There were a couple of false starts when it came to seeing the Tracey Emin exhibition. The vagaries of London life, veering towards the age when suddenly summers become synonymous with hen dos and weddings, paired with half-finished Whatsapp conversations and holiday distractions, meant that a first attempt at organising the excursion at the end of February was only realised five months later, narrowly avoiding the exhibition finishing its run altogether.

It felt quite fitting, for some reason, to be going to see it in the twilight days of August. The heatwave had finally exhausted itself, and while the day was sunny, I had darted back home after a few steps towards the station, to sling a grey jumper around my waist, conscious of how mean-spirited end-of-summer evenings could be. B and I had lunch first, knowing the perils of a gallery visit when neither of you have had an extended catch up for a while. Mackerel and gnocchi, creamy cod’s roe with a perfectly jammy boiled egg, watermelon and tomato salad, fresh and acidic, at the Garden Café in Lambeth.

I forget how pretty South London is, and B just laughed, a settled resident of the other side of the river. But it was true – I’d been spending a lot of summer in other places, and thinking about other places even when firmly in my house, and walking to meet her I’d remembered that no matter how long I’ve lived here, there would still be more to see.

I was still fresh from the comedown of finishing the Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante when I walked around the exhibition. It feels silly to rave about a series that came out fifteen years ago, the first of which, My Brilliant Friend, was named the best book of the century by the New York Times, but my god is it worth the hype. In all honesty, it took me a while to get into. I stopped and started through the first book, last summer, and while the final thirty or so pages ramped up and ended on a great cliffhanger, I didn’t come away ravenous for more. Then for some reason, at the start of this summer, I picked up the second. Immediately, I was enthralled. Perhaps because we begin to follow Elena and Lila past adolescence into their twenties, and suddenly their concerns feel closer, more defined. I’ve always loved a coming of age story. But it wasn’t just the incisive manner Ferrante paints the interiority of the two girls, that drew me in; it was the ambition of depicting the scale of a whole life, mapping how inextricably it sits within a wider network of class and art, politics and gender, and the unique position of a city.

Ferrante is a surgeon; she slices and she neatly cuts to reveal the underneath or inside of things; the violence teeming in the houses of the families she depicts, the machinations of money and intelligence that prop up (or appear to prop up) the lives of the most successful. A surgeon, unafraid to shy away from blood, or guts, or rot. Emin is the same, except her patient is herself. She opens herself up to us; in one series of photographs literally showing us her insides, a series of selfies of her recovering from surgery due to an aggressive form of cancer, that amongst other things, led to her having her bladder removed and fitted with a stoma bag.

I thought a lot about narration and self-mythologising as I walked around. Emin’s work is surprisingly full of words, in her idiosyncratic handwriting, em dashes all over the place. People stood clustered around certain corners of the room, where we could read her ‘CV’ (a concise chronology of key events in her life, including the moment she fell in love with Edvard Munch1), or a painful retelling of her childhood, one sheet detailing an afternoon playing with her twin brother, the one below it detailing a rape aged 13, a startling loss of innocence that stayed with her, one she doesn’t shy away from discussing or referencing in her art.

Elena, too, rewrites her own experience of violence. Her loss of innocence becomes part of the book she writes that makes her famous, that allows her to leave ‘the neighbourhood’, and escape the poverty that has clung to her throughout her youth. It’s interesting how both her and Emin, as they age, return to their place of origin. Emin has set up a thriving arts scene in Margate, her hometown. Elena, who harbours a deep-seated repulsion to her upbringing and family, is never really able to leave Naples. Even when she lives elsewhere, she remains fixated on it, tied by the thought of the people and the streets she has left behind, most of all Lila.

I thought about the feminine too. About what it means to have the power to create both art and children, and what the choice to do one or the other, does to your life. Emin’s ‘How It Feels’, is a painful, startling film of her describing her first abortion, walking around the places in London where it all happened.

“After my first abortion, I learned more about the essence and knowledge of where things come from than any art college or lecture or anyone could tell me. I also knew intuitively as soon as I’d come round from my abortion that all the art I’d ever made was a real big bunch of crap and had to be destroyed immediately. I promised myself I wouldn’t start making art or making things again until I could justify it, parallel, alongside my life, which I do now.”

It’s a point of view on art that struck me with its rawness. Why bother making things anew, when there is so much here already? What’s the point of the imagination, if we don’t make sense of what is real?

Ferrante’s novels feel real. The way a character, that you’ve long since forgotten, will recur the way people re-enter our lives in the most unexpected of manners. How the materiality of our lives may change - different jobs, cities, partners, incomes - but the personality traits at our core, the thing that made us an annoying child or a seductive man with a wandering eye, persist. Perhaps it’s a pessimistic view of human nature. Ferrante seems to find it hard to allow for more than a temporary reprieve in her characters’ lives before pain rears its ugly head again. The quartet is a startling achievement, but it ends with loss at the heart.

There’s a video in the exhibition that I had never heard of before. Over lo-fi shots of Margate, Emin narrates her teenage years, after her assault, hating school, and wandering the pier, she becomes entangled with a variety of older men. She talks about a dancing competition she enters aged 15, dreaming of fame and an escape from her life, where she ends up taunted by cries of ‘Slag! Slag!’, by the very men she had slept with. Emin doesn’t win the competition, she never became a dancer. But the video ends with her windmilling around a room, wearing a bright red shirt and denim shorts, swaying her hips in a loose S formation, beaming with joy. Maybe that’s the power of being an artist whose primary subject matter is yourself. You’re allowed to write your own ending to everything that happens to you. You’re allowed to add in light, after all the dark.

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I start re-reading Giovanni’s Room on a trip to Paris in high June. I’d read it for the first time more than ten years ago now. At boarding school, girls pressed together, and hours spent sprawled on each other’s beds, looking at each other’s belongings, trying on clothes and ways of being. I spotted the slim volume on a friend’s shelf – I think it must have been the Penguin Modern Classics edition with the red outline of a man in the foreground, two smaller figures in the back, against a stark black. I have always judged a book by its cover. I remember thumbing through it on top of her sheets, while she sat at her desk, maybe doing homework or meticulously drawing. She’d always been someone who seemed put together; uniform handwriting, well-chosen clothes, food and books and interests I hadn’t encountered before. I remember reading the book and liking it. I remember being surprised by the plot, having no real understanding of who James Baldwin was. I remember reading it, and hoping it made me become like the girl who owned it. But I couldn’t have described to you the style of writing, or any plot points beyond a vague ‘it’s about a tortured relationship between Giovanni and the protagonist. And it’s set in Paris.’

Returning to it, first outside a café in Lille, after a friendly conversation in French that went better than expected (Comment dit ‘sweet tooth’ en français? ah, c’est un bec sucré), I note down lines that cut me with their poignancy and just rightness. That blend of language that feels so familiar to be almost idiomatic, but precise enough they stand out.

Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it than freedom. I suppose this is why I asked her to marry me: to give myself something to be moored to. Perhaps this was why in Spain, she decided that she wanted to marry me. But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their loves and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say yes to life.

My four and a half days in Paris end up feeling like a re-run. I'm here for Fête de la Musique, a nationwide free street party, that I first encountered almost ten years ago, when on my year abroad. Then, it was just me, and two other friends, happening upon guitarists and DJs after work, thrilled by the spontaneous party, the wholesomeness. Today it’s grown to a chaotic open air festival, like South East Corner at Glastonbury on hyperspeed. Elbowing our way through crushes of crowds, it’s fun, but a little stir crazy. I go to bed at 1am, but on the Eurostar back I eavesdrop on a gaggle of boys bragging about staying up till 7 or 8.

During the trip, I visit the same bakery (Du Pain et des Idées) and the same coffee shop (Bonjour Jacob) as I did last year, with a different person than I did the year before. I buy the same pain suisse, but opt for an iced americano instead of a iced latte. I remember narrowly escaping a heatwave last year; this year we’ve come as the canicule begins to peak.

On the Saturday I get ice cream with some friends visiting at the same time and we sit in a park in the Marais, talking about weddings and people moving to Dubai. It’s the same one I sat in last year, where H and I realised our parents got married on the exact same day. Then we’re at the Musee Picasso. I walk around the Henry Taylor exhibition in reverent silence; it feels rare to find something that surprises me, when we’ve scrolled for years, have already pinpointed the references to the references. I’d somehow never heard of Henry Taylor before, but as I walk around, his paintings felt familiar; the figuration reminiscent in some parts of Noah Davis, the bold brushstrokes and colours a hint of Kerry James Marshall; but still entirely its own. Taylor’s interests and personality shine through. At one point I linger on a small block pasted with cut-out Cancer horoscopes, and think about how my birthday is exactly a week away, at the start of July. Taylor’s preoccupation with famous Black figures sees me stand in front of a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. playing with a group of children. Their faces are swirled and disfigured. It’s eerie, even before I spot the white figures in the background peering over.

Last year, at the same museum, I walked around an exhibition by Sophie Calle - a French artist that is difficult to categorise. Ostensibly, she’s a performance artist, but really her art is her life. A film of an auction house pricing every item she owns. A video of her mother’s dying breaths. A floor full of unfinished projects. A breakup letter transformed into a crossword, a song, evaluated by a judge.

It’s an instinct that feels wholly familiar, to transform emotional experiences into narrative. This newsletter, for instance; essentially the flotsam and jetsam of my days, smoothed down to words and sentences. “The project had replaced the man”, Calle said of the breakup letter and its many variants, and I think about how in the re-telling of love found, then lost, the story begins to feel like something different than the reality. Your friends won’t ever fully know the blissful mundanity of sitting side by side or exchanging songs or developing an inside joke from one week to the next. All they hear is the rushed explanation as you catch up over a vermouth and tonic; He said this, then I said that, and ultimately it’s for the best, even though it hurt. And you can no longer remember if you ever even believed those words, or if you’ve said them enough times that they end up being true.

When I get back to London, I feel a little restless. The déjà vu feels like it’s continuing, but morphing into a Groundhog day loop, where familiar grooves start to become uncomfortable because of their stagnancy. I attempt to make some big changes, but it’s not the right time, is what I tell myself, when things don’t work out.

Then idly browsing Substack one afternoon I come across a line that calls to me, from one of my favourite writers, , in her advice column:

…think like a fiction writer and consider the many, many, many unpredictable and exciting ways your story might improve.

Think like a fiction writer. Now that I can do; reading novels as a child and learning about life before I experienced it, studying literature at school and university, the thrill from dissecting layers of text and meaning. Maybe neuroticism, from a certain angle, is just an active imagination, the mind being able to create a million different theories for how things will unfold, catastrophising with aplomb. And maybe one can flip the script, and harness this overactive imagination for good. Isn’t that exciting? To be soothed by the possibility of all the good, unknown things that could happen? To remember that you will be constantly surprised by life again and again? To revel in the fact that you have no idea who you will meet when leaving the house, or who will send you a message that changes your life, or how a normal day will begin and may end up being the best day of your life?

I finished re-reading Giovanni’s Room in London. It’s one of those books, like The Secret History or Anna Karenina that has its ending written in, whether obliquely or explicitly, from the very first page. And yet, like both those books, this doesn’t stop you holding your breath as you read, as you witness each turn or fall from grace. It’s something that I always admire in writers, that feels difficult to re-create myself; to produce a story that at the end feels inevitable, that just makes sense, but reading it, discovering each plot point feels unexpected, novel.

Although, when you think about it, it’s what all of us do everyday. Our house falls through and we move to a neighbourhood where we meet a friend who gives us a new lease of life - thank God that didn’t work out, it was meant to be. A haphazard series of jobs, looking back, becomes a straight line to fulfilment - of course I do this now, all those things before led to this.

Joan Didion said it much better than me: ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live’. We’re all writers, even if we’ve never put pen to paper. Making life choices based on the characterisation we’ve given ourselves, or been given by other people. Perhaps déjà vu is the universe’s version of a rewrite. ‘Here you go, I’ve started the scene again for you. Last time was the first draft, feel free to have another try.'

