‘In every parting there comes a moment when the beloved is already no longer with us.’

Flaubert recognised that we separate ourselves from those we love both physically and emotionally. The emotional separation comes before the physical detachment.

My wife and I were with friends at the weekend and the disappointment of having to leave their company arrived before we left. Such disappointment is not particularly difficult to bear, but it is always nonetheless something akin to a sadness. On Saturday, this began with a message from my daughter, an hour shy of midnight, to ask if we could collect her, having completed her shift at the restaurant in town. We finished the last of the wine that sat in the glass, as a wet thumb and forefinger came to press gently against the wick of conversation that had hitherto burned brightly. Conversational digression — arguably the high benchmark of dialogue between friends most at ease in the company of one another – becomes strictly off-limits at this moment of near departure. Big talk becomes small talk. Hugs, anticipated, appear as an acknowledgement of the small grief that now exists between one and the other, what each is about to lose becoming clear as they say goodnight. That loss becomes double as they part – we left and our friends were truly no longer with us.

The physical and the emotional come together with every foretold separation of this kind. Each day that I leave the house to walk the dog there is a definable emotional divide that happens both before and after the physical act of leaving. There is rarely any kind of discomfort in these small daily comings and goings, but there is never not an emotional response, merely an unconscious resolve to endure the separation. These short insignificant moments of grief might play out tens of thousands of times during our lifetimes. It is not to hunt and kill that requires us these days to leave our caves, but it is a micro form of these same emotions which ensure that we desire to return again soon.

As such, a life coming to its foreseen end is a loss that might happen many, many times. ‘End of life’ is the most ambiguous of terms to the layperson; it allows one to keep hold of both hope and despair by the same grasping hand. Here, prolonged and repeat emotional departures can bring far more grief than the physical one. My brother mentioned to me that the carer of a dying loved one is destined to suffer a loss twice and I recognised this state of greater bereavement for him, and know that he emotionally lost Mum an uncountable number of times. He will continue to keep losing something – a loss among so many losses; a separation that will splinter into an unquantifiable number of farewells.

‘In every parting there comes a moment when the beloved is already no longer with us.’

And so to return to Flaubert and to dregs of wine and to closing conversations and embraces with friends. I wonder if the need to emotionally feel that these loved ones are no longer with us, and why we need to know and keenly experience these repeat small separations is so that one day we are able to cope with the unimaginable goodbye and loss of something far greater.

Sometimes, a word will catch in the mouth, more often the ear. Sometimes, it will find refuge in the mind too, where a sotto voce deployment of those two aforementioned organs will soothingly play out on repeat, wishing to hold onto the shape and sound of something for longer: for contemplation.

‘Ajar’ has its roots in the Middle English phrase on char, meaning ‘slightly swung open’. With this original meaning there is a kinetic energy attached, a description of something that has been started; of a phase or movement paused and yet to be completed. Today, the word seems very much about defining something that is purposefully stopped or stuck; a position meaningfully engineered. One might question why we need a word to describe such an ambiguously/ambivalently in-between state at all. The idea of something being left half-open is different to one of a thing being left half-closed, is it not? We are told, after all, that to assess the glass either half-full or half-empty determines an optimist or a pessimist respectively, regardless of whether that glass is being poured into (filled, to become full) or being drunk from (emptied, to become empty). The glass is not afforded this definitive ajar quality of in-betweenness.

Leave the door ajar. ‘Leave’ – further still with this sense of an abandonment of motion. ‘Leave/left’ implies deliberation. And that deliberation hints at the possibility of something that might be about to happen on the other side of the door, be that an infant waking from sleep, or a conversation to be eavesdropped.

My ear caught the word the other day and my mouth rolled it over and over, my head recognising an affinity with the liminal state that loss and grief and recovery and work and memory and forgetting have placed me into these last six months or so: a mind that feels intentionally kept half-open and half-closed; a protective and intentionally in-between position.

An ajar state speaks also of interiority: of inside and ‘the other side’. In the instance of a front door being left halfway between its open and closed state: it is interiority that is the prize – it is left between for someone who is about to re-enter. An ajar front door is concerned only with insideness. For the person leaving through the front door who does not intend to return, there is no such state as ajar, but merely a door left open, because ajar is concerned only with interior possibilities. Only interior doors. One leaves a gate or a cupboard door open or ensures that it is closed, not ajar. For the correct, but significantly most useful state of both is to be either open or closed – to be a secure and privileged point of access across a boundary for the gate; or to discretely contain or display objects in the case of the cupboard. Only the interior door of a room can truly be ajar, can exist with the possibility of something happening on one or both sides.

Heidegger gave a lecture in 1950, ‘Das Ding’, considering what it means for a jug to be a jug and wanted his audience to dismiss the conventional way of seeing the world objectively, arguing that the essential nature of a jug is not what it looks like or is made of, but of the thing it conceals and reveals – the ‘thingness’ of a jug is the void inside; it’s ‘jug’ character comes from the ‘poured gift’ of the jug’s pouring out. The void and that poured gift are the two things which we almost ignore and that are far more vital to what we understand of a jug’s being than either its shape or form.

An ajar door is one that is between two positions, but also between potentialities. The infant will sleep or wake; the eavesdropped conversation will reveal something or nothing; the grieving, busy mind will feel lighter one day; and the words that our mouths and ears and minds hold will slip gently from our grasp, from this fixed long look. (I’m reminded that the word ‘contemplate’ comes to us from Latin – templum – a sacred precinct, a space for the foretelling of events.) Slightly swung open, neither fully open, nor closed: seeking to understand one’s position, place, one’s before and after.

The orange plastic cup into which my father used to piss sat in the windowed recess in the kitchen of the house that was the first place I ever called home. In that same kitchen: a second orange plastic cup, one used for drinking. The drinking cup hung from the limb of a pine mug tree. The piss cup sat in its alcove. Each was defined for use by its station. Twin vessels: one to expel into and be filled, one to drink from and be emptied. Function and malfunction in a kitchen that was but one broken room connected to another broken room, the one in which my broken father laid.

That first orange cup, and that window recess, that alcove with its shattered plaster edges; wet, swollen and cracked. A shelf surface marked by the undersides of several thousand cups and bottles, ghosts of activity all confined to this one small area, yet at the same time confirming the cup’s travels to so many others. The cup, neighboured on one side by a block of Fairy household soap and its ooze of green ejaculate, and on the other by a bar of Imperial Leather soap, no dish or pedestal to elevate its pearl, alkaline carcass. The kitchen: half-finished plaster walls; white tiles claiming small holdings of the wall space, but those too wearing the neglect of care due their upkeep. Those grimy ceramic squares brought demarcation of a kind to the cooker and sink areas. Tiles, a cooker, a sink, a broken plaster alcove and shelf, a run-down room, bruised memory: my father’s orange cup.

Not always there, though, on that shelf, but sometimes beneath the withered organ that my father would evacuate his bladder with, and also beneath the smaller organs of the three boys who followed their father’s lead. What was used out of necessity by one was recorded and then seized upon by smaller hands – the facsimile that plays out between young and old, between father and child, between doer and copier across myriad routine patterns of a day, of a life. Young fingers copying the rooty configuration of older fingers.

Not always on that shelf, but also next to the settee, pushed into the corner where valance, hearth stone and wall created a nook of discreet clutter and shade. Not always to hold urine, but also a vessel for catching phlegm, more often than not its purpose when stationed next to the settee. I can see Dad’s cheeks puffed, balling pellets of mucus and firing them into the cup, tailed by beads of spit gripping to his bristled chin. When he was too ill to reach the cup, the cup would travel to my father. It would often then fall to one of us to empty its contents once full. We carried it carefully through to the kitchen, to be emptied at the sink: a journey both perilous and stomach-turning. At the sink the piss would find the plug hole with ease; the phlegm would require hosing underneath the tap. Once disposed of, we would sluice the walls of the sink clean. The sink as toilet; effluence and expectorant, leaving the house via sink hole and pipe, connecting to a next pipe and a drain – what did we care as to which pipe? That one pipe should carry this waste and not another? The cup would be swilled, rinsed, washed and swilled again. Then turned upside down onto the corner of the sink’s enamel ledge. There it would dry, and as it dried it would fade: from wet, glossy orange back to its desiccated, cracked and clouded hue. Later, empty and dry, it would be returned to its home once more, onto plaster shelf once more, into that recess once more; once more to the ghost circles of past mapped travels.

