Below is the editor’s note for a magazine I made, comprised of a bunch of articles and photos and poems, some of which have already been posted here.

The idea of sending individual articles as email newsletters lost its lustre for me, and the only solution I could come up with was to batch a bunch of posts together and publish the collected magazine less often (once every three months rather than once a week, perhaps). The problem is that Substack doesn’t work like that, so for now, you’ll have to take it in this format.

Wayward Pigeon #1

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This is a link to the PDF of the magazine. That's probably not the best way for it to be read, to be honest, but I don't have any other options to get it out to you. When I figure them out, I'll re-share it, maybe. The editor's note you can read here, and if you want you can print the whole thing out, though I'm not sure if that would be the most cost-effective option because I made the background of all of the pages almond coloured, and that would use a lot of ink. Anyway, enjoy the magazine, or at least, enjoy the editor's note

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Welcome to this editor’s note, dear reader.

I will start with a question, if you’ll indulge me. Why, you may ask, when you had a perfectly functioning email newsletter with a grand total of twenty seven subscribers, which you could make incredibly easily using tailor-made software, did you decide to throw away everything to create a magazine which will, in all likelihood, be read by even fewer people, and which is also far more difficult to create, necessitating as it does the use of an entirely new tool which has a steep learning curve?

In a word, fun.

I liked the idea of making a magazine, and I liked the idea of being the person who made a magazine instead of a newsletter. Sue me. Anyone can have a newsletter, and indeed most people do, it seems. You can’t move on Substack for budding columnists, and what did I have to set myself apart?

Amusing turns of phrase? Sure.

Biting insights on a number of contemporary issues? Absolutely.

A rambunctious knack for storytelling which I have been honing since the age of eleven? Naturally.

But it doesn’t matter. Not when I wasn’t willing to put in the effort to get that work seen. To niche down and churn out article after article on the same topic (though three of my latest essays have been on football, as it happens), to spend hours on market research and messaging other creators begging them to share my work, posting Notes and tweets and Reddit posts and daily Instagram stories.

I hadn’t worked on developing a product/market fit. I had the product, but couldn’t be bothered finding the market.

And if I can’t be bothered finding the market (as evidenced by my paltry mailing list) then I may as well have some fun while I’m doing it.

There is also the fact that on Substack everyone uses the same font, the same formatting, the same set of stock images (which, now that I think about it, though I have of course used them in the past because they seem like a quick and easy way of adding colour to an article, actually add nothing to an article other than superficially improving the aesthetics without any of the soul or effort involved in using personalised images. They are the opposite of a creative constraint. You have immediate access to an almost infinite selection of seemingly relevant images. The problem is that none of them are actually related to what you’re writing about), the same little boxes asking you to subscribe...

And sure, you can change the colour of the boxes, the captions of the pictures, but ultimately everyone knows they are reading a Substack article. Which isn’t the end of the world, but the whole point of us all having our own newsletters was that they are unique expressions of who we are and what we think. When we are all working inside the same little boxes, which also demand that we play the same little games to build our audiences, then we all (as everything in the world outside does too- e.g. all coffee shops having the same little black boards with removeable white letters) start to converge towards the same end.

When I was at Uni, I wanted to submit my thesis using a slightly whacky typewriter style font called Kai Ti. My friends and family convinced me not to do this as it may have influenced the marker somewhat, but the title page looked especially cool in that font and I’ve always felt a little sad that I couldn’t use it. In that instance, however, not using it was the right move. But outside the rigid walls of academia should we all be stuck in these same boxes? Its a lot easier, sure, to use the default font on Substack, and maybe there’s even an argument in favour of it because people like what they know (its why everyone goes to McDonald’s even on holiday). It means you don’t have to think, neither the writer nor reader (and maybe fonts is a bad example, because most books use similar fonts and no one is bothered about that), but it removes any kind of choice from the situation, which I have decided is sad.

This magazine will also give me a place to put all of the different kinds of writing in which I partake, even when they would have made no sense as a coherent newsletter. Because like I said, if you want people to subscribe to your newsletter then your newsletter needs to be ABOUT something. It needs to be about fashion, or sports, or, as is increasingly popular, growing a newsletter. And perhaps if I knuckled down and found a topic about which I could write something 50 times a year I might have found marginally more success. If I spent an hour each day DM’ing other newsletter creators and asking them to share mine then someone would have eventually agreed and maybe that would have got the ball rolling.

But all of this feels, and I don’t know how to say this without sounding pretentious or moralistic, trite. Content for the sake of content. And it’s difficult to articulate the difference between that kind of content and this kind of content, but I think the key lies in the difference between the words ending and neverending.

The planned schedule for this magazine is four issues a year. A finite supply (if I do this until I’m 80 it would only be 200 issues, whereas I used to post 200 tweets a day in my prime). I don’t want to have to post something at the same time every week in order to build trust with an audience who barely know who I am and may not have even noticed that I’ve not posted in months. I don’t want to feel like I am doing my enterprise a disservice by posting a travelogue followed by a poem, followed by a 6000 word essay on music and advertising.

And so while there may be the same total number of words in this magazine when compared to the weekly newsletters, there is something about the finite nature of quarterly issues which I am a lot more comfortable with. And it also means that if a reader doesn’t fancy reading a poem then they can skip it and move on to the next thing, without feeling as though I have robbed them of a week’s essay by posting a poem in its place. Now, I am not so arrogant or presumptuous as to think that there were any among my two score and eight who felt like that, but the point I’m making still stands, I think.

You can’t build a massive newsletter audience by doing stuff like that. You can have a hobby newsletter, which is what I had, I guess. And I did enjoy writing the stuff, for the most part, but when something sometimes feels like an obligation rather than a hobby then perhaps that’s a sign to hang up the keyboard for the moment.

Or, as I have taken it, its a sign to do something differently. To batch three months of articles into one place. Meaning that there is less obligation to bash something out each week. And more opportunity to include silly things like poetry about ginormous landfill sites.

I know that the mere fact there will be less supply of this doesn’t make it inherently any different from the rest of the slop we all see on YouTube shorts or random sub-Reddits tangentially related to the cousins of subjects you might once have been interested in (my current nemesis), but... Who knows, maybe there is no difference, but to me as the maker it feels like there might be.

Or, did I just read Stephen King’s On Writing and become fixated on the story he tells about his brother making a local town newspaper called Dave’s Rag, which he printed himself (which is the ultimate goal of this endeavour too) and decide that I wanted to do the same thing? You be the judge.

Anyway, that’s quite enough for an editor’s note, I’m sure you’ll agree.

https://iambickilometres.substack.com/p/zen-and-the-arteta-of-belief-maintenance

In fact, with 45 minutes to go until the World Cup starts, here is a piece on the first ever World Cup and some stories from the earliest days of international football.

The first international football match was played at Hamilton Crescent, the home of the West of Scotland Cricket Club, on November 30th 1872. Scotland and England played out a 0–0 draw, a scoreline made remarkable by the 2–2–6 and 1–1–8 formations on show. To be fair to them it would be the only 0–0 they contested until 1970, with 85 games in between.

Scotland had come the closest to hitting the back of the net (although it would be nearly 20 years before nets actually started being used) when the referee disallowed a goal which he adjudged to have cleared the tape. What tape? I hear you ask. Well, that would be the tape that was used in place of a crossbar. If only they’d had VAR in the 19th century (and the ability to connect two parallel metal poles with some sort of perpendicular metal pole).

Wales soon decided that they wanted in on the action, and were quickly followed by Ireland, who in 1883 completed the line-up for the first Home Nations Championship. Scotland beat England 1–0 with a goal from John Smith (yes, that John Smith) to claim the inaugural title.

For nearly 50 years this was considered to be the premier international football tournament in the world, until 1930 when Uruguay hosted and won the first World Cup. However, none of the home nations designed to enter, under the proviso that it was not up to their standard, which is a shame, because if they were as good as they said they were, they would have had a great chance of winning.

Either way, international football had been going for 58 years by 1930, and plenty of teams — from Argentina to Yugoslavia — had had teams since before or around the turn of the century. Indeed Fifa had been founded in 1904, but it had it taken them 26 years to create a worldwide competition. Fortunately for them, another institution had stepped up to the plate and been running major international tournaments for the beautiful game since 1900.

Football at the Olympics was typically limited to amateur players (though there was some blurriness regarding the definition of amateur) so it maybe wasn’t an indication of the true strength of the game, but given that Uruguay won consecutive gold medals leading up to their world cup triumph, it likely gave some indication of where the power lay. And up until 1930, it was the only opportunity for fans to support their teams against sides from all over the world, so it would still have had meaning invested in it.

The first tournament was nominally won by Great Britain, beating France and Belgium into silver and bronze. I say nominally because at the time no medals were handed out (the IOC now officially recognises the podium though) and only two matches were played. Britain thumped France 4–0, and they then thumped Belgium 6–2. I don’t know why that meant that Britain got the gold, seeing as the tournament was likely planned as an exhibition, with France also scheduled to play Switzerland and Germany, who never made the trip, but they did.

I also say nominally because the three teams weren’t really proper national sides either. Britain were represented by Upton Park FC, a club side who participated in the first ever FA Cup. The French team was formed by the USFSA, an amateur sports governing body, who would go on to enter a team designated France B along with another French team called France A in the 1908 Olympics. The Belgian team is listed as the University of Brussels, although the University archivist denies that they sent the team, and the squad did comprise of players from a number of different Belgian clubs.

The 1904 competition was won by those footballing giants Canada, or should I say, by a club called Galt FC from Canada, who defeated handsomely two separate teams from the USA. Christian Brothers College and St Rose’s Parish then had to replay their match twice to determine where to send the Bronze and Silver medals.

Four years later was the first universally accepted tournament between genuine national sides. The first French side, France B, were knocked out in the quarter-finals 9–0 by Denmark, who then went on to thrash the France A side even heavier with Sophus Nielsen scoring 10 times for the Danes in a 17–1 semifinal win.

So shocked were the French by this defeat that they withdrew from their bronze medal match, allowing the previously knocked out Sweden a shot at the Netherlands, which they could not take. Despite their intimidating 28–1 goal difference, Denmark could not beat Britain in the final, who, to their credit, had also beaten Sweden 12–1 in the quarterfinals. And there you all were thinking 4–2 was an exciting scoreline.

The Stockholm tournament in 1912 featured many similar faces to the previous one, but a few new ones resulted in a record field of 11 teams (although Bohemia’s application was rejected for the second time in a row due to having no membership of FIFA), and the same three nations stood atop the medals podium, in the same order. This time Britain, captained again by Chelsea forward Vivian Woodward, who scored 29 goals in 23 games for the English national side, did beat Denmark 4–2 in the final.

For understandable reasons, there was no tournament in 1916, although Germany are said to have defeated a British side 3–2 in No Man’s Land on Christmas Day 1914. However, no medals were handed out on that day.

Bohemia, under the new name of Czechoslovakia, were allowed to enter the 1920 event, but then suffered the ignominy of becoming the only side to have ever been disqualified in an international final when they walked off in the middle of the match against Belgium, in protest against what they viewed as shoddy officiating by the 65-year-old English referee.

For their part, the Belgian press had done their best to create a hostile atmosphere by portraying Czechoslovakia as one of the baddies in World War I, and Belgian fans then threatened the Czech players during a pitch invasion after the walk-off, so, all in all, there was a fair amount of chaos.

Because of their disqualification, Czechoslovakia were stripped not of the silver medal, but of their right to compete in a separate tournament for the silver medal. The format, devised by Swedish water polo player Erik Bergvall, was designed to make sure that the best three teams would theoretically get the three medals and to avoid a situation whereby the second best team would be knocked out in round one by the eventual winners and end up with nothing to show for it. Lewis Carroll, of Alice in Wonderland fame, also came up with a similar system for Wimbledon.

The four losing quarter-finalists would face off in two knockout rounds, and the winner of this tournament would go through to another four-team knockout, against the teams beaten by the gold medallists in round one, the semi-finals and final.

As it happened, Belgium had received a bye in round one after Poland failed to show up due to the Soviet-Polish war (fair enough), so Czechoslovakia’s disqualification left only Spain (winners of the quarter-final loser KO) and the Netherlands (beaten semi finalists) to slog it out for silver and bronze. Spain won, giving the Netherlands their third consecutive bronze medal. Got it?

If you don’t then it doesn’t matter, because the format was scrapped for the following tournament, and never heard from again. Only 24 years after it had hosted its first games, Paris was the battleground for what is commonly accepted as the first true Worldwide football competition, with the inclusion of the USA and Uruguay. FIFA recognise it and the 1928 tournament as official competitions equivalent to a World Cup and allow the victors to display a star above their crest in the same manner as World Cup winners. It was so popular among fans that around a third of all income generated by the Olympics came from the football tournament.

Uruguay, having travelled across the Atlantic with third-class tickets, had toured Spain in the lead up to the tournament, and comfortably dispatched Yugoslavia 7–0 in their opening match. The previous year they had won the South American championships without losing a match to qualify.

Belgium, winners last time out, suffered an ignominious 8–1 loss to Sweden in the first round, afterwards mythologised as ‘Catastrophe de Colombes‘ by the national press. Silver medalists Spain, themselves were beaten only once in the 4 years since 1920, were dumped out by Italy thanks to an own goal. The Netherlands may have been thinking that this was finally their chance to improve on third place, but were knocked out by the South Americans due to a controversial penalty scored by Hector Scarone late in the game.

When a Dutch referee was appointed for the final the Uruguayans were understandably upset, and persuaded FIFA to reconsider, with a French replacement being drawn out of a hat. Switzerland, who had impressed on their way to the final, couldn’t match Uruguay’s passing game (which is described similarly to that of Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona) and succumbed to a 3–0 defeat. Uruguay became the first true champions of the world, a feat they would of course repeat in the inaugural World Cup 6 years later.

But first they had an Olympic title to defend, and defend it they did. A rematch against the Netherlands in round one proved nowhere near as stern a test, as the hosts were sent packing early on. South American representation had doubled with the addition of Argentina, who utterly devoured the United States 11–2 in their first competitive appearance on European soil, and they would follow it up with a slightly less monstrous 6–3 win over Belgium.

Italy required two games against Spain to make it through the quarterfinals but somehow transpired to win the rematch 7–1 after a one all draw the first time around. Egypt would also make the semi-finals following a 2–1 victory over Portugal, but they would lose 11–3 to Italy in the Bronze medal match, with no fewer than three Italian players scoring hat-tricks. All of which meant, quite predictably, that the two South American sides would face off for the Gold medal.

With over 250,000 people requesting tickets for the final, it was one of the most hotly anticipated matches in the history of the game. On June 10th the two sides played to a one-all draw after extra time, but they came back three days later (with no penalty shootouts a rematch was required) and this time Uruguay were able to snatch the victory, and with it their second straight Olympic Gold Medal.

A year later the FIFA Congress in Barcelona voted to award the hosting of the first World Cup to Uruguay. They didn’t disappoint, duly winning their third major tournament in a row, in front of home crowds.

Football wasn’t even included in the 1932 Olympics, in part due to the introduction of the World Cup and in part down to the American hosts wish to promote the up and coming sport of American football. It would make its return in 1936, but with the World Cup established as the premier international competition, the Olympics would lose its lustre.

And with the increase in professionalism of the sport, it became more and more difficult for nations to field their best players. So while the 1924 and 1928 tournaments can be viewed as effectively the first two World Cups, the Olympics in the years to come wouldn’t be quite so revered.

A mute WW2 veteran returns to his home in the Balkans and doesn’t speak a word for thirty years.

Then one day, listening on the radio to a football game featuring his local team, he leaps up and yells, “You dumb ass! Are you trying to give them the match?”

This is a story from the book Influence, by Michael Cialdini, about different ways our brains adopt automatic responses to certain stimuli. Or as he describes it, ‘click, whirr’.

Partly, it’s about how salespeople and marketers manipulate our base instincts to get us to buy something (for example, we want things more when there are fewer of them, and we blindly follow the orders of authority figures), but it’s also about some more unexpected ways in which we can be hijacked by our own brains.

The silent veteran never said another word again.

Football fandom is one of joy (and sorrow) by association. We become so attached to our football teams that, in a meaningful way, we believe we have achieved their successes and suffered their failures ourselves. Cialdini calls this ‘Basking in Reflected Glory’, or BIRGing.

This effect is amplified when there are no other successes of our own with which to fuel ourselves, and this last point is something which Nick Hornby also mentions in his book Fever Pitch. We care more about football or other sports when it is the only area of life by which we can gain recognition for success. Because we truly do feel the success as if it is our own. This is the power (and curse) of being a sports fan.

12:30, 11 April - Arsenal 1-2 Bournemouth

My ankle was injured for about three months from December to March, so I was unable to do many of the activities I would normally do - hiking, running, going to the gym. Among other reasons I’ll get to later, and a cold, dark Winter, this period on the sofa increased the stakes of this season to the point where it felt at times like everything depended on Arsenal winning.

Two years ago, we moved to Kinlochleven, a village on the west coast of Scotland. Knowing no one here and being miles from anyone we knew elsewhere, Arsenal also became a link to the outside world. When I lived in Malaysia ten years ago it was the same. Watching matches felt like being at home.

Cycling from Oban to Ballachulish, I listened to Arsenal vs Bournemouth on the radio with my phone in my pocket, and screamed a meltdown into the sea by the cycle path.

I can’t remember what I said, but it was probably something along the lines of “You dumbass! Are you trying to give them the match?”

Bournemouth took the lead before Arsenal equalised through a Gyokeres penalty, and I calmed down somewhat. Gyokeres then scored in the second half, but he was flagged offside immediately, before Bournemouth grabbed a winner in the 74th minute. Arsenal then offered seemingly nothing other than a threat at set pieces for the final twenty minutes.

What could have been a twelve-point lead (albeit briefly) over Man City is likely to be a six-point lead, and we play Man City next week, so it could soon be three. They still have a game in hand, which could completely wipe the lead out. Zero points with five games to play. Will City win all of those matches? Likely not, but at the moment it feels like Arsenal will win none of them.

The best chance in twenty years to win a league and they’ve bottled it.

Or have they?

Man City drew their last two league games, and play Chelsea today. They might not win that. If they lose and we beat them next week, it’s a twelve-point gap again. Nine if they win their game in hand. Five games to play. Suddenly, things look a little different. At the moment, it feels like game over, and I can’t see a way past the loss of the title, which would be embarrassing and annoying and devastating.

Don’t Ruin The Spectacle

After the match, I suffered a loss of a different kind. When we got to the car, I realised I had lost my glasses case. Walking back along the route, I kicked out at phantom footballs with impotent rage. At having lost the glasses and Arsenal having lost the match.

But what would cause me more trouble in real life? I really like the current frames I have, and they are, at four years, the longest serving frames of my life. Could you say that I have begun to identify them as a part of myself, too? If they could be replaced, it would be expensive, and if they couldn’t, I would lose the semi-frequent interactions with strangers where they compliment the frames. Basking in the reflected glory of my bloody glasses.

Cursing the world, I scanned the cycle path and eventually spied them in a patch of grass. Specs secured, identity crisis partially averted.

Time moves on, and we get over things.