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So visiting New York ‘as an adult’, as I kept telling people I was going to do, felt monumental for some reason, like I was going to feel a certain way in its streets, or be struck by an urge to immediately upend my life and move there. Undoubtedly, New York has a special energy; one full of purpose. Everyone there looked like they had something to do and somewhere to be. We were lucky, it was beautiful weather, 25 degrees, sunny, but not too hot. My sister and I kept remarking that it was like we were walking through a film set – the light was golden, the buildings tall, the roads wide. Dinner at a much-hyped restaurant on a Monday and every seat was full; I thought of a date I’d had long ago at a nice, popular pub in East London on a Monday, and how we were the only people there apart from the bartender, conscious of how much he could hear our stilted conversation. Still, that urge I’d had when exploring other cities, like Paris or Copenhagen, to transform myself and imagine what my day to day would involve over there, didn’t emerge. A friend asked how the trip was going:

Other friends I met up with while there, who were relatively recent newcomers to the city, talked about creative projects and literary parties. A man across from us on the subway, stared intently at a script covered in pencilled notes, shopping bag full of groceries next to him. It was inspiring, but again that word purpose popped into my head. Does one need a reason to come to New York? I can’t imagine moving on a whim, directionless. Maybe it’s a place that serves people who know what they want and are willing to fight to get it. A place with so much money and opportunity that a good idea and a lot of grit can set you up for life. I’m sure one day it will be for me – when I’ve got that idea, and need a big enough stage to realise it. But for now, I think I’m looking for a place that can contain uncertainty. Somewhere that has space for figuring things out, that can give second or third chances even if things go wrong.

Today it’s raining in London. But the barista at my local café remembered my name, and I’ve hung up all my laundry. I’m happy to be home.

The Amtrak from Boston to New York City is surprisingly comfortable. A tour of East Coast hotspots with auspicious names; Providence, Mystic, New Haven. Even a New London and Berlin found their way into our route.

I’m a big fan of matching book to holiday destination. This was a long holiday in the US, with my family, so it felt like the perfect opportunity to tackle a Franzen. I adored it – Crossroads was funny, heartfelt, clever, and I barely noticed the almost 600 pages it unfurled over. And most fortuitously of all, as I took the Elizabeth line back home after landing, I saw that an excerpt for the second book in the planned trilogy had just been released in the New Yorker. Sometimes being late to things pays off.

After a quick stop to drop bags upon arrival, my sister Sarah and I headed to the Met. It was the V&A on crack; everywhere I looked some new object emerged, demanding my attention. I walked around the Costume Exhibition; interesting, but I wasn’t bowled over.

I was more captured by the The Face of Life exhibition, which brought together a collection of modern portraiture from the Met collection.

Links between art I’d seen in Boston kept surfacing. I was drawn to an image of a regal young Black girl, and read of its connection to the Harlem Renaissance. A few days before my family had looked around Renaissance, Race, and Representation in the Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African American Art, a couple steps away from Harvard Square. The scrunched up face of a baby by Van Gogh had been featured in a show I had seen the year before at the MFA Boston. She had the same expression as a photo of Sarah that we had looked at on the Amtrak.

The Met was overwhelming and before too long I began to suffer museum fatigue. After a quick walk through Central Park, it was time to head back to Williamsburg and get ready for our evening meal.

Lilia was gorgeous, our waiter recommended a red wine with berry notes she said was ‘the sort of thing I imagine a bear loving.’ We had head-on prawns with fennel pollen, focaccia with green garlic butter and a lamb steak so juicy we ate it in silence. We spent most of the evening eavesdropping on the two women next to us, one of whom was dating someone who clearly didn’t care whether she lived or died, and her long-suffering friend who encouraged her regardless.

The next day was a Lower East Side day. After a heavenly breakfast burrito, we spent most of the late morning at The New Museum, looking at uncanny artistic representations of ‘the future’. I enjoyed seeing how many things were named after patrons. Maybe a few hundred pounds could get me a plug socket?

Then– dragged Sarah to wait in line for a $10 brown butter latte, that was entirely worth it. Tried on clothes in a Cou Cou Intimates pop up and a Paloma Wool store that looked like a gallery. Tried on a lipliner in Hourglass that I think I’ll end up getting. Bought a tank top in Los Angeles Apparel, and thought about the body dysmorphia trying on American Apparel disco pants gave me in 2012.

That evening– visited the Climax Books store and bought perhaps the platonic ideal of a hoodie - thick, pockets, very slightly cropped, double zip.

Dinner at Eel Bar with Lottie and Gazelle. Gorgeous waiter who kept calling us lovers and had the word DIVA tattooed on his right hand fingers. A Tuesday, but felt like the weekend. Sexy lighting. This time, lots of chat, so the only photo of the food I got was of these pintxos.

We had one more day, and this was a designated bookshop crawl. Bagels in McCarren Park to start, watching little kids play underneath rainbow parachutes, a class learning to ride bikes, girls power walking past our bench, talking loudly on their phones–and they were roommates–a cold brew to accompany the heat. I am now obsessed with cold brew. Walk to McNally Jackson. I’m probably going to the wrong places, but I rarely see bookshops in London as places of discovery. Normally I’ll be reminded of something I’ve said I want to read, or spot a copy of an already Guardian-approved book. Here, I found myself browsing through novels I’d never heard of, but immediately wanted to devour.1 Restrained myself and just bought one, Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt, which I’ve only just started, but already know I will love.

In Bushwick, heat rising, someone had opened a fire hydrant. On a recommendation from Sarah’s friend, we went to Molasses, a used bookstore. Another prime eavesdropping arena; a man talking to a woman about his job editing social content for a vaguely controversial 21 year old comedian and in the next breath detailing how he plans to sue his ex-roommate for beating him up. I think I could get like 20-50k, easy. God, I love America.

Back to LES. Everything in New York seems to be half an hour apart. We get a slice from Prince Street Pizza, watch 6 NYPD officers house their own pies. I try on a pair of $325 jeans from Still Here. I like the composition of their fit pics; straddling the line between candid and posed. A browse around Dashwood Books and time to head back to Williamsburg. Navigating the L, uptown, downtown, local, express.

And all too soon, we’ve descended to the subway again, to Penn Station, laden with items, thank God we both bought new bookshop tote bags. Haven’t seen anyone with a McNally Jackson bag in Dalston yet, time to retire the Trader Joe for something more unique. Amtrak back to Boston, and our three day excursion is over, just like that.

At the start of the US trip, still in Cambridge, Mass. for Sarah’s graduation, we kept running into British people we knew from life back home. It’s funny, isn’t it, that we would meet at this time, in this place, of all the places and all the moments. Sarah mentioned how one of her professors didn’t think it was that strange. Sure, it feels so random, but think about why you’re there, and why they’re there–both of similar backgrounds, you know each other because of this degree or that job, is it really weird you both end up at an airport going to the same academic conference? I demurred, it’s the same in London too, shocked when I get on the same tube carriage as a friend, when we all live in the same city and frequent the same four places.

But– as we wait for our delayed Amtrak, we sit and grab a quick dinner in the food court. I notice a girl walking near our table, looking for a seat, and hope I don’t have to move my bags. Sarah and her make eye contact and gasp in shock. One of her best friends from school in the Surrey countryside, at uni in Pennsylvania, but about to move to New York for work. Haven’t seen each other in years, and now overlapping in the busiest station in the Western hemisphere. They reminisce about teenage days, how they used to talk about ending up in America, and now here they are. She has to rush to catch her train after a few minutes but promises are made to meet up, to reconnect. A train on time, a free seat somewhere else, a turn of the head, an infinite amount of things that had to happen or not happen, to produce this spark.

What are the chances? Sometimes life is stranger than fiction.

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I am constantly caught between a rock and a very hard place when it comes to consuming culture. Deathly afraid of spoilers but also chronically online - I find it hard to avoid reading a review or glancing at a tweet about anything I’m vaguely interested in. Coming to the exhibition free of any real outside context made it feel that much more fresh and surprising. So much so that I decided to write a review of it and ended up longlisted for this year’s The Observer/Anthony Burgess prize. It was fun trying to get my feelings about all these photos in 800 words – if you’re interested, here it is:

The first thing I notice is the tape. Off-white, translucent Scotch tape sticking postcard-sized and poster-sized images to the walls.

The second thing I notice is the sheer scale. Under fluorescent lights, across 6000 square metres, photographs are displayed on pillars and tucked around corners, tables containing magazines and books are dotted around the cavernous room, and dozens of videos play on rows of clunky computers. Next to the taped images are framed photos as tall as a human, so big I feel like I’m about to be swallowed up by them.

This blurring of the quotidian and the dramatic is typical of German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’ oeuvre, but it is brought into even sharper relief in his 2025 exhibition Rien ne nous y préparait – Tout nous y préparait (Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us). Before the Centre Pompidou in Paris closed for a five-year renovation, Tillmans was invited to stage a show in the building’s Bibliothèque Publique d’Information (BPI), an extensive public library. The result is an impressive curation of a nearly forty-year career, recontextualised away from gallery walls.

Tillmans is used to working outside of the contemporary art world’s confines. He first piqued public interest in the 1990s, as a street-style photographer for publications such as provocative fashion magazine i-D, and his subsequent work has been characterised by its flexibility and constant evolution, frequently disseminated as album or book covers. This means I immediately recognise certain shots; a Black man with green hair, his hand covering a wet face. Two white men, maybe boys, mouths smashed together in an embrace. Others I’ve never seen before, but they still feel familiar. A yellow plastic bag next to plantain and mangoes. The waning hours of a house party, beer bottles and cigarette butts littering the floor. Tillmans is a photographer concerned with the material; I can feel the crinkle of the bag in my fingers, can imagine the close dampness of the room where the boys touch.

But the digital feels as present as the physical. The volume of images and objects on display mirrors the endless scroll of the social media feed and the algorithm’s tendency to make everything feel chosen just for you. It’s impossible to linger over each photo (there are approximately 500), and Tillmans rejects chronology or hierarchy when arranging his work, so you are left to draw connections between pieces yourself. A group of people in a smoking area, blurry through a fogged up window, intrigues me; it turns out to be from a nightclub I’ve visited multiple times, in East London. The yellow bag and fruit that felt so familiar is called Lagos Still Life II; my parents are Nigerian, fried plantain a Sunday dinner staple.

Indeed, ‘how does one re-energise the familiar?’ is the central concern of this exhibition. Tillmans has altered the BPI to varying degrees, leaving photocopiers untouched, but emptying certain shelves and filling them with his own magazine collections. An AirPod in an ear is elevated by the light reflected on the face around it, metallic pinks and greens shimmering like an oil spill (African_Sheen), or pairs of entwined arms and legs become something alien due to a tight crop (arms and legs).

Tillmans veers into the political in Truth Study Center (2005-present), an ongoing project that juxtaposes mixed media to show how differing versions of truth abound. One table contains a photo of Tony Blair smugly splayed on a couch, next to one of a hand caressing a hunk of meat, next to newspaper headlines about the Iraq War. Yes, I understand the point, but it feels slightly heavy-handed.

Instead, I find his quieter pieces better at conveying a sense of social consciousness. Flowerhead with its careful placement of tulips and carnations in plastic water bottles, artifice and nature rubbing up against each other. Or Temporary Shoe Shop, where rows of shoes stacked across a car become a comment on consumerism and globalisation the longer I look; I can make out the Coca-Cola logo on the side of a trainer. Mundanity is rendered special through attention.

Tillmans’ intimate, diaristic photos of friends bring to mind Nan Goldin and her raw, unfiltered depictions of eighties New York, while his still lifes remind me of writer Annie Ernaux’s Uses of Photography book, where she and a lover take photos of their clothes, post-coital, light falling on abandoned shoes and crumpled trousers. But I also think of how many of us in the audience possess the same documentarian instinct; recording shaky sunsets and loved ones on our phones. Tillmans takes this instinct and builds a fresh frame around it. I think of flowers, water, shoes, plastic bags, and sticky dance floors. The stuff of the everyday, but through Tillmans’ lens we remember why they’re worth a second glance.

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What else, since I last wrote? I’m still wrestling with half-finished books and thoughts. Spent five days in Tbilisi, Georgia. Went clubbing in an abandoned swimming pool, and then an abandoned Soviet power station. Walked past an abandoned cinema. Thought how good of a club it would make. Made lots of elaborate meals for one - the last was roasted fennel and chicken thighs, with kale and roasted chickpeas dressed in an olive oil/pomegranate molasses concoction. Watched The Piano Teacher - reminded myself how good art lingers, makes you uncomfortable. I know buying things technically doesn’t make you happier, but my recent purchases of the perfect pair of grey trousers, an also perfect V neck grey sweater (both second-hand at least), and a bottle of Aesop Rozu perfume, have done wonders for my serotonin. Enjoying James Blake’s new album (especially Days Go By) and seeing him in Boston this May. Boston! To visit my sister, and also go with her to New York for the first time, since my first time (age 9 or 10, I think). Spring in London, finally, finally emerging. Iced coffee weather and London Fields sprawl. A fat maritozzo bun from Forno, creamy and simple, with a slightly bitter coffee to cut through. Feeling content, or trying to be at least, with how things are, or how they’re going to be. Reminding myself that the probability of a good outcome is the same as a bad. What if everything works out? Have you ever considered that?

