I was born and raised in Cobourg, a sleepy little beach town an hour’s drive easy of Toronto on the north shore of the smallest of Canada’s great lakes: Ontario.

The province and playground of my youth. A body of fresh water which President Trump, in a trade-war-induced spite-tantrum, yesterday renamed Lake America. No joke. As you read this, all over America official atlases, maps and geography textbooks are being updated, reprinted and distributed. The old ones are being pulped.

Does it matter? As someone who grew up on Lake Ontario, I think it does. Let me tell you a story that illustrates how much and why.

Our house was three blocks up from the beach. On a clear summer night you could see the factory lights of Rochester, New York winking on the horizon. As a little girl those lights were all I really knew about monolith that is America.

Years later when I read The Great Gatsby, I re-imagined the lights as South Egg to our North Egg. Cobourg was the genteel empire loyalist counterpoint to Rochester’s mysterious Gatsby. This was the late 80s, a time when America’s sitcom-star president, Ronald Reagan, was cajoling our Prime Minister Brian Mulroney to agree terms for what later became known as the North American Free Trade Agreement — a deal every bit as controversial and seismic as Britain joining the EU two decades earlier.

The ladies at the Cobourg Yacht Club nicknamed Rochester the Armpit of the Universe. Unlike our prim and orderly little Victorian town, Rochester was rough and ready, a place where the poor didn’t have doctors and law-abiding citizens were mugged at gunpoint. The school librarian told me she’d once seen a litter of drowned kittens floating in the harbour. My parents blamed Rochester’s smog for my sister’s asthma attacks, and also for the banks of dead silver fish that washed up stinking on the white sand shores of our beach.

Still being Canadian, we made nice with the neighbours. Every summer, the Cobourg and Rochester yacht clubs held a cross border sailing regatta. Two small fleets of day-boats would race sixteen hours back and forth across the invisible border which bisected the no man’s land of our shared great lake. The crossings were timed with a stop watch and averaged out by the harbour master on opposite shores; whichever fleet got there and back fastest won the cup.

On race day, my sister and I would play on the beach and watch our parents’ bathtub-sized C&C16 shrink to a white point on the horizon before vanishing into the haze. For hours there’d be nothing to see but a few bobbing gulls. Then they’d appear on the horizon in the same place the as the lights: A tiny battalion of Yankee vessels, spinnakers puffed up like robins’ breasts.

We weren’t afraid. After all, we’d fended them off once before back in 1812, albeit with the help of the British navy. When the last American sail boat crossed the mark, the harbour master’s fog horn would wail and the Americans would tack and double back on their course, pulling down their spinnakers, beating upwind back to where they came from, the armpit of the universe.

Later, as a brooding prepubescent daughter of divorce, I began to wonder about the state of the universe and my place in it. Was I actually a real person with agency in the world? Did my thoughts and feelings matter in the context of history and reality as I knew it?

I felt like they did. I believed I had something important to offer, that I could be of service and make myself useful to the world. But how could I actually find my purpose in light of my circumstances? There were two fixed aspects of my identity that troubled me.

The first was that I was a girl.

Females, I’d begun to notice, did not seem to exist in reality the way males did. You could tell because of Disney cartoons. Mickey and Daffy were the main characters, whereas Minnie and Daisy were after-thoughts, accessories to the generic mean average of maleness. I only realised Mickey and Daffy were boys when their female doppelgangers appeared. You could tell the girls were girls because they had long eyelashes and hair bows. Their only function was to lure the protagonist off course by flirting. This seemed stupid to me, because it was.

The second problem was that I’d been born Canadian.

All my life I’d believed this was a stroke of luck but I was beginning to have doubts. Canada, as I understood it, was the safest, cleanest, biggest and most beautiful, high-functioning constitutional monarchy and social democracy in the world. But for all its abundance, Canada lack certain things that I loved. Like celebrities, pop stars and world famous anything, apart from Celine Dion.

As a child I’d naively assumed all my favourite TV shows and movies were Canadian because they looked and sounded that way. But I’d recently discovered almost all of them were made in a place called Hollywood.

Hollywood was a place in a city called Los Angeles in a state called California on the pacific coast of the country on the opposite side of the lake. This America was nothing like Rochester, New York. It was a place where the sun always shone and instead of trudging to school in the snow to learn about the Indian Act and the War of 1812, kids drove around in convertibles and went surfing in string bikinis. I learned this from reading Sweet Valley High novels and the liner notes of my father’s Beach Boys albums.

This led to the realisation that, apart from Bruce Cockburn and the McGarrigle sisters, every single album I loved came from America. The same was true of the videos on MTV and the computer games I played our Commodor 64. Judy Blume and Harper Lee, were US imports, just like my Dad’s Chevy. Ditto Michael Jackson, Madonna, Coca Cola, The Flintstones, Dukes of Hazard, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Caddy Shack and my box white Nike trainers. The prairie Laura Ingalls’ family built their little house on wasn’t Saskatchewan but somewhere called Wisconsin.

In every movie and TV show people either lived in big exciting cities like New York, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles or smaller ones like Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Detroit. Around age ten, I was shocked to learn that none of these cities were Canadian. There were Canadian programs on public television of course but they were unwatchable and we had cable, thank god.

So if I wasn’t American or a boy, who actually was I? How could I transcend the cultural stigma of being born a Canadian girl? Did my life even matter, and if it didn’t, would anyone care? I’d probably end up divorced and miserable working split shifts at a call centre in the beach town I was born in. The highlight of my weekend would be six pack of vodka coolers and Saturday Night at the Opera on TV Ontario.

Then I remembered the lake. Our lake. The one I’d grown up swimming in and sailing on, three blocks from our house. The lake had been there long before I was born and would be there long after I died. When you looked at it on a map, Lake Ontario was tiny compared to its gargantuan fresh water sisters. Superior, Huron, Michigan and Erie were oceanic by comparison and yet ours still took eight hours to cross by sail boat each way.

The longer I thought about it the more I realised our big little lake was astonishing and dazzling and important. Not in the way that America or politics or movie stars are dazzling and important but in the way nature, the planet earth and the gift of human consciousness is dazzling and important. Important just in and of itself. Because it exists and it so easily might not do, and that in itself is a miraculous gift.

The lake was only half Canadian but it wasn’t called Rochester or New York or Armpit of the World or even Lake America. It was called Lake Ontario. It so easily might not have been, but it was — and it is. And that name in that moment meant my province mattered, which meant my country mattered which I mattered and everyone mattered. And that’s why it will never not be Lake Ontario to me.

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One of the strangest things about making a life far away from the country in which you were born and raised is the experience of returning home and seeing the place with fresh eyes. I am back in Ontario, my home province, after a four year absence — the longest chunk of time I’ve ever been away.

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When I first moved to London in 2002, I opened a file on my laptop called London Proper. A couple of years later it migrated to the Notes app on my iPhone before taking up permanent residence in my brain where it has continued to grow, crowding out many profound human insights and gmail calendar notifications.

The London Proper List was and remains a point form round up of stuff to do in this beautiful, exhausting bombshell of a town. Stuff tourists ought to do but don’t because they are inherently out-of-their-depth. I don’t mean this as a dig but as a more generalised empirical truth. The fact that all tourists are essentially clueless is an argument for, rather than against, travel in all its forms. Because people who avoid situations in which they are humbled by their own inherent ignorance are obviously the the least interesting of all. Anyhoo.

What follows is the whole entire list (which is massive) but a bunch of top line highlights. I am sharing it out of sheer people-pleasing generosity. I have sent versions of the London Proper to so many people, readers now ask for it by name. I don’t mind! I consider it a public service but this summer I’ve noticed discernible spike in demand. Turns out I’m not imagining it at all.

According to reliable government stats, London is now ranked as the top visited city in Europe and third favourite globally after Bangkok and Hong Kong. This summer over five million tourists will pour into the capital, nearly double post-pandemic levels. And interestingly, there’s also been a 16% rise in staycations among locals.

The reasons why are both obvious and weird. Firstly, climate change has made the weather here less permanently miserable. It’s been sunny and warm, sometimes hot, but a heatwave in London (or England in general) is not like the heat of southern Europe which has become hellscape of forest fires from the cities to the unspoiled (now charred) coastlines. Secondly, despite the post-Brexit economic slump and relentless Westminster despair-cycle, over the past decade this city has become a cleaner, safer, calmer version of best-ever self. Thirdly Trump. Fourthly global inflation. I am not making a political argument here, I am just stating facts. Yes I know London is crazily expensive but everything is relative and lots of previously affordable places are no longer that.

I have chosen to live in this city for most of my adult life. I came and for work, stayed for love and then had children and just got tired of moving around. What began as an adventure eventually just became home. It’s only recently that I’ve truly fallen in love with the place, and for reasons that are counter-intuitively rational if you believe that familiarity breeds contempt. I’m not actually cool, see. Yes I know I look edgy and mysterious but deep down I’m just a conventional middle-aged, middle-class blonde. Never saw a kitchen counter I did not year to wipe. What I mean is that I am exactly the sort of person who ought to hate living in a city like London. And yet I don’t.

Having said that I really do dislike crowds and noise and rudeness and queues. And I absolutely love nature and gardening and quiet and trees and books and cooking and long walks. I am not rich or fancy or interested in rich and fancy things, nor do I enjoy taking drugs and dancing in nightclubs. I have actual relationships with highly ranked sellers on Vinted which has banished the need to enter an actual shop ever again thank christ (those whippety girls on commission scare me). I’d always half-assumed at some point I’d be seized by the desire to move back to Canada or that strange dreamy foreign land known as ‘the countryside,’ but unlike the desire for babies it just… never arrived.

So I am committed to London by default and will stay here as long as I possibly can. I honestly believe now it is the best city on earth, the best that ever was or perhaps ever will be — and it is at a high water mark right now. I say this as someone who has come round to this view grudgingly and painfully, over decades.