In reissuing scenes from the past, it’s easy to glorify an object or a moment of squalor or tragedy or beauty in order to metaphorise a memory into some larger truth, convenience or story. Interpretation, too readily declared, dims the light of things.1 Four decades and that orange cup is still one of the most vividly sharp fragments of my childhood. On that shelf, it’s form seems so very bright and perfect: tangible, perversely beautiful, Dad.

A boy kicks an iridescent blue football printed with black hexagon patches from one side of the beach to the other. There is no-one to return the ball to him, so he runs to his future self again and again. The tasselled fringe of a blanket blows and brushes gently against an ankle. Stray dogs stray. A girl strokes at the wisp of grass hanging limply from the umbrella beneath which she is sheltered from the sun. A blistering whiteness. More blue: this time a polythene bag, lifting on the wind, being dragged along a floor of sand, shale and stone, catching on the corners and jagged edges of that which the sea has not yet softened. The bag is the same colour as the water – that is to say the colour of where the sand, sky and sun conspire to be most beautiful. And yet the sea is not blue, but merely part of the same lie of that mother sky above, also without colour: parent and child both dashed by a smattering of light waves. Close by, water rips gently and folds over clear, then white, then clear again. Light everywhere, moving and flowing: a rhythm that is possibly the most serene of any that we know. All a dance: one of light – shimmering, dizzying light. A breeze and warmth finger delicately at the edges of each sensation, picking at the blue. Stone buildings and concrete roads watch over the granite minds of the inland city beyond. Blue is a call for humility; a warning to slow. Blue is the incomprehensible beauty of something we won’t ever fully know. The water returns the ball to the shore. The boy runs and meets it there, next to the rock, a friendship with solitude, brown skin glowing in the light.

When you book concert tickets on a cold end-of-December day for your daughter (and her father) to watch one of her favourite artists (who has become one of his favourite artists), it doesn’t really cross your mind that in six months’ time the country could be in the grip of one of the fiercest heatwaves it has ever experienced. Indeed, it doesn’t even occur to you that the concert venue will turn out to be the first nightclub of your youth, repurposed and rebranded, but unmistakably the place from which you were ejected by four bouncers, each holding onto one of your limbs as you swung drunkenly between them, on the night of your eighteenth birthday. It could also not possibly have been known in advance that your daughter would need to be awake at 5.30am the morning after the concert in order to catch the day’s first train and reach the airport in time for a first overseas holiday with her boyfriend.

In December, I had booked two tickets, excited to share an evening with Tilly to appreciate the art of a musician who she loves, then relax with a lie-in and a late breakfast at a nearby hotel, and then travel across town to spend the rest of the day visiting my mother – her grandmother – and complete 24 emotionally immersive hours in the city of my birth. A lot can change in six months.

We went to see Ethel Cain in concert for the first time at the Hammersmith Apollo last October: one of the loveliest experiences we’ve shared together. Cain’s music is an acquired taste – a few highly infectious 80s-inflected pop anthems front a catalogue of otherwise dark, sprawling lyrically intense songs that touch on rock, goth and gospel influences. It’s a beautiful thing to introduce your children to the culture that makes you ‘you’ – a favourite book, film or song. It’s truly wonderful when your children start to experiment with, shape and define their own tastes and encourage you to read, watch or listen as they do so that you understand something deep and emphatic about what makes them ‘them’.

‘Red weather’ warnings and train cancellations were all across the news. Don’t travel unless strictly necessary. The arts are more under threat than at any time during my life. Time together with ones that we love feels forever more squeezed. What greater necessity could there be for travel?

We approached from the back of the concert venue shortly after the doors opened and baked in the evening sun for a slowly advancing hour as the queue uncoiled itself from around the building and delivered us into the airless refurbished nightclub of my youth. The window through to the 50p coat room was still on the right as you go in. The back bar where I once ordered bottles of K cider and pints of Strongbow with my brother was still unquestionably the same back bar from which I would nervously both try to get attention and hope to remain invisible some 30-plus years ago. Stage hands were building a set in front of us as three thousand people were navigating their way towards pre-booked seats or up-for-grabs floor space – to wherever a best view could be procured. We’d arrived already soaked not to the skin, but from the skin out. I made a mental note to never ever again be without a cotton flannel for whenever I travel between May and September.

For all the heat, the wet, the wait and the discomfort, I was with my first-born and her great passion, and she was with – to borrow from Camus – her first man, in his home city listening to beautiful music in the first club of his adulthood. There are too few moments in our lives like this. Ethel was great; I hope we see her again one day. Tilly was better: her father’s precious company, a happiness shared between two. Music, memory and love once more.

A black round button fell to the ground as I pulled my keys from my pocket this morning. It had detached from my coat maybe six months ago, leaving behind ripped tendrils of severed dark grey thread, bunched together like a prodded spider. I picked it up from the floor and held it in my hand, the pleasing memory of its familiar form returning instantly. Its prolonged stay in my pocket had now been a half-year-long deceit since I had no real intention of sewing it back into place. There seemed little point in returning it to my pocket, yet it was now unthinkable that I might throw it away, for I had become used to it being there, perhaps for no other reason than the small occasional pleasure of its weight and feel. My neck was cold without being able to fasten the collar. Perhaps I still believed that I might yet repair the coat.

Later, at the train station, I pulled my ticket from that same coat pocket and offered it to the slot at the front of the platform gate. I fed it into the contraption to reappear inverted at the top of the machine. As with the button, I found myself once again shaken by an unremarkable thing: the wonder of something so seemingly insignificant. I removed the ticket – the gates opening like saloon doors in front of me – and walked through, with a sudden anxiety that this small yet arresting moment had so quickly been lost to the past. Each moment of the day disappears like this: anticipated sometimes, but happening and gone instantly, and with the next moment and then the next clamouring to bury each previous sensation. I wanted the moment back, to find it again, to live it once more; not because of any particular value, but to celebrate it for being without any – these thousand small graceful acts of life which suture together a day. I walked up the stairs, turned right and on towards the end of the platform, losing grasp all the time of that delicacy, sensing some unstoppable dismantling force, like a wind stripping the seeded head of a dandelion.

This morning, before the station, before the button, before those thousand small moments, I woke my eldest daughter as I always do. I brushed her hair back from her face lightly and whispered, ‘Good morning.’ I saw her eyes, underneath her lids, sliding like slow-moving magnets towards where she knew me to be. I kissed her cheek and her eyes opened, then faltered shut and then opened again. Then her hand came down gently over mine, which lay across the top of her breast bone. She let it rest there, closed her eyes again and pushed her tongue into the corners of her mouth, to break the small web of film that had formed at each end. These seconds, these moments that come before she is conscious of anything else; only me, only us, only these feelings. I love to find her still sleeping each morning that I go into her room. I then went to wake her sister, but she was already awake: her eyes smiling just that fraction before her mouth shaped the same expression. She stood and jumped excitedly as I approached, lifting her arms ready for my own to slot underneath and lift her from her cot. She seated herself on my arm. She still doesn’t care for kisses, but I kissed her anyway, into her soft hair, softer, four years younger, than her sister’s. I carried her downstairs, her arms around my front and back to steady herself as we descended. I called for Tilly to come join us and Bessie echoed a refrain of her sister’s name, which she still pronounces with a soft ‘D’ at the front.