For example, Arsenal lost 2-0 at home to Aston Villa in April 2024, and at the time, it was just as devastating as this Bournemouth loss. Two years later, and it isn’t exactly a pleasant memory, but it doesn’t annoy me anywhere near as much as the Bournemouth result. Even the 2-2 with Wolves, which I wrote about last month, doesn’t hurt as much.

I would have got over the loss of my glasses, too, eventually.

I think there are many reasons why this season feels like it matters more than usual. For one, it is the culmination of four years of coming close, and this, in combination with the fact that we (apparently sports fans will often revert to the team’s name rather than saying we when the team is doing badly, but I’m trying to stick with we) have been leading for most of the season, creates a heady cocktail of loss aversion, which is even more powerful than the desire to win - the desire to not lose.

Oh, Baby

Here’s another reason.

My life will soon change in a way which will probably affect how closely I identify myself with my football team. We, and this time the we is not Arsenal but Lucy and me, are having a child.

The first scan is next week. This is a Very Important thing, so next season my association with Arsenal will likely diminish a little bit, because I’ll be spending the majority of my time looking after a helpless sprog.

All the more reason for Arteta and the boys to go out and win it for me now.

For now, come on, Chelsea! Which is not a phrase I thought I’d be using while announcing my impending fatherhood.

14:00, 12 April - Chelsea 0-3 Man City

Man City beat Chelsea embarrassingly easily.

One of their fans has fifteen minutes of social media fame, filmed in the crowd pretending to drink from an Arsenal-branded water bottle. The metaphor is a bit mixed. Why is he drinking from it? The idea is that Arsenal have bottled it. And that they have bottled it so hard that they have become an actual bottle. At first, because of the drinking, I thought that he was supposed to be drinking Arsenal’s tears, or something like that. But I am overthinking it. Everyone knew immediately what he meant, and he was promptly invited onto Sky Sports. If City win the league, he’ll become an icon of Arsenal’s demise.

This bottling talk used to annoy me because I didn’t think it was true, and in the past, it wasn’t - certainly not to this extent. It was lazy discourse by pundits, lapped up by fans and then rehashed by the pundits because the fans were talking about it. The hamster wheel of sewage. The never-ending cycle of performative banter. I came to peace with this version of the bottling conversation, even if it is hard to ignore when it feels like you, personally, are being accused of lacking bottle, via the principle of association.

But when it comes true, it is much more annoying.

Soul Slides Away

The last time Arsenal faced Man City in the title run-in was 31st March 2024. They drew 0-0, which kept them in 1st, but needing to win all of the remaining games to ensure victory. They lost 2-0 at home to Aston Villa a few weeks later, with Arsenal fan Ollie Watkins sticking the knife in. That season, Arsenal won 16 of the last 18 games, but City won 19 of their last 23, including the last 9, to seal it. Not much you can do in the face of such relentless winning.

The previous season, a young Arsenal side went into the crunch match at the Etihad with a creaking Rob Holding in the centre of defence, having drawn the previous three matches (surrendering 2-0 leads to Liverpool and West Ham, and coming back from 3-0 down at home to Southampton).

Living in Manchester, I went into town and watched the match at a bar full of Man City fans. We lost 4-1.

Losses like these feel like a bereavement. Which is clearly a hyperbolic thing to say, and intellectually I understand that, but at the same time, this is what it feels like. A death, or a breakup. But because you are so tightly associated with the club, it feels like it is your own death you are grieving. Your own failure. And this failure is a kind of death.

I used to have a recurring dream where I was running through undergrowth, hacking away at bushes, chased by some unknown but evil entity. At the end, I broke out of the bushes, only to realise that I had lost out on one million pounds. Not lost out on, actually. One million pounds, which had previously been mine, was taken away from me. And it was my fault.

This is key to understanding the extra pain that would come with the death of defeat to City this time around, because this title was ours to win. In our grasp, like my million pounds of dream money.

Coming back from this, from three second places in a row, requires a superhuman level of belief, which we are fortunate was instilled in the players by Mikel Arteta.

The Dissolution of the Soviet Union

People don’t generally rebel against authority because they lack something. They rebel because they were given something and then had it taken away. This is why children can’t understand why they aren’t allowed a fizzy drink today when they had one yesterday.

It was allowed yesterday; ipso facto, it should be allowed today.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union happened in 1990 and not 1970 or 1980 because it followed a period in which the post-WW2 repressive state had relaxed its control over citizens, with Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika (transparent restructuring) giving them greater freedoms.

The KGB didn’t like the sound of this and staged a coup, but the Russian people liked the taste of these freedoms, and they fought back. As so with the child (and, I suppose, the Russian citizen) denied the Coke, as so with the Arsenal fan who thinks the title was his.

Maybe I just wanna fly, wanna live, I don't wanna die

How, then, do you cope with the looming potential of your own death?

There is nothing one can do but humbly accept the possibility, and try to know that there will be no real death but the death of the ego, and that this is something we should be seeking. Life will go on, things will be remembered, and things will be forgotten.

There is nothing you can do but go on.

16:30, 19 April - Man City 2-1 Arsenal

I am almost too scared to watch this game. And miss the first two goals while checking into a hostel. We’d been listening on the radio while driving over, and as soon as we pulled in, Cherki put City ahead. There was time for me to check my phone and feel desolation for a moment before I saw the notification for Havertz’s equaliser.

The second half, we watch in a bar. Eze hits the post. We play decent attacking football at times. Nowhere near the defensive stodge-fest that had been predicted. Then Martinelli lets O’Reilly maraud into our box, and Haaland manhandles Gabriel to score (he was also being manhandled, let’s be fair. It was a classic bit of centre half/striker mutual manhandling). Not many more chances for City, Gabriel hits the post and then somehow avoids a red card for moving his head towards Haaland.

Trossard is subbed on and crosses for Havertz, who heads over the bar. He’s been great, so much better than Gyokeres, who looks like a rag doll out there at times, but he couldn’t put the chance away. A draw would have been deserved, I think, but you can’t begrudge City the win.

A Mountain, to Climb

This loss feels far less brutal than the one to Bournemouth last week. Or the equaliser against Wolves. We played decent. What hurts the most is that it came too late.

After the match, Declan Rice is seen on camera, not covering his mouth as players often do, saying ‘Its not done.’ He still believed, even if we feared the worst.

The next day, we climb a Munro, our first of the year. We deliberated for a while about whether we should actually go, because the weather forecast was quite bleak. But we’d come to Inverness (partly) to go hiking, so, after trying and failing to find some last-minute waterproof trousers from a Cotswold outlet, we headed for the mountain.

It rained for the first hour, but it wasn’t too bad, and by the time we were halfway up the hill, the sun had come out. A man coming down said that he was jealous of the views we’d get at the top because he’d had snow on the summit.

Reader, we also had snow at the summit. Mist rolled in like a gymnast and was followed quickly by a horizontal storm. Once we were off the top, it went away again, and the descent was mostly stepped, which I prefer greatly to steep slopes.

Plum Lost

In the morning, we went to the hospital, where we proceeded to get magnificently lost, doing a lap of the outside of the (freakishly big) building, before wandering aimlessly on the inside for good measure.

We are about ten minutes late, but they are running later. There are three other couples in the waiting room, two of the women already quite far along, and one who is also there for their first scan. This is the only room in the world that it would make sense for the eight of us to be in at the same time.

One of the men has brought a ginormous water bottle for his partner, but she doesn’t want it. Another man goes to make a phone call, but they are called through as soon as he leaves, and he has to be chased down. We are called through straight after.

It’s a dark room. Lucy is on the bed. I get a seat in the corner, and the midwife swings the computer so close to my face that I can barely see a thing.

Mercifully, she pulls it back so that I am in the first row of cinema seats rather than inside the screen.

Gel on the belly and there it is.

A baby.

I’ve seen the pictures of the babies before. I know that they have the shape of a baby. But it is still shocking to see this being that is already the shape of a person. There is a head. There are the feet. Arms. It is the size of a plum.

Our plum.

Baby is the wrong way up, so Lucy has to shake her hips from side to side, and Baby settles. It is apparently the correct length. We are given a due date, and it is impossible to say whether the six months feel like an eternity or a moment.

Lucy texts her mum saying that we have big news. Doesn’t get a reply for half an hour. Sends a photo of the scan. I don’t give my parents as much warning. Maybe two seconds.

Lucy’s dad tries to bid for the kid to be a Middlesbrough fan, and her mum is pleased that there will be another vegan in the family. My parents are on holiday in Italy, and Lidl is closed, so they can’t get a bottle of prosecco in.

Lucy tells her sisters, I tell my brothers. Two aunties and three uncles.

Everything feels a lot more real. Our baby. Our plum.

20:00, 22 April - Burnley 0-1 Man City

Man City go away to Burnley and score within the first five minutes. No chance of an upset, then. Only they don’t score again, and with five minutes to go there is a chance that Burnley could nab one? Not really, but a win by a single goal, while it puts Man City top of the league, doesn’t do their goal difference much good.

Both sides are now tied on 70 points with five games to play. Man City have scored three more goals, and it is by virtue of this that they are top of the league.

Despite everything, it is still not over. If we beat Newcastle and Fulham, we will be six points clear before City play another game. Saka is coming back. Timber, Calafiori. They might slip up. They only scored one goal against Burnley. We could even beat them on goal difference.

But that requires us winning all five of our remaining games.

Newcastle, Fulham, West Ham, Burnley, Crystal Palace.

It’s the hope that kills you.

When I was on top of the hill, cursing the snow and the wind and my freezing hands, I was calculating league title permutations in my head to get through the pain. If we win these matches and City draw that match, and if we score six goals against Crystal Palace...

We beat Newcastle, 1-0. I listen to the second half on the radio as we are hiking to a bothy for the night. We beat Fulham 3-0. I watch in a pub in Aberfeldy whose clientele are more interested in the Snooker semi-final, which is on the bigger of the TVs.

Two down, three to go.

This Time Next Year, Rodney

Will it mean that much to me this time next year?

It will clearly still mean quite a lot, given that the first thing Lucy’s Dad said to me was ‘Good to have another Boro fan in the family’.

I’ve listened to other Arsenal fans talking about how these matches haven’t meant as much to them as any since the 1990s, or earlier. So maybe there are ebbs and flows. Maybe it will mean as much in thirty years as it does now. But surely it won’t mean as much next year when there is someone so much more important to think about. So, for God’s sake, win it this year.

20:00, 4 May - Everton 3-3 Man City

City drew with Everton. They’d taken the lead, and it looked like a procession, but Everton (lovely, glorious, magnificent Everton) scored three goals in quick succession to go 3-1 up. City equalised in the last minute thanks to Jeremy Doku and his new, seemingly unstoppable trick of cutting inside and bending one in the top corner. The Man City fan with the bottle had brought it along again. Didn’t get it out, surprisingly.

Goal difference doesn’t matter any more. Win all the games, and that’s it.

The day after, we beat Atletico Madrid to make the Champions League final. The double is there, waiting for us.

Would that it were so simple.

Let Forever Be

To come to peace with the results of Arsenal Football Club, good and bad, I need to surrender to the lack of control. We have established that a part of who I am is Arsenal Football Club, like a part of who I am is a writer, and a part of me is the mountains outside my house. Most of these things I have some control over. As I wrote in my essay about Wolves’ late equaliser, I have no control over Arsenal.

When my child is born, I will have to surrender another piece of my identity to them, but in a way that I have control over. I will exist no longer as a single body, but as a body in two parts, one of which will be helpless and rely entirely on myself and Lucy to survive. This isn’t something it feels possible to imagine, but I am looking forward to this splintering of the soul.

Perhaps, then, I should also think of my relationship with Arsenal in the same way. Because, as I said in the Wolves essay:

We are in relationships of a sort with our football clubs, or maybe they are members of our families. And while there are some things which would be unforgivable in these relationships, as in any relationship, losing a football match is not unforgivable.

You can be annoyed, you can want them to try harder, to play better, you can wish that they didn’t lose that football match. You support them in the good times, you don’t kick them in the bad times. You give them a hug and move on to the next match, because there is nothing else to do.

• If I only accept winning, then I am doomed to disappointment (as is every football fan).

• If I only accept winning and abandon the team when they lose, then I am not a fan in the first place.

• If I am a fan, then I will continue to support this team for the rest of my life.

• If I am a fan, then the story of the football club gets woven into the story of my life, for better or for worse. In time, the good stories become songs to be sung in Irish bars in Madrid. In time, the bad stories become something to laugh about. The bad times are the fuel of the good times; there is nothing to be gained from trying to erase them.

The next match is away to West Ham. The toughest game left. After the Man City-Everton match, Thierry Henry was on Monday Night Football talking about how he was worried about this game. It is the same for all of us, brother.

16:30, 10 May - West Ham 0-1 Arsenal

I am watching the match at home with two of my brothers, one of whom is an Arsenal fan, like our Dad. It’s a good start for our guys, lots of chances but no goal. Ben White gets injured, and Mikel Arteta momentarily loses his mind, putting Declan Rice at right back rather than using the perfectly healthy right back we had on the bench. This steals our impetus, and the match devolves into a battle of attrition, without much in the way of attacking threat from either side.

Until there is. Mateus Fernandes swans his way past the Arsenal defence and is one on one with the keeper, less than six yards from goal. I’ve seen this film before. We are done. It’s over. Everything they said about us is true. A generational bottle job -

Wait.

I said maybe…

Somehow, David Raya saves it. He stands still, and Fernandes inexplicably opts not for the far side of the goal, which is completely open and out of Raya’s reach, but for the side he can get at. He blocks it. Life itself is given a reprieve.

Ten minutes later, Martin Odegaard, decried by many (myself included at times) for a lack of end product this season, glides into the box and takes more touches than anyone has ever taken to move two metres, then passes to Trossard, who, for the first time in 2026, makes no mistake with his shot. Release. A scream. The goal never felt like it was coming, but it has come.

Ten minutes to hold out. Shot by Wilson, block by Gabriel, corner. Cross comes in, cleared weakly by Saliba, and another shot by Wilson, blocked by Declan Rice, but only after it has crossed the line. The referee’s watch beeps. Goal.

To quote Arseblog’s latest podcast, ‘It felt like I had died’.

This is so much worse than the Bournemouth defeat. So much worse than the Wolves equaliser. Everything they said about us was true. This is the end of things. The death of Joe as a football fan.

And then, again, reprieve. Replays show a clear foul on the goalkeeper (multiple fouls actually). Nearly five minutes later, the referee agrees. After review, West Ham number 19 commits a foul on the goalkeeper.

Almost every angry opposition fan who is angry that the goal gets overturned still thinks that it is a foul. They’re angry for other reasons. Perceived injustices elsewhere. A general hatred of Arsenal, which manifests as an overidentification with the idea of Arsenal as the personification of everything that is wrong with the world, meaning that they are (in the opposite way to me) experiencing this as the victory of the forces of hell.

Either way, the goal is disallowed. The match ends around 35 minutes later (or so it felt, it may have been less than two), and everyone collapses to the floor.

After Review

I have never yelled as loudly as I did when I yelled ‘Fuck’ as the West Ham goal was given initially. There wouldn’t even have been enough time left to launch the ball forward. Man City would have been back in the game, and it was inconceivable to imagine that Arsenal would win in the end. Lucy tells me that our baby has just started being able to hear. Hopefully, this wasn’t the first time that it heard my voice, but there’s no doubt it will have been able to.

The narrative around this decision has been nothing short of insane, and it proves how right I was about the extent to which football fans feel results as if they have happened to their own bodies. There are professional football journalists coming out with things like the screenshot below. Arsenal are hated, they have always been hated, and maybe always will be. But it is fascinating what this hatred can do to people’s ability to think logically.

The narrative is that Arsenal have been getting away with the same thing all season, and this is simply not true. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that it feels like it might be. What matters is that it feels like Keir Starmer is doing a terrible job, regardless of whether or not he is. The only example where an Arsenal player interferes with the keeper in the same way was Ben White vs Leicester in 2023, and the goal was disallowed. But as I said, that doesn’t matter.

Don’t Look Back In Anger

There are clips of rival teams’ fans watching the ‘equaliser’ and celebrating as if their own team has won the Champions League (especially ironic given the reaction to apparent over-celebration by Arsenal at reaching the final). This is not a healthy way of consuming football, as I have been trying to learn myself. You should exist in a state of celebrating your own team’s wins (and even their losses) more than the downfall of other teams.

And this is all fuelled by the same forces which have had journalists standing outside Downing Street 24/7 after the local election results. The always-on nature of the media cycle. Nothing is allowed a second to breathe, and there must always be something to talk about. In football as in politics, the more chaos, the more clicks, which is why Chris Mason is desperate for Keir Starmer to resign (I don’t think he’s been good at all, but in the 80s would people have been so vociferously angry about it all right now), and which is why that Man City fan with the bottle was given prime viewing and an interview on Sky Sports.

I am trying not to use this as something to make Arsenal’s wins even sweeter when they come, but it is hard not to.

I will try to teach my child to love Arsenal for what it is, rather than for what other teams aren’t. But how will I manage that if they win a league and cup double, having been labelled as cheats and bottlers the entire season?

Perhaps, what’s easier to think about is the question of what I will remember in thirty years, and what it is that I want to remember. Do I want to remember the feeling of joy and release as the final whistle goes to complete the win over West Ham? The sound of fans singing North London Forever, a song about a place I have never lived, but which still manages to tug at my heartstrings. The players singing and dancing with the fans after beating Atletico Madrid to qualify for the Champions League Final.

Or do I want to remember the three lads who hate Arsenal watching live on YouTube as West Ham scored their fake goal, celebrating wildly only to get their comeuppance immediately? That’s funny, sure, and in the moment feels vindicating, but it’s nutritionless fare, small-time in the long run, and won’t bring me any sustenance in the future.

I’m going to take the joy.

In the meantime, I’m going to try to meditate in the hope of a 6-0 win against Burnley on Monday.

20:00, 18 May - Arsenal 1-0 Burnley

I have come home because we have an appointment with the midwife tomorrow, so no screaming brothers in the room for this match. Not as stressful as the West Ham game, thankfully, but still pretty stressful. Despite the fact that Burnley didn’t have a shot after about the 60th minute.

Havertz nods in from a delicious Saka corner (the 18th goal from a corner this season, ole, ole) in the first half, and it seems like it’ll be plain sailing. And it kind of was. Or it would have been had the title not been on the line.

Havertz tries his best to get himself sent off and is quickly subbed for Gyokeres afterwards. Full-time whistle blows. One-nil to the Arsenal. One win from the title.

By Now, You Should’ve Somehow

My Grandpa, my Dad’s Dad, was born in 1924. He would have been nine when Arsenal won their first league title in 1933. Fourteen when they won their fifth title of the 1930s in 1938. Seventy-four when he died in the year of Wenger’s first title. Would have been one hundred and two this year.

And perhaps this is being overly nostalgic for a time long before I was born, but in the 30s, decades before big money entered the game, the connection between the players and the fans would have been much closer. The game wasn’t as professional. The players were a lot closer to being fans than they are now, when they are superhuman, super-rich world-class athletes.

To give you a real-world indication of how much less money there was in the game back in the day, Lucy’s Granddad turned down a contract with Chelsea to play for Whitby Town because he was making more money with his current job than he would have got playing for Chelsea.

