Life Litter

“I went to Wales because the place is stiff with magic …”

Roger Deakin, Waterlog

You know it’s going to be a good weekend when it starts with whiskey at 2am. I don’t even like whiskey but there never was a time like the present.

No time like the present.

That phrase was turning in my head a few weeks ago, when I sat up in bed and said “fuck this, I’ve got a month left in my thirties. I want to go on an adventure every day.”

Joel, still half asleep, murmured something irresolute, but not unwilling.

That day, we went climbing in Ban-y-Gor, a disused limestone quarry perched in a slice of woods in a nature reserve above the River Wye, just on the English side, facing Wales across the valley.

There is online disagreement (a tautology, if ever there was one) about what the name means.

‘Boundary Hill’ was one reasonable suggestion, slapped down by a chippy user who pointed out that Welsh names were around long before the English border. (If you have a confident assertion as to what the Welsh name “Ban-y-Gor” means, please write me a letter and pop it in my pigeon-hole.)

It’d been awhile since we climbed and the first days back on rock are usually hard so I was pleasantly surprised to feel strong: stronger than usual.

All those panicked I’m-turning-40-and-must-stay-in-shape work-out classes at my gym paying off.

We climbed a first, then a second and then a third climb without knowing the grade because I forgot the guidebook (aging, you see).

My son read the book he’d brought to the crag, in between giving the climbs a try. He did well and I was reminded that he’s getting closer to teenagerdom and will be a fully-grown broad-shouldered man before I know it.

We pulled apart a rotisserie chicken like ravening beasts and coiled the rope at 8:30pm just as the sun sank behind the woods on the opposite side of the gorge.

The moon, almost full above the Severn, marked the way back east upland to the Cotswolds.

A good start to my last month as a thirty-something, I thought with satisfaction.

—

The next day, lust for adventure undimmed, I proposed a walk to the local swimming pool several miles away, for a dip.

Joel gave me a look that said ‘please leave me alone and stop tormenting me with your midlife angst’ but acquiesced because he loves me and because it was the day before his birthday and he knew I got him something good.

We took an unorthodox route that almost landed us in a lavish back garden. We backtracked by way of a leap over a river and a shimmy through a nettle-adorned hedge, where I inculcated my son in the rewarding art of Right to Roam. Another satisfying adventure.

The next day, I gave Joel a break and took myself off alone on a solitary cycle in the sunshine to a far-distant estate with gardens I’d heard about north of Oxford called Rousham. They don’t allow children under 15 so the no-kids rule keeps the place blessedly peaceful. There are no dogs allowed, nor is there a tea room or any of the other usual National Trust tat. It’s a welcome change.

The only thing that pierced the peace was the occasional Oxford-Banbury local train, away across the water meadow of the River Cherwell.

Otherwise all was birdsong.

The estate has a mix of formal gardens and woodland that spills down to the river banks.

There were sculptures round corners and buried in scrub like an Edward Gorey dreamscape. A lion munched the spine of a horse, curved in frozen, wide-lipped alarm. An abandoned garden fork, with four deadly prongs, lent the underbrush an air of menace. The call of a falcon pierced the sky, and murmured cooing buzzed from a pigeonnoir with a faded 1685 etched into its doorless walls.

From the depths of a mixed hedge of privet, holly and snowberry, a weathered Athena surveyed visitors.

I lounged down to the banks of the Cherwell, basking in the sun, with the place entirely to myself.

A haze of insects above the river created an optical illusion, moving more swiftly as a unit than any individual arthropod.

Like a murmuration, I thought, but of mayflies and midges.

A damselfly lumbered past, awkward, working hard. An electric blue dragonfly, wings an invisible blur, put it to desperate shame.

A mother duck, clinging to the shadows along the bank, trailed four ducklings upstream, and a translucent yellow spider avoided my eyes and fled to the far side of the bench.

The birdsong was impeccable: song thrush, wagtail, nuthatch, wren, spotted flycatcher. In a minute, Merlin picked up twelve different tunes.

I launched myself into a patch of grass where an albino slug ambled through clover, antennae dancing in and out.

My presence was probably saving it from all those hungry birds in the trees, I thought.

A migraine, circling for days, stalked my brain from one temporal lobe to the other. It watched from the fringes of consciousness—but, when I laid by the river, it retreated.

To spend a day lost in thought is the greatest adventure.

Closing my eyes, I’m in great danger of staying here all day.

Two American couples rounded the corner and the peace was broken.

One of them, peevish, requested a stop.

“What if you don’t come back for me?”

“We’ll come back for you.”

“Well, as long as you’re coming back for me, go ahead and take your time.”

He sank to a bench near me.

I thought about engaging him in conversation but wasn’t at all sure what I’d say.

Hey, how about that dumpster fire of a country of ours.

I felt guilty when I got up and left the albino slug to its fate.

—

That weekend, we packed the cars with children (ours) and went to Somerset, where the flat lands around Glastonbury are laced with hidden waterways, weirs and swimming holes.

Joel’s friend Harry lives in a very grown-up house, decorated with considered collections of antique books, decanters and wooden tea chests. A delightful retreat from the world of parenthood, where there are no crumbs under the dining table and the bathrooms are blessedly free of mouldy underpants, smears of poop and discarded loo rolls (until we visit, at least).

We went to swim in the sea at Ringstead Bay, where a hang glider cut a neat loop in an updraft above a two million pound house of plate glass nestled on the cliffs.

“If you haven’t peed outside you haven’t lived,” remarked my son at one point, streaked in sand and salt.

I must be doing something right, I thought with pride.

Coincidentally, I’m re-reading Roger Deakin’s Waterlog, an old favourite. It is a particular early edition I never had in my collection and always wanted: rarer than hen’s teeth because its full text is no longer in print.

Current printings expunge mention of certain controversial swim spots where access is contested.

I read it years ago because my ex had a copy of this early edition of which he was so precious that he made sure to extract it from my shelves when we split (and because he knew I wanted it and refused to give me a moment’s gratification).

I am a big fan of cold water swimming. In Waterlog, a character warns of the dangers of too much warm water bathing, lest one become like the latter Romans, soft and decadent. I grew up paddling in ponds and rivers in upstate New York, and progressed to the Irish Sea.

These days, I dip in the river at the end of my garden regularly, as Deakin did in his moat. My Belarus-born great-grandad was part of a group of old country men called the Polar Bears who used to swim in winters off Brighton Beach in Brooklyn.

Cold water is in my veins.

The ex who clung to his copy of Waterlog loathed a cold water dip and luxuriated in hot baths for hours. The irony of this was definitely lost on him.

Years passed and I thought of Waterlog from time to time as a gap in my bookshelf that I must fill. Once, I sourced it online but then accidentally sent it to my old address in London. Whoops.

Anyway, when I saw that exact same early edition in the window of the second-hand bookstore near me last week for a queenly sum of £2, I knew it was meant for me.

I knew it because no one in my vicinity wants this book, and I know that because I eavesdropped on this conversation between a couple at my local breakfast spot that went like this:

“So, do you like beaches? Are you a beach person?”

“Well, yeah, if it’s like a private beach with sun loungers. But a crowded beach where you have to lay out a towel? No.”

If you’ve read Waterlog, you’ll know this cosseted conversation is its antithesis.

Anyway, Roger and his merry aquatic adventures accompanied me on some phenomenal swims this month: the River Brue near Glastonbury and the sea in Dorset, that most superlative of English seaside counties, where plesiosaurs flip out of the cliffs with astonishing regularity and the bracken is lush and still distinctly Jurassic, peppered with groves of elephant grass.

We also went in a river I shan’t name that Roger strongly recommends—with good reason because it is pristine and lush—where we got a stern telling-off from an old busybody for launching from private property.

This spot is mentioned in a book, I said.

Not in current printings, it’s not, she responded sourly. I could tell she would burn my early edition, with its precious lore, given half a chance.

Epic.

But the best was still to come.

—

Cue: a weekend in Wales, no kids, with Joel’s sister Kirsty and her husband, Gareth.

It started with the whiskey at 2am. We were away.

Joel and Kirsty are both tall, dark-haired and lean, with family roots that can be traced back a few generations to the Welsh borderlands. It doesn’t surprise me they are drawn to this area.

Gareth is russet, broad-shouldered and capable. His friend Ish is a quick, brown pixie of a man, with a stately dowager Jack Russell terrier named Millie. I wrote about him once before.

The Brecons are in their blood.

Ish regaled the group about driving along the A303 recently, past Stonehenge.

“I was just looking at the Henge and the way the sun was hitting it and then I heard the vvvvvvvvv sound of the wheel crossing the edge but I thought it’s fine, just correct a bit, and kept looking but then, out the corner of my eye, there’s a line of traffic stopped, and no way to brake in time so I swerved and hit the verge and went past about eight cars and rolled to a stop and everyone was beeping like ‘whoa dude, are you crazy’ so I pretended I meant to do it to park and look at the Henge then I waited until everyone who had seen me had gone off. Then I kept driving.”

