In 2023 a Swedish influencer named Saskia Court asked her Instagram followers to question the men in their lives about how often they thought about the Roman empire. And it turned out that lots of those men thought about Rome quite often - some several times a week, some of them daily.

While it’s true that recently I did write about the Roman Empire in a widely ignored piece comparing Rome’s tacky hijacking of Grecian antiquity to the contemporary American empire’s buy-out of English football, universities, and country houses, there’s something I think about more often.

Paul McCartney.

I have an early memory of asking my Mum to call-in to a radio vote to choose a favourite Beatles song. I voted for Strawberry Fields. I was five. There has been no let-up since. The Beatles are not a band; Paul McCartney is not a singer and songwriter. He is given, a structural part of existence. Not as important as a parent, probably, but more important than any aunt or uncle. Not as important as the sun or the ocean, probably, but certainly more important than the colosseum, for example.

It’s not about if he and The Beatles are any good, it’s not like that. You don’t ask if trees are any good, they’re just there. The best way I can express it is that Paul McCartney and The Beatles are like football or roast potatoes. Weaved into the fabric.

McCartney v Death

There’s one aspect of McCartney I think about more often than any other.

These days, I think about Paul McCartney’s death maybe three, four, five times a week. Maybe more. It’s such a troubling prospect that I’ve started to develop a plan for when it happens, so I’ll have some basic grooves to follow when the shock hits. Clearly, I’ll take time off work. I won’t be able to function. I’ll retreat in seclusion. Nobody needs to see it.

The next part of the plan is tricky. You’d think it would be listen to the music. Start with Maybe I’m Amazed, or Silly Love Songs, Blackbird, Temporary Secretary - listen to the bassline in Taxman. Really wallow. Helter Skelter, Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsay, Jet.

Next, maybe read all the think pieces, all the papers, all the coverage. Listen to the solemn broadcasts. Gorge on grief.

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McCartney v Windsor

In fact, I don’t imagine I’ll do any of that. It will be a while before I can play the music. And certainly I won’t be able to consume any media. When the late queen of England died, soon as I heard, I turned off the TV and radio, didn’t read a paper, go online, say the word queen to anybody, join in with any chat.

It’ll be like that with McCartney. I won’t be able to engage.

With thingy Windsor I couldn’t engage because of the oleaginous, ashen-faced toadying that I knew was coming. The peculiarly English sanctimonious deference, whimsical and self-serious simultaneously. The propaganda. The abasement. The Witchelling.

As the cortege makes its way down The Mall we give thanks for her majesty’s noble blahblah.

As Chuck D said of Elvis, he was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me. Swap Elvis for whatshername Windsor in that lyric.

I’m getting off topic. A bit. Can’t help it. Strong feelings.

The death of McCartney will be like the death of the queen in that it’ll occasion me having a media blackout, for self-protection. But it’ll be the opposite of that too, given McCartney’s prominence is spectacularly earned, not bestowed, assumed and expected via chancy inheritance customs.

McCartney is not just more important in my mind than the Roman Empire, he’s provably more significant than the queen.

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As you read this I’ll be canoeing down the Thames on an annual midsummer trip with three old friends, one of whom really had better have brought a working tent this year. And I just wanted to take a moment, just as I did at the winter solstice, to have a quick look round creatively, and see where we are. This post then is split into the sections: Floaters, Films and Farwell.

Floaters

First thing is I’ll be ‘in conversation’ in Oxford with cult author James Attlee about my new novel Floaters on the evening of Wednesday 24th June at Caper bookshop. (James is one of the most fluid and energetic speakers I know and I won’t be hogging the airtime.)

Described by The Guardian as a ‘coming-of-age revenge caper’, limited edition copies of Floaters kept back for readings will be for sale on the night. Only 215 copies of this edition will ever be printed - one for each mile of the Thames. Each copy is hand-numbered, hand-named, and signed.

Tickets for the event can be bought here

Wednesday, 24 June 2026 at 19:30 - 20:30 BST

Caper, 74-77 Magdalen Road, Oxford, Oxfordshire, OX4 1RE

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Films

Next up are Slow & Spurious films.

I was delighted that my short film The Library of Unwritten Books won Best Art or Poetry Short at the very cool Dreamer of Dreams film festival in London and I have dutifully added their laurel, with my poor photoshop skills, to the homespun film poster.

There are two more Slow & Spurious films in the works. For those who don’t know the story behind this commitment to making weird, slow films with no skills or cash, you can read about that here. (Viewable via that link incidentally is the completed short experimental film Analogue Digital Dead Alive - winner now at seven film festivals).

The first new film in the works is called Le Jazz (see homespun poster at top of the post) named after an unusual painting I bought off the wall of a restaurant on the Costa Blanca in Spain twenty years ago.

While the second new film is named after the flags of a non-existent country I imagined. The country is called Nalbandia. (I don’t mention this in the new film itself, but Nalbandia is so-called after the Argentinian tennis play David Nalbandian, whose name I have always loved.)

During a World Cup seems the right time to represent the inhabitants of imaginary countries, not just those tethered bothersomely to earth, and I would like to see some kind of tournament for imaginary countries put in place soon - perhaps a sauntering while whistling contest.

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And a Farewell

William Boyd in Sunday’s Observer called David Hockney England’s Picasso, but for me Boyd had sights on the wrong man.

In The Shock of The New, Robert Hughes describes Matisse’s brushwork from his Fauve years as having a ‘eupeptic, take-it-or-leave-it quality which seems to deny craft.’ Remind you of anyone?

The light of the Riviera gave birth to Fauvism in Matisse, and when Hockney moved to California he was similarly freed. Both fell in love with the light and the colour of more Southern climes.

‘With decoupage in the 1940s’ Hughes again says of Matisse, then in his 70s, ‘he rediscovered the incisive liberty of his fauve years.’ Just as Hockney rediscovered incision and liberty in his own eighth decade, with his iPad and large-scale digital drawings.

As a culture-mad kid from West Yorkshire Hockney meant a lot to me, and we could talk if we wished about the slender moment of postwar meritocracy in the UK’s cultural industries which Hockney thrived in, and how that moment has now largely gone.

But no politics now. His brushes are finally down, and the sun is up towards its midsummer height. Like Matisse, Hockney was in love with colour and with light.

He was perhaps England’s great colourist. Which is no bad title to have.

Thank you as always for reading.

Blessings on your loved ones and your home.

Paddles in!

Craig

Stu and I were outside, sitting on the crappy plastic chairs that the Portuguese deli had chucked out onto the pavement when the news broke that Jo had been shot and stabbed in the street, about 180 miles North of where we then sat.

Stu is an aficionado of true crime, and not just as a genre. He showed me his phone. ‘It doesn’t look good mate,’ he told me grimly.

Stu explained that because updates on Jo’s condition had stopped being made on the news, what that meant, probably, was that she’d died already and that they were telling the family first before they went live with that.

Then we saw that Jo’s husband Brendan had posted a brand-new photo of Jo on his socials. She was stood in front of their houseboat, and we guessed from that that he’d been told and that this was the image of Jo he wanted to be used through the coming storm.

So it proved.

It was during Euro 2016. The Portuguese deli had wheeled out a big screen for the football, shaded it with a cheapo gazebo, co-opted the pavement. Stu and I were nicking off work to watch England v Wales.

I don’t remember anything about the game.

I do remember taking our daughters that night to their Aikido lesson in the community centre as normal, and the news coming through officially that Jo was dead, and just sitting at the back holding hands and blubbing, my wife walking out so as not to freak the girls.

I do remember that later, my wife and I, in some unusual blast of fiscal maturity, had invited some finance guy round the house to help us draft our Last Will and Testament, and that we went along with the meeting, despite Jo’s death - glazed, obedient, polite; timing being as crucial to tragedy as it is to comedy.

And I do remember that that weekend we’d had a camping trip planned with the kids and some friends and we stubbornly went along, insisting on some level of normality for the benefit of our girls and ourselves, and that unbelievably Brendan, Jo’s husband, turned up coincidentally at the same campsite with his folk band, honouring his own family plans, insisting on some level of normality himself, seeking the succour of friendship.

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It will be ten years on June 16th, 2026, since the sitting Labour MP Jo Cox was assassinated, just one week before the Brexit referendum that would take the UK out of the EU. I don’t want to touch the political-cultural stuff, rehearse some narrative line that leads from 2016’s troll farms, Brexit bots, and Boris bus to today’s post-truth Makerfield Reformation. There’ll be plenty of people doing that in the coming weeks.

What I also don’t want to do is talk about the inadequate person that killed Jo, the confused misogynist that murdered her in the street. I don’t remember that person’s name. Proper nouns are best used elsewhere.

Really, I just want to say some things about Jo as a mate, some unconnected things probably about her friends, just record a few things before they get lost in the wind. You can’t talk about your life without talking about your friends.

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Jo grew up eight miles from where I grew up in West Yorkshire, but we didn’t meet then. Jo went to the same university as me at the same time, but we didn’t meet then.

Where we did meet was in Brussels. I was a trailing spouse as my wife worked for the European Commission, and Jo was an assistant to Glenys Kinnock, then Member of the European Parliament, and she was already wired into the whole Labour machine.

Brussels, clearly, was super political and a hotbed for smart kids going places. This was Jo. She was funny, smart, and twinkly and - despite me being the cliched aloof Steppenwolf writer guy - we got on. It helped that we were both working-class kids from Yorkshire. It helped that she also supported Leeds United who we referred to as The Leeds, and who we’d watch together on satellite TV in the ex-pat bars.

You’ll have seen that at the top of this piece there’s a photo of Jo and me gleefully talking shit at the wedding of our friends Joanna and Hywel, in Brussels, in 2002 maybe I’d guess. Our friend Lucy is in the background talking to my wife, her back to us. I’m wearing some moth-eaten Paul Smith suit that my friend Andy gave me a few years before. This is the only photo I have of Jo and me together. Thanks to Joanna for sending it.

We met Jo before she married Brendan Cox, when was called Jo Leadbeater. And so she’ll always in my mind be called by her nickname, The Beater, which I think is a name that our friend Danny came up with.

What else to tell you?

The Beater was a minx. She liked a drink. I have this memory of drinking White Russians with her round our mate Paul’s, watching England beat Denmark in the World Cup in 2002. Why are so many of my memories of her to do with football? And not just of her, I remember watching England beat Sweden at the World Cup, with Kim, her sister, two years after Jo was killed.

After Brussels, my wife and I ended up living in Oxford and Jo pitched up there too, living with us in our tiny flat overlooking the Thames for a few weeks before she got herself sorted. Then we’d bike over to see Jo for dinner after she’d bought her first house in the city, and it was always, always jacket potatoes. She was a crumby chef.

What else?

She came to our wedding; we went to hers.

Jo had velocity.

She would reminisce about her hometown’s crap nightclub, The Frontier, which she called T’tier.

My wife knew Jo much better than me, worked with her, was amazed at how quickly Jo mastered a brief, deleted the associated emails, moved ever forwards.

The Beater was irrepressible, had bouncebackability. The day after the 2010 general election when Labour got shut out by the infamous Liberal-Conservative coalition she texted me to say - tough night. we go again! She became an MP at the next election.

I can maybe be a bit cold hearted and once Jo said to me, ‘I wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of you’. Don’t worry - you didn’t.

Our friend Joanna campaigned to have a square named after Jo in Brussels, which came through in 2018. We took our daughters in 2019 and just kind of slumped there and cried. It’s quite something, to have a square named after you. A plank across the volcano.

What else? My wife’s friend Jamie, who performs magic in refugee camps to cheer up kids, planted a load of trees for Jo in an Oxfordshire village, where we planted a load of trees too. I haven’t been there for ages. I should make the time.

I still pass that house Jo bought in Oxford, when I drive up Between Towns Road, taking my kids on a TK Maxx odyssey as I did this week, and every time I think about The Beater and her jacket spuds and watching The Leeds, and I try not to think about how scared she must have been in the road.