This Arsenal team, led by Mikel Arteta, feels like a throwback in the way they all love the club like fans. And maybe this is just because I’m an Arsenal fan, and I don’t see the way that other teams feel, or maybe it’s that we have all been bonded by the defeats of the past three seasons. The past twenty-two years.

19:30, 19 May - Bournemouth vs Man City

Mikel Arteta’s reign began with a Bournemouth game. A 1-1 draw on 26 December 2019. This post also began with a Bournemouth game, which brought me close to death.

I have done my best to come to peace with that death over these 5000 words, but watching Kroupi Junior bend one in to put Bournemouth ahead brought me back to life.

City look so poor. Almost as if they are not the same juggernaut which blew us away with 10 game winning streaks in years gone by. They lack the ruthlessness of those sides. They are more vulnerable. Pep brings off Doku, their matchwinner of recent weeks, and things are even more relaxed. City need two goals to keep the title alive, and they’ve barely had a shot.

David Brooks comes on for Bournemouth and hits the post, immediately after fluffing another one-on-one. The ball drops to Haaland in the box after an inexplicable overhead kick clearance from a Bournemouth player, which could so easily have resulted in a penalty.

1-1. Less than two minutes to go.

As is the case in football, Bournemouth instantaneously forget every aspect of how to play the game. Slicing at clearances, failing to capitalise on numerical advantages on the break. Lunging into tackles and setting Savinho free on the left wing, with no one in sight to close him down.

Into the box, anything could happen here, and once more, death is in the room…

Ancient History

A few weeks ago, driving through Perthshire, we stopped to visit a prehistoric yew tree in a churchyard in the village of Fortingall.

Yew trees have an exceptional ability to regenerate and so can survive for hundreds, or even thousands of years. There are claims that this particular tree is more than 5000 years old, though some suggest it is a mere 2000 (a baby).

There is a stone path leading up to the tree, which lists off the different groups of people who will have passed by the tree over the millennia. The same tree, in the same place, witnessed by Picts, by Celts, by Romans, by Kings and Queens and peasants and now us.

As we leave, the church service is starting, and music sounds from inside. A man and his elderly mother pass us on their way in.

Religion like this makes me slightly uncomfortable, because of my lack of faith, but there is no doubting the beauty of a place like this and the beauty of congregating in a building like this with a 5000 year old tree just outside. I feel a connection to this place even though I don’t believe in God, and I feel a longing for something like this. A place of congregation. A place of worship.

21:30, 19 May - Bournemouth 1-1 Man City

Had Savinho been Kevin De Bruyne, he may have found a colleague in the box, but fortunately, he isn’t. Bournemouth clear it, and the ref blows the whistle.

A banner on the screen.

Arsenal are Premier League Champions.

I scream. I kick a crumpled up jumper like Junior Kroupi scoring the goal that has won us the league.

I get a mild telling off for scaring the baby with my delight. Text my Dad, whose birthday it is, text my brother.

Ten years ago, I commissioned a schoolfriend of mine, who drew the cover art for the first novels I ever wrote when I was in primary school, to paint a picture of me and my brother holding the Premier League trophy. He was born five months before the Invincibles won the league, so I’m pretty sure he doesn’t remember that.

That season, Arsenal had a shot at the title. It eventually went to Leicester, and who can begrudge them the greatest fairy tale in sport? But in the moment, it felt like Arsenal had a chance. Watching with a uni friend in the student union, Danny Welbeck scored the winner against Leicester to put Arsenal in the mix with twelve games left. It really felt like we’d win the league that season, but we didn’t come close, really. And never again, until the three second places under Arteta.

The abiding image of Leicester’s title win is of the players having the party of all parties at Jamie Vardy’s house. Leicester had been relying on Spurs to drop points, but they’d gone two goals up at Chelsea in what was to become known as The Battle of the Bridge. Chelsea pulled one back, and then Eden Hazard curled in the equaliser from slightly further out than Kroupi scored against City.

Cue bedlam in the Vardy house.

Take Me To Church

The Arsenal players had all gathered at the training ground, and as soon as the final whistle went at Bournemouth, clips of the celebrations hit social media. Players losing their minds. Singing, dancing, unbridled jubilation. And these scenes were mirrored outside the Emirates, where fans had gathered after City went 1-0 down. 100,000 people, ten o’clock on a Tuesday night, going to Church.

To stretch this metaphor further, see the story of the fans who found themselves wandering around the stadium at 5am, as Saka, Eze, Timber and Rice materialised in front of them. They, too, had returned to put some closure on the evening, and the fans who saw them must have thought they were hallucinating.

I hope my kid isn’t 22 by the time Arsenal win another title, but if they are, I’ll be there at five in the morning, 52 years old, one hundred times younger than the Fortingall Yew, filled with love and joy, worshipping at the altar of the two parts of myself.

You either loved them or you wanted to smash them to a pulp and spread them on toast.

Don’t Believe The Hype

When I first listened, the hype put me off.

I’d seen so many people talking about them all over the Internet that I rebelled against this consensus and decided that they must be shit.

It turns out that this consensus may have been manufactured.

The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop

From the article:

Essentially, the firm creates networks of social media pages (typically on TikTok) and uses them to drive the band’s music into the recommendation algorithm. Songs are dropped into the backgrounds of videos. Live clips are shared. Sometimes, burner accounts, comments, and whole ecosystems of interactions can be fabricated out of digital cloth, stoking—and in some cases, completely manufacturing—discourse around an artist.

Basically, giant bot-farms of fake fans.

Being generous, you could call this marketing. An aggressive form of marketing constructed on a throne of lies, sure, but nothing more.

Being ungenerous, you could say that this agency has built a giant social media Truman Show and put all of us inside it to sell music.

Being generous again, you could say that the Truman Show they built is far less nefarious than the ones built by the social media companies and state apparatus to rig elections and foment civil unrest.

Marketing has always been built on misdirection and the activation of automatic responses - for example:

1. Here’s an actor who played a doctor on television.

2. He is selling (advertising) some medicine.

3. He must be trustworthy, because he was a doctor on television.

4. Please let me have some pills.

Eventually, we cotton on to the trick du jour, and the ad agencies have to find the next one. Perhaps bot farms and fake reviews are just another trick we’ll have to become literate in. Actually, that’s almost guaranteed now. It’s probably already happening in myriad industries - this trick is too good to be the sole reserve of the arts.

The original scoop came from a Substack (below), subtitled ‘the digital marketing agency that creates your music taste’

words from eliza

Fake Fans

Edit 4/2: One day after this piece went up, Chaotic Good made significant changes to their website — including pulling the “Narrative Campaign” section completely. Some of the artists I write about here no longer feature on the website, though it is not clear if they are still clients of Chaotic Good (my suspicion is that they are, and that their manage…

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5 months ago · 2288 likes · 83 comments · eliza mclamb

Payola

I’m going to be generous to the marketing agency again, for a third time (I don’t know what’s gotten into me) and say that there were always marketing agencies creating your music taste. There were always PRs and agents calling up magazines and getting their buzzy new boys (for whom they had created the buzz) on the cover of the NME or Kerrang or whatever. Slipping a cheeky £20 to a radio DJ to get a song prime airtime.

And actually, I’m going to be generous for a fourth time - I’d rather have human beings making decisions about who to market, rather than an algorithm which cares about nothing more than making the most money, and which thinks that the easiest way to do this is to play it safe and give you what you already like.

Although I suppose in this case it’s a human being directing an algorithmic entity, so I’m going to retract the fourth instance of generosity.

You Can Be Free And Still Come Home

Some people are viewing this marketing campaign as a vindication of their long-held beliefs that Geese are trash, like this Substack.

MAXIMUM EXPOSURE INC.

YOU DON'T ACTUALLY LIKE THE BAND "GEESE™"

“ADS ARE NOT MEANT FOR CONSCIOUS CONSUMPTION. THEY ARE INTENDED AS SUBLIMINAL PILLS FOR THE SUBCONSCIOUS IN ORDER TO EXERCISE A HYPNOTIC SPELL…

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5 months ago · 668 likes · 213 comments · TONY PRICE

The thesis of this piece is that no one actually likes the music they’ve been told by marketing to like. And this is half of a good thesis.

But it doesn’t explain the feeling I get when Cameron Winter screams this absurd verse from Au Pays Du Cocaine.

Like a sailor in a big green boat / Like a sailor in a big green coat / You can be free / You can be free and still come home

This might be an idealistic way of looking at things, but I think a bad song that’s marketed well will still be thought of as a bad song. For example, Friday by Rebecca Black.

A good song that is marketed badly is a song that no one will ever hear. This is an unfortunate truth, but it is the way of things.

The Pre-Eminent Satirical Novelist of His Generation

I’ve written four novels, and I think that three of them are good enough for consideration by traditional publishing, but I haven’t had any luck with literary agents.

There is a Substacker I’ve argued with who wrote a post about how he thinks that literary agents don’t even read query letters, but I think that this is mostly nonsense.

However, it is undeniable that having a bigger social following is very likely to bump you up the slush pile. So if I did as Geese have done and hired the Chaotic Good Marketing Agency to make a bunch of TikToks about how Joseph Kilvington is the pre-eminent satirical novelist of his age, would that be enough to get me a book deal? Who knows, but my chances would almost certainly skyrocket.

This idea, that selling oneself is inherent in the process of having sold something, tramples over the supposed sanctity of making art for art’s sake, but to ignore it doesn’t do a favour for anyone. I’ve seen loads of novelists complain about how they have to market themselves, and how this is a job in itself, but the reason they are complaining about this is not because there was no one doing the marketing in the good old days; it’s because there was someone else doing it. A marketing agency. Like the one Geese hired.

Nowadays, to get ahead in the book game, you have to self-market. Geese added a middleman into the equation. That’s all. Well, not really. They added a thousand shapeshifting mind-controlling middlemen. But this is merely because that’s what they needed to do in order to get noticed.

Because everyone else in the industry is busy selling the twenty-fourth re-release of the Taylor Swift vinyl.

The Twenty-Fourth Reissue of the Taylor Swift Vinyl

Spotify and the other streaming services have taken over the music industry. In 2025, Spotify held a 47% market share of UK streaming subscribers, with Amazon Music in 2nd with 26.9% and Apple Music in 3rd with 19%. Not going to lie, I guess I knew that Amazon had a music division, but I’d assumed it was relatively small.

Anyway, none of this is new information to you. We all know that no one buys music now. We pay Spotify, and in turn, they pay artists a pittance.

My most-played artist since 2013, when records began (that’s my personal statistical records, I’m not saying that the concept of the album only began in 2013), is Arctic Monkeys. I’ve listened to around 4,000 songs of theirs in that time (on iTunes, which is where I still mostly listen to music). According to this stream calculator, that would be worth £15.

My total number of plays is 126,000, equivalent to £484. Spotify cost £10/month for most of the time since 2013, so had I been a Premium subscriber for the duration, I’d have paid £1500, meaning 33% of my money would have gone to the artists, which is actually a higher percentage than I’d have thought.

Let’s Get Physical

In 2006, the year I bought my first CD, 152 million physical albums were sold in the UK.

The total revenue from recorded music (again for the UK) was just over £1 billion, down from a peak of £1.23 billion in 2001.

In 2024, the figure was £1.49 billion, with streaming alone accounting for just over a billion. Physical media still accounted for £247 million, with K-Pop and Taylor Swift driving a recent resurgence in CD sales (one of the reasons Taylor Swift contributed so much was that she released four different CD versions of The Life of a Showgirl).

If we adjust the 2006 figure for inflation (£1.75 billion), this is a reduction of 15%. Which is far less than I thought it would be. In an earlier version of this, I’d done some dodgy calculations and come up with a 90% reduction, which gave me the perfect narrative for the story I’d been writing about the money in music having disappeared. But it doesn’t seem that this is the case.

However, when you break down these numbers by artist, things get more interesting. A 2020 study showed that 90% of all streams go to 1% of artists. This is a global study, and six years old, but if things have changed, I would imagine it’s only been to concentrate streams into an even smaller elite.

Let’s go back to 2006 to see how (if at all) things were different.

Snow Patrol had the best-selling album in the UK, with Eyes Open. It sold 1.5 million copies, around 1% of the total album sales. The top 50 artists sold a combined 31 million records, about 20% of the total, so not as top-heavy. Streaming obviously counts all previously released music too, but all this does is further consolidate things at the top.

Again, this is not a novel observation, but I think it’s helpful to put it in numerical terms.

Gross Domestic Product

I once got into a Twitter beef with the author John Green (by which I mean I replied to one of his tweets snarkily and he hit me back, also snarkily) when he was bigging up GDP growth as a barometer of social progress. My point was that this isn’t necessarily a proxy for ordinary people having better lives, because money is increasingly being siphoned upwards into the hands of the few.

So, while a 15% reduction in total revenue doesn’t seem that bad, the concentration of that revenue in the bank accounts of an ever-increasing few paints a less rosy picture.

Last year, British indie stalwarts Field Music announced that they were forming a Doors tribute band called The Fire Doors. In their own words:

Why are we doing this? Making a living from making our own music has become increasingly difficult. We need other income streams

This is a band who have released three top 40 albums and have been touring for 20 years. Millions of streams on Spotify. That should be enough to make a living, but it isn’t any more.

The next stage is the why behind each component. Why has it become difficult to make a living from original music? Well, for one, it's always been difficult. But where we used to see a lot of casual record buying — how many of you spent a tenner on a CD back in the 90s and only ever listened to it once? — we now have a streaming culture where casual listeners get the same experience but without wasting that cash (which inadvertently subsided thousands of smaller artists.) Streaming also funnels attention and money to the top, the middle class of record makers either fights to get to the top table (by making music which fits the streaming paradigm) or gets a real job.

They go on to say that they feel no embarrassment at doing this (nor should they), but it is clear that money was a motivating factor.

Kate Nash, who had a number one album in 2007, recently spoke to MPs about how she had lost £26,000 on her latest tour of Europe. By contrast, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour grossed $2b, which amounts to a profit of roughly $5.5m per show, according to this blog.

One way of combating this capitalistic concentration is to buy music on Bandcamp, which offers a way of paying more reasonable amounts for albums, and a more reasonable cut for the artists, but it is very hard to justify £10 on a single album (which you might not even like) when you can get every album ever made for the same price. People also have less money than they used to, which makes it even harder to justify the cost.

Personally, if I could buy every album on Bandcamp for a fiver, I’d probably do it, but it will take a lot for the average listener to unlearn the convenience of streaming.

Cultural Homogenisation

This funnelling of profits upwards isn’t limited to music.

Substack loves it when a celebrity with an existing following comes along because they have loads of baked-in subscribers. So they are already at an advantage.

Likewise, Spotify loves existing megastars because it knows they are safe bets for making megabucks. Film studios love existing IP because it is perceived as less of a risk than something new. Remakes, reissues, rehashing, repackaging.

The twenty-fourth reissue of the Taylor Swift vinyl.

Every coffee shop with the same font. Every book with the same cover. A McDonald’s on every corner selling the same Big Mac in Boston, Brasilia and Beijing.

In the short term, we are happy because we are getting what we want, which is what we know. It takes less effort to engage when you don’t have to think about whether or not you like something. But in the long term, there is a cost. Lack of innovation, lack of creativity. Lack of originality.

Lack of the new.

Don’t Hate The (Music) Player, Don’t Hate the Game

The dominance of streaming is also important because of the role that these platforms play in the discovery of new artists. They use data, and lots of it, to try to predict exactly what it is we will resonate with. But, and as is the case with any kind of algorithmic predictions, these are only as good as the assumptions underlying them.

To get people to listen to you, you have to play the game. Social media followers, cross-promotion, hype. As the linked article says:

If you want it to notice your music, you need to implement a Spotify strategy, create hype in the run up to your release date and develop some genuine momentum.

Not to say that Spotify and its ilk never recommend different things. I found the song Dizzy on the Comedown by Turnover (a certified 10/10 banger) on a Discover Weekly playlist in 2017. And there is definitely a pathway to discovery through playlists like that these days (though, as I said, you have to be willing to play the game). But when 1% of artists hoover up 90% of the streams, it is clear which music is being pushed the hardest.

I’m trying my best not to come across as an old man yelling at a cloud. Because all I’m doing is describing pop music, isn’t it? There is always going to be someone at the top (and if she has her way, then that someone is always going to be Taylor Swift).

There is always going to be pop music which is listened to by a majority of music listeners (or at least, under a system with either human or algorithmic gatekeepers, it will always exist. Not that there could be a system entirely without influential gatekeepers of some kind. There is a study (I can’t find it, but it was mentioned in Influence by Robert Cialdini) which showed that we perceive music to be better when we think that it is liked by other people.

So, even in a 100% meritocratic system, with 100 songs of exactly equal excellence being rated by neutral listeners, a hierarchy would still emerge, so long as each subsequent voter was able to see the votes of the previous voters.

But, and here we reach the point I’ve been trying to make for a while - convergence is a net negative for any creative industry.

If all you can get is more of the same, then you lose the ability to be shocked by something. And the worst part is that we wouldn’t even know that we were missing out on something, because there wouldn’t be anything left for us to be missing out on, like a child walking through the abandoned wasteland of what used to be a majestic forest, looking at a plastic bag tangled in the lone remaining bush, thinking that nothing is out of the ordinary.

I’m not saying here that there isn’t a plethora of incredible music out there right now. There is. This isn’t a ‘music was better in the 70s’ type discussion. I’m saying that if we continue to follow the orders of our algorithmic overlords, then the only artist we’ll be able to listen to will be Taylor Swift (who actually ranks 17th on my all-time most-played artists list, for what it’s worth). And not even Swifties want that, I’m sure.

This is, of course, a hyperbole. But it is an exaggerated endgame for a scenario that is already playing out.

We are not obliged to have all of the amazing music we currently get. As Field Music and Kate Nash show, when making music that people like is not enough to make a living, some of these musicians will have to stop making music.

And this won’t happen quickly. As John Green said of falling in love, it will happen slowly, then all at once.

People will still form bands. But Spotify will further concentrate streams into the hands of the megastars, so there will be fewer opportunities for people to break out. There will still be magazines and radio shows playing music from outside the mainstream, but most people listen to what is easiest, so if more people are listening to the stuff being pushed by the streamers, then there will be even less left at the table for the rest of the artists.

People will still listen, but fewer people. So these bands can’t afford to make a living. Can’t afford to tour. So they stop making music, and someone else defaults to the Spotify Top 40 because their favourite band called it quits.

Timothee Chalamet got into a lot of trouble during his Oscars campaign for comments he made about ballet and opera:

“I don’t want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this any more’”

But he’s not wrong about one thing - opera and ballet are not the giants of mass entertainment that they used to be. Imagine quoting Timothee’s comments to someone at the Rite of Spring riot in 1913 (very pleased with this reference). They wouldn’t understand what you were talking about (and to be fair, they’d have bigger things to worry about pretty soon). The point is, ballet used to be huge. It got replaced.

But ballet was replaced naturally. People liked something else and moved on. That happens. It won’t be the same this time.

Unless we fight for musical variety, we might just be left with the same ten faces on the Spotify carousel, revolving over and over until the day we die.

The Pre-Eminent Substacker of His Generation

When I joined Substack, as was the case when I joined Medium before that, I had the naive belief that the readers would come to me. That the quote-unquote ‘quality’ of my writing would be enough to bring the subscribers rolling in. But that’s not the case.