They know this part of the Welsh Valleys intimately. Ish is going to look at a house in Mountain Ash, which is the most beautiful name for a town that I can think of.

Gareth wanted to know what street it’s on.

“The one where that guy is building a wall.”

“Oh yeah,” Gareth knew it instantly. “The guy with the high-vis vest.”

“Yep.” They were both nodding. “He’s been working on that wall for two years now and it’s still only ankle high.”

The weekend was punctuated with high mirth: Gareth tormented Ish that he fancies me.

“You’d want to put a ring on that Joel or someone’s going to pinch her off you.”

I feigned embarrassment but actually basked in it, with pathetic gratitude.

Frankly, it’s the greatest birthday present they could give an almost forty year old.

Still got it, I whispered to myself.

—

The next morning, a temporarily clear sky, though rain was forecast. The plan was to go swimming at a new spot deep in the Brecons that Kirsty found.

A perfect rainy day activity, because who cares about getting wet if the aim is to get still wetter.

No wetsuits, we’re assured. It won’t be as cold as the waterfalls.

If you’ve ever been to the waterfall country of South Wales, you’ll know this isn’t promising much.

On the whiskey hangover, we stopped at a place in Merthyr for a late breakfast at 2pm. It was closed.

We strolled in hope and stumbled upon Plas Coffi, where they had cakes, coffee and smoked salmon bagels.

As if that wasn’t enough, in a gallery room downstairs, they also had a photo exhibit: shots from forty years ago showing the miners’ strike, protests against the Thatcherite closures and pre-closure shots down the pits.

I browsed the photos and first-hand accounts to my heart’s content. We even got cherry blondies, yoghurt-dipped berry flapjacks and sausage rolls to go.

10/10. Go to Plas Coffi, if you’re in Merthyr.

Satisfied I had enough calories to keep Joel going through a hike and a cold-water swim, off we went and left the car on a whale’s back swell of road somewhere in the Brecons.

We set off across open heath: bog cotton, black skies and bare rolling hills, above the Neath disturbance.

What a great name.

It’s a fault line: an ancient weakness in the earth’s crust.

The Neath Disturbance is the disturbance beneath.

It is the most southerly of the many fault lines that ripple out from a suture—a join in the earth’s crust—where, half a billion years ago, the bulletproof granite of the Caledonian ranges drove up against Scotland’s western edge and squashed the proto-Atlantic ocean of Iapetus to a puddle.

The Atlantic is named after Atlas, who carried the skies; Atlas’s father was the titan Iapetus, hence the name.

In the Brecons, these ancient fault lines ride under carboniferous limestone: a karst landscape of caves and sinkholes, the carved and compressed remains of calcified shells, on a long-ago sea bed.

We were aiming for a perfectly round bog pool, a bullet hole in the hills that is totally invisible at ground level.

It sits right above the fault line: perhaps what’s left of old Iapetus itself.

An ancient ocean, the size of a pond.

Kirsty pointed it out to me on a distant hillside, visible only as the faintest line, a bog scar, a hallucination.

“You don’t see it until you are nearly upon it,” she said.

If you didn’t know it was there, you’d never see it. You could be twenty feet away and miss it entirely.

But there it is: a perfectly round pool, hidden in a swell of heath.

The skies are so grey the water doesn’t look especially dark but I am assured by Kirsty that it swallows light.

Black water, she says, into which Ish won’t venture.

Bog monsters down there, he says.

Maybe bog bodies, I offered, and told Joel about the sacrificial brown-stained corpses they pull straight from the Bronze Age in the Irish bog lands.

“Cool,” he said. Monsters, bog bodies and ancient oceans notwithstanding, we are definitely going for a swim.

Slipping into the water, I struck for the opposite bank, intending a full diameter.

The water is definitely alive, alternating gusts of chill and balmy.

It is not difficult to imagine a malevolent creature tossing restlessly in the deep and roiling the stasis.

The Neath disturbance: the disturbance beneath.

This is not stagnant water. It is a spring, or it is connected to underground rivers and aquifers in some undetectable system.

It has an odd molasses-like quality of heaviness but without the buoyancy you associate with salted waters.

This is heavy water that will drag you down, not bear you up.

Joel pulled out an arm streaked with pondweed.

“It’s the bog bodies, grabbing at your ankles.”

“I want to dive down and have a look.”

“How would you see anything? Imagine diving and getting tangled in the weed. You’d never come back up.”

Down you go to join the dead, in the dead ocean.

The cold in the pool was insidious. At regular intervals, the water fluctuated twenty degrees in temperature. We were alternately borne up in a warm bath and blasted with frigid draughts from below.

We steeped for about fifteen minutes, floating about, joking that the warm patches are where we’ve had a wee (they’re not).

I felt fine, the cool was silky.

Pulling myself up the bank, the peat clung to every hair: even the finest were tea-brown. My belly and thighs looked as if they’d been dipped in iron filings.

It wasn’t until about five minutes later that the lowered core temperature made itself known. Every layer on, chilled to teeth-rattling, we shared out the best brownie I’ve ever had, baked by Kirsty.

Walking back to the car, at a certain point the chill in my bones retreated enough that I pulled down hood and let the wind roll my hair. It felt incredible, like a cool splashing. The lightest of rains dusted brow and chin.

A flock of sheep startled itself and flowed, liquid, across the hill. The lower flanks of the mountains were sun-lit while, up high, we were in deep-browns and grey-greens: bracken, bog and peat.

Just then, the clouds parted and there was sun on the pool.

Whatever magic fills this cleft was satiated, for the moment.

“Next time,” I said, “we have to bring some whiskey and pour it in as an offering to the water gods.”

A bit for the ancient ocean, and the rest for me.

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A friend sent me a Guardian article a few days ago about how loads of Americans—specifically: young, wealthy, tech-y Americans—are moving to the Cotswolds to escape Trump.

The rationale is it offers the chance to live in the quaint English countryside where there is no risk of water shortages, wildfires or demented, roving bands of preppers (at least in the short term).

I showed this to Joel and, with a lofty air, suggested that my newsletter probably helped to popularise the Cotswolds for that particular demographic.

“Come on babe. That’s exactly the slice of America that’s on Substack. I’ve definitely played a role here.”

He suggested gently that I may have overestimated my reach and significance.

Scoffing (I never do this), I allowed that the smash TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Cotswolds epic Rivals, and its heaving bucolic shagging on tennis courts and al fresco under shady oaks by trickling burns, may have had something to do with it. But, doubling down on my role as trendsetter, I pointed out that I am in fact an American in the Cotswolds, coming up on four years now. Ahead of the curve, what?

So, for my American readers, as a fellow American, if you’re planning to relocate to middle England, allow me to share with you some nuggets of wisdom that I have gleaned from my time on these blessed shores.

* First, it’s quite rainy, so you’ll need to choose a house. An idyllic 17th century stone cottage with a pitched roof of bundled thatch will naturally be your first choice. But allow me to offer you a word of caution. While these cottages are a dream to look at, you would not enjoy living in one. Trust me on that. These cottages were built back when people fetched water from the river and washed their clothes twice a year. They are totally impractical to live in. The kind of thatched, stone cottage that looks super cute dappled with peachy summer sunlight and draped in wisteria was not built to the requirements of 21st century family life—certainly not to the requirements of 21st century American families with their rec rooms and laundry chutes and triple garages—nor to the sizes of 21st century humans (again: certainly not 21st century American humans).

Don’t believe me? Tiny, blocked-up windows (a hangover, I am told, from the strange, lost “Window Tax” period of English history); staircases that can be ascended only in full crouch; living rooms too small to accommodate more than an armchair; kitchens and bathrooms without natural light. Plus, silverfish and woodlice in the walls. When it floods, the waters will seep up and through the stone floors like the hell-slime of Golgotha in that scene in Dogma with the shit-demon. And if you think, no worries, I can fix all that: no, you can’t. Now would be the time to Google what “Grade II listing” and “conservation area” mean. Planning to alter, extend or replace that thatch or those ancient single-pane sash windows? Think again buddy. But, you know, the wisteria sure looks dreamy.

* As for house specifications, a boot room is probably the most important thing you can own. More important than kitchen and bathroom combined. If you don’t have one, consider selling a child to acquire one. This is a room just for boots, which get muddy and so need a room of their own in which to sit and think about what they have done. It is impossible to overstate the importance of the boot room. There are, I understand, entire costumiers and decorators who make a living just from the outfitting of boot rooms. They will even, for a small surcharge, pre-muddy your boots to spare you the effort. In any case, you cannot hope to make friends and advance in Cotswolds life without a boot room so please don’t even think about it.

* Likewise, you will certainly need a room with lots of natural light falling through checked curtains, the sole purpose of which is to prepare your wildflower cuttings, arrange stems and hang loosely-bound bouquets of lavender, tied with sedge grass. Don’t have one? See number 2 above.