I’m quite screwed up about it still. I haven’t dealt with it, I’m sure. Not exactly sure how to - a mate being assassinated is dissimilar to other things that happen.

I loved those Portuguese deli lads: the smiley one and the grumpy one. Brothers. Grafters. Nodes. The deli’s gone now but I still see the smiley one round town, driving the buses. I haven’t seen Stu for ages.

If I had to guess, I’d say our friend Paul loved Jo most of all.

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We visited sites, this friend and I, in Thebes, Delphi, Corinth, Plataea, Mycenae and Athens, but it was at the archaeological site of Eleusis, centre of the cult of the Goddess Demeter for well over one thousand years - and the place where the video above is shot - that I felt most at home.

On entering the archaeological site - before hitting anything actually Greek - you are obliged to first encounter the remains of a Roman courtyard, a 65m by 40m marble-paved hangout, reached on its original completion by passing beneath a 16m triumphal arch, once bedecked - archaeologists hold - with bronze statues of Roman emperors and their Kushners.

Across this grand, triumphant arch, chiselled proudly into both sides, were the words: «THE PANHELLENES DEDICATED THE ARCH TO THE GODDESSES AND THE EMPEROR», with the word ‘Emperor’ featured exactly above the centre of the curve. (The Panhellenes incidentally being a Rome-led puppet organisation created to administer the conquered Greek diaspora).

Subtle, right.

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This two-thousand-year-old example of a new empire rocking up and sealing the legitimacy of its dominion via quasi-philanthropic over-writing of the meaningful sites of a previous world power could not remind me more of the US oligarchs Larry Ellison and Steven A. Schwarzman’s twenty-first century moves towards the monumental dominance of Oxford. And actually, I found it great fun to think in this way, while strangely it feels quite sweet and reassuring that these cashed-up big dogs are still so touchy that they have to do this kind of emotionally basic showing off.

Because let’s be honest, with the U.S. in 2026, we are dealing with an out and out Empire, and we are dealing with an orange guy who will inevitably in time take his historical place alongside Nero in the pantheon of ridiculous and world-historic tyrants - a fitting subject even for Tacitus.

History could not be happening more obviously right before our eyes. It’s darkly thrilling seeing this whole grand narrative ‘historical Rise and Fall of Empires’ stuff unfolding as journalism; to feel how base and normal and parochial and gaudy it all is. For me, it brings the past to life - makes me feel, for example, close to the Romans, sense what a bunch of jumped-up march-arounds they were; these comically bossy dudes pitching up, pointing, ordering, building. Claiming other people’s kit.

But please don’t think that by teasing the exploits and pretensions of both Romans and Americans I am here implying some Brit superiority. My hometown of Oxford is a one-time colonial madrassa with the self-regard of empire still baked into the stone for anyone interested in life beyond the Downton Abbeyfication of contemporary culture to see. History outright bellows that the popinjay venality of our rulers has no mother tongue. But what are we going to do about it?

Statues and arches are brittle metaphors for the real freedom you can make for nothing in your mind. There are diamonds everywhere. Plough your field, love your loved ones, feel the sun and the breeze. Life is magnificent my friends.

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Less weightily, but again quite sweet, we believed that the accomodation we rented for the single night we stayed in Eleusis, was a knocking shop. The tacky baroque vibes (below) were screaming brothel. But apparently not. It is in fact a Love Hotel. With intergenerational living being the norm in Greece, lovers rent this place for a little privacy.

So cute. Mammals and their actions, eh.

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Similarly, it seems rash to dispute that The Ziggurat of Neo-Liberalism is the more appropriate name for Oxford’s Saïd Business School, (below) a recipient of £70 million plus from Wafic Saïd - a man who presided over the addition to his school of a cuboid annexe named after Margaret Thatcher, and who built a 30m gold-topped obelisk in the grounds of his mansion to honour the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II.

The global rich are increasingly pouring money all over Oxford, like honey onto a cake that’s already been rather thickly iced. Co-founder of Oracle, long-term Trump associate and Republican financer Larry Ellison is donating hundreds of millions to establish a campus to be known as The Ellison Institute of Technology. Ellison is also repurposing the culturally significant pub The Eagle and Child (known locally as The Bird and Baby) where Tolkien and C. S. Lewis used to meet to chunter about elves and God over warm stout.

Last week, I went with my family to the inauguration of The Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities - the latest endowment from the global super rich to the University of Oxford, following Blackrock CEO and Trump advisor Schwarzman’s £150m donation to the ongoing cause. As far as I know, the Schwarzman Centre has yet to be informally named by the residents of the city, and given its relatively innocuous appearance - a kind of mid-brow, managerio-Classical affair, faced back and front in traditional Oxford Clipsham stone - I am struggling to come up with a sticky zinger myself.

Perhaps the answer lies inside, where the building burrows deeper than a wisdom tooth, via its underground concert hall, etc, and where beneath its fractally latticed atrium, its inauguration ceremony last week took place.

The artist Es Devlin (below) took centre stage at a pleasingly daft ritual in which members of the public with free tickets (us) sat circularly and were asked to cup bespoke bowls of tea in silence, while listening to recorded soundbites from academics and AI ethicists emoting liberally on incompatible aspects of humanity set to an ambient soundscape.

Somewhat woolly, yes, and rather self-serious, and at the back of it all the cognitively dissonant rattle of Blackrock billions could always be heard. But the tea was absolutely magic. As was the original choral piece of music composed by Nico Muhly specifically for the night and sung from on high by the Chamber Choir of Oxford University. Maestro!

Coming out of the Schwarzman Centre afterwards, what was thrilling, and what I had not truly processed before, was its apposite proximity to the Blavatnik biscuit tins, like a kind of post-cold war money-off, a global philanthropical pissing contest with Oxford as the chosen bullseye for this bout of status combat via architecture. Or is that too much? Certainly, it was enjoyable when I returned some days later in the gaudy day to see that the Schwarzman actually looked at its best within the distorted, curved reflection of the Blavatnik, where it magically invented a kind of Yemeni Cubism (below).

This stuff runs deep in Oxford. Not half a mile from the Schwarzman, in the now-demolished Beaumont Palace, Kings Richard I and John were born in the twelfth century. While we can tick off the contributions of the city to the Establishment of this country and further afield, with 26 and counting UK prime ministers educated here, with God-knows how many non-UK government heads having been spruced up across the centuries by this finishing school for domination and ascent.

A contrasting fixture from a different stream of Oxford’s establishment, the writer Philip Pullman, remarked, in accounting for the profusion of Fantasy writing produced and set in the city, that Oxford had a ‘Solvent effect on reality.’ He meant by that that the look and feel of it - its creamy walls and arches giving unexpectedly onto whole, hidden quadrangular worlds - could dissolve the everyday and stimulate the writer’s imagination. And so repurposing Pullman’s sentiment, I think it might apply to our donors as well; Oxford has a solvent effect on them too…

Here you can turn up as one thing and leave as another. A name chiselled above a door; an institute endowed, a medal given to a benefactor in the university’s Wren-built Sheldonian theatre - Oxford can dissolve and re-veneer the way that you’re seen by the world. Or dissolve it at least for a while, as followers of the case of Cecil Rhodes will know very well.

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The above piece was written due to its thematic appropriateness to an upcoming Northern Earth evening in Oxford, considering people and place. You can buy tickets here.

James Attlee, who knows as much about the landscapes of Oxford as anyone, will be there. I’ll be showing a single-shot film I made about the landscapes of rural Oxfordshire, and I’m as excited as the audience to learn what Louise and Paul will be bringing.

The event takes place on 22nd May at the Friend’s Meeting House in Oxford. Pleasingly, the Meeting House is close to an original Oxford landscape, a henge now lost deep beneath St Giles’ church, as well as being close to the Woodstock Road, which, as my friend Paul Lenz recently told me, is a good four thousand years old.

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It’s a single-shot film documenting my daily rural run, which becomes a contemplation of our species history, and a personal skirmish with nature, ageing and art. But with, you know, jokes.

After the screening there will be a brief Q&A before the evening moves on to hear from amazing speakers in James, Louise and Paul, as below. You can buy tickets here.

Also in the month of May, I’m happy to have the second film I ever made, The Library of Unwritten Books, screening at the 7th edition of the Dreamer of Dreams Film Festival, May 7th, where it is nominted for the Best Art or Poetry Short.

The festival is held at the Close-Up Film Centre in Shoreditch, which looks like some kind of paradise, and honestly the other films selected look courageous and bold and reflect so well on the organisers, Massi and Jan.

The only downside for me is that I’ll be in Athens and will miss the chance to receive nourishment from watching the work of others. You can buy your tickets here.

Screening the next day, Friday 8th May, at the 10th Edition of the Eastbourne International Film Festival is the third film I made, Analogue Digital Dead Alive. Again, Athens rules me out of this festival which is so well organised and has such great comms and such expert, eager people working on it. Sad to be missing this myself. You can buy tickets here.

And there are two new films in the works. The plan is to make short films during the course of which a work of art is created, and then to show the film next to that created work of art.

I’m doing this twice right now, making films along with the art which accompanies them, and I’m having eighteen types of fun, even as the content of the films inhabits my go-to zone of laconic misery - BUT WITH GAGS.

And finally, in what is becoming a festival of extraversion for a usual near-hermit, I did a talk and a reading of my novel Floaters on Thursday night for the organisation Wild Oxfordshire in Shipton Under Wychwood.

A proper crowd turned out - not for me, I was the warm-up act for the real life people on whom the Channel 4 drama Dirty Business was based.

The campaginers at the heart of that Ch4 drama are such tenacious and informed people. Yes, the UK’s sewage crisis was the only topic of conversation last night, but I felt that another apparent crisis was indirectly addressed too. With much talk about the crisis of masculinity it was excellent to experience the immovable morality of the four guys on stage, here pictured with host of the evening, Ruth Weston. You want to see what a good man looks like, take your pick from the picture below.

The famous south door (below) is crammed with Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian influences beyond the period-typical Norman Romanesque. To start with, there’s a green man, a ouroboros, a manticore, a basilisk…

Away from the door, on one of the ninety-odd corbels tucked beneath the roof is the equally-famous Sheela-na-Gig (below) about which the experimental novelist B S Johnson published a short story in 1964.

Visiting Kilpeck for the first time in March this year with my friends Showb and Andrew, I shot the video above early in the morning when the frost was still on the fields. My friends’ antiquarian interests are more coalesced than my own - Andrew runs the magazine Northern Earth and Showb writes the Substack Histories - and we’ve gone wandering, the three of us, with irregular persistence over many years: tramping down B-roads to find standing stones swallowed by unkempt hedges, or else sniffing out Saxon burial mounds smoothed out by graveyards’ theological proprietary.

With these two friends, and more often by myself, it is true to say that almost without exception such wanderings sooner or later end with churches.

In depicting his conversion to Christianity, the formerly Wiccan environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth talked of a process in which he repeatedly visited empty churches, ostensibly from architectural or antiquarian interest, but really as a denied aspect of his ineluctable journey towards accepting the Christian God. Similarly, the once-pagan storyteller and mythologist Dr Martin Shaw talks of his own long-denied journey towards Christ erupting whilst out on an animistic retreat. Knowing of Shaw and Kingsnorth’s journeys, and considering the truth that I find myself almost weekly in some berserko listed chapel or other - up some lichened lane or down some dog-legged street - it seems only honest to ask myself if I am in denial myself about Christianity’s spiritual pull.

So, I ran an audit. This is how it went.

My friend Laura died last year. She was mid-30s. Recently married. Cool as you like - style, smarts, kindness. She went to the doctors feeling peaky and was dead within a month. Lovely Laura. Tragedy, right?