Everything is a game here, too. Following other accounts, interacting with posts, posting notes, reposting articles, constantly selling the idea of why people should give you their precious email address, because the writing is not enough.

And if this all sounds a bit ‘poor me’, then it’s not supposed to. I understand that in the days before the Internet, there were still gatekeepers. That before the blog, there was nowhere for an unknown writer to even have the chance that someone might read what they had to say, unless they lucked their way into an article at a legacy publication. That before Spotify, there were still industrial tastemakers and marketing departments and major labels, and that getting a record deal was pretty bloody difficult.

The difference, then, is that there were still people involved. The algorithm would autoplay until the end of the world if you gave it a chance. Everything is automatic. There is no one choosing what to suggest, and you are not choosing either. We are no longer individuals; we are cogs in a machine which has so far paid Daniel Ek 8.7 billion dollars. Netflix autoplays the next episode of the show which it autoplayed when we finished the last episode of the previous show it had autoplayed.

So what have we established? That to be successful, you have to be both good and well-marketed?

Let’s take a trip back in time.

My first MP3 player had four albums on it. A far cry from what’s available on Spotify.

There were probably more, if I’m being honest, but the ones I can remember listening to on repeat were:

• Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, by Arctic Monkeys

• Alright Still, by Lily Allen (the first album I ever bought, after watching her on Jools Holland’s Hootenanny, 2006)

• Buck Jump, by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band

• Hotel California, by The Eagles

The MP3 player itself was a gorgeous, tiny cube with a unique design, unlike anything you would see today, now that music players have become phones, which have all converged into the exact same shape.

There was also a 39-second snippet of a song, which I have never been able to find the whole version of. Someone in my swimming squad had it set as their ringtone, and they Bluetoothed it to me. I’ve just spent another fruitless twenty minutes using ChatGPT to try and find the song, like a personal AI version of the Case of the Missing Hit, but no dice (it had the line ‘money, money, money’ I think. But it wasn’t Price Tag by Jessie J, or Money, Money, Money by Abba)

I loved that MP3 player, and loved those four albums (all of which are still certified bangers. The DDBB one has a song called Run Joe, which may have endeared it to me, and there is an incredible trombone solo on the opening track, which certainly did). But those were the only four albums I ever listened to of my own accord. Everything else was on CD in the car or on the radio.

Citizen, Erased

Until I met Jason. Nowadays, he is the ultimate music hipster, but when we were eleven, he was very into Muse. Knowing only Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen and The Eagles, I thought that liking Muse was enough to make him a hipster then, too.

He introduced me to the screeching guitars and wailing vocals of Matt Bellamy, and I was hooked. When The Resistance came out in 2009, I was obsessed.

This obsession peaked when I listened to the song Exo-Politics on repeat for the duration of a two and a half hour bus journey back from a maths tournament in Glasgow. When you listen to the same song on repeat for two and a half hours, you enter a kind of trance, a meditative state I may have also been subconsciously seeking when I listened to Biffy Clyro’s Born on a Horse for a full day when studying for a chemistry exam, or The Stereophonics Have a Nice Day for eight hours while finalising my Master’s dissertation.

We finished mid-table in the maths tournament, despite only arriving halfway through due to a broken-down bus. I flatter myself that I was part of the reason for this, but I was merely one quarter of a team which also comprised a maths prodigy who had been going to University classes since he was about 12, so he probably had more to do with it.

As we got back into Aberdeen, I remember being very annoyed that I was going to have to walk through Union Square, the newly built mega shopping centre next to the bus station. My mum and I were boycotting it for unremembered reasons (perhaps something to do with the convergence of the shopping experience), so my Exo-Politics binge clearly hadn’t quite manifested a truly zen-like state of acceptance.

Over the years, Jason introduced me to so many more artists and sent me so many albums that it would be impossible to list them all here, so I’ll just give you a flavour.

• Cardinal, by Pinegrove (one of my all-time favourites, by probably my favourite band. Feels childish to have a favourite band when you’re thirty, but I’m going to fight through the cringe).

• Antisocialites, by Alvvays.

• In Time to Voices, by Blood Red Shoes (their song Cold was another which I attempted to trance out to. Also, the first gig I ever went to, with Jason of course).

• The Art of Forgetting, by Caroline Rose.

• Juillet, by En Attendant Ana.

• Disparitions, by Jonathon Personne.

• Crushing, by Julia Jacklin.

• Romance is Boring, by Los Campesinos (Jason’s old Twitter handle).

I could keep going forever, but I’ll stop there. If everything but the Pinegrove had been shit, it would have been worth it, but there are countless bangers in my collection courtesy of him.

One of my favourite things to do when we were in school was to pretend that I had introduced him to Muse. It must have annoyed him one time, so I kept on doing it (this repetitious style being a key tenet of my comedic persona).

I would like to take the opportunity here to clarify for posterity that it was indeed he who showed me the hysterical light.

The 100 Greatest Albums of All Time

For Jason’s 30th birthday, I made a list of my favourite 100 albums of all time, and he has promised me a return list (which I have yet to receive, despite the fact I’ve been 30 for more than six months). I can’t remember what was on my list because I wrote it on a piece of paper, which he now has. Should probably have made a copy.

Anyway, he hasn’t completely flaked out on me - I got a sneak preview of five albums, plus three of the best from 2024, before I went interrailing last year, so today’s essay was going to rank and review these eight albums. Or at least, that’s all it was supposed to be, before I got sidetracked by Geese.

AIA: Alien Observer - Grouper

Ambient music. Another of Jason’s loves. Not sure it’s one of mine. I do enjoy hypnotic, repetitive stuff from time to time. Hypnotic, repetitive stuff from time to time. Hypnotic, repetitive stuff from time to time… But I like my hypnorepetition to have a bit more bounce and melody than this. It doesn’t draw me back in, grab my attention, but then I suppose if it grabbed my attention too much, it would no longer be ambient. Also, and not to dunk on Jason too much here because clearly he has great taste and lots of the stuff he likes I also love, but I don’t get how this can be one of the best albums ever. It’s nice enough, sure, but what sets it apart?

I watched Bottoms the other day, and there are some incredible jokes. But I only rated it a 70%, because for me, I need more than one great element to make a film a classic. So for a comedy to be truly great, it needs to also be something else too. Likewise, for an ambient album to be an all-time great, it would need something else too. And I don’t really get that from this.

The Law of Things - The Bats

Agreeable jangle pop which reminded me of The Beths. Perhaps I should say that The Beths reminded me of this, but that wouldn’t make sense since I heard The Beths first. Perhaps I should actually say that maybe the Beths were inspired by these guys, considering that they are both from New Zealand. There we go. Very modern-sounding record from 1990. I also just realised that the Beths were almost certainly inspired by the Bats, given that they have basically the same name, especially when you say it in a Kiwi accent.

Diamond Jubilee - Cindy Lee

A project from the former lead singer of Women, another band on this list. Two hours is a stretch too long for my liking, but there are some excellent screeching bangers on this. One where I should maybe construct an alternative track listing featuring twelve of my favourites from the twenty-four and listen to that, because it would probably slap.

Rong Weicknes - Fievel is Glauque

Once again, Jason hits me with some music the likes of which I have never heard before. Took me a few listens to get into this, but it goes hard - piano and saxophones getting up to absolute mischief. And the band is named after Fievel from An American Tail, one of the best animated films of all time.

Night Palace - Mount Eerie

I had previously only heard of Mount Eerie, which is the moniker of solo musician Phil Elverum, with respect to the album A Crow Looked At Me.

That album is about his wife’s death, and I have seen it consistently described in ways that have made it impossible for me to listen to. Having not listened to it, the closest comparison I can come up with is Benji by Sun Kil Moon, an album I have only ever managed to listen to three times. The Pitchfork review states that ‘There are 11 songs on Sun Kil Moon’s astonishing sixth LP Benji, and in nearly all of them, somebody dies’, which is an accurate description of how the album makes you feel.

So I was very surprised when I listened to this new Mount Eerie album to find it propulsive and groovy.

Marquee Moon - Television

There was a Twitter blog called Ruth and Martin’s Album Club, which got guests (initially friends of Ruth and Martin and then celebrities) to review great albums from history which they’d never heard before. Martin would write a review, then the guest would write their own, after listening to it at least three times.

Marquee Moon was one of the albums on that blog, and I remember listening to it once and not really getting it. But I failed to follow the rules of the blog, so I never really gave it a proper chance. However, listening to it on more than three occasions this time, I still don’t really get why it is so universally lauded.

I also don’t get why Geese are often slagged off as a poor imitation of Television, because to me, they sound nothing alike.

Public Strain - Women

The other record by Cindy Lee, and this one is much more ambient adjacent. As we have already discussed, if an album is going to be this relaxed, it needs to be special, and I don’t think this one is. Some nice melodies from time to time, but mostly droning, hard-to-focus-on songs.

Deceit - This Heat

Let’s end with a good one. Repetitive and driving but on the right side of boring. Who knows why some things end up on the boring side and some on the good side? Clearly, Jason has a different line of boring to me, and that’s okay. This is quite similar to the Women record, but way more engaging and interesting to listen to.

Boom, and that’s eight albums down the hatch. 5/8 I liked, which is actually quite a low ratio for Jason’s suggestions, but not a bad score.

And he’s forever in the good books for sending me Cardinal by Pinegrove anyway.

The Algorithm As Tastemaker

Everyone should have a Jason. But I fear that most people don’t. I fear that for most people, their Jason is the algorithm.

And when the algorithm is content to feed us the same stuff over and over again because that’s the safest way to make the most money, you can see why Geese took the steps they did to sidestep it. Even if they did so in the creepiest post-modern way imaginable.

Jeff Bezos recently sacked all of the book critics at the Washington Post because he reckons that data does a good enough job of selling books.

If Geese had left it to the data, where would it have landed them?

I Just Wanna Be One of the Strokes

It’s not just the data they’re fighting against. To quote from the above Tony Price article, “[Geese] don’t sound like The Strokes.”

I agree with this. I also love The Strokes. Watching Julian Casablancas muse at a Glasgow seagull was an all-timer of an experience. But the father of their guitarist was already a famous musician. This is clearly different to the Geese psyop, but is it conceivable that no one would have ever heard of The Strokes if it wasn’t for this fact?

To quote Phoebe Bridgers:

“The Strokes are an industry plant – literally! Everybody knows that, at least in music, but it’s never made anyone like them less. It’s such an insane fucking double standard. If you have wealthy parents, you’re not allowed to make music as a woman, but you’re rewarded for it as a man. Every white boy who is mediocre is an industry plant by that standard”

It also doesn’t mean that the Strokes are bad. To get idealistic again, there are plenty of nepo-baby bands who don’t make it. In an even more idealistic world, some of the nepo-baby bands who do make it might be replaced in a meritocratic music landscape by some nobodies.

Alright, Still

You can have advantages and also be incredible. The two concepts are inextricably linked. The advantage is what makes them great, in some cases. Look at Max Verstappen.

Or look at Lily Allen. The daughter of a famous actor. Neither Lily Allen nor the Strokes needed to engage the services of a viral marketing agency because they were already in the game.

Arctic Monkeys made their own viral marketing campaign in 2006. I first heard of them because they were going stratospheric, thanks in part to the fact that they handed out free CDs at gigs. My Dad’s mate gave us a copy at Cambridge Folk Festival, and it made its way onto my first MP3 player.

The Eagles were created by a record company!

I don’t know how the Dirty Dozen Brass Band came to the big time (AKA my MP3 player), but with trombone playing like that, I don’t want to cast any aspersions on them. I’m a trombone player, if that wasn’t clear. I’m sure the whole piece makes more sense now.

And this is where we come full circle. Even Geese - my beloved Geese - are not immune from these accusations of nepotism. Lead singer Cameron Winter’s Dad is a composer, so does that render this whole essay moot? I don’t think so.

I’m going to say that if industry connections aren’t even enough these days, if even nepo babies are having to resort to deceptive marketing ploys, then we’re further along the race to the One Final Artist than I thought.

Coda

Let’s wrap this baby up - what have we learned?

Marketing is, marketing was, and marketing will be.

The algorithm will continue to converge until there is only one musical artist left.

Unless we stop it.

This, then, is why we all need a Jason. A trusted recommender of art which would otherwise not have found its way to you. A shield against the vices and vagaries of the algorithm and the profit motive.

But we can’t leave it all to Jason. We need to pay for music. We need to put a stop to the automatic processes that feed the conveyor belt directly into our brains. Make the effort to hunt out something new, something strange. Send it on to someone else.

Because Jason is very good, don’t get me wrong, but he’s also really into ambient music.

He has 81,600 followers on Instagram, 123,000 subscribers on YouTube, and he really does not like the idea of veganism.

By itself, that’s not very interesting. Plenty of people are anti-vegan for plenty of reasons. What is interesting about Dave is that he is a big climate advocate. He gave up his petrol car and has starred in Net Zero adverts for the Scottish Government, where he talks about how he drives an EV and urges other people to do the same in order to limit global warming.

I saw him give a talk about self-publishing at the Fort William Mountain Festival a few weeks ago. He was articulate, thoughtful and insightful, and admirably has his books printed in Glasgow rather than outsourcing to China like the other members of the panel (who worked for publishing houses).

He holds an undergrad degree in Sports Science and Physiology, an MSc in Sport and Exercise Science and an honorary PhD for science communication. All of which is to say that he holds a high level of credibility in the area of sport and nutrition, with expertise in both theory and practice. So when he posts graphs and scientific studies on his Instagram page, there is a good chance that people take what he says seriously, even when he branches out into areas of science in which he might not be an expert, and even when he displays a persistent bias.

Why am I telling you all of this?

I’m not a climber, so I became aware of Dave through posts on local Facebook groups in the area of Scotland to which I had moved - he lives in the same area. I looked at his Instagram page and quickly got very annoyed at his repeated and false jibes against the merits of a vegan diet (both in terms of physical health and global warming). I was going to post angry comments on all of these posts (and maybe I did post a few), but decided that it wasn’t worth it.

Arguing with people in comment sections never gets anyone anywhere (though I did write one the other day, which we will get on to), as I learned when trying to convince random people on LinkedIn to go vegan.

However, his posts popped back onto my feed, and this time I couldn’t let it go, so I’m going to go through a few of his posts, which demonstrate, variously and sometimes all at once:

• Rhetorical sleight of hand

• Ignorance of data which doesn’t align with his existing views

• Selective acceptance of trial data

• Unwillingness to follow his views through to the logical conclusion

Hopefully, you’ll see what I mean.

Starting off with this post.

Rhetorical Sleight of Hand

Quite subtle, the illogical conflation, did you spot it?

“When vegan diets were peaking in popularity, voices pointed to mouse data showing that restriction of protein could make mice and worms live longer”

There are several sleights of hand, actually. First, the assertion that vegan diets have peaked in popularity. Secondly, and more pertinently, the conflation of vegan diets with low-protein diets, which, combined with the findings of the graph, implies that veganism means you live shorter.

The study he cites in the original post does not account for what kind of protein was being consumed, but this one does. It is on the protein intake of over 100,000 people and showed that “replacing animal protein of various origins with plant protein was associated with lower mortality”

Additionally, veganism is not by definition a low-protein diet. It can be, but so can an omnivore diet. The vast majority of omnivore diets do not contain sufficient fibre. This is not proof that it is not possible to consume sufficient fibre on an omnivore diet. He responds to this in the comments.

The link takes us to this study: ‘Influences of vegan status on protein intake, lean body mass, and strength in lightly active, young women: A cross-sectional study.’

I can’t see the number of participants in the study, and I’m not a sports nutritionist, but any study which discusses nutrition and veganism needs to include information on why that person is consuming a plant-based diet. People eat a plant-based diet for many reasons, one of which, often in young women, is to lose weight.

Likewise, any studies into this subject (like the one he cited and the one I cited above) need to take into account things like exercise and wealth before wide-ranging conclusions on complicated issues like mortality can be made. Neither, so far as I can see, does that.

A side note, for another point which comes up later. The above paper concludes with the following sentences. I’ve left the first one in to avoid accusations of selectively quoting.

Given the importance of functional strength in daily activity and sport, habitual vegans should be advised to optimize daily protein intakes. Fortunately, a large [body of] literature indicates that body strength and muscle accretion with resistance training in vegans are comparable to those of omnivores.

Selective acceptance of trial data

In the above photo, Dave says:

Sometimes, the fact that the findings were on mice in cages is lost to the discussion.

In the comment section of the very same post, he says this.

Aside from the fact that to him the animal studies are useful proof in one case and easily dismissible nonsense in the other, note how the language changes. He portrays one example as frivolous (mice in cages) and the other as serious (animal studies on rodents. Somehow, even the use of ‘rodents’ adds a bit of gravitas).

Deliberate ignorance of data

The idea that plant-based protein is incomplete and/or inferior has been largely debunked many times over, with countless studies purporting to this. But let’s go through the three points he makes one by one:

• Reduced amino acids

• Reduced bioavailability

• Packaged with antinutrients

All plant foods contain all amino acids, but he is right in saying that some have reduced amounts of specific ones. What he fails to mention is that combining different foods (rice and beans is the classic example) results in a complete amino acid profile - and that these foods do not even need to be consumed at the same time to have the same effect. I do not believe that Dave is ignorant of this, but he thinks that eating beans with rice is ‘making nutrition so complicated’.

If that is complicated, then how can anyone hope to optimise their nutrition?

As for reduced bioavailability, this is a case of rhetorical sleight of hand packaged in a veil of truth. Some plant-based proteins have lower bioavailability than animal proteins, according to the Digestible Indispensable Amino Acid Score.

However, there are some limitations to this concerning plant proteins, namely:

• It doesn’t take into account cooking, which increases the digestibility of plant proteins (“inadequate recognition of the increased digestibility of commonly consumed heat-treated and processed plant-based foods”)

• It is based on feeding (fast-growing, farmed) animals rather than humans (“formulation centered on fast-growing animal models rather than humans”)

• It doesn’t account for combining proteins and other food types (“a focus on individual isolated foods vs the food matrix”)

Even assuming that DIAAS scores could be taken seriously (note this from the study linked above: “When investigating protein quality, particularly in a plant-based dietary context, the DIAAS should ideally be avoided”), soy has a DIAAS score of around 0.9 (compared to 1 for animal protein). Dave has no problem suggesting that people eat more meat to increase protein intake, so why not simply eat 10% more soy to make up the deficit, or supplement with shakes made from pea protein?

To end this sub-section, another study, this time funded by the beef industry, compared wheat protein vs cow protein (in itself a strange choice as people typically don’t eat bread to hit their protein goals, although you can, of course, buy high-protein bagels these days). This study showed that there was no difference in muscle protein synthesis between the protein types.

The TikTok below cites several studies which changed this doctor’s mind about the effectiveness of plant vs animal proteins.

@dr_idzDR IDZ CALLED OUT BY DR IDZ!! 😱❌💀 #weightloss #fatloss #nutrition #fitness

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Finally, the ‘packaged with antinutrients’ point. Again, this is a case of misdirection with an adept turn of phrase. Many vegan protein sources do contain things like phytates, lectins, oxalates and tannins, which are all classified as ‘antinutrients’. Suggesting that they are ‘packaged’ implies that they come together, that the antinutrients are an ineffable part of them.