The weight of things. The significance of things. The gentle things that so nearly escape. The things we need to hold on to. The button. The ticket. First words. The beginning of a smile. Light and gossamer-thin things that a wind can take from us so quickly.1

‘I like to imagine all of the piss and shit travelling around where they sit.’

I once had lunch with the restaurateur behind one of London’s swankier establishments – someone who always seemed grounded in the more mundane and secular aspects of hospitality life. One room at his restaurant was a dark space illuminated by a central bar with back-lit glass housing a variety of fashionably expensive spirits. Around the sides were leather-upholstered benches, each lit by a single dim spotlight or lamp. In the evening, the place would fill up with a mix of London’s elite – the rich, the want-to-be rich, the cool and the desperate-to-be-cool. A mix of suits and heels, of shirts unbuttoned past the chest, and dresses without backs, of overpriced cocktails and ice buckets of Cristal. On the floor above the bar was a stunning bright, modern restroom.

In many high-end places, the restroom – a euphemism that came to this country from the US over a century ago – is a place where people can truly find rest. It is a place where one can pause and recharge, where make-up can be reapplied, where a quick spritz of perfume can quickly refresh. A conversation held elsewhere can be analysed within the walls of this safe space in greater depth and secrecy. The restroom can also be a place of respite – an escape from the intensity or boredom of company which one doesn’t wish to prolong. It is not unusual, of course, for many of us to evacuate our bladders and bowels in these places too, for they house not just mirrors, cotton hand towels and Aesop moisturiser, but also toilets. Indeed, this most perfunctory of tasks is often the easiest way to achieve the state of ‘rest’ that such spaces advertise.

Anyway, underneath this London restroom’s floor and above the ceiling of the tenebrous bar below, runs a network of pipes which carries away the waste of the wealthy. ‘I like to imagine all of the piss and shit travelling around where they sit.’ In the heart of his restaurant he had created a bubble of exclusivity, artifice, escapism. Above that bar, a series of cubicles, merely three feet wide, into which a person must stand, stoop or sit above a latrine and perform the one or two bodily functions common to us all. There was nothing deceitful or mocking in what he said, but a simple acknowledgement of the work of hidden plumbing and of the masks that we wear.

The toilet is a great leveller was, I think, my restaurateur friend’s point. The oft-quoted advice to nervous public speakers is to imagine that your audience is naked. I can’t think of anything more traumatically distracting for the lectern-shy of this world. The toilet, however… imagine a toilet, imagine your audience reduced to the same need and function that is basic and necessary to us all, and pretension and superiority can disappear in a flash.

I’ve written before regarding music that can save you, and also about the modern classical compositions of Max Richter. Maybe this short paragraph is a third act to those two pieces. I have been repeat-playing – since January – a piece of music by Max Richter titled ‘On Reflection’. It became for me a soundtrack to the pain and wonder of looking after a loved one, and then to the grief that keeps me tethered to her loss. Richter’s music is from an episode of the TV anthology series, Black Mirror – ‘Nosedive’ – a satire about acceptance and social status in an exhaustively interactive but isolationary digital world. Richter described writing a score about ‘the tyranny of happiness’ which seems a fitting description for the messed-up social-media age that we live in. I expect there will come a time when I don’t want or need to listen to it again, but for now it is a constant. And so I continue to play it every day, without fail, and it brings happiness and sadness back in equal measure and helps me to remember parts of a room, routine, words spoken, sounds and smells and seconds as they ticked by, and silences that held everything together. It helps me not to forget.

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Actual jobs

The filmmaker Adam Curtis, in conversation with the writer and podcaster Marina Hyde, once observed that we go to work all week long and do a thing and we get paid and we all think that that is our job. But our real job is to then go out into the economy and spend the money that we earn. He added that this is why, when you walk around a shopping mall, everyone ‘looks so miserable’, because they realise that ‘spending, not earning, is their actual job’.

I’ve changed the accounting software I use for my business and find myself now able to scan receipts using my phone, for me to then send them to an online database in the cloud, to update a multifaceted glorified spreadsheet, whereby a cell in a column will within seconds show that expense amount and calculate whether it can be deducted from the amount of income that I earn and so lower my tax burden for the forthcoming year. I immersed myself in half a dozen or so of these small mechanical procedures, manually overriding half of the scanned data with the correct information, and still making sure to file and hold onto the original paper record of the transaction. This, I’m assured, is progress and accounts made easy and a workflow streamlined – yet it feels like so much more work and built-in doubt than my previous system of pen, paper and Xcel spreadsheet ever engendered. I was left wondering how much time it takes me away from doing my ‘actual job’.

A conversation with a prospective new client last week focussed much more on the amount of work they need not be doing rather than the work they wanted to discuss that did need doing. I unpicked several layers of things that were destined to make their desired outcome far more costly and convoluted than it needed to be. With that done and a nod that I would look further at cost and efficiency savings after our call, we discussed work and started to define what my actual job on the project might be.

The joy of a rose

Like most relationships, there are things around the home that one partner does or is good at doing and there are things that the other takes on or is simply better at doing. I walk the dog; I do the washing-up. My wife drives; she does much of the shopping. The chores of bed stripping, tidying and cooking tend to split evenly or at least less proprietorially between us. These are the small things that keep house, home and family ticking over. Charlotte is better at keeping us connected to friends and aspirations. We worry differently and about different things. We still fit well after thirty years together. The garden, however, is an area that we both enjoy and neglect in equal measure. I’m not sure that our combined four full hands would deliver more than two or three green fingers in total, but we try every year to plant a few things and keep them alive. And Charlotte tries harder than me. There is a rose plant that was given to us by two very dear friends last year, into which she scattered a few of her mum’s remaining ashes. She has nurtured it carefully. The first young buds came three weeks ago, just as the hot weather arrived. When last week’s rain arrived, those buds were fully open, having bloomed into the most beautiful pastel-pink petals. We are reminded of our friends and of a lost mother with each wonderfully fragrant drift of scent; with every glance of pink. I’m reminded too of the bush that grew next to the step in the childhood garden at Bosworth Road – the one potent enough to stop this young boy and his twin brother from running on to the path beyond to play cricket or football, or lob windfall apples to clear the fence at the top. That was the bush with eggshell and hearth ashes spread around its base; the one which my mother and father must once have chosen to plant, care for, lean into and take joy from.

Recommended other fragments…

Just read: I Who Have Never Known Men, Jacqueline Harpman
The story of a young girl who has spent her entire life imprisoned underground in a cage along with thirty-nine other women. Harpman’s spare prose brilliantly pushes the story forward at pace, constantly keeping a thin flicker of hope alive for an idea of rescue, salvation or explanation. It is more a book of questions than answers – most notably what is it that makes us human, what brings people together, what does freedom mean to different people, and why should we continue to go on when there is so little to go on for.

Now reading: Ghost Stories, Siri Hustvedt
When a novelist dies who you once used to enjoy reading so much, you find obituaries and stories about him and you go back and re-read books you remember being wonderful and you are pleased to find that they still move you. You recommend The New York Trilogy to a dear friend. And you resolve to finally explore the writing of the author wife who this author shared his life with. And you discover that her books move you differently but perhaps every bit as much as his did. And then that new writer you have discovered writes a memoir of their life together, and it is a beautiful and sad record of two remarkable people and the life they shared and the loss that was anticipated, feared and left behind. The Spectator’s literary editor, Sam Leith, hosts a really interesting podcast interview with Hustvedt about her book here.

Film: Game, National limited release
Many years ago my friend told me about a story he’d been writing. That story became a first feature-length release for independent studio Invada Films, sister to the brilliant Invada Records. It won a nationwide theatre release that began at the back-end of 2025. Marc worked on the story with his childhood friend – musical composer and Invada head honcho, Geoff Barrow. They developed the story further with the film’s director, John Minton. Marc is a cracking designer and just so happens to be a really rather good actor too, and so stars as the film’s main protagonist, David, who the film opens on, trapped in the seat of an upside-down car that has crashed off-road into woodland in the middle of the night. A timeline jump or two reveals that David might well be on the receiving end of a twist of karma. That karma is contorted yet more cruelly when the local gamekeeper – played by Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson – decides to balance out the harm that David has caused. The film’s power comes from a taut psychological suspense, multiple unfolding victim narratives, and a psychedelic ending that nods to the rave era in which it is set. It’s a film that dares to do great things at a slower pace than most and it looks great. Game receives its live stream premiere on June 18th: I’d heartily recommend you give it a watch.