At her Church of England funeral my solace came from the slanting light warming the stone of the nave’s octagonal columns. The words of the vicar felt like an irrelevant scamming of my friend into an uncomfortable didactic theological box. I wanted to shout, ‘Stop! You’ve won! No need! You’re occupying one of the spiritual places of this island. We get it. It’s yours. Can’t we just look at the light and the stone and feel the time and think about our friend.’

At another funeral last month, the Catholic Priest seemed to be talking himself into believing his own metaphysical contortions. It’s hard for me to relate to a person secure enough in their narrative to stand up and explain the life and death of someone they barely know to a gathering of grieving people who loved that person the best. The Eucharist then felt amdram. Withstanding the Priest’s schtick seemed like the price to pay for use of the site.

If the Christian liturgy leaves me baffled and sore, what of feelings provoked by solitary visits to churches? I have checked myself again and again as I sit silent and alone in various pews and strangely it never occurs to me to think about Christianity, unless if I am honest to lament the ugliness of a hung crucifixion spoiling the view to the altar. Self delusion is possible, but right now I feel about as likely to convert as I am to lay siege to Constantinople.

Whilst deeply grateful for much painting and music and architecture produced in the Christian tradition - I’ve literally written a book about my devotion to the Catholic painter Jan van Eyck - still, contact with those things doesn’t provoke any belief in the plausibility of Christ. Visting the church at Kilpeck wires me into the crazy stonemasons who lived out on the marches, and into the silence and the stone and the light.

Play the video. Listen to the birds. Enjoy the light. Have an excellent day.

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PS: Alongside the Dirty Business dudes, I’ll be doing a reading from my novel Floaters on Thursday 23rd April in Oxfordshire. Tickets are free but there will be a collection for the Earth Raise campaign.

The car stopped on the patched-up lane. I could see her face in the rearview mirror peering back at me and I knew what was happening even as she climbed out.

In situations like this - she walked towards me; mid-20s, professional - I’m not above handing back a flavour of whatever antagonism I receive, but I wasn’t seeking escalation - I visited this lane often and didn’t want it tainted with conflict. Besides, being fair to the driver, I was anomalous. With my tripod standing on stepladders to find the right angle on the dawn, I wasn’t the usual deer, hawk or dog walker you might spot down here.

My teen children are susceptible to the daggers of embarrassment and their uncomfortableness with me being ‘difficult’ in any way - and let’s be honest, with my speaking much at all - has trained me to be unobtrusive and placid, even if feeling provoked. But while there were no children present, still I channelled their influence as the driver approached me, her game face on, her authority activated.

Here we go. Closer. Closer.

The opening salvo - ‘Do you have the landowner’s permission?’ - was pretty provocative.

‘I don’t know them,’ I replied.

‘Everything this side of the bridge belongs to us,’ she said.

‘I’m on a public footpath.’

The footpath snaked left from the bridge which she’d just driven over, then it ran adjacent to the lane she was eyeballing me from. I was on this path. Very deliberately on the path.

‘We’re the people who put all the new fencing in,’ she said.

These were the words that topped me out, pushed me towards abandoning civility. Because over the last couple of years I’d seen the new fencing go in. The wires that corralled the walkers from my village away from taking favoured routes across the flood meadow towards the river - denying walking lines that had been used, it is not fanciful to say, since at least the Bronze Age

I’d seen the new inhabitants of the farmhouse which lies between my village and the river wire off routes not just to humans, but also, more upsettingly, prevent the natural travel of deer and fox. (Badgers and rabbits, I had noted, had found their way beneath). I’d seen the new owners erect wooden ‘Private’ signs along the lane, painted in upmarket, tasteful tones. I’d seen the cottages by the farmhouse turned into holiday lets, causing SUV-driving guests to bundle in ignorant speed round the blind corners of the lane. I’d seen security cameras arrive, scrutinising the domain from tall poles.

So, yes, certainly I knew that they were the people who’d put the fencing in, and I found myself shaking with emotion as I stood on the footpath looking at her, all of the upset I’d silently swallowed with each small new act of unanswered dominion now yelping at once into my body as she spoke.

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It has been said in the past that I’ve a problem with authority, which is certainly accurate when authority is inherited, assumed, or enforced, rather than earned via skill, achievement, or wit, and besides, from my perspective - not naturally cut out for a career in the obedience industries - it is authority that has the problem with me. Anyway, she looked at me. It was my turn to speak. I was struggling to stick to my passivity brief.

This was what was running through my mind:

About a mile southwest of here, in a village in which a crippled poet wrote an ode to a pair of doomed peasant lovers struck by lightning, there were found, not so long ago, the bones of a herd of woolly mammoth from perhaps a quarter of a million years ago.

The bones of red deer from three-hundred-thousand-plus years ago were found near a village about three miles northeast of here. About two miles north of here, fifty-thousand-year-old Neanderthal bones were recently found. Two miles north of here, flint axes made by Homo Erectus more than half a million years ago have been discovered.

One hundred and sixty million years ago, everything around us was covered by a sub-tropical sea. There are wars on. My eyes hurt. My teeth ache. Soon you and I and everyone we know will be dead. This morning is as unique and glorious as the breath in your lungs. Your fencing and proprietary are pedantic and obscene and diminishing. Hello. It is nice to meet you

I didn’t say any of this. Instead, I took a deep breath, repressed my spiky cosmic fatalism and said, ‘I live in the village. I come down here a lot. I make experimental films and teach at the university. I’m shooting the sun coming up over the trees. It’s very beautiful with the fog.’

I believe, though this may be fanciful, that I may even have smiled at this point, or at least arranged my features in lieu of such a thing.

She was defused, backtracked on her stance. ‘It is very beautiful,’ she said. ‘I don’t mean to bother you. I was just interested in what you were doing.’

I just nodded. She nodded and left. I returned to filming, tried to calm down. Later, when I told my daughters what had happened they seemed proud of me. Black belt in civility unlocked. Not an easy test to pass.

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Amongst other weathers, this particular broadcast foretells…

Friday afternoon, Southwest light gale, 12.

Up to a strong gale 20, East.

Rain later. Rain building.

Expression of thunder…

Gales in exposed places.

And yep, that was accurate, because I do remember that the wind on the Friday got handsy and gregarious, causing us to abandon a cycle trip and head back to the hut.

We were on a family blow out, an adventure in Norway, discovering what I think is Brexit’s only known benefit - that prices in the famously expensive country of Norway were less shocking to us due to inflation at home caused by our European exit.

We’d decided to head out to Norway’s Westernmost fishing village. As well as being Western, it’s pretty Northern too - on an archipelago just below the Faroes, and it took three seperate boat trips to get there. The third boat trip was on the post boat, and we stopped on the way at the postman’s sister’s island for pancakes and coffee.

The video above is one I find myself watching quite often, not because of any biff bang pow production values - it’s badly framed and wobbly - but because of how it makes me feel.

I’ve written before about what Vermeer’s View of Delft (below, 1660-1661) means to me, or rather how that painting makes me feel, and how I seek the calm that it gives me in other artists, notably Vilhelm Hammershøi and Pieter Jansz Saenredam. And now I find that the video at the top of this post evokes in me a similar calm to The View of Delft

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Although I’ve watched the video clip a few times, only this week did I notice a kind of self portrait in there, as my reflection floats into visibility at about 1 min 20 secs, for 30 secs or so, then floats out again, like the changing weather.

The video works to calm, not neccessarily because of the artfact itself - although you tell me, maybe it does - but because of the memories I associate with it. I am coating the thing with a biographical calm not provoked solely by the thing itself.

Much more likely to emit calm inherently themselves I think are the photographs of Bulandet below. Just due to how things have fallen with family convenience etc, my wife’s photos and my own get swirled in together and I’m not 100% sure who took the ones below. Although I do remember standing at each of these locations and making images, my wife is a better photographer than I am and I would guess from the strong composition that these are hers.

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These pictures seriously calm me. Clearly I have a thing about clouds reflected in water, and about architecture seen on a far shore. Is this a common thing shared perhaps with you?

And these photos calm me for another reason. I love them because when I was stood in the place they were taken, at that time inevitably my own endemic, mammalian bullshit would have clogged perception. I would have been fretting about the kids, or about some words once said or not said, or just common or garden needing a piss or food, but these photos strip my ticking fret from the view and let me see the place I was in better than I did when I was actually there.

It’s peculiar and sweet isn’t it, using memory and images to go to places more deeply only once you’ve left them. And perhaps - and here I’m terrifying myself, feeling gales in all my exposed places - perhaps this is true of people too - knowing them more clearly only once they’re gone.

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Today is publication day of Floaters.

If you don’t know about the book you can read about it here in The Guardian.

Today, I want to do two quick things:

Firstly, an update…

Already, less than 25% of the super limited edition deluxe print run remains. Remember 50% of profits go to Surfers Against Sewage.

If you have interest, best make your move today.

There is literally one place on the internet you can buy Floaters, which is here.

To folk who have pre-ordered: THANK YOU.

Books have been signed, assigned their stretch of the Thames, and bagged up, and the post office will be tortured in the next few days, as you can see above.

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And Secondly, a few words on the book’s title...

Floaters of course refers to the obvious💩- sewage in the water, which rightly has been huge news in the UK all week off the back of the Channel 4 series Dirty Business - but it also refers to the central relationship of the novel, which is an alliance between a disaffected teen boy and a radicalised boomer.

As a ten-year-old boy, I recall being off sick from school and reading the Roald Dahl* book Danny the Champion of the World and being absolutely thrilled that the adult characters - Danny’s father, Sergeant Samways, and Doc Spencer - colluded and indeed broke the law to thwart the arrogant landowner, Victor Hazell. The book made me feel like I’d been let into a secret - not all adults were killjoy enforcers.

I still have the actual copy of Danny that I read more than 40 years ago and it is not exaggerating things to say that it changed the life of the working class lad I was then in at least a couple of ways.

Firstly, Danny got me reading.

Reading for a working class boy was not as rare in the 1980s as it is now but still it was pretty unusual. A rarity that knocks through of course to the publishing industry - where in December 2024, 68% of workers were female and 66% from professional classes - and to the types of books that get comissioned and promoted and so ultimately read.

Suffice to say that a male from a non-professional family (me), publishing a book with a working class male protagonist (Floaters) is about as rare in the UK publishing industry today as rocking horse shit.

The second way that Danny changed my life came later.

As I reflected on the book in my teens and twenties - now more aware of the financial and cultural grooves of history - I saw in it a blueprint for a genuine progressive political agenda, which was an alliance between the skilled trades (Danny’s Dad), the law (Sergeant Samways), and the professional classes (Doc Spencer), acting covertly to check the power of a domineering aristocracy (Victor Hazell).

And so, many years later again, I pinched this idea of smuggling a programmatic political alliance into a novel, and slipped it into Floaters.

As mentioned above, the central relationship and alliance in Floaters is between a working class lad and a radicalised boomer. Together, they stand up against misguided corporate and political power. These two groups, the pre-work and the retired, give the title of Floaters its second meaning.

They are the floaters. They have the wriggle room. These two classes of people, the old and the young, are not, as with myself and all the middle-aged people I know, strapped to the hamster wheel of responsibility and bread-winning. They are floating a bit more. They are free.

And it also seems to me that they have complimentary skills. Vigour, idealism and energy from the young; contacts, organisational smarts, and cash from the old.

Jeez - imagine what these two groups of people teaming up on a nation-wide scale might do. I’ve tried to make a start imagining it in Floaters.

So yes, the book is about sewage in the water, and is a caper and a comedy and an entertainment, but like Danny it also imagines a progressive political alliance between groups of people who together might really make a difference.

Over to you.

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*Dahl was unquestionably an antisemite, which unquestionably I deplore

NOTE

Floaters has gone on sale since this article was written:

You can buy it only here:

There are not many copies left.

Publication date was brought forward due to surprise early publication of a Guardian article about the book:

END NOTE

For more than twenty years I’ve lived by the River Thames. My daughters have grown up swimming in the river but they’re hesitant to swim in it now.