* Now, this one is optional but, if you’re not a monster, you will probably also want a lake, delicately reeded. This is so you can dive at a moment’s notice when you return sweat-stained from the commute to London, after handing over the reins of your horse to a squire who will helpfully materialise when required in the woods at the edge of your manor. What’s that? No squire? See number 2.

* Now you’ve found a house, in a postcard-perfect village, the first thing you’ll notice is that there is no Uber Eats. Please adjust your food expectations accordingly. You will also find that restaurant options are somewhat constrained. There is no Sichuan, Caribbean or Vietnamese food anywhere west of London and, as for Mexican, you will need to learn to live with crushing disappointment. After vast amounts of fieldwork, I’m pleased to report there is a solid curry place in Chipping Norton. But that’s it. You will want to plan your meals in London many weeks in advance for ramen, conveyor belt sushi and all the other things totally unattainable in the ‘wolds.

* Country pubs will stop serving food *much* earlier than you expect. Hours, if not days earlier. No, I can’t tell you when. That is something you must learn for yourself.

* You can, if you are sufficiently charismatic and impressive and popular, join a fancy members’ club to get access to their private members-only restaurants. Note that, if you choose to do so, you must be prepared for all your friends to call you a dickhead when they spot the club app on your phone.

* Note also that your phone probably has no cell service. Ever.

* Basically, my advice? Learn to cook.

* Once you’ve learned to cook, you will also need things to cook. This is where that wooded manor comes into play, so you can live out all your wet-dream grow-your-own millennial fantasies. Luckily, investing in a greenhouse and the right pair of secateurs from Daylesford will transform you instantly into a proficient gardener. A total lack of know-how need not hold you back. A word of warning: make sure that your greenhouse is Crittall-style aluminium in a pleasingly aesthetic colour, say: sage-green or rust-red. Nothing trashier than a plain white uPVC greenhouse.

* If grow-your-own is too successful and you have to stop because you’ve increased the GDP of the UK so much that it isn’t fair on the other producing nations, you will need some wheels to navigate all those adorable country roads to a grocery store. One can’t ride one’s horse and muddy boots everywhere. Living in the Cotswolds is mostly driving to other places, as it’s quite far from anything in British terms—but, for you? The distances are positively diminutive by American standards. 50 miles round trip to Costco? Nothing.

* So choose a vehicle. Be warned thought that, if you want to blend in and burnish your credentials, it will need to be a battered Land Rover at least thirty years old, equipped with a snorkel and flecked with mud from driving it around your copious acreage. Anything else is frankly embarrassing.

* When you are driving, you’ll want to note that the roads, which wind round frequent bends and hills, are approximately the width of a single car and traffic flows at 60 mph in both directions. You’ll also want to look out for bicyclists, walkers and horses—all of which use the motor vehicle roads despite miles of open countryside in every direction—and those fun old arched bridges that bear signs warning that large oncoming vehicles may have to pass under the bridge in the middle of the road. In other words, you may come face to face with an 18-wheeler under this bridge, so perhaps think about tapping that brake. Oh, and did I mention we drive on the left? You’ll want to remember that.

* A few other miscellaneous survival tips. In the right season, you can get free apples all over the place. No, I won’t tell you where. Well, maybe I will, in a sidebar, for a founders’ subscription.

* Eggs too, in roadside boxes, if you leave a couple quid.

* Farmers will get very cross if you walk across their fields. They will definitely shout at you and may also shoot at you, pretending to think you are a pheasant. Don’t risk it.

* You’re all set. Having now managed to house, feed and convey yourself about in the sunshine for a glorious week of perfect summer, the clouds will reconvene for approximately 51 weeks of rain. At this point, you will retire to your panelled library, with a snifter of malt whiskey, to gaze contentedly on vast swathes of rain-dappled woodland, as your sanity slips steadily into the rearview.

* Congratulations! You’ve just made it through your first year. Just seven or eight more generations, and you may well be on your way to passing for a local. Of course, unless you can trace your lineage back to pre-Roman conquest, I daresay you’ll never be truly accepted, but still. It’s a small price to pay to live in the Hamptons of England.

* Oh, and don’t forget to stockpile instant noodles for when all those roads—adorable single lane affairs—and bridges—adorable hump-backed arches—flood and the nearest Tesco is in Cheltenham.

Good luck!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lifelitter.org/subscribe

This morning I nearly spilled a full cup of coffee on my laptop.

Reflexes and dexterity aren’t what they once were. Forty looms large.

Joel took delivery of replacement razors for his shaving implement. After years of being, shall we say, pogonotrophically challenged, he now needs to shave every day.

Puberty finally harpooned him at the ripe old age of 32.

I told him if he starts growing chest hair, it’s game over, so watch this space.

Anyway, back to the razors.

I was at my desk, AirPods in, and sensed a disturbance in the hallway. Joel was flapping around looking for something.

I popped out my AirPods.

“What’s up?”

“Can’t find my ID.”

I wandered out of the office. A delivery man stood at our front door, much more on top of the situation than I was.

He spoke briskly, a man who has places to go and people to see.

“Oh good, mum’s home. What year were you born?”

I stood very still, failing to grasp what was happening. Joel looked uncomfortable but stayed nice and quiet so he wouldn’t have to continue the hunt for his ID.

The delivery man looked expectantly at me, thumbing his tablet, all business.

“1985,” I whispered to the hallway.

“Great, here you go, thanks.” He thrust a parcel at me with a warning label: “Contains bladed implement. Over 18 only”.

Then he was gone and, with him, every scrap of peace and dignity I had gently cultivated that morning.

That was when I nearly destroyed my laptop.

An hour later, after the near miss with the coffee, after a brief consolatory hug from my much smoother-skinned companion, I thought about the years writ so evidently on my face.

Time heals all wounds, I’ve heard. A cheap nonsense peddled by people who have never been wounded.

Turn the other cheek, to err is human, to forgive divine. I’ve heard that too.

To paraphrase one of the characters in the latest episode of The Last of Us: what a bunch of victims.

Who but an irredeemable victim would forgive the unforgivable?

I choose not to forgive.

The past, Hilary Mantel says, belongs to those who have suffered in it. A little girl, punished years ago for lying, owns the past and reminds her father who the liar really is.

There was a lot hiding in my Notes, when I sat down this morning to write, behind both glasses and sunnies. England is awash in spring sunshine and I can’t bear to be inside.

There was a bit about my recent trip to Dublin.

Dublin is where I was schooled, where my parents still live, one of them lapsing into demented decrepitude.

It’s been a long time since I went back.

I’m not a real Dub, there’s nothing that could ever fool you into thinking I am. Doesn’t matter that “feck” starts flying out of my mouth as soon as I roll down the gangplank from the Stena ferry. That I can name every DART station from Dalkey to town. That an article about an Eddie Rockets closure due to rodent faeces contamination brings a nostalgic tear to my eye.

Dublin is a marvel these days, with her startled, monied internationalism.

Google’s European HQ in the old tarted-up docklands. More Silicon Valley than Joyce around the 40 Foot, where everyone is after a selfie in the spot Sharon Horgan and her sisters took a dip on Christmas morning (in the sunshine?!? Wearing pedal pushers and a light jumper?!?).

Ah Dublin.

In the sun, there’s none can touch you—but the sun scarcely ever touches you.

The tide curls around Bulloch Harbour and seals heave themselves onto the rocks in Scotsman’s Bay. No sign of the mail ship scudding out to sea from Dún Laoghaire but if you go into Fitzie’s, the benchettes still bear the faint imprint of Joyce’s arse.

There’s a fancy new bike lane that’ll whizz you up along the seafront towards town, where the shuffle of shops along Nassau Street is altered for the first time in living memory.

House of Names, with its heraldic plates? Gone.

Celtic Music? Gone. Who buys CDs these days? Enya is on Spotify.

Knobs and Knockers, the nautical antiques place with the best name ever? Also gone.

Molly is still here though, tits rubbed raw for luck at the bottom of Grafton Street.

Dublin feels a bit raw alright. Or is that me?

The houses are tarted up like an uncomfortable facelift or lapsing gently into disrepair. I prefer the latter but I’m alone in that, it seems. At least the toasted coconut smell of gorse, piña colada on the hillsides of Killiney, hasn’t changed, nor the wych elm, sporting pale green clusters of seed heads like cherry blossom.

Ahead of the return, a quick trip to Irish Tesco for as many cans of Beamish as I can carry.

That’s a request from my carpenter friend back home in Oxfordshire. They don’t sell Beamish outside of Ireland anymore, who knows why.

The cans on the shelves offer a “creamier head”. Keep them away from yer maiden aunts.

I ping his missus a pic and ask is there anything else she would like from Ireland?

Access to the single market please.

I don’t think Tesco stocks that.

Not in this day and age anyway. Never have free market economics been less of-the-moment.

I left Dublin, pleased to have made my peace with it, even if some things will never be forgiven.