Music: Pearl’s Girl, Underworld
A few years on from the setting of Game, above, Underworld would release one of the most important albums of my youth, Second Toughest In The Infants. A month or so earlier, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting had been released and had catapulted Underworld – and one of their older single releases, ‘Born Slippy’ – right into the heart of mainstream popular culture. Unequivocal ‘banger’ that Born Slippy was and remains, the true dark and wonderful delight of that time was waiting to be discovered as the first track on the second side of that 1996 album (we were listening on CDs back then, people): ‘Pearl’s Girl’. That single has just been rereleased and sounds every bit as wonderful as it did thirty years ago – a frenzied blast of sharp shuttling techno beats and Karl Hyde’s crazed cut-and-paste lyrics. There’s no other electronic music which makes my heart pound quite so hard and fast.

People: Carole Cadwalladr
There are few journalists speaking real truth to power these days. Fewer still who have any kind of platform with which to do so. Cadwalladr is one of those people, though her platform has changed over recent years. Formerly of the Guardian and Observer, the contentious sale of the latter of those publications gave rise to Cadwalladr and four other ex-Guardian and Observer journalists setting up The Nerve in a bid to create a new home for independent and free reporting, with journalistic integrity at its heart. They were the team behind the groundbreaking Cambridge Analytica investigation that sent shockwaves around the world. Cadwalladr is almost certainly one of the most thorough and brilliant journalists of her generation, and she’s unquestionably one of the bravest. Do go follow, subscribe and support her work in whatever way you can… we need hundreds more like her right now. As Cadwalladr herself says, ‘…look after facts, you’ll miss them when they’re gone.’

Forthcoming events…

My next Zoom-based phone photography workshop date will be Monday 13th July 2026. If you would like to improve your food photography skills with just your smartphone for company then do consider joining me for the session and helping donate to The Trussell Trust in the process. Find out all you need to know and book your place here.

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A few months ago, I sat down at my desk early one morning and pushed a finger against the top of the mouse so as to bring to life the sleeping monitor in front of me.1 No familiar wake-up hum or illumination came from the screen. I tapped the mouse more firmly. Still nothing. I looked for a sign of power on the control panel of the printer below, saw glowing light, and therefore knew that an electrical fuse could not have failed. I reached behind the computer to manually reboot the machine, but that also elicited no response.

I checked the time. I needed to be away, to catch a train, to be beside my mother, and so left the computer and pulled together a bag, coat and money and carried a secondary sadness with me all the way to Birmingham. It is said that one hardship or tragedy helps to place another into perspective, and so it proved over the course of the following few days and weeks that Mum managed to hold on for.

Six weeks after the failure at my desk, my wife drove into Bath, with me beside her, balancing the ineffective computer on my lap like an unruly, corpulent child. At the store, a technician from the so-called ‘genius bar’ declared the internal power unit of the machine dead and beyond repair. Given the age of the computer, replacement was no longer an option. I asked if it would be possible to retrieve the hard drive? He warned of the pitfalls of a layperson attempt, but recommended a company who would happily extract the drive for £900. I happily declined. And returned home with my broken computer.

Then, a funeral.

I found a company who told me they could remove the drive for significantly less, and so took my computer for a second day out in as many weeks, this time by train to Cheltenham. A fellow commuter, nodding towards the machinery in my arms, remarked that there were surely far more compact laptops available, before claiming the carriage’s last remaining seat. A few hours and another specialist later, I was returning home: sans machine, but with the all-important hard drive.

But not, it transpired, the all-important SSD drive that had hitherto been fused to it.

I repeated the Cheltenham trip a week later, collected the overlooked secondary drive, and took it and the previously recovered hard drive onto another expert, not a self-declared ‘genius’ or Apple-affiliated specialist, but hopefully, finally my end-of-level boss. He stood the other side of a high counter strewn with discs, hard drives, pen drives, memory cards, keyboards and cables, some identified by masking-tape labels with Sharpie-scribbled names and phone numbers. All around us were shelves occupied by a thousand or more deconstructed computers, disc drives and storage devices. Though at first glance chaotic and labyrinthine, there was all too obviously some form of filing system in place, known only, almost certainly, to this one living person. ‘Yep. No problem. I’ll have it done by 1pm.’ And I handed over the drives of my former workhorse computer one last time.

Two hours and still significantly less than £900 later I returned home and this strange parallel grieving process finally started to unwind itself.

That was a fortnight ago and the drives have sat on my desk ever since, inside a padded envelope with black marker-pen spelling my name across the front in an unfamiliar scrawl. A new computer sits there too: younger, slimmer, more obedient. Also on the desk: the porcelain mug that belonged to Mum, a pile of her bills, Post-It note ledgers of expense, statements from care companies, correspondence from the council, a mail redirection form, photos and cards of condolence, a handwritten shopping list for milk, eggs, celery and more.

Papers to file away. Keepsakes to be treasured. Groceries no longer required.

A lesser loss: reversed.

Returning to work after nearly two months away was a foreboding prospect. It was an absence that was perhaps closer to seven months than the seven-week marker that walked me back to the day that I lost my mother, such was the amount being juggled long before that date came to pass. Also, I was going back to much more than just work – a return to the rhythms and needs of a family; to my daughter’s side as she revised for exams; to the love and support of my wife and care for another parent. Reverting also to more than just patterns of necessity and added value, but to ones of pleasure – something in which my life had long ago started to become increasingly deficient – and rediscovering the initially guilty happiness of reading and writing, self-care and the company of friends. Life is a constant balance of how we yield our time and energy. Our capacity for love, however, seems exponentially capable of encompassing more and more. As this heart beat loudly beside just one, it became yet more swollen by the absence of others – an imaginary web of unseen veins and arteries threading invisible red lines between one vessel and another. Like one of those in-flight international route trackers, they show lines of travel and yet serve to confirm neither distance nor destination, but to remind us that we are forever connected to an idea of home.

This post was drafted two weeks ago. I’ve not been willing to trust my writing until now, fearing that the same anxieties of that person who was living in the distress and disorder of previous months were continuing to hijack the reflection of this mind and soul of today. Honesty can be messy; it can coil itself around life in an often uneasy manner, sometimes like gum that can’t be teased from hair, and sometimes like shit that can’t simply be scraped from the tread of a shoe. The most uncomfortable truth of returning to work is that I had so little interest for it, which, for a creative, is the hardest of circles to square. For a photographer to deliver something of real value to a client, he needs more than just the muscle-memory coordination of eye, mind and hand. Good creative work needs that aforementioned swollen heart to be in service. A brain needs capacity to think. Mouth and ears must function well to transform a brief into a story. One can hide one’s physical self behind a camera, but risks revealing everything in the resulting image.

Any plaudits for the work of a food photographer are often wrongly or at least not evenly attributed. Credit is due first to Mother Nature, then to the skill of a chef or stylist, and then to the available light with which one chooses to work. With these in place, one can start to think about the photo. There are many times I have observed a chef looking at their food through the prism of photography to see a dish they recognise and admire more than their own creation. Like Narcissus, the reflection of beauty can be deceptively bewitching. On a good day, the photographer is sometimes no more than a trusted custodian for the pool of water into which others will stare.

And so I photographed Sicilian winter tomatoes on an overcast Wednesday at the beginning of May in the dining room of a west-London restaurant. There followed fresh peas with mint on a bed of ricotta and toasted sourdough. Beautiful produce; the delicate but sure touch of a chef friend; diffused natural light from a window facing south. It felt like I knew what I was doing once again and that I was enjoying what I was doing once again – lost in admiration of reflections and the fulfilment of an honest day’s work.