Because look. It’s not easy place to live, let alone visit. London is sprawling and confusing. The tube system is subject to breakdowns and strikes. And while it’s absolutely gorgeous in high summer, the lack of air con is a drag. Plus you have to book almost everything in advance through some unbearable online portal. Unlike New York or Paris, London doesn’t stand up with a smile and introduce itself to strangers. You don’t get off the train or the plane and whirl around, face to the sky going, It’s just like in the movies! It’s just not that kind of town.

Instead, it’s a city of secrets, hidden pockets and short-cuts. Astonishingly beautiful parks, charming neighbourhoods and soaring architectural wonders are connected by brutalist tower blocks, gritty strips of tanning salons and betting shops. On the cultural upside the poor and rich live cheek by jowl and while you will get your mobile pinched without knowing it, barely anyone gets attacked here because of all the CCTV plus most people are too embarrassed to make eye contact.

Admittedly London is badly sign-posted and full of petty unspoken rules of urban etiquette that makes absolutely no sense. For instance: Pushing past a total stranger standing on the wrong side of the tube escalator and muttering ‘dumb-ass’ as you pass is considered a far less galling act of rudeness than the crime of standing on the wrong side of the escalator in the first place. Just think about that.

But people keep coming back in droves. Because it’s got all the art and culture and food and drink and fashion and history and stuff. But there is no Disney budget-version of this town you can do in three days or less. The big tourist traps aren’t worth your time or money — you can see Big Ben, Westminster, the Palace and the Tower in stroll along the Southbank. The interesting stuff isn’t impossible to find — most of it’s free! — but apart from Michelin-starred restaurants, West End shows and hot ticket art openings you won’t find the coolest stuff in Time Out, TripAdvisor or even on Instagram. To do London properly you need to ask a proper Londoner. Maybe every city is like that, it’s just that this one is more so.

What follows beneath is an abridged and curated version of my Proper London List. I will add to it in future and am happy to expand and explain and provide further information and/or links on request in the comments, so please do send me your comments and questions. I promise it’s worth your while.

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1. There is only one song of the summer.

2. The first time you hear it you will be in an idling car. The second will be at six minutes past midnight in the sweaty kitchen of a party hosted by woman whose name you forget. The third time you’ll be alone in a remote forest overlooking a sea cliff, miles from any other human being or power source. The lyrics will be utterly non-sensical, yet somehow by mid-July you will know them by heart. This is how you know it’s the song of the summer.

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3. Shandies are the perfect drink.

4. Don’t be taken in by culottes.

5. In late May you will dutifully book a flight to visit your mother. Three days before you go she will FaceTime you to discuss logistics then take offence to something you’ve said and abruptly end the call. Later you will text her to say you are now thinking of going to visit your ex-boyfriend on Crete because you need an actual holiday. She will respond with a large ‘thumbs up’ emoji.

6. Always add chopped dill pickle to cold potato salad.

7. Make sure to pack a second bathing suit. Ideally something slutty you wouldn’t normally wear.

8. In the end you will visit your mother and wish you’d gone to Crete, but understand this is a false binary.

9. Clam-diggers and Capri pants are the same thing. Unlike culottes they are generally okay.

10. If you’re serious about needing an actual holiday, the most relaxing thing is to stay home and do nothing at all.

11. If you lose your child in a public place, check the nearest ice cream stand.

    

12. There you will find a frazzled young woman named Nina. She will have a four-month-old strapped to her chest and a deranged labradoodle puppy on a lead. Your child will be holding Nina’s hand, gazing up at her, blissfully eating the second ice cream cone she has purchased for the occasion while she frantically messages you on Facebook. Thank her lavishly for her good deed. If you have cash offer all of it to her so she can refuse.

13. It’s a crime against humanity to have the windows down while the AC is on.

14. Unless the song of the summer is playing on the radio, in which case it’s fine.

15. Don’t bother ‘friending’ Nina on Facebook. She’s too tired to be your friend. Kids occasionally get lost in public places in summertime. Very soon she will discover this for herself.

16. If you feel yourself overcome by an inexplicable feeling of sluttiness, do not pause for breath. Run straight to your suitcase and wriggle into that strappy gold latex bikini. Don’t look in the mirror. Do a little dance and thank the gods you’re alive!

17. If you misplace the hardback novel you were reading on the plane or the ferry don’t call lost and found. Leave it for the next person. To find out how it ends, order and finish it on your phone.

18. There’s literally no difference between taking a nap and spending an hour in bed looking at Instagram reels on your phone. If you don’t believe me ask a Spaniard.

19. Stop waffling and just have it in the waffle cone.

20. Never tell anyone to ‘relax’ if you want them to relax. Especially someone you love.

21. If you really feel like going: Just go!

22. By the same token, if you pack up in a fury, walk out the door, get halfway down the road then suddenly realise you want to go back? Just go back.

23. No one ever died from acknowledging their own ridiculousness in the moment that I know of. But FAR too many people waste years of their lives trying to justify their own ridiculousness retroactively. Better to climb down, apologise.

24. You’ll laugh about it next summer. It’s true!

25. If you want to take good pictures of loved ones, the trick is to start taking loads and loads of pictures of everyone and everything all the time for no reason at all. Then make it a habit.

    

26. Most of the pictures will be crap. Understand and accept this. You will need to edit.

27. If you take enough pictures, eventually everyone around you will get used to it and forget you’re taking pictures, at which point they’ll start behaving normally. This is when you’ll get the best pictures.

28. It’s not about the view, it’s about the light.

29. If you’re getting in the water, get your hair wet.

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As Near Death Experiences go, the setting was perfect. A vast private lake on an Irish country estate outside Dublin. Brooding skies. A lush forested island floating in the lake’s murky centre.

I was invited to rural Ireland by my friend Marguerite. She was hosting a women’s writing retreat-residency long weekend. I went last year and loved it. This time round was quieter; I got more work done. There were fewer women and the weather was more… Irish. Both of these facts relate directly to how the NDE came about. I’ll get to that story in a moment — both how it happened and what I learned from it — but first I want to stress that I am not, have never been, a fan of the cold water swimming trend that’s swept across the Western Europe in recent years.

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A Canadian repatriated to London UK, I never really understood the term ‘wild swimming.’ But I get it now. Wild means remote enough that there’s no one around to hear you scream for help should you need it.

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There’s a heatwave in London and it’s too hot to think or write or do anything except watch television in front of a fan and slowly suck ice cubes (if you can get them). The secondary schools have closed which means it’s an emergency and my house is full of pre-teens and teen-teens lazing about on their ipads and phones refusing to go out and ordering food to the door and I am trying VERY VERY HARD to be cheerful, which is another way of saying I am offering to pay them to go out for an hour and do something — anything — that is not lazing about on their phones and ordering in food because it will make them cranky.

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The problem with heatwaves in a city that lacks air conditioning is that a) people actually die and b) the people who don’t die feel like they might die and everyone else just becomes irrationally irritable when what they actually are is just hot and uncomfortable. People get snappy on the tube, a faint scent of urine hangs in the air. When helicopters begin hovering overhead, buzzing like mosquitos that’s how you know the murder rate’s spiking.

To avoid getting sucked into this vortex, I got up extra early this morning and jogged very slowly round the park, did a few push ups and crunches on the grass, then sat quietly on a shaded bench and thought about nothing much for ten minutes. It helped! It’s just past noon and I don’t want to kill people — not even the teenagers lazing around my house. Anyone can do this. But if you want to actually be reasonably cheerful and productive, by which I mean do something — anything — in a heat wave in a city that lacks air-conditioning you need to cool down. It’s that simple.

Luckily I have a solution for this too.

1. A cheap silk kimono.

2. An outdoor bathtub.

   

   My method is simple. I fill the tub with cold water in the morning and slip in and out of it during the day alternating with the kimono. Kimono, tub, kimino, tub. Nothing else touches my skin. When the water looks worryingly murky, I pour it on my thirsty plants, rinse and repeat. The fact that the tub is outside makes the exercise especially mood-lifting (because: nature) but if you don’t have this option you can do the same indoors. And if you don’t have a bathtub you can do it with a shower. Or better yet if you have garden hose you can spray yourself down on the terrace or in the garden if you have one. If you don’t have privacy and care about the neighbours seeing you naked you can even do it in a bathing suit.

   A bonus effect of this routine is that any teenagers lazing about will become mortified and leave the house — or at the very least avoid asking you for anything.

   I know this might sound like a lot of trouble but I promise you, it’s really not. You will feel much better almost instantly. Try it, you’ll see. I will never understand why more people don’t have outdoor bathtubs (or showers) for this reason.

An outdoor bath or show doesn’t need to be expensive or complicated. You don’t need to have it plumbed or built in. It’s not a sauna or a hot tub. I am not a fan of the latter because of all the chlorine, churning water, wasted energy and (worst of all) pressure to be sociable and make small talk. Obviously I’m happy to frolic around a swimming pool with friends on holiday like a normal person but serious outdoor bathing, in my view, is a solitary, almost spiritual pursuit. In a heatwave, I generally avoid eye contact.

For an outdoor bath, all you need is a big tin pot or plastic tub, a garden hose, hot and cold water and an extra large watering can. Strong arms help and failing that a strong teenager who wants money can be useful.

I use my outdoor bathtub all year round, by the way, and have done for years. In the dead of winter I fill it will hot steaming water and lay there for hours staring at the dark grey sky and it has the same effect that it does in a heatwave, just in reverse. Instant mood shift. I swear by it. You can’t change the weather but you can change how you feel just by altering your temperature. I mean that literally. It’s too hot for metaphors.