My first post at the start of 2025 talked about my ‘word’ for the new year. Instead of choosing a resolution I tried to latch onto an organising principle that would hopefully help guide my path, but not be as limiting or finite as something like ‘run a marathon’, and end with me feeling like a failure if I didn’t achieve it. It’s funny looking back on what I wrote all those months ago. I chose the word spontaneity, in a bid to be more reckless and less stagnant, to try new things. I’m not sure how much I’ve actually achieved this; I’m not sure I’ve said yes any more than usual this year, or done things that have surprised me or felt out of character. This isn’t to say it’s been a bad year, but maybe it’s been a fallow one.1 Just as fields need time off to recover, to grow back, maybe there are just points in our lives when not much really happens, where we bob along, just fine, dealing with regular ups and downs, but ultimately close to our baseline.

As I look towards next year, I still want to choose a word. And as a Type A looking enviously at Type Bs, I’m stuck between two options. My first instinct was open.

Open to experiences, open to life

Open-minded

Open to failure and missed opportunities

Open to growing and changing

Open to uncertainty or ambivalence

Open to differences and newness

It feels of a similar tenor to spontaneity, another attempt to be a bit more freewheeling, figure out how much more expansive life can be.

Another part of me wants to lock in, put my head down, and see what comes from the hard work. To be audacious and commit to things I tell friends I want to do but never actually pursue. To feel no shame about being ambitious.

Nothing dictates that these two desires are contradictory. Perhaps they will inform the other, openness preventing me from gritted-teeth burnout, ambition offering me direction instead of distraction.

A writer and filmmaker I follow, Mickey Galvin (), posted a video a few months ago about creative practice.

The whole video is interesting, especially coming from someone who hasn’t yet ‘made it’, who is still trying to write and create films whilst having a more traditional job to pay the bills. Towards the end she talks about the idea of ‘strategic underachievement’, – accepting that achieving certain goals will inevitably mean neglecting other parts of your life. If you are focused on finishing your novel, you’ll have less time for socialising. If you are sinking into a new romantic relationship, maybe your tennis skills fall by the wayside.

It’s a concept referenced by Oliver Burkeman in his fantastic book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, a book I kept seeing people recommend, but dismissed as a self-help volume that would force me to colour-code all my emails. Instead, it revealed itself to be a philosophical exploration of how we manage time, and by manage time, I mean manage our existence. Burkeman covers various topics, but the red thread through all of them is our mortality and what that means for our priorities. He implores readers to accept the impossibility of succeeding at every conceivable goal they could have, and in this acceptance find freedom. To understand that life matters because it is inherently restricted, that choices gain meaning through the very act of choosing one thing and therefore excluding other options – having a family in your twenties means not becoming a prima ballerina, working your way up the corporate ladder precludes the chance of a rural life as a farmer.

What I particularly enjoyed about the book is how Burkeman himself is along for the journey. He isn’t an all-seeing, all-knowing guru bestowing his wisdom for £12.99, he is equally as unsure and neurotic as the best of us. As someone who constantly tries to think through her problems, instead of just doing, I recognised myself in his anecdotes about stewing over minor inconveniences or struggling to make decisions about the ‘big things’, like relationships or jobs, ending up caught in a pros and cons paralysis. At one point he references philosopher Costica Bradatan’s advice on procrastination:

Bradatan argues that when we find ourselves procrastinating on something important to us…we fail to see, or refuse to accept, that any attempt to bring our ideas into concrete reality must inevitably fall short of our dreams, no matter how brilliantly we succeed in carrying things off—because reality, unlike fantasy, is a realm in which we don’t have limitless control, and can’t possibly hope to meet our perfectionist standards. Something—our limited talents, our limited time, our limited control over events, and over the actions of other people—will always render our creation less than perfect. Dispiriting as this might sound at first, it contains a liberating message: if you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax—because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start.

The sole difference between artists and non-artists is that the first group actually created something out of their ideas. It’s a value I’m trying to learn, slowly. I took painting lessons for the first few months of this year, learning about colour and shade. I’ve cooked more and more, inviting friends round two at a time to taste-test. I bought knitting needles and wool in October and have been working steadily on a scarf full of dropped stitches.

Even this newsletter. I’d written sporadically a couple of years ago, then picked it up again this year. I didn’t end up writing every week like I’d told myself I would,2 but I wrote more regularly than I ever had before, tried different genres and styles, had friends and acquaintances and even some strangers say they were interested in what I had to say. Next year I will keep writing and experimenting, in the interest of being both open and ambitious. I want to write more about fashion, and try more fiction. Be less precious in some posts and more considered in others. I owe a lot of myself to the internet. Being on Tumblr age thirteen introduced me to music and art and films and designers and books that I can’t imagine coming across otherwise, not in the way or combination of references that left itself imprinted in my brain and formed that unwieldy thing called taste. I think I’m constantly searching for the high I felt looking at screenshots of The Dreamers and searching for a link to watch it illegally in my bedroom, or poring over backstage photos of Prada shows, mentally noting the models’ names3. Reading Rookie Mag and watching vlogs obsessively, learning about worlds and subcultures miles away, or in my city behind closed doors.

I’ve followed writers I was already fond of to Substack, and discovered many others, small and big. My Christmas present to you all is a list of some of my favourites:

• - One of Substack’s early adopters, and maybe the person who introduced the platform to me? Previously working at Man Repeller (rip), Haley manages to write about modern life with intelligence and care, without drifting into confusing theory, and I have to physically stop myself from making all my posts just poorer rehashes of her own. I’ve been recently enamoured by her ‘matrixes’ – where she codifies social behaviours into graphically pleasing charts and robust analyses. Her Gossip Matrix made me take a long, hard look at some of my group chats.

• - Party reporting is hard. You end up reading lists of names of people you don’t really know, or annoying quotes from said people, or the whole thing just seems like a massive advertorial for whichever brand is hosting the party. But Amanda, a stylist based in New York, manages to bring a new lease of life to the form, and her enthusiasm for socialising makes me want to take a shot and talk to a stranger RIGHT NOW. Also, beautiful gowns.

• - I have discovered so many authors and schools of thought and ideas from Celine’s Substack. I admire her approach to explaining her process – how she chooses books, how she improves her writing, how she understands unfamiliar topics. The effort and steps involved in creating something, anything, is often opaque to those on the outside of an artistic sphere, or who haven’t had access to structured education. Even as someone who studied history and languages for four years, approaching writing away from those academic constraints is intimidating. Celine illuminates such difficulties, detailing her own experiences. She also makes me want to read more of the classics.4

• - Each day of December, Salome writes Critmas, her own reviews and takes on cultural content in the year gone by. I appreciate the high low mix of choices, as well as topics that sit outside the classic genre categories of book, film, exhibition etc. etc. – a recent post covered the particular anxieties around getting the most out of Glastonbury.5

• - A recent find, The Goal is to Eat digs into the food and restaurant industry, mainly in London, but with stints abroad, in a way that makes me feel like I’m listening in on some gossip I shouldn’t be.6

• does a personal essay-cum-cultural criticism piece really well. His post on New York Fashion Week felt like reading the diary of your coolest friend.

• - It’s a wonder Jess posts even a few of her stories for free online, because they really should all be novels and TV series and elaborate stand up shows that tour the country where she can regale us in person. Her tales of her life, mainly set at the bookshop where she works, have a hint of the David Sedaris about them, wry and witty observations, always overlaid with a warmth and clear appreciation for people and all their foibles. My sister and I have still not figured out which bookshop she works in. I’ve been picturing the Daunt Books by Hampstead Heath in the meantime.

• Taylor - Since I left university, I’ve convinced myself my brain has atrophied. That my memory is getting worse, and I’m less creative, and I can’t keep up. Reading (and being able to understand) Brandon’s posts reminds me that not all hope is lost. He manages to synthesise what is clearly an extensive amount of rigorous academic research and produce interesting, thought out arguments about literature, refusing to dumb down his work, but still writing with humour and humanity. I’ve played a bit of tennis, not very well, but I devoured his account of his time at tennis camp, relished in his descriptions of improving backhands and serves, and I noted down this paragraph towards the end:

Why get good at all if I am never going to become sublime? Why spend the money and the time and the effort? Why not become like one of those happy people not trying to improve but just accept myself for who I am and who I am not? Why drive myself so hard? Why push myself so hard? Why am I trying to get good? Why? Why? Why? What is the point? What will I gain? I’m not playing tournaments. I’m not trying to get ranking points. I will gain absolutely nothing material from this. I will gain nothing but the satisfaction of a well struck shot or a carefully constructed point. The only thing to gain is, well, living precisely as I would like to live.

Next year I want to take photos on my new film camera and think more about composition. I want to go on more walks. I want to sell most of my clothes and fill my wardrobe up all over again. I want to spend time with friends in different countries and in our living rooms. I want to write more and dance more. I want to live life precisely as I would like to live it.

She decided to leave the orange chair behind when they moved. He said it had never suited them – the rest of the flat was outfitted in varying shades of beige.

In their new home, the ghost of the chair followed her. Sometimes she would walk back to the corner where it had been discarded, and try to will it back into being. It never returned.

Five years later she moved again, this time with another husband. It was far away from the old neighbourhood; here the pavements were wide, so you could walk three abreast, and the trees were taller, with leaves the colour of fire.

One night, as she pushed the pram down the street, she looked into the window of the house on her left, its living room lit up by a solitary lamp. The man she used to live with, a woman, and a child sat on the floor around a coffee table. Next to the lamp was the orange chair.

I stood by the bar and watched everyone take photos in their Halloween costumes. I’ve always hated fancy dress. The same reason I dislike musicals and team sports (participating, not watching). To be confronted with a display of unguarded effort, no dissimulating, no hint of irony, is a challenge. A reminder that not everyone is as plagued by self-consciousness as me. I was wearing all black; black long-sleeved shirt, black pleated skirt, black knee high boots; my usual uniform, but if someone asked I could tell them I was an undertaker. No one had asked yet, so I continued to sip my gin and tonic and smile at strangers. The girl who had brought me to the party was in the bathroom with people I didn’t know. I hadn’t seen her for a year, but when she texted it didn’t seem like the time to rehash old wounds, so I went along without bringing up our previous estrangement. After I finished my drink, and a second one too, it was clear she wasn’t coming back. The white lace gloves forgotten on the seat next to me had not been reclaimed. I picked them up and pocketed them. The 38 bus home was quieter than usual.

The man and the woman looked forward to Thursdays. Under the cover of ‘after work drinks’, they could laugh freely. Touch hands passing pints backwards through a crowded room. When he rolled her a cigarette, it felt like a kiss.

Her favourite colleague asked her about it, one Thursday in November.

‘So, what’s going on with you and him?’

They were smoking in the narrow alley next to their regular. It smelled like urine, and the woman pulled up the neck of her coat over her mouth and breathed in deeply. The expensive perfume she had sprayed last weekend at Liberty’s still lingered; the mineral top note had faded, but a powdery, berry musk remained. The word ‘nosegay’ popped into her head. She wondered why the Victorians didn’t just bathe more, instead of creating all this scaffolding to mask their stench.

‘I mean, obviously nothing. He’s just a massive flirt. I don’t know, I’m trying not to read too much into it.’

The colleague opened her mouth to reply, but the man had bounded out to join them.

‘My favourite ladies! How are you going?’

She smiled at his Australian twang, thought about how sunny his childhood must have been.

‘What’s down here?’ he asked, peering into the darkness of the alley.

‘It’s a dead end.’ the third-wheeling colleague replied, and looked at the woman.

There was a phrase that kept popping up on this streetwear meme account I follow2. Stolen valor, referring to the clout certain trendy men try to appropriate by buying jackets or trousers traditionally worn by blue-collar labourers, whilst having no claim to the identity itself (see: me searching for those paint-splattered trousers).