However, most of these are destroyed by cooking, soaking or sprouting. And sure, I eat a piece of raw tofu from time to time, but I am not chowing down on raw broccoli or dry, unsoaked beans.

Also, amusingly, “Keep in mind that anti-nutrients may also exert health benefits. Phytates, for example, have been found to lower cholesterol, slow digestion, and prevent sharp rises in blood sugar. Many anti-nutrients have antioxidant and anticancer actions, so avoiding them entirely is not recommended”

Unwillingness to follow his views through to the logical conclusion

Now for his bizarre point about methane.

Note, I would be vegan even if it caused 10x the emissions of the fossil fuel industry, which is another interesting point when debating these issues. I do not need meat to be bad for the environment for me to not eat it.

Dave needs to justify the environmental impact of animal farming in order for it to align with his views on climate change, which leads to contradictions.

Emissions from beef are largely methane. However, they are not exclusively methane, and there are myriad ways in which animal farming is destructive (e.g. land use, soil deterioration, water use, fossil fuel emissions, water-course pollution), and to ignore those is odd to say the least. Especially when the non-methane emissions amount to roughly half of the total emissions from beef.

Back to his comment, “Stable beef production does not further warm the climate”

Two questions:

• What about reducing beef production? (This is the comment I couldn’t help posting, and he knows that this would have a cooling effect, as we shall see).

• What about the 50% of non-methane emissions?

But the main point is this - methane is a short-lived greenhouse gas, which is why Dave says that stable beef production does not further warm the planet.

Methane does not accumulate in the atmosphere in the same way that CO2 does, so there are not the same exponential effects from its emission.

However, it is far more potent at the whole ‘global warming’ thing (84 times more potent than CO2). Therefore, reducing methane in the short term can have a large and rapid effect on global temperatures. The word rapid is key. Because of the 10-12ish year lifespan of methane in the atmosphere, reducing emissions will induce cooling far more quickly than reducing CO2 emissions.

To this, I imagine Dave would respond along the lines of this, below.

This argument is specious and disingenuous to a stunning degree.

In the United States, to which his post refers, an estimated 99% of livestock are factory farmed. 75% of cows, specifically, or 66 million individuals (out of a total of 88 million), are factory farmed. These are not free-roaming animals, which would be replaced by bison. They are caged.

Furthermore, if you were to reintroduce bison (as this article by the BBC recommends as a way of improving the quality of wild vegetation), there is no reason to think that there would be anywhere close to as many animals. How on Earth could there be? Where would they go?

It simply doesn’t make sense that if you removed (mostly factory-farmed) livestock from the equation, their numbers would be entirely replaced by wild animals. Even assuming that all of the land used to factory farm cattle was given over to wild bison, there would be nowhere close to the same number of animals, because they would not be being forcibly bred and kept prisoner in enormous herds.

Some more sleight of hand from Dave in this post - “you have to make sure that no large ruminants, domestic or wild, are ever allowed to live on that land, in perpetuity.”

None? Why would it have to be none? What if you had 10% of the number of cattle that are being farmed currently?

And “If you rewild the land and it reverts to herds of bison, you are back to where you started, except without the high-quality food source”

Again, he makes a needless logical leap. If you rewilded some of the land, but took back other portions for growing other crops such as beans (also a high-quality food source), then you wouldn’t be back where you started, would you?

Identity

I will end this by saying that even if everything Dave said was true, I would still be vegan. As I said earlier, I would still be vegan if being vegan somehow caused more emissions than the fossil fuel industry.

If vegans couldn’t get enough protein through their normal diet, I would be advocating supplementing with protein isolates. If being vegan spiked global methane levels, I would be saying that it is worth it for what it achieves - the liberation of our animal brethren.

As it is, I don’t need to do those things. But to maintain the illusion that eating meat aligns with his stance on climate change, Dave needs there to be reasons why veganism isn’t the answer. And so he finds them.

They were up, and then they were down.

What on Earth has happened, and what is this force that caused pain in their hands as they hit the floor? They are now initiates into the brutality of gravity’s pull.

Ilia Malinin, however, is twenty-one years old.

Malinin Maligned

Unbeaten for two years and fourteen competitions heading into the Olympics, he was the odds-on favourite to take home the Gold.

There has been a lot of talk around the improbable physics of curling - the stone curls in the opposite direction to the spin it is given by the athlete (if football players could do that, then goalkeepers would be mightily confused, though kicking the stones would probably be quite painful).

But that is interesting on an academic level, a scientific level. Malinin defies physics in a more tangible way.

The first skater to ever complete a quad-axel in competition, he is still the only one to have managed it, and has done so more than ten times. Some skaters don’t even attempt it because of the perceived dangers (presumably they involve whacking your head on the ice really hard), and these are people who are already zooming around on ice, spinning at breakneck speed for four rotations rather than the four and a half that Malinin manages.

There’s a clip of him in the gym before he takes to the ice, wearing a vest that says Quad God on it; he jumps from a standing start and spins more times than it should be possible for a person to spin. And not to disparage the scientific sensation of oppositely bending rocks, but there is something far more viscerally stunning about a prodigiously pirouetting person.

After the short program, Malinin was leading with a comfortable margin, which became even more comfortable when all of his closest rivals made mistakes of their own before his free skate.

But then he fell over. And then he fell over again.

He said after the event that the pressure got too much for him. The expectations on his shoulders finally became too much to bear. In footballing terms, he bottled it.

For athletes in sports like figure skating, the Olympics are quite above everything else, and they only come around every four years. There won’t be the opportunity for Malinin to gain redemption until 2030. There is the possibility that even then the nerves will still get to him, but if the results are all that matter, how will he be able to live freely until then?

90+4 Calafiori OG

Which brings me on to Wolves 2-2 Arsenal, a Premier League match which took place three days ago on 18 February.

Arsenal are top of the league, chasing an elusive first title since 2004, having finished second in each of the last three seasons, once to Liverpool and twice to the financially doped Manchester City.

Arsenal lead 2-0 thanks to a header from Bukayo Saka and a first of the season from left-back Piero Hincapie. Cruising against a side at the bottom of the league who are basically already relegated.

Then their right-back cuts inside and curls a shot into the top corner (the second goal of his entire career). 2-1. No problem. Arsenal have the best defence in the country and should be able to hold out.

Not much action until the 94th minute when a routine cross comes in from the left-hand side. Centre back Gabriel jumps to head it, but the ball is taken away by his own goalkeeper and falls to Wolves debutant Tom Edozie, who smashes it in off a defender (it is credited as an own goal to Riccardo Calafiori, who sits dumbstruck on the goal line for about a minute afterwards).

Two more points dropped for Arsenal after a draw against Brentford last week. Two wins in seven matches. Manchester City are hot on their tails with a game at the Etihad still to come.

Welcome to the Bottle Factory

Things look bleak for their title chances, and I feel sick. Physically sick, like I’m about to throw up. I can’t shut my thoughts off, and go straight to bed (too upset to even look at Twitter, because I know I wouldn’t be able to face the posts from opposition fans). I lie there trying to rationalise the result. Still two points clear. Can’t play that badly for the rest of the season. The equaliser was lucky and the result of a once-a-season defensive blunder. All true. None helpful.

I maintain that the previous three second places involved minimal bottling. First time round, it was a young, unfancied team for whom it was too early. Second time round, they won 16 of the last 18 games, but Man City were unbeaten in their last 23 games, winning 19.

And last season Liverpool were miles clear early doors, while Arsenal had a monumental injury crisis (and some outrageous refereeing decisions. I am still furious about Rice being sent off for kicking the ball away) to contend with. This time, however, as much as it pains me to admit it, there would be more than a whiff of bottlejob.

I drift into an uneasy sleep and wake up several times, each time hopeful that the result had been a nightmare. That Arsenal didn’t throw away a two-goal lead against potentially the worst team in Premier League history. But unfortunately, it is all real. And when I wake in the morning, the table doesn’t lie. 2-2.

Here I Am In The Hammersmith Hotel

As I sit at my desk, two questions come to me. First, should I be this invested? The second, an answer to the first - how could I not be?

I find myself reassessing my entire life. What is the point of sport? Do I even enjoy watching it? I watched 83 football matches last year, and for what? Why would someone do something which makes them feel such a tight, anxious knot in their stomach when they could just as easily not do it?

I read a post from Tim Stillman on Arseblog. He feels much the same as me. Another from . We share a collective mania, football fans.

When I realise that I am wishing the days away, I know that something needs to change. In a macro sense, I found myself wanting in a non-idle sense for it to be May, and on a micro sense for it to be the day of the next match.

Because every day, every week, every month spent in a world without the final outcome of this torrential torture box made plain felt like it was too much to bear.

But that is three months of this precious life. Three months which could be spent in enjoyment, in curiosity, in living.

The Moment and Savouring It

I still want to feel things. To feel the emotion of a last-minute win and yes, even the emotion of a last-minute gut-wrenching equaliser to fucking Wolverhampton Wanderers. But I don’t want it to send me into a spiral of fear and anxiety. I can’t allow something outside of my control to control so much of my life. The problem, then, is whether you can feel the highs so deeply without feeling the lows so horribly.

They say time heals everything, and so it does. But right now, it feels like it would take a while to recover if this implosion continues. Would I be able to come back next season with the same joy, or will something be broken forever? And you may say that this is dramatic, but as legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly said:

The Flamingos

Last year, I came to another realisation - that I don’t care about other football teams

To illustrate my point, there is a common question on Football Twitter:

Who had the better season?

Did Arsenal finishing second have a worse season than Chelsea finishing fourth and winning the Europa Conference League, or Spurs winning the Europa League but finishing sixteenth?

And yes, I would like Arsenal to win a trophy, but on the flipside, I don’t give a shit because why should I be bothered if Charlton Athletic or Lincoln Town win League 2? All I care about is Arsenal. It hurts to be beaten to trophies by other teams. To lose the league to City, etc.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I take delight in Man Utd losing games and have an intense sports-hate (as Bill Simmons would say) of Rodri and John Stones. But Chelsea winning a competition Arsenal aren’t even in? I don’t care.

This is a key observation, and one which sets me on the path to enlightenment, which I hope I am on now.

Before League Title, Chop Wood, Carry Water. After League Title, Chop Wood, Carry Water

Back to Ilia Malinin. After his loss, he was probably feeling even worse than I was when Wolves equalised on Wednesday. That I say ‘probably’ indicates the depths of my sickness.

And if results are the only thing which matter, then he has every right to feel sick. Plenty of elite athletes have that mindset. They won’t be able to sleep or relax until they have righted this wrong. Michael Jordan. Kobe. Serena Williams. The kind of twisted individual who exists for nothing other than winning and can remain completely locked in for years at a time. And maybe that does help them get to the top.

But there are plenty of people who were locked in just as hard and never three-peated in the NBA or won 23 Grand Slam titles. For most people, the process has to be part of the goal. The day-to-day of life has to take precedence.

And if you are in the position of being Michael Jordan, your day-to-day can take the shape of practising basketball like a maniac. If you are Ilia Malinin, your day-to-day can take the shape of practising spinning through the air like a maniac.

But for every Michael Jordan, there is a Charles Barkley who never won an NBA title. For every Ilia Malinin, there is a Michelle Kwan (a five-time World Champion figure skater who never won Olympic gold, which may also be the case for the Quad God).

A key difference between me (a sofa-bound football fan) and Ilia Malinin (a world-renowned athlete who backflips while on ice skates) is that he has a level of control over his malady. If he puts in his best effort and still fails, he will be able to tell himself that there was nothing more that he could have done. And maybe that won’t be enough for him, but at least it will be something.

It Isn’t Everything, It’s The Only Thing

As for me and every other fan, if winning is the only point of watching, then we may as well all give up watching.

Would I swap one Arsenal title for ten Manchester City titles, because that would mean I had “won” more? The question doesn’t make sense, because I only care about Arsenal.

Another Winter Olympics comparison - Eileen Gu, a freestyle skier (who won two golds at the previous Games), won two silvers at these Games, and a journalist asked her whether she was looking at it as two Golds lost or two Silvers gained. She laughed at his question and proceeded to ‘destroy’ him, much to Reddit’s delight.

I think it was a perfectly fine question - plenty of athletes would consider it as two Golds lost. She considers it two Silvers gained (though I would perhaps say that she doth protest too much. Which is, of course, ironic from a man who has written a two-and-a-half-thousand-word essay about how he’s not that bothered by his football team drawing a match).

As a fan, however, if Arsenal football club were somehow competing in the Freestyle Skiing, I would have no option but to consider it as two silvers gained (second place again - ha ha ha! Let’s all laugh at Arsenal), because, and let’s try and break this down step by step:

• If I only accept winning, then I am doomed to disappointment (as is every football fan).

• If I only accept winning and abandon the team when they lose, then I am not a fan in the first place.

• If I am a fan, then I will continue to support this team for the rest of my life.

• If I am a fan, then the story of the football club gets woven into the story of my life, for better or for worse. In time, the good stories become songs to be sung in Irish bars in Madrid. In time, the bad stories become something to laugh about. The bad times are the fuel of the good times; there is nothing to be gained from trying to erase them.

We are in relationships of a sort with our football clubs, or maybe they are members of our families. And while there are some things which would be unforgivable in these relationships, as in any relationship, losing a football match is not unforgivable.

You can be annoyed, you can want them to try harder, to play better, to wish that they didn’t lose that football match. You support them in the good times, you don’t kick them in the bad times. You give them a hug and move on to the next match, because there is nothing else to do.

Golfer Jean Van de Velde held a three-shot lead going into the final round of The Open in 1999. He hit a triple-bogey seven on the eighteenth and subsequently lost a playoff to Paul Lawrie. He would never finish in the top 10 of a major ever again. You could see how this might crush a man. And perhaps it did, for a time.

But in an interview with the Independent, a few months after this disaster, he said, “I couldn’t live with myself knowing that I tried to play for safety and that I blew it. That’s not in my nature. So I made my choices. I made my decision.”

“At the end of the day, it’s a game,” said Van de Velde. “It’s a game, and I play at that game because I enjoy it.”

Van de Velde also says that golf is not life and death. Nor is it more important than that.

For me, I’ll end with two quotes. First, as either Pope John Paul II or Arrigo Sacchi said:

Second, as Robert Pattinson says in Tenet:

Although, of course, Ilia Malinin has broken them.

When I was younger I wrote a story called The Leaf Pirate Goes to the Shops. The idea was to take a mundane subject and try to enliven it, as a kind of writing practice.

The Leaf Pirate was a character I created who was a pirate. He was also a tree. I can’t remember how the tre…

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Milkman, by Anna Burns

Milkman is a stunning novel about the Troubles, narrated by a confusingly depersonalised 18-year-old girl, who refers to all of the other characters by reference to other members of their family, or to their job, or some other aspect of their lives that is less personal than a name (e.g. third brother’s wife, or Milkman).

This she has done as a shield against the violence of the Troubles. It is easier to say that third brother died than to give that brother a name. It also explains the clinical precision with which she dissects the other issues of the city (also unnamed) in which she lives. She has become so detached from reality that she observes everything that’s happening in a very textbook, academic way.

The best example of this is when she’s in a French class and the teacher asks them what colour the sky is. They all say blue (and start shouting le ciel est bleu!) at the teacher, but the teacher insists it is more than that, that it can be yellow and orange and black and white and grey and pink and green.

They can’t believe it because they are living in a police state (doubly so, because of the surveillance tendencies of the IRA) and believing anything out of the ordinary (“beyond the pale”) would mark them as dangerous, someone to be watched. It is the main character’s reading-while-walking which initially marks her out as one of the community beyond the pales.

And yet the book is so funny. The farcical way she describes the community’s pathological idiosyncrasies. The way that the Paramilitaries are always taking photos of people, or the state is. The way that you can’t say anything to anyone for fear of it being taken out of context. The way the central misunderstanding of the plot spirals out from being a made-up rumour to something that is completely believed by all of the city’s inhabitants.

The style is singular (see excerpt from the opening page below), and I have no idea how Burns managed to come up with it, much less to make it work. It’s written in a way that would get you chucked off any Writers 101 course. Or maybe it wouldn’t. But it would get you chucked off if the people chucking you off were other students who didn’t know how to write but thought they did. I.e. it breaks all of the rules new writers think you have to follow. The truth, of course, is that you don’t need to follow them.

The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died. He had been shot by one of the state hit squads and I did not care about the shooting of this man. Others did care though, and some were those who, in the parlance, 'knew me to see but not to speak to' and I was being talked about because there was a rumour started by them, or more likely by first brother-in- law, that I had been having an affair with this milkman and that I was eighteen and he was forty-one.

The style is the world-building. This is the key. At first, you think it’s just the main character who talks like that, perhaps because she is odd, but everyone talks like that, and the style of the writing is also world-building. It gets across the way the community thinks, which is a unique thing about the community, and helps get across the paranoia.

Style as world-building. Prose as place. Genius.

Reading other reviews, it seems as though many people who dislike this book think that it was trying to be a normal book, but ended up like this by mistake. And if you go in expecting it to be normal, I get how that would be jarring and tough to get into, but if you accept its idiosyncracies you find yourself wrapped up inside the language, which transports you directly into a paranoid mind.

Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir

Wow. Not a clue why this is such a highly regarded novel.

Spoilers abound.

Something appears to be eating the sun, so the smartest minds in the world knock their heads together and come up with a plan. Which is to give sole access to the sun-eating entity to a guy called Ryland Grace, who used to be a research scientist and is now a high school teacher. Eventually, they let other people have a look, but the teacher is still involved and gets selected to go on a massive space mission when the original astronauts are killed.

So far, so good. Other than the idea that this one random guy would be given private access to something that is eating the sun.

When he wakes up from cryosleep, he discovers that all of the other astronauts are dead and that he has forgotten who he is. He realises he is at the planned destination - another star in the Tau Ceti system, where they have detected the stuff that’s eating the sun - and there is another ship waiting there too. It turns out that there is an alien on board that ship, and he becomes best mates with this alien (whom he calls Rocky because he is made of rocks), then together they solve a load of science and send a solution back home to Earth.

At this point, he remembers that before he had amnesia, he was a coward, and we are supposed to be impressed by this, even though he didn’t know it was something he needed to overcome.

The Good Stuff

I really did not like pretty much at all of this, so I’ll start with the stuff I did like. The concept of the astrophage was fun - an alien microbe that eats sunlight. The execution of the concept I did not like. There was one enjoyable action scene fairly close to the end, just before he and Rocky first leave the Tau Ceti system. Most of the other action was boring, and I couldn’t bring myself to care. Oops, stuck some of the bad stuff in the good stuff section. Needed some way of bulking it out, I suppose.

The Bad Stuff.

Ryland Grace knows everything. On the ship, he has a computer with the full breadth of human knowledge, but in pretty much every scenario, he already knows, instantly, what he has to do in a wide range of scientific fields.

• He knows what to do to analyse the astrophage

• He knows how to instantaneously calculate all kinds of physics vectors and velocities (this is his area of expertise, sort of, but everything comes to him instantly)

• He knows how to write code to translate an alien language into words

• He knows how to 3D model a chain.

It’s too much. And it means that every problem that comes his way is solved immediately, meaning there is no effort needed to get to the next thing, where the same situation repeats itself.

Complicated problem, instant solution. Next!