For those outside the UK, you might not know the state of our waterways but they’re not doing well. Yet the ‘owners’ of our water are doing very well - they’re true modern day alchemists, turning shit into gold.

The year 2026 is a big year, a once in a generation opportunity for those campaigning for cleaner waterways, with a variety of legislative and industry opportuities on the table. There’s even a Channel 4 drama coming up about it - Dirty Business.

I wrote the novel Floaters - a crime caper with a stack of damn good jokes - about a group of teens who take the fight to the water industry. People seem to especially love the book’s ex-raver local policewoman, PC Mixtape.

To support the campaigning opportunity offered by 2026, and before wider book trade publication of Floaters, a unique limited art edition of the book is being published, with 50% of profits going to Surfers Against Sewage.

Only 215 copies of this first edition will ever be printed. One copy for each mile of the Thames.

Each copy will be hand-numbered, signed, and hand-named after a feature of the waterway associated with the numbered mile. It’s kind of cute.

The edition will not be for sale commercially through Amazon or Waterstones but only via a single author webpage which I will send privately to all subscribers to this substack the day before the web page goes public, with thanks to you for reading my ongoing schizzle.

Once copies are gone they’re gone.

I’ll be doing readings, events and press in support of the campaign throughout 2026, but everything will get announced here first. Expect more information in the coming days.

Publication date: March 1st, 2026

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Here’s the book blurb:

Sometimes cleaning up means getting dirty first

School’s out, meaning a long summer of freedom for three best friends – lost boy JP, high-achieving No Phone and ever-changing Twix – but when they dive gleefully into their local wild swimming spot they find sewage oozing from an overflow pipe.

Eww! They’re angry and bewildered, but what can they do? Can their spirit of rebellion turn to genuine activism when they meet gutsy boomer Barbara Bone, especially when she exposes MP Julian Coutts and the water company’s role in the sewage dumps?

A mad plan evolves, to take revenge, but can JP, No Phone and Twix really pull off their unlikely eco-heist? Funny, fast-paced, and heartfelt, Floaters is a coming-of-age story capturing the generational moment when youthful despair turns to fearless action.

Info on Surfers Against Sewage:

Surfers Against Sewage is a grassroots environmental charity that campaigns to protect the ocean and all it makes possible. It was created in 1990 by a group of Cornish surfers, fighting to clean up the sea that was making them sick. Now, Surfers Against Sewage campaigns on all that threatens the ocean - plastic pollution, the climate emergency, industrial exploitation and water quality – by taking action on the ground that triggers change from the top.

Here’s the super simple cover look:

And for those of you who do not know me as a writer…..

Praise for C M Taylor

You’ll have a hoot: The Guardian

Taylor is clearly a very accomplished and witty prose stylist: The Mirror

As with all good satire, this dystopian vision inspires laughter and loathing in equal measure: Independent on Sunday

Magnificent: Sport Magazine

Brilliant: The Sun

Professor Jennifer Krauss is the world’s leading synthetic biologist, having revived aready a woolly mammoth frozen within a glacier for more than ten thousand years, so when billionaires prospecting for rare earth minerals beneath melting polar ice discover a perfectly preserved Neanderthal family, Krauss is forced to try and revive them too.

This is the premise of A Crack In The Ice, a love story and tech thriller I started writing some years ago, but have so far left unfinished. I’ve returned to it of late, stimulated by US sabre rattling about Greenland, and by this amazing new mapping of the Antarctic.

The EO Wilson quote from the subtitle above is the guiding spirit of the so-far unfinished story. The ‘God-like’ in Wilson’s quote is a bit high-pitched, but otherwise I find it one fair encapsulation of our human predicament.

Please use the comments below to tell me what you think.

Thanks for reading.

Craig

(Image: NASA, wiki commons)

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Chapter One:

Emma is waiting for me in the car park. ‘You’re late,’ she says.

I am. I look at her. She’s gorgeous. She’s unbelievable.

‘Open,’ I tell the pool car nearest to us. It knows my voice and releases and we hop inside.

Not ten seconds in our seats when Emma makes the first attack. Must have been rehearsed.

‘If you could have had kids yourself, Mum, why did you and Dad adopt me?’

She is by nature merciless, but my daughter’s sixteenth birthday has emboldened her to ask these crushing personal questions.

We’re heading away from the city’s medieval centre towards the private enclave of tech money on the west side of town. I’m taking Emma, the birthday girl, to her dad’s.

‘Why though, Mum?’

I blank her inquisition, hide inside mothering. ‘Did you pack your medicine?’

‘I’ve got spare medicine at Dad’s.’ I can hear her smiling, ‘I’ve got spare everything. I’ve even got a spare Mum.’

It’s both a joke and a barb. I’ll run with the joke. ‘Can you tell your spare Mum there’s a stack of laundry needs doing at home.’

‘We have a cleaner at home.’

‘I work to pay them.’

‘You’re rich.’

I am. It’s true. Well off, at least. As the university’s most feted intellectual, I’m certainly paid well. Though not as well as her father. But who is? He’s sold every gift he’s ever been given.

Husky light slants into the car. I look out of the windows as we drive. Our old European town isn’t yet submerged like many others. There’s a queue by the roadside. Agitated people snake from the doors of a Distribution Centre. But why so many?

Emma doesn’t notice. She fiddles with the dongle that Doug gave her to open his compound gates – the keys to his kingdom.

‘Why no breeding, Mum? You and Dad were young, you were in love, I guess?’

‘We were in love, yes.’

‘Why wouldn’t you make a mini-me?’

‘You sound like your father.’

‘And you sound like my mother.’

‘Touché.’

She’s so sharp, so clever. How am I ever going to keep up with her?

‘So, Mum?’

‘Look, it was me. My fault. My decision. My weirdness.’

‘You’re not adding to my information bank here. Tell me, really. I can take it.’

I turn my head, look right at Emma.

Was she right? Could she take it?

Let’s try her out.

‘I was carrying your father. Emotionally, intellectually, financially. I loved him, but he was drunk. He wanted kids, loads of them he said, running everywhere, hanging from treehouses.’

‘That’s what he has now.’

‘Yes.’

Doug’s second wife’s been more accommodating. It hasn’t helped Doug deal with his loneliness though, which is his to keep forever.

‘But you didn’t want the kids and the treehouse thing?’

‘I was carrying him. I couldn’t carry his baby as well.’

‘Wow. Is that how you see it? A baby’s like a chore?’

‘Not a chore. A parasite, more technically.’

Her eyes widen. ‘Christ Mum, you were hardcore.’

I was – and little has changed in that regard – but I had my work, my research, and it was going to make all the difference, it was going to save the world. I didn’t want to be reduced to this womb thing, this bow-legged baby bag.

She peers at me for a while, then looks away. ‘I kind of admire you Mum, but I kind of hate you too – speaking strictly as a parasite, of course.’

‘You were never a parasite Emma, you were a…’

‘I was a what, Mum?’ Her gaze is burning up my face.

‘Nothing.’

She clenches her hand in a fist around the dongle, almost bangs that fist against the car door. But she controls. ‘I was a what, Mum?’

I see that I have to tell her. Besides, I hate dishonesty. ‘You weren’t a parasite. You were a compromise.’

Our eyes meet for a second before she looks away. Raw emotion burns inside her. I’ve hurt her. I’m expecting a tantrum but it doesn’t come. Instead just silence, a heavy one.

I look beyond her turned head and out of the window. The falling light. The roadside trees, readying to turn. Another agitated queue outside another DC. Why’s everyone collecting at the same time?

We turn right onto a private road and Emma broadcasts passcodes to open the enclave gates. Inside, where compounds ring ostentatious houses, we drive along towards Emma’s dad’s house, a few hundred square metres bigger than the drafty University apartment she and I share.

Emma loves coming here, she’s told me, the bustle, noise, and people – unlike home with its knocking pipes and creaking boards, and her mother’s closed, tense face.

The car pulls up and she’s on the kerb already, her hand on the car door, itching to slam it shut. ‘Call me when you’re ready,’ I say. ‘I’ll come and get you.’

She looks back into the car, defiant. ‘Dad will want to drop me back.’

This toughness of hers will be gold for her in later life. But right now, I just wish it wasn’t aimed at me. ‘No, I’ll come and get you.’

‘Mum, I haven’t spent a birthday with Dad in ten years.’

‘Eleven.’

‘I get an extra half hour with him if he drops me home.’

‘Tell your Dad…’

Emma’s eyes widen. ‘Come on Mum, compromise.’

She has me, as always. All I can do is laugh. I can’t admit how terrifying I find Doug’s company, how harsh the light his presence shines on my emotional poverty, my choices, my failure to find my peace. But Emma can’t know this.

‘Okay. Tell Doug to drop you home. And ask him up for a drink, if he wants.’

For this I get a kiss. ‘Thanks, Mum.’

Emma swings closed the car door and I watch her approach the house, rising high behind the gates, lanterned usually by squares of light from the bedrooms of Emma’s half-brothers and half-sisters, but dark now, with just one room ablaze in the falling gloom, one light from the crow’s nest of Doug’s study, as inside he buys and sells, outsources, and reassigns. It’s just as his message said, Doug’s new wife and kids all away, with just him and Emma alone for a birthday treat.

Emma strides towards the compound gates, which recognise her and open to admit her.

I’ve never been in.

He wanted a breeder but I was a reader.

The gates reach their broadest swing then tip back closed as Emma passes inside.

*

My name is Professor Jennifer Krauss and I am two distinct things.

On the outside, I am a world expert on synthetic biology and paleogenomics. It was me who brought the mammoth back to life. But that tawdry show was just for funding, with no long-term public benefit, and the poor thing – Malcolm – died again soon after, in Stuttgart.

More importantly, but less showbusinessly, I am the first female President of the Royal Society in its 350-year history, and the second female President of the National Academy of Science. I have received the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique’s Médaille d’Or and the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology. I have lectured the Chinese Academy of Science and disproved the orthodoxies of umpteen bumptious laureates.

I am, as they say, the bomb.

If you look at me you will see all this. Everyone does. My dazzle claims the eye. But what is not seen – what has never been seen by anyone but Doug, who understood me and whom I chose to leave – is that inside I tremble.

I sit and I tremble at the kerb. My arm fidgets in its sling. The ache is deep. I look at the high, closed gates. I should go to the Faculty to supervise Edwin my protégé, but the thought of his subservient eyes makes me tired. So I sit and I stare at the gates. And then, from behind them, I hear my daughter’s voice.

‘Mum.’

The voice again – ‘Mum!’ – from behind the gates.

She’s left something in the car, or she wants to say some last smart cutting thing. But then again there’s something wrong here isn’t there. I step from the car, walk forward.

‘Mum!’ The voice is close, scared, just the other side of the gates.

‘Mum! Mum!’

Suddenly I’m ripped on maternal adrenaline. ‘Open the gates.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Use the thing.’

‘I dropped it.’

‘Get it.’

‘I can’t… Mum, get in here.’

I pelt to the gates with the notion of scaling them, but even panic won’t haul me up.

‘Mum. Now!’

‘Get Doug.’

‘Now!’

Her terror is pure and real.

I look up at the high gates, glance back at the car. I sprint back to the road, get in the car, start it.

…I roar to the gates, smash them through, tear it off the hinges…

Of course I don’t. Because I can’t, can I? Emma’s there.

I climb out. ‘Get away from the gates. Get away… Are you away?’

‘Yes. Hurry.’

I jump in, flip the controls to manual, pop my arm from its sling, back up, scream forward towards the gates, right foot heavy on the pedal.

…Sounds and shapes and tearing metal…

My body jags forward against the wheel, then I’m shoved back, pinned in my seat by the detonating air bag – white balloon palming up against my face, arm throbbing.

I hear a clang and a hiss. Emma screams, ‘Mum!’