The phrase originally denoted civilians who impersonated those in the military, by wearing medals or uniforms belonging to real veterans. But it’s a concept that feels applicable to a large swathe of current consumer culture. It’s at the heart of the jokes about Salomon wearers spending more time pounding the pavements outside their natural wine bar than pounding hiking trails in the countryside. It’s why The Row was selling a chore jacket for £1,530, when men who worked for the rail company SNCF received one free jacket a year, thanks to campaigning by French unions.

I started thinking about this (as I start thinking about many things) after reading a essay about her taste changing. She muses about how trends have become substitutes for identities:

“Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation,” Guy Debord once said, of our descent into a postmodern society of signs and symbols. Always the ones dressing like coastal grandmas, never the coastal grandmas ourselves.

We don’t buy into babydoll dresses or bows on their own – now we call ourselves ‘coquettes’. It’s not enough to just like a grey pencil skirt and kitten heels – we are ‘office sirens’ (even if we work remotely in PJs and Uggs). She goes on to say:

While I don’t think it sounds realistic or even interesting to drain modern aesthetics of reference, I think it’s worth admiring what happens when style springs, instead, from the creative fulfilment of real needs: Japanese Hakama pants that can be tied to fit different size bodies and protect legs underneath kimonos; Breton-striped sweaters so that sailors could be more easily spotted should they fall overboard; fisherman beanies folded up to cool the ears on shore. These designs have endured for a reason.

It was a welcome reframing for me – a reminder that the outfits and clothes we aspire to, possess their power because they were borne out of function. There’s something illogically appealing about ballet dancers’ off duty looks. Sweatshirts slung across shoulders, mismatched leg-warmers, athletic shorts layered over pink tights.

@belle_urwinbaggy but ✨chic✨ #ballerinas #ballettok #balletcore #ausballet

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They’re all part of the uniform for a reason - to keep the limbs warm, but still enable teachers to see the lines of their body. To remain comfy while engaging in strenuous physical work. When I was younger I was obsessed with the idea of becoming a ballet dancer – I took out a book about the Royal Ballet School from my local library and stared at the double spreads of girls my age practicing at the barre. I daydreamed about stretching on the shiny, cold wooden floors, and walking to class with friends. I got excited anticipating the first time I’d get fitted for pointe shoes. I did everything but commit myself to a practice that could actually help me become a ballerina. I gave up on that dream pretty early (I’m too tall, and yes that’s the only reason it wouldn’t have worked), but it’s funny looking back at the way I fetishised that lifestyle, and how clothes were a sizeable part of said fixation. Maybe this is a post about how I’m a bit lazy and I like the idea of doing things, more than the thing itself. But I think it speaks to something wider about the human instinct to find a short cut through commodities, rather than work or action. We find ourselves being sold a lifestyle, and we buy it. All the gear, but no idea. It’s an easier dopamine boost to purchase the pair of hiking boots, rather than struggle through the hike. There’s a concept I talk about a lot with friends: Type 1 and Type 2 fun. Type 1 fun is fun in the moment – clubbing, eating good food, hanging out with friends. A frequent corollary of type 1 fun is that it’s less fun afterwards (a hangover, food coma). Type 2 fun is difficult in the moment, but provides subsequent satisfaction – a marathon, a tricky creative project. The upside of Type 2 fun is that the satisfaction often lingers more than Type 1 fun – the effort put in creates a lasting effect, the relief and fulfilment at having pushed through a hard task, makes the recollection of said experience that much sweeter. I think we should be striving for more Type 2 fun. More experiences of getting things wrong, or trying new things, instead of attempting shortcuts.

It’s why I think influencers are so popular. We live online so much of the time and as a consequence, we live disembodied. I don’t necessarily think people use social media or the internet to escape; I think we want to be as proximate to real life as we can, without actually dealing with sweat and friction and the difficulty of it all. People want their clothes to make it seem like they live a full and varied life. But shouldn’t we try and get a life first?

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This isn’t an anti-fashion thesis. Far from it. I love clothes. But I want to start thinking about them as vehicles or expressions of a lifestyle, rather than a substitute for one. And my favourite editorials and brand campaigns reflect this in their styling and art direction.

Outline, a boutique in Brooklyn, recently released a catalogue. Instead of snapping models against white backgrounds, making sultry eye contact with the camera, they created tableaus of modern New York life, small children and skaters and office workers, all dressed in brands that Outline stocks. In a doubling down of their commitment to reality, the catalogue is in print, and you can email, call or send a picture of what you want to purchase. I was fascinated by the composition of the images, and went down a rabbit hole reading about the movement director, Anna Thérèse Witenberg, who helped facilitate the heightened realism of the models’ positioning.

It was an approach I also saw reflected in Paloma Wool’s recent campaign.

Inspired by the brand’s founder, Paloma Lanna, and her real-life experience juggling motherhood and growing a business, the A/W 2025 campaign sees the new collection showcased amongst the debris of toddler art, and mess of morning meals.

I’ve talked a lot about how your lifestyle and your work should influence how you dress. But I don’t want to ignore how what you wear can also impact the way your work unfolds. I’ve been slowly leafing through A24’s book How Directors Dress, made in collaboration with one of my favourite Instagram accounts, director fits. It covers many of the ideas I’ve talked about here, through the lens of cinema. One chapter traces the history of the baseball cap – from wide brimmed hats originating to serve Ancient Greek farmers and hunters to a cap donned by members of the Brooklyn Excelsiors team, a close predecessor of the baseball cap today. Then, falling in the hands of film directors, well suited to the practical demands of their profession, a profession depending on ‘clarity of vision.’ The cap ‘provides shade and shelter in bright or rainy environments. It soaks up sweat. On a chilly day, it offers a bit of warmth.’

The theme I found the most interesting however, was how much of a role clothing played in helping certain directors channel their artistic vision. I read of how Francis Ford Coppola wore three piece suits when directing, in tribute to the great Italian director Federico Fellini. Or how David Lynch’s instinct to keep his shirts tightly buttoned up, because of deep-seated neuroses, snaked its way into his films, with Kyle MacLachlan taking to fastidiously buttoning up his character Jeremy Beaumont’s shirt in Blue Velvet, inspired by Lynch.

For some directors, wearing the same thing every day helps create protective distance from the mental labour of directing a feature film. It becomes armour, as they pour themselves into creating their art. Sofia Coppola, for instance, wears cotton shirts from Parisian brand Charvet for each film she makes. As she shoots a quartet of ill-fated sisters in the 70s (The Virgin Suicides), an out-of-her-depth princess in Revolutionary France (Marie Antoinette), or a group of bratty teen burglars in noughties LA (The Bling Ring), she remains constant in her neat blue, pin-striped shirts. ‘A kind of uniform helps,’ Coppola says.

What’s clear throughout the book, is no matter the reason the directors wear the clothes they do, it’s always in service of something bigger than style for style’s sake, whether of practical help to making the film, or part of a wider sensibility and appreciation for beauty that then filters into their work.

Sure, sometimes we don’t care what we wear – the thought of picking out an outfit fills us with dread, and all we want is the sweatpants and comfy t-shirt at the back of the wardrobe to go to the shops with. Nevertheless, I love to be reminded of how powerful clothing to be – as wrappers for our bodies as we move through the world, tools to shift our emotions and moods, as well as reflections of our identities – signalling countless things to other people, without us having to say a single word.

While I try to decide what I want to attempt for the next few months (being able to do the splits has been on my New Year’s resolution list since pre-Covid, and I’m nowhere closer to this party trick), I thought I’d put together a list of things that I’ve enjoyed, come across, and thought about this summer. In no particular order:

A restaurant

Kolae, a Thai restaurant in London Bridge I visited with little expectations, and was blown away by. Each dish was dense with flavour and oh so spicy, but never to the detriment of enjoyment. Standouts included biryani rice crackers with green chilli nahm jim and pickled ginger, tart and crunchy and moreish, a crazily tender pork belly curry, and a mango custard with sweet, sticky rice. A definite winner for when you’re trying to figure out dinner for a catch-up with a friend, and need somewhere with easy transport links because you live on opposite sides of London.

A perfume

The only time I’m spontaneously complimented on my smell is when wearing Byredo scents. I was topping up my Oyster card once at Tufnell Park Station, and a man next to me turned and said ‘You smell amazing, what are you wearing?’. It was Rose of No Man’s Land. Whenever I pass a store I go in and use my best acting skills honed way back when during LAMDA classes, to peruse the selection with a curious expression on my face, and then ask innocently for a couple of samples. I won’t tell you I’ve won the lottery, but there will be signs (the full collection of Byredo perfumes on my dresser). Their newest, Alto Astral, is the perfect summer scent. Jasmine, musky, coconut, a hint of suncream, but none of these things end up being cloying, which could so easily happen. The way I feel about perfumes is the way I imagine people who are really into coffee or wine feel – always thrilling to discover a new nuance in your palate, or a familiar smell that fits your taste just so. In another life, I would have been a nose. Maybe there’s still time.

A wallet

Artist Rue Yi makes some of my favourite TikToks – philosophical meditations on flirting, design, approaching an art practice, what it means to be funny, the ethics of horniness. She also makes these beautiful metal wallets, inspired by the Schmidt Sting Pain index. Created by Justin Schmidt, an entomologist, the index seeks to categorise pain, the usual numerical options (how much does it hurt on a scale of 1-10?) failing miserably to convey an individual’s experience to another outside of their body. After stinging himself with 83 different insects, Schmidt wrote descriptions of each wound, and the results are pure poetry; A red paper wasp feels like ‘hydrochloric acid on a paper cut’, another insect feels ‘pure, then messy, then corrosive. Like love and marriage followed by divorce.’ Rue transformed selected descriptions into stainless steel card holders. The one above is my favourite.

Competency

I’ve been thinking a lot this summer about what it means to be ‘competent’. When I was younger I valued many things in other people; intelligence, novelty, ‘coolness’. Recently, I’ve found myself dazzled by those who act like adults and just handle things. People who take initiative when organising a weekend away, someone who can host a dinner without breaking a sweat, can decide to do something, then do it. My dream man is now a carpenter (I’m imagining he looks a lot like Aidan Shaw).

Satisfying colour combinations

My friend Hugo () lent me a copy of A Dictionary of Color Combinations and I spent a good amount of time poring over it, marvelling at just how lovely some colour combos are. One page inspired the theme of this blog, and others have been filed away to use for future creative projects.

The algorithm also recently led me to a TikTok account that finds gorge colour combos in the wild.

A fashion show

A trip to Paris at the end of June happily, unintentionally, coincided with Paris Fashion Week. It meant the already chic denizens of the city were even better dressed than usual. At one point, my friend and I found ourselves walking down a side street literally in the middle of a fashion show. We only realised when we noticed a large camera rig trained on the people sauntering down the pavement. Some held UE Boom sneakers, or drank from cans, and casually held iPhones to their side. It was a clever reminder of how detached the usual presentation of fashion is from its actual intended purpose of being worn – here were clothes in the milieu they would be in real life, moving in the middle of the dirt and noise of the city, dodging Deliveroo drivers and bollards.

The casting was clever, a variation of ages and looks, the movement naturalistic yet choreographed well enough to still catch the eye, models chatting as if they were a couple, a woman walked with two young boys like she was on the school run. At the end of the show, we discovered the brand was Camiel Fortgens, a Dutch designer.

An album

I’ve finished my first listen of Blood Orange’s new album Essex Honey, and am enjoying it a lot. As Alexis Petridis puts it in his review, ‘Its primary mood is a very British kind of late summer-into-autumn melancholy.’ Rustling, orchestral songs to take us from one season to the next. It feels very English - a jungle edge on The Last of England, Tirzah’s haunting voice on Life. Vivid Light is another favourite track of mine, but this definitely an album to be listened to top to bottom.

Looking forward to wearing more layers and hot coffees again, dreading the 4pm sunsets…

On two separate afternoons, we visit Grolier, a poetry bookshop near Harvard Square. To paint a picture of what sort of place it is, the first time around, the bookseller, a bespectacled, strawberry blonde young man, greets us, slightly stooped, then a few minutes later sits down on an armchair and brings out a violin, tunes it, then begins to play a song I don’t recognise. He interrupts himself occasionally to greet entering customers or answer questions, but doesn’t swerve from his task for more than a second or two. My sister, Sarah, and I make eye contact with raised eyebrows in disbelief. He plays for ten minutes then continues about his day.