And on the rare occasion where he can’t do something, Rocky the genius space spider can do it. Oh no, there’s no fuel for the return journey. Don’t worry, Rocky has millions of tonnes. Oh no, there are no fuel tanks because we ejected them. Don’t worry, Rocky will build you some more right away.

People talk about this book and the science in it as being like a tonic to the nerdy soul, but I really don’t get that. Its science, sure, but what’s the point of it other than as a factual explanation of equations? The initial calculations can be used as a way into Grace’s character, but to keep them going the entire time when they add nothing in terms of character development or suspense or plot impetus or anything… It feels like a hollow use of scienc-y language that doesn’t add anything to the overall story.

Like if you whooped and hollered because a book scratched your football itch, but all it did was list out a load of matches and goalscorers. Sure, it was about football, but it was also like a reference textbook. There is no story associated with it, so why does it scratch that nerdy, dorky itch? Is merely mentioning angular velocity enough to get nerds off - is that what they have to stoop to?

In France last Summer, we got a sachet of hot sauce that tasted of nothing but spice. This is what the science in this book is like - all spice, no taste. Maybe some people just like to be able to say that they ate really spicy food, but the true joy comes from the flavours that you can get along with the spice. The whole experience, not the spice isolated.

How To Do Science Good

Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson, a book which is flawed in its own ways, has a much better use of science in Navani and Raboniel’s discovery of towerlight, a new phenomenon in their universe. They come up against obstacles and are also both trying to hide what they are discovering, because of the tension between their characters - they are working for opposing sides. The science is exciting, but it also develops the story and the characters as well.

In PHM, Grace figures everything out the moment he hypothesises something and proves it in the next sentence. There is no drama. Nothing to make you interested in anything beyond the initial concepts.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this is the speed with which he learns the alien language. Maybe a day or two? With his magic Fourier transform and Rocky’s infinite memory, they crack what took the entire world years in Arrival. Maybe this language was easier, but Grace is not a linguist (though it seems as though he must be), and the potential issue of their communication is solved like that (I thought there was a finger-click emoji, but it turns out there isn’t, so you’ll just have to imagine it).

The only issue with translation is the word thanks, which Rocky says as ‘thank’ for some reason. A Reddit comment said that this is because in Rocky’s language, the phrase is ‘to thank’, which is shortened to ‘thank’, but that’s bullshit. Bonjour means good day, but we use it for hello, so why would ‘to thank’ not be translated as thanks? It’s meant as a joke (foreign person speak word funny some time), but it doesn’t fit with the supposedly meticulous scientific accuracy of the rest of the book.

Not that there was even a problem of communication before Grace translated the language. They were able to speak perfectly using gestures, because the alien uses the same gestures and mannerisms as a human. Another Reddit comment described him as Alien Mark Watney (the hero of Weir’s novel The Martian), which is spot on.

I have rewritten the meeting scene from Rocky’s perspective to illustrate the similarity between the two alien races.

The alien comes out of his ship and waves at me. Hang on, is he waving to say hello? I’ll wave back. Very odd that we both wave to say hello, but what do I know, I’m only a genius engineer with perfect memory, thank.

So, that’s the story dealt with.

Now, characters.

Ryland Grace is a Gary Stu who knows everything all the time. Rocky is the same, but for engineering. Making Grace care about his school students isn’t enough of a character to make me care, and having the reveal that he’s been given amnesia to hide the fact he’s a coward doesn’t either, because having him forget it completely takes away the value of him having overcome it (he overcame it because he forgot he had it).

The amnesia is lazy and mainly used as a way of having him wake up in a mystery, which doesn’t add much to the story beyond the additional few chapters, and detracts from the overall story because of how it removes his agency in becoming a good person later on.

All the other human characters are non-entities, with the only memorable scene being the one in which two scientists announce that they’re shagging in a way no humans would ever speak (having the alien act like this would have been more believable than having him be Alien Mark Watney, to be fair).

And yet everyone loves this book. Perhaps someone in the comments can tell me why, or how that is.

Maybe the film will be better…

When I finished the 201st episode of the US Office, I paid 99p on iTunes for the theme song, listened to it probably a hundred times in a row and cried for about half an hour.

It was the end of a journey, the end of an incredibly intense Netflix binge. I had lived half a lifetime with these people, grown up with them (them more than me). I’d seen them in laughter and in strife and in paper and trapped in jelly and everything in between.

And now it was over. What else could I do but cry?

It’s not my most impressive Netflix binge, that would be Breaking Bad, which I had completed in ten days just after Fresher’s week at uni, trying to beat a guy who told me he’d done it in a week. That worked out to six hours a day.

The 201 episodes of the US Office add up to 73 hours, so a measly three and a half hours a day over three weeks. To be fair, I was also (allegedly) studying for my first set of university exams. I didn’t do particularly well. Not surprising, given that the only fact I remember from this period is that there are 201 episodes of the US Office.

When the tears stopped, I hit play and immediately restarted episode one. The second time round took a bit longer than three weeks, but not that much.

All of which is to say, I don’t cry at stuff that often. This is the main memory I have of being moved in such a way by a piece of media. I may feel sad or shocked, but rarely do I break down like this. A single tear may trace a lazy path down my cheek, but never a bona fide flood.

Crying as Listicle

Some other examples:

• Episode 7 of Season 1 of Ted Lasso, when Ted gets drunk because he doesn’t want to sign his divorce papers, then has a panic attack.

• Episode 9 of Season 4 of Succession, when Roman has a breakdown at the funeral.

You'll never see anything like this ever again

This year, I watched something which blew all of these out of the water. Spoilers abound for I Swear, which was my film of the year, and based on the real life story of John Davidson, who has Tourette’s.

We meet him before the onset of any symptoms, when he is the star goalkeeper of the school football team - on the cusp of being scouted by Berwick Rangers. After this, he starts developing ticks, first shaking his neck and then swearing and spitting at people.

No one in Glasgow in the 1980s has a clue what Tourette’s is, and the general assumption is that he is making it all up, performing all of the ticks on purpose as a kind of way of getting attention.

This gets him in trouble at school and at home. His dad leaves, his mum makes him eat his tea facing the fireplace, and he gets repeatedly hit by the headmaster and bullied by the other children, which culminates in him trying to drown himself in the river behind his house, where he used to fish in happier days.

Time jumps to when he is 26. For his entire life, people (including his mum) have thought he has been faking the Tourette’s and acting the fool, even when it has brought him nothing but pain. He is on pills which numb him out and suppress some of the symptoms.

He bumps into an old friend, Murray, who acts like there is nothing strange about him and invites him round for dinner, where Murray’s mum, Dottie, demands that he stay for spaghetti bolognese. He is too scared to eat with them and flees after accidentally smashing their bathroom mirror with a spasm.

Dottie comes out to find him and offers to let him stay with her, suggesting that he come off the meds and stop apologising for the things he says because of the Tourette’s.

She gets him an interview for a job at the community centre, which he gets. The caretaker is another person who treats him like a human being, in heartbreaking contrast to everyone else he has encountered. He is good at this job because he is hardworking and kind and has only ever been desperate to be treated like anyone else.

Still, not everything goes his way. He is naive and desperate for companionship and gets arrested while holding a massive packet of drugs for a new friend, but gets off with no trouble, despite yelling ‘I’ve got loads of drugs’ at a police officer, because his new drug dealer pal had given him a kilo of sugar as a test.

He shouts at a girl in a takeaway, and she gets her boyfriend to beat him up. He goes out for a drink with Murray, then gets in a fight and is charged with assault.

The caretaker dies after giving a stirring defence of him in court, and John takes over the job. He goes on to become an advocate for other people with Tourette’s, bringing them together and showing them that they are normal and should be treated as such. One of the best scenes is when he sits in a car with another girl who has Tourette’s and who has never met anyone else with the condition. They sit and swear at each other for about two minutes and then laugh with decades of relief.

Some reviews have described it as formulaic (in its attempts to make you cry), and maybe there are some parts that are a bit obvious and could be described as cliché. For instance, his reunion with his mum at the end (which is affecting but didn’t hit me as hard as some of the other bits), after he has been away for a long time, and after he has chosen not to invite her to his MBE ceremony, where he yells ‘fuck the queen’ at the queen.

He didn’t want to go home, even though he had forgiven his mum for the way she treated him, because it reminded him of the days before he found solace, the days when he was treated as an outcast from society. But the scene falls slightly short compared to the rest of the film.

Crying My Eyes Out

Why, then, did it have me blubbing, speechless on the street after leaving the cinema, and then crying again while I wrote my review? And very nearly again when I came to write this essay more than a month later. Because it clearly sets out to affect you in this way. The first thing that L said to me (after she had made it past the ‘unable to get her words out’ phase) was ‘Why did they have to make it so sad?’

They could have chosen to tell this story in a different way, which would have been less heartbreaking. Instead, they chose to maximise the pathos and show all of the terrible things which happened to John.

But that’s not always enough to make us cry. I need more than just the bad thing, because bad things (especially in fiction, though this is based on real life) can seem contrived, and when that’s the case, I struggle to connect with the emotions the creators want us to feel.

For example, in the later seasons of Ted Lasso, every character seems to have a horrible backstory, and we are supposed to take the expository scene where they explain this as sufficient fuel for feeling touched, but instead, it takes you out of the story, removing the veil of suspended disbelief. It feels like they are forcing it, trying to make us cry without having earned it. It is the emotional equivalent of a pun without a secondary connection.

Fringe Humour

Here is a joke which won the Best of the Fringe Prize a few years ago, but which (I think) is crap.

It’s a pun because Hans sounds like hands, but there is no actual wordplay. There is nothing related to the phone being hands free. It’s just homophones.

Actually, that’s better. That one works on two levels. Let’s try again.

No, that one is still better.

It’s proving quite difficult to write a joke as bad as Hans free, sorry.

But back to the point at Hans. The second thing you need, along with a non-contrived bad thing happening, is a connection to the characters.

It’s why I cried at Succession, despite the fact that it is a show about some of the most privileged, vaguely evil people in the world. The characters had been written and portrayed so well that when the bad thing happened, their reactions were undeniably true to those characters. And it is in that truth that you find the tears.

Spunky Milk

I Swear has both of these things in spades. So many horrible things happen to John, but none of them are trite. Everything that happens is a direct response to the way the world treated him, and it is deeply affecting because of that. He is viewed as something to be beaten, to be hidden away, because no one understands what is going on with him.

So when Dottie and Tommy the Caretaker treat him as a person after he had been cast aside, written off as a hopeless case for more than fifteen years, it’s impossible not to find yourself sobbing on the street.

But the film is also undeniably hilarious, because some of the things he says because of the Tourettes are simply outrageous - shouting fuck the queen at the queen or telling the judge in his hearing for assault that he replaces the milk in his tea with spunk. Then you see the effect that the Tourette’s has on his life, and you don’t know if you should be laughing.

But you can’t help it. Just like you can’t help crying.

Stuff, stuff and more stuff

Did you need to buy that?

We are in the midst of the Autumnal Amazon Prime Day, which features a plethora of cheap deals on all sorts of consumer products. This will be followed fairly quickly by Black Friday, which will have another smorgasbord of sales and discounts.

The amount of stuff which will be purchased over this period of indulgent spending would boggle the mind of even someone born a few generations ago.

The question I have for you today – did you need that?

Even if it was something that you had been planning on buying when it was on sale. Did you need it?

By need I mean – could you have gotten on by pretty happily without it?

Sometimes there is stuff we need, and sometimes there isn’t. More often, there isn’t, but it’s so easy and cheap to get the stuff that it can feel silly not to.

Milk Makers

I’ve been trying not to buy stuff in general, but I was taken in by one of the ads I saw – for a plant milk maker (if I were being a responsible content creator interested in maximising my profits, I would have put a link to one there, but that would somewhat undermine the point of this article).

You put in oats, or almonds, or cashews, plus whatever other flavourings and such you would like, add water, and voila, you have a fantastic bottle of plant-based milk, for a fraction of the cost of a store-bought carton.

My motivation for buying this was supposedly well-intentioned. It would save money in the long run, despite the high cost of the item. And it would reduce the amount of packaging waste I would create. A net gain for the planet.

But is it something that I wanted, something I had even considered getting before I idly scrolled through Instagram when I should have been working and saw the ad?

Absolutely not.

But I could have just bought it on the spot. It was on offer, down to £199 from £349. So I’d be wasting money if I didn’t buy it then, right?

How Much Stuff Is Too Much Stuff?

This ignores the fact that I’ve been getting on fine without one, and would continue to get on fine without one going forward. Maybe it would provide a benefit, and maybe I would use it every day. But there’s a decent chance that I would use it avidly for a few months, probably up to the point where I’d clawed back some of the investment as savings, and then give it up, leaving it to acquire dust on the shelves.

Perhaps it’s a bad example, because the potential benefit would be to reduce waste as well as being a shiny new toy, but there are other devices I could buy which could make me oat milk at home. I already have one, actually. A smoothie maker does the job just as well.

The drawback is that it takes a little bit more of my time and makes a bit more of a mess. But if I really wanted to make my own oat milk, which maybe I do, then shouldn’t I give it a go with this first?

The trouble is that it’s so easy to buy things. And because it’s so easy, we buy them without thinking. Clothes, electronics, toys. And sometimes we do like the things we buy. But more often, and even sometimes when we do like them, they don’t bring much joy beyond the opening hit of dopamine as we open the package.

The quick-to-stale satisfaction of an Instagram like.

When you don’t buy things all the time, as I have been trying not to, you sort of lose the reflex that makes you want to. It’s still there, as evidenced by the milk maker, but it’s difficult to get rid of completely when the entire internet is a glistening avenue of shops.

Everywhere you look, you can buy something.

Nowhere can you buy nothing.

Sharp Objects

An old housemate had a mezzaluna, a half-moon shaped kitchen implement for finely chopping herbs. When he left and took it with him, I was bereft. I had been using it almost every day, and for a while I craved a curved blade of my own.

But you can just use a knife and it’s pretty much the same. I didn’t buy one and I no longer crave one. I could’ve bought one, and I probably would have enjoyed it slightly more than a knife for a while, but then it would have become something I couldn’t be bothered using because it created extra washing up.

The reason I know I never really needed to have one is the fact that I don’t really want one anymore. There will be things which persist in your mind, months and months later. For me, this was a proper kitchen knife (rather than another knife and a mezzaluna), and I recently got one.

So I’m not saying that you need never buy anything ever again. Or that it makes you a bad person to buy a mezzaluna. Just that there are plenty of fleeting desires which will pass if you let them.

The only thing that buying stuff really gives you is a desire to buy more stuff.

April 27

Finally, we were ready to do what we came to Switzerland for - climb a mountain. So we climbed a mountain - Mt. Rigi.

It is far taller than Ben Nevis (about 1000m extra), but it is more populated at the top than most of the highlands. One of the guys in the hostel spent the night at the top because it had taken them too long to climb up, and the cable car was too expensive.

There is a spa town halfway up the mountain, a holiday resort a bit further along, and several restaurants which you can reach by cable car at the very top. Not many people are hiking the whole way - there is a massive stretch where we see no one, with the most remarkable feature being these swinging gates with the smoothest action I’ve ever seen.

The least friction I’ve ever seen on anything - you could push them and they’d keep swinging for about a minute afterwards. A marvel of Swiss engineering. I honestly wish I’d taken a video.

Halfway up there is a self-service vegan cafe, which is a delightful surprise.

We get the cable car down, and accidentally blag a free ticket by showing our Interrail passes, which are supposed to get us a discount. It should have been €40 each, which would have made me sick, for a four-minute ride.

We do a load of laundry in the morning, because the only clothes Lucy has left are the dirty ones that were fortunately in my bag, but they refuse to dry, no matter how many cycles they go through in the tumble dryer, so I have to go out with wet pants.

We wandered around a nice forest that made a mockery of the one in Paris. An actual, honest-to-goodness forest, right in the middle (okay, on the outside) of the city. It should be mandatory for all cities to have access to a forest like this, but we live in a country which has been nature-depleted.

Well, I live in the countryside, which has more nature than your typical city, but even then, the hillsides used to be covered in forest (and now all that’s gone, apart from the rigid human planting used for wood).

L beats me at crazy golf due to an incredibly dodgy rule she invented for one of the holes, and there is a kid losing his absolute mind because he keeps missing. Tears in his eyes, thumping the ground, a good old-fashioned tantrum, complete with the occasional glance at his parents to make sure that they are watching him have a tantrum. When I was little, I used to go and watch myself crying in the mirror, to try and extract every drop of feeling from the situation. This is what the kid reminds me of.

Returning to the lakefront, we sit and watch the birds and the people while having tea. The ducks are climbing steps. The swans are diving. The moorhens are chasing each other, and there is a solitary crested fowl of some sort croaking angrily at its isolation. In the middle of the lake, there is a party, hundreds of birds in a patch of sun.

Back on land, there is a group of people playing some of the worst football I have ever seen. Eventually, they launch their ball into the lake, an outcome I saw coming from a mile off. When I used to play football on the beach with my brothers, our parents would warn us that our balls were going to hit the people around us, but we didn’t have their lack of belief in our self-control, so we continued until inevitably our ball did fire off in the direction of an unsuspecting sunbather.

These guys were like us, but with the strength of adults, and far less control than we had as kids. So the ball was blasting off in all directions, almost taking the head off a woman sitting on a bench reading her book.

In contrast, a group of graceful dancers were boogying to music being played from a coffee van. Swing dancing with full verve on a patch of grass by the lake. What an evening for them, and what entertainment for us. It would be nice to be able to dance, but my skill therein is probably closer to the level of the footballers than the dancers. My enthusiasm is equal to both, but that doesn’t get you very far in swing dancing.

On the bus home, we have a silent disco listening to the new Self-Esteem album, and had a go at dancing after all, two-stepping our way through the nighttime streets up to the hostel. Special moments. Precious moments. The demons of the shopping centre are dispelled by this moment of intense connection.

April 28

We take the train to Lake Lungern and walk around it. It is now Switzerland’s turn to enter the weird non-holiday netherzone that France was in. There are loads of giant dead bugs on the pavements, and the lake gets lowered for the winter, so there are creepy flumes freestanding on concrete where they should be submerged in water. Still, we make it down to the lowered waterfront and have a refreshing dip. A group of kids next to us also go in, and cover themselves in mud. We weren’t quite so brave.

April 29

Train from Switzerland to Glasgow. What could go wrong?

Before we left, a Ukrainian guy who lives in Portugal was shocked by the idea we were getting the train back, but then told us that he once drove 1000 miles into Spain to get a Costco hotdog.

In London, there are loads of people wearing Arsenal tops because it’s the first leg of the semi-final against PSG tonight. I didn’t ask O’Briain for a ticket to this one, but I don’t think he would have had a spare.

The train wifi is insufficient to stream the Arsenal game, so I try and listen on the radio, but it’s insufficient for that too. Arsenal lose 1-0.

Carlisle is about one hour from Glasgow. We’ve been on the train for about fourteen hours at this point. 14/15ths of the way there. At Carlisle, the train stops, and they tell us there’s a broken-down freight train on the track ahead. They don’t know how long it will be before someone can get it moved. A woman down the carriage says the same thing happened last week.

And thus we enter purgatory. 

An hour later, there is a ‘slight update’ from the driver about someone being sent out to move the freight train, and the possibility of replacement buses, which doesn’t seem likely, seeing as it’s getting close to midnight.