1.
I always had so many words for you and yet shared with you so few: you were tired so quickly, so often asleep and so many times just wanting to sit with a silence that we were both happy to share: I loved those quiet hours by your side. So many words, and yet now – ink-stained but fountainless – I know not where they all reside, only that they are most likely hiding, not lost. I once found words in a tissue you held onto in your sleep; found them again in the fold of your pillow; and had ready an essay of love, built around the spoon and straw with which we fed you, as your life crept into its final dusk hours. You seemed content with less, as less became all of you that we had left. And yet that less was so intensely searched for, felt and cherished right to the end. You shared your last moments with each of us by your side. Life reversed: our pain became greater than yours, just as your comfort became our only comfort. Your smile and that twinkle in your eye fluttered in those final hours. Your hand was in each of ours as we loved and stroked you gently into sleep.

2.
I’ll remember you by those same things that have always reminded me of you: the cherry blossom each spring, pulling blackberries in late summer, the cascading scent of rose, soft and pink above a floor of broken eggshell, and knee-high grass. I’ll find you in the twinkling eyes and mischievous smiles of your granddaughters and through the shimmering soft shadows of a net curtain. Through light bulbs hung bare, sticks of coloured chalk and long-soak bath water in enamel tubs, perfumed by Imperial Leather. There too, in late-night bowls of warm-milk cornflakes; off-license treats of fondant chocolate and bags of pork scratchings; in cake-mix pastes of sugar and butter; in cherryade and ginger-beer and cream-soda thirsts. I’ll hear you in the quiet of a ticking clock, and in the quietest of quiets, once more sat next to you as you sleep. I’ll touch you when I hold the hand of my children who are also you, and of a wife who will hold on to me to remember you, too. I’ll feel closest to you with photos and with words and with memories that have already lost a little of their shape, sharpness and certainty, but remain no less you. I’ll sit with you again and again and again. Sleep for as long as you need now. I’ll be here: light, light, no longer dark.

Hamnet feels like a film that could have been made for these slow winter hours and this cold, damp February air. Much has been written regarding its beautiful imagery and the performances of its lead actors. Much, too, of its haunting soundtrack, composed by Max Richter, whose spare minor-key arrangements dovetail perfectly with Maggie O’Farrell’s wrenching story of love, loss and grief and Chloé Zhao’s cinematic adaptation. Richter’s most famous piece of music, ‘On The Nature Of Daylight’, was added to the film’s newly composed score at the very last minute, rendering its climactic scene with a near-overbearing weight of emotion and feeling. As elegiac swells of textured sound go, there are few modern pieces of music which can compare. It’s more than twenty years since I first discovered it – the standout track from The Blue Notebooks album that would effectively launch Richter’s career. Originally written for five string instruments, the song has a sonorous backbone of double bass, cello and viola, with one oscillating violin that gently unfolds over the top, then another that cries mournfully above everything else. String instruments – more than any other and especially in adagio arrangement, especially here in this piece of music – have an ability to replicate the human voice in its most desolate moments of despair and sorrow. Of music capable of ‘describing the indescribable’ – the pain of losing a child – I don’t know of many pieces quite like ‘On The Nature Of Daylight’.1

Several years before Richter, I’d fallen under the spell of Mahler and the fourth magisterial adagietto movement from his Fifth Symphony (also to be immortalised in film: Luchino Visconti’s Death In Venice). Linking Mahler and Shakespeare would be the death of a child: Shakespeare would write his grief into Hamlet, Mahler expressed all of his into the slower and yet more heartbreaking albeit lesser known adagio that would begin his unfinished tenth symphony. Before I found Mahler, there was the more muscular modern work of Samuel Barber: his beautiful ‘Adagio for Strings’ (forever too to be associated with cinema – Oliver Stone’s Platoon – but also with the assassination of a president, the death of a princess and with those who died in the attack on the Twin Towers). I was working a part-time job at a homeware store during my university days when I heard Barber’s soul-stirring arrangement for the first time. His adagio was the first track to feature on the second side of a two-hour cassette of store music that played on rotation throughout the day as people shopped. My friend Nick and I once spent a deathly-quiet Sunday morning running back into the store room to rewind the tape recorder and listen to Barber’s musical lament again and again in between selling rattan furniture and bags of nightlight candles. We never did tire of hearing it repeat, though our manager eventually would.

Whilst the musical term translates as ‘in slow time’ adagio comes from two Italian words – ad agio – meaning ‘at ease’. It is curious that some of the musical canon’s most profoundly sad pieces of music should place us into such a state, but rarely do I feel more at ease than when listening to and carried away by these compositions of Barber, and Mahler and the daylight-exploring, grief-unfolding wonder of Richter.

One of the cleaners helped my brother carry the mattress down from the spare bed of the guest room to the floor of Mum’s flat, neither of us optimistic that, removed from its usual housing, it would any more likely reward us with comfort or sleep, but it was better than the floor and it was not the chair. There have been many nights spent in rooms and wards, in adjacent rooms, in waiting areas, in the backs of ambulances. Those nights distribute unevenly between three sons. The fewest of that total have fallen to me; the unfairness haunts each of us in different ways. We have spent hours in hospital rooms, beneath the sickly glimmer of a security light, next to the illuminated rectangle of a door left ajar, alongside banks of windows of a ward quietly still at work. We have rested, waited and paced; mapped vending machines, and noticeboards, and polypropylene chairs and sat before the salt-scoured flesh of other anxious relatives, untethered together on the same sea. We promised her there would be no more hospitals the day that we were told that they could no longer restore her health, only reduce her pain. And so these vigils fall more often now, as we get closer to that which we used to fear giving name to, but which doctors and nurses have been defining and describing for all of the weeks of late summer, autumn and winter, like the ink of a dictionary page tattooed to our skin. I spend an hour or so chatting to my brother, the door through to Mum’s room open; each of us with one ear devoted her way. He looks better than I expected him to and I persuade him to eat one of the meals that my wife prepared hastily for me before I left. He talks me through nurse and carer records, pill packets, food supplies and sanitary aids – none of which needs doing, but all of which one by one frees him from carrying this baggage into the three days of rest and recovery which lie ahead for him. He texts to say he caught the bus with seconds to spare. There are so many exchanged messages these last few months that we long ago exhausted the language of consolation, gratitude and simple acknowledgement, and increasingly the most sincere replies these days are those marked simply by an ‘x’. My reply signals the completion of his handover. I set the mattress into the middle of the lounge floor with little hope of procuring sleep or comfort from it. Light pours in from the bright window of the care home corridor – the kitchen blind has only ever partially subdued its glare. From the other room, I can hear the pump that pushes air to gently undulate that mattress beneath Mum. I miss the silence that used to hold me so softly in that room. I wait for her first call, certain that it will come before sleep, and sure enough it is there, an hour or so later. It’s a chance to share a look, to bring the face of her child once more before her, and for that son to comfort her in a way that she once prioritised for that child. There are three more exchanges that night: a few quiet words, a reach for water, a brush of skin each time before I return to the lounge and the mattress and the half-light. The last time she whispers something and I have to ask her to repeat. I lean in closer and think I hear, ‘Are you comfortable?’ She is thinking of the mattress on the floor. I reassure her that I am, and I grip the sheet and cover to tuck them more tightly around her, but realise they haven’t budged one inch since I was beside her last. Birdsong comes at 5.30am – the first joyful noise of the last eight or nine hours. I think of my friend Anna, who would almost certainly be able to name the musician. Sleep comes. It eases me through the next couple of hours. When the carers enter and call hello, I’m already awake. I pull back the nets and open the window and the air is cold but delectably fresh. I fill the kettle and flick the switch and catch a glimpse through the door of Mum half-smiling at the young girl, five decades younger, who is brushing her hair and my just-woken heart feels like it could burst. (There is a footnote that I added to a piece of writing that I published a year ago: if there is a shame that this parent feels and which I believe others will know too, it is that we love our children hard, perhaps hardest, from the very beginning; and yet we love our parents hard, harder and hardest as they get closest to their end.) The kettle sputters and I lift the mattress from the floor and slide it behind the chair, beneath the window.