I fight sideways from behind the bag, fall from the car, crunk hands then knees onto pavement. Look down, - shit – see my gunshot cut has opened. Pain but no matter, no time for pain. I drag my eyes from the cut, aim them down the wing of the car towards the gates.

No. No! They still stand.

…But not wholly intact though.

One of the gates is angled, leaning forward slightly at the top, off a bottom hinge. I crawl towards the front of the car, slide into the gap between the bumper and the gates, wriggle through to see a small opening at the bottom, a triangular hole where the gate’s tilted.

Madly, I squirm towards it, push my head through, my neck and shoulders, grazing myself, hurting myself. The arm of my jumper wet with blood. Emma stands inside by the side of the drive, mute now, crying. I tear myself fully through the hole, run to her. My lips kiss her hair, my arm’s round her back.

‘What…Baby? What?’

She takes my good hand and pulls me to the house, Doug’s money mansion, all the edges he’s found and markets he’s gamed glommed into this dazzling hutch. I look up to the lights of his study, blazing through the dusk.

‘What, Emma?’

She just turns to me and stares.

She stumbles, drags, marches us towards the open front door.

I’m inside Doug’s house for the first time, a blur of old furniture and new art as she hauls me through, away from the main staircase and over to a smaller one. Up she drags. Heart booming; breath short.

‘What? What?’

No answer.

Up the stairs. She is sobbing, sobbing.

We come to a landing and there is the dongle, dropped on the plush carpet by a doorway. The door’s open. The sound of rolling news comes from inside, a TV presenter talking about the Dow and the FTSE and the Dow Jones, talking about ‘economic terror,’ about ‘unprecedented crash.’

Ah, so that’s why the Distribution Centres were mobbed.

Some steps from the doorway, Emma stops moving. She’s reluctant, mute. She points into the room. She drags me close to her then shoves me away, aiming me towards the room.

Okay. Right. It seems I’m going in.

I step forward. I can see inside now, the vast TV screen on the far wall of Doug’s study, the clamour of falling numbers, plunging graphs, the shocked presenter intoning fiscal apocalypse.

Behind me, I hear Emma whimper.

I’m through the door now, eyes moving from the blahing screen over to the leather desk – the wrapped birthday present for Emma on the desktop, the drained decanter of Scotch.

I’m fully in the room.

My eye catches something strange, the tip of a shoe, a simple, classic brogue, nothing unusual, except it’s in the air. It’s next to another shoe, also in the air, shining, clean, and above the shoes are legs and a torso and a puce neck, yanked sideways by the belt tied around it which is hung from the roof beam.

Doug hangs dead before me, a chair kicked away behind him, his fancy shoes dangling before my eyes, our girl Emma behind me, hiding from the sight she alone discovered, as the TV chatters on.

Just as grumpy pub regulars hate Xmas, when loud office parties in jolly jumpers order time-consumingly complex drinks and block up the bar, so grumpy regular runners are similarly tested by January, as resolved newbies with wickaway outerwear, blazing headtorches and water bottles in the form of backpacks cluster their previously deserted lanes.

I used to say that I did the same run every day - three miles, up and down the same dead-end rural track; running Sundays, birthdays, brutal hours before teaching class - but in fact that’s not true. With holidays and work taking me away from home, the strictly accurate statement would be that I do the same run more than three hundred times a year.

Which still qualifies me as a regular. I made a 13-minute, single-shot experimental film about my morning run, which I’ve promised first screening of to a mate, but I’ll stick it up on here one day. It’s about the pre-history of the place I live, yes, but it’s also about the relationship between creativity and repetition - about Paul Cezanne painting the same hill for twenty-six years - and about the peace to be found on the other side of boredom.

On most mornings, for perhaps the past four months, I’ve seen a family of four brown deer far off in the dark brown field. You wouldn’t spot them if you weren’t looking and when I do spot them I think about poor Franz Marc, killed in Verdun in 1916, whose Deer in the Monastery Garden (above) - his deer hiding within unlikely shape and colour, and not within flat brown fields - was for me the highlight of Tate Modern’s 2024 Expressionists exhibition and is one of the finest, finest things I’ve ever seen.

He moved so quickly, Marc, assimilating Cezanne, and Fauvism, and Cubism, into his singular pantheistic pre-occupations, and he was heading out towards abstraction when he died. Of all the holy painting talent slaughtered or smashed or other ways dislocated by the Great War, Marc’s the one I most often feel who had he lived might have been as varied and vital as old Matisse.

Franz Marc in his 50s and 60s - what he would have made for us.

These are the things I think as I run. This is the point of running.

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On the morning run all last year there were two other whatever-the-weather regulars, neither of them runners. Other folk came and went, sure - weekend dog walkers; sweet families on bikes - but in terms of set-your-watch daily die-hards, just the two.

There’s the guy clutching his phone as he walks by, as though the podcasts he listens to on contemporary Russian politics will detonate if he loosens his grip. He’s a retired spy, it’s clear, and we exchange barely noticeable head tilts as we pass, though he occasionally floats a terse, ‘Morning,’ if he’s feeling unusually buoyant.

The other regular is a walker too, in his early 70s, I would guess, who teams black shorts with a thick coat and a green military cap. He wears bulbous, unlikely headphones and carries small dumbbells, presumably to work on his hand grip or arm strength. This guy gives me a shy smile every day, revealing a desperado missing tooth in his otherwise reputable face. He’s been missing these past three weeks and I suspect the winter flu might have laid him up.

We regulars share minimal interaction, as is right. It’s pretty clear that you don’t come down a deserted lane at weird hours because you want to hang out. And this is the issue with the new year’s resolution runner, they’re often gregarious. They greet you and comment and so prompt you to activate a social persona, do complex, unwanted things with your face.

But they don’t last long. One week. Two. Already as I type the new January runner is a thing of the past.

Almost. There’s this one new guy. I saw him out in the snowstorm last week and out in the freezing fog three days ago. Fair enough. He may be showing the kind of masochistic commitment that a true regular needs. He may be shaping up as a replacement for the dumbbell and headphones guy who sadly has gone missing.

So yesterday, when I saw that January Guy had stopped running to forlornly try and photograph a Kestrel winging away from him, I broke policy and pointed out - in passing, of course, I didn’t stop - the telegraph wire from where this particular bird always hunts. And maybe, I’m thinking, if January Guy becomes February Guy, I might even point out the hedge by the dead milk thistles which is home to the gold finches who’ve opted to over-winter on our mossy rock. But I won’t tell him about the deer, that’s just between us and Franz Marc.

Note: February 3rd: After writing the above, I never saw January Guy again. Nor has Desperado Tooth returned, so it’s just me and Retired Spy out there taking it to February

Hello, this is As Best I Can, your free Substack devoted to the creative life of art, film and literature.

This week, for fun, and to arm myself against the doldrums of the festive perineum - the gap between Xmas and New Year - I wrote a story opening. The tale is pulpy, camp and somewhat rococo, and certainly it will never be finished, but we start the year with this tongue-in-cheek original fiction which I hope you find amusing.

If you’ve any ideas about the name of my uncommon narrator, btw, I’d be happy to hear them…

Chapter One

While the opinions of many internet catastrophists, suburban preppers, and sundry anxious doomsayers strongly favoured AI, war, robotics and virus as the more likely four horsemen of humanity’s final cataclysm, the first omen I received of the true shape of our oft-imagined species end arrived whilst sitting alone in the Gouged Signet pub in the village of Twizzled Barrington on New Year’s Eve, 2025, diligently re-reading my Herodotus over a pint of Snarky Otter, a slender twelve hours before the swift and irreparable emergence of global civilisation’s bombshell nemesis.

In the snug to my left sat a bearded delivery driver, his company polo shirt stained with sloshed beer and fresh tears. ‘Sacked,’ he sighed, as I surreptitiously side-eyed, watching him dab a finger at the few remaining crumbs of Sparrow Chutney crisps littered across the greasy, open packet on the table before him. ‘Sacked on New Year’s Eve.’

‘Mate,’ the maudlin ex-driver’s companion said, thumbing the peak of his baseball cap across the table from his unfortunate friend. ‘It’s so wrong.’

‘And all I did,’ the ex-driver lamented, ‘was ask about the gurgling.’

‘The what?‘

‘The gurgling.’

‘Go on.’

‘There was a gurgling sound in the warehouse. Louder every time I came back to pick up deliveries. Louder and louder.’

‘Gurgling?’

‘Yeah.’

‘That’s weird.’

‘I know. And I just said, What’s the noise? and next thing you know my lanyard’s yanked off and I’m paid up and out the door.’

‘You just said that? What’s the noise?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And they done that?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Weird.’

Curious indeed it was, especially, as with myself, if you are a malicious busybody with neither employment nor distraction.

As I prepared to stand, arranging my ivory prosthetic legs within my Saxony tweed hunting breeks, I noted the corporate logo on the unemployed driver’s shirt - Amazon - and I determined to pass by the gurgling warehouse myself, to either determine the origin of the uncanny sound, or else to begin amateur medical diagnosis of the fired driver’s uncommon aural hallucinations.

Pocketing my Herodotus, I exited the Gouged Signet, walking down iced and whimsical Cotswold lanes to my ancestral manor where I took to my four-poster, receiving, inevitably, little rest as my dreams were haunted not only by the usual ghost of my dead great-grandfather who was strangled by his wronged valet in this very bed, but also by the nouveau twist of a spectral and malign gurgling sound, which seemed to float across the land to summon me.

I arose on New Year’s Day refreshed however; refreshed and powered by my intrigue.

Having seen off contact with all family and friends many years previously I was mercifully free to investigate the gurgling puzzle, even on this New Year’s Day, and, via my traditional kicking of his kitchen cot, I woke my driver Wilf, whose services are retained - in the teeth of his acute heroin use and near-constant seizures - solely for his uncanny and reassuring resemblance to Dame Judi Dench, the object of my lifelong unrequited love.

Wilf’s Polaroid camera bucked on a strap around his neck as he convulsed and injected his way down narrow B-roads, keeping my dinky Jaguar somehow out of ditches until we made the A40 then slalomed down wider roads towards the industrial zone where the gurgling had been reported.

I rubbed my hands together, full of the zesty power of extreme nosiness. ‘You know, I presume, how to work that thing?’ I asked, eyeing Wilf’s camera.

‘Yerp,’ Wilf said, looking deeply becoming beneath his Hermes headscarf.

We careened towards the industrial zone, where today neither vans nor lorries came nor went; where the giant car park stretched out placid and empty as the surface of a lake.

Wilf stopped the car a croquet pitch’s distance from the vast, artless warehouse we had come to scrutinise. The industrial zone was quiet. Uncannily quiet, beyond the pig-like cawing of a single misplaced raven atop a single marooned tree. Quiet that is until it wasn’t.

As I stared across the tarmac towards the giant rudimentary oblong of the warehouse, there then came a single eerie gurgle, playful and reverberatingly vast, then a sudden wild and ripping sound, a tearing tinnitus-causing horror noise, a wretched, contemptuous, brawling din.

The warehouse roof was bending and ripping upwards, being destroyed from within.

A giant pinkish dome smashed up first from inside the warehouse, a Saint Peter’s of a dome, huge and smooth in terrifying up-turned parabola. It was a huge, hairless scalp, pushing up from inside the warehouse, followed by a huge and hairless head. The head was facing away from us towards London as next the huge neck and shoulders emerged, but I was able to catch a side view of the giant’s face as it emerged - next torso, then nappy - from within the warehouse like a god from the waves.

Unmistakably it was a giant baby Jeff Bezos.

Incubated silently beneath the thousand or more Amazon logistics centres worldwide, as we were soon to learn, a thousand giant Baby Bezi, like an army of smooth and gurgling Godzillas, were in that moment rising globally and simultaneously to romp and toddle their way towards the Capital of each major country and wreak their domination.