Four hours after that, we get moving.

The train gets into Glasgow at 3.30 in the morning.

By this time, everyone is delirious. Sprawled over seats like they’re dead. Everyone, apart from the man at the table next to us, who persisted with a work PowerPoint until about 1am. The queue for taxis at the train station is apocalyptic. People who have another hour left before they get home, at a minimum.

We are fortunate, at least, in that we only have to walk twenty minutes to the hostel.

It shouldn’t be possible for a train to be this late. There should be more slack built into the system - people on call to come and move broken down freight trains. Surely that would cost less money than all of the refunds they’re going to have to pay out for this. We get nothing because our ticket was the InterRail pass.

I wonder how many people this will put off from taking the train. It’s quite a horrible experience, and it would be so much worse if you then had work in the morning. Not worth it. All for £200, probably. So people will drive their cars instead, and the planet will burn.

There are some poor souls awake at reception in the hostel, and they don’t seem in the least bit surprised to see us traipsing in so late. Bedtime.

A vegan McMuffin from a cafe on the Trongate, then the bus back home. A group of students are taking the same bus for a day trip to Loch Lomond. The bus left at 11.20, and one of them claims she woke up at 11.07. Not sure I believe that, but very impressive if true.

We have an hour to wait for the village bus, but the sun is out and the loch is beautiful. A far more pleasant wait than the five and a half hours on the train last night.

April 23

Train day. Lots of planning for the final week, and booking trains home. L starts her job in just over a week, so we have something to get back for now. I booked the trains home for the wrong day by accident, but I think the right day was fully booked, so no harm done.

Holidays are nice, but they are less important than your daily life. I understand L’s qualms about the holiday a lot better now.

This leads onto the first of many discussions about the nature of holidays as compared to the day to day. By the end of the month I feel like we have some kind of an answer to this question - i.e. what is the actual *point* of them? Other than as a reset within the capitalistic 9-5 grind, or is that the only point - but at the moment we are floundering. When you don’t have the fact that it is a break from the monotony of work, what is the inherent value of a holiday?

It is nice to visit different places, and to have nice food from fancy vegan restaurants (which we don’t have at home), but could we do this in the UK? We like nature, and to walk, but we live in the middle of the Highlands so thats the kind of thing we have on our literal doorstep at home.

Like, what is the point in going somewhere just for the sake of it? You do need some kind of purpose, some desire, a reason. Beyond it just being a holiday. To do something you can’t do at home.

The problem with our trip was that we locked in the month of travel without a specific set of dates or plan in mind. And then couldn’t find anything that fit the month. We tried to plan it around my half-marathon and the Arsenal match, but this tied us into France and Spain, which aren’t ideal for interrailing because it turns out half the trains are fully booked. Why is it always easier to see things like this in hindsight?

Interrailing either needs to be well-planned in advance or fully open-ended. Where you can stay anywhere you want for as long as you want.

L hasn’t done much yoga on this trip. I haven’t done any writing. We’ve had too much moving around and on-trip planning to make time for those things. What felt like unlimited freedom isn’t actually what we wanted, and meant that we didn’t perhaps do everything that we might have wanted to on this trip.

Still, that’s not to say it hasn’t been great. Just that there have been times when I haven’t been enjoying myself fully. And is that something you can completely eliminate from a month-long holiday? Or a week-long holiday? You can’t eliminate it from life in general, so why would a holiday be any different?

But back to the train. We have gone from Perpignan to Lyon, then to Geneva, where we bought some wine to have with our tupperware of pasta.

There are some guys playing loud music and refusing to stop, so we move away, leaving our bags on the luggage rack.

Big mistake.

When I went to get some water, her bag was gone.

I race up and down the train in the naive hope that they might have just moved it as a joke, but it’s gone. She cancels her card before they try and use it in a shop at Bern train station. The conductor tries to help, and we call the police, the train security at Bern, but no one is able to (or wants to) actually help. The police station is closed when we get into Luzern, and the bag is lost.

Sleeping bag, hiking boots, clothes, jacket. Gone.

We couldn’t camp due to the lack of a sleeping bag, so we booked a room in a hostel. They upgraded us to a private room because we’d be arriving so late, which is the only good thing to happen. The hostel has a gigantic window with a glorious view of Luzern from up on a hill.

At least they didn’t nick my bag too, I suppose.

April 24

Out of a sense of duty, we head to the police station to file a report. There is CCTV looking directly at the luggage rack where her bag was, so if this were a world in which they wanted to actually catch the thieves, it would be incredibly simple.

We’ve just finished binging Slow Horses, and some of the stuff they do with CCTV in that show is pretty insane. Probably not possible in real life, but if it were, and if they applied that kind of zeal to catching these loud music-playing bag snatchers, we’d have had the bags with us in time to set up camp the night before.

But this is not that world, so the bag is gone, and we have to spend the rest of the day traipsing round in the rain to replace Lucy’s jacket and boots so that we can go hiking tomorrow.

Switzerland is not the ideal place to have to replace a bunch of items, I’ll tell you that. We get a good deal on a rain jacket because the price tag has fallen off, and the saleswoman makes up a price that is probably far less than it should have been. She is obsessed with my Monzo card too, which is the same colour as the jacket, and she says the jacket used to be hers. We got some boots from a guy on the Swiss version of Vinted after begging a guy at the hostel to let us use his account because you need a Swiss phone number.

Shopping centres are a horrible place to be at the best of times, especially when you’re supposed to be on holiday. So many people with so little connection to anything meaningful.

Stuff, stuff, stuff, money, money, money.

To wash off the scent of consumerism, we went for a dip in the freezing lake, joined by one couple who filmed their swim (presumably for Instagram) and some rather aggressive geese.

Relaxed back at the hostel, where we had negotiated a reasonable rate for a lower-tier private room, we chatted to a German biker about the tyranny of tax and the value of decentralised government. I tried to explain my novel to him, but I’m not sure he understood what it was about, and he said he liked making Afternoon Disco music with his Dad, who he has been getting to play saxophone on the tracks.

An American girl who works at the hostel mishears bag as bike when we are talking about the train theft, and goes on such a long monologue about bike rides that we don’t have the heart to correct her.

You win some and you lose some. 

And some get nicked off a train.

?

April 18

Having mocked the restaurants in Manchester where people queue outside the door for Sunday brunch, we find ourselves waiting outside the equivalent Madrid vegan version and have to go and wait in a nearby square until a table becomes free.

It is a trendy place, focused more on Instagrammability than substance. The food looks incredible, but there is an ungodly amount of guacamole, and the matcha latte tastes like cardboard. Take me back to Pasiones.

Not being museum types, we permitted just the one over the course of the month, and this was it. The Reina Sofia, which is more of an art gallery, and houses Guernica as well as a bunch of other Picassos and Dalis. There was also a bunch of stuff by Joan Miro, who at one point in his career decided he was going to ‘assassinate painting’.

He did this by drawing a triangle on a piece of sandpaper and sticking a picture of some ballet shoes at the bottom. That’s like me saying I’m going to assassinate newsletters by emailing you all a blank page with a question mark in the middle. Genius. Maybe I’ll do that next week.

There are people walking around taking videos of the entire floor. Not even just photos, but one long video so that they don’t have to keep clicking the shutter button. What is the point?

Mum and Dad told us to go to this authentic old sherry bar, so we do, and it is indeed very authentic. We find a table at the back and order a couple of small glasses - they serve nothing but sherry. The walls are made of ancient wood and covered in posters from the fifties. The vibes would have been amazing but for the fact sherry is foul. Truly disgusting. Shame.

A trio of Madrid finance bros take the table next to us and worry very loudly whether they should leave their jackets inside while they go for a smoke because the jackets cost in the region of €500.

The plan was to get a train to Marseille in the morning, but all of the trains to Marseille are fully booked. These bloody French holidays, thwarting us at every turn. Instead, we go to Perpignan, which is as far as we could get, and spend the whole journey trying to plan something else to do since our Marseille plans had been destroyed. I get quite angry with the Interrail pass, because the whole point of it is that you’re supposed to be able to just hop on any train you like to anywhere, without planning, but it turns out that is not possible a lot of the time.

We come up with a decent alternative plan, which Lucy improves once we get into the Airbnb.

April 19

The plan is again derailed by the inconsistent French summer holidays. The bike shop we plan to rent from says it’s open 9.30-7. The sign outside the shop says 9.30-12 then 4-7. We arrive at 11.45, but there is no one in, and now we are once again in a semi-abandoned French resort town, where there is barely anyone around but a shop selling fresh fruit.

Who is the fruit for, shop?

There is a bar which ‘isn’t open’ despite the four people sitting inside and the family at a table outside. Strange, surreal, liminal space.

We have a coffee, then get an Uber (why is there Uber here - there are no people!) to another bike shop, where I get an electric bike this time, with a trailer that is much more flimsy and smaller than our previous one.

We set off and immediately lose the key to the electric battery, then get caught in a biblical thunderstorm. The trailer can’t handle the weight of the bags, and the wheel starts wobbling, then dragging against the side of the trailer, negating (and then some) the effect of the electric power. The right wheel then falls off, and I reattach it, then the other wheel falls off and would have gone tumbling down off the side of a hill but for the barrier that happened to be on that corner. There is a campsite in Tautavel, but we haven’t been able to get in touch with them, and it is getting close to the time they say they close.

The town of Tautavel is quiet and creepy and feels like it has been left behind, so our fingers are crossed that this campsite is actually going to be open. We haven’t seen anyone (car or bike) for hours, so it feels like we’ve cycled into the middle of nowhere.

But the campsite is buzzing. Nearly full, so we are fortunate to get a spot rather than turning up to a closed, empty field. Tea is an 800g tin of beans, cold, but at least we found a place to stay.

I am kept up by the incessant tolling of bells in Tautavel, punctuated by what I theorise to be a cave rave, as loud spurts of music are carried to our tent by the shifting wind. When we went to France a few years ago, we were cycling through some fields with eerie music on the airwaves, which we couldn’t place into any recognisable category of sound until our Airbnb hosts told us that some people go into the local caves and blast EDM because the endless echoes really make it pop off.

If we hadn’t had that experience, I don’t think I would have immediately come to the cave rave conclusion in this case, but there were lots of caves in the area, and it sounded like rave music — ergo cave rave.

The rave and the bells keep up the birds, who add to the cacophony throughout the night.

April 20

We walked through vineyards to the Gouleyros Gorge, which is full of climbers. Probably explains why the campsite was so full - this must be a famous spot for it. We don’t partake but have a swim and a read, and then everyone is fascinated by an unearthly croaking sound. No one is able to work out where it is coming from because it is echoing across the gorge, but it is incredibly loud and sounds like an alien. It turns out it is not an alien but a frog.

Tautavel is much nicer than the road we came in on yesterday. There are a bunch of wineries offering tasting sessions, but they all seem closed now. We are standing outside one of them when a man appears behind us and asks if we’d like to go in.

He quit his job 12 years ago and bought a bunch of vineyards, which he runs as a permaculture. Knew nothing about making wine, so taught it all from scratch, and now he makes incredible wine. He gave us nine tasters, of very generous proportions, and one tiny snifter of a 20-year-old bottle made using 125-year-old vines, which apparently adds to the flavour.

We bought a couple of bottles - one red and one dessert - which Lucy was very worried we would break at some point before we got them home. Just about managed it, and had the dessert wine at my Granddad’s 90th birthday party.

Another day at the gorge, then we bought some couscous from the campsite shop, which we had to cook with the office kettle because we had no gas. The owner was very amused by my Monzo card every time I used it - calling it a magic card. I guess colourful debit cards haven’t made it to rural France yet.

We managed to cycle back to Perpignan without any more trailer mishaps, which made it easier to enjoy the magnificent scenery we were cycling through. We played cat and mouse with a cyclist called Mario, who eventually stopped and asked us whether there was a baby in the trailer. I told him that the wheels had fallen off the other day, so it’s a good job there was no baby.

We are fined €39 for losing the key to the electric battery, and the guy is furious with us. You can either be furious or you can charge us €39 for something which costs you less than a fiver. You can’t be both.

April 16

We get the early train to Madrid and early access to our AirBnb, which is one of those tiny, may-as-well-have-got-a-hotel-room places which has one window looking out on the non-courtyard courtyard in the middle of the apartment block.

It would do, though, and we have some wine and crisps before heading to MadMad Vegan for a burger before the Arsenal game. This is nice, but it is nothing on the glory of Pasiones, to which everything must be compared.

Where that was authentic local cuisine veganised in a truly delicious way, this is a store-bought (nothing inherently wrong with this, and they are tasty enough) fast food burger. You get this kind of place for non-vegan food, too, of course, but they are always the least interesting restaurants.

A few hours before kickoff, we wandered past the Bernabeu, partly on the off-chance that someone might be hawking a ticket for less than $300 but mainly to soak in a bit of the atmosphere.

I message my old Bridge Club group chat to ask a former teammate whether his Dad is still in touch with the guys who got me Dara O’Briain’s ticket for a match at the Emirates that one time, but no dice on this occasion.

We were in London for a match against Oxford (they trounced us), and staying at the Chelsea townhouse of our teammate’s grandma. That’s probably enough context to make it plausible that the same family would move in the kind of rich-person circles which could source a ticket for Arsenal very easily.

So my mate’s dad texted around, and it turned out that Dara was filming Robot Wars that day, so he couldn’t use his ticket, which was kindly donated to me. I got dropped off at another giant townhouse and driven to the match in a Range Rover. Free beer at halftime. It would have been a perfect day had we not been knocked out of the FA Cup by Watford.

Back to Madrid. It’s heaving. Real are 3-0 down from the first leg (thank you very much Declan Rice), but that hasn’t deterred any of the fans, who all seem to think there is a remontada on the cards. Remontada means comeback, but as with vale from last week, there is a bit more enthusiasm to it than that, like when Liverpool fans say Istanbul to refer to their 3-0 comeback rather than just saying comeback.

When Barcelona came back from 4-0 against PSG (winning the second leg 6-1) that became known as the quintessential remontada. Real fancy a signature one of their own (they have had a few late comebacks in recent times, but not from 3 goals down).

Wandering around the centre of town, we find an Irish bar which is full of Arsenal fans, although there are a bunch of tables which have been reserved by Real Madrid fans too.

There are two main chants which pervade the evening.

Arsenal at the Bernabeu 
Tottenham watching Emmerdale. 

Which is a half-rhyme, really; and

49-49 Lewis Skelly! 

49-49, I say! 

49-49 Lewis Skelly! 

Playing football the Arsenal way. 

Because the prodigy Myles Lewis-Skelly wears the 49 shirt, the length of Arsenal’s famous unbeaten run in 2004. Classic stuff.

With ten minutes left, the score is 1-1 (4-1 on aggregate), and after a few beers, I am more confident in my remedial Spanish (more so than in my remedial, Almond-based French), asking an open question, ‘Donde esta la remontada’ to the room.

A Spanish fellow who had been watching quite nonchalantly at the table next to us turned to me and said, ‘There’s still time. ’ There wasn’t, and he shook my hand amicably at the full-time whistle.

Standing next to us on the other side was a young guy wearing a vest, who was a massive Real Madrid fan and appeared to have brought a girl to the bar on a first date. She didn’t seem to have much of a clue about football, but was having an alright time. Far less aggressive than watching at an equivalent bar in the UK, I’m sure.

The lad behind me told me at halftime that his two mates had paid a grand each for hospitality tickets and ditched him, which is poor form. Just before full time, he grabbed me by the shoulders and shouted, ‘Where were you when Arsenal beat Madrid?!’.

Thinking he was meaning the first leg (because at this point the score was still 1-1, though Gabriel Martinelli would add a late winner), I start to say ‘In France’, and am going to launch into the story about the guy who punched a lamp, but he looks so confused, and checks the people around him to make sure that he’s not the crazy one before yelling at me, ‘You were in Madrid!’

He’s right. I was in Madrid!

No hay remontada

April 14

All the waiting from last week’s essay (subscribe if you need the context 😉) means that we are able to select a lovely vegan restaurant for breakfast, and we head there as soon as we are able to dump our bags in the hostel.

The food is almost worth the lack of sleep and brief period of bus-based abandonment in itself (again, click the subscribe button if you don’t want to be confused by every second sentence. I’m not spelling it out for you, I spelt it out last week already).

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A tiny little cafe called Pasiones, run by an Argentinian couple (L doesn’t think they were related, but I’m pretty sure they were married), serving vegan versions of local classics. A Spanish omelette to die for. I will mention some of the other things we had there (because we went back every day we were in Gijon), but the Spanish omelette was the star of the show. I can’t conceive of a better version. And it was all so cheap. If I lived in Gijon I would be there every single day, I think. Often more than once. Sometimes three times. Maybe even, for a supremely special occasion, or if I was training to be a powerlifter and needed to bulk up the calories, four times.

Riding a Spanish omelette-based high, we walked down the seafront and into a lovely park. Or so we thought. There is a pond with an island inhabited by entirely too many birds.

They are squawking like crazy and flying around and flapping at each other. I don’t know why they are all trying to live there, but someone needs to tell them they can leave. A seagull is shaking something in its beak - a baby duckling.

I throw a stick at the seagull to try and make it drop the duckling, but it is too late, the duckling is dead. The seagull flies off, leaving the corpse behind. Killed for fun, it seems. We walk around the park and find a bird enclosure. Emus and peacocks and other exotic birds in tiny cages. The emu is emaciated and walking back and forth in circles, clearly distressed. The place is horrible - why would anyone want to come and see captive animals like this? It is disgusting and should be shut down.

When we are eventually allowed into our room, we immediately take a nap - so much for the efficiency of the night bus! (That’s a call back to last week’s post, so you’re missing out on jokes, too, if you don’t hit the button.)

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Still, we are by the sea and head down to the beach when we wake up. I go in and surf a few waves without a board in preparation for the lesson we booked. I fall asleep watching the final round of the Masters, and I see in the morning that Rory McIlroy has won.

Surfing is so good that we immediately plan to move somewhere with good waves. Our teacher is a young local called Jaime, and he keeps yelling ‘vale’ at us. It can mean several things, but I was taking it as an enthusiastic version of ‘okay’, like ‘okay! not bad at all!’

Practising without a board. About 40s in, I get completely wiped out.

After the lesson, we have our second Pasiones meal - tortilla, empanadas, frisolitas (a pizza-type thing). This is a perfect example of veganisation. Food is a big part of culture - and making stuff like this means you don’t have to miss out on any of the cultural aspects of cuisine. It is not mac and cheese without any cheese replacement, as we were served at a pub in Scotland.

There are a bunch of sculptures along the coast; we walk over to check them out and watch some of the serious local surfers on massive waves by the cliffs. I think we would have been destroyed in those waters. A wise move from Jaime to keep us in the shallows.

April 15

The hostel is full of and staffed by people who are in Gijon for the surf season. It seems we have semi-accidentally happened upon a mini surfing Mecca. We knew there were waves here, or we wouldn’t have come, but there are people who have been here for months catching them. Who have come to work in this hostel just so they can go surfing in their free time.

We return to the same shop and hire boards for a couple of hours. I would happily have stayed in all day, but that would probably have wrecked my body. According to Strava, I caught four waves in the two hours, for a total distance of 51m. It felt like more, but if I’m being honest, that’s probably about right. Most of the time, I’d catch the start of it, stand up and immediately fall off. So you can’t really count that.