—

Back on this side of the Irish Sea pond, spring was in full thrust.

The trees wear a filmy negligee of blossoms after the end of March and all of middle England exudes moisture, a long held exhalation of winter’s dampness.

Roots stretch and the ground dries. The woods fill in.

There are hardly any woods worthy of the name. Meagre clumps dot the fields—polite little tree villages—but, by April, the days are long and full of bees and blossom.

And now it’s May, which means I will be 40 in a month. I feel as if I’m straddling some significant isthmus: Corinth, say, en route to the riches of the Peloponnese, before I finally end up in the sea.

I hope that I keep my wits, even if dexterity departs.

—

On the way to the gym, two butterflies circled each other in the road, spinning upwards. I slowed the car to a crawl to let them spin away.

At the gym, I crossed the lawn to the stream in my bathing suit, carrying a pair of mating toads that got lost by the shower stalls.

At first, I thought it was a mama toad, carrying her baby on her back, but Google told me it’s the much smaller male astride his mate.

I left them in a patch of sun at the edge of the stream, still motionless, still going for it. Nettles swished luxuriantly against my ankles and calves.

The terror and pity I feel for small helpless creatures in the face of a great, impersonal animosity leaves me crushed and breathless.

Not caring would be much easier.

Just like not loving would be much easier, when you have ample evidence of man’s faithlessness.

Choosing to love is the harder road.

In my garden, a patch of speedwell encroaches on the lawn. The apple tree explodes into frothy white blossom and the cherry tree too, pink and perfect: the Platonic ideal of cherry blossom in spring.

The water level in the river drops and drops to gently burbling. In November, in thrall to an autumn storm, it was a torrent that swamped the bridge. Now, it barely tickles the roots of a gasping sycamore.

So go the seasons, charted in this small patch of river.

—

A month ago, I went down to London to meet an editor.

Almost missed the train but after a full sprint, I was on, chest heaving. It was one of the rare nice trains. Comfortable seats facing forward with padded armrests and ample legroom. [Chiltern Railways, is that you? You ok, hun?]

My head clanged. No time to stop at the kiosk.

I would commit seven kinds of sin for a coffee, I thought to myself.

The guy next to me was on a serious, boring call. Seriously boring.

“Yeah, we should almost threaten to pull the team.”

Almost threaten is the most British thing I can think of.

“It’s not what we can do about it, it’s what we can do in the absence of it.”

I wonder what it is. Probably money.

Cold, grey and misty in Oxfordshire but sun splitting the sky in London, altogether a different country. No sunglasses because who grabs sunglasses when it’s cold, grey and misty?

A man carried a shoulderful of bouquets past me, looking like he’d gone missing from a production of My Fair Lady. I willed him to tip his cap, say “guv’nor” and break into song and dance. (He did not.)

In the coffee shop (coffee! finally!) the girl behind the counter was American. We bonded for a moment over California and then I was lost in a wash of when I too worked in a coffee shop at her age: the stress-excitement and performance of calling out names and orders with confidence, turning out a stream of hot custom drinks.

Brief euphoria: all these people depending on me to get their morning beverage just right.

In London, the shops were forthright, named for what they sell: Eggs and Bacon in Marylebone, Rice and Peas in East Dulwich.

In the charity shop where I purchased an emergency pair of sunnies, the woman next to me was carrying a bag that said “Medjugorje” on it.

I exclaimed, I just went to Bosnia last year. She looked at me with disdain.

“Medjugorje is in Herzegovina.” I felt a fool.

“Oh, same thing,” I said, compounding the error.

“That’s like saying to someone from Wales they’re from England.”

Consider me appropriately chastened.

For some reason, we kept talking. I liked her, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the prickliness. I told her I’m here in London to meet with an editor about a book I’m writing.

What’s it about, she wanted to know.

Something vague about Vienna, I mumbled.

“Oh Vienna! I’m half Viennese.”

We talked for several more minutes and I told her about the book, in more detail.

She listened with interest, looking increasingly concerned and eventually cut me off.

“But let me ask you.”

She laid a hand on my forearm and seemed deeply troubled.

“Will it inspire people to love?”

“Yes,” I said. “At all costs.”

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Not long after the thing with Rob fizzled out (not that it ever really fizzled in), along rolled the man everyone thinks I left my husband for.

He had it easy.

I was primed. It was like Rob had warmed me up: pre-heated to the right temperature.

Ready to cheat.

It turned out it was still too early for me and Rob: neither of us was ready to dive so catastrophically out of the safety of our relationships.

I’d have given it a damn good go.

But Rob was—remains—a void of unsatisfied longings.

I could show you the messages: messages of indescribable yearning.

Frustrated, inchoate yearning. “I want you so bad my dick hurts.” Etc.

Every time we missed secretly meeting up, or I missed a 1am call, or he couldn’t get out of bed with his girlfriend, I spun out all the alternate worlds in which he and I were naked, alone, going hell-for-leather.

If the main component of the universe is dark matter, it must be all those things that didn’t happen.

All the things we didn’t get—the job, the love, the family.

The shadow worlds of unactuated desires and successful loves we never get to touch are infinite.

They spin off and make the darkness. Build darkness and anger and dissatisfaction in us.

Embitter us.

So every non-happening with Rob spun off and made more dark matter: pushed my universe apart a little bit more.

There were so many non-events: dark, significant, non-events. So many missed opportunities.

We just never got it together in this dimension.

Because by the time he decided to come around (literally), it was too late. I was with someone else.

That someone else was the one everyone thinks I left my husband for.

But the truth is he found me like this: frustrated, lonely, ready to plummet.

Rob had already done all the legwork for him.

The thing was I didn’t fancy this other guy, the one everyone thinks I left my husband for. Not the way I fancied Rob.

Which was weird because objectively the new guy was more traditionally good-looking. Dark hair, dark eyes, heavily-built.

Bearded—but I don’t like beards.

Swarthy—but I prefer waifs.

He was the kind of guy girls on the street turned for. Eye-catchingly attractive from afar—because he worked hard to catch everyone’s eye.

I know he did it to other girls because he did it to me, in hallways and lifts at work.

There would be that nanosecond of pure raw eye contact as we passed: the exchange of eyeballs that said “up for it?”

Rob was never so blatant. Much harder to pin down. The real thrill of the chase.

If Rob was chess, this guy was that kids’ game with the cartoon buckets and the nets and catapults. Mousetrap.

But nothing was happening with Rob and I had never been so frustrated in my life. He was gone, away at another law firm now.

The messages we exchanged after his leaving drinks, at first so horny and yearning and ever-present (including that long weekend he was away in Rome with his girlfriend), decreased in frequency.

Every time I passed the tower where his new law firm was I imagined running into him. I’d be at the same bar, the same lunch spot, on the same road.

Oh hi, I’d say casually.

But it never happened. He was gone. We were gone. We missed our chance.

And my marriage? It was too late for that.

I told you: I had already fallen, irretrievably, out of it.

It happened in that moment, when Rob’s knee landed on mine under the table.

So what to do?

Well, now there’s this other guy at work: the one with the roving eyes that scream “I’m up for sex.”

There was no magic to him.

He wasn’t the one I wanted. I could see his teeth were terrible: British teeth, crooked and yellowing.

I didn’t really want him. But he got me anyway.

How?

He discovered I’m a nerd. I actually remember his triumphant chortle: “You’re a nerd!”

He started gifting me books. Patrick Leigh Fermor, Robert Macfarlane.

My kind of books.

And I fell, like deliquescent fruit.

It was that easy.

Cut to a year later, on a train to Oxford, heading to meet him. Probably reading a book he got me.

Halfway through the journey, I got a call from my sister and talked to her briefly.

My voice is distinctive, especially on a quiet train.

Moments after I hung up, a soft tap on the shoulder.

Someone behind me saying my name.

A voice I knew: mocking, gently ironic and soft as caramel.

I could hear the half-smile before I turned.

It was Rob, sitting behind me on the 10:27 to Cheltenham.

With his girlfriend.

—

Pair with Call your Girlfriend by Robyn.

TO BE CONTINUED.

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⬅️ Read previous 12 — Sex Chess

⬅️⬅️Read T H E N O T E B O O K S from the start here.

The thing you have to understand about Rob is that he wasn’t a real person.

Not saying he didn’t exist. He definitely existed (insofar as any of us do).

I mean he wasn’t a real person you could really know. He didn’t express real opinions or preferences.

Sure, he knew what was desirable or what his friends might want or what someone in his position ought to have.

But Rob himself? He existed at the Venn centre of everyone else.

Even in our most intimate moments, and in our most private messages, it was as if he was performing for some unseen audience.

What I’m trying to say is that Rob was cool in a way I’ve never been cool.

He was too social a creature to be ruled by his own unfiltered desires.

It made him oddly selfless.

If the essence of cool is never letting them see you sweat, never letting them get an in on you, never letting them know what you really think, Rob was the coolest motherfucker on the planet.

