating breakfast. Behind her, men are erecting scaffolding against a white wall. I have not noticed this wall before and because I have not noticed it, I suspect it might be newly painted. As she empties her bag, the gulls hover in that way they do. It is then I realise that perhaps all she wants and needs is to be of use in the world. How nice and neat it must feel for her wants and needs to line up like this once a day, every day.

In Ava Anna Ada, as Ada dies, she finally finds the comfort she’s been looking for all of her short life when she realises she is about to be of use in the world, no longer consuming but consumed. Perhaps this is bleak, perhaps this could-be-bleak thinking is a symptom of her illness, tell a doctor a thought like this and they’ll likely pathologise it, they won’t be thank you for your logic.

After the woman leaves and the gulls depart, the men continue to build the scaffolding. They have with them a machine for something else. I can’t see this machine but I can hear it. The noise of it is extraordinary. Someone walks down the street, holding a tray of seedlings, two mothers push buggies after the school run, a man is washing his car. They are all being so useful, and there I am, watching them.

I have been watching for hours. Perhaps this is my greatest use in the world, perhaps a paltry one at that, but I like to see. Maybe this is why I hate the true dark. Why I prefer to wake with the curtains open. Why I had a panic attack in a hotel room last week because of its too-absolute-dark-ness. It is a type of death to be unable to see. I lay earlier this morning when I woke, watching the sky. It was as milky as an opal then, and I thought of my grandmother’s opals, specifically a tiny ring inset with three opals, tiny diamonds between them; engraved on the inside. I cannot remember the specifics of the engraving now, although if I tried hard enough, I could. Maybe I can and I don’t want to tell it. I know it belonged to her namesake, a namesake found in the Clyde the day after the Treaty of Versailles was signed. How it must’ve been then, to be half German, half Scottish, to live in a lime-rendered house and come out to find it painted with slurs. I loved that ring, a ring so tiny everyone said it must’ve belonged to a child. Only she wasn’t a child. A ring I fitted easily at 17. Some circumferences tell their own story.

I lay watching the sky change, thinking how opals were my grandmother’s favourite stone, how much she would have loved this sky, but now I am writing this I remember I am wrong and it was rubies she loved the most, but now I have written that I wonder if I am still wrong, and it was simply that my grandfather bought her rubies the most frequently. I try then to think of what she wore after he died. I think I remember her in pearls the most, and when I talk of her pearls I am not talking of a simple string of pearls although she loved these too; I am talking about a pearl necklace so rare that when it was valued, the valuer couldn’t put a price on it. The story is that when my grandmother’s grandmother came of age at 21, each of the workers on their coastal estate, contributed a pearl to this necklace. They are not big pearls, they are not cultured pearls but saltwater ones; harder to form, harder to find. The necklace is heavy and beautiful and strung with I don’t know how many pearls. Before my first wedding, my grandmother offered me a selection of necklaces to wear. I sat on her bed, as she pulled out boxes from her vast jewellery collection. I didn’t think it special then, for someone to possess so much jewellery, I just thought it how things were. Ten years earlier, my mother sat me on her own bed, opened her own jewellery box and brought out a heavy necklace of South African gold belonging to my father, under it, the first photograph I saw of him. I thought before that, if I saw his face, it would make my own face make more sense. It didn’t. After that, I knew secrets lived in jewellery boxes.

I sat on my grandmother’s bed, that summer I was 21, going through those boxes of necklaces. I put the pearl one on for the first time. It sat heavy on my neck, I felt like a grown up in it. I wanted to wear it, it would’ve gone with the cream silk I’d chosen for my dress. It was perfect. I took it off, put on another chain, a delicate one with a ruby and diamond pendant. You could hardly see it there against my skin, brown still from a spring driving around South Carolina with the windows down, my father’s country music up loud. I was young enough then to still be trying to make sense of things. I chose to wear that necklace. In the one photograph I still have from my first wedding day, it’s nearly invisible.

I want her pearls now. I want to see them again. I want to imagine myself the type of person who could wear them easily to a midweek lunch in the way she used to, like they were nothing at all, over her cashmere jumper. I want to imagine myself the sort of person with boxes of necklaces in her top drawer, satin and silk underwear beneath them. I want to imagine myself the sort of person who keeps things and cares for things carefully. I want to imagine myself the sort of person who does not leave their jewellery behind in hotel rooms. I want to imagine myself the sort of person who remembers to construct themselves carefully every morning. I want to imagine myself the sort of person who makes themselves up with great care. I want to think I have become the sort of person who would chose a necklace that might draw attention.

talk to locals

be alive to the story

always take the flight when the opportunity presents itself, after the flight take the slow train

don’t kidnap a tortoise

if you have to write for a market, make it Italy (or one where they possess good imaginations at least)

when you most want to run, that’s when you have to not

always remember to get your passport stamped when you leave a country, the absence of an even number of stamps will arouse suspicion

live in a forest for a month and you’ll discover exactly what you can and cannot live without. This will present itself as a problem at first, then later, the solution

Jenny Holzer is right about nearly everything

just because it’s bad on paper doesn’t mean it is, likewise the opposite is also true

the art is in keeping at least 92 percent of everything private

there is no such thing as too much Ted Hughes

you cannot keep your out of office on permanently

watching the sky for 30 minutes when you wake up sorts most things out

if that fails, arriving at the sea after an accidental midnight trip across the country might

if both fail, try smoking

if you don’t know where it hurts, Joachim Trier will help you find where it does

let a millionaire steal gin for you

a Bloody Mary will not fix a sore heart but a Bloody Mary, a double espresso and a train to Wales might

sleep with the curtains open

there is a difference between a sore heart and a broken one, be alive to it too

if you don’t know where to run away to, let a street sign decide for you

listening to your sons play music with their dad will make you cry

make mausoleums out of everything

she hides when she is the most visible

doing it for the plot might make it look like you have lost the actual plot

feel first, write later

you are at your best during and after a storm, do not succumb to the lure of calm days

when someone says they saw a falling star, believe them

trust in your ability to find the most interesting (and possibly wayward) person in a room

write what you remember

get yourself off the page/be invisible in a room

you will realise over a time who your one phone call in an emergency is, pay attention to this knowledge

when asked to choose between Rome and Napoli, don’t

there is no such thing as too many anchovies

see also olives

multitasking is a lie

develop tunnel vision and niche obsessions

pay attention to your recurring dreams

the things you think at 3am tend to be correct

always borrow the dog.

Yes, I think the answer is flight…I’ve ended up with twice as much as I had, and all the things I want to keep lost, I read. Ted Hughes again, to Daniel Weissbort, autumn 1969. Sylvia has been dead for six years, Assia and Shura for about as many months. Yes, I think I have been thinking the answer lies in flight. Although the answer to what, I am not sure. Just as I crossed the border into Germany, a heron stood at the side of a pond. I like to think of these birds as a sort of familiar, partly because it’s hard not to with the strange combination of grace and menace they possess, partly because my German families were Herrons, partly because I spent many happy hours watching one on in Tighnabruaich in the west coast of Scotland where the rest of my grandmother’s family were from. Yes, I think the answer is flight.

Reading this, I recall a conversation with a friend last year. We were messing with each other, one of those first sunny afternoons of the year, sitting outside a pub with pints and whisky chasers, the ashtray too full for 4pm and the sun in our eyes. Squinting he rolls another and we get to Bill Callahan, and there are some things you remember and then wonder how it can be that you do, after the beer, the whisky, another night of no food, but you do; we get to Bill Callahan, and his album Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle. I say it means something, this we, try to come up with some theory on the spot, one person wanting the two of them to become one thing, something like that. Nah, he laughs, it just sounds good. He writes songs so I let him be right. I play Too Many Birds on the flight over, if you could only stop your heartbeat for one heart. When my daughter was unwell last year, I couldn’t listen to that song. If I had not already lost my faith, I would have then, with the combination of that song and the illness; if God could not think to stop his heartbeat for one heart, then I’m not sure I want to worship Him.

Perhaps it is that I have been thinking too much about birds. All the crows in Sweden, all the swallows in Scotland, or perhaps it is I have been thinking too much about flight. In thinking about both, I return to Peter Godwin’s Exit Wounds, a brilliant memoir about living as an exile, but also about halfness, and that feeling of never really landing. What it does to you. There’s a great line in it I don’t remember and want to. I run around the house checking every bookcase to try and find the book but it remains unfound. It is likely I put it somewhere safe. The line is something about how refusing to land leaves you rotten or maybe it is that you are not to be trusted; not being able to find the book, I can’t remember, it is seems hardly possible that it was only last summer I interviewed him. Time is doing its stretching thing again. Another friend reminds me late last night of the autumn equinox, how we watched the stars and I refused to believe they’d seen shooting ones. I lay awake on that equinox with my windows open, hearing the birds, and the river further off but louder than the north circular, perhaps it is that you are always in two places at once. This river, those birds, now in a manuscript I am writing; all this method writing, all this thinking of flight, perhaps it is it will get me nowhere.

I begin to worry he’s some sort of puppet, for the way he barely moves, I realise I am talking too quickly, I am telling him how very much I love his shop when really I should be saying nothing at all, when maybe I should be buying something, I have let myself become too excited by the emails, the coffee, the rain, the rare afternoon off. It becomes imperative I leave his shop and never return, although if he is as bad with faces as he appears to be, I could walk back in in five minutes and he likely wouldn’t recognise me. Bye, I say to him, having hardly finished a coherent sentence, and I am running out the door when there it is.