Returning to Pasiones for the third time, we have a squid sandwich. The proprietress tells us she gets the fake squid from a woman in Vigo, and its incredible. We decide to stay in the cafe until close at 4 because it’s such a nice place, and have a dessert, which she has been begging us to have since day one.

I’ve written about my love for caffeine-free Coke Zero, and they have that in the cafe. They have it all over Spain, because they enjoy a siesta and are also the only country in the world which has realised the caffeine in normal Coke stops you from getting to sleep. They call it Coke double zero, which is obvious and brilliant.

I tweet Dara O’Briain to try and get a ticket for the return leg of the Arsenal match, but he says he doesn’t have one. This is less random than it might seem, because I once got the use of Dara O’Briain’s season ticket to go and watch Arsenal play Watford in the FA Cup at the Emirates. A story for another time.

For tea, we have a salad, and I chat to a German guy while I’m making it. He is a wizard with the foot-controlled taps - one for hot and one for cold. Plays the water like an organ, getting the exact temperature he needs. I say that we are vegan, and he says he used to be, but likes cheese too much now. I want to tell him that I used to be a cheese-head too, but the moment passes.

When you have Spanish omelettes like they make at Pasiones, you no longer have any need for cheese. I should have just sent him this video, but that would have been difficult as it hadn’t been released yet.

He’s been walking The Camino, and won’t stop talking about how much he loves walking the Caminos. He has spent much of the past decade walking back and forth along them, and we have an interesting chat with him about his life. He used to live in a commune in France, where he paid €500 for a hut and then no further rent. Grew his own vegetables, lived the simple life. But even on a commune, there are complicated inter-personal politics, and it got too much for him, so he dipped and went back on the Camino. A young English guy is in the room and makes sure he gets the exact location of the commune because he fancies joining up.

The Camino guy is really into the Bagavad Gita, and reckons that the source of all the unhappiness in the world is that we have forgotten the old truths of the human condition. Or something like that - I didn’t make comprehensive notes on this and am trying to piece it together from the phrase ‘chatted to German guy about the Bagavad Gita’, but it was along those lines at least.

The Camino sounds good, but for now it is surfing which has captured our hearts. Surfing and the vegan Spanish omelettes made by our delightful Argentinian grandma.

Capbreton is a town centred around one giant harbour, and we watch the boats bobbing gently while we have the final coffee of the bike ride. Then we hop back on and head to the bike shop, where we were told we’d be able to drop them off.

It’s closed. The website says they’re open, but no one is home.

I call the previous shop, and they ring around before confirming that the Capbreton shop is indeed closed, just for the day, and for no particular reason. Despite the fact that they should have known that we were going to be dropping our bikes off there today.

My phone is dying, so we need to get something sorted soon, but he’s telling us to cycle an hour back the way we came.

Which might have worked, but we have a hotel booked and won’t be able to get there if we go back to this other town, which doesn’t even have a train station.

This, the man doesn’t seem to understand. Eventually, they agree to send someone to pick them up, so we just lock them outside the shop and post the keys for the locks under the door. I take a video of the bikes to try and hedge against them stealing the deposit, and we run for the bus that will get us to our train station.

It takes about two weeks to get a straight answer from them as to whether we’ll be getting our deposit back, or even if someone actually did come and pick the bikes up.

All this drama in service of the fact that we have booked a hotel in Hendaye for the night. This is the only place, other than the pre-marathon hostel, which we booked before coming on the trip. L had seen it somewhere and thought that it looked really cute and unique. We thought it was going to be our own little apartment, but it turned out that it was just a room in a B&B. If it hadn’t caused such chaos, then it might have been nice, but after the stress of getting to it, we had been hoping for something more exciting.

On the train over, we chatted to an English guy who was super into Basque history, and he excitedly pointed out an old building which we could just about see from the train window. We did not share his enthusiasm regarding the palace or whatever it was, but it was nice to chat to him.

There is no vegan food in Hendaye, so we get a pizza with no cheese, and the guy who is selling us the pizza looks at us with even more confusion than the lait de amande lady from last week, even though he understands the words I’m saying perfectly well. He practically begs us to add some more vegetables at least, and presses several sachets of hot sauce on us. I think he was genuinely worried for our well-being, which is quite sweet, I suppose. The hot sauce tastes like garbage. No flavour, all spice.

A Man Without A Plan

The rest of the evening is spent trying to come up with a plan for what to do over the next few days. This takes ages and is excruciating. Planning is not our strong suit (hence the fact that we had only booked three nights of accommodation for our month-long trip), and it is made even worse by the fact that it needs to happen now.

We can’t stop planning until we have a satisfactory plan, and it takes ages to come up with one. This planning bleeds into the morning when we finally decide to get the night bus to Gijon for some surfing, which is one good idea wrapped in two terrible ones.

The first bad idea is the fact that we now have to stay in Hendaye for the rest of the day. There is nothing of much interest in Hendaye, other than the fortress town of Hondarribia across the water. This is a cool enough town, but walking around only takes about an hour, and our night bus isn’t until 1am, so there is still plenty of time to kill.

We walk out to the marina to try and get some vegan dessert, but the restaurant has randomly decided to close at 4.10 (the advertised closing time is 5pm). I took two chairs that had been stacked and sat down at a table outside, but a waiter came and angrily told us to clear off. A cursed part of a cursed town.

I ask a sports bar if they are showing the Arsenal game, so we watch that with some chips and a beer, and there are still about four hours to kill.

Tabbouleh, tofu and guac for tea in the Irun train station, then some more beers in bars, killing the rest of the time. The toilets have a strange tap, and I realise that all of the toilets in European countries have the taps in strange places. You have to develop a kind of sixth sense when trying to locate it. Is it powered by a pump underneath the sink? Motion-activated over on the right-hand side? Rarely will you get a normal twister.

I try and workshop a stand-up set on this subject, but don’t get very far.

At some point around here, I should change it to April 13.

There are lots of people out in the bars, which is nice, even if the vibes are a bit off. A man playing a harmonica comes up to a group at the table next to us and plays some truly awful music, then asks them for some money, but they don’t want to give him any. Undeterred, he stands there chatting to them for a while, uncaring or unnoticing of how uncomfortable they all are.

Now for the second bad idea.

There are people waiting for the night bus scattered all over the square. Each of them is acting like they are doing something sneaky, like we are going to board a bus to get across a border illegally. We get on and fall in and out of sleep while listening to podcasts.

At about six in the morning, I wake up, and we are stopped at a bus station. Needing a wee, I make my way to the front and get off, but stay within two metres of the door while I assess the situation. This was too far away, apparently, because the door closes before I can get back, and even though I knock on the glass, the driver pulls out and zooms away.

I chase the bus along the road, but it is a bus and I am a mere man, so it quickly outpaces me. I keep going though, because what else am I going to do? I turn the corner and see what I think is my bus stopped at a filling station, so I sprint up to the driver and tell him that this is my bus, can I get on. He shakes his head and turns back to his petrol, and I am convinced that I was mistaken about this being my bus.

I don’t have my phone. I don’t know where I am.

L is still on the bus, and I later find out she has run up to the driver and pleaded with him to stop. We’ve left my boyfriend behind! Please, go back and save him, he’s the most handsome man alive! Stuff like that, you know. But he doesn’t speak English, so he doesn’t realise the seriousness (or handsomeness) of this and keeps his foot down.

When I turn to trudge back along the slipway, there is another man who looks to be in the same situation as me. We shrug at each other, make harrumphing noises in a universal language and make our way back to the depot, where he speaks to another woman who had been on the bus and tells her that it’s left without us.

She gives no reaction, which is interesting, then she says something to him.

I don’t know exactly what it was she said, but it must have been something along the lines of ‘He’s gone to fill up with petrol, he’s going to be back at 6.30, you absolute moron. Pair of morons, actually. If that handsome man is with you.’

My fellow buffoon typed the number 630 on his phone calculator because he didn’t know how to tell me in English, and I went for a glorious piss, safe in the knowledge that I hadn’t been abandoned.

Now, it turned out that we were in Oviedo, only half an hour from Gijon, so I’m sure we would have been able to figure something out, but when its six in the morning and you’ve woken up half-dead on a night bus and you see it disappearing into the distance with your phone and your girlfriend you start to panic (should probably have started with girlfriend there, but the phone was important. The lack of it meant I wouldn’t have been able to get in touch with said girlfriend. Now, you might say to me, why did you get off the bus without your phone anyway. Why was it not in your pocket? Well, I’m not sure, there’s nothing more I can tell you).

Half an hour later, we arrive in Gijon, and the city is dead. No one is walking around at all. And I know it’s early, but it’s eerie how few people there are cutting about. The hostel isn’t open yet either, so we have to snooze on the sofas outside while we wait for someone to let us in.

So much for the efficiency of a night bus.

Next time, we’ll go surfing.

We get to the town of Leon and drain a litre and a half of miscellaneous fruit juice from a supermarket, then try and figure out where we’re going to be sleeping that night. There are a few campsites, but none of them will let us book online. We quickly figure out that this is because the holiday season hasn’t started, so none of them are actually open yet. Why were the ones we stayed at the previous two nights open? Who knows, maybe they’re closer to big towns?

Calling around, I reach someone who speaks perfect English, and they tell us that while their place isn’t open yet - it opens tomorrow - there is a place in the forest that says it’s open. We pick up some dinner and zoom off down a dead-end road to where Google tells us this campsite is.

It’s getting pretty late by now, but we have no choice but to trust the random lady I spoke to on the phone.

There is a sign pointing off the main road down a dirt track to the campsite, so we head down to a deserted farmstead. There is a sign on a shed door saying reception is open until 8 (we are there just before), but no one is around. The shed is locked. There is a nice house in the centre of a large field, and a load of farm-type buildings off to the side.

Movement out of the corner of my eye, and I turn to see two dogs bounding towards me. They are followed a few seconds later by a man.

A man who tells us that they are closed, not open till next week. We look at each other but don’t say anything, and fortunately, the man starts convincing himself to let us stay. It took him a moment, but he must have seen how dishevelled we looked and taken pity on us.

Still, he doesn’t want to make this too easy for us and tells us that the campsite toilet and shower are both broken. We say we don’t care; all we want is a patch of grass for the tent. He tells us again that the toilet and shower are broken, as if any civilised person would not wish to stay at a place without such basic facilities. Compared to wild camping on a Scottish beach, this is luxury, I think. Okay, fine, he relents and gestures broadly at the field, saying we can take wherever we like for half the usual price.

He then tells us he is going for a shower, the cheeky bastard.

Setting up camp quickly before he changes his mind, we head back to the farm buildings, outside which he has set up a table and chairs for us. Not a cheeky bastard after all. Tea is tabbouleh, tofu, beans and guacamole. It is an unbridled delight. One of the best meals I’ve ever had. Taste is a transient thing, and if you’ve been handed a table and chair in a French field, when, until a moment earlier, you thought you’d be heading blindly to find a semi-flat space on the forest floor, it adds several Michelin stars to the tupperware from which you’re eating.

As we are enjoying our gourmet meal, the man’s wife approaches and tells us they are closed. It would have been an incredibly bold move for us to set up like that if we hadn’t spoken to her husband, and we tell her he’d let us stay.

We have no toilets! she exclaims

We have no shower!

This is all fine, we say. In fact, the lack of a shower is quite nice because it means we don’t have to bother with the effort. Not that we say this to her.

No toilets! she says again, looking pointedly at L this time, but L is unmoved. We can handle this.

No shower! she says as she’s walking away.

After-dinner entertainment is a game of rugby with one of the dogs. An incredibly energetic sheepdog, it is difficult to end the game when its time to go to bed. He’s back with the ball before I’m able to get into the tent, and if I were to go in with him standing there, it feels like he might try and dart in too. So I have to kick the ball as far and as hard as I can, then sprint back into safety before he can join us.

When the ball is stationary at my feet, he stares at it with an intense, multiplicitous longing. He wants it, but he also wants me to kick it. He is so quick that a few times my kicks smack him in the face, but he doesn’t seem to mind. When I don’t kick the ball for a while, he continues staring at it, but throws a few sidelong glances my way, to check that I can see him staring at it. Textbook emotional manipulation, and I fall for it every time.

Finally accepting that we were okay with no shower, the woman tells us that it is going to rain later, and it does. A thunderstorm, lightning flashing through the tent with a vengeance. Before the storm, she came up to the tent and told us that it was going to be free, having spoken to her husband and disapproved of his charging us - how could they charge us when there was no shower! I’d have been happy to pay full price - best accommodation of the trip.

April 11

The one condition of our free night on the farm was that we be out of there early, so we pack up and head back to Leon for a coffee at the local boulangerie. There is mention of almond milk on the menu, so I ask for it in French, latte avec lait d’amande. The server looks at me as if I were speaking French.

Erm, she looks at me as if I were speaking German. As if the words I was saying bore no resemblance whatsoever to the French language. And I’m not claiming that my pronunciation was immaculate, far from it. But it can’t possibly have been so wrong that she was unable to work out from context that I was saying can I please have some almond milk? If someone came up to me when I was working in a UK coffee shop and asked for some oh-at milk, I’m pretty sure I’d be able to figure it out. I’m trying my best! Come on.

We stop for another coffee at a place which opened later than the boulangerie, and there is a gang of six old men out for their morning espresso. Just bros chatting. Reading the newspaper, shooting the breeze. Wouldn’t it be nice if this were part of the culture in Britain? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get a tasty coffee out and about for less than two quid? One by one, they got up and left, pottering back home or on to do their messages, buy some almond milk (probably not) or something like that.

Oh, to be an old Frenchman drinking coffee with the boys.

Stopping for a beach break at Visca de Reux, I have my second trailer crash of the trip, but everything seems fine, so we park up and have a delightful coke on the beach.

Four hours later, our four-day bike ride was done. But not without one last hiccup, which I will save for next week…

L has an interview, so I am sent out to do some laundry while she takes the call lest I overhear any of her answers about why she would be a good fit for the job.

Another train takes us to Arcachon, where we hired bikes for a four-day stretch of La Velodysse, which is part of EuroVelo 1, a long-distance cycling route which travels from the North of Norway to the South of Spain (and then most of the way back up Portugal for some reason). There are a bunch of these EuroVelo routes criss-crossing the continent, and by the end of our four-day stint, we are enamoured with the idea of conquering some more of them.

It took a while to explain to the bike hire guy that I wanted a trailer for our bags. They offered a pannier a few times, but eventually realised that I wasn’t going to be able to fit my giant rucksack inside one of them, and went to get a trailer, which one would usually fill with children but which we would be filling with rucksacks.

The plan was to cycle 50k that evening, but after about half an hour of riding around trying to find a supermarket and failing to make it to the actual start point of the route, including a dodgy moment where I drove the trailer into a bollard, upending the entire thing (good job there were no kids in it), we decided to cut that day short and found a campsite next to some sand dunes.

L got the job!

Time for a celebration, but all we have for tea is tabbouleh and pickled carrots (the carrots are shockingly nice to be fair), so we cycled back into the nearest town on the hunt for something more celebratory (and a TV showing the Arsenal Real Madrid game). We don’t find any vegan food - the waiters at the restaurant are very kind and know exactly what vegan food is, but the chefs are unable to come up with anything at all that doesn’t contain animal products. Have a bit of imagination, my guy. We have a few pints and they bring us olives, which is something.

This random bar, which is mostly an upmarket restaurant, is miraculously showing the football, so we settle in with a solitary French guy, who makes his way through a steak, several glasses of red wine, a cigarette and an espresso. The perfect cliche.

When Declan Rice scores his second free kick, the Frenchman punches a lamp by accident because he is so joyous. As he leaves after the match, he hits me with a fist bump. No words were exchanged over the two hours we shared. The ideal male bonding session.

The last time I celebrated an Arsenal goal like this was when Danny Welbeck nodded in the winner against Leicester in 2016. Strange how football can evoke such strong memories. I was in the student union sports bar with my mate from the jazz band, and we thought we were going to win the league.

April 9

The campsite had a shop selling fresh(ish) baguettes, and we took one of these to the top of the dunes with some jam for breakfast.

Climbing the dunes is an ordeal, we did this last night too - but the best kind of ordeal. Burning hamstrings a welcome price for such views.

Next, we cycled the 50k we were planning on doing yesterday which took 6 hours, so it’s a good job we didn’t start doing this at 5 pm last night. If we had done we’d have ended up in a similar situation to the one we manufactured for ourselves in this essay, but more importantly, we’d have missed the Arsenal game.

Last week, I discussed the question of where the inherent value of a holiday comes from, and didn’t really come to a conclusion other than the fact it has something to do with beer and rivers.

This holiday now feels like it has purpose, thanks to L having a job at the end. A sort of last hurrah type situation. I don’t have a job (or at least I didn’t at the time of writing), and what I’ll end up doing instead is learning how to play Magic The Gathering. It was nice being a house boyfriend.

Our purpose is also focused by the bike ride. When you have nothing to do in a day other than cycle from point A to point B, there is a refreshing simplicity to your existence. Anything else you manage to achieve above the point A to point B thing is a bonus, and because you’ve spent the day exerting yourself physically, there is an aching satisfaction to everything.

So long as you don’t push yourself too hard as I do on day 3 of the ride, which gives you a negatively aching satisfaction rather than a positively aching satisfaction.

A subtle difference entailed by the twinge in my knee (either from having the saddle too low, or the fact I cycled 80k, which is the longest bike ride I’ve ever done, with two giant bags and a trailer hauled along behind me. Could be the saddle, could be the excess weight and mammoth distance, who knows?)

I have a note here that says we don’t like moving around hotels or taking long train rides too often, so we should try and limit this for the rest of the trip. This is not something we managed to stick to. Oops.

Anyway, here’s another poem, because I promised last week I’d post any that I’d written, this time about the sand dunes.

So much sand in
My shoes
From climbing this
Dune
That you could build another
Dune

Following the tracks
Of a tiny bird
Over the sand
Why have you walked so far
Tiny bird
Don’t you know you have wings?

April 10

We are sat watching the sunset over an oil rig on a lake with a glass of oat milk. We were planning on swimming in the lake, and our research tells us that we would be allowed, but when there are oil rigs on a lake, it no longer feels that enticing.

Pollen has become us. The trees have been raining it down on us all day, and it covers everything like dust. Normall,y you don’t get dust outside, so this is an interesting development. Unlike dust, it is sticky and doesn’t leave when you blow on it, which is an annoying development. It would have been nice if we could have swum in the lake.

Our ride today took us through so many odd French towns and holiday villages. It is not yet holiday season - it starts very soon - so all of these places are deserted. The towns have a couple of people wandering around, but not everywhere is open. We can get a coffee, but if we came back next week, we’d have the choice of ten coffees. The wooden villages hiding in the forest are completely empty. Weird simulacrums of normal towns, little houses scattered among the trees, with swimming pools that haven’t yet been cleaned, tennis courts that haven’t yet been de-pollened.

There aren’t many other cyclists, certainly not many other people who are bikepacking, but this adds a tranquillity to the experience. I imagine it would be quite different if you were part of a perpetual peloton.

Next week, I will continue our journey along La Velodysse and we will find out how difficult things can become when you are travelling out of season...