A day of fleeting impressions. | A coat hanging from a peg in the hall. A rope of orange polythene spilling from the left-hand pocket; bags for collecting the dog’s shit at the beginning and end of each day. | A phone conversation on the bus between father and son about a broken zip on a wallet. | A plane, heard overhead, but hidden by a blanket of cloud. | A tree, bare against a white sky, like a bony arm with a palm of twenty or so fingers sprawled open; leaves stripped and long ago scattered. | Two coils of frost-bitten mooring rope, unravelled on the towpath. | A tap left running; an even, constant flow of water, hitting the steel sink almost without noise. Untrammelled: if left alone, it would run like this for the next hour, week, year. | A memory of lying in the bathtub as a child, the water long since warm, the room bitter, two kneecaps almost blue above the surface: frozen by the indecision of whether to stay submerged in the almost cold or exit, painfully, into the total cold. | Evening on the street: a row of rectangular greys burned brown by amber-lozenged street lamps. Further along the road, the muted dying headlights of a stationary car: life fading as a battery drains. | Recording things: the business of memory, the accumulation of age, the agony and ecstasy of reflection, moments of fulfilment, pieces and peaces of mind, a contrail of the small, a spluttered collection of that which feels tangibly close, within reach, that which could almost go unnoticed, that which risks being lost.

‘Friday Fragment’ is an additional weekly instalment to my A Thousand Fragments monthly newsletter.

There is an episode of The Twilight Zone, ‘Time Enough At Last’, about Henry Bemis, a bank teller, who desires nothing more than time left alone to read. When his wish is finally granted, in the most devastating of circumstances, his initial reaction to finding himself alone is one of bereavement. On realising though that he at last has the freedom to pursue his great passion, to read book after book after book, his despair of loneliness is replaced by the bliss of solitude. Loneliness and solitude are both defined by the absence of other people, but one elicits pain, the other pleasure. The story’s cruel final twist hits incredibly hard and seesaws Bemis straight back into utter despondency and total loneliness. | In the middle of some difficult days a few months ago, I browsed Instagram in an effort to fill my head with something vacuous, too scared to fill it with anything more substantial. Instead, I discovered this beautiful short video by Joel Duntin, which I watched on repeat some four or five times and to which I have returned again and again in the weeks and months since. ‘I am the loneliest I have ever been in my entire life’, begins Joel’s video. That word ‘entire’ lands hard just like the words ‘at last’ spoken by the bank teller Bemis, above – each the precise and personal defining measure of something costly and profound. He continues that, ‘maybe the hardest thing about loneliness is that it feels unshareable… like a shadow that settles beside you’. Loneliness can feel non-specific, less something inside of you, more that which is intangibly attached to you. Shadows form when something comes between a light and a surface onto which that light would otherwise fall. Shadows owe their existence to these multiple things. That light can flare or fail. That subject can stick or move. That surface can be altered. Loneliness can shift its weight and shape, its edges can be clearly defined or soft and vague: a crisp outline on days that are paradoxically most bright; diffuse and barely traceable when the skies appear most grey. | The simple exercise needs of a dog are the closest thing I have to a metronome in my life. At this narrowest end of the year, there are very few shadows that settle across the paths, towpaths and tracks of our walk each morning. The skies are resolutely grey and the land below is uniformly dark. Colour, texture, shape and line become more and more hidden as the cold sets in. Winter makes lonely spaces of the fields, roads and pavements, and of the paths beside canal and river along which we walk. It makes lonely the people who navigate these spaces, too, perhaps never more strikingly so than when each of us momentarily connect with and then pass one another. It is that which we struggle to share. It is that shadow that can attach to each of us.

I chose a large bowl from the middle of the table. Rupert had brought a collection of his father’s ceramics to the farmhouse building in which we were all gathered, inviting each person there to take a piece of pottery or glass home with them. He half-joked that it was an efficient way to partly clear a house, but each of us knew that we were in some small part extending his father’s life in this world. The bowl is beautiful, quite probably impractically large, but I’ll nevertheless ensure that it is photographed and in use very soon. | All photographers and writers are navigating loss. We capture things so as not to lose them: a shaft of light that cuts through slats or fog; an autumn floor sprayed red and ochre; the voice or glance of a loved one in a shared second of tenderness. Art makes loss bearable. | A few weeks ago, I removed two steel brackets from the bedroom wall that once held a radiator in place. I peeled away four shards of decades-old, saffron-painted, embossed wallpaper: evidence of an idea of home that had once existed for someone else. Beautiful in their own right, I held onto them; it seemed wrong to discard them too quickly. | I was describing the diaries of Derek Jarman to a friend, writing that they were, ‘so sad and yet so very beautiful’ and afterwards reflected that the words ‘so sad’ alone are enough to imply beauty. Sadness doesn’t need that further qualification: it’s never not beautiful. | There is music to which I have been returning again and again these last few months. There are several songs that ‘save me’ when I need them most. ‘Hobart Paving’ is one of them – the most melancholic song about a failed relationship. The chorus repeats, ‘Don’t forget to catch me’ – a promise of support in return for a risk taken. I’m lifted every time that I listen to it. | With Mum, over these last few months, we have been prepared for loss by people who know much about medicine and what the body can and cannot endure, but who don’t know her. A fear: that I have been wasting time and energy waiting for a light to go out when I should be enjoying the warmth of a flame still flickering. Each visit that remains is a chance to sit with that glow, and I’m resolving to hold onto that thought much more tightly. | Loss is a process never completed – that which was once loved, enjoyed, held onto can never easily, realistically, truly be that which we can let go of. Loss, most accurately and contradictorily defined, is that which we will forever possess.

‘Friday Fragment’ is an additional weekly instalment to my A Thousand Fragments monthly newsletter.

One day you notice that something has moved. Not geographically – across a physical space, between determinate places – but a move onwards through time, from one lived moment to another; a distance from one past event in your life to the present that we understand as ‘now’. This realisation visits all of us, but rarely does it sit with us; rarely will it find comfort and stay with any of us for long. Today it lingers and won’t be moved. Nor do I want it gone. This noticing happens as I sit in the chair in the corner of her room, watching the trees sway, pushed by the palm of a mid-Atlantic wind. Five trees, one of them a sycamore, I think, though I’m unable to identify most of the nature I enjoy by name. I’ve never cared for the proprietorial obsessions of this world: it seems not important to know a sycamore from a yew or an oak so long as we can indulge in the splendour of each. Namelessness might perhaps be the kindest proposition for loving and sharing what lives and breathes alongside us in this world right now. Classification is by its nature division: titanium white, ivory black, burnt umber and sienna. The eye should revel in each block of pigment much the same as the water-loaded brush: with equal joy and thirst. So, the chair in the corner, through the window, in front of the sycamore and four other trees when it happens: a moment that connects me to the me of the past, sitting in the window of the previous house, where one towering tree stood in the corner of a dried thatch of dead grass, with a dilapidated shed, dim in its shade. Stillness connects both moments. Here, now; there, back then. A third window, back further to when I was no longer a child, but not yet a man, to the house before, stillness again, leaning into a wall where the plaster is blown above an electric four-bar fire, barefooted on brown linoleum, floor bleached beige where I stand by a flood of cat piss and then the sluice of a Dettol-soaked mop. And through that window, through this same but not same moment, a view through a window to concrete flagstones, concrete posts and concrete steps, wire mesh fence and red brick walls. Pessoa, whose words save me more often than they should, wrote, ‘I look at myself but I’m missing’1. Here I see myself and feel three times more present, intensified by the repeat of a moment lived twice before. Thirty years across three views and still this weight of immense melancholy, and yet now I understand the linking thread so well, can follow the needle and see each stitch mark. She watches me as I stare out of the window, and I resist the temptation to turn round and immediately find her eyes, not wanting to deny her the pleasure of a gaze that has fallen, rested and can now wander over her son. And as she watches, so too do I, through this window, a window that echoes place and time, a re-opening of light and lived moments, where leaf and branch and the leaves and branches of the sycamore and its unnamed sisters move in the wind. Does she see her son, in this moment, or herself reflecting back, because we classify to divide but also to unite that which is most inviolably common. She watches as do these multiple brought-together moments of me. Does she see the carer who helped to feed her lunch, or is she back with the child she once spoon-fed lunch to? Does she notice the fingers spread across his cheek? Does she see the leaf on the lawn before her son, hinged to the grass, lifted and then dropped, lifted and then dropped? Does she see his eyes, not because she finds them mirrored in the window, but because she knows their colour, her colour, her own brown eyes (those blocks of pigment, again, awaiting the joy of water and the brush). Is she connected to somewhere else in time now, too? Back with the shed and the parched lawn, back with the concrete and the mop bucket? Is she back further, watching her children making deckchair-and-bedsheet dens on that back-garden carpet of cherry stones? I turn around to find her gaze, wanting to catch her both smiling and lost in reverie, but she is asleep. And I let the rest of it settle beside her for now too. The cherry tree, the helicoptering winged seeds of the sycamore, a son, his twin and their brother, her children, the calm and the quiet of the world she once classified for herself and then shared with each of us, the life she created and gave names to, the chair we chose for her, the window that looks out onto the green and brown and the windows of years gone and yet still tethered, then, back then, and now, here: now.