I am not sure if he has a letters section in the shop. I am sure that now, there are not enough letters to sustain one. This fact makes me sad. I have not written a letter in years. I used to enjoy writing them although I rarely posted them. I have always been bad at posting things, often finding letters at the bottom of my bag long after they were written. The same with Christmas cards. I write them. I forget to post them. I would like it to be different. When I stayed in Paris my mother sent me letters from home, she’d tell me about the animals on the farm and the people she had dinner with and I thought her so old and parochial although she was younger then than I am am now; when she stayed in Greece for a time she did the same. They arrived on that thin, blue airmail paper, her writing made smaller to fit the sheets. they made me miss her more. I don’t know where those letters went. I think I replied, although I doubt that now. Perhaps I replied and those replies lie unsent somewhere. Regardless of if he has a letters section or not, right there at the door is a copy of Letters of Ted Hughes. I read many of his letters last year, and have been possessed by them since. I have been afflicted since a teenager with an inability to leave anything Ted Hughes related alone. For a long time, I couldn’t stand him. I thought him a patchy poet and a terrible man. I now think him a patchy poet and a difficult man. Under a redemptive impulse, I pull the book from the shelf. It will be too expensive, I know it. I open the front cover and see the pencilled £5 inside. Surely not, I think. On the cover, Hughes is writing notes, his face bent to the page, the light picking out the details of his hair, his nose, his wrist watch. It is the kind of photograph taken covertly by someone. Inside the cover, there is no photo credit. He is wearing a white shirt, I once joked my favourite Ted is Ted in the white shirt. I once fell in love with a man because he looked like Ted Hughes from the side. I like to think there were other reasons for falling in love with him, but years later, when all I can remember is his profile and his way with words, I doubt the strength of these other reasons.

I take the book to the counter. Smile at the bookseller. He doesn’t smile back. Since I came from near the door I’m not sure if he thinks I just walked in the door and am an entirely different person. I like him, I say, I think I see his eyes widen a little, I tutored at his house, I say, realising too late that without any context this might seem a little unhinged. He fumbles with the card machine. It might be that he wants me to leave. In Devon, he says, no I say, Lumb Bank. He still looks confused, this might be his default setting. Hebden Bridge, I say, he still looks confused, Yorkshire, I say, nice up there, he says, it is, I say as I tap my card. The approved tick appears on the screen. I want out the shop and he wants me out. I pick the book up, run out into the rain.

The Brighton train’s pulling into the station. I jump on it and am so engrossed I run the risk of missing my stop, something that’s not happened since I read AM Homes’ A Real Doll on the bus on my way to uni, terrified someone was reading it over my shoulder. If you’ve read it, you’ll know why, if you haven’t read it and want to know why, it’s here. In these collected letters, we see largely right inside Hughes’ mind, until, after being burned by Alvarez and many other vultures in the wake of Plath’s death, he confesses to Assia Wevill that he’s worried about who might read his letters to her. And there I am reading them. It is a curious sensation, am I reading them for a sense of scandal? Am I reading them to join the other vultures, picking over the bones of a story long dead? Am I reading them because I want to work him out? Am I reading them because I like the mechanisms of his mind? Am I reading them because I hope they make sense of my own mind?

As I am reading them this morning, as I’ve done every day since the day it rained, I think of a quote I saw from Thomas Pynchon, who wrote somewhere I had come up with the notion that someone’s personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is nearly the direct opposite’. I think there’s something in this in connection to the why of the letters and my reading of them and the way the spine is now bent, the pages turned down in neat little triangles, already these letters have accompanied me in the bath, to London, to Devon, to the beach, to several pubs, many nights I wake to find it closed, my left thumb marking where I fell asleep. For a time, I was sleeping well and since this book, I am not, I wake after strange dreams, possessed and dispossessed. I told a friend just after I bought it they could borrow it after me, I have since changed my mind. I take a photo of it, send it to my editor -Ted’s editor- saying, have you seen this. I am evangelical again.

And there it is, the first book I ever owned. I love this book. I take it from any of the possible piles and decide it is for my library alone. It is ripped in places, there are scribbles in others. Inside the front cover, my mother has written my name. How she has written it is curious. She has written my full name, and not the abbreviated portmanteau agreed between her and my father, nor has she used his surname, although at that point, it was the one I was to be known by. When she writes my anglicised name alongside my Hebrew one - as if these two parts could sit in perfect harmony - her writing is stiff; she uses a hand I am not familiar with and from this I realise she was not either. I look at the other books in the pile, the habit I have of writing names and dates inside the inside cover, lifted no doubt from her, and I see I have done the same with each of my children. That sublime moment when their names are still a mystery - you do not know who you have named or how really to write those names; you write them with a flourish the same way you write the name of someone you have recently fallen in love with or hope to admire, these names so new under your tongue you want to repeat them all the time, you to see how they sound in your mouth, and the same when you write them down. The first time I wrote my eldest son’s name it felt like such a mystery I was ever writing it at all that I developed a kind of compulsive habit where I wanted to write it on everything; sometimes still I repeat my children’s names to myself in a kind of stupefied awe that these names in this precise combination have ever come into being at all, and via myself; how can this fact of their existence, so beautiful yet mathematically so defying of any logic, be in any way, true.

The pile of books grows; and it is then I find buried in it, a box photographs from when I was a teenager. There I am, bleach blonde in a short skirt with my best friend, ready for the school ball. It gets cancelled the following year on account of certain (my) behaviours; there’s a photo of my foot in the park, a coke bottle half full of vodka in the corner of the frame; there’s the Parc Monceau and the Tuileries and there’s my sister crawling out onto a roof to watch the boys in the pool and there the Twin Towers still are and there somehow, there’s a cow in the garden and there I am on the Southbank, eclipse glasses on and time’s doing the collapsing thing it does without you asking it to as you sit there that Sunday afternoon, the now becoming then, and so it is, you stand up and go for a walk, in the hope then becomes now again but the thing is with walking, is it wakes your brain up and it is while out walking, all the then and all the now meet, almost impossible lines of convergence crossing each other, as shipping routes do on the Cape; and the first line of a manuscript you both thought and knew unwise to write is right there, knocking, bursting at the base of your skull.

No, you tell it. No, you repeat, go away. You return home, you dream of the sea, the sea you dream of is too full, too close to land. You wake and do not need a dream analyst or anyone with much of a brain to interpret this dream for you. It is five am, and the sky is empty. No moon. No stars. No dawn. No seagulls. You would like every 5 am to be like this. The first line is still there. No, you tell it, knowing this is not at all how it works.

By 6pm the following day you have written 6,000 words of the thing you do not want to write. You know by then this is the thing you have been writing all your life. You know it is the thing you were born to write. This absolute conviction, no matter how wrong it is, must possess you at least once in your life, otherwise how will you ever write the thing you do not want to write. You find yourself drawing lines and equivalencies between things you never thought possible and as you do you know this is not because of anything special, they might call it magic, but you know to call it a long time; a book does not get written overnight, nor does it get lived in the space of a few years, it is the tip of an iceberg of the life it’s taken to live before any writing of it is possible, from the first moment my mother wrote my two names on a hard cover, this book was being written; this book is the cows in the field and the cancelled balls and the Twin Towers still there, it is the pile of picture books on the floor, it is the winking sea telling you to follow it, it is the blue on the wing of a Swallow whispering you to come this way; it is magic, to find yourself there, one Sunday sorting books on your child’s floor and feeling that pull of adventure again and letting your small control freak self submit to something much much larger, grander and older than you are.

Spend a month in a forest and you will learn new things about yourself. Or perhaps not learn, but remember them, you will re-call them to yourself in almost the exact sense the word contains.

In the forest I slept in a mezzanine bed. I have always been a fan of sleeping close to the ceiling, my apartment in Paris had a similar bed, and perhaps it was this that reminded me of things I thought I’d forgotten, or perhaps it was the fact that on waking I didn’t have to immediately get out of bed. This too was something I’d forgotten, I’ve been a mother for nearly 21 years, it’s easy to forget not every day needs to begin as soon as you wake. The first morning I woke there, the cabin didn’t have curtains, I woke, still tired from the journey, sorting through all the things I’d seen, the various sensations new countries immediately assail you with; I woke and lay watching the large pine outside my window. It seemed to be dancing the way the branches moved in the wind; I watched crows land and perch in it; it seemed as I watched there was nothing better I could be doing in that I was the luckiest person, to be lying there, watching that tree. There is a line I love in a book I love written by a friend I love but I can’t remember it accurately enough to quote it, it says something like ‘in the truest sense he spent his time loving her because there was nothing better to do with his time’ - I have this line wrong but the sentiment remains; sometimes there is simply nothing better than the thing you are doing.

After the curtains arrived in the cabin, I would only draw one at night, every night I would leave the cabin to check on the stars and then later I’d fall asleep watching them and then wake to morning skies, sometimes heavy, sometimes that pure Nordic winter blue, other times pink; I would wake and watch the tree and when I came back to the UK, possessed by a fit of anger at no longer being able to see the sky from my bed, I moved my bed, dispensed with a full curtain, and even if the light is changed and even if the birds are no longer crows but gulls and even if the stars have shifted slightly, I still get to watch the sky when I wake.

I watch this sky for many days as my throat gets sorer and as I watch this sky and my fever rises, it seems time disperses and melts into other times, I might be 16 again, when I first learnt to watch; when I was so emaciated walking was difficult and then dangerous for my heart; any sudden exertion threatening to draw it to one, final conclusion. I would lie all those long days, when my mother was at work, and watch the sky; I would watch the flames from the fire on the ceiling; I watched a single spider for days on end. It was in those times that I realised the world is infinitely beautiful and always there, if you just know how to look. I have been lucky to remember this again.

My throat clears up. I am left tired and in need of a good meal. I go to Scotland for 48 hours for work, I stay up drinking whisky with old friends until 3 in the morning, I walk up to the flagpole in Queen’s Park just so I can see the distant snow on the Campsies. The duck pond’s frozen and the Glad Cafe is too. In Edinburgh, I take my daughter to the same cafe we used to visit on Mondays when she was little, after school and before drama club. We’d share a brownie, she’d drink a smoothie and me a bad black coffee; she drinks a smoothie and me a bad black coffee, time still bleeds. She has a coffee too now, and the brownies are gone; the bar’s changed and the menu upgraded, it’s nearly the same, she says, and I can see she’s old enough now to be nostalgic. I know she realises childhood is a con, that we spend the rest of our lives trying to recover from the grief of losing it. And then you become a mother and you spend the rest of your life trying to recover from the strange grief of always already losing your children’s childhoods; time bleeds but time moves and times move on, they like to say, this moving on signalling some idea of progress.