The consummate lawyer.

Even then, it was clear he would go far. Shapeless as the snow; just as cold.

And me?

I was playacting.

Almost a lawyer, but still in training. I was pretending to be cool, trying to be cold.

I thought I just needed to learn how to lawyer to be a lawyer.

Turns out I needed some more fundamental dismantling first.

It was like I had been measured and found too… earnest.

I imagined the partners’ conversation:

“She writes a good email, knows the law. Studied at {checks notes} yes, it was. Oxford.”

Mutinous muttering. “She’s too earnest.”

“Well, she did used to work in {stage whispers} human rights. What do you expect? Need some time to unpick all that starchy moral fibre.” Clears throat with distaste.

“It’s been almost two years. Still a bit too moral, I think.”

“Mmm. I heard she leaves at 5pm every day to do bath and bedtime.”

Concerned rumbles, raised eyebrows. “She does come back to the office in the evening to put in the hours. Sometimes…”

“Does she? Yes, well. Hmm. That’s a good sign.”

“I think she’ll turn.”

“Let’s put Rob on her.”

—

I’m joking, of course. In a law firm, no one cares about your moral fibre—as long as it doesn’t interfere with the bottom line.

The struggle was all internal. When you do a shitty job, how long before the shit starts to wipe off on other parts of your life?

It’s a decent question without a decent answer.

Perhaps you can stave it off for many years.

Or perhaps the chasm between office desk dissociation and fucking a hooker in Dubai on a work trip is not so wide as you might think.

How long until you say to yourself wonderingly, without cognition: look what you’ve done.

—

Alright, enough foreplay. So what happened the night of Rob’s leaving drinks?

If I close my eyes, I can still see the view out the office window. It was dark already: rainy old London, and a fogbound Thames.

I had a cold coming on, I could feel it. That slight rasp behind the eyes and rawness of the throat told me I could probably nip it with an early night and a quart of orange juice.

Stephen, the partner I sat with, turned to me just before 6pm. Like all the other male partners, he had an unhealthy obsession with Rob’s doings.

“Are you going to Rob’s leaving drinks tonight?”

He was feigning casual. I could tell he really wanted to go but was torn between his genuine love for Rob and not wanting to appear to approve Rob too much. (Rob was, after all, a rancorous traitor, abandoning ship for a different firm.)

“Yes. Are you coming, Stephen?”

“Oh!” Hastily stowing papers in desk and wiggling mouse to sleep his computer. “Yes, alright then. I’ll look in on the way home. Just for one.”

“Great.” What the hell else do you say to your boss? “I’ll just nip to the loo and see you down there.”

In the loo, I checked my brows, a slick of lip balm. Pinched my cheeks. My eyes were bright and feverish looking.

The impending cold, I told myself.

Back at the cubicle, Stephen, in his eagerness, had already left without me.

I stood on his side of the small room—the better side, the window side—for just a moment.

Rain lashed the glass. It was a mucky night.

Look what you’ve done.

The decision to go out felt momentous. Don’t for a second think I didn’t know what I was doing or that any of this took me by surprise.

I watched with impartial fascination.

Considered myself in that little cubicle and thought how interesting—how academically fascinating!—that I could go home, silence my phone, drink my orange juice and go to bed.

It was a real option.

Rob’s leaving drinks would happen without me. Maybe there would be messages asking where I was, maybe not. In the morning, he would work at a different firm and any danger he presented, passed.

How interesting, I told myself. I would awake in a different tomorrow, unsullied by tonight.

Alternative futures would spin off through the rain-streaked glass, and never happen. Alternative me would sprint up along the river towards home, to nowhere.

I would never know what happened on this side of the glass.

I knew what I would regret more.

The lift dinged. One or two flash frames of a rain-soaked street, and I was in the bar next door where Rob’s leaving drinks were kicking off.

About ten people were already there, including Stephen, the partner. He was in a private huddle with Rob.

“… and there’s nothing to say you can’t come back, door’s always open. Partnership committee love to see it: go off, get some experience elsewhere, maybe go in-house. Then come back.”

He held Rob in a tight handshake with accompanying gripped forearm, and sustained eye contact. It was almost indecent.

“Right, I’ll be off then.” Stephen made his dash for the train.

Once the bosses left, the night went the way these nights go.

We did shots, took a chaotic taxi ride to another bar, ended up in the lobby bar of a hotel up Shoreditch way.

Gradually, the numbers dwindled.

The last four standing, still drinking pornstar martinis at 11, 12, sometime long past lights out: me, Rob, Naomi, Harry.

Harry was the next most junior member of the department after me. He had only just qualified and returned from leave to find that the team he thought he’d be joining was off to an American firm, without him.

Rob slapped him on the back, told him not to worry.

Harry wasn’t worried. He’d been to Eton. Things would come off fine for him. He was a good time boy, up for a night out because it had presented itself to him.

In my head, I flagged him “Non-combatant (only here for the coke)”.

Naomi was a different story, a senior associate. A woman who looked like she might have been born on the trading floors of the London Stock Exchange, chain-smoking in the loading dock behind the office, sending emails at 4am, from her nest of discarded shoes under a desk on the 12th floor.

She couldn’t have been more than five years older than me but a face like an aged monkey and a hacking laugh to match. She also, I remembered with unease, knew Rob from whatever Counties village they both hailed from. Her father knew his cousin, or something. She was an old family friend, knew him from way back.

And, what was more, she knew Rob’s live-in girlfriend, the unmentionable Sarah.

Naomi I flagged “Enemy combatant” and further added: “poisonous breath”.

Chat was laden with innuendo. We were all talking shit, squawking at each other, intermittently playing “Shag, Marry, Kill” about colleagues and necking shots.

Shag the fit one in HR (that was Harry). Marry the hot, young stud in insolvency (that was Naomi). Kill the partner in reg who never checked her emails (that was Rob).

I looked at his face, at a side-angle.

Harry across the table, darker, with lashes, dimples and pixie cheekbones, was much more conventionally handsome.

Rob looked somehow … medieval. He had a Renaissance fair face. I could see him in another age, scrappy, in felt shoes and a peaked cap: a tall yeoman, a rangy squire, a plague-dodging peasant. Too clever to get caught. High forehead, firm jaw. Eyes slate—but just a bit too close together, a bit narrow. Nose long, and crooked where it must have been knocked askew at some point.

There was no arguing the point: he was only average good-looking.

But, my god. There was something about him.

I could no more have stayed away from him than I could have flown a loop over Tower Bridge, under the power only of my own two arms.

The clock above the bar ticked steadily on.

It was just after 1:00am now.

Naomi turned to me.

“Ok, your turn. Shag, marry, kill: Stephen, Rob, Harry.” She meant Stephen, the partner I sat with and indicated the other two at the table.

Rob smirked and looked at his drink; Harry smiled broadly and looked at me.

“Well, shag Harry, obviously.” I raised my glass to him over the table and he clinked mine, loudly (“Yaaas, darling”). I pretended to consider. “Marry Stephen, bless him, he’s such a lovely man.” I drained my drink. “Kill Rob.”

Across the table, Naomi and Harry hooted.

Naomi started bantering Harry about how good-looking he was: almost too good-looking. Harry rode along. He was wasted and Naomi was way more senior than him.

Rob looked straight at me. “You wouldn't kill me.” Confident undertone.

“Oh yes I would.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t know what I’d do.”

“Actually, I know exactly what you would do.”

The lobby started spinning but not irrecoverably so.

He gave a soft laugh and turned to face the others, joined Naomi in mocking Harry.

His phone lay on the table. Before I could think about it or stop myself, I pulled out my phone and typed a message.

You’re right. I want you. Just saying.

Sent. 1:07am.

I joined back in with Harry and Naomi across the table, not daring to look at him.

After a moment, his phone flashed and he grabbed it. I laughed at something Naomi said and we clinked glasses.

Under the table, he pressed his leg into mine—hard.

I kept joking with the other two, leaning forward, not even looking at him.

In my lap, my phone dinged.

Just saying what?

His message and my response came all within a minute.

You need it spelled out?

The two of us, briefly impassive, side-by-side on our respective phones. Nothing to see here.

The merriment across the table continued unabated. A few more rounds of Shag, Marry, Kill. It was determined that Naomi would happily shag and marry (and whatever else was required) a swarthy chap from the other end of the corporate team.

Eventually, the other two rose and rustled wrappings, looking for lighters. They wanted to go outside for a smoke.

Finally.

I sat looking at their backs retreating further, further, until they were out the revolving doors.

I turned to him. He’d been watching them out too.

It was probably only a matter of seconds: the smoothest three seconds in the world.

He shifted his chair, moved his arm to the back of mine.

Just like our knee-to-knee under the table, the sound extinguished itself and, for a moment, nothing else mattered.

And all I could think was this.