‘Friday Fragment’ is an additional weekly instalment to my A Thousand Fragments monthly newsletter.

A curled leaf, a tin of light tan shoe polish its colour, caught in a spider’s web stretched between table and chair. A rotary washing line, planted into the tarmac outside her bedroom window, nine pegs hanging, the tension in one wire broken, sagging, expired. Inside, across the room, Mum, head dipped, half hidden by the pillow, a tissue balled into her hand, held only just, hand resting against clavicle. Breath, body, in and up, out and down, rise and fall. And the second hand sweeps. She sleeps. Light outside the window, dappled, printed on the curtains. Light through the trees, branch and leaf disconcerted by the wind, sunlight here, through gap and thicket and canopy which bends and blocks, which spills and showers this fabric in the room, bright, then dark, a dance of shifting tone and hue. Warmth, too. On her skin, soft, that dance, then bright, then soft. Quiet. Such quiet. A calm that exists only here. A tissue, held only just, but light, so much light. Lightness, so much lightness. | Peach and pear, grape and cherry: pale cubes and spheres of tinned banality, sat in a lake of watery syrup. I pass her the spoon and she punts it towards the fruit, concave side down, and so drops and lifts it without reward. She takes time to change her grip, thumb and three fingers slowly spinning the handle, the belly of the spoon catching the light as it rotates. She dips into the fruit once again, lifting out green, yellow and red and takes a shaking hand towards her mouth. She spots the top of the sheet and her nightdress with the sugary water and I reach for the napkin on her table. She withdraws her hands, surrenders herself to my care, waits patiently – such patience, such acceptance – and I smooth out the fabric across the top of her chest. I press a corner of the material up around her neck and tuck a length of hair back in place behind her ear, signalling that she can try again. She smiles. The light comes again, shimmering momentarily on the wall behind her. She lifts just yellow and I see the tissue from earlier, pushed into the bottom of her sleeve.

‘Friday Fragment’ is an additional weekly instalment to my A Thousand Fragments monthly newsletter.

On the plane, thirty-two thousand feet clear of the everyday, I slip my hand underneath my wife’s hand, wrap a bandage of fingers around hers, and tell her that I love her. Not that she hears it, for it is not audible, not spoken. There are so many moments of complacency and distraction between two people, so many demands on the individual parts of body and soul. This is the person who engages harmoniously with all of those separate components. And this seems as good a definition of love as any that I know. The three window covers in front of us have been lowered. Through our window, I look out over a bank of clouds, no longer above but below us, and shiver a little at such an extraordinary reversal of the quotidian. I love you. What courage it took to give voice to those words for the first time to someone you feared you might actually feel them for. I love you. The joy and magic of speaking words that bond you so hermetically close to another, that deliver you from that thing you feel so keenly. That thing which can be phrased only once for it to contain a particular desired quality and effect; that thing which can never quite be said the same way ever again. And so it is that its repetition must bear itself out in new ways. I pull the cover: shut out the clouds, the sky, outside; resist its obvious wonder. I think she catches me smile – here, treading the waters of reverie – and through that gesture of upturned mouth and dimpled cheek, and via this wrap of flesh around flesh, I try to say something so much louder than the dull echo of those three limp syllables. She is smiling now, too. Her gaze holds mine for a second and then it sails away and falls opposite, finds the window: once more to the clouds, which pout with orange edges.1

‘Friday Fragment’ is an additional weekly instalment to my A Thousand Fragments monthly newsletter.

It’s been a long time since I wrote one of these collections – 389 days to be precise. This was the format I began posting to Substack with, back in November 2022. They appeared monthly thereafter and then more sporadically, and then my attention turned to smaller single-subject pieces. I started to fail to write these ‘through’ the month, slipped from adding bits here and there – probably the death knell for most kinds of compendium writing – and they then became too big a thing to write from scratch a day or two before each self-imposed deadline. And so they stopped. But I missed creating them and so here we are: Number 11.

At the same time that this larger publishing format fell into decline, so too did my desire to read. Life is rarely straight-forward or straight in direction and took turns that made both of these creative pursuits feel incredibly difficult. I plugged away here and there, but, for various reasons, time spent reading brought with it an anxiety that there were more pressing things to be done. Reading or the thought of it has at times felt suffocating (not least trying to keep up with the relatively small number of friends and creatives I follow here). Nevertheless, I managed to read some very good books, and maybe a couple of great ones. The best was the one I had delayed reading the longest (no surprise it was also the biggest): Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. It is a quite staggering achievement. Harari stands on the shoulders of many for the huge amount of research this book comprises, but while the information contained within is impressive, it’s the way in which he tells the story of how humans have evolved and what we have evolved into that makes it such a thoroughly engrossing read. A few other notable, occasionally stubborn reads from the last twelve months or so:

Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris, States Of Plague • Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism • Hannah Richell, The Search Party • Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens • Juhani Pallasmaa, Eyes Of The Skin • John Berger, The Foot Of Clive • Samuel Beckett, Company Etc • Madeleine Bourdouxhe, La Femme De Gilles • Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses • Paul Auster, The Red Notebook • Gwendoline Riley, My Phantoms • John Berger, Confabulations • Brian Dillion, Affinities • Garth Greenwell, Cleanness • Emanuele Coccia, Philosophy Of The Home • Deborah Orr, Motherwell • Albert Camus, The Fall (re-read) • Katriona O’Sullivan, Poor • Samuel Beckett, First Love & Other Novellas • Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance • Samantha Harvey, Orbital • Leszek Kolakowski, Freedom, Fame, Lying & Betrayal (re-read) • Claire Keegan, Antartica • Hayley Campbell, All The Living and the Dead

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A smudge of colour

Last September, my youngest daughter started Year 10 at school, the year when ‘grades start to count’ and ‘effort will get you the reward you deserve’. Parental platitudes back then, almost unintentionally, were ratcheted up a notch or two in seriousness; each like a short, sharp snip through the cord of soft, huggable childhood every time that we repeated them. Choosing subjects from which to form a path into vocation and adulthood can feel like something that is done to you. The school will advise, the curriculum will narrow and restrict, the parent will nudge, and the student will choose: certain of some options, worrying over others, perhaps floundering over all. In the end, it can feel like a tail being pinned onto a donkey of education. Ever since, we have been trying to steer and limit the anxieties of the ensuing ride.