We talk about this, me and her, perched on stools she can now reach the ground from. We talk about her siblings and their way of speaking we don’t fully understand, how they tease us and call us unc, which I’m sure is an abbreviation for uncle but she thinks signals uncool; vitally, neither of us know for sure.

I tell her about an essay I’m writing, how as part of this I have been researching AI, I tell her how it scares me, not because I am old and stuck in the past, but because I am afraid it’s messing with our humanity. While researching the essay I am writing, I discover how the use of AI in healthcare insurance claims in the US has led to increased litigation against insurers who use AI as a way of determining treatment and payouts, or some might say, deferring, delaying, denying treatment. It stinks.

But it all stinks, I begin to think. Yesterday the Bookseller reported that agents are asking would be authors to stop using AI in submissions. I see this change all the time, especially on Substack, where everyone seems to want to be a writer, and instead of learning how to write or embracing their own idiosyncrasies, they give a machine a prompt, and cut and paste what it tells them. What this does, other than straight up cheating, it is disrupts the order of appearances. For a time I was so obsessed with reality and simulacrum that I wrote Ava Anna Ada using Baudrillard as a framing device, so besides being a lot of fun, I also spent and spend a lot of time thinking about how reality is bend and shaped, how it’s narrated to us, how technology now allows us to bend and shape our reality, but how hollow that bending and shaping might make us, and in leaving us hollow, how it creates a loop of presence and absence, that loop necessary to any addiction.

AI creates the appearance of being able to do something. In essence, it creates a facade, an exterior presentation that does not reflect the interior; this exteriority is reflected in the way AI ‘writing’ speaks; AI is a big fan of the declarative utterance - it declares but for whom? To whom? It speaks into a void of its own creation, all these ‘creators’ speaking the same platitude ridden prose to each other and for what? So as to appear a certain way. It takes our over reliance on images carefully cultivated over the past two decades by tech bros who know exactly what they’re doing, and turns that fakery now toward the word. And The Word was God. Past tense. The word, as any good writer knows, is fallible, as all Gods are, but now something sinister is happening, because behind all prose, whether it’s good or bad, well executed or not, perfectly articulated or not, are thoughts. You cannot write something without thinking it out beforehand, and even more beautifully and perhaps importantly, you cannot write something without changing your mind as you write. This essay I am working on has demanded I change my mind, remake my mind, question my mind - it’s that that writing’s for. If you think of Greek slates, how they were inlaid with wax that would be melted again for a different impression, I think of this when I write, that I am drafting and drafting and drafting, these near endless revisions ways of reaching into my mind, ways of going beyond what I already know into an unknown; if I were to give chat gpt a prompt about freedom of speech, sure it would result in words on a page, but what would I get from it other than appearing to have done the work? What would my mind get from it?

AI presents the appearance of thought, without the user having to do any of the necessary work behind it. It will even say, I think, so the user looks like they indeed have thought this thing, perhaps on reading it back the user sees a type of familiarity or flattery and thinks, yes I have though this thing, so they do not see the use of AI in this way to be what it is, which is that it is a con game, a type of cheating, but who’s being cheated the most is ultimately the user. It is a bit like using a dated photo on a dating app , although even that was once you, whereas this AI writing and the thoughts it appears to contain, never were you.

Being able to think and think well and think things through is so vital, it is more vital we do that than we can appear a certain way online. It makes me laugh but also want to howl and throw things when I see the pseudo-inspirational faux-intellectual way these people enamoured with AI write, sorry, appear to write; but really it makes me want to be sick, because if you say you love art then protect where art comes from, get precious about it, get fucking pedantic and believe that synonyms don’t exist, don’t accept substitutes - I can’t imagine Yves Klein would’ve been all yeah that blue’s almost good enough.

AI has learnt all its tricks from some of the best writers there are. It’s predicated on what’s been called the biggest art heist in history. Anyone who loves art would do well to realise this almost Promethium theft shows the nature of people who would profit from AI; profit above all else. If you love art, then leave it alone. It’s taken the best writing there is, and spews it out in aggregate. And everyone who uses it, is training it to do the same. I worried for a time that AI would learn to think like us, that it could replicate our writing, but it seems it can’t, it creates a type of mechanised methodical and sometimes comedically so, prose that is easy to spot. I have a friend who’s an editor at a culture magazine who says increasingly press releases arrive written using it, and if these are spotted, they go immediately in the bin. But what this prose does, is that in being a real thing in the world, it impacts how we write - perhaps instead of us training AI, it’s training us. Perhaps even not using it, but being surrounded by it, it’s making us more declarative, less imaginative, less curious.

For the essay I am writing, I’ve been drawn back to Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet, where speech has become a virus. Of course, in the ways of the best dystopian fiction, it was always thus, but it is now startlingly so. AI has infected language.

Last September, I gave the keynote speech at a conference on dystopian futures in Bologna. Bologna in autumn is a film makers dream, all shadows and ochre. The brickwork there is remarkable. Early mornings I would visit the cloisters near my hotel just to look at the tiny bricks laid so long ago, and then walk to the University to listen to people talk about an imaginary future, which is all we ever have but now even that imagining seems naïve. I spoke at this conference about how strange it is to live with these existential threats; ones both threatening the planet, but also threatening our humanity. We’ve always made art; we haven’t always made ‘good’ art, but we’ve used our hands and our minds to concoct something new in the world, something tangible, portable, communicable. I don’t want us to give that over to machines. I remember the first time I held a needle and I knew what my hands were for. Before that, I’d caught balls, held bats and rackets; they didn’t make sense to me, but a needle in one hand and fabric in another, I knew what they were for. The same with a pencil and paper. A tactile life makes sense to me. Makes me feel alive.

Almost recovered, I go to a gig on Friday, half way through I am possessed by a near insatiable and immediate desire for burgers. I have not eaten meat since October, it is vital that I do right then. I want burgers, fries, and red wine. I want a lot of all of it. Around midnight, we track this supper down. We sit and we yap and we drink more and we yap more, the burger drips down my thumb, the bun soft and yielding, the wine perfect; all of it is perfect because it is real and happening and happening outside a machine, it is happening without my thinking I will record this later; it is happening in the same way the birds are playing still in the thermals, soaring outside my window and soon I will go downstairs to my kitchen and put the kettle on the stove, and I will measure my coffee with my old wooden scoop, watch it drip into the glass jug before I pour it in my stoneware cup, still bearing the hallmarks of the time it got in the way of me spray painting a print; see, how real it all is, how beautiful it is to think and to watch and to make.

I’ve spend the last two weeks of January editing work in response to a four word note. The maths is off. Then I was editing something that’s out later this spring, not sure if I can say what yet, so I’m doing that horrible coy author thing that makes me want to sandpaper my own skin off. Now I am beginning to surface and replying to all the people in my inbox I’ve neglected to since the turn of the year. But here are some things I’m up to that you might want to get involved in.

February 17th sees me back home in Edinburgh to read at the launch of Gutter 33. I’ll be reading from an essay in fragments called The Damned, The Possessed, and the Beautiful (thank you Louise Bourgeois for the title). I wrote this essay at the end of October in the Cotswolds. The windows were open to torrential rain; because I don’t smoke, I’d bummed a fag earlier, it felt like the end of summer even though really it was the end of autumn. It was dark and the dark made it feel safe to write anything. Now, thinking of reading it feels less safe. You can get tickets here, both in person or if you’re further away, online.

March 9-14th, I’m in Totleigh Barton tutoring for Arvon. I’ll be co-tutoring with the incredible Alexander Masters, who wrote among many other incomparable books, Stuart, A Life Backwards. Because I studied this book at uni and because it’s structurally so clever, I struggled to speak to Alexander the first time we taught together. Don’t worry, we make a good team, and if you want to learn more about memoir or biography writing, then please think about joining us. We’ll be joined on the Wednesday evening by Anna Whitwham, author of Soft Tissue Damage and Boxer Handsome. You can find out more here.

Later in March I’ll be back in Scotland for another event. More details soon.

May, and I’ll be back in the Cotswolds where I wrote the essay for Gutter. This time I’ll be with Luke Turner, who I last tutored with at Totleigh Barton. It’s worth mentioning at this stage that both Totleigh and Hawkwood have beautiful grounds that really add to the writing retreat experience. It helps to be able to wander, and if you’re the walking type, I often take tutorials over the course of a walk, it can help to walk, talk and think. Also, the food at both of them is excellent, and I should be able to comment on this since I’m picky. Mid-week we’ll be joined by Andy West, whose memoir, The Life Inside has recently been adapted for the BBC as Waiting for the Out, and met with widespread critical acclaim.

Luke and I will be tackling how to connect yourself to the wider world. There’s a lot of talk about the personal being universal, but how do you actually make your work do that? How do you balance writing about other people, how do you write sex, sexuality, the body, and place successfully, and how do you create a wider lens, making a story of interest to you, interesting to an audience. We’ll cover all this over the course of the week, and be joined by a guest yet to be announced. Details, here.

Mid May, I’ll be doing something special at Bath Literature Festival - keep your eye on the programme for that.

June and I’ll be in Oslo for the Future Library handover. The Future Library is one of the cleverest and most touching pieces of art I’ve experienced. Devised by Katie Paterson, it encompasses themes of time, ecology and human survival. I visited the library in December last year, and stood crying a little. Walking into it is a little like walking into a burial mound as a visitor from the future. This year two authors will be handing over their manuscripts, Tommy Orange and Amitav Ghosh. It’s slightly strange to think that I won’t get to read the manuscripts they’ll be submitting, especially since I’ve hungrily read everything I can by Tommy Orange and evangelically try to make everyone else do the same (some habits are hard to shake).

I’m returning to Hawkwood in October and this time I’ll be joined by Horatio Clare. Horatio’s Heavy Light is one of the finest depictions of psychosis I’ve encountered. I use this book when I tutor as an example of how you turn a book from the personal to the universal. We’re focusing over the week on how to bring life writing alive; how to craft work to publication standard across forms, be it essays, books or journalism. We’ll also look at planning and research, how to structure and organise these throughout the duration of a work. Mid-week guest still to be announced. You can read more and book here. I’m hoping for more rain. More rain = more essays.