He feels so good and his white shirt collar is open and he’s such a good kisser and he’s so sexy and I want him and my marriage is over and it’s all Stevie fucking Nicks’ fault.

Look what you’ve done.

—

Pair with Starboy, The Weeknd / Daft Punk.

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The bed was so comfortable when my alarm went, and Joel so safe and warm, that I was loathe to get out. What madness compels this? For a moment, I sank back and thought how easy it would be to cancel my tickets, change my plans, stay put and have a nice childfree week at home with Joel.

Not doing the thing is always easier than doing the thing.

Joel made me coffee and I had a quick shower, packed last minute items. Charger, toothbrush, book. Another book. Then a third. It’s ok, two of them are small. (I ended up buying another two books on the trip, and one of them was by Robert Musil so you know it ain’t small. What can I say? I travel with books.).

The train rushed me towards London on the familiar commuter line. It was an overcast morning and the light was flat, air cool after a scorching week.

I miss Joel already, I thought.

I’m reading Transit by Rachel Cusk which, thematically at least, felt appropriate for a journey. I’m on the fence with Rachel Cusk. On the one hand: closely observed and well-written. On the other: laboured, pretentious and over-engineered. Like a Michelin meal touched by too many fingers.

“The next station is London Marylebone. All change please.”

In Marylebone, a billboard of a leaping killer whale.

Orcas are apex predators with a diverse diet.

That’s cool, I thought: informative.

Then:

Looking for apex connectivity?

It was an ad for a mobile phone package.

By a strange quirk of the underground lines, it was quicker to walk several blocks to Baker Street than muddle through connections from Marylebone.

On the pavement outside the station, it’s so hot that London smells like Bangkok: an air of lightly cooked sewage on the streets.

It’s a Monday morning and feels strange—wonderful—to be abroad in the sun with a pack, not bound for the office. Wonderful to see London ticking along as it always does. I said a silent hallelujah for not having to live here anymore.

It’s been a long time since I was a lone traveller. I’ve noticed travelling alone has become less comfortable, more anxious, as I’ve grown older. Counter-intuitively, I was less concerned as a 22-year old ingénue than I am now. Aging into this world has made me increasingly aware of the deep well of hatred some men reserve for women. I am increasingly uneasy to be out in it. Travelling alone, disconnected from the relationships that construct an easily-parsable identity (“this is my man, these my children”) I wear a fake wedding ring as a protective device: it screens me, shields me, makes me less of a riddle and enigma to casual observer. Eyes pass onwards, incurious.

Just outside an optometrist near Baker Street, there’s a rotating screen trying to capture eyes of passers-by. It flashes up famous optical illusions: what do you see: an old lady or a young lady?

Often, I want to ask passers-by the same question.

What do you see?

In my mind’s eye, still a peripatetic twenty-something but in reality, a woman pushing early middle age, with a backpack, carrying a pillow, perhaps down on her luck (if you don’t notice the backpack is Patagootch).

I paused to take a picture of the optical illusion but it was gone, replaced by new scrawling messages that invited me to come in for a free eye test. I waited a minute or so for it to reappear but it didn’t.

Eventually, I decided this would be a really stupid way to miss my train to Brussels and moved on.

—

On the train, I was starving and took myself off to the café car.

I looked intently at the meal deal poster trying to work out what’s included. The blonde woman behind the counter addressed me while I was still looking.

Unsolicited, she told me I can have any of the baguettes, which she can heat up for me, or the veg curry or the salmon spinach quiche, plus any snack and any of the soft drinks or juices. She said it all very quickly and competently.

Head spinning with the complex options, I started to ask for a baguette but she cut me off.

“You can take it.”

“Oh… ok.” This is advancing quickly and also I live in England. I’m not used to this unapologetic forthrightness. What is this? No cringing? No saying sorry for telling me to get my own baguette? She physically can’t get it for me—there’s a Perspex barrier—but I am certain she would have apologised had she been English.

I grabbed a can of Coke too and asked if I can please have a cup of ice with it.

“It’s already very cold. You want ice as well?”

Now, stay with me a second.

I’ve never—and I mean, never, not once in all my thirty-nine years on this planet—had my need for ice questioned.

Is she being rude, I wondered with mild panic.

But her eyes are clear. I don’t detect rudeness. She is in earnest, just wanting to point out that the drink may end up being colder than I expect.

She isn’t being rude. She is just Dutch.

I reassured her I’ll be able to handle the iced beverage. Then, considering the three chocolate bars, I asked if this was the whole snack choice.

“No, I said any snack.” She indicated the row of crisps and nuts behind her.

Again, I scanned for passive-aggression. Again, none detected. This is just … how she talks.

I warmed to it. “Oh, ok, so those sausage bite things are included?” The bag of mini-saucissons is, I know from experience, a real treat.

“Yes.” She clearly thinks I’m a bit dim, which perhaps I am. “I said any snack.”   

I’m standing there, in what is fast becoming a fairly involved social interaction, when there’s a kerfuffle behind me. An American woman is asking the conductor if she can switch to a forward-facing seat.

“We’re all getting dizzy.”

I was eager to help and stepped in.

“Do you have a window? I’ve got a forward facing seat but no window so I’d happily trade.”

She demurred when it became clear I only had one seat to offer (she needs them for the whole family) and the conductor sorted her out with seats elsewhere.

Before the conductor left, the Dutch woman behind the counter held a quick exchange in French with him. I caught the word “fenêtre” but no one said anything to me so I just waited for my heated baguette.

As I was paying, the conductor reappeared.

He said to me in English:

“Were you wanting a seat with a window?”

Oh my god, hallelujah. “Yes please!”

And he led me to a perfect forward-facing empty two-seater with a big window.

I thanked the Dutch woman fervently on the way back through the café car to collect my stuff, the mystery of what she was saying to him about a fenêtre resolved.

See? I knew she wasn’t being rude. She was just Dutch, bless her.

—

I’ve only ever taken the Eurostar to Paris so this is a novel journey. The train was bound for Amsterdam but I had to get off in Brussels to catch a connecting train. I tried to pay attention, to form impressions of my own.

This low country is mostly unknown to me, outside of obvious historical reference points (war, more war) and the Dutch and Flemish art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries I so adore.

People call it a theatre: it’s so often been the theatre for war.

Theatre seems right. It’s a flat plain of corn, studded with cypresses, like a stage. Rows of upland Europe rise around it like an amphitheater.

There’s an enormous DHL transport centre and Belgian place names with far too many vowels. As we approach Brussels, tall leaning high-eaved rows of houses crowd the tracks. Then, lines of freight cars flash past, covered with elaborate colourful graffiti out of which I can discern the words: Amor and J’existe.

—

In Brussels-Midi, it turns out that my ticket doesn’t let me board just any old train to Köln but solely and exclusively the 16:23 one. I have an hour to kill.

An unexpected bonus: an hour to go see what I can of Brussels.

I know nothing about Brussels (apart from, you know, European Commission). Amazing how helpless you become in an unfamiliar milieu. I had to be shown first how to scan my ticket to get into the Brussels Metro, then (realising I was on the platform going the wrong way) how to exit and find the right platform, down a secret set of stairs.

Then, how to scan a barcoded ticket to get into the toilet. A barcode toilet! A barcode barricade! I’ve never entered a toilet with a barcode before. Isn’t it amazing how many different ways there are in the world to do even the simplest things, like access a public shitter?

Truly, the spectrum of human possibility knows no bounds.

If my observations of Brussels itself are brief, that’s because I had about thirty-five minutes to turn a smart loop from the Bourse to the Grand-Place and back via Manneken-Pis. I narrate my life internally (who doesn’t?) so capturing it is just the trick.

A Belgian Beer World Experience billboard draped across the Bourse (the old stock exchange) cheapened it only slightly. Everywhere there were indications we were hitting peak Belgique: TinTin, Magritte, Horta. Affligem beer. Gaufres, conveyed about the streets topped with piles of cream.

It occurred to me that I heard mostly French and realised this must be where Belgians holiday. I bet the restaurants are great. A narrow lane, barely shoulder-width, snakes in between the buildings.

Eenmans Straate. Rue d’une personne. One-man lane, it’s called, before the lanes broaden into the Grand-Place.

I love a lofty spire (I live in Oxford after all) and Brussels has them in spades: airy as feathers and with little mouse-sized peephole windows in the colonnades. The towers of the Grand-Place are straight out of an Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole fever dream.

Brussels may be a city of history and culture—the coal-stained brickwork hiding under concrete in the Metro is ancient and full of personality—but the Belgians have no style whatsoever.

A young woman passed me wearing shiny red wellies (it was sunny and not raining), with shorts in a jaunty black and white check pattern and a navy and white striped tank. It looked so much worse than it sounds.

The graffiti is wonderful though. Is this a Banksy, these rubbish collectors fox-hunting a plastic bag?

Then, there it is again! J’existe.