I turned to Wilf, looking more and more like Best Exotic Marigold-era Judi with each passing day, and so flushed and comely in that strange, unprecedented moment, and I urged him to take a snap, which he did, the first I believe ever taken of a Baby Bezos, whose cloned ilk would swiftly establish their gurgling empire of vicious control.

Unconsciously, I reached to my pocket to touch my book for comfort but found there only fluff and florins. The day it seemed had ordained a second catastrophe - I had left my Herodotus in the Orangerie.

End, Chapter One

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Today’s solstice marks time more meaningfully for many people than do either Christmas or New Year, neither of which occasion I’ve ever inwardly felt as vital, even when culture, convention and crowds have at times gamed my participation.

As we hang planetarily at furthest tilt away from the sun, it feels ripe to politely interrogate the past and the coming rotations, from the perspectives of the creative life just lived and the creative life intended during the immanent next cycle.

This go round, I certainly pushed at creative capacities.

To my surprise I wrote a novel, at full tilt, from March to June 2025. The story, significantly concerning Jan van Eyck, was written at the edge of my ability in terms of craft and meaning. A cussed stint at the desk was broken only by a short trip to Tarragona with my youngest for Easter. The novel is currently on submission to publishers via my staunch and supportive literary agent, Catherine Pellegrino of Marjacq Scripts, so please hold a small candle for that.

I worked in a brand-new medium - short film - and wrote, shot and released two zero budget, ‘slow and spurious’ works (Analogue Digital Dead Alive and The Library of Unwritten Books) which have been screened internationally, winning me my first and second international film festival awards. (The laurel presented as winner of Best Experimental Film at the Bangkok Movie Awards is below). Love me an elephant.

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Another creative first was working in long-form non-fiction for the first time in which I am collaborating with a co-author and good friend, and this has been hugely stimulating and tightropey. News on this should emerge.

In addition, I’ve shoved, patted and cajoled the projects below, all of which are inherited from previous solar spins.

For Dead Man’s Wood, my co-written 1860s-set pastoral folk thriller, we finished up the script, scouted the locations, and appointed a casting agent and a BAFTA & Olivier-winning actor. Currently a screen agent is attaching a director and we’re looking to schedule a three week UK shoot between May and September 2026.

For a second movie, Phoney Ponies, a music-driven romantic comedy drama, my co-writer and I attached a producer, having previously attached the song-writer of a platinum-selling band to compose the film’s original music. Again, a screen agent is attaching a director and we’re looking to shoot in West Country, UK, between May and September 2027.

In terms of TV work, the adaptation of my 2018 novel Staying On is being developed with an Emmy-winning producer and events around that could unfold pretty quickly in the New Year. The same is also true of two other TV projects - an art heist comedy and an adaptation of my 2012 novel, Premiership Psycho.

My YA debut novel will be published sometime soon and I’ll talk about that when I can talk about that.

Also, there’s this Substack.

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Now on to the juice in terms of brand new work currently in planning. The big one has the working title Love Story with Art Fraud and while I’m currently studiously agnostic as to if it’s a movie, or a novel, I’d better know by February because I plan to write it from March 2026

Researching this project led to reading much work about the contemporary art market, as well as making a study of the art of the portrait, and of the self portrait. The latter has occasioned many tender gallery assignations with Rembrandt van Rijn, as regular readers will know, and also led to a first eye-balling of Dürer’s messianic third self-portrait (1500, see top), with its soul-glow/Medusa hair, encountered in Munich’s Alte Pinakotheck in early August. The hell was he up to?

Laura Cumming’s excellent book A Face to the World has been super helpful on my tour around self-portraiture, talking of the ‘intensity about the eyes that even a child recognises as a self-portrait’, which is absurdly evident in LS Lowry’s illustrative, Mad Magazine-esque self portrait The Man with the Red Eyes, photographed below on a visit to the National Portrait Gallery in November.

While in portraiture, during that same visit to the NPG, honesty compelled me to finally lay down the cudgels of antipathy towards the aristocratic-bagging Baroque painter Anthony van Dyck and to accept his evident majesty, because really look at this 1620 Portrait of Cornelis van der Geest snapped in close up below. Jeez. Give over.

It is intended to write, shoot, edit and release another zero-budget ‘slow and spurious’ short film next year for which the locations need to be found.

Somewhat surprisingly, and with great enthusiasm, it seems highly likely that I am doing a PhD.

On top of this, it should be remembered, not least by myself, that I remain somewhat of a person, and that the work above has been done in the corners of a life whose main business is to be a breadwinner, husband, father to two teenagers, and a son to an elderly parent. My friends and myself may have been short-changed this year regarding time spent, though there’s been some magic days walking the byways, swimming the waters, and biking the paths with my dearly beloveds. God bless the Bavarian Lakes.

With risk of sounding like an Acknowledgements section, crucial to the creative life is teaching at Oxford International Centre for Publishing and Journalism, where I lecture on congruent subjects, and receive both research hours to work and support from colleagues.

While the year in truth has frigged me sideways in approximately fifty ways, with literally months’ of 5am starts at the desk, I do not seek otherwise, being here precisely to see what the capacities are.

But, enough. Sincere love to all brothers and sisters turning alike on this mysterious ball and seeking knowledge and nourishment.

Great orbit. 10/10. Would recommend.

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Gary leaned over the lock edge, peered down at us inside our boats, dropping away from him on the diminishing water: ‘It’d be a national shrine if it was in Japan,’ Gary said. ‘There’d be coachloads of tourists coming to see it.’

I took a note, paddled on, and visited the place Gary mentioned soon after with some friends, then again with another friend, then again with my wife, then again and again on my own, because, well, honestly…

Crooked, lichened and beige, it doesn’t present obtrusively, alone in a water meadow on the confluence of the River Coln and the Thames, the church at Inglesham - with its crude plywood porch door - has been officially classed as ‘redundant’ since 1980. And unless you’re a proper buff of ecclesiastical architecture - which I’m not - and note the rarity of the slate roof’s twin bellcote, you’d likely not guess what awaits inside.

The Victorian artist and socialist William Morris - reduced these days to pedlar of cushions, curtains and coasters but a fair force back in the day for kicking against the pricks - knew what this place was. He lived maybe five miles away at Kelmscott and he saved Inglesham in the 1880s from the sort of punctilious over-restoration that would have cleansed its anomalous beauty. Poet John Betjeman, a hound for churches, who lived a dozen miles away at Uffington, beneath the leaping Bronze Age chalk horse, was drawn here often too.

A meticulous rehearsal of the history of Inglesham church - gifted 820 years ago by an English king to French monks - or a categorical itemisation of its features - the Anglo-Saxon stone carving, the intact Tudor pulpit, the original gas wall-lamps - wouldn’t truly account for its acute and abiding charisma, as neither do my own photos below, but rather it is the manifest ragout of histories innocuously persisting behind a shitty door in a dead end meadow that perhaps form the exceptional atmosphere and call.

Who can say? We are pinning the tail on the donkey here, effing the ineffable. How can a place be so rich and so spartan, so bleached and so full? So neglected and so vital?

Perhaps in bone-smooth sparsity and in calm and peace, the interior of Inglesham church compares to the work of the 17th century Haarlem painter Pieter Janz Saenredam whose Interior of Cunerakerk in Rhenen is below and whose contribution to serenity I have written about previously here.

I can’t truly say what it is that I find here - that Gary the Lock, and William Morris, and fussy John Betjeman found their versions of before me too - but there’s something that allows this prickly old pagan to make sighing détente with the bossy upstart Christianity - the gregarious cousin who claimed and relaunched my island’s sacred dells - and to make peace with much else too - with the day, with work, with the iniquity of entropy - and so I invite you to watch the video above, to sit in a pew in a long redundant church in the hamlet of Inglesham for a handful of minutes, and to watch the sunlight inch across the plaster there, and so perhaps to find something that you might seek or need.

Being devoted to the joy of creativity irrespective of the fate of the work produced means having interest in the unrealised, the neglected and the unfinished. It is often at the these frayed edges of art that the biography of the artist can be the most magnetic, and also the most elusive. Who knows why, for example, having completed more than eighty self portraits with extraordinary results and facility, that Rembrandt van Rijn left the above work unfinished? Something as prosaic as a visit from a friend interrupting him? Or else some fuller existential abandonment to do with the tortures of self or art or love? Looking into his eyes in this work, I’m going with the latter.

The short film I made on the subject of unfinished work, The Library of Unwritten Books, yesterday won an Honourable Mention at The South West Film Festival, which is nourishing news given I made the film on my own, in my village, with zero cash and skills.

Mentioned in that short film is the unfinished novel How To Fix A Family, which I shared the opening part of here two weeks ago and which was well received on here, so to celebrate my minimal film’s honourable mention, I offer part two of that unwritten book below. Remember you can catch up by reading part one, here.

How To Fix A Family Part Two

It took almost two hours at the house in West London, but finally Em was satisfied. She left the house and texted her colleague Sarah: Darbys all clear.

Em walked to the top of the street and started to head towards home. Then she stopped, took her phone out again, texted Chris: Can you do bedtime? Have to work late.

Again? the reply pinged back.

It was true that she’d been hauling long hours of late, but this couldn’t wait. She wanted to do this herself.

Em took the tube from Kensington, then changed for Baker Street, then changed again for Neasden, heading for the council’s temporary accommodation to see Kirsty O’Hallagan, the kid that the Darbys were in line to adopt. She was a brave girl, Kirsty, bright as a button, eight years-old and Em would have worked for nothing just to give her the chance of a decent life.

Six months before, Em had seen Kirsty’s bruises on a routine home visit and pulled in an order to take her into care. Big call. People get bruises all the time, as Mrs Darby showed, but Em had a bad feeling, and she’d had to back it. And now the kid was raw and unsettled, rootless and vulnerable in a temporary foster house, and Em’s job was to fix Kirsty up, get her thriving in a permanent home. That’s why Em had pushed the Darbys so hard, to make sure they were safe. The last thing Em was going to do was maroon a beaten kid in another brawling home.

Em was a Children’s Social Worker, fostering and adoption. She was the best, so they said. She had some gut sense of which kids were vulnerable, which family could fix which kid, which kid could fix which family. And for all the grouching of Mr Darby, Em could see that couple were aching for a kid.

Em left the tube stop at dusk, the entrance crammed with day-jobs travelling home, the pavement stands of Turkish grocers strip-lit from inside the busy shops. Em moved along. She looked up and eyed the estate. Her heels clacked too-loudly as she moved across an open courtyard. Dark buildings loomed. The scent of high-end skunk drifted down from an open window. Em pressed on.

The estate was as alien to her as the Darby’s private street, but she did not power pose this time, instead she huddled into herself, tried to seem not there. She neared the house. A mountain bike was locked to a bent drainpipe. The handlebars, seat and wheels missing, just the frame and pedals remained. Em walked by a ripped-up sofa, chucked out on the street. She approached the front door of the foster place. The glass pimple of a spy hole peered out at her as she knocked and waited.

The kind face of the beleaguered foster mother nodded Em through and she mounted the stairs. Em knocked on the kid’s bedroom door and waited. She knocked again then stepped inside.

The room was small, ratty, impersonal – just the bare bones of desk, bed and chair.

The kid was curled up on the bed, wearing headphones, arms wrapped round herself. A cuddly cat toy with huge eyes lay next to a blue asthma inhaler on the formica desk. Em stepped forward. Kirsty glanced to the door and recognised Em and smiled as she sat up. Taking off her headphones, the kid stepped towards Em, then hesitated.

Em knew why that was. Kirsty’s Mum was a user, and the kid never knew what mood she was going to be in. Would the world give Kirsty a kiss or a slap?

‘It’s all right,’ said Em. ‘I’m the same.’

Em opened her arms and the kid rushed to them.

‘How are things, Kirsty?’

‘I miss Mum.’

‘But it’s your Mum that hurts you.’