That’s all there is to talk about for now. I also offer one to one mentoring - if you want to talk, please get in touch. That’s the great and terrible thing about work, you can do it wherever you are (even on holiday it follows you…)

In this eternal February Monday, I go to the cafe with the large tables and drink strong black coffee with everyone else who is doing the same, there is a kind of tacit hush over the whole cafe, only broken by the man next to me joining a teams call and talking loudly about import and export duties and possibly also shell companies, although I pretend not to hear that bit, and then when he loudly mispronounces Ghislaine Maxwell as jiz-lane, everyone else also pretends not to hear him. I like cafes with this type of hush, since it seems the opposite of what you should expect from a cafe, and is far preferable to cafes with babies in, or worse, cafes with mothers in who can only talk about either 1. their babies (who are also there) and/or 2. their husbands who are always utterly inept at everything that have ever tried to do; although it is also the type of hush that would have me running from a library since it is expected in a library and therefore to be avoided. After a time, I break my head by reading too much Roland Barthes and Marina Warner; some people they should not be read together, or should but perhaps not on a Monday morning after two cups of coffee and next to a possible money laundering expert. I leave and walk back along the seafront which by then is the type of biting cold my overly optimistic leather blazer is a poor match for.

By the time I stand up from my desk at home, with the true dark outside the window, punctured only by the lights from the houses opposite the rows of back gardens, I realise in the sudden way you do when you’ve forgotten the fact of your body for many hours on end, that I need air.

This is how it comes to be that on this interminable Monday when it is still February and after we all wonder how it was that January was at least 400 days long, how is it February lasts for twice that, despite the fact of the snows drops I saw in the park yesterday, despite the crocuses and the buds and a fool’s spring they’d call it but we are not fools enough to think of this as spring, not yet, not when on this longest day of the year so far, I am standing on the cliffs, with the 30 miles an hour gusts of wind not strong enough even then to knock enough air back into me, wind so ferocious it steals my youngest child’s laughter away, finding it when it hits first landfall from across the channel and then whipping it off, in the way it is doing the same with our hair, wet now from the might be sleet, might be the sea thrown up the cliff towards us. I ask my daughter why it is I’ve brought her specifically up here, away from town, high up with the wind, to look at the stars. Lately, we have taken to night time excursions for this purpose. I tell her the names of the stars I know, and point out the planets too, and she also prefers moonless nights for the way the stars are brighter then. She can now recognise Venus and nothing else, I take this as a victory. I tell her about the forest, how I saw stars there I had never seen before or since; how close the sky looked, how at times it looked like it might buckle under the weight of so much light. When I ask her why we are standing where we are, she says, her voice full of a frown, is it because we are closer to the stars up here and I want to keep her like this forever, just on the verge of the next stage of childhood, when her logic will not be as simple or as pure as this. I tell her it might be. There are no stars tonight. Just wind. Even the street lamps are difficult to pick out. There must be a haar, the same as there was the night after I took her to Edinburgh on the sleeper train, and her going to sleep barely before the train pulled out of Euston, going to sleep one age, and waking in Scotland another on the day of the spring equinox, and me at the window with the blind up as she still slept, the rime on red pantiles signalling home. And that night, the night of her birthday, I walked her around my old haunts, her my only child not born in that city, born instead in the foothills of the Eildons, where they say pixies are born, and some legends make a person make sense. I did not think to call the haar a sea-fret that night and can not bring myself to call it that since. How many words are there for mist and how is it I know so few, how was I lucky enough last year to learn new words for wind and to not stop thinking of these since; the winds the migratory birds must encounter and come to understand in ways we can hardly imagine.

I think of the word haar travelling by sea, the norsemen rolling in and the words they brought with them, the echoes still in Sweden, acting like a bridge when I encountered them there, a bridge from heart to home, and I think I heard this phrase in Carol Ann Duffy’s The Christmas Truce but when I check, it is wrong; instead it is a song that is a sudden bridge from man to man; a gift to the heart from home. It is melody that creates this unifying bridge she writes about in this poem, one I read every Christmas Eve to my children, and every Christmas Eve, I worry it’ll be the last they’ll want to hear it. I cannot stop thinking of the sea as a road. It helps to see it like this, uniting more than it divides. For much of my childhood I was conscious of the sea, not simply because I grew up in close proximity to it, but because much of my family lived over it, and one especially enterprising one, lived largely on it, creating much excitement (for me at least, I was young enough) when he was beset by pirates.

I thought of this in December, when I stood looking out across the Mersey, how much - unless winged - for so long arrived or departed by water. I was struck then by the commonality of the word Mersey with the word merse, used more commonly in the Scottish Borders than anywhere else in Scotland, specifically Berwickshire, where even the rhythm of the name evokes still the sound of the foghorn on school mornings as the haar rolled in from the coast, and the rolling hills, always present, on one side, Scotland, the other England, a border we crossed so often it should have been commonplace and yet it never was, always we’d whoop when we got back over, safely back on the proper side of it where the roads were properly maintained and the hedges allowed to ramble, where merse doubled its meaning to denote lowland flatlands in close proximity to the water, or to stand as a synonym for Berwickshire and the border the Tweed demarked between Scotland, move further west and its meaning triples, referring to land along the Solway Firth, again water separating Scotland from England. It is no surprise perhaps that the Mersey, another boundary river, shares the same root. It is no surprise either perhaps, that having grown up in the borders, and reaching 20 before I realised I was asked which borders, and realising there was perhaps a more specific name for the region, that I always feel at my most comfortable in these peripheral places.

Maybe too, home and the time we mark it with, the way in which we remember it, is through a series of moments more closely aligned to Kairos than Chronos. Specific moments return us to points in time that continue to exist even though the logic of Chronos would suggest otherwise. Kairos too allows these moments in time to continue, it preserves the fleeting, whereas Chronos in that it is always seeking to move forward, endlessly and also annoyingly, at the precise point memory begins to fail us, will ruin time, Chronos will only ever try to obliviate time, and the memories we create within it. Just as in The Christmas Truce, when it is melody irrespective of a specific language that unifies the men in the trenches that Christmas Day, similarities in language, and the persistence on returning to elements of our mother tongue, that enables home to live on, irrespective of where it is we end up.

I stand there on the clifftop, my daughter not knowing yet there are words like sea-fret, fog, mist even, all these lesser words; I ask her if she were Grace Darling would she set out in this weather across the oil dark sea we sense but can’t fully make out, more a looming presence in the way anything truly dark is. I ask her this and for a moment she doesn’t get the reference, the school project too far away, and her memories of Northumbria the same, how us children on either side of the border were indoctrinated with the story of Grace Darling’s heroism, in the same way on the Scottish side we were thrilled by Jim Clark’s daring, or would have been if he were not so commonplace as to no longer feature in our collective imaginations, he simply was there in the graveyard, and in a small car on the clock at the top of the village, in the same way the statue of Wojtek the Bear risks becoming boring to local children, but never my children, because he will to them always be tinged with the rarity myth needs to function; seeing him will be part of the moments of their childhood, just as this moment, me and her on the cliffs, laughing at the wind on this everlasting Monday which is still Monday, might become part of the myths she later tells of her childhood in the same way I talk to her of the haar, the foghorn, the hills and the hedges.

(it is a coincidence that I wrote this while listening to Erland Cooper’s Holm. When I was in Sweden I made a playlist of work songs, hoping for a Pavlovian type of response when I put it on. The first song on this playlist is Erland Cooper’s Haar over Hamnavoe (with Bill Ryder-Jones). As usual, I didn’t decide on what I was going to write about before I started writing this, maybe subconsciously I was influenced by this song, it is truly beautiful. Also the song titles on that record pretty much sum up what I’m thinking about language and the sea and how maybe we should let Scotland be part of Scandinavia - please.

i miss the blazing world

for us to have perfection, everyone else was shamed

Lottie Reiniger

it’s a problem of light and space

how do you defamiliarise grief

there is little beyond

Scottish dilemma of the sabbath (will you burst into flames if you set foot inside a shop. think of inheritance of this)

dating apps and eugenics

it is spring and I wake up without you

they love appearing able to do the thing without being able to do the thing

think more

confirm Oslo

is it a knot or does it work like a box unfolding?

the order of appearances

structure over three acts but tell like a thread on a reel

the worry is not that AI will learn to write like us but that we will begin to write like it

find the Patricia Lockwood LRB speech again

Did Debord pinch from Barthes or the other way round - think for stolen pieces

IKEA as purgatory?

make it more of a panopticon

what if we’re all just someone else’s simulation, mum?

Laura Mulvey - Crystal Gazing

my only language was starvation

order spray paint

a blank piece of paper is a prayer

think about the crack in the house

pitches x 6

a cult becomes the logical extreme

chase Bluthner

it ends with the wind phone in Cape Town

you must become a small factory

claim delay repay (also hotel)

where’s the when to kick it into motion

The escalator at Myrtle Beach - and I would not turn around

(also pilfered things)

(also the smell, and the colour Hockney blue but peeling, the swimming pool and him being so angry and his eyes changing colour more blue)

and never knowing a March so warm

and the missing passport

music but also being in a body, how do you convey it?

Sarah Perry

download files before redacted

reply to pissy note (don’t be a dick)

not matter what I do, I’ll always been who I was and not who I am - DON’T WRITE LIKE THIS

Wellness

what does Hoss WANT (what did i want? what was i afraid of; does anyone stop wanting)

there comes a point where you must consider the themes of your life, not what you want them to be but what they are

swap act one with three?

Huskisson monument//Bidston observatory

what’s the series hook? where’s the ep hook?

