You want to know how I spend my time?
I walk the front lawn, pretending
to be weeding
- Louise Glück
Re-entering London from Scotland last month was a like-it-or-not greeting of hot rubbish by day and randy jasmine by night. It was footballs in basketball courts and pumping speakers in pedestrians’ back pockets. Kingsland High Street was linked arms and slicked hair, masks and strides and sequins. Shacklewell Lane was housing estate signage for anti-climb paint, crows nosing at oily paper bags, and good bored kids jostling outside the franchised academy (be polite be positive) in their too-hot woollen blazers. It wasn’t London though, it was N16 - above the canal and below the marshes, as plane-lined as they come, a blueprint for a colony on the other side of the earth, a modern day landlords’ paradise. In N16 each day is utterly full of itself. I’m going to miss it. The two months are up and tomorrow it’s off to another rental, in another postcode, and it does feel like the beginning of the end of summer, or at least the end of the middle.
The heatwave has worn out the canopy. It’s nowhere near run its course, but the green is tired. The passion flowers are malting spikily and the very first black brambles have arrived. I’ve never had an August in London before. This time last year I was just about to leave for Scotland, the final days at the ex-upholstery warehouse flat ticking down, wheezing bus brakes out the window for company. This month I read books from the flat owner’s shelves that I assumed I would have read of my own accord by now but simply never had, Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (surprisingly direct) and Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential (surprisingly defensive). I read ebooks urged at me by the internet, Raven Leilani’s Lustre (dry as anything) and Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water (sincere as anything). I read then recommended Katherine Angel’s Tomorrow Sex Will be Good Again. I played a lot of Novara Media podcasts as I went to sleep (listening to other people analyse the ills of the day permitting release from the night-racing duty to do so myself in the dark). When it wasn’t the joyful militancy of political accountability in my ears it was the secondhand strains of parties down below, steel drums having their way with Pachelbel’s Canon.
I was in a lot of harried contact via phone calls and I was not in a lot of contact via social media. The less you participate the less you want to participate, which I am sure some productivity or wellness guru would applaud, but I’m not sure it’s so simple. My Words for Turning Thirty were published. I missed out on a second cat-sitting stint because I was self-isolating, as per the NHS instruction for contacts of positive cases of Covid-19. No cat, but I was able to watch the glad unownables living big in the city: swallows above and rats below, high-shine beetles in the morning and midge-feeding bats at dusk. I watched each aired episode of Love Island, enjoying the triple duties of single words: don’t be a mug, my worst fear is being mugged off, that behaviour was really muggy. If Katherine Angel’s thesis in Tomorrow Sex Will be Good Again is that we can never truly know our own selves and desires, necessitating vulnerability and play, Love Island is the antithesis: so what’s your type? Who do you usually go for? What are you looking for then? In the villa one is rewarded for knowing, obtaining and hoarding what one wants.
On Love Island there is no climate disaster. Heat is welcome because heat is merely a holiday. On Love Island there is no capitalism. Everything is provided, everyone has the same standard issue water bottle and clothing cubby; residents cut up fruit for each other and concoct beakers of iced coffee and pop prosecco for each other. And on Love Island there is only capitalism. Purveyors of sweat-shopped plastic garments eye up the most influential of the participants. Success would be a deal with a brand. If things start to get serious the paired-off people start to talk about getting a dog, or meeting the parents, or becoming parents themselves. Success would be a private family. Otherwise there is always the default success of limitless consumer choice. Participants shop for each other. If you can know your self, your type, you can appraise another, pronto. But all this is beside the point. I stay for the parasocial relationships with witty live-tweeters (Jason Okundaye, especially), the myriad sing-song accents (aural hangovers from medieval hamlets), and the dedication to getting dressed up only to go down stairs.
This month I cooked a lot of courgettes (sautéed shreds, raw ribbons, roasted hunks), collected a lot of nasopharyngeal swabs, worked my jobs, and swam once in the Hampstead Heath Ladies Pond, completing just two of the compulsory clockwise circumnavigations, enjoying the earthy warmth of the water but resenting the orderliness of the place. On an algorithmically offered interview I heard pianist Stephen Hough respond to the question of managing performance anxiety: you just have to be yourself, realise that some people will like you, some people won’t, almost everyone has some friends in the world, no one has everyone as a friend, we’re all just ants. Fine, okay, but then the kicker of the concrete: I learn everything a year before I have to play it in public; it’s ready long before the deadline. I can’t cram at the last minute, I just can’t - if we feel this immense pressure all the time then the brain doesn’t work as well, we’re not as creative. Right, okay, so the organised really do rule the world. I got back on my AI yoga app, I re-entered some group chats, I built some small dams against despair. I didn’t land on an argument for the month of July because the whole month was preamble, to who knows what. A preamble to August, that’s enough.
Until next month,
H x
P.s. Comment below with any odds and ends of consumption or creation that made your month <3
Your musings are always addition to my inbox, Hannah and I am particularly grateful for your musings re:THIRTY years - keep it coming!