` ‘Only she can stop me when I cry.’

‘But it’s your Mum that makes you cry.’

‘I still want Mum.’

Em knew many sad things about humans, and of all those sad things, this was the saddest: After the pain, the victim looked to their abuser to make it better.

The person who had broken them was seen as the best person to fix them. It was a disastrous ecology; a pernicious psychological imprinting that kept abusers and dictators in business everywhere.

Em came to the point. She knew how to stop Kirsty talking about her mum. ‘I might have found you somewhere.’

‘What?

‘A new home with people that won’t hurt you.’

‘For real?’ the kid replied.

‘Yes. And not just with a Mum.’

‘What?’

Em knew that Kirsty’s Dad had walked out even before her Mum’s bump had shown.

‘You mean with a Dad too?’

Em nodded.

‘What’s he like?’

Em thought of Mr Darby, composed her answer carefully, ‘Well, he’s very clean and neat and tidy, and he’s read a lot of books, and he’s got a lot of money.’

‘Do they have any toys?’

‘Yes, they’ve got a stuffed owl, and bits of a funny old plane stuck to the wall.’

‘Wow. Awesome. Thanks, thanks,’ Kirsty said. ‘Thanks Mrs Green.’

‘Em.’

‘Thanks Em,’ the kid said, tightening her arms around Em.

‘Nobody will hurt you there.’

This was what Em lived for.

Too many stories start with a girl in trouble - beaten, trafficked, taken, raped. But not on Em’s watch. Em’s story starts with a girl being fixed.

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*

The office was dour enough to be used as a set for a cold war spy film. The desks were grey, the doors were brown, and the walls were brown and grey.

The traffic noise was fierce.

Em was finishing the paperwork for the Darby adoption. Little Kirsty would soon be on her way. She signed the final form, then looked across the office to her boss’s corner cubicle. Her colleague Sarah was in there, being interviewed for the vacant senior job. It would be Em’s turn to go in next.

She looked around the room. All her colleagues were watching; everybody knew what was happening. The interviews could at least have been done on another floor. Not that Em minded, she was thinking of Sarah, not herself. Em felt torn about the job. Yes, she would control more of the child protection budget, she could make more decisions about more families and more kids. She could do more good. But at what cost? The workload would be brutal.

Three times this week she’d been back after Chris had been asleep. And a heavier workload would only make that worse. He didn’t even know she’d gone for the new job. She was too confused to tell him. He needed her right now. Plus, they were trying for a kid. And how would that work out? Working even harder, and with a kid. Did helping other families allow you to sometimes neglect your own? Would an older child later understand that by not always being there she had saved many other kids from peril? Would Chris accept it? Either way, guilt was on one side of the equation and guilt was on the other.

She was getting too far ahead. She hadn’t yet got the job and she wasn’t yet pregnant.

But even now, Em was white-knuckling it as wife and main earner – forget about time for friends or self. Even now, there was just too much life. The demands on her felt irreconcilable.

Em looked to the side of her computer monitor, towards an old photo she’d tacked-up. The house in the photo was unexceptional. A scruffy bungalow down a little lane; a flint church behind it and a brook across the meadow. Quaint perhaps, mildly bucolic, but certainly no tourist trap. Certainly no utopia.

Unless you were Em.

The photo was a Polaroid and sunlight had warped its tones to yellow and brown; time had tattered the picture’s edges. No matter. Em could close her eyes and walk up the dusty path to the house – see the blistered burgundy paint coating the front door, the screwed-on brass house number. Whenever she wanted, Em could close her eyes and see her old bike leaning against the front wall, her skipping rope dropped on the porch step; whenever she wanted she could step into the house, see her elder brother Sage come for a visit, chatting happily on the sloppy brown couch.

‘Em, if you could come in please, we’re ready for you now.’

Em came too, looked across the office to see her colleague Sarah walking out of the corner cubicle, her boss Mr Leon stood behind Sarah in the cubicle doorway, signalling for Em to come through. Em took one more look at her photo of the tatty bungalow, the only place that had ever been home, then she stood and walked over, passing Sarah on the way.

‘Good luck,’ said Sarah. ‘Don’t hurt the precious boss.’

‘Is he bad today?’

‘Yep.’

To suggest that Mr Leon was a peaceful, non-hierachical man would be an understatement. It was said that if he had a horse he would rather put on the saddle himself, and he was once overheard in the canteen empathising with his lunch.

‘Please, sit down. Is there anything I can get you? Is it warm enough? I turned up the heater because I know Sarah likes it warm, but I can turn it down if you want. Is the sun in your eyes? I can twiddle the blind. That chair is quite hard, we can swap if you want.’

‘I’m fine.’

Em sat down and gestured to Mr Leon to do the same.

‘Right,’ he said, sitting down, then scooting his chair out to the side of the desk to remove the chance of any furniture between them reinforcing the power relations he was keen to subvert.

‘Is that chair...?’

‘I’m fine,’ snapped Em. ‘Can we do the interview?’

Mr Leon looked down to the papers he held in his hand, ‘Well, you are the most qualified member of our staff and you have the best statistics in the city in terms of matching children with new parents. You work twice as hard as anybody else and you know more about child protection legislation and psychology than anybody I have ever met.’

Mr Leon looked up smiling.

‘That’s not a question,’ said Em. ‘Interviews contain questions.’

‘Well, yes, well. Questions are such nosy things. I don’t mean to pry.’

‘You are supposed to pry, Mister Leon. Or at least probe. Please’

‘Good, good, as long as everything remains consensual.’

‘It does. Ask.’

‘There was one question. Not from me you understand, one question I have been asked to ask, one I would never have asked myself. It would never have occurred to me to ask it myself.’

‘Okay.’

‘And because it’s not my question what I will do is just read it out.’

‘Fine.’

Mr Leon pulled a piece of paper from his pile and looked down, ‘We were wondering. The Director was wondering. I am perfectly satisfied on the matter. The Director was wondering, well, if...’

‘What?’

‘The Director was wondering if...’

Mr Leon sighed and fell back in his chair. Em looked at the piece of paper in his hand. She leaned forward – not across the desk of course; across the non-hierachical space between them – and plucked the piece of paper from his hand. Mr Leon did not resist.

Em held the paper and looked down and read. She knew the handwriting well. It had signed off any number of her successful projects. It had signed Christmas cards that had arrived at her flat, had signed the semi-formal notes of congratulation when she had fixed another broken case. The pen strokes were firm, smooth and well-balanced. The ink that flowed from the Director’s pen was well-suited to her character. She was a fair and shrewd woman, one of the few people at work Em would listen to, a kind of mentor even.

Em read her words:

Of course, Ms Green will get the job, but first ask about her obsessiveness. Ask her why she works late when she has a little boy at home. Make sure to ask Ms Green if she understands that it is the awful events of her past that make her behave as she does. As Ms Green if she thinks that helping others exempts her from having to help herself? Ask her if she has heard the phrase: physician heal thyself?

And can buy them shoes instead of travelling to Vienna to see this….

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As Best I Can, the name of this Substack, is taken from Jan van Eyck’s personal motto which appears on the frame of or even painted within many of his works. I explain more about that here. And although I can’t say much right now, I wrote a book about the artist earlier this year, so the exhibition is greeted with some fanfare in this house.

While details are not yet released of the exact portraits to be included in the National’s major exhibition, I’m guessing now that there are some works of van Eyck’s not strictly classed as portraits, but which have portraits within them, that will not feature in the London show. For example, I’m not expecting the Groeninge Museum in Bruges to lend the National the immaculate 1434 Virgin of Canon Joris van der Paele, which contains both a portrait and a self portrait:

The ailing cleric van der Paele, being recommended to heaven by Saint George on the right, is painted so distinctly that contemporary doctors can now diagnose him as suffering from polymyalgia rheumatica and temporal arteritis. It’s worth spending time soaking up the detail in this painting- the fabrics, the tiles, the metalwork, the masonry, the glass. It was not until my second visit to the Groeninge that I spotted the ghostly self-portrait which van Eyck smuggles in, wearing his trademark red chaperon and reflected in George’s bent shield, more than 200 years before Diego Velázquez performed a clearer trick of self-inclusion in his own Las Meninas.

Velázquez would have known first hand of van Eyck’s meta tricks. The 1434 superstar Arnolfini Portrait, which will certainly feature in the National’s 2026 van Eyck exhibition - and which contains the more celebrated and slightly clearer mirrored self-portrait of van Eyck - used to hang in Madrid’s Alcázar when Velázquez toiled there for the Hapsburgs, before wending its mysterious way Londonwards after the Peninsula Wars of the early nineteenth century.

Rubens visited the Alcázar during Velázquez’s habitation, incidentally, and although not documented it’s not impossible to imagine Peter Paul and Diego standing together, assessing the Arnolfini Portrait, acknowledging that this is indeed a fair bit of kit. But I digress, which is in the nature of writing about van Eyck, about whom nothing is flat or straightforward.

It is also doubtful that the Louvre will lend the 1435 Madonna of Chancellor Rolin, which includes a tonsured portrait of Philip the Good’s major statesman, a man responsible for commissioning a second masterpiece, after the death of van Eyck, namely The Last Judgement of Rogier van der Weyden which hangs in his Hospices de Beaune in Burgundy to this day.

The two cheeky scamps hanging out by the parapet before the river at the back of the Rolin painting contain in my opinion, and in that of some others, another Jan van Eyck self portrait. The aquiline nose and the tell-tale red chaperon suggest so, both of which we see in the acknowledged self-portrait in the National. While again we also see this billowing red hat in the reflection of the painter in the Arnolfini mirror.

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But I’ll go further than art historical evidence strictly allows to venture my own intuition that this detail in the Rolin painting includes not just a portrait of Jan, in his boisterous red hat, but also a portrait of Jan’s dear departed elder brother Hubert, with his back to us in the black chaperon, maybe dropping down a fish hook, maybe lobbing a bread roll at some snooty courtier below.

Why do I think that? Well, there’s a precedent.

Jan’s veneration of his dead brother Hubert is touchingly clear in two ways within the mind-blowing 1432 masterpiece The Ghent Altarpiece, which is currently twelve years into the most meticulous restoration of its near-600 year life, and which was started by Hubert and finished six years after his elder brother's death by Jan.

First up, since at least 1572 when engravings were published in Antwerp showing portraits of the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck - and possibly since its completion in 1432 - it’s been believed that two figures in the Just Judges panel of The Ghent Altarpiece offer portraits of the brothers van Eyck.

The stout lad in the fur hat on the white horse in the foreground is believed to be Jan’s portrait of much-missed Hubert, while the figure at the back with the swooshing black hat and popping orange rosaries, the one checking us right out, is considered another self portrait by the younger Jan.

(The Just Judges panel incidentally is the only one of the Ghent Altarpiece panels which is not fifteenth century, the original having been stolen in April 1934, never recovered, then copied by Belgian restorer Jef van der Veken from a mid-16th century copy of the original panel made on behalf of Philip II of Spain. As I say, nothing about Jan van Eyck’s work is straightforward.)

So my feeling that the two rapscallions hanging over the garden wall in the Rolin painting are a smuggled portrait of the van Eyck brothers is firstly based on this fact, that Jan has smuggled Hubert into his work before. (And while we’re talking like this, aren’t there two figures reflected in the doorway of the Arnolfini mirror?)

Plus the second way in which Jan honoured Hubert in the Ghent Altarpiece, showing his love for his dead big brother, was via the original 1432 inscription at the base of the outer panels, which in translation from the Latin reads:

The painter Hubert van Eyck, a greater man than whom cannot be found,

Began this work. Jan, his brother, second in art,

Completed the weighty task at the request of Joos Vijd.

He invites you with this verse, on the sixth of May, to look at what has been done

Jan clearly loved the guy, considering himself second in art to big brother Hubes. Why wouldn’t Jan have painted Hubert behind Rolin, the two lads pissing about above the river, like they did when they were kids, back in the day in the Meuse valley.