The second visit I buy Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara and Coeur de Lion by Ariana Reines. They don’t have Ben Lerner so I go down the street to buy The Lights. I’d like to know the psychoanalyst’s interpretation of an inability to finish books, as it’s been plaguing me the past few months. The pile of dog-eared volumes by my bed is growing, and I haven’t even cracked open the Reines or Lerner yet.

I’d only ever read Having a Coke with You before this trip. It’s no sign of discerning taste to say you like O’Hara, but sometimes (only, sometimes) things are popular because they’re good. I’d watch this video of him narrating the poem in sixth form whenever I wanted to feel a little warm inside. His intonation scratches something in my brain, in the right way.

O’Hara labelled some of his work “I do this, I do that” poems, a wry chuckle at the steady detailing of his life and thoughts and days and steps that characterise most of his oeuvre. It’s a reminder that going down into the specifics, naming things, that those details add colour. Instead of alienating your reader, it draws them in.

I don’t know who Joan is, never heard of Grove Press. But I want to keep reading. Don’t you?

I’m only in the US for eight days, but somehow I find myself a routine. Jet lag means I wake up at 7am each morning, a perfect time. I leave Sarah’s house, and run towards Harvard, listening to this. On the way back I pick up an oat iced dirty chai latte (my favourite tongue-twister) and two scones for both of us. American scones are not UK ones – they’re denser, less cake-y, and if I can say it without being c*nsored, better. Sarah takes me to a cafe frequented by students, and I feel like I’m on the set of an A24 film about liberal academia. Oat milk is free, but cow milk is 25¢ extra. A man wearing a pink hoodie and Red Sox baseball cap sits down, and opens Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason at the first page. It’s box fresh, as is the copy of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in front of him. He keeps getting distracted as people enter, looking up and losing his place. I hope he’s doing well.

I don’t start crying till I’m reading the postman’s letters. We’re at the MFA Boston to see an exhibition of Van Gogh’s portraits of the Roulin family, Joseph, a postman, his wife, their three kids, who lived in Arles at the same time as Van Gogh in his last few years of life.

Towards the end of the exhibit, there’s a room filled with the letters of Joseph Roulin to Theo, Vincent’s brother, reaching out, updating him, trying to offer some sort of balm as Van Gogh struggled with multiple breakdowns and moved in and out of psychiatric hospitals. As you grow close to each letter enclosed in a glass box, a microphone above you is switched on, an actor reads out the words, and suddenly you’re there hearing ‘Roulin’ describe Van Gogh’s state, from ‘weak and despondent’, to slowly gaining energy, able to ask if Roulin’s daughter was ‘as pretty as ever’. Looking up Roulin’s letters to remind myself of the text, a website I visit has this postscript in the corner:

Van Gogh’s story ends, as we know, two years later, in despair.

O’Hara and John Ashbery frequented Grolier. e. e. cummings did too.

This plaque is about a five minute walk from my sister’s house. It feels like a small, quiet pilgrimage of sorts to be in the same place as an artist. We visit Provincetown, and we think of Mary Oliver and her geese. I see a Cy Twombly in the flesh for the first time and learn he studied in Boston.

Recently, I tell Sarah I haven’t had any fun for a while. But you had fun when you came to visit me, didn’t you? And fun when you went to Berlin with your friends? And you were in Paris just last month? I demur, but those don’t count, not really. They were fun, because they weren’t real life, they were an escape. But you lived it, didn’t you? You were still you, when you were there. It’s hard to write about home, the way you do other places. Or maybe it’s hard for me. I try to imagine what a ‘I do this, I do that’ poem would look like for my London life. How I’d translate it through a poet’s eyes. I make a mental note, to make even more iPhone notes than I already do. Force myself to describe something mundane like it’s a work of art.

P.S. I’ve changed the name and design of my blog. A rebrand for the sake of my 56 subscribers <3

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Another interaction, at a fancy concept store, you know the type, that could just as easily have been in Paris, or Copenhagen, or Hackney. All brushed metal, and white plastic, tapestries and expensive pastries. I chat to a girl with large doe eyes and dark eyebrows who tries to help me find a present for the host whose villa I will be staying at on a nearby island later that afternoon.

‘We have some great candles, or perhaps he, or she, I don’t know, would like these coasters?’

She starts to pick out her favourite objects, hesitantly at first. I dither, going back and forth before settling on an embroidered pillow case. She asks where I’m from and she breathes out in delight when I say London.

‘I went there recently, to visit a friend. It’s so nice.’

We discuss how much she dislikes the buildings in Athens, the blocks of flats that look pretty much the same across the city, compared to London’s mix and variety of houses, actual houses.

I tell her how much the shop reminds me of places in London.

‘Yes, well, the two owners, they’ve spent time abroad. I guess they are almost like sisters, one is married to the other’s brother. Anyway, one spent time in London, and the other also London, and Amsterdam too.’

It’s funny, this softening of the edges of taste, creating a universal language of ‘cool’. Certain lines and materials, signifiers of a distinctly creative upper class, with the money to spend on ceramics and accoutrements.

The weather in Athens is confusing. Layering a bomber jacket over a hoodie, I feel sweat prick under my armpits as I walk up the stairs to the Acropolis, but my ears start to go numb from the wind that whips past. It’s the end of November, so there are no queues, and I feel slightly self-conscious at this solo tourist expedition. I take some selfies by the Parthenon, angling to get a shot without scaffolding. To say I’m underwhelmed wouldn’t be right, but I get the feeling I often get at historical monuments. A feeling that something is supposed to be happening to me that isn’t, that I should be struck by a sense of smallness or greatness, or something else when faced with such significance. All I can think about is how cold I am. I walk towards the exit and hear someone say ‘Wow, how cool’, as they emerge and catch sight of the Parthenon. I turn back and hesitate - maybe I did this the wrong way, I know my mind had drifted to my flight and my friends back home. I walk a few steps and look again at the grooves in the columns, the spaces between them. I feel nothing.

Solo dining on the other hand has always presented a sense of satisfaction. I over-order at the Italian-inspired restaurant down the street from my Airbnb. An overwhelming plateful of hot, crispy, deep-fried courgette slices, the size and shape of 2 euro coins, arrives at my table, accompanied by a small pot of thick tzatziki, the consistency of cream cheese, with small flecks of cucumber smattered inside. Next is my seafood linguine, a bowl heaped with mussels, clams and prawns, all swimming in a salty, watery, tomato-ey jus, that I drink gleefully with a spoon. I alternate between these plates and the jug of white wine placed before me, taking very little time to pause between mouthfuls. It’s a sensational meal, and each forkful quietens the usual swirling mass of thoughts in my head.

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It’s been a few months since that trip and I’m reading the latest hyped Fitzcarraldo book. Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico details the life of Anna and Tom, a ‘millennial expat couple’, (the blurb’s categorisation, not my own), who live in Berlin. It’s laughably confronting, how much it links to the lives of me and my friends. The references to Monocle magazine and Anglepoise lamps, their obsession with Monstera plants. A description of how their social circle has elevated food and cooking and dinner parties to a religion;

...reclaimed wooden tables would be laid with raw cotton tablecloths and tin or amber glass plates, themselves filled with elaborate salads sprinkled with seeds and fruit, quinoa and fava beans, or seasonal roasted root vegetables seasoned with ginger and sumac. Wedges of chèvre or fossa would gleam beneath a glass cheese dome. IPAs from local microbreweries would slosh in earthernware steins, while the spent yeast sediment from the natural wine would sit at the bottom of thin-stemmed glasses. The smell of freshly ground, single-origin, lightly roasted coffee would waft from chunky brown and white porcelain cups…Food was part of their culture, and they would discuss it among themselves in the same way previous generations had discussed films, books and politics. It helped define who they were.

I think about how I half jokingly, half seriously call eating out and small plates one of my hobbies. Remember a friend of mine visiting my house brandishing a sad, barely-bitten shawarma. I didn’t want to look up any restaurants, just walked into the closest place I saw on the way here and it’s so bad. I just wanted to be like Jonathan Nunn, y’know, be all Vittles about it and find some hole-in-the wall place.

and talk of Perfection in a recent Substack post, and Sykes references the work of writer Kyle Chayka, who coined the term ‘‘airspace’, ‘this identikit global taste which started in Australian cafe culture, with exposed industrial design and flat whites.’ It was the word I was looking for when I was in that shop in Athens. It’s why I joke with friends that our favourite neighbourhood in any foreign city is the one that reminds us most of Dalston. It’s this specific combination of the internet, and globalisation, that has created a flattening of culture. It’s the thing that drives the endlessly thinkpiece’d Instagram accounts, @real_housewives_of_clapton and @socks_house_meeting, highlighting the idiosyncrasies of a young ‘liberal elite’, with the money and cultural capital to buy nice shoes and go on holiday, but in quasi-creative jobs that leave them grasping for greater satisfaction, or more freelance work to keep up with rent in expensive neighbourhoods.

Anna and Tom drift. Graphic designers, cultured and with ‘good taste’, looking for a life of more substance. But ‘their idea of a revolutionary future didn’t go beyond gender balance on corporate boards, electric cars, vegetarianism.’ They struggle to find contentment within their objectively ‘privileged’ lives, and something that strikes me while reading is how few true friendships they have. As a couple they seem happy, but their social circle is transient and built on the pretence of liking contemporary art, or by dint of the fact they are all expats and so look out for each other. There is a hollowness to the book (or rather, I felt hollow while reading), and only after coming across Sykes and Akpovbovbo’s newsletter about it did I realise there was no dialogue throughout. You are never privy to the conversations they are having at all these dinner parties and private views, leaving you unsure of just how emotionally intimate any of their relationships are.

Perfection is based on George Perec's novel Things: A Story of the Sixties1, but it also reminded me of À Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. I first read it many years ago while studying The Picture of Dorian Gray, after learning it had been an inspiration for Oscar Wilde. It fascinated me – this tale of a 19th century aesthete, locking himself away, seeking to create the most beautiful world for himself, obsessed with books and arts and perfumes. The novel itself is heavy with detail, claustrophobic and beautifully written. One image stuck with me – the protagonist loads up a tortoise with glittering, expensive jewels, so many that the tortoise eventually dies, suffocated under the weight of his owner’s riches.

There’s an inescapable irony in my reading about the emptiness of Anna and Tom’s lives, and feeling the need to post about it on Instagram and write a Substack about it, artfully signalling how ‘in the know’ I am.

And yes, Perfection has been called a satire; but it is also a book written in Italian, translated into English, only able to be in my hands because of the work of a publishing imprint that has been profiled by The New Yorker, whose offices are in the Bussey Building in Peckham, an industrial estate which became a creative hub, a place I remember going to club nights in during university, at one point about to be transformed into luxury flats, and now houses rooftop bars and artists’ studios and pop up food stands.

It’s part and parcel of the culture it critiques – and that’s probably why it’s so good.

That was great. Right? I mean, I know nothing about jazz.

Yes, she’s such a mature performer. A lot of the time you can tell someone is trying to imitate someone else, but she’s doing her own thing.

Ok, I felt validated. My instincts were correct. But it opened up a conversation – do you need to be an expert to be able to pass judgement? Is there something about being exposed to a large amount of something, that helps refine your taste, gives you a vocabulary to understand it better? We began to pick apart mediums – my friend’s housemates are really ‘into film’; when they watch something they want to dissect it before and after, the antithesis of my friend’s approach. I never read reviews or really watch trailers, I just want to experience the film. I sided with her housemates; there’s nothing I love more than scrawling Reddit threads after I’ve watched something in search of obscure fan theories. No surprise there, considering I write a blog overanalysing the things I watch and read and listen to.

My other friend brought up the contemporary art world. As I’ve learnt more about modern and contemporary art, through friends, through my own exploration, I’ve found myself better able to articulate my ideas about it, able to understand why I feel drawn to a particular type of painting or use of texture, feel something in my stomach faced with a Louise Bourgeois sculpture or Lynette Yiadom-Boakye painting.

Watching the film Once Again… (Statues Never Die) by artist Isaac Julien, in the dark womb of the Tate Britain a couple of years ago, was a stirring experience, but I’m not sure I would have got as much out of it if I hadn’t read James Baldwin in sixth form, or written essays about the role of museums during a course on the history of science during my undergrad. Julien’s narrative about the Harlem Renaissance, Black queer desire and the knotty question of cultural appropriation and repatriation was a many-layered thing, and having a bank of references stored up in my mind added colour to an already vibrant piece of art.