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For as long as feminists have been fighting for equal rights we’ve also been battling each other over the moral high ground. The burning question of what was once called ‘the women’s moment,’ a question that ought to be at the centre of any social justice endeavour (eg. ‘How do we safely affect lasting change for the good of humankind?’), has often seemed a distant, all-but-irrelevant query compared to more pressing feminist project of parsing who among us is the most virtuous and good. Put another way: Who’s in and who’s out?

A stupid, boring question, because have you met women? If so you will have noticed we vary. Quite widely. Some of us are really cool and nice and brilliant and exhilarating and principled and others of us are liars and scammers and drunks and arrogant bores who spend most of our lives acting like total jerks. Not because we’re oppressed and traumatised but because we are actual jerks.

It’s a good reason not to generalise, but I am going to generalise a bit here — not about women and men per se, but contemporary feminism. Specifically I am going to generalise about the latest thought crime against the sisterhood, which I have noticed being discussed on this platform and others. A practice called ‘man-pleasing’ or ‘man-centred’ thinking.

What it amounts to, as far as I can work out, is the act of purposely pleasing men and/or putting men and male needs before our own. So if you are a woman reading this while picking out a father’s day gift for your husband or making a squishy ham sandwich which you intend to cut into teeny for your elderly father or a girl about to smile at a boy barista before thanking him for your flat white: STOP NOW, and consider yourself warned. With any luck you can still save your feminist soul.

For me it’s too late.

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In his 1978 classic, Of Wolves and Men, the American natural history writer Barry Lopez devotes the better part of a chapter to the curious phenomenon of ‘surplus killing.’

Also known as ‘henhouse syndrome,’ surplus killing is a well-documented predator behaviour in which the wolf, confronted with an unexpected bumper crop of easy prey (a coop of nesting chickens, say, or a herd of dozy sheep or even a raft of suspicious interlopers who call themselves asylum seekers but frankly just smell weird) find himself overstimulated and temporarily goes haywire recklessly engaging in killing spree instead of doing what the wolf usually does, which is conserve its energy by dispatching only the prey it can eat in one sitting.

Surplus killing is frightening, spectacular, decadent and spectacularly pointless. In recent centuries, humans have excelled at it (for more information google ‘20th Century,’ ‘genocide’ and ‘mechanised warfare’). Hardly surprising since we’ve been thinking up new ways to kill other animals and eachother since before recorded history began. Things really got cooking around 9000 BC when we began shepherding ungulates and figuring out ways to neutralise the competition.

Animal husbandry + surplus killing = wolves-as-clusterfuck.

Even in their hey day, wolves posed almost no physical threat to humans compared to other wild predators. We hunted the wolf obsessively and ruthlessly, banishing it into near extinction because the spectre of surplus killing terrified us. Like us, wolves are pack hunters, tribal, ruthless killers yes but they are also intelligent, natural team players who share resources with the weak and older members of their pack. They are canny and aloof to the point of invisible. Unlike racoons, bears and foxes, they are not prone to scavenging.

The reason wolves terrified us was more complicated and disturbing than fear of predation. They seemed indifferent toward our complicated systems of organised surplus killing. The wolf was stand-offish, canny, unwilling to recognise our natural superiority. Perhaps it knew something we didn’t?

This air of mystery could be why wolves are so often cast as villains in fairy tales and fables, whereas more common burglars like foxes, racoons and bears barely get a look in. We fear the wolf because it reminds us of ourselves but isn’t us. So we demonised it in cave drawings, verses and song. When the wolf howled, it wasn’t a natural mammalian call and response, but an eery, occult communion with the moon. Instead of recognising surplus killing for what it was — a temporary madness brought on by specific, artificial man-made conditions — we blamed the wolf for revealing our own cruelty and decadence.

Our revulsion and fear of the wolf morphed into a cautionary tale that became received wisdom. The upshot was a centuries-long mass extermination that culminated in near total extinction everywhere except the most remote wilderness.

The point I’m trying to make here is not actually about wolves. It’s about human behaviour and the confusion that ensues when we are confronted with problems in multiple. Like wolves, most of us can make short work of chicken if we are hungry enough. Presented with chickens plural? That’s when things get interesting — and dangerous.

When problems multiply into clusterfucks, it’s easy to lose our way and resort to surplus killing like our wolf cousins. What we must endeavour to do in such an instances is to slow down and use our big brains to break the cluster down into smaller, more manageable, solvable fucks. But when our brains are flooded with cortisol and adrenaline wires get crossed. Everything speeds up, instincts scramble and thinking goes haywire. Disorientated and frenzied, we conflate the unrelated. Triage fails and practiced survival mechanisms backfire.

We hit upon a terrible plan: “I’ll vanquish the lot of you!’

A bit later, we wake up blood spattered, exhausted, give our wounds a lick and limp home, unsure of what’s happened. Unsure of anything really, except that we are simultaneously weak with hunger and oddly devoid of appetite.

If you’ve ever been caught in a clusterfuck and lashed out in fear anxiety you’ll recognise this morning-after-walk-of-shame-feeling I’m talking about. It’s awful. And if you don’t? Congratulations Smuggles, go back to your needlepoint.

In recent years I’ve become a reluctant expert at navigating clusterfucks. I’m much better than I was at resisting the natural temptation to give into the surplus kill frenzy. As life skills go, the ability avoid totally FREAKING in the eye of a pain-hurricane is handy indeed. A clusterfuck can make you or break you and I came close to the latter more than I’d like to admit. Beset by big problems in multiple it’s easy to find ourselves wondering, ‘Surely all these horrible, awful, no good, very bad things are happening to me at the same time for a reason?’

Good question, in theory. We must strive to be more accountable and alert to our many flaws and failings. But if, like me, in times of crisis you find yourself silently posing this question to yourself over and over again like a mantra while prostrating across the blistering hot sand of an imaginary desert? Just stop it. Unless you are the Zodiac killer in hiding, punishing yourself will help no one including yourself.

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Good people get stuck with bad rubbish just as often as reprehensible humans get lucky. Subjectivity precludes objectivity so forget trying to assign blame in an effort to make sense of this nonsensical narrative. The only thing to be done in the face of a multiple-problem clusterfuck is to breath slowly and weather the storm without compounding the damage.

For most of my life I had a relatively easy ride. Of course I had problems, but they arose one by one, which allowed me to deal with them pretty efficiently and effectively. Plus admittedly many were self-inflicted, born of foolishness. Then one day, halfway through my forties, I found myself with two problems at once.

And these two problems? They were BIG PROBLEMS. Unforeseen, world-collapsing, immediately consequential and pressing. I’d never grappled with like of them before. I didn’t know anyone — not a single soul — who’d been through anything like what I was going through back then. Not only were these two big problems attacking me in tandem, they mated like gremlins and gave birth to a nightmarish nursery of baby problems who mated with each other incestuously in turn.

What did I do? I went to bed and failed to sleep. Then I got up and cared for my children brusquely and irritably, going through the motions but failing to give them the gift of my full attention. Then I sat down at my desk and failed to work and cooked healthy meals I failed to eat, saw my friends and failed to laugh, then I went to bed and failed to sleep all over again. For months I repeated this pattern and when that was done, I paced and panicked and wept and found some more important and interesting things to fail at. Most of which involved relationships with the opposite sex.

For a long time I went round and round like this, trying and failing in circles, needlessly killing every stupid chicken in the hen house without curiosity or appetite. On the surface I looked impressively functional, but my internal reality was roiling chaos dressed up as productivity. The best thing I failed at during this extended killing spree was conserving my energy. In the end nature won out and l collapsed in exhaustion. And that is how most people survive their first clusterfuck. I don’t recommend it.

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In the hope you might be spared this unpleasant experience, below the paywall I’ve assembled a short compilation of tips for keeping your head above the waterline in a clusterfuck sink pit. It’s wisdom hard won after all other reasonable routes were exhausted. I promise if you follow it to the letter you will save yourself the horror of accidentally losing your mind and going on a mass murder spree (yes I’m being metaphorical). So if you or someone you care about is in the middle of a complicated crisis, or dealing with any problem however large, small, medium, singular or in multiples, please do read on. If nothing else it might just prevent you from getting shot by the farmer next door.

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The Bridge Theatre’s new production of Stephen Sondheim’s Into The Woods is an extraordinary piece of live theatre. Really worth seeing. I say that as someone who lives in London, a city teeming with musicals and plays. Going to the theatre here can feel almost mandatory, like a visa requirement for residency. Even people who don’t enjoy it (i.e. most) seem to end up in the West End a couple of times a year. As a rule I try to avoid musicals, not because I dislike music but because there’s so much good music out there and most of the music in musicals is crap. If I wouldn’t listen to the sound track why on earth would I pay through the nose to see it live on stage? If that’s too high a bar I give up.

But Into the Woods isn’t a musical — it’s Sondheim.

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My father and stepmother are in London for Easter this week, after spending most of the winter in Portugal. Like many retired middle class Canadians they used to go to Florida to golf in the winter but because of Trump’s trade war they have sworn off visiting the rampaging elephant that is — last time I checked — Canada’s major trading partner and vice-versa.

On their first day here I informed them I had a grim errand to run the following day. After weeks of agonising, I’d decided it was time to find our accidental second cat, Gracie the Stray, a new home.

Regular readers of this newsletter will remember that Gracie came to us quite randomly almost a year ago. It’s a bit of a story, I wrote about it here if you’re interested in her X-factor backstory. It’s quite a tale!

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Despite the fact she was starving, mange-ridden and had recently given birth, Grace was also tame, housetrained and excruciatingly desperate for affection. I wouldn’t have taken her in by choice but once she was over the threshold, it seemed morally wrong to turn her away. At the same time I needed another mouth to feed like a hole in the head. And although we have another cat and I’m the boss of this house, I am not a huge fan of pets in general. I loved having pets before I had children and I will love having them in future, but at the moment only the lowest maintenance creatures will do.