Most of her choices feel like they have been the right ones for her. Of all those that she did choose, art is the subject that she is showing the most aptitude for. She has the same natural talent of her sister, the same creative flair of her mum, and seems to share the same love of faithfully representing parts of this world that her father did at her age. It was a sentimental moment to buy for her a first set of artists’ pencils, from the softest grades of 12 and 10B through to the hard, fine points of 2 and 4H – I cherished the set that I had as a child. And then there was the joy of seeing an old box of chalk pastels out on the table once again – never a medium I excelled in. They were too beautiful in form and colour – snapped and stubbed sticks of pigment that only the artist can truly revel in the heft of – not to photograph; too vivid in associated memory not to fix and hold onto for longer.

Forty-nine-year-old scallops

At the start of July I met with my twin brother, Pete, to walk a day around the streets and parklands of our old childhood haunts in Birmingham. The excuse was a birthday that would fall a few weeks later at the end of the month, by which date we would have shared in a century of life together. This was a chance – the first in a couple of decades – to revisit a time and the feelings of when we were inseparable and the clichéd truth of life being much, much simpler.

We walked with a notion but no strict plan of where to go next, nor a well-formed idea of where or when we would finish, but seven or so hours later, we’d pretty much checked off every significant place in or along which we had spent our youth. We finished with dinner at the public house where we enjoyed our first legal drink (and several previous illegal ones). We talked almost exclusively about our childhood as we walked: it was all before and around us, close, tangible. One thing that we both observed is that the scale of everything is so unsettlingly different when seen and walked as an adult. We started from the top of the road of our first childhood home, baffled as to how we had arrived at No.48 so very quickly when it seemed to take an age to get from one end of the road to the other as children. The grass lozenge where we used to set down jumpers to kick around a football as kids could be counted out in just a few forty-nine-year-old’s steps. The dangerously steep banks of the grass-lined dells we would slide down for hours as children were little more than mild gradients, scaleable in a few impatient strides today.

In the middle of the day, we stopped for a quick snack at Clay Lane Fish Bar, the chippy from our childhood. The cheapest item on the menu back then appeared to be the cheapest item on the menu today: the potato scallop, listed simply, rightfully, as ‘scallop’. It was the thing both of us were craving. The scallop is a chip shop delicacy which I was shocked to discover was not a universal delicacy when I moved to Bath, away from Birmingham, when I was eighteen years old. It occurred to me that the last time I had bought one it would probably have set me back some ten or twelve pence. Pete did the honours this time, spending a pound apiece. We sat in the bus shelter outside what used to be Sam’s newsagents on Woodcock Lane – the place where we handed over weeks’ worth of pocket money for Panini stickers, Eagle comics and Shoot magazines, and shamefully occasionally kept watch as our friends stole various of the aforementioned. The scallop is a slice of potato, coated in batter and deep-fried. It should be served hot, showered lightly in salt and doused heavily in vinegar. If your nostrils don’t flare as you raise it to your mouth, you should add more vinegar. The crisp batter should be starting to soften from the heat and the acid as you eat; the potato should be cooked, but not too soft. Reader, that scallop was wonderful: faithful to the cherished memory of that previous one some thirty-plus years ago.

The scallop, much like the glimpse down the alley and over the back gate at Bosworth Road; much like the bedroom bay window we pointed to that used to display the Star Wars AT-AT walker at Mark Wooton’s house; just like the still-running stream that we would jump back and forth across at Jubilee Park; like Aunty Doll’s house with the outside loo which backed onto the canal; like the bridge where the bus got stuck in the snow one winter; like the sycamore tree that used to helicopter down its seeds outside our bedroom window every autumn: each returned our childhood to us for seven or eight warm, blissful hours. The most wonderful of days with my four-year-old, ten-year-old, eighteen-year-old, forty-nine-year-old best friend.

Recommended other fragments…

Just read: Letters To My Grandchildren, Tony Benn
“I have divided politicians into two categories: the Signposts and the Weathercocks. The Signpost says: ‘This is the way we should go.’ And you don’t have to follow them, but if you come back in ten years’ time the Signpost is still there. The Weathercock hasn’t got an opinion until they’ve looked at the polls, talked to the focus groups, discussed it with the spin doctors. And I’ve no time for Weathercocks, I’m a Signpost man.” Benn wrote this book for the generation to come, aware of all the tradition and the great history in which his own generation was still connected to. One of the most principled politicians of that and any generation, Benn is the signpost that many on the left still look to on matters of moral, ethical and political difficulty and still try to emulate in terms of clarity and conviction.

Now reading: Small Island, Andrea Levy
I’ve not read any of Levy’s work prior to this, though this has been sat on my shelf for about four or five years. She’s a consummate writer and this is an incredibly well crafted novel. It deals with themes of war and Empire, love and extreme prejudice and does so through the interweaving first-person stories of its four main characters. Gilbert is Jamaican and joined the RAF to help the British forces in their fight against Hitler. He decides to stay in England, but converting to civilian life reveals the same racism, bias and hostility that he experienced as an officer, fighting for a country that wasn’t his own. He ends up in Earls Court, into the boarding house of Queenie – the glue of the novel – whose own husband, Bernard, also signed up to fight in the forces, but who has not returned following the war’s end. Gilbert’s wife, Hortense, has dreams of England more fanciful and delusional than her husband. She is brought crashing down to reality when she arrives in London. And when Bernard does eventually return, years later to Queenie with his father’s house now full of Jamaican lodgers, the attitudes and ingratitude of this small island are brought sharply into focus.

Podcast: The Diary of a CEO, Mo Gawdat on AI:
A disclaimer: not withstanding the troubling rise of health ‘claims’ made, shared or hosted on this podcast, I’ve always disliked the pomposity of the title and find the format of Bartlett’s series a little too long-winded and flabby – self-important; an eavesdrop into one man’s journey of self-improvement. This episode with Mo Gawdat, however, felt like it might be essential listening. Gawdat – like his host, a very wealthy man and prolific podcaster – has had an interesting life and shares warmth and vulnerability alongside his insights. His thoughts on artificial intelligence were informed and fascinating when I read them a few years back in his book, Scary Smart. His updated thesis paints a far more dark picture than his writing of 2021. If you’re of a nervous disposition about our future alongside the growth of artificial intelligence, you might wish to avoid.

Music: Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, Ethel Cain
One of the things I like about Ethel Cain is that I really don’t like all that she does. She does her own thing and seems to cater not to her fans, and certainly not to the critics, but also not to the times. She is a quite brilliant writer of lyrics and an equally gifted creator of richly emotive music. Her subject matter is often dark – the narrative arc behind her sonorous debut, Preacher’s Daughter, makes for a disturbing close listen. Her musical tastes cross and merge between pop, goth, gospel and rock. The ’80s synths of ‘Fuck Me Eyes’, the second single release from this new album, are infectiously catchy and headily nostalgic; it’s easily my favourite song of the year so far, but the rest of the album is beautiful in very different, but similarly intense ways.

Watch: Shifty, Adam Curtis
‘When power begins to shift in society, everything becomes unstable, exciting and frightening.’ Curtis’ films show us how individualism and atomisation have been two of the most prevailing and troubling forces of the Western world over the last four or five decades – eroding the realities that we had previously understood to be shared and agreed upon. Shifty begins with the arrival of Thatcher into power. It ends with Blair and Brown at the helm. The viewer is left to consider what has really changed between and indeed since these two eras, because power was and continues to be ceded from the State to the corporations through both periods of governance and subsequent ones since. The film finishes with the building of the Millennium Dome, a project which he concludes confirmed one incredibly alarming truth: that the Liberal elite that had been running the country for over 150 years no longer had anything to inspire with regarding the future of Britain. The Dome stands tall as a metaphor for the decline of British political power that Curtis paints so provocatively across these compelling five episodes.

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