I couldn’t figure out why there were statues of men all over a certain building (the patriarchy?) so I decided to film it. An old lady and her grandson stood discreetly by and waited until I finished filming to tell me I had dropped my sunglasses off my head.

The screams of a toddler, outraged to be strapped back in her push chair, chased me down to Manneken-Pis.

It was tiny. The fountain, I mean.

Heading for the Metro, I passed a “Men for Progress” poster that says in French:

“What if you didn’t insist when she already said no?”

Then, as I crossed back in front of the Bourse to regain the Metro, there it was again.

In enormous letters: J’EXISTE.

I have an eerie feeling I am the only person in Brussels who can see it.

Sinking back into the bowels of the Bourse, I felt grateful and glad to have seen Brussels and quietly delighted with the Belgians for taking the right things seriously but not themselves: for loving chips and beer and a tiny fountain of a little boy having a wazz.

—

A woman sat down opposite me in the first class car of the Köln train and said ‘bonjour’.

I was taken aback. I’ve lived in Britain for so long. I don’t know how to respond. She’s addressing me in public! A stranger! She must be mentally unstable. Or perhaps she wants something?

I pretended I didn’t hear her.

She repeated herself, looking at me pointedly, thoroughly disappointed with me for allowing us to get off on the wrong foot.

Sheepishly, I extracted an AirPod and muttered “hello”. Shamed for my poor manners.

She decided to pay me no further heed. When I was sure she was ignoring me, I went to work trying to extract shreds of the earlier saucisson from my molars.

Traffic on the motorway leaving Brussels was thick but we flew over it. So small is Brussels we were in deep agricultural countryside in moments. Then, in another smaller city. Then out of that one too. Quick as a blink, less time that it took me to write that sentence or you to read it.

In the prosperous Belgian countryside, tidy houses abutted cornfields in the sun.

Opposite me were two women in hijabs with a little boy and girl. The kids were busy with McDonalds cartons and the women administering their lunch.

One of the women dropped her phone. It landed in the aisle between us and I glanced up at the thud. I wondered for a second if I should pick it up.

Then she leaned forward to grab it. Before I could stop myself, before I could wrap a hand over my mouth and smother the word, it slipped out.

“Sorry.”

She looked at me, confused. Her friend looked at me, also confused. The woman I didn’t say hello to looked at me like I sicked down my front.

What was I apologising for? I didn’t make her drop it. I had no obligation to pick it up. I had nothing at all to do with any part of the situation.

What on earth was I apologising for?

None of us knew.

Reddening, I turned attention back to that stubborn scrap of saucisson.

—

At Liège, surprisingly dramatic scenery. The enormous bluffs on the far bank of the Meuse looked like stations for antique armaments and, let’s face it, they probably were.

The scenery was wilder as soon as we crossed the border into Germany. This is the Victor Horta woods and Google Maps tell me there’s an ancient milestone for Köln, at least two centuries old from the Napoleonic era, crested with an eagle, just off the rail line.

An enormous apple tree bent ponderously under an unripe load. At one point, buried in trees, I spotted an old chunk of stone bulwark, some twenty feet high.

It never fails. The ground speaks to me with echoes of what has gone before, always.

The lady opposite and I are bezzie mates now, by the way. Watching each other’s bags when we go to the loo with a nod and a conspiratorial outthrust lower lip. I listen to her phone conversations in what sounds like Portuguese. She’s not from around here either. Maybe that’s why she was so concerned to appear well-mannered and French.

When she leaves, she says ‘au revoir’ to the ladies across and ‘bye bye’ to me.

After she gets off, the woman who dropped her phone murmurs to the other in French:

“Did she just say ‘au revoir’ to us?”

—

As we pulled into Köln, I caught a passing reference on the loudspeaker to connecting trains to Wuppertal. I felt a momentary urge to go and seek out my friend there but it passed quickly.

Köln station was chaos: the squawking of steel, scream of metal on metal along the lines. I don’t know what it is about Germany but man, does it set my teeth on edge. Can’t shake a perma-hunted feel that at any moment someone will ask exactly how many sixteenths Jewish I am.

Plus it seems my train is delayed but there’s no being sure.

Now, in contrast to Munich, I’m sorry to report that Köln boasts the ugliest and least helpful rail officials in the German federal republic. The first one I asked about my train, a dour prick with a Hitler ‘stache and a paunch, responded irritably in German ‘yes, this is platform 6’, which wasn’t my fucking question.

His eyes were shifty and I realised his issue was a big old chip on his shoulder that he can’t speak English. Then I felt bad for forcing him into the open: in this country where basically everyone speaks English, not speaking English must be a real sore point. And this is his country, after all. Who am I to bark English at him.

Chastened, I went looking for the information desk.

As I queued, I couldn’t miss immense Köln cathedral filling the station’s atrium windows. It looked like Orthanc, or a tower of Minas Morgul, drawn by John Howe.

I batted back two American teenage backpackers (“no boys, I was here first”—early middle age has its virtues) and asked the man behind the desk about the train to Stuttgart.

He instructed me to go back to platform 6.

Sigh.

Back on the inescapable platform 6, there was the cathedral again, buttressed right up against the station, as if the two might have coexisted harmoniously since the Middle Ages.

Incidentally, it was also on platform 6 that I decided Germans are more stylish than Belgians, purely on the basis of this tattoo:

Apex connectivity.

—

Sliding gratefully out of Köln, there’s a moving map showing how far the train has come today, from Streisund up on the Baltic coast through Bremen, Osnabruck and Dortmund. Speaking of apex connectivity.

None of those places mean anything to me, apart from Dortmund (football?) and Bremen (a harbour? And a folk tale about some musicians scaring away burglars, which I might have done well to remember last week?)

In the evening light, I examined German garden rooms. Everyone has one, it seems, a little cube in a square patch of garden, often kitted out with its own patio, mini-BBQ and hammock. There are trailers piled with pumpkins, polytunnels and tractors. The countryside is so flat here, it makes me itch for a hill or wrinkle—but it’s obviously good for the produce.

I noticed the guy across the aisle was reading a book with pictures of cereal in it.

Weirdo, I thought to myself.

A conductor came by. To check my ticket I thought, but no, it’s to take my food order for dinner. The perks of first class and that extra fifty quid I paid for legroom. Would I like to order dinner? Yes please, what is there?

He found a menu in the seat ahead and I flipped through until I went too far and got to the breakfasts.

Pictures of cereals.

Bonn seemed a lovely town, with beautiful old town houses and an Asian food market, outside of which children played with a ball in a quiet street. My veg chili arrived, an infusion of salty beans and tomatoes that tasted like salt, beans and tomatoes.

The landscape became lumpier, with hills like furred animals. Then, we were sliding along the Rhine, under bluffs at Remagen.

A tanker—big enough to carry my whole street and all the houses on it—chugged past.

I understood in that moment that, when people talk of a mighty river, they mean the Rhine. The Rhine looks mighty. With its locked arms of cliffs, the surface calls to mind a boiling pot of water that seethes with unseen rips. The green and red buoys plot a central shipping channel past submerged wrecks and sunken jetties.

I wouldn’t try to swim across it, not for a million pounds. It’s marked with death, plain as anything.

The train threads along the river, under Schlosses at every promontory, every mile. The traditional timber-beamed houses seem to have been lifted from a Disney movie (or vice versa: Walt sure was a big fan of intra-war Germany… ).

Tilled fields on 60 degree slopes called to mind Southeast Asia but this is the land of Luther and religious wars. We passed a Gasthof zum Landsknecht, bearing the image of a cartoon fighter, gripping a halberd. I imagined Landsknecht fighters roaming these bluffs, incongruous, alongside a modern holiday park with caravans and a pizzeria and a carousel full of children. Then, a quiet riverside churchyard, speckled with graves, in the town of Bingen, of Hildegard fame.

What an odd history this country has, at once grandiose and depraved.

Curving sinuously down the Rhine at sunset, I’m reminded why I love trains. If there is a better way to travel, please tell me. I looked and looked at the pretty Gasthofs and Schlosses and burgher’s homes until the light gave out and my eyes failed.

Then, thirsty, I walked several blocks (read: carriages) to the café car.

The woman behind the bar ignored me. She giggled and flirted and served instead a tall, handsome, absolutely stacked guy who pitched up after me wanting a beer.

I was not in the mood for it after twelve hours on trains. I gave her a hard look that said:

Don’t fuck with me, Gretchen.

I think she got the message.

—

In Stuttgart, it’s 10:43.

We are pulling in at platform 10 and my connecting train, the overnight one to Vienna, the only one I can possibly get without having to find a hotel and waste a pointless day of my week in Stuttgart, leaves at 10:46.

I have exactly three minutes to run from the very end of platform 10, with my backpack and pillow, to the very end of platform 5.

By the time I’ve run past ten carriages of the Stuttgart train I just disembarked, my heart is pounding uncomfortably and neck sweaty. I’m still wearing my fleece and it’s a Central European hot summer evening in Stuttgart.