Thomas Cromwell, our other cat, is elegant and aloof. A stone cold vermin-exterminator and the dictionary definition of ‘no bother.’ His Instagram handle is Ratter of the Exchequer, give him a follow or don’t. He won’t care. Like this Tudor namesake he’s made himself indispensable and serves and the pleasure the Monarch. He stays WAY THE HELL out of my way, is what I’m trying to say and I love him for it. He is is the perfect cat. Grace, on the other hand, is a charming, eccentric foundling and waif with Very Special Needs.

I knew someone would love her but I don’t have the bandwidth.

When she came to us I told the boys we could keep her until we found her a good home. Since then I’ve had her spayed, vaccinated, groomed, regularly watered and fed. She settled into family life quite neatly.

But there were a few issues. Grace is a shedder and I’m mildly allergic, so I was forever having to brush my clothes and having sneezing fits. Also, in just few short months, she’d gotten rather alarmingly plump.

Thomas Cromwell, being who he is, has a modest appetite. He prefers to graze, so we free feed him. Gracie the Stray, having survived life on the streets, is understandably hyper-vigilant and greedy. The kind of cat who eats her own feelings. This is the kind of cat I am not equipped to deal with, as it turns out.

As she began to pack on weight I knew I needed to put Grace on a diet but this posed a problem. When I tried to restrict her food to one or two small feeds a day, she’d finish her own kibble, then gobble up Thomas Cromwells, STAT.

Thomas had been quite tolerant of her presence but the Food Situation changed that. It led to a lot of hissing and squabbling. I already have two sons who are constantly wrestling and punching each other for fun. I really didn’t need to be breaking up cat fights on the hour.

Gracie is also a bit of klutz. The sort of cat who clears coffee tables and counter tops with a flick of her tail. As with the fighting, I really don’t need any extra messes to clean up. I could deal with the odd broken mug but the final straw came when Grace managed to up-end a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle my younger son and I had been working on for weeks. Frank was in tears and although it was an honest mistake, his relationship with Grace was never quite the same after that. Nor was mine.

She needed a new home. And a good one.

On top of everything else, Grace is emotionally needy, highly vocal and perennially unsure of whether she wants to be inside or out. What I am trying to say is that although we have lots of love to give, her care needs were just too much for our family. She drunk us plum dry. After the puzzle incident I decided: Enough. And set about finding her a new home in earnest.

But because of Gracie’s peculiar character and history of trauma, I didn’t want to give her to a complete stranger on a random WhatsApp Chat. So at the outset I figured the best plan was to take her to the Mayhew, my local animal rescue shelter. I’d tried and failed to adopt a cat there years earlier and knew from experience it was easier to get a million pound sterling line of credit at a private bank while on benefits. Pet-doting British people take animal welfare very seriously, see. The country that brought you the SPCA, PETA and the Humane Society, plus a long line of inbred pet-obsessed royals, would be able to rehome her properly in a jiffy. This was my thinking.

But as it turns out it’s just as hard to get an animal rescue centre to rescue a cat as it is persuade them to let you adopt one. Bureaucrats like bureaucracy I guess? Or maybe they’re a cat trafficking agency in disguise? I don’t know. All I do know is the place is full of homeless cats but trying to drop one off or get one out is next too impossible. I called a bunch of similar places and they all had lengthy waiting lists too. Just getting Grace in the queue was a bit of a nightmare. I had to do a forty-minute phone interview with a volunteer, fill out various long forms, register on a web portal, upload vet records, videos, photo, and so on. I was about a tenth of the way through the paperwork when I decided to take matters into my own hands.

Then I thought, Anna Wharton!

My friend Anna writes a popular newsletter on here called White Ink. She fell in love with Grace after she clambered up on Anna’s lap looking for love during an overnight visit just before Christmas last year.

Calling Anna was pure kismet. Because as it turned out, Anna’s mother Marion’s dog had died a few months ago. Since then Marion had been missing her pooch terribly and toying with the idea of getting a rescue cat. I sent Marion a video of Grace and she sent me back a voice note saying she was madly in love and would have her. The only issue was that Marion lives in Norfolk, so we agreed to meet on the platform of Peterborough train station to do the hand off the following week.

The boys didn’t take it as badly as I’d feared. My eldest Solly (a.k.a. the cat whisperer) protested loudly at first but relented after getting used to the idea. It probably helped that I’ve been saying we needed to find her a new home from the moment she scrambled through our front door, gobbled up all the food then hid under the couch. Frank, like I said, had gone off Gracie after the puzzle incident.

So as I explained to my parents on arrival, the following day I had to go to Peterborough by train to give a sweet old lady named Marion a cat. They found this predictably hilarious.

But then over dinner, Solly said he wanted to come to wish Gracie good by. I thought about it then told him since he was now old enough, I’d pay him a tenner to take Gracie to Peterborough himself. He agreed, and once Solly was in, my father and stepmother declared they would go too.

‘It will be an adventure!’ MJ declared.

‘Can I come?’ asked Frank.

‘Of course!’ said my Dad.

Solly, being a teenager, rolled his eyes and looked embarrassed, then asked if he’d still be getting paid. I said I’d think about it, which means no.

Then the following day my entire family (save MOI) took the train up to Peterborough to meet Marion who arrived with her boyfriend Chris and a high tech cat carrier manufactured by Tesla. It had air vents and side panels and compartments and wheels. The hand-off went swimmingly. The boys charmed Marion to bits. Gracie’s settling into her new home (see video evidence below). And the best part was, I didn’t even have to go.

We are now back down to one cat, which I think is the right amount of cats. And Gracie is happy. If you don’t believe me see for yourself. Happy Easter everyone.

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My younger son Frank has a new favourite come-back. If I ask him for something, anything, no matter how basic, he looks at me witheringly then deadpans:

No promises.

Funny right? When an eight-year-old boy effects this kind of don’t-fence-me-in-toxic-bachelor-aloofness, it’s hilarious. This morning I found myself wondering, if he keeps saying it, will it still be funny when he’s sixteen? Or twenty-two? Or when he’s thirty-seven and I’m asking him whether he’s coming home for Christmas?

Less so, I suspect.

I once lived with a man who, when asked when he’d be home for dinner, always said, ‘Too soon to tell, isn’t it?’ then strolled out. At first it was funny. But once I realised he meant it, I stopped laughing.

It’s maddening when people are feckless and refuse to be accountable. At the same time, the older I get, the more wary I am about making or being subject to Big Promises. Literally about anything. In my experience, Big Promises are distinct from commitment and accountability, which are composed of small acts of devotion, a day to day thing. Big Promises are like Big Plans. You can make and obsess over them and many people do, but more often than not they unravel to dust often being supplanted by other Big Plans and Big Promises, which unravel in turn, and so on ad infinitum. We engage in these fantasies in an effort to create an illusion of safety and permanence. But nothing is permanent.

We will never know for sure what’s going to happen. We can only trust and hope and muddle along in the present moment. It’s one thing to know this consciously, but another thing entirely to believe it in our bodies. It has taken me nearly half a century to get here, but I am beginning to actually grasp it.

I have no idea what’s going to happen and I am okay with it.

These days, it’s like the weight of three decades of social conditioning has been lifted off me and replaced with a helium levity. I feel a great opening up of possibility just here: under my ribcage, an expansive feeling of acceptance and wonder. I have not found god or a guru or anything like that, I’ve just gone through some hard stuff in recent years and I’m beginning to learn from it. It’s astonishing how much we change and continue to change. I’m excited, for the first time in a long time.

What I’m interested in now is how I can earnestly endeavour to be accountable to the needs of my loved ones without precluding the possibility of change in myself, which is constant and inevitable.

Sometimes, of course, it’s appropriate and necessary to make and follow through on a Big Promise. If a clock is ticking, the more vertiginous and fraught the moral binary. For instance, if someone you love is dying and asks you for a kidney, you should probably give them a definitive answer quickly. But more often we project big emotional stakes onto small issues, creating unnecessary conflict and power struggle, damaging our relationships in the process.

Romantic comedy and fiction is full of trumped up versions of this scenario. People vacillate and vacillate until suddenly they… realise what is they actually want! Now they’re running through the airport! Will they get there before the plane takes off and they lose the love of their life forever?

Real life isn’t like that. Nobody runs through airports anymore, if they ever did. In real life, ‘no promises,’ is an honest, if unsatisfying, answer to almost every Big Future question we come up against. In real life there is only the present moment and we reveal our true desires through an ongoing series of tiny decisions made minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, week to week, month to month and so on. Why make promises when the right thing to do will reveal itself?

Also: making clear decisions about the future in the present is almost impossible, because by the time we get there, we’ll be a different person with a different world view. When we are confronted with decisions like ‘Should I have this baby or buy this house or give my dying brother my kidney?’ The question shouldn’t be, Will this make me happy? But rather, Am I excited and curious to meet the Future-Me who results from this?

‘No promises,’ makes room for the fact that our feelings and minds are constantly in a state of flux. This is uncomfortable to think about but we should think about it. The less time we spend anxiously trying to shore up our false sense of security in relationships, the better. There is beauty and pleasure to be had in the not-knowing-ness. In the uncertain and ephemeral. I promise you.

In a recent post on marriage and monogamy, Miranda July set out her revised-midlife post-divorce view on love and commitment:

“Romantic relationships,” she writes, “are usually not supposed to be lifelong, but rather a season of a particular length, to be determined. People default to ‘lifelong’ in part because it can be really hard to trust your gut about the length of the season. Some relationships only last a few weeks (or a night) but you spend the rest of your life using things you learned from them. No length is better or more profound than any other length. But knowing the right length isprofound, letting relationships change and perhaps even come back as friendships, is very meaningful. My very best man-friend was once my worst boyfriend.’