And this is exactly how it looks in the footage of Alex Pretti’s murder. Just another day at work for ICE, none of them look concerned after they kill him, one walks towards the camera, and shrugs. I say to my daughter if Farage introduced the same here, there’d be queues around the block. At first, I think the footage looks like Hitler’s Brownshirts must have looked, but as the day goes on and I can’t stop thinking about my family in the US - my very non-white family who were not born there - I come to think I am wrong in thinking this. The footage we are seeing now might look like something else but it is its own thing. What we are seeing is its own threat, a unique threat, it is not history repeating but something more sinister that that. We have in a many ways been conditioned for the spectacle of this. I think here of Baudrillard, when he says ‘Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe the rest is real’, it feels possible now to think that the way our perception of reality has been altered, first by film, and now by social media, the continued spectacle of violence we’re exposed to, lessens the effect of what we’re seeing. If when we first encountered images like these they were in fiction, how then do we make them real? In seeing these murders in real time on our screens, with the same codes as visual signifiers of film and of history, it becomes harder to think first of this as reality, and easier for us to look away from. In the same way we would turn a film we’re not enjoying off, we can now choose to look away from reality, a reality itself that is manufactured as a deliberate smokescreen to conceal or to distract for the yet worst still reality of what it is Trump hopes we don’t look at. There is no reason for ICE to be occupying cities in the way they currently are. It is no coincidence that ICE’s presence and activities intensified after the release and redaction of the Epstein files.

Roberto Saviano suggests that the constant seeing only normalises violence; which is not to say don’t pay attention, don’t watch; but we must continue to see the violence we’re observing as abnormal, no matter how wide-spread it becomes. There is a fine line between being informed and entertained, just as there is a fine line between being aware and numbed. As he continues to say, the normalisation of the presence of ICE is the first step to normalising the presence of armed militias elsewhere. The more you’re exposed to something, the more its power to shock is lessened.

But when the option is to look away entirely; to allow the algorithm to feed you only what you want to see, only what you want to believe, that too is its own kind elective ignorance. When it is easy to say you support all women and then neglect to even notice the fact that TIME estimates that on the 8th and 9th of January alone, 30,000 people died in Iranian street protests, silence still speaks. This is almost the capacity of Hillsborough football stadium. And I use this stadium deliberately, because on the 15th April 1989, 97 people died there. I still remember the headlines, I still remember the impact that had on me as a child, The Sun is still boycotted in Liverpool. Now imagine the whole stadium had died. Would you look away from that? Would you say oh it’s a bit much? Imagine it didn’t even make the news. Imagine that’s how selective your empathy has become.

How do you pay attention in a world that works to fragment our attention? How do we hope in a world that seems devoid of hope? I asked myself this at 2 this morning, when I couldn’t sleep. I was still searching for an answer at 5am.

It is normal, in the face of such screaming global injustice to ask what we can do. I am someone who likes and needs to do things. I am at my best in an emergency. I like difficult situations. When my son was blue lit to hospital, I knew what to do. But what do you do when things are like this. What do I do as an artist? What do I make that feels of any value when humanity is facing so many simultaneous existential threats? These are questions I think many artists are struggling to answer, or I hope at least they are. And there it is, the word hope.

What does it mean to hope? It is such a common phrase. I hope you’re well, every second email begins with. Often it feels anodyne when someone talks of hope. As if it is simply a thing to say and not a verb that requires action. In 2012, I covered the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference, I think it was there that China Mieville said, we must learn to hope with teeth. There is in this, the suggestion that hope can be an aggressive force. It is not simply to hope for progress and sit back or hope that something might get better, or worse, to egotistically think our own individual actions can effect significant change, or to turn off the news and focus on the good in our own lives; no, to hope is to do something.

But do what?

And here I ran into a brick wall at 5am. What is it that hope makes me do? I think as writers, the biggest thing we can do, is to bear witness. I did not want to bear witness to the life I had lived until I was 30. I wanted to leave it behind. I didn’t want to live with the consequences that came with bearing witness. In short, I was a coward, I often still am. And then I read Primo Levi’s If This is a Man. Levi could not stop the concentration camps. He could not undo the death. He could not prevent what happened to him. But he could bear witness. He gave dignity and humanity to the suffering of himself and others. I read this and realised if I did not bear witness to what had happened to me, I would be committing a sin I could not forgive myself for. I would in a sense be inflicting moral injury on myself in the way Peter Godwin so well describes in his memoir, Exit Wounds. I can’t stop Jehovah’s Witnesses operating. I cannot undo the harm they have inflicted and continue to inflict on millions. I cannot get my mother back, talking publicly about them ensures I will never get her back. This situation could seem hopeless. It could seem that I am not really able to do anything other than recount the facts of my life as they happened to me. But in bearing witness, I have attested to the abuse of power. This is hope as a verb; this is hoping with teeth. It does nothing to stop ICE, but my work exposes how cults work, Trump is a cult, make no mistake. The novels I write might look bleak, but for me they are a way of looking out at the world, of witnessing what is happening and then using the imagination to predict what could happen next. Perhaps they are a warning system, as all fables are. They are flawed, and so am I, but I try.

To hope, requires looking at the world, not as we want it to be but as it is. What has been made unreal by social media, what has been made everyday and commonplace, what has been made to create divisions, schisms and sides, must again become real and abnormal. We make this become real by reading the testimonies of witness bearers, by encountering worlds that are not our own, we do this by looking beyond the easy narrative; we do this by paying attention; we turn in many ways to the non-human too, that beyond us.

What does it mean to pay attention? Recently, in Sweden, I did an event called Attending the Text, where the host broke down the word, bringing to life the idea of stretching towards something, as implied in its earliest Latin incarnation. I love the thought that to pay attention we must stretch towards something. We do not ask the thing to stretch towards us, instead we stretch to it. We stretch our minds to it, we stretch perhaps our hands to it, if we see it as a visible gesture. Stretching is an act of contortion and effort, it is not meant to be easy. It reshapes. It requires too that we see the thing, and the uniqueness of the thing we are stretching towards. I think here of Barry Lopez, whose paying attention was perhaps, the best. Lopez understood and conveyed this in his work. The strength and power of Lopez’s work lies in his ability to see the uniqueness of a thing. He does not fall into the mistake I made yesterday of comparing one thing to another. In his essay, Six Thousand Lessons, from his collection Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, Lopez speaks of this way of seeing:

From the beginning, I wanted to understand how very different each stretch of landscape, each boulevard, each cultural aspiration was. The human epistemologies, the six thousand spoken ways of knowing God, are like the six thousand ways a river can run down from high country to low, like the six thousand ways dawn might break over the Atacama, the Tanami, the Gobi, or the Sonoran. Having seen so much, you could assume, if you are not paying close attention, that you know where you are, succumbing to the heresy of believing one place actually closely resembles another. But this is not true. Each place is itself only, and nowhere repeated. Miss it and it’s gone.

I think about this often, that each thing is only its thing. I think this about days all the time, today is its own day, it will not be repeated. I think this about people too, each time we meet someone, we meet them only once. Sure, we might meet them again, but in different circumstances, moods, lightings; we encounter everything only once, and in this way everything stays beautiful and rare and special, or if not that, almost bearable at least. It is not easy to stretch towards a thing you do not understand. It is not easy to stretch towards something you do not want to see. It is not easy to tend to this stretching either. To do it, requires a certain way of seeing, or of learning to see. The greatest writers are the ones who do this, and then in an act of generosity, convey how they see the world, and the world they have seen. This too is hoping, is seeing the possibility in the world. Is conveying not just difference but reasons for difference.

Perhaps it is this ability to see difference that can create hope. We do not need to agree. Recently I have become irritated by the phrase we have more in common than that that divides us. Really? Do we need to have anything in common with someone to treat them decently? What a vile idea to think that so long as we have something in common with someone we tolerate them. It is precisely this kind of thinking that leads to ICE, to murder in the street; we must learn radical compassion, which is really hard to do. This comes not from condemning people, but trying to understand the forces at play, which is another way writing remains of value. George Saunders, Dave Eggers and Andrew O’Hagan have all done brilliant work on Trump’s campaign trail, not cartooning or vilifying supporters, but bearing witness to them as they are. To write this and to read it, requires a stretching towards people we might not otherwise try to understand. It is easier to believe people are stupid, it is easier, as I said to my son at the weekend, to believe in evil than to try and understand why people believe what they do, why they behave as they do. Sometimes this stretching becomes almost too much, Gordon Burn’s extraordinary biography of Fred and Rose West, Happy Like Murderers, is almost too much for the reader and certainly was too much for him, the act of writing the book making him unwell. Something I know all too well, I am in fact writing this to avoid returning to my own work that recently has started to make me wonder if I am ok. Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest demands a similar stretching, in situating a wall between the nazis and the people in the concentration camp, the viewer stands in the position of the perpetrator; this is a horrible situation to find yourself in, almost unbearable for the duration of the film, but it reframes your idea of evil and shows the power our desire for good, when corrupted, has to cause harm.

Maybe it is this that lies at the crux of a lot. I want a nice home. I want to live somewhere safe. So did the nazis, this is what Glazer shows us. This is what repeats across years on the campaign trail. This is what power exploits, this simple human desire for safety, security and shelter. This desire has been corrupted time and time over and is being corrupted, by Trump, by Farage, by tech giants and their algorithm gently whispering don’t look there, look here, look how pretty and safe and nice this is, not that. It is precisely this desire of my mother’s that was used to trap her in a cult. It is this desire that has created the numerous existential threats we are facing.

I don’t have an answer. I don’t have an ending. We are living through something of its own kind. None of us know how this will end, or what next cycle it will lead to. We stay awake. We bear witness. We pay attention. We do not retreat into our simple lives. Just as I typed this, the news that Suella Braverman has defected to Reform flashed up on my lock screen. I don’t know. I really don’t know. We must learn to identify the truth threat, which are the people in power. A tiny percentage of people, who are out for their own gain, who have and who will exploit people’s desire for a good life, without regard for delivering that life, with no plan other than to make themselves richer and more powerful. It simply stinks. We say it as it is.