There’s a saying: “It's not a bug, it's a feature”. It means the unintended or seemingly broken features of a system can actually be the things that help them function or add value. It’s how many medications come into being; the drug used to prevent premature balding was originally created to treat high blood pressure, but doctors noticed a side effect of excessive hair growth, and voilà: Rogaine (Minoxidil) was born. It applies to the contemporary art world too, an industry characterised by opaqueness and obscurity, that many view as intimidating or impenetrable. In fact, it’s this closed nature that gives the art world its strength, allows dizzying amounts of capital to be moved around by a tight-knit elite, capital linked to video art or paintings or performances that mean very little to the average punter. You wouldn’t understand. And so, the inner circle stays small, and the prices keep rising.

Still, two things can be true at the same time. You don’t need to understand every reference to enjoy something, but it can deepen your appreciation. Tirzah is one of my favourite musicians, often called ‘genre-less’, playing with a heady mix of electronic music and R&B vocals, synths and heavier bass inspired by the club, but also unafraid of sparser arrangements, where her voice takes centre stage.

I’m not sure, however, that without coming across Phoenix and Disclosure when I was thirteen, then listening to SBTRKT and Jai Paul a few years later, that I would have ‘got’ Tirzah. This isn’t to say it’s a linear/hierarchal journey at all – I still listen to all those aforementioned artists regularly. But there was something in the construction of those earlier songs that helped attune my ears to the ones that came later. That slowly introduced unfamiliar but still intriguing musical elements, so I wasn’t immediately confused or put off by more experimental styles.

So, is it better to know or not to know? To have an awareness of context or background in order to fully appreciate a work of art? As for all these types of questions, the annoying answer is it depends. What’s for sure, is that there was something in not knowing that made that jazz performance all the more exciting. As you grow up, it becomes harder and harder to experience things for the first time. And as I sat there, I was reminded of how good it felt. To be surprised and a bit confused. To be excited by something new, without really understanding why.

Haim has returned to music after a three-year hiatus. Their new song is an earworm (already predicting it will be on my Spotify Wrapped) but I was most excited by the music video, and specifically the truly delicious styling.

It’s very Prada FW 98.

And 90s Calvin Klein.

I actually have a pair of blue tights my friend V gave me for my birthday and I’m now determined to bring them out, as soon as London decides to stop being so avoidant and fully commit to spring.

Visited The Standard in King’s Cross for the first time this week, to celebrate G’s birthday. Very sexy, very moody. Will be returning. We started at the top bar, Sweeties, then ended on the ground floor in The Library (complete with an eclectic choice of books on offer, would love to talk to the person who filled those shelves). The real test of an establishment is its bathrooms (Atelier September in Copenhagen is a lovely brunch spot, but the bathroom was giving crack den). The Standard delivered, with some gorgeous red tiles and great selfie lighting.

Lastly, I would like to publicly announce that on the 9th of March, I completed the NYT mini crossword in 15 seconds. Some people meditate when they wake up and in times of stress. I do Connections and the Mini to start my day, then pivot to Geoguessr and whentaken for a mid-afternoon pick-me-up.

When I first watched Before Sunrise, it felt like it had been made with me in mind. I know that’s what good art often feels like, but in this case I felt special. An American boy, Jesse, and a French girl, Celine, meet on a train travelling through Europe and spontaneously decide to jump off in Vienna (I used to live in Vienna). They wander through the streets, hitching rides on trams (I’d ridden those very trams), staring longingly at each other in record shops (I owned a record player) and talking about wanting to write (I spent most of my adolescence talking about writing rather than doing it). Spoiler alert: By the end of their day and night together they’re clearly in love.

The subsequent two films in the trilogy detail the next stages of their relationship – in Before Sunset they meet nine years later, slightly weathered by life but still optimistic about love. It’s set in Paris (I did my year abroad in Paris!) and is highly effective propaganda for anyone looking for an excuse to get back in touch with the one who got away. Before Midnight takes place after another nine years, and middle age and children has created an itchy tension between them, the grooves of long-term relationship wearing thin. All three are beautiful films, charming and naturalistic, but it’s Before Sunrise I keep coming back to. And that’s in large part because of how perfect Celine and Jesse’s meet-cute is.

Romance is built on meet cutes. I would argue Romeo and Juliet is the OG meet-cute – a serendipitous and unusual encounter between two love interests, the idiosyncrasy of which immediately sets up the importance of the ensuing affair.

You’ve got Sex and the City; Carrie bumps into Big on a busy New York street and spills the contents of her bag (including an embarrassing amount of condoms), and the endless on and off again begins. Richard Curtis has made his fortune on a foundation of meet-cutes; a recent re-watch of Notting Hill stands the test of time remarkably well.

What is it about meet-cutes? There are lots of relationship tropes – friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, workplace romances (shout out Shonda Rhimes). I think I’ve always loved the spontaneous meet-cute because of the way they help foster a belief that life can change radically and instantaneously. That you can be going through a hum-drum existence and in a split second your life is transformed.

Whenever I hear a friend has started dating someone new, my first question is always how did you meet? Maybe it’s the overwhelming prevalence of dating apps and all that jazz (I might write something about the dating-industrial complex at some point but I’m currently in a good mood so will leave it for now), but it feels like there’s a real fetishisation of the ‘organic’ encounter, as if meeting someone in real life adds more legitimacy to your dating.

There’s a term in psychotherapy named transference. It describes the process of emotionally attaching to one’s therapist, because you are displacing feelings about your parents or past relationships onto them, someone who is present in the here-and-now, being an open, receptive ear, giving you validation you’ve previously lacked. Good therapists are trained to watch out for this tendency and delicately steer patients back to a more stable point. I’ve fallen victim to this – but mainly regarding baristas in the greater London Fields area. Occasionally a friendly bartender slips through, but by and large I have felt a real connection to pretty much all the nice men who give me my coffee. I’m sure this is because of many factors (lots of free time during a previous WFH job, the Pavlovian effect of a hot, caffeinated drink in my hand increasing my heart rate as I pay) but my love of meet-cutes is the biggest contributor to this predilection. Lingering by the Fitzcarraldo section of my local bookshop in the hope that both I and a sensitive soul reach for the same critically acclaimed work in translation at the same time. I once had a man ride up on his bike to me in the middle of the street after spotting me at a bar and ask for my number. The novelty of the approach meant we definitely went on one date too many, as I remained fixated on this fun, opening anecdote instead of seeing the person in front of me.

Writer Asa Seresin coined the term ‘heteropessimism’ in an article from a few years back. In it he details the tendency of heterosexual women to denounce heterosexuality, to lament the fact they are attracted to men but continue to actively seek out and date men. It’s an affliction that feels markedly familiar – even as a joke, the instinct among my single friends is to default to a generic ‘men are trash’ rhetoric when the woes of dating get too much. But where does that leave us? Perhaps not every romantic encounter is Before Sunrise quality, but if we convince ourselves that dating or love is impossible, that men can be tarnished with the same brush (don’t worry, I’m not joining the #NotAllMen movement) then we’re faced with the cognitive dissonance of seeking connection and community with people we condemn. Instead, as Seresin shrewdly points out, we should be looking to break down the wider structures that put us in this position:

If “heterosexuality” becomes shorthand for misogyny, the proper object of critique falls from view. To be permanently, preemptively disappointed in heterosexuality is to refuse the possibility of changing straight culture for the better.

So we raise our standards, but leave room for growth. Acknowledge the humanity of individuals, but prevent the societal pressure to be coupled up to lead us astray. Meet-cutes may be mostly fantasy, but they still give hope for some magic amongst the misery.

I had drinks with a friend this weekend. I mentioned my planned topic for this newsletter, and she excitedly told me about her own recent meet cute. She was on her commute (classic meet-cute locale) and pressed up against a man on a packed Overground train. He was tall, with dirty blonde, chin length hair, rolling a cigarette, wearing an Arc'teryx jacket. He finished rolling, and she made eye contact and said ‘That was skilful’. He smiled, said he liked her jumper and asked her where it was from. ‘Paloma Wool’. ‘Course it is’. Then it was her stop and she jumped off the train. ‘Why didn’t you ask for his name? Or his number?’ I screamed. She just laughed and said that wasn’t really the point. Sometimes it’s OK just to leave things feeling sweet.

1. We can’t all be a fresh new voice in literature by Sheena Patel - I noticed Patel’s debut novel I’m A Fan in the Tate Britain gift shop a couple of years ago. It was small and square, with a purple cover, and bright red letters, and I assumed it was a picture book or a collection of quotes, the sort you buy for a distant aunt because you know you will see her at Christmas drinks. On a quick flick through, I was struck by the boldness of her prose, and immediately bought it. In short, sharp fragments we hear from an unnamed narrator about her affair with an artist, and a subsequent, parasocial relationship she has with the artist’s ex, mediated mostly through Instagram stalking. It’s rude and painful, and the protagonist speaks of those embarrassing, painful parts of herself and every other being, the shameful parts we daren’t even write down in our diaries because of what they would reveal about our longing for acceptance or our anger at others. I’d finished reading it before I realised I’d read another of Patel’s works, a zine about someone going through a painful situationship, This Is What Love Is, that I weirdly enough picked up at the gift shop of another museum - The Foundling Museum in Brunswick Square. Judging books by their cover works sometimes. The article I’ve linked is about her grappling with newfound public exposure after her first novel’s publication, and it reminded me of what I find so fantastic about her work – she doesn’t shy away from being difficult, chooses to include details of fraying friendships and ugly crying. An image of her reading every Goodreads review of her novel sticks in my mind – picking at a scab, a scab I know I myself would dig at in her position.

2. A poem by artist Jean-Philippe Delhomme

   

His paintings are lovely too (discovered him at the Yvon Lambert bookshop in Paris).

3. A New York Times article about - Emily’s newsletter was one of the first Substacks I ever read – she drew me in with the selfies (part of the reason I drop a Photobooth pic here and there) and kept me there with her gossip-y, insightful takes on business, fashion, culture and New York social mores. I’m intrigued by her current process of upscaling her newsletter. She’s added columnists, (some I think work better than others), but ultimately I still visit to hear what she has to say, her sly asides and personal opinions. A reminder of how important valuing your own voice, and caring less about being accessible to all audiences makes for the most engaging writing.

4. I Spent 24 Hours Watching the Clock - Ever since I read about The Clock in Zadie Smith’s collection of essays Feel Free (found the essay online here), I’ve been desperate to see Christian Marclay’s installation, where he knits together clips of timekeeping devices from film and TV so each IRL second is matched by an image taken from the screen. At 12.01 am you see a shot from Gone with the Wind, from 7am a quick succession of people waking and grabbing breakfast, in the afternoon, ticking office clocks signal the ennui of corporate life, in the evening the viewer is greeted by Holly Golightly gallivanting around her apartment in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. This article about a writer for MOMA who spent the entire 24 hours watching it was fascinating and funny and made me want to experience it even more. I’m going to the US in May, but will sadly miss the exhibition by a couple of weeks – I’m determined to spend my own 24 hours there one day.

   

5. A Year in Reading by Sophie Haigney - Haigney is the author of one of my favourite articles ever (Thunder or Lightning, about the binaries we sort ourselves into, which might deserve further exploration), and a reader whose tastes I greatly respect, despite having read nowhere near the breadth she has. Her reviews of books are weaved amongst her reviews of life; in one breath she describes a novel she’s read, in another she transcribes the details of a conversation at a pub with old friends, said novel quickly tucked away in her bag as she begins the reunion. It reminds me just how porous the act of reading is; the way you felt and the other events occurring in your life while reading a particular book can seep into how you experience the book, not forgetting the energy exchange can flow the other way too, that books can influence how you act in your ‘actual life’, opening your eyes to things previously unnoticed, pushing you towards different thoughts and impulses.

Currently in the middle of, or just started reading: The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick, The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, and I’ve just stolen Open City by Teju Cole from my sister’s bookcase.

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I was walking through London Fields today and a well dressed man holding a large bouquet of flowers passed by me. The one snippet of his phone convo I heard was ‘I was just in Copenhagen for fashion week.’ Immediately added to my list of ‘Overheard in East London’ and messaged to my friend W. I've been to Copenhagen twice, once in the depths of winter, and once during an April heatwave. Both times fantastic, and both times I was fixated by the style of their residents. There are loosely two camps of ‘Scandi’ style. Cos vs. Ganni. Minimalist vs. maximalist. I’ve recently become obsessed by a Danish influencer who can do both. Katarina Krebs, manages to get the perfect balance of masculine and feminine - baggy jeans and polos one day, chic trenches and pointy kitten heels the next. I need a magic wand to steal her wardrobe.