A season of a particular length is a beautiful, I think. A romantic and optimistic way of saying ‘no promises.’

The fact is, most of us go through our waking lives feeling a mixture of emotions about everything. This ambivalence extends to include even the people and things we are most committed to. In the course of any given day, I love my sons so badly I would happily die for them AND I am also convinced I will die if I don’t find a way to get away from them. Am I committed to them? Of course.

Ambivalence is not antithetical to enduring love and commitment, it is literally baked into the equation. The struggle, I suppose, lies in figuring out how to live with it, by which I mean learning how to balance out our own needs while endeavouring to meet the needs of our loved ones. In the meantime, enjoy the season while it lasts. Summer is just around the corner.

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I recently did a podcast interview I should not have. It had a cringe title and a middle-aged-womany theme based on a negative assumption I found reductive.1 I won’t mention here because I’m going to have a long bitch about the experience. The interview wasn’t adversarial or offensive, it just wasn’t my vibe.

Vibes are important. I should have said ‘no’ but I didn’t. Why? Because I’m a people-pleaser-validation-junkie-idiot who says ‘yes’ then feels resentful for days afterward. Also I’m a deeply flawed person.

But like many unpleasant experiences, it got me thinking. What makes one interview better than another?

It’s the interviewer stupid.

There’s a reason good chat shows and interview podcasts tend to built around the personality and charisma of the host, no matter how glamorous and/or powerful the guests are — a good interviewer sets the tone. And a great interviewer makes posing a series of questions looks effortless, whether the interview is adversarial/political or talk show/pop-cultural. Interviewing, like writing a book, is one of those things over-confident people assume they’ll be good at because it’s a formalised version of a skill they already possess and use on a daily basis (I can write sentences, why not a novel? I chat to strangers, why not host a podcast?). But of course it’s much more than that. A well-executed interview takes practice and skill. But unlike books, bad interviews are easy to produce and publish. And because of this they are everywhere.

Interviewing is an art. Everything else is just content production.

So this middle-aged womany podcast host, I will give her one thing. She was tenacious and pushy as fuck. She did not give up. She was, in legacy media terms, an excellent chase producer. She applied consistent pressure, kept following up and calling and emailing and at a certain point it just felt more exhausting for me not to do the interview than to do it and be done with it. So I did then regretted it. I’ll get to precisely why in a moment.

I worked as a journalist for a very long time and have interviewed lots of people on various formats, lots of them famous, important and/or difficult or evasive, and I’ve done so on tight deadlines. Because of this I recognised pretty quickly this interviewer had no idea what she was doing. Like she really did not. I didn’t even mind that so much. What I did mind was that she did not do any of the very basic things that would have made the hourlong (!) experience of being interviewed much more pleasant for everyone involved, most importantly her audience (assuming there is one).

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In advance of the interview she marketed herself heavily — endless numbers and metrics implying she was HUGE when we both knew she wasn’t Oprah. Then when we got on the line she asked whether I’d had a chance to listen to the other episodes of her in the back catalogue. I confessed I had not. She seemed a bit miffed, which was a bit ridiculous in light of the fact I was giving her my time for free. But whatever.

Things went from bad to worse when the we started recording. It was at this point I realised she’d not bothered to read anything I’d written. She’d read about me, however, and told me so with a smile. But Googling your interview subject isn’t research. As far as I could tell she knew nothing about me beyond my (error-ridden) Wikipedia page, and because of this her questions were boiler plate, vague. The interview was dull because it lacked the single essential ingredient that the interviewer is solely responsible for adding to the mix: Curiosity.

She then asked me to send her 5-6 photographs of myself in jpeg format as well as a bio/CV she needed ‘in order to promote the show.’ I said sure then forgot all about it. She followed up with email reminders requesting the materials which, when I paused to consider it, was sort of staggering given that my bio is a matter of public record and there are many pictures of me on the internet.

I know I’m being a bit petty, but honestly! What kind of host asks their guest to do their work for them then acts put out when they refuse to do so? To be charitable, I think it’s indicative of the strange times in which we we live that this host seemed to be confused about the roles of interviewer and interview subject. (Like an actors and directors, the subject’s job is to simply show up on time, hit their mark and bark. A good interviewer should be in charge of absolutely everything else.)

Instead she kept proudly emphasising the casual nature of her style. ‘I don’t do formal interviews,’ she said. ‘I prefer to just have conversations.’

It’s a great line! I’ve used it too, both as an interviewer and a guest. Calling an interview a conversation is an easy way to establish an immediate sense of intimacy. I actually learned it from Nigella Lawson who used the line on me when I was a nervous young reporter and it instantly put me at ease and made me warm to her.2

But here’s the thing: It’s a flattering lie.

Clearly an interview is not a casual conversation! It’s structured and organised and public. The roles are crystal clear. The interviewer asks questions, the subject answers them. Have we really reached a place in the social mediasphere where this is no longer obvious?

Look I get that we’re all a bit lost in the shifting sands of this new digital landscape. Apart from Trump and K-Pop it’s hard to know who’s ‘big’ anymore, hard to tell a celebrity from a public figure or a leader or a guy at the bar. Everyone is interviewing everyone else on every imaginable platform.3 But one this is clear: interviewer and subject are two very different roles and it’s essential to understand the difference if you want to interview someone properly. My recent podcast host did not seem to get this. And judging by the number of people GOING LIVE to have dull conversations, I think many interviewers also don’t.

I am going to stop griping now and dispense some practical advice. What follows are thirteen basic rules for conducting a good interview.

I urge you to read them if you are planning to interview or be interviewed by someone, about anything, anywhere on any platform literally ever. You can also read them if you happen to be wondering why so many interviews these days suck.

But if you have an interview podcast, for the love of god and your audience please consider my taking my advice. Yes of course it’s behind a paywall. I’m sorry, I need money, don’t hate me, I love you. Okay, here goes:

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I have never understood how to do Mother’s Day right, as a daughter, a mother or wife. It’s the most confusing day of the year. The whole thing feels cruel and wrong somehow. There just something off about it, don’t you think? And as it turns out, this is for good reason because no one seems to know what it’s for. If anything it’s a day of ambivalence, a distorted tradition untethered to meaning or purpose. One thing it is definitely not about is celebrating mothers. Seriously. Let me explain.

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Look I don’t love the term either. People keep telling me to stop saying it and yes, okay, I get why it grates. Why should guys like that get credit for being stalwart, stoic, gritty or any version of tough when they are obviously erratic imbeciles lurching from one gratuitous photo op and self-serving untruth fest to the next? The legit rich one is obsessed with Batman for chrissake. I know this because Jill Lepore was talking about it on BBC Radio Four. Jill fucking Lepore! I’m not judging her — she can talk about what she wants — but it depresses me that the best journalistic minds of my generation are being forced to contend with such substandard material, sifting the ashes for meaning when all the available signs point to chaos and farce.

But I will keep saying it, because I believe in calling it as it is not as I want it to be: These guys are literally in charge. But also because they operate from a tactical advantage that is virtually unassailable and ignored at our peril. When you come out flailing like a toddler with an actual live-prop-toddler on your shoulders and confuse everyone with chaos, nonsense and lies, you don’t just change the rules of the game, you upend the table. Your opponent is like, Wait, wha? and by time they regroup and think of an appropriate corresponding move, it’s too late. The board’s on the floor, along with the snacks, the mugs, the teapot, the playing bits are scattered round the room. The rules of engagement haven’t just been redrawn, as we are all now well aware: there literally are no rules. As anyone who’s parented a toddler well knows, no matter how weak, illiterate, impulsive and shit-smeared your opponent is, if he’s willing to deploy mayhem in order to get what he wants, you lose by default. There’s no game anymore, it’s just a fight for a knife in the mud.

And Strongmen will always win that kind of fight.

My Uber driver the other night, apropos of nothing: ‘You know, I think he’s not so bad. He’s going to make peace in the Middle East and Ukraine, who wouldn’t want that?’

‘Dude, you literally just told me you’re from Yemen!’

(There was traffic. We’d been talking for a while.)

‘Via Saudi Arabia,’ he said.

Then I remembered he was a dental student driving his brother’s Merc. Leather seats, blue light detailing. I fell silent. Confused. He’d mistaken me for American and when I set him straight he’d apologised so profusely and with such utter disingenuousness I understood that really, at bottom, he was just a kid from Wembley Central the same way I’m from Kensal Rise. And we shared a hollow laugh, two immigrants marvelling at the weirdness of the world. How the hell did we end up here together? In a car inching east along the Harrow Road at night. What a world.

I am going through demented and dispiritingly complicated and painful court case at the moment. I don’t write about it here because I’ve spent years hiving myself off from it emotionally in order to function like a human being, but man. If I have learned one thing it is this: Bullies do need standing up to in the end, but it’s important to bide your time and when you pick your moment — strike fast and hard. Bullies learn this lesson young. For the rest of us it takes years to sink in but when it does, it sticks.

Another hard won lesson from the trenches: When you are forced into a back-footed battle on outrageous terms you did not set in order to simply ensure the safety and survival of yourself and your children, you can’t actually win. The only aim is to regress to the mean of safety. When your opponents’ only real goal is inflicting pain through chaos, they cannot fail to win.

The pressure on the aggressed faction to concede stolen territory in order to ‘make a deal,’ is almost impossible to withstand. And the ruinously expensive expert advice is always the same: Keep on fighting! You’re in the right! Fling that last brick!