And anyway, just imagine it. Being one of the best painters in history but not even the best in your family. Bloody hell. Roll on Autumn 2026.

And at the National also to renew acquaintance with Giovanni Moroni’s 1564 Portrait of a Gentleman, my first reaction to which is always to incriminate the subject as a smug popinjay, but Moroni buries such psychological depth, such a complex emotional challenge in the gaze, that that first reaction never holds long.

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Also, while thinking of portraits, I was digging around in some of those unwritten books referred to in the film title above, and came across something to share, a portrait of a different kind.

Below is the opening of How to Fix a Family, an unwritten novel concerning Emerald Green, a social worker with genius-level skills in fixing the families of others, but with questionable abilities in fixing her own.

The story sees Em act as ‘an emotional detective’, solving problems as a social worker, just as a detective solve crimes. Em was a character in my 2018 novel Staying On, who wouldn’t leave me alone even after Staying On came out.

Will Em ever seek me out again and demand I finish the unwritten book? Or is she destined to remain a fragment, an unfinished portrait, lacking Moroni or Rembrandt’s solidity? For the moment I don’t know, but see what you think.

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How To Fix A Family, Part One

London, Spring

Em was late. She was on the phone, but before she could speak to an actual person the bank needed to know her six digit pass code. She didn’t hesitate, just keyed it in.

020891.

2^nd of August 1991. It was a crucial date. It had made her who she was. Not because it was her date of birth, she was eight years too old for that, and not because it was her husband Chris’s, because he was older still. It wasn’t her son’s birthday, or her Mum’s or her Dad’s or her brother’s. And given that she was in primary school in 1991, it could hardly be her wedding day. But still the date tripped easily off her thumb and out onto the keypad.

020891.

Em’s memorable number. The day that everything had changed.

She walked down the West London street, eyeing the elegant houses, phone to her ear. She could hear a ringing tone and then her call was answered.

‘Hello Mrs Green,’ said a polite voice. ‘Before I help you today we need to do a couple more security checks. Can I take your full address please?’

She gave it.

‘And your full name please.’

‘My name is Emerald Green.’

The polite voice laughed, then quickly apologised.

Em didn’t mind. She was used to it. ‘You think my name is silly, you should meet my brother Sage.’

‘Sage Green,’ said the voice.

‘We had a cat called Bottle but it got run over.’

‘All very green,’ the polite voice managed.

‘My parents were conceptual artists. They were in a green period when they had me and my brother. What’s the weather like?’

‘Baking hot,’ said the voice. ‘Thank you for asking.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Gujarat, Madam.’

‘I had a friend from Gujarat,’ said Em. Her phone beeped. ‘Oh hang on.’

She took the phone from her ear, looked at the screen. A text from Chris: Have you moved my shoes again? x

No. Am not your mum, Em tapped back.

‘Hello. Yes, I had a friend from Gujarat, when I was at school.’

But the polite voice did not respond. The line had been cut.

There was no time to call back, because now Em stood outside her destination.

She looked the town-house up and down. It was tall and white, a huge bronze sculpture conspicuous in a first floor window. The wealth was perfectly visible. She checked then double-checked the address her colleague Sarah had printed out for her. This was it. No way round it.

‘You’re not an imposter,’ Em reassured herself.

She remembered a motivational talk she’d seen on YouTube which advised standing in a power pose if you ever needed confidence. Em planted her feet apart and rolled back her shoulders. Better. She stepped forward and touched the garden gate. Well oiled, it swung easily open. Em powered up the chequered path towards the wide front door. Standing between two potted olive trees, Em posed for the security camera as it scanned her face.

Her skin felt flushed. All this money was doing its job – putting her in her place. Her posture slumped, her pose powered-down. Her arm felt heavy when she rang the bell. London fell quiet as she waited.

When the door opened it was Mr Darby himself, wearing brogues, cords and a lambswool V neck, side-parted hair distinguished with grey. He didn’t smile at Em.

‘Yes?’ he said, though Em guessed he knew who she was.

‘I’m from the council,’ she said.

‘You’re late.’

‘Yes,’ she wanted to say, ‘But only by three days and I have a very erratic cycle anyway.’

But Em didn’t say that. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Bad service on the tube.’

‘Tube,’ he said thoughtfully.

The word seemed to perplex Mr Darby. The word may have been Gujarati for all he knew.

Slowly he looked her up and down, just as she had done to his house.

Still he peered. Em fumbled around in her handbag. A lip balm went flying and she bent down and picked it up from the tiled path. Then she pulled out her ID which she held beneath Mr Darby’s nose while he made a big show of checking it.

‘So you’re the one the nanny state has sent to judge us,’ he said.

Christ. She’d had friendlier greetings from bulldogs.

‘You’d better come in.’

He turned abruptly and Em stepped inside. There was a cream carpet. Should she take off her shoes? He was wearing leather slippers himself. She settled on wiping her feet, then followed him down the hall, a tunnel of high-end clutter. A moose’s head. A Stanley Spencer original painting. A shelf of Waverley first editions. Em gulped. She felt flyaway amongst Mr Darby’s antique trinkets, and suddenly she was a child, following the head master to his office.

Her confidence melted. Her mouth felt dry. She felt dizzy in the hallway. She looked around. A stuffed owl in a glass box. A brass aeroplane propeller.

Then she saw it. A photo on the wall. Em stepped forward.

Ha!

She smiled at his university graduation photo. 1980, Christ Church, Oxford University. And there he was in the photo, Mr Darby, about twenty years old, holding a degree scroll and wearing a mortar board, looking sullen and grave, old before his time.

She laughed.

Mr Darby stopped abruptly in the cluttered hall and turned, ‘What exactly do you find amusing?’

But his coldness couldn’t touch her now; Em was free. ‘Your college photo,’ Em said. ‘You graduated in nineteen eighty. ‘

‘Yes.’

‘A great year for Christ Church, nineteen eighty.’

‘What?’

‘Probably the greatest year.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘I...’

‘Oh, it’s such a crucial date I thought you would have known.’

‘Known what?’

‘Nineteen eighty was the year women were first admitted.’

‘Was it? What? How do you know that?’

‘Dominus illuminatio mea,‘ Em said, quoting the University’s motto.

‘Well I never.’ Mr Darby stood, open mouthed. ‘I’d never have guessed you were...’

‘What?’

‘One of us.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, a person...’

‘Go on.’

‘A person like you.’

‘Like me?’

‘You know...’

She did know. He meant an oik, someone who’d had to buy her own furniture. Someone who had to pay her own way.

‘I’m not one of you,’ Em said and stepped past him. ‘I’m one of me.’

She had this now. There was only one person in charge here, fuck you very much.

Em entered the snug. ‘Lovely smug,’ Em said.

‘Snug,’ Mr Darby corrected.

‘If you like,’ she whispered.

Mrs Darby was perched on an antique couch, looking groomed and twitchy, the kind of person who’d apologise to the toilet for crapping in it. They said Hello. Mrs Darby’s hand shook when she shook hands.

Now ten minutes in and Em shuffled her papers, turned the page. If the Darbys were already needled by her presence – she peered over their heads towards the drinks cabinet, the decanters, the wine racks – wait until this next bit. ‘And what about your drinking?’

‘Oh, you know,’ said the wife, off-hand, lying, ‘socially, once or twice in the week.’

‘Once or twice in the week,’ Em noted. ‘What about weekends?’

‘The odd tipple, you know.’

‘Does one of you drink more than the other?’ Em addressed the wife. ‘Will one of you,’ now she turned to the husband, ‘always be the one who suggests you have a drink? Always drink more?’ She was looking him right in the eye. ‘Would you say that one of you has a problem?’

‘Only with you,’ he snapped.

‘These are fair questions,’ Em said slowly. ‘We have to ask. Children are at risk from alcoholic parents.’

‘Of course,’ said the wife.

‘And from parents who use drugs... You worked in The City, Mister Darby?’ Em turned the screws. ‘Bet some of the traders snorted a few lines off the desk?’

‘Now look here. ‘ He bolted to his feet, snorted angrily, ‘This interview is...’

‘Mandatory. This interview is mandatory,’ Em said. ‘For those wanting to adopt a child.’ She raised her eyebrows, raised her pen. ‘Sit down. Please.’

The wife eyed the husband and the husband grimaced then slowly sat. Em’s pen was poised above the official form. ‘So, let’s carry on. Is there any history of drug use?’

‘No.’

‘A cheeky pill?’ she said, not looking up. Was she wrong to find this bit funny? ‘Few spliffs back in the day? Mug of mushroom tea?’

‘No,’ said the wife. ‘Nothing.’

‘Just, you know,’ dead-panned the husband, ‘high on life.’

She liked him for that. Em paused, made a note, waited until they thought the moment had passed. She didn’t really care if they drank a bit too much, strayed across the odd white line. Lives were lives; homes were homes, living was a sloppy science. It wasn’t ideal that people got wrecked, but she was no puritan, no judge. How could she be? Still, there was one thing that was very much a deal-breaker. She looked squarely at the husband.

‘Do you hit your wife?’

‘What!?’

She turned to the wife. ‘Has he ever hit you? Slapped you about when he’s had too much.’

‘No!’ the wife protested.

But this was just a smokescreen. Something to get them off balance. Em had noticed the cut on the wife’s knuckle when they shook hands. When she asked the husband about the bruise on his forehead he’d muttered about, ‘Squash, you know. Hard bloody walls.’

‘Have you ever hit your husband, Mrs Darby?’

‘Please!’ said the wife.

‘Your knuckle...’

‘I banged it.’

‘Yes,’ said Em. ‘But on what?’

‘The fridge. A door. I don’t know.’

‘Is this a violent home?’ Em stood, her long black cardigan falling out beneath her like a cape. ‘I will place no child in a violent home.’

Read Part Two, Here

Elsewhere I’ve written about why, exhausted by our hyperactive visual culture, and despite being a person of advancing years with zero directorial or camera skills, I decided last year with just the barest of kit to start making extraordinarily slow short films, that may or may not be art installations, with the only stipulation being that they met following two criteria:

1) The film would cost no money

2) I could write, shoot and direct it entirely on my own

And also elsewhere I related how one of these wonky, zero budget films - against all odds, like Eddie the Eagle jumping off against Swiss Princes born with skis for feet - was selected for the UN’s Big Syn, the world’s largest sustainability film festival.

The film is a shamelessly pretentious Borgesian / Jungian affair about a library stocked only with books that have never been written. I said I’d share this film after the awards, and here it is above.

The festival awards gala was at Soho Curzon last Friday and I dodged the drinks and nibbles, spent most of the time in National Gallery and then didn’t win. Classic behaviour, and rightly I can be rebuked for hiding in art’s history when I should have been communing with my fellow makers to hear its contemporary expression. Truthfully I did feel a bit of a shit - though clearly not enough to prevent me - and strolling to the defence is the titanic confidence of Rembrandt’s brush work on this sleeve. I mean, phwoar.

Was I disappointed not to win? Yes, I was. Despite the wobbly camerawork (I have since bought the small tripod I so clearly needed earlier) and despite the four minute-long shots of rural nothing accompanied by a homespun voice-over of highbrow misery, still I had talked myself into an outside chance. (With this I can live: deep down it seems I am one more vain and cliched pest). But did I then afterwards meet two beloved friends for dinner in Chinatown and plan our annual summer canoeing trip, so mitigating very quickly the disappointment of loss? Also, yes.

Unexpectedly, my highlight of the awards gala was when one of the hosts introduced herself from the stage as Monique Lucas and I misheard and thought she’d said Wheat Lucas, a moniker of implausible brilliance which I knew immediately would sometime get hung on a fictional character, whom, even as I misheard the name I could feel developing in my mind.

Wheat Lucas, nice to meet you, fabulous name. Even a loss is a win.

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