Sentimental Value

standing on the hilltop being battered by the wind

Brooklyn Beckham hinting that he might be about to spill THE tea

Peter Hujar’s Day

borrowed dogs

sweetcorn fritters

lusting after this dress

photos of brand new babies

frost

cancelled trains

the woman who feeds the gulls every single day - where does she get that much fish?

charcoal again

grampa’s old films

collaging again

Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams

Turner at the National Gallery in Edinburgh

Remembering Hercules the bear because of this documentary

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone

Louise Bourgeois at Modern One

£6 negroni night

realising how fucking lucky I am to be doing what I’m doing

desperately trying to find out what happened to the kid in this documentary

a room, just me and the sound of my fingers on the keys as I type

gin and juice in Brel like it’s 2000 again

clementines

She Bangs the Drums

ginger water

Listening to Michael Price and remembering seeing him at Sea Change the weekend I knew what I had to do next

watching every Joachim Trier interview I can find

Stellan Skarsgard’s eyes

Fargo season 1

Fontaines D.C’s cover of Whipping Boy’s Twinkle

vinted sweatpants

and there’s the fox again

thinking of how faces work best close up

and it’s after five and it’s still light

how swallows navigate

squared paper

hating half the camera work in Hamnet

Italo Calvino’s Invisible cities

maybe it’s not luck, maybe it’s hard work

throwing up at The Zone of Interest again

a room, just me and a pile of tissues, how do you rewrite what you wrote about the past without coming undone

maybe it’s luck so dumb you have to listen for it

I have flown a plane

I have fired a gun

I have kidnapped a man

I have jumped hedges on racehorses

I have surfed in the Atlantic

I have nearly bled to death

I have nearly starved myself to death more times than it seems sensible

I have spent a birthday alone in New York with 500 dollars of my father’s money to spend

I have been so convinced it is the end of days I believed I would have to eat my own baby

I have lived alone in a Swedish forest for a month

I have done similar in Paris, London and Amsterdam

I have wondered often about the fate of the man I spend a transatlantic flight with in the spring of 2001, who told me excitedly about his new job in the Twin Towers

I have escaped and survived a cult

I have flown to Napoli for Sunday lunch with friends

I have conspired to kidnap a tortoise at 3am over a stolen bottle of gin

I have stayed awake all night just to watch the light change

I have taken a road trip down the east coast of America with my family who were strangers still to me then

I have cried on night buses and on trains and on planes, either I do not like going home or I want to keep looking for it

I have ran away to indulge a sore heart by smoking in graveyards and walking until my legs hurt

I have been kidnapped for roast chicken and coke at 5am (declined) although the ransom remained unclear

I have made myself forget the bible verses I was raised on

I have vowed never to forget what it is like to be a child although

I had forgotten until recently

I have taken to feeling that way again

lying on my belly, watching the stars until I fall asleep

sometime in the new year, I change my bio to unreliable narrator: it is both all I ever am and all I can ever hope to be

if I do not consider both sides and believe in both equally, can I be said to have been reformed from my love of certainty, from my earlier hopeless devotion?

Or is it that I proclaim my desire for a private life so loudly because I hope it might absolve me of my sins?

Or is it that I only want privacy so as to not confess to the things I have done?

Or is it that a lifetime of confession is a hard thing to shake?

Is it simply that if I were to tell of the substances I have taken, how much and how often; of the addictions I have no desire to leave; of the men I have indulged in, how many and how often; is it simply then I that fear blank faced judgement in the same way I feared the judgement of the almighty for so long

is it that I let the reader become another god

as absent and yet present as any can be?

If I were to tell say, of the idea that beset me, while face down, on a hotel bed in a city I had never visited before and have not since; if I were to tell this idea

if say I have told this idea, if say I were to change the tense of the idea, and I were to tell it to a friend in a different city, another I had not visited before and have not since, as if I have become a ghost to many cities; say I tell this idea and they like the idea, but they do not like it when I say of course I would write it under a pseudonym, as if women can only tell the truth under false pretences;

what if say, I were to say the ending of my recent manuscript came to me on the same bed, when I were no longer face down, but fully able to see; what if say I were to say that occasionally, the muse comes in the least expected forms and places.

When I teach I make a joke about autofiction, or I would if it were still a genre, I think it might be dying now or dead; I make the joke that men write it to make their lives seem more interesting and women write it to conceal the facts of their lives.

Even as I am making this joke, I feel bad. I like men, I do not want to make them the punchline of anything.

Even as I am writing this I am thinking of who might read it, how it might be construed. It is funny that I do not have the same concern when I write books. It is only this, here, that worries me.

I try not to think of this as a failing on my part.

Is it that I cannot tell the truth because I still want to be thought of as good despite the fact I am not sure anyone ever thought of me as good and certainly not good at anything much or good for much. If then, good for nothing, why is it I try to be good at everything. Especially when it comes to revealing myself. Yes, I try to be good at it by doing it and simultaneously, not.

I like to think it is because I am protecting other people. Yes, I will say, this is the case. I continue to say this after writing a book about my mother. As if I have not already crossed unforgiveable lines.

I speak to an analyst. I tell him my dreams. I tell him about foxes. I tell of the owls recently, when I stepped out the van. I tell him how it was 3 am and what did they mean. I want him to tell me a story in return but I want this story to be true. I want answers I can believe in.

If I cannot have certainty I would at least like a parable. I would at least like meaning from symbol. He tells me you name a thing and you kill it.

I have so many things I would like to name. I have as many things I do not want to kill.

I think from now on I will stick to film, there is no I on the page that way. People are simple enough, it is the I that confuses them.

Yes, I think, that is the way I will differentiate fact from fiction, with actresses who look nothing like me, playing roles that cannot in any way be connected to me. If I am particularly lucky, these scripts will be developed and never green lit. Not that I have ever been given to having my cake or eating it, but the money in return for the things I have or have not done, would be nice.

It’s biting cold and my fingers hardly work to type to check into a hotel. I go to the pub to warm up, despite the fact it’s been a week of pubs, of the end of year kind of partying you get possessed by doing between Christmas and whatever day it is. New Year’s Day and I watched Sentimental Value in Glasgow. It’s the kind of film that sticks around. Cried the whole way through, and after, still trying to shake it there in York. Fingers defrost enough to text a friend, tell them I’m around tonight, are they? I forget sometimes that people have first days back after holidays, that it’s a Monday night and maybe it’s late for them. It’s a strange life, this nomadic one, but you don’t think it is, from the inside. It is what it is. Sure, he texts back. A bath, a book, a tin of gin later, and I’m walking to the pub. My phone doesn’t care for my safety, sends me down dark back alleys and steep frost riddled bankings.

It’s a good pub. Best in York, I’m told later. A fire. A band in the other room. Just enough bleed through. Good beers. £4.50 for a pint of hazy IPA. Not London. Not Edinburgh. I like the accent here. For a time, me and this friend have been making a list of icks. We’ll message each other these without preamble when an ick occurs to us, as if exclaiming something suddenly. It has occurred to us that a list of icks might in and of itself be an ick, but this doesn’t matter, it helps to be prepared. It’s a long list and like most lists, nonsensical, but I like lists and the apparition of sense they create. Over pints, we debate what might be chic and not chic this year. Scandals, we decide are extraordinarily chic.

But there’s a catch. You cannot have a commonplace scandal and call it chic. You can’t for instance say have a scandal someone could predict. You also can’t break your own scandal. In the age of social media, scandals are harder to come by than you might think. Everyone knows who’s connected to who. Everything’s so visible. Everyone’s so desperate to spill their own tea that we’re pretty much post-scandal. We’ve all seen the soft launches, the blurry shots of someone’s back with the caption: this one. No one cares. What we need are scandals that up the ante. We need the unpredictable. Cross genre scandals. Some really left wing poet say ends up caught in bed with Jeremy Hunt. That’s a scandal I’d pay to see. Tony Blair and Addison Rae gleefully spending Blair’s ill-gotten war gains: a chic scandal. I like to think that maybe Raynor Winn was maybe just incredibly chic too with her scandal last year; now all memoir writers need to work much harder on their scandal. It’s only chic if it outdoes the last one.

It’s clear by now, we were being silly. I am often the least serious person in the room, even if I am often the most serious person on the page. It’s a good way round to play it. But the next day, when the trains are finally back on and I’m walking up the Euston Road in the rain, I’m thinking about scandals and how much we give away, how impossible we make them now.

In the days leading up to Christmas, I felt impossibly bleak. I find the time of year hard, I didn’t grow up celebrating and still don’t really know how to do it. This fact makes me feel like an alien that hasn’t learnt how to adapt. Sure, I can make it look like I know what I’m doing, but I don’t feel it on any level other than a superficial one, and over the last year, I became sick of and sickened by, surface things. Year of the snake. So much shedding. I was tired too, trying to adjust after the forest, to the noise, to the light pollution, to the rhythms of capitalist time I’d learnt to disengage from, and maybe I hadn’t been eating enough in the forest because certainly my clothes were loose and my mind was slow and preoccupied again by the lure of restriction. And it was dark, UK dark, that damp that gets into your bones and the Christmas lights both too much and not enough to keep out the dark. I’d not stopped all year, which is the way I like it, but then when everything else stopped and I was faced with the option of doing nothing other than the same, it felt like running into a brick wall.

In an effort not to succumb to self pity (the worst of vices), I began to re-read Eva Hesse’s diaries. I love these diaries, spanning from her late teens to her death at 34. When I read them, they are always overshadowed by both a sense of sadness and curiosity, what might her work have looked like if she’d lived. What would a life the span of Louise Bourgeois’s have done to her oeuvre? Certainly when I saw her work alongside Bourgeois’ earlier this year, hers overshadowed Bourgeois’, even by 34, she was a truly unique and curious artist. This curiosity is evident in her diaries in that she is both strange, and interested in the world around her, which translates into her work. Reading her diaries is like being thrown around in a washing machine for a while ( which is the same thing a friend said about me once after dinner, and I’ve stolen it because it’s too good not to use), you feel both invigorated and slightly like you might be at risk of drowning or at best, serious bruising. As I read them, I can’t imagine reading anything like this by contemporary artists.