In retrospect, it’s rarely good advice. But you can’t prove a counter-factual, in for a penny and all that. In truth, the longer you do battle with Crazy, the weaker your position becomes. And soon all anyone can remember about any of it is that you’re fighty and messy and possibly a bit crazy yourself. And the longer and harder you slog on in that particular trench, the more truthy the liar’s song becomes. And eventually you will actually go crazy fighting with Crazy (seriously, just try it for a lark) and before you know it you’re conceding stolen territory like it’s sharesies because the general consensus is: A pox on the both of you. Lower your weapons, boys. Kissy-kiss and make up.

The one thing you can do is cultivate calmness of mind. It really is the jewel of human experience and I promise you have what it takes. A subtle shift of the lens changes the landscape from every angle. So when the world is on fire but you are safe and warm in you house remember: Your purposeless panic and suffering helps no one. Nothing good will come of it. Remember: This is not happening to you — and that’s reason to celebrate, not tear out your hair while scrolling your phone.

And one more thing about battles: when the judge — or the Uber driver — or whoever takes the view that you are, in fact, the architect of your own misery, there no point shouting your truth to the wind. Doesn’t matter how true your truth is, no one will hear it. Once the story’s irretrievably torqued, it doesn’t matter what actually happened. All that matters then is that everyone’s too exhausted now to remember or care. The time for backwards math has passed. This is how Strongmen win. Not by displays of courage or valour but by weakening the opponent through endless cycles of confusion and ultimately, despair. Despair is the real enemy we have to contend with.

Don’t give in, don’t give way.

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My first friend in London was Zara. She wrote the diary column for the Daily Express, which is a polite way of saying she was a gossip columnist. When I arrived she let me sleep on the sofa of her North London studio. One night she took me out to a party in Knightsbridge. Some sort of launch or private view. Doesn’t matter. On arriving, Zara’s eyes lit up scanning all plain clothes security and idling sedans. Then she nudged me in the ribs and whispered, ‘Four o’clock.’

Lo, the sea of Whistles frocks parted and there he was: A short, paunchy royal Prince. The Real McBatten, holding court in his natural habitat, the naughty corner.

Zara and I watched him for a while. Everyone in the room was watching him or pretending not to. The divorced Duke delivered.

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A couple of weeks ago, after a small dinner party, a girlfriend left her umbrella at my house. She is a freelance writer in her early thirties and, like me, a foreigner. Unlike me, however, she is from southern Europe and has limited experience of the elements. When I saw the umbrella, I noticed it was expensive, high quality and I thought, How lovely, an unexpected hostess gift.

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This was not selfish of me but perfectly culturally acceptable, especially in London where umbrellas are generally regarded as disposable. If you are silly or rich enough to buy a good one, you WILL lose it (as with sunglasses, the only kind you are guaranteed to keep forever are the cheap ones you bought in a train station pharmacy, which will break after five minutes). As a native Canadian, I have also understood from birth, that any inclement weather garment or accessory left behind anywhere is essentially finders-keepers, no matter the cost or sentimental value.

Umbrellas, contrary to popular belief, were not designed to keep humans beings dry. It’s odd they continued to be marketed for this purpose because as anyone who has ever used one well knows, they fail miserably in most conditions, i.e. if there is even the slightest breeze and/or puddles. Umbrellas are handy for detaching the retinas of passing tourists on the pavement, but their primary purpose, I suspect, is to make grumpy people absolutely miserable so British publicans can survive by recouping winter their losses over three days in mid-March when the sun comes out again. Apart from that they serve absolutely no purpose — except as unexpected hostess gifts.

However, my friend, being a young foreigner on a budget, was unaware of this.

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Exhibit A: Cat

I went to a high school for the performing arts in Toronto in the late 90s. There was this dance major in my year, Crysta. We called her Cat. Asian-Latino, ferociously talented, ambitious, gorgeous, thick-muscled body like a puma. Great tits.

Cat founded an all female funk dance troupe and choreographed numbers to James Brown and the Rolling Stone’s Brown Sugar. They performed to standing ovations at every school assembly, which really did take the edge off all the dreary War on Drugs and AIDS prevention workshops, during which we were handed free condoms and dental dams, given maps of where to find the closest clean needle exchange, then counter-intuitively instructed to remember that ‘abstinence is always the best policy.’

Cat’s dance shows were so good the teachers (mostly failed actors, musicians and dancers themselves) couldn’t really complain about the ethics of watching fifteen year old girls grinding it up in torn fishnets and leather playsuits jiggling side boob and muffin top. In her final year, Cat surprised no one by landing a place in the Alvin Ailey Academy Company in New York City. The cheer that went up for her when she strutted across the stage at graduation was deafening. She was our Beyonce at the Super Bowl, off to make it big on Broadway, or wherever the modern dance theatres were.

Turns out there weren’t many left. She got cut within a year.

Then in ‘99, I was working at a paper and got offered box tickets to see the Raptors play the Nicks at the Air Canada Centre. At half-time, there she was: The Cat, ferocious as ever, twerking her thing, holding up the bottom of a pyramid of blonde blue eyed twiglets of diminishing proportion. Even in a stadium, cheering on the warriors, it was a joy to watch her dance. I could still see the funk choreographer under the flippy poly-cotton skirt and sequined bra top. The spaghetti straps that contained the breasts that soiled a thousand goat-scented teen boy Star Wars duvets in North Toronto from ‘92-94. She wasn’t going to be Martha Graham or Twyla Tharp but I could still see all the drive and desire throbbing under the glitter gloss smile, the fake lashes, the rote pom-moves (omg the indignity of Cat doing jazz hands, the literal horror!) But whatever. She was so much better than the rest of them but instead of drawing attention to her star power she used it to raise and elevate her cheering troop. It was a decent gig and she needed a gig. She was dancing for an audience like she was born to do.

I pointed Cat out to one of the suits in the champagne box and said, ‘I used to go to high school with her.’ He said she was a real firecracker. Then said he’d heard she was in an off-on-thing with a second-string sub point guard. Good for her, I thought.

A few months later I ran into Cat in the wee hours at a techno club toilet in the industrial district of Toronto. We were both a bit drunk. Maybe a lot. She was still feline but less puma, more Chinatown alley mog. Skinny as a rail, white cut-offs hanging off tortured hip bones, mascara bleeding. She showed me a scar on her leg, said she’d torn something (a meniscus? achilles?) a few months into rehearsals last season. We both cried a bit, said we loved and missed each other like crazy like all stupid drunk girls do at 4 am toilets. I gave her my card and told her to call me. She never did. Not long after I heard she went to rehab for cocaine.

The last thing I heard about Cat was from a labour lawyer who’d gone to my high school. We bumped into each other at some party and he said he’d recently been to The Brass Rail strip club on Dundas and seen The Cat on stage dancing. I asked how she seemed. He shrugged.

‘Fine,’ he said with a neutral expression. ‘I mean just like you’d imagine.’

After a pause he added, ‘She was naked obviously.’

‘Yeah I got that,’ I said.

A particular kind of awkward silence ensued. It reminded me of the moment my Mum would pick me up from my Dad’s in the years after the divorce. Even though they were polite to each other, I felt like I had to pick a side, but any side meant crossing the floor. I didn’t want to say anything to betray Cat nor did I want to seem defensive because that seemed patronising and weird. The lawyer was a nice guy, not a frat bro type. He’d been a split drama-tuba major. So I asked him the only thing I could think of.

‘What’s her song?’

‘George Michael’s Careless Whisper.’

I nodded and smiled. He said something about getting another drink and moved back into the crowd. Something about Cat choosing that song comforted me. The sad sweetness of it. I imagined her slithering round the pole, whipping her hair extensions over her haunted eyes. I wondered if she did lap dances. Private VIP rooms had just become a big thing in Toronto and Montreal. I mean probably. Obviously she did. What was wrong with it? Her body, her choice.

Exhibit B: Roxy’s Mom

Toronto, 2000, Trinity Bellwoods Park.

It’s five pm on a Thursday and I am shivering in the off-leash area of the dog park sharing a cigarette with a pop singer called Mel. She’s famous in a Toronto famous way. Like Canadian charts, Junos not Grammies. We’re not friends exactly but we kind of are because we walk our dogs at the same time in the same place and our dogs are in dog love with each other and because of that we often get to chatting. Today is like every other day in January. We’re both wearing parkas and Kodiaks, cursing the Canadian weather.

After a few minutes, another young ‘dog mother’ our age joins us. She’s tall blonde and pretty in a Canada Goose puffer, owns a semi-deranged schnauzer poodle-cross named Roxy.

‘Hey,’ we all say.

‘How’s work?’ Roxy’s Mom says.

This is kind of a weird question because not only do we not officially know each other’s real names, we don’t actually officially know what each other’s jobs are, except I do know Mel is a singer because she’s a bit famous and I’m a journalist but I’ve never actually mentioned this out loud. It’s entirely unclear to me in this moment if Roxy’s Mom knows it.

‘Pretty slow,’ I say.

‘January’s the worst,’ says Mel. ‘This fucking recession.’

‘Yeah,’ Roxy’s Mom says. ‘I haven’t worked in like over eight months. Not a single booking. My agent just dumped me.’

‘Dude, sorry to hear that,’ Mel says with genuine sympathy, then adds, ‘Agents are total cunts. I totally feel you man.’

I am beginning to work out that Roxy’s Mom is some kind of model-slash-actress and because Mel is pretty and talking about agents, I am starting to realise Roxy’s Mom thinks maybe they are in the same industry, which they sort of are if you use the umbrella term ‘show biz.’ I am also wondering if Roxy’s Mom assumes that I too work as a performer, which I obviously don’t, although in a way I sort of do have a kind of public job because I write a column in a newspaper, but this level of Toronto fame is much nerdier and more niche than the pop singer fame Mel has.

At this point Roxy’s Mom reaches into the pocket of her coat and pulls out two business cards and gives one to each of us. It’s the name of an agency embossed in gold and a phone number.