My top 3 Copenhagen must gos are Louisiana Museum (technically not Copenhagen but my top rec, an hour out of the city, filled with the most beautiful modern and contemporary art), La Banchina and Apollo Bar (best mocha of my life).

2. Wearing more colour

A rogue topic of conversation at work is our ‘colours’ - figuring out the shades and hues that suit us the most. At the end of last of year we all gathered around our laptops and sent a selfie in to ChatGPT (it has ALL my data) and the AI robot told me I was a ‘warm autumn’. Apparently, I should be wearing more deep hues - oranges, yellows, forest greens. Noted - one of my New Year’s resolutions became ‘wear more colour’.

My mum bought me this jumper for Christmas – I am historically afraid of pink but it’s been getting me a lot of compliments. A personal theory of mine is that more often than not people compliment you on an item of clothing because they’ve noticed it, not necessarily because they like it (their mind is trying to justify why something’s caught their eye). More outlandish means more remarks. Either way, at this rate I’ll be wearing leopard print by June.

3. Solange

   

Loved Solange’s outfit at the recent Lemaire show – so casual, so cool. She’s one of my favourite artists (Cranes in the Sky will be on my Desert Island Discs) and she’s been popping back up on my radar lately. She just released a short film and has a piece of work in an exhibition on The Met about Egypt and Black artists. I’ve always admired her multidisciplinary approach to her work, spanning mediums and forms. Also, her 2019 performance on Jimmy Fallon lives in my head rent-free, as the kids say.

4. Being a hat person

Lena Dunham posted the pic on the left on her Instagram two years ago, and I’ve been thinking about her hat ever since. A perfectly chic way to signal to people you’re in the literary know. The only thing that’s put me off buying it are the heinous import taxes from the US, but since my sister has started her masters at Harvard she can be my mule.

At after work drinks this week, I spotted another baseball cap in the wild.

IDEA Books is a publisher of rare and interesting art and fashion books (I’m particularly intrigued by photographer Angela Hill’s Sylvia). But they also do an array of sly/ironic merch. I’m quite into this one.

5. A new brand

On one of my more productive doomscrolls I came across this Turkish brand Siedres. In the depths of winter I’m always drawn to party wear and this brand does it so well. The way their photoshoots mix textures and colours is a real masterclass in styling

I also love the way Istanbul is centred in so much of their marketing.

I went to Istanbul for a few days last year and it was one of my favourite trips in a long time. It’s a feeling that has probably been better articulated by many a writer before me, but whilst there I was distinctly aware of its liminal position between Europe and Asia. There were familiar elements – bustling squares that felt like Marseilles or Rome at night. Some in between – a Soho House worlds away from the Shoreditch outpost, a 19th-century palazzo built by a Genoese architect, but situated in the midst of the Asian side of the city, near Galata Tower. And then elements like our beautifully preserved apartment, directly opposite a school, where we were woken by the call to prayer each morning, reminded of the traditions and culture at the heart of the city. Definitely a place on my re-visit list.

I’m at a café in Dalston and my ears immediately prick up. It’s a girl and a guy, a few years older than me. My sister and mine’s favourite game is trying to guess strangers’ relationships to one another. Third date or first? They have the same nose, they’re definitely related. Why is he ignoring her but holding her bag for her? I quickly conclude this pair are just friends. The man is angled too far away for it to be romantic and their conversation is very much ‘catching up’, but they seem relaxed with each other. She starts to talk about someone she’s recently started dating. I surreptitiously start noting down bullet points.

• Their first date: she’s about to message the guy she’s going on a date with that she’s five minutes away and just as she does someone rides by on a bike and snatches her phone

• She spends half an hour looking for the pub

• Waits at pub for him - he ends up being later than her

• They have two bottles of champagne in the park

• Then go to a Bicep gig with some of his friends - she has no phone so might as well

• He broke up with his gf four months ago - has to dog sit because they still share the dog. Is it weird that I’m in the house they used to share looking after her dog?

• He bought her a motorbike helmet for her bday

• He’s a stoke fan

• Going to gig with his parents on Wednesday

• Both from Sussex

• Two weeks into dating he meets her whole family, thanks to the Sussex connection

• Male friend is encouraging, asking really good questions

• The guy she’s dating has started three companies

• One red flag - she wakes up at 7 he wakes up at 11

By this point, I really need to go, even though I’m desperate to hear more. I wonder whether they’re still together.

Other notes include:

Cynophobia - fear of dogs

One evening during my year abroad in Paris, I was walking down an empty street with my friend L, everything bathed in a muted orange glow from the streetlights. We had just been at a bar or a restaurant and were the level of drunk where everything feels a little bit magical. Also, we were in Paris. Halfway down the deserted path we spotted a tableau. A single leather heeled shoe, some scrunched up paper, and a empty pregnancy test box. We couldn’t stop laughing at the sight, immediately began riffing about what on earth could have caused this pile – a bust up between lovers, a secret exposed. It became a bit between us over the years - sending photos back and forth of odd objects left scattered on streets, out of place and begging to be narrativised. I called them urban debris.

Two of my favourite artists are Annie Ernaux and Sophie Calle. Both work to excavate something of their lives and expose it to the world, Ernaux usually through writing, Calle through a mix of visual art, performance and words. One of my favourite works of Calle is The Sleepers. She invited 27 people, some strangers, some friends, to sleep in her bed for a few hours, and she photographed them and interviewed them. The result is a voyeur’s dream – although her questions are all related to sleep, the answers reveal deeply intimate insights into each person’s lives and psyches:

Even participants who refuse to elaborate in their responses give themselves away in doing so.

The Paris Review has published some excerpts.

And at the start of last year I went to Calle’s exhibition at the Musée Picasso, which was so overwhelming in its meaning and depth that it’s hard to describe. It brought together text and image to create something deeply personal, as she explored the depth of human relationships, and her relationship to herself.

I recently read an excerpt from Ernaux’s latest book – a photographic and literary record of her affair with the photographer Marc Marie. She weaves details of her battle with breast cancer together with notes and photos of their relationship and post-coital rooms – life and death contrasted, the mundanity of existence brought into stark relief by the highs and lows of sickness and sex.

Ernaux and Calle play with interiors – I feel more comfortable considering the exterior. We’re all obsessed with documenting. I have over 27,000 photos on my phone and almost 1,000 notes. I re-read Facebook messages and WhatsApps, unearth old journals to remind myself of past feelings. I screenshot endlessly and rarely look at them again. I save photos on Instagram and keep old birthday cards unorganised in folders. Why do I do this? Why do any of us? I’m not really sure – maybe recording things makes us feel more real.

I immediately note it down:

Mystery

Then add:

Spontaneity
Try and surprise yourself

We arrange to meet at The Barbican in that twilight time between Christmas and New Year. An artist neither of us have heard of is showing for free in The Curve and we rush through the usual catch up routine as we unfurl, shedding our winter shells of jumpers and coats.

Distracted by a conversation, we decide we can’t focus enough to read the preamble at the start of the exhibition. So we wander around, context-less, trying to understand the work without the guide of an accomplished curator. It’s fun - feels more like being a child when everything in the world is anew, and we make up stories about the figures sketched large on wooden boards. There’s a lot of wood - I comment that it looks like a halfway constructed set, and I lean on the one word I glimpsed from the exhibition text – ‘film noir’ – to inform my interpretations.

’She’s got a murderous look in her eyes.’
’She definitely doesn’t like her husband.’
’Is it the same woman in all of them?’

J prefers the landscapes, I like the ones with people in them. This makes sense for who we are.

Every conversation I have in the first two weeks of January is all about resolutions. I’m going to stop vaping. I’m going to intentionally date. I need to get my shit together and work really, really hard.

Sophie Mackintosh writes about having a slutty year:

Next year I want to be more slutty, I tell my friend M over drinks and cheese gougères at Bar Américain, meaning it a few ways, but overall as a state of mind – of energy, expansiveness, curiosity. I’d like to reconnect with things that give me pleasure, after a period of time where pleasure has felt more elusive…Write a lot, and try to do the things that make you feel happy and safe and good, I write down. Give over control. What else, really, can I do?

I’ve always gravitated towards this approach - eschewing specific resolutions or goals, instead searching for words or ‘vibes’ to inhabit through the course of a season.

I circle back to the word spontaneity. I want to get used to getting things wrong, not overthinking and being more daring. I don’t want peace, I want friction - and through this, hopefully growth.

Recently, I’ve realised that I’ve stopped looking up. I go down routes I’ve taken a hundred times, back and forth from work and home and friends’ flats and my family home. Out of habit I still plug well-worn addresses into Citymapper and follow the pulsating blue dot. On my way to visit friends at a pub I’ve been to a few times before I force myself to ignore my phone and feel my way there. I’m reminded of how different things look in the day vs. night, how noting the names of streets adds a layer of narrative to normal journeys. One road near my house has the same name as the girl I was with when I first visited the neighbourhood. A small shift in my daily routine means I no longer pass the deli that was witness to countless life landmarks - lunch breaks during old jobs and debriefs of new dates, hungover coffees and last-minute birthday presents. Sentimentality has always felt closely linked to space and place for me (I’m a Cancer after all), and in a city as itinerant as London eras become tied to the rooms I’ve lived in or the streets I walk down, instead of years or people. I’m trying to find different ways to change, while staying in the same place.

A while back, by way of Haley Nahman, I came across an interview and performance from the singer Maggie Rogers. In a Rolling Stone interview Rogers talks about how she grew up thinking there were two camps of musicians: ‘writers who could sing, and then there were motherfucking singers.’ It wasn’t until a SNL performance that she realised her strength as a vocalist and later touring her album further helped solidify this belief in her talent. I thought of the performance again as I considered the command I had written down to surprise myself, as I thought about the ways in which we remain unknown to ourselves, because we put ourselves in boxes, declare that we’re not good at sports, or are simply ‘late people’.

When I was 13, I was obsessed with personality tests (still am). I took the Myers-Briggs test, painstakingly filled in each question sitting at my dining table as my family busied themselves around me with Sunday errands. The website spat out INTP. The Logician - it meant I was an analytical thinker, loved solving puzzles and craved solitude. The I stood for introverted. A few years later, I took it again. This time ENTP - The Debater, who loved nothing more than sparring with friends and enemies alike, E meaning extroverted. Of course, your Myers-Briggs isn’t infallible scientific fact. But the flip in letters signalled to me the malleable nature of our personalities, something that is easily forgettable in the day-to-day.

Sometimes it’s an acute external factor that shifts our frame of reference, a comment from a friend or a stranger, that rejigs the adjectives you commonly apply to your personality. In other instances it’s more gradual, a new hobby or relationship that over time opens up a side of yourself that lay dormant, or elides a trait that previously you felt defined you. The extent to which our identities are pre-determined or not is obviously a question too big for one Substacker alone - indeed, a question so big a swathe of religions and countless philosophers have dedicated lifetimes to searching for an answer. But as we start a new year I’m taking a micro approach. Walking a different path from normal, purposefully doing things I’m ‘bad at’ and seeing what happens. Remembering that there’s still room for novelty each and every day.

And on a final note, here’s a killer opening note:

To that end, I’m going to try to post on here weekly (making a public commitment will hopefully shame me into keeping it) - even if it’s a link to a YouTube video I’ve liked or an image that’s caught my eye. A place to vent, daydream, try new things, or talk about the old.

A book

I just finished Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad (late to the game) and it was brilliant. Sonia, a half-Palestinian, half-Dutch actress visits her sister in Haifa, in the aftermath of a failed affair, and reluctantly joins a production of Hamlet taking place in the West Bank. Hammad’s writing is precise but fluid, and often very funny, describing the motley cast of the play with painterly strokes. Early on she writes of an interaction between two characters - ‘his gaze fell, his eyelashes long and dark. His jaw flexed with some internal machination and I knew he was thinking about me. Like a switch, his interest had sparked my interest.’ Packed into those few words, we can already see a dynamic being constructed - a familiar one to anybody who has revelled in the beginning stages of a crush.