I trundled alongside the Vienna train, running a fierce gamble, expecting at any second the train will pull out. Should I play it safe and jump on early, spend half an hour weaving through crowds storing luggage to get to the right seat? Or do I run as fast as I can straight to my carriage and pray the train doesn’t pull out?

Ever the risk-taker, I made it to my carriage, heart thrumming, with half a minute to spare, where it swiftly transpired there was no café on this *overnight* train to Vienna.

Really? This is the train on which there is no food or water? The nine-hour *overnight* one?

There was, it turned out, a little self-serve trolley and bottles of water in a vending machine.

But vending machines and I have an uneasy relationship at the best of times.

This one didn’t like it when I typed in the product code. It didn’t want me to tap my phone to pay first, didn’t like that either. Then it chirped at me urgently in a chastising tone, flashing a red X.

Several long minutes later, with rising panic (I was super thirsty after my sprint), I worked out that I needed to hover—but not tap or click—my phone near the sensor then quickly punch in a code and then—only then!—tap to pay.

Who invents this shit?

The bottle dropped—and got stuck. The neck of the bottle wedged perfectly vertically upright in between two black plastic flaps when I tried to get it out. It wouldn’t move.

I looked around because surely I must have an audience for this. It’s too perfect.

There is some malevolent God, I know it. He loves tormenting me.

Those messages in Brussels! They were a clue.

J’existe!

Grunting softly, on both knees, and trying not to make too much noise lest the Teuton inhabitants of this train assume I’m trying to jimmy an illegitimate bottle out for free, I managed to knock the bottle slightly askew. Then, with a few more finger nudges and grunts, I got it to fall sideways, as God intended (or maybe not, depending on his whim and malice… ).

When I got back to my seat, it’s sparkling water.

I loathe sparkling water. It may technically provide hydration but only of the least satisfying sort. It fell in my parched mouth like rain in the Sahara, vaporising instantly on contact.

I called Joel. The line was terrible. I told him I am fucking shattered and we are coming into Munich now.

He went quiet.

“What did you just say?”

“I said we’re coming into Munich now.”

“Oh. I swear for a second I heard you say ‘we’re coming in a eunuch now’.”

After assuring him that was not what I had said and bidding him goodnight, I wrapped a top around my eyes, threw my pillow under the tray table and curled up on the floor, with my head under my seat.

Through the night, I was shaken awake not once but thrice by various officials of both the German and Austrian rail lines to check my ticket. No one told me in a stern voice to get off the floor because they obviously took pity on me.

Either that or they feared me. Wisely.

Waking, I felt like several shades of sun-baked shit. Breakfast was black coffee and a Snickers. My throat was raw and head full of snot. My ears were underwater.

I had the cold to end all colds, and a sleep-deprived immune system unable to fight off anything at all, thanks to my night on the floor.

But, outside the window, the sun beat down on Austrian fields still shrouded in early morning mist.

When I stepped off the tram at the Volkstheater in the heart of the Inner Ring, the air was cool and smelled like creamed potatoes with nutmeg.

I made it to Vienna, again.

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Do you have a cave?

If you live in Paris, you might.

In that case, you will pronounce it like what a whale does when it gives birth. Or what Bostonians do to a turkey at Thanksgiving.

Cahhhhve.

It’s kind of a basement but French people will tell you, actually, a basement is a “sous-sol” (literally: under-soil), a place that can also serve as living quarters.

La cave is something else entirely. It’s the cellar, the larder, the storage place. It’s where you keep your extra bits and pieces, dry goods, wine bottles perhaps.

In Paris, my sister says, the caves must be full of treasures. Ski boots and escalade equipment from early attempts up Mont Blanc, maybe. Ancient film reels from the ’30s, rows of dusty vintages. Perhaps a lost Manet, or two.

It’s where people keep all the forgotten, lost bits of themselves.

If you want to go in search of lost time in Paris, you could do worse than starting in a cave.

My sister’s building has a cave, shared by the building’s occupants. You descend into the cave via a coffin-size lift with a folding accordion door.

It’s pretty creepy down there, especially when you have to go alone. A cave full of lost time is a scary thing.

I’ve just come back from Paris. Actually, I’ve been twice this month and stayed with my sister both times.

My sister is my artistic bellwether. I can generally tell my latest piece is a stinker if I don’t hear from her the morning it goes out.

Usually: silence. She’s a busy woman and much, much cooler than me (she has tats and, as I say, lives in Paris).

But I know I’m onto a winner if I get a message with a one-liner quote from the latest piece, a "lol” or (every once in awhile): “loved it”.

Those good ones have usually been fermenting in drafts and notes for awhile. Sometimes, they just need time to acquire the right flavour and come together.

In fact, the Notes app on my phone is like my own personal little cave. It’s where I keep the lost, forgotten bits of myself. It’s full of treasures, and plenty of stinkers too. Many of the recent ones are Paris-flavoured, so it makes sense to share them here.

They may impart the flavour of the thing, but not the real time in Paris.

I’ve never read Proust (time is short and À la recherche du temps perdu is long) but I’m familiar with the key bits: the flavour of the tea-dipped madeleine as an entrée to memory; his bed-bound boyhood illness; the sea of images, swimming on the walls of his bedroom cave.

If I had to come up with a Proustian equivalent childhood-memory taste-trigger, it would be cheese Doritos and an ice-cold orange soda. Perhaps we were less discerning in upstate New York in the 1990s than Paris in the 1880s.

But I digress.

If you think about the past, light falls on certain images in the memory cave and the rest floats in shadow.

I’ve written this before, even (especially?) in Paris. Writers are lamplighters, the lampiers, shining little cones of brightness in the depthless black.

If art is a lamp-lit cone into the past, the disconnected images can never be more than a simulacrum of lost times.

And of course, the only way to experience Paris is to … experience Paris.

—

In Paris, I suddenly feel certain I am a person who might wear floaty skirts and little strappy sandals in day-to-day life, completely forgetting that I live in the UK.

My sister buys me delicious breads and cheeses that cloud the senses. She takes me to brocantes—that’s flea markets, to you—that only the locals know. I browse rows of impossibly chic cast-off clothes and imagine I might be the kind of woman who wears orange palazzo pants, with thigh-high slits, or hand-embroidered Italian loafers. For just a second, I toy with the new Jill who smokes a Gauloise (or is it a Gitanes?) and gazes disdainfully at my clown self from behind chic, dark glasses.

A slang word for “junk” in French, I learn, is “bazaar”.

My son finds a mini-crossbow that he must have. It fires bottle corks. My sister gives me a wink, wanders off and presents it to him as we’re leaving.

They try it out and she accidentally shoots it across the brocante.

“I lost one of the corks.”

“That’s ok.” He is sanguine. “You guys get through a lot of wine.”

—

Speaking of clowns, we went to an actual circus in Paris. It was kind of by accident, in a kids’ amusement park.

The first act was a male juggler, in tight trousers. Not several degrees removed from “dishy”.

I raised eyebrows at my sister.

“One for the mums.”

Next up was a pole dancer. You think I’m joking but I’m not. She wore a smoking hot bikini and looked strong enough to rip me limb from pathetic non-pole-dancing limb. She pulled splits and planks, Superwomaning and shimmying up and down the pole in nought but glitter and a smile.

I turned wordlessly to my sister.

“One for the dads.” She nodded, sagely.

—

We ate lunch in a perfect brasserie, the kind with one or two daily specials, where you can get a great steak at lunchtime and a lengthy wine menu.

We ordered a café gourmand (literally: ‘greedy coffee’), which is basically the greatest contribution ever made to the world of desserts: an espresso and a selection of doll-house versions of many desserts. Tiny creme brûlée, diminutive brownie, pocket-sized rice pudding.

“What’s this?” I poked one of the offerings.

“It’s compost.” That’s my son. He’s just been given a tour of the dessert menu by my sister.

“I think you mean compôte.”

The older gentleman at the next table folded his paper and whistled for his dog, which had been cavorting happily on the other side of the restaurant while its owner dined.

The man got up with a nod to the waitress.

She held up his half-finished bottle of wine as he turned to exit, and a cork.

“À demain?”

“À demain.”

He must live nearby, in an apartment above this narrow street. This is his living room, and his dining room combined.

—

Books are more interesting than people.

No, that’s not what I mean.

Books are like the best bits of people. You get all the insights without the annoying habits of the real world. You develop fondness for inhabitants of the written world who would, in real life, get right up your nose.

Just think about Proust. He was insufferable and all about self-promotion, writing up his own reviews and paying for their publication, via third parties. If he was on Substack today, you know he’d be the one shamelessly self-promoting and paying a Substack luminary to get featured in their latest round-up.

Another reason I haven’t bothered to read Proust yet.

Also, that guy in the restaurant with the dog? Probably an entitled swine.

And me? You might imagine from the above snapshots that I’m likeable. I’m not, trust me. I have a strong tendency towards prickly suspicion. It