‘I’ve been doing a bit of work for these guys,’ she says. ‘Pay’s decent — thousand bucks a night cash. You just go out for dinner at fancy restaurants with Japanese business men. Half the time they don’t even speak English. It’s kind of hilarious once you get over the weird awkwardness.’

I laugh in a panicked, haven’t we all been there kind of way. From under the hood of her parka Mel shoots me a poison look. An awkward silence descends.

‘It’s just for now,’ Roxy’s Mom says quickly. ‘I mean, you don’t have to do anything more than that if you don’t want. The men are all super polite and it’s really easy work. Plus the perks are great. Ha!’ She hesitates, flushes. ‘I mean the cocktails and the food, obviously. Most of the restaurants are Michelin-starred.’

Mel is now staring at Roxy’s Mom with chilling concern that verges on haughtiness. Then she says, ‘You know I’m a singer-writer, right?’

Roxy’s Mom steps back startled, then squints at Mel and looks like she might die of shame. Watching her beautiful pixie perfect face collapse I feel like laying down on the ground and pushing my whole head into a snowbank.

‘No. I’m so sorry. Wait. Are you —’ Roxy’s Mom begins but before she can say the name, Mel hands the card back then turns and walks away without a word, calling her rescue dog over her shoulder.

Roxy’s Mom winces and looks at the ground then says, ‘I mean, there are worse things right?’

‘Yes,’ I tell her. ‘Definitely.’

‘Really? Like what?’

I think for a bit. ‘I once waitressed for a summer at this patio bar down by the docks where they had a ‘Spring Break Event weekend’ and brought in hot tubs and fake sand and made all the waitresses play beach volleyball for tips.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Also I went to theatre school and had an acting agent in my teens and once, at the age of sixteen, I auditioned for a Moose Head beer commercial where we were told in advance to wear tight tank tops. The casting director got us to slate ourselves and then just like… jump up and down for two minutes.’

‘With or without a bra on?’

‘With.’

‘Did you get the part?’

‘No.’

‘Yeah that’s worse.’

Exhibit C: Layla

Early 2000s, Toronto.

My gym friend Layla works as a booking producer at MuchMusic, Canada’s version of MTV. We do spin class together on Tuesday and Thursday nights. She went to the same university as me and studied English but she’s a couple of years younger. She’s zippy and zingy with punky-wild style. She tells me crazy stories about the pop stars she handles before interviews, the weird shit on their green room riders. Sometimes when one of the presenters is off, she fills in on air doing vox pops. She wants to work her way up to being a VJ, then after that a news anchor and a proper on air reporter at one of the major American news networks. She asks me why I don’t apply to be a foreign correspondent at the paper I work for, go cover the war in Afghanistan or something exciting like that? I tell her I’d miss my boyfriend too much. Plus I’m a coward. Plus I’d miss spin class and yoga and sushi. Also I want to write a novel, I’m not sure about what.

Layla and I read the same books, mostly fiction, and we talk about them at dinner after spin class and then talk about starting a book club but we never get round to it. After a year or so the gym closes and we lose touch then one day the paper sends me to cover The Toronto Car Show at the Metro Convention Centre. Walking past one of the luxury car booths and hear someone call my name. I turn and there’s Layla, laying across the hood of a yellow Lambo in a red string bikini.

‘Jesus Christ girl!’ I say, ‘put your clothes on!’

We are both laughing uncontrollably.

‘It’s a gig,’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘I’m doing it as a favour to Kamal.’

Then she holds out her left hand and flashes a big square cut diamond. ‘We’re moving to Lebanon. His family owns nine dealerships.’

Exhibit D: Me

July 2002. I have rented a small flat in Florence, Italy for the summer.

I am twenty-six, unmarried and childless, working as a staff columnist and arts feature writer for the London bureau of the Canadian broadsheet, The Globe and Mail. I’ve washed up in Italy because the American landlady novelist I was lodging with in London (a friend of a British editor) needed her daughter’s room back for a bit.

I decided on Florence because I wanted to visit the Uffizi and do a story about Michelangelo’s David, which I have heard is being cleaned painstakingly over months by a lady using nothing but a pot of warm water and a horsehair toothbrush. Also I wanted to drink coffee in the square from A Room With A View and watch the pigeons take flight, but most of all I chose Florence because my favourite novel is Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and I fancy myself as a Canadian 21st century version of the witty and intrepid heroine, Isabel Archer…. minus the rustling silk skirts, unexpected massive inheritance and anguished proposals from noble suitors.

The summer starts off a blast. I’m having a casual summer fling with a handsome older American writer who introduces me round to all these fascinating mad people I cannot believe exist outside of novels and movies. Anglo-Florentine aristo-bohemian eccentrics, I guess you’d call them? Anyway, they were all very charming, welcoming and funny. Despite insisting they were nobodies and do-nothings, they seemed to have travelled everywhere and met everyone and knew everything about history and art and fashion and politics and horticulture. They never exercised or paid attention to anything they ate or drank but looked well rested and naturally radiant. They were the sort of people who constantly insisted they were destitute but lived in vast inherited villas and crumbling medieval castles, which they also complained about constantly because of the upkeep. Instead of doing DIY on the weekends like my Dad did, they spent their days lazing about reading and talking to their various guests, drinking tea and wine as flecks of plaster from ancient dying frescos floated down from above like a never ending blizzard.

They were delighted to hear I had a job and a career—found it almost a kind of curiosity. They also could not believe I only spoke one language fluently. They ran themselves down constantly and endearingly but with such consistency it began to feel like a veiled and sinister assertion of superiority — except there was truth in a lot of what they said about themselves. They were lazy do-nothing nobodies. They were a bit boring. But they were also funny, polite, well-read people with interests and passions who’d been related to people who gave them castles to live in that they felt conflicted about because they couldn’t be bothered to fix them up or get a job to pay someone else to do so. The point is, I liked them and they were good fun.

Well almost all of them. There was one guy who wasn’t.

And even he wasn’t that bad. But he kind of was.

Giovanni (I’ll call him) was married to Sandra. They lived in a castle. Like a literal one on a small mountain with a turret that probably once belonged to the Medicis or whatever the other rival family was called that funded Leonardo DaVinci. Anyway, after the writer guy I was casually dating went back to Paris, the couple took me under their wing. They were actually rich and had servants and lots of space and they invited my mother and sister to come to stay for the weekend which blew their minds. They lived in the old way. Without irony. Like after dinner in the dining room Sandra would stand up and ask the women if they’d like to retire to the sitting room for limoncello and the men would take out cigar boxes. When my mother asked for a single malt on the rocks the whole room exploded into laughter — but it wasn’t mocking laughter exactly. It was more like the baffled but amused response you’d get from a New York dive bartender if you pulled up a stool and asked for a single shot glass of cold milk.

One weekend Giovanni calls up and asks if I’d like to spend the weekend with a few others on his yacht in Puerto Ercole. I was like, Sounds great.

Florence, it turns out, is absolutely unbearable in summer. Seriously, never go there in July or August. It’s hotter than Vegas and just as thronged with rich asshole tourists. Except these rich asshole tourists are cranky because instead of black jack and shopping and sex parties and seeing JLo and Donny Osmond, there’s nothing fun to do except queue for hours to look at churches and Old Master paintings then eat gnocchi in cream sauce.

Giovanni picks me up in a smart two seater car. I asked if Sandra was already on the yacht. He said she was actually at their house on Elba, she preferred it there in August. When we got to the yacht it became apparent it was a couples’ weekend. All the men were old and rich and Italian like Giovanni and the women were my age and a bit younger, say 20-25 at most. All of them attractive; a couple of girls I knew instantly were models because only models look like models. Giovanni was about fifteen to twenty years older than the older writer guy I’d been dating, so maybe sixty? Sixty-five? After we’d cast off that afternoon and set sail for a two night Mediterranean cruise, I judged the mean age gap between the men and women on the yacht to be roughly 35-40 years. There were loads of servants and one of them showed me to my room which I was relieved to find was a single.

We all had dinner together that night which was tricky because there were about sixteen courses and the men spoke to the men in Italian and only one of the girls spoke English — or could be bothered to speak English to me. Happily, it turned out we had things in common. She worked at a fashion house in Milan and because I’d been a fashion reporter, we talked about the recent shows and gossiped about a bitchy PR we both disliked. I asked how long she and her boyfriend Luigi had been together. She said about two years. I asked if they lived together. She said no. I asked if she thought they’d get married one day and have a family? She laughed and said, ‘I don’t think his wife would like that so much.’

After dinner Giovanni suggested we go for a walk around the foredeck to look at the stars. Like we were on the Love Boat. I would have laughed but nobody else seemed to find it funny. The whole thing felt weird, like we were in an old movie or Harlequin Romance without the romance or sexy bits. I knew what was going to happen next, at least I thought I did.

But I mean look, I wasn’t scared. I was a blonde slim female in my twenties who’d been to my fair share of parties. Most of what I knew about the world came from books and reading the news but I’d travelled enough by then I knew how to bat off unwanted male advances. This situation was so different however. The context made it slightly surreal. I didn’t didn’t feel predated or trapped. It didn’t even feel inappropriate really, just incredibly, painfully awkward. I mean, Giovanni was the host. I was his guest. All the other couples at the table looked just as plausible together as we did. How was I meant to say no to a fifty metre walk? Should I feign a sudden headache like Vivien Leigh? Do something dramatic like plunge over the side and drown while trying to swim to shore (wait wasn’t that how she died in real life)? When he tried to kiss me would I slap him away with my gloves? I didn’t have gloves anyway. It was 2002.

So I got up and we went up to the bow where I looked up at the sky and marvelled at how the big dipper was the wrong way round. Then he tried to kiss me like I knew he would. I shook my head and covered my face. When I uncovered it, he touched my hair and looked into my eyes fondly and made a couple of wincing puppy dog noises. I laughed, so he tentatively put his finger tips on my waist. I shook my head again but this time I squinched up my face really tightly and poked out my tongue and said, ‘No. Seriously.’