I can’t imagine it because we are hobbled in a way. Blog culture meant that many of us grew up giving everything away. When you’re sharing everything online, in real time, is there any need for a diary? When you’re aware too of the fact people might read your diaries, do you write them with the honesty people previously did? Or are the diaries themselves a type of posturing? I’m thinking here of the publication last year of Didion’s diaries, which seemed a serious infringement of her privacy. In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm considers the issue of being a biographer, and the implications inherent in that; the living, she reasons, are protected, but the dead, not so much. Now I am writing biography, I am thinking of this too. The responsibility of being the biographer of someone who can’t talk back is almost overwhelming.

I’m thinking of what it means to give yourself away, and the expectation of it. I know I’m not alone in this. I wrote a book about my life, and afterward, it seemed expected that I’d answer anything. I’d get people asking what my life looks like now, I’d get others asking about my relationship with God, people who’d hang around the back of events after the signing just to tell me they were praying for me, that really I should come back to Jesus. In the summer, when I was travelling a lot, I was beset by a slew of messages from people I barely knew asking ‘how everything was’ which I’m smart enough to know is code for, it looks like something might be wrong can you give us something to talk about please. I didn’t reply.

If you’ve given your trauma away once, people want more of it. You’re meant to write another book along the same lines, or you’re meant to write the book about how you fixed it, or you’re meant to become a poster girl for whatever trauma it was you disclosed. It’s a reductive expectation. In Winter Pollen, Ted Hughes speaks about how the poet must protect the part the art comes from. For me, that means protecting my private life; not the mechanisms of where I am or what I’m doing, I think I make it pretty clear publicly that I’m a disaster most of the time. I’m not the kind of person who’d be a surprise if you met me, the distance between me as a narrator and me as a person isn’t big. I’m also, for better or worse, not the kind of person who really wants to interact with people I don’t know. I can’t call someone a friend unless I’ve met them, I find it really hard (impossible) to read people on social media, I’m the kind of person who likes touching things, I mean this in the truest sense in that I touch things all the time, I love textures, and I love the texture of people, I need to meet people to get the fabric of them, if this makes sense. I find the idea of online engagement slightly morally dubious, because all the engagement ends up being measured in is numbers, and I hate thinking of people being reduced to this. Having battled my whole adult life against my tendency to measure my worth in numbers, I find social media and its follower counts, verified badges, metrics, etc all really difficult. Increasingly, I want to retreat away from the work side of it. Having retreated in the forest, and now thinking of the value of retreat, and why an artist might retreat for a whole decade of their life like Louise Bourgeois did, I find the idea of writing about myself and presenting myself in a certain way online, difficult.

It comes back to Ted Hughes, that protecting where the art comes from. I don’t know if I make art. Sometimes I think I do, more importantly, critics have said I do. I think it comes in keeping something back. In keeping a lot back. In private, I am not forthcoming. I cried last week with a friend. Chances were we were both a little drunk. We were tired too. It’d been a long year for both of us. I cried and then she looked at me and said but you can tell me right. I don’t tell people things. It’s a conundrum to be like this and write from life. Maybe it’s the not telling that makes it work. I stood in another friend’s kitchen recently, but it must be hard, he said, really hard, and I shrugged, not really, I said but all the way home on the train the day after, I replayed the not really. Why can’t I just say it. Ted might know. You keep back what you need to, or you do until it’s impossible. You call it essential to the art, hoping that’s excuse or reason enough.

I look like I give it away, but the details of my life, the possible scandals (if there were any), who I’m with and when, what makes me laugh, what makes me cry (ok, I’m straight up with that - Joachim Trier, John Lewis adverts, the taste of Robinson’s squash, Wimbledon, snow, railway platforms, arrivals halls, horses when they fix you with their honest eyes, notes that fall out of books, the wrong sort of sunset, etc and everything), what makes me furious, who I love and who I despise, they’re mine. I wont even tell you my favourite song or book, I am an interviewer’s nightmare maybe even if I don’t appear to be, I am practised in the art of saying everything and nothing at all, so much so I spent so long giving therapists the run around they kept sacking me, I will do everything I can to avoid telling the truth about myself while appearing to tell it all, this is what comes from coming from a family consumed by silence hidden under a veneer of conversation.

There are many ways personal details bleed into my work, I sent a script off before Christmas with the note, it might be a little auto-biographical, but I like elegance over the first person bruised essay, over the revenge attacks and the break-up pieces, I am no Lily Allen, I am bored of people trying to write like Rachel Cusk because even Rachel Cusk seems bored of Rachel Cusk and has moved on, a trail of pale imitations grasping in her wake; I am tired of the expectation that as a woman the most interesting things I could think to write about are right in front of my eyes in my own home, as if I too cannot be possessed by thoughts of polar regions or the equator or determined to follow a specific type of blue that may or may not exist and see where it leads me, as if I cannot be caught by the thread of a dead woman and fall in love with her; as if instead all I am defined by is the past of myself, a thing that only happened to me, as if a woman is made only from tragedy and not the life that is lived after that; as if I must share every love story and heart break, as if they should be packaged up for public fodder; give me instead silence, the joy of behind closed doors, the clandestine, the conversations and the covert, the life that is mine alone, a life I have made simply for my own enjoyment; a life that maybe biographers might want, give them the headache of it after I am dead, the legal reads and the lawsuits, let them have their fun; the chicest thing perhaps we can do in 2026, is reclaim a private life, even if the how of it remains elusive.

That, or create a really good scandal.

Last year, I went to so much. Filled my head full of films and art and music and it was so so good. This year, I don’t know what happened, I think I still did but it was this whirlwind of a year. Not that it felt fast, it was a long year; it feels like someone else started it than the person I am finishing it. I don’t believe people change so how can I believe in this year? I read somewhere, maybe Jonathan Safran Foer when kitsch and sincerity were in, that people don’t change, they just reveal themselves to you. I think maybe this year revealed me to myself in ways I couldn’t have expected. It was a hard year. It was a beautiful year. It’s a year I don’t want to leave behind because so much has happened in it. It’s the year I remembered how much I love travelling. It’s the year I’ve met some people I would like to know forever. It’s the year I realised how little I know, and how little I’m certain about. It’s the year I began to admit I’m more fragile than I wanted people to think. It’s the year I began to consider letting people in. It’s the year I flew to Naples for Sunday lunch with friends, the year I stood crying in the Future Library in Oslo - totally overwhelmed by the thought of how long a book can last - it’s the year I stomped through forests looking for elk at dawn, the year I learnt to shoot, the year I went in search of a specific blue and continued to be eluded by it, the year I watched Swallows overhead at dusk in Turin, at dawn in Rome and all the long midsummer day in Cagliari, and watching them combined with the search for blue, took me back to my grandfather’s films, films that meant for the first time since he died nearly 30 years ago, I heard his voice. Something thought lost, returned to me by the Swallows, the search for blue. Life is funny, the way it happens.

I think I saw art, I did see art, but my mind was always elsewhere, on the novel I’m writing or the film I’m working on. There comes a point when you’ve writing a book that everything points to that book, as if the world is telling you yes that one. I spent the beginning of August in London. Early mornings in the garden tucked away in Brockwell Park. Other mornings staring at the sky in the Lido. I was working on a novel I’ve been trying to work out for 18 years. In it, there’s a man who preserves sounds that would otherwise be lost at the end of the world. I don’t know where he came from or I do but am not telling, whichever way round it goes, everywhere I went those few weeks, sound preoccupied me. I began to think how it is that no two people sound the same. If you think everyone’s heart beat’s the same, you have never stopped to listen. Often I miss the sound of people I’ve lost, not just their voice, but the sounds they made, the noises they made in rooms. I love when you’re in one room and someone is in another making different sounds. Those are things worth missing.

I went to Feel the Sound at the Barbican that August, one of the best exhibitions I’ve ever been to. To see the carpark there transformed into a massive rave site almost, was really special. I sat thinking of the body as a cavity, one sound resonates inside; a hollow waiting to be filled, and then the following day, I went to Crystal Palace to see friends play. Sat on a box at the side of the stage with the noise and the roar of their set right there, inside me. I couldn’t hear right for days after and didn’t even care. Some things, it’s worth going a little deaf for.

When I was a kid I used to take the cover off the speakers and put my hands on them, just to feel the sound. Everything that late summer pointed to the fact of the book. And maybe I made the soundman up or maybe he always existed, somewhere outside of me. Your characters find you, you just have to learn how to listen.

Same month, in Edinburgh, one of Louise Bourgeois’ spiders. People send me photos of them now, knowing how much I like her. Not knowing it’s not even about how her things look, it’s how they make me feel. I see her work and it fills me with a type of terror I then want to repeat. The spider in Edinburgh was small, and although I could understand it was something incredible, it didn’t do the it I wanted. Didn’t smack me hard in the chest. Didn’t make me want to throw up. I have become addicted to her and now I’m in search of harder highs.

Maybe that’s what the year was characterised by. Feeling again. Learning to feel again. Letting myself feel again. I was ambushed earlier in the year by a terrifying thing. It’s hard when you write about your life to write about things without alluding to things in a sly kind of a way. I don’t want to do that. But earlier this year something terrifying and terrible happened, like all terrible and terrifying things, I didn’t plan for this, I couldn’t factor it in. It was simply that life was one way at the beginning of a March afternoon, and by evening it would never be the way it had been before. This thing became a kind of seismic thing, and I think now I’m thinking about it, or at least trying to squint at it, it did the same thing as any seismic event does, in that it reconfigured ground I’d thought certain; but this ground was internal. I read my horoscope at the beginning of the year, it said many changes, it said you’ll be a new person by the end of the year; I said I don’t believe in the stars but I read it anyway, read them every week really, daily maybe, in desperate times. Whatever it was, fate or chance or dumb luck or the best luck in the end, because the terrifying terrible thing made not-feeling impossible. Being numb was no longer the option it had been for so long.

Not just feeling again. Wanting to feel again. Wanting to be too cold. Wanting to be too hot. Wanting the hard feel of northern lakes to slap me back to life. Wanting the wind to knock the breath out my body. Wanting the rain on my face, wanting the sound in my body, wanting to see art that makes me throw up, letting myself make art that makes me throw up; a year spent returning to the first book I wrote and learning how to retell that story, my story as cinema. How do you do that, take the worst things that happened to you and make them look beautiful? I am learning. It helps, to see the past differently.