One of my favourite things about the book was Hammad’s, not refusal, that feels too strong, but her ability to avoid over explaining cultural references, to leave it up to the reader to figure out nuances and definitions. I found myself going down Google rabbit holes as I tried to figure out what a ‘48er was or learn the biographies of activists mentioned. It’s a quality I value in art - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writing in Americanah does it well, as does Ryan Calais Cameron in his play Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy. I watched it with my sister and we remarked afterwards about how hard we had laughed at the jokes poking fun at the competitiveness between Nigerians and Ghanaians, and wondered whether the others in the audience unfamiliar with the nuances would have understood. It didn’t matter, we concluded, the play was strong enough to stand in its truth, and any watering down would have removed the authenticity that made it feel so alive. Difficult as it is to remember, you have to trust your audience.

A song

Writing about music is hard. Really, really hard. To write about it feels contradictory, for its power lies in how it stands above language, how the silences between sounds can be the most affecting part of a song, the best music creating something ineffable. I’ve been greatly enjoying reading Katherine Angel’s Substack, its form also hard to describe - on the surface a diary, but also a history, and cultural criticism, and an unfurling of an inner monologue. In one post she details a concert in celebration of Arthur Russell, a musician I hadn’t heard of before, but one she writes about so lovingly, I felt compelled to listen. I’m glad I did. I was entranced by ‘That’s Us/Wild Combination’.

Again, I seem to be writing about how difficult it is to write, but his music isn’t easily definable. It feels distinctly 80s, but its electronic elements add something contemporary, a haunting love song, a male and female voice wrapping and echoing around each other. At almost 7 minutes, it’s long, with a punchy, rhythmic drumbeat undergirding most of it. I want to explore the rest of his (extensive) discography, but for now I’m happy to stay a moment with just this song. Learning all its ups and downs.

A tip

Was talking to a friend and we have concluded the best way to meet someone (romantically speaking) is to go to a second tier pub and linger by the bar. By second tier pub, we mean a pub in a cool location, but it itself is not cool. It can’t attract a ‘fashion-y’ crowd, or too obviously care about the food it makes. It can’t be a bad pub; ideally it’s relatively big, with a convivial vibe, and some sort of character i.e. big beer garden and kitsch photos, or a regular pub quiz and charming leather booths. The bar should be centrally placed to expedite stranger-stranger conversations, and if it’s on the way to the toilet even better. I rarely venture south of the river, so in East/North London, that means The Prince George and The Victoria in Dalston, The Regent in Islington, The Chesham Arms in Homerton, The Army and Navy near Newington Green (Arsenal pub so rejoice/beware on match days) and The Shacklewell Arms in the middle of Shacklewell Lane. The Spurstowe Arms/Scolt Head maybe three years ago would have worked, but alas they are now overrun by Aussies and Real Housewives of Clapton followers. I still visit them frequently.1

An artist

I love the way Emily Ferguson uses reds and pinks and yellows.

Speak soon,

x

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• I had a very Rohmer summer. Thanks to Mubi, I watched A Summer’s Tale, and about 2/3 of La Collectionneuse. My favourite type of film, wherein nothing much happens, but the screen is full of sumptuous, sun-kissed landscapes, dinner party scenes fraught with tension, both sexual and violent, beautiful people and beautiful clothes, and intricate conversations about life and relationships unspooling during a walk across a beach or verdant countryside. The protagonist in A Summer’s Tale was a softboy avant la lettre, whose ambivalence about his potential romantic interests was off-putting but somehow didn’t make me hate him. All the characters were blunt and spoke to the point, in that especial French way. I came away determined to be more upfront with crushes and/or acquaintances that annoy me.

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• I’m not sure if it’s ironic or makes sense but as winter has crept in I can’t stop watching films set in the summer. I rewatched Call Me By Your Name a couple weeks ago, a comfort favourite, and was struck once more by the authenticity of Timothée Chalamet’s performance. He embodies his characters so well, every twitch or eye roll perfectly displaying the internal emotions of Elio. I didn’t actually think Armie Hammer was that great, and maybe it’s because I’m older now, but the age difference between the two of them felt jarring in a way I didn’t really notice the first time round. Nonetheless, it’s a beautiful film that exquisitely captures the pain of longing for someone who seems unattainable, and the tender wound that one’s first lost love leaves.

This rewatch inspired a dig into the archives of the director, Luca Guadagnino, and I settled on A Bigger Splash. A stellar cast; a near mute Tilda Swinton, a bleach blonde, louche Dakota Johnson, Ralph Fiennes proving himself to be one our foremost character actors in a spot-on imitation of a Gen X music producer unaware of how uncool he’s become.

Quick plot teaser: Tilda is Marianne Lane, a Bowie-esque rock star, recovering from a vocal injury with her photographer lover Paul in a gorgeous villa on the Italian island Pantelleria, when former lover Harry (Fiennes) turns up with his daughter (Johnson) and chaos ensues. About a third of the way through, I started to get a strange sense of déja vu, and realised this was a modern update of Jacques Deray’s La Piscine (1969), which I’d watched a few months before. I’d come across La Piscine during my very Rohmer summer, and was entranced, mainly because of Alain Delon and Jane Birkin’s faces.

It’s a sizzling film, claustrophobic and sweaty, and will make you desperate to go to the South of France and lounge around drinking pastis, listening to vinyl records, and chain smoking endlessly. Jane Birkin’s doe eyes are the star - she really was the original coquette.

• Continuing the sexy French vibe, I’ve been raving about Passages to everyone. Franz Rogowski and Ben Whishaw are a chic, loved-up couple but Rogowski’s character gets his head turned by the always gorgeous and unbearably sensual Adèle Exarchopoulos, and chaos ensues (are you sensing a theme?). I want to rewatch, as at first viewing I do remember thinking the structure could have been a little tighter/slightly more direction with the plot, but the acting was superb, the dialogue naturalistic and funny, and above all the costumes and production design were stunning. Some particularly standout tops on Rogowski. A friend (hi Bella) also sent me this article from the director Ira Sachs and it was a really lovely insight into the process of making the film. I was also lucky enough to see a screening of the film that featured a short Q&A with Ira Sachs; I adore hearing the practical details of artists’ creative process, especially from those in film, which feels like quite an opaque industry for the average punter trying to figure how anything gets made, or how one suddenly knows how to ‘direct’.

• Some more recs on the French vibe: A Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Tomboy, Water Lilies (all by Céline Sciamma, who had a great interview with one of my favourite writers Elif Batuman here), Jeune et Jolie, Bergman Island, and Paris, 13th District.

• A bit of a tone shift, but I’ve begun a rewatch of Girls and I can’t stop thinking about it. My first watch must have been around or just before uni, my second during the pandemic at the same age (23/24) they all are during the first season, and now, at 26, I feel a weird mix of distance but a continued sense of kinship with the girls. A big realisation: I am Shoshanna - one scene of her saging her room and chanting affirmations was a bit too close to home. I also still marvel at just how funny Lena Dunham managed to make everything - the characters’ foibles so true to life, their flaws awkward turns of phrase, ones you’ve seen painfully reflected in friends and yourself. At one point, Charlie reassures his ex Marnie that his current girlfriend is intimidated by her. ‘Yeah, you’re right, there’s no way she could be intimidated,’ he opines sarcastically. ‘Because you’re not smart, or beautiful …or incredibly clean.’ Marnie smiles coyly. Genius. I could write a whole thesis on Girls, how so early 2010s it is (the Crackcident makes me desperately want to wear neon at a house party in Bushwick, but I might have to settle for one in Hackney Wick) the soundtrack, the genius of the casting, regulars and guest stars (Donald Glover, Michael Imperioli, Jenna Lyons as Hannah’s boss, Adam Driver’s arc from weirdo fuckboy to one of the most complex, sensitive characters). I know Dunham is divisive, but her ability to blend pathos and humour is second to none.

There you have it, lots of stuff to add to your ‘to-watch list’.

Till next time,

x

To start – some things that have caught my attention this month just gone:

• Israel/Palestine - I can’t even begin to express my sadness and horror about what is happening in Israel and Palestine currently. The October 7 attacks by Hamas were undoubtedly abhorrent, but the Israeli government’s response is causing unbearable damage to millions of innocent lives, and Western governments are both perpetrators of the decades-long historical conflict, and enablers of the current destruction. I’m still learning as much as I can, but here are a few things that I’ve found helpful/enlightening over the past few weeks:

  • “I Condemn Violence Against All Civilians, Why Can’t Keir Starmer?” by Jeremy Corbyn - a clearcut explanation of why a ceasefire is needed.

  • On incoherence by : on the ‘both sides-ism’ that often arises during this debate - we can recognise the brutality of Hamas’ methods while still knowing the root of the problem is the Israeli occupation and oppression.

  • Recognizing the Stranger by Isabel Hammad - a gorgeous essay which is about the Palestinian struggle, but is also posits the question of what novels are for, and the human inclination (or perhaps inevitability) to impose narratives and paradigms on our lives, and how empathy emerges through epiphanies – but also how certain groups are given more leeway about when this empathy emerges. An anecdote about an Israeli soldier choosing to leave the IDF is particularly striking.

  • What It’s Like to Grow Up in an Israeli Settlement - Still thinking about empathy - this short doc from a Israeli filmmaker living in Tel Aviv, interviewing Israeli West Bank settlers was shocking, but helpful to understand the deep-rooted, psychological nature of the opposition between Israelis and Palestinians.

• Black History Month - listen to or read an article I wrote recently on Black British culture today, where I think about why so many Africans are becoming famous, and how Black Brits are breaking new ground in theatre, fashion and contemporary art. I’m especially excited by the black female designers making a name for themselves in the industry – Martine Rose, Grace Wales Bonner and Bianca Saunders. For so long the norm has been male designers designing for women, so to see women focusing on menswear, or creating clothes that blur the classical distinctions between menswear and womenswear is refreshing.

• The latest album, Lahai, from one of my favourite singers Sampha came out a couple weeks ago. I love being able to hear a shift in the emotional state of a musician - still retaining the beautiful voice & lyricism he’s known for, but more energetic, happier. He’s talked a lot about how having a daughter has changed the way he lives his life, and it shows - he’s always made work that’s ‘tender’, but this album also feels a lot more hopeful and forward looking. The creative direction for this release has stood out to me, dreamy visuals, and some really good fits. Him and Grace Wales Bonner seem to have some sort of ongoing partnership where she dresses him for his concerts and public appearances which I’m loving. Fave tracks from the album: Satellite Business, Jonathan L. Seagull, Only, Spirit 2.0, Suspended.

  

• I’ve only just got round to reading this profile of art dealer Larry Gagosian by Patrick Radden Keefe but I think it’s genius. As someone interested in the art world, occasionally in contact with, but mainly on the periphery of it, I’m always intrigued by insights into its opaque machinery. Gagosian is a behemoth, and this article both humanises and criticises him in a way that is never over the top. Artists of the moment Anna Weyant and Issy Wood also feature. My favourite part:
  
  The beach house’s front door opened and Anna Weyant, Gagosian’s girlfriend, entered. She is petite and blond and was wearing oversized sunglasses and holding a half-finished beer. Her hair was wet and she greeted him warmly.

  “Were you swimming?” Gagosian asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, smiling, before disappearing upstairs.

  At twenty-eight, Weyant is half a century younger than Gagosian. She is also one of his artists, and her work has sold at auction for more than a million dollars.

  
  

  I guess I just love gossip! Enjoyed Keefe’s writing so much I’ve finally found myself a copy of his book on the Sacklers, Empire of Pain (thanks Abie). On that topic, I would highly recommend All The Beauty And The Bloodshed, a heartbreaking documentary about Nan Goldin, a large part of which details her activist work bringing the Sackler family to account for their role in the opioid epidemic. And shout-out to the woman next to me at the Castle Cinema in Homerton who kindly ignored my intermittent sobs while watching.

• Huge fan of celebs repping music merch - Addison in a SOPHIE sweater, Paul Mescal, in a very cute Clairo hoodie that is sold out but I’m tempted to get a dupe of from Etsy. Addison Rae in particular has been a real transformation story from TikTok dancing star to singer who cites Arca as her dream collab. Hyperpop queen.

• Amusing Substack post from on that most eternal of questions - why are all women beautiful and smart and funny and men are just…there?

• Delightful meal at Rita’s in Soho - beef tartate, chicken à la diable, and a tuna crudo type thing amongst other delicacies and a reminder of the power of a Shirley Temple - more maraschino cherries in things please.

That’s all for now,

x