Giovanni took his hands away immediately after that and apologised. I thanked him for having me and said sorry too. I said he and Sandra had been really generous hosts. He asked if I wanted to go back to port or stay for the rest of the weekend. I said I was happy to hang out — as friends — and we walked back to the cockpit and joined the group. The rest of the weekend was fine.

What happened to the rest of those girls I don’t know.

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I’ve been in talk therapy off and on since my mid-20s. At first I went to a respected Jungian analyst whom I saw twice a week for over two years1. Her office looked like a New Yorker cartoon. For the first six months we talked about nothing but my parents’ childhoods and my earliest memories. It was intense.

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After I left the paper and had to start paying for it, I went back to therapy on and off through my thirties and forties. Like most people (read: writers) I enjoy talking about myself, probably too much. And I found it especially pleasant to do so when my listener was professional obligated not to let their eyes glaze over for instance, when I start retelling the story of how my mother once forgot to pick me up from a month at sleep-away camp because she was throwing a dinner party… then muse for several minutes if this explains my insecure attachment style in relationships. So yeah, I won’t knock therapy. I like it. It’s fun.

But did it make me feel better? Less anxious, sad or neurotic? Absolutely not.

After the Jungian my pattern was as follows: I’d go for a few months or a year or more, then quit because something awesome would happen in my life (unexpected love! the chance to move abroad! a new job! a windfall! the perfect holiday!) but eventually time would pass, my upswing would regress to ho-hum-life-as-usual, then an unforeseen crisis would knock me flat (a break up! a migraine! a rejection email! Philip Seymour Hoffman dying!) and I’d wind up back on the couch again, talking and talking and talking about all the same stuff I’d already talked about before but this time to a new therapist, often one I was less than wild about.

Still, I consoled myself, it was good, right? At the very least I could offload my worries and avoid confiding in friends by saying I was ‘talking to someone.’ But then I’d end up quitting again, usually in frustration because I felt therapy wasn’t ‘working’ because I didn’t feel ‘better.’ Meaning: I still felt like myself. I came to this conclusion over and over again, then for a long time I just stopped.

But now I’m back in therapy again — for the past six months — and the first time in my life, I feel it is working. I don’t mean I am fixed or feel perfect, but I feel different. More steady. More grounded. I still feel my feelings intensely but I experience them with more clarity than I ever did previously. Also, my emotions don’t terrify me the way that they used to.

So what’s different?

Well the therapist, for one thing. Her name is Jill. She’s really smart and the waiting room in her office has a top-notch espresso machine. Also I’m 50, so I have more life experience to draw from. Another factor might be that since the last time I did therapy I’ve actually qualified as a cognitive behavioural hypnotherapist myself and published a childhood memoir, which means guess I have more critical insight into the process. And positive as these developments are, they’re not the reason therapy is now working for me.

The reason is this: Therapy is finally working for me because I’ve stopped expecting it to work.

What I mean is that I’ve let go of the idea that therapy will cure me of being… me.

Or to put it another way, I’ve stopped asking the question: Why isn’t this making me feel better? And instead, I have replaced this completely facile and irrelevant question with a new and absolutely crucial one: What can I learn from this process?

It sounds kind of obvious, but many staggering and life-changing insights are just that. The only thing I regret is that I arrived at it only after decades and decades of agonising trial and error. After spending hundreds of hours and massive amounts of hard-earned cash in a process that took me round and round in circles. It was a painful, arduous and expensive process and I would like to spare you the trouble of having to go through what I went through to in order to get to a point where you are actually able to reap the benefits of talk therapy — whether you are in therapy now or just thinking of starting.

Whatever the reason, if you are in therapy, or just considering it (because hello, it’s January) and you have found yourself wondering ‘Er, what’s the point of this?’ I am here to tell you, it’s a normal question to ask about therapy. And a good one.

I am also here to assure you, from hard-won experience, that you can make therapy work for you — but doing so requires a crucial shift in perspective from the one most people have, i.e. ‘I’m unhappy. I’ll talk to someone and that will make me feel better!’ While that can work for a bit, the shift can only come with a clear understanding of the process and what you can reasonably expect from it, which I will unpack below the pay wall.

This will be the first in a series of two paid posts. Please do consider subscribing. I promise you it’s a hell of a lot cheaper and less time-consuming than going in circles on the couch when you could actually be conquering your self-sabotage and re-patterning the unwanted and unhelpful thoughts and feelings that are holding you back.

It’s not hard and think of it this way… you’re so close! But doing talk therapy right is a skill like any other. It does work and it’s easy and freeing — but you need to learn how to do it right. Let me teach you.

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Every so often a young woman of childbearing age writes a piece about how badly she does not want a baby, and the whole world loses its shit.

Most recently it was Jameela Jamil declaring her aversion to the messy business of pregnancy, birth and its logical conclusion: Children.

She unpacked her argument elegantly, I thought, offering up a dead-pan point-by-point list of why motherhood isn’t for her. The clincher (which caused a Substack-wide rage black out) was that she simply doesn’t like little people and hasn’t done since she was one herself.

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‘I dislike [kids],’ she wrote. ‘I find them fucking annoying and very loud. They are also very messy. I am a neat freak. The constant stream of snot freaks me out. I’m sorry. I know I am awful.’

Personally, I did (and do not) think it was awful of Jamil to put this widely held, if taboo, statement in print. But a lot of people disagreed and made themselves heard in the comments. Hooh boy, did they ever.

I thought she was dead on the money — and I say that as a devoted and more or less perfect mother of two utterly adorable immaculately well-brought-up boys. Jamil’s reasoning was so sound I couldn’t argue with a word of it. This is because I can assure you from lived experience, children are indeed very fucking annoying and loud and messy, and the snot-river thing is no joke. In fact sometimes it’s actually day-glow green like cartoon puke, which in real life is mostly this disturbing shade of mustard yellow. Same goes for infant poo btw and sometimes there are these inexplicable seeds…*PTSD flashback*… gross, sorry sorry!

But obviously children are irritating and disgusting. They just are! And the crazy thing about motherhood (for me anyway) is that it’s somehow possible to fully experience and acknowledge this revolting disappointment and yet simultaneously love them tenderly beyond reason with every cell in your body. And what’s more, you can go years and years experiencing this profound love/disgust dissonance all the time on less than zero sleep and somehow not die.

Plus parenthood is deeply fulfilling and makes you wiser, nobler and more empathetic than childless people. (Kidding! It does not.)

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I did not fully grasp the love/revulsion paradox of motherhood until I was several months into it and by that time it was too late. Actually it was too late before the first one was even born, twelve weeks after conception or whenever the legal abortion cut off date is here. That’s another thing many people don’t take into account when wondering whether to have a kid or not. If you opt in, there is literally another helpless person involved, which not only means there’s no going back. If you dare to admit to actually wanting to go back out loud you are figuratively eating your young, which is both wrong and highly illegal. (Animals are lucky, they have different rules. They also lick their bums.)

Which brings me to the crux of this piece. The single most important thing no one ever seems to consider when contemplating what Rebecca Solnit called ‘the mother of all questions,’ is the very real and harrowing possibility that if you do choose to have a child with a partner, you might wind up…

raising said child (or children plural) entirely on your own.

If you are a woman you should think about this very seriously. I don’t care who the guy is, I don’t care how solid his gene pool seems or how good he looks on paper. I don’t care if he’s a feminist with a man bun who votes Labour and listens to Belle and Sebastian — statistically speaking, fathers are way less sturdy in the long run than mothers are.

Feckless fathers have a back-up plan. Most mothers don’t. Why?

Because honey, you are the back up plan.

I don’t just mean dads are more likely to run off to Boca with a Swiss Air hostess or slip out for a pack of smokes and vanish into the night. I mean, statistically speaking, men are more fragile than women in every conceivable way. Especially after the age of forty, men are more likely to fall ill, succumb to addiction, get themselves incarcerated, incapacitated or killed, accidentally or on purpose. It happens all the time. This is another thing I know from lived experience because it happened to me.

ME!

And I’m blonde. And I can cook.

Anyway, it did happen. I got stuck with the kids all by my lonesome and because of it I now sorely wish I’d thought about the possibility of sole care single motherhood in advance because then I might have at least had a barebones sketch of a plan for dealing with shocking reality when it happened. But honestly? Until the exact moment it became my life, the idea I’d have to do it on my own never crossed my mind. Not once. This seems patently bonkers to me now.

In her piece, Jamil does say she’s put off by the ‘inherent inequality’ of parenthood (wise!) but she doesn’t mention the possibility of abandonment. Or even just getting stuck doing 70-90% of the care work on a fraction of the material resources. No one ever mentions it! I’m guessing this is because even childfree girls don’t want to offend their very special boyfriends. But ladies, it is madness not to think about it.

Even people who have been abandoned by their own fathers don’t seem to acknowledge the possibility it might happen. And yet it does happen to many, many new mothers (and a tiny minority of fathers) around the world every day. Take from me.

And if you don’t want to, here are some stark statistics compiled by Gingerbread, a respected British single parent advocacy group:

• There are 2 million single parents with dependent children in the UK

• 1 in 4 families with dependent children in the UK are headed by a single parent

• 3.3 million dependent children live in a single-parent family

• 89% of single-parent families are single-mother families, 11% are single-father families

Lastly, while writing this column I re-read Jamil’s original piece and I’m sad to report that because of the uproar, she has now edited it to include several softening caveats that make it somewhat less funny than the original knock out punch. It’s a shame, but that’s the internet for you. I hope one day she reconsiders her editorial decision and changes it back. Because on Substack you can do that.

With babies not so much.

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