I never resolve at the beginning of the year. I am too scared to tempt fate. I like the past, I like the memories from this year, I love a lot of the people I spent it with, I feel really fucking lucky that my strange little imagination has taken me so many places this year; that my mind’s given me so much when for so long I believed it to be a problem. I like the past because it’s known, for better or worse. I find the future difficult, tomorrow’s only borrowed really. I don’t know what will happen next year, I know what I’d like to happen, but I’ve given up on trying to make things happen. You let a thing happen, you cannot make it happen.

Next week I plan to go home. See out this year and in the next, as low key as possible; pints and yaps in the pub with people I love. Maybe wash my hair and try and be pretty for a night. Do some work. Thank whoever it is I believe in for this year, try not to hide from the next.

If say, you were to think the lists were names of places you have visited over the last 12 months, they might say how nice, how lucky. If say, these lists were divided into cities, towns and rural places; if say I were to have visited 23 cities, 6 towns and 4 villages and if say that list were to exclude where I live, you might begin to do the maths and think that sleeping in 33 different places over 52 weeks might begin to look like strange, even bad maths, the type of maths that might mean when I do wake in my own house, in my own bed, I am beset by the type of panic previously reserved for other places, a type of panic that means I lie there for a time, unable to know where or why I am where I am. A type of panic that takes an hour at least to abate. The type of panic that might give rise to other lists.

These other lists, if they were to exist, would be simple lists. These would be entirely harmless lists listing what I have eaten in a day. They would be short lists. At times these lists might contain only liquid. If say these lists were to exist at all.

You make other lists too. Some of these lists, you don’t remember making. In bold you have written, I would like to know what we are scared of. You think of this we in the same way as the we in Bill Callahan’s Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle - perhaps it is an accidental we, perhaps not. Other lists, you made when you left the forest and forgot how to see yourself in a mirror - it is 8 am and I have seen myself five times; there comes a point you must consider the themes of your life - not what you want them to be but what they are; you must become a small factory (disregard the rest) and so it goes.

I list all the places I have been this year, and the second to last place I was, I stood thinking of my great grandfather standing in the same docks, watching the sunset perhaps like I was that evening, but me spending the day just a normal day but him getting on the boat leaving for South Africa, and how could he hold that in his mind’s eye, a whole different continent, had he even seen it in atlases, were there even photos for him to look at, or had he just got himself into the type of trouble he needed to leave? How to leave for somewhere you don’t even know how to imagine. How to leave a sunset like that, without knowing what came next.

I am good trouble. I am good at leaving. I suspect I have only become good at both because I am not naturally given to either. I stood there thinking of him, watching the kind of sunset you only get in the west.

Recently, I have been missing everything again. The problem with missing one thing is that missing one thing only leads to missing another thing and this another thing leads to missing the rest, until all you are is made of is missing parts. You are at a party in Turin when you are beset hard and heavy by this missing. You like to think you have mitigated this missing with handsome wealthy men and stolen gin. These things make for a good story but like most things that make for a good story, they are far from the truth. You are in a castle, and it is a particularly beautiful castle full of particularly beautiful people who happen to be particularly brilliant. The chances are on that night and every night really, you can pass for neither. You balance your gin tonic as you walk the stone stairs of the castle to the rooftop where there are many authors you recognise, and possessing neither the wit nor the energy to talk to them, you light a cigarette and look out over the city hoping you appear aloof or even enigmatic, instead of simply strange. You sit with the noise and the crush around you, the intellect and the ideas, thinking of the only person you really want to be talking to. You think of how they’d make you laugh, and, trying to dispel them in the truest sense, in that you are using all the magic you have ever known to forget them, you recall the stupid quote from Catcher in the Rye painted on the stairs you just climbed don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody. And it doesn’t matter if you first read that at twelve years old, the night of a thunder storm, lying face down on your bed, that summer you read everything you could, with the windows open and the hot breaking air coming in, it’s still true, don’t ever tell anybody anything. It becomes important you turn yourself into a citadel again. One built to keep everyone else firmly out.

Or maybe it does matter that you first read it then because all of a sudden reading this quote again, you start missing everyone. You start and you don’t know how to stop. That’s why you stopped telling anyone anything; why you stopped missing everyone, in the hope you’d never start again. That’s why you do things like move all the time, just to say look how good I am at it. That’s why you deny your appetite, just to pretend you’re not hungry all the time. That’s why you don’t stand in the docks in a city like Liverpool, say, and look out over the Mersey, thinking of the last person in your family who did the same. That’s why you don’t think about migration routes, of birds and people, of ships and planes, that’s why you don’t message a friend you trust with an idea of a book you are definitely not thinking of writing, and when they reply it’s a great idea, you’d be crazy to try, you do not think of it as an invitation, a gauntlet thrown.

You never could say no to a dare.

When you are split between two continents, two races and two religions, it is hard to know where home is. It is hard to know if you are wholly anything at all. Easier to stay half than to reconcile anything, even if the recent lists indicate the necessity of trying to solve this problem. Even if homesickness seems to have become a verb in the sense it is acting on you, in that it does things to you, in that you are sickened by the lack of home, pining perhaps for a place you knew and another place you have not yet known, even if you miss your grandfather’s films with a hunger you knew and hoped yourself not capable of again, films you watched in the summer, films tinged with the colour of memory now, VHS tapes where you crawl across the floor, trying to escape his lens, your voice one you hardly recognise, even if when your cousin tells you of the veld and the monotony it brings, all you want is just to go home, back there, wherever it is, just for an afternoon, although if you did, if you were able to, you’d never leave. You’d love everything you hated, you’d love the place you only ever wanted to escape, you’d eat the dinner you cut up into smaller and smaller pieces on the plate, you’d watch the sunset and not think of dying, you’d get in your dad’s truck and let him turn his bad music up, just once, just again; you’d do what you were told, just to be home, just for an afternoon at least, like a Swallow, just flown in for a time.

The route between Euston and Milton Keynes is particularly ugly. Even the Red Kite overhead can’t do much to soften it. Being of the sky as it is, it can’t be said to be exactly the route either. From the train, Milton Keynes station is tiled with the sort of tiles that haven’t been in common use since the eighties but were in much common use during the eighties, in the same way Charing Cross station and Glasgow Queen Street, until recently, could instantly be aged by their tiles, so can Milton Keynes. There’s something reassuring about a bad station; you know what you’re getting. In a similar way there’s something excellent about a dive bar, anything good comes as a surprise. A smooth running station, now that’s a cause for alarm. Arriving in Copenhagen recently, I felt thoroughly displaced by its smooth platforms, its easy to navigate ticket hall, the announcements in both Danish and English; all this combined to make it feel foreign in the way Rome did not, when barely half an hour after arriving I’m standing on the platform arguing with the Carabinieri. Copenhagen has the same effect expensive hotels or good dining rooms have on me, when in them, I want to be very very badly behaved. Whereas put me in a Travelodge and I’ll spend the whole time wondering why it doesn’t have two ls.

After Milton Keynes, the landscape remains nondescript but more open than it was before. The sky is low and grey, none of the drama of Sweden. Being back has been harder than I thought it would be. I never expected to say I missed moss. I never expected to find walking on pavements offensive. I miss the feel of the forest floor under my feet. I miss the sky. I miss the blue hour. I miss showering outside. I miss the extremes of temperature; how biting cold it was when I ventured my foot outside the covers in the morning. I miss how alive the shock of it all makes you feel. I have taken to prowling around the house, saying things like I’m just going to look at the moon, and standing on the hill looking out over the sea in the dark, in the same way my father said his mother did over the Indian Ocean, her with her fortune telling and watery blood. But the stars here are not bright enough, not with the sky not being dark enough. I had not realised how my eyes had adjusted to the darkness until last night, when I went looking for something late, not even thinking or needing to turn the light on. I glower at the rain hitting the train window, really it should be snow.

Then I remember I’m changing at Crewe. Another less than beautiful station but always an adventure of a station. The thrill of never knowing if you’ll make the connecting train, or if there will be a train to connect to is really something. Last time I was at Crewe, I’d left Wales early in the morning. I’d been supposed to travel the night before, but a storm had got up, the roads were flooded. I had not thought to think the storm might be travelling in the same direction I was. At the station, a large ginger cat befriended me. He’d clearly been out all night, settled himself on my knee. Purred. Didn’t seem to want to leave when the train arrived. The light was curious that morning. Pastel backlit clouds. That heavy feeling of a storm on the move. At Crewe, all the trains west were off. Trains north too. Trains south too. I needed a coffee, bought on in the Upper Crust, a mistake. The station was full of Scousers, maybe it was about 8.30am and at least half of them were drunk already. A fact I found so interesting a messaged a friend, who replied about something to do with match day and not being allowed to drink at the match. The logic didn’t seem to hold much. But a drunk scouse accent is a fun thing to encounter that early in the morning.

I have come to know the west coast line too well. I know if you’re going to get stranded the danger points are Crewe, Preston and Carlisle. Carlisle because if you’re trying to get to Scotland, you’re so very tantalisingly nearly there that God likes to throw a grenade on your plans. I have come to know terrible pubs in all three places. I have come to wonder if there are good pubs in any of these three places. I know the sleeper pulls into a siding somewhere on this coast, and when it does, it cuts the Wi-Fi out, so that when I checked the map in a desolate mood not helped by a siding at 2am, all I was was a blue dot on a background of blue squares.

When I open this map now, it’s doing the same thing. The electricity on the train is as patchy as the Wi-Fi is, so that sometimes my laptop is charging, and sometimes it is not. The fields are flooded, cows have taken to the scant higher ground there is, and are lying bunched together. Not a good sign. When the doors open at a station, wind gusts in. I recall a similar day in January, when I had not thought to check the weather, and if time is a straight line, it’s just a lie we tell ourselves to avoid the likelihood of ending a year in the same way it began; storms, train journeys, and me at the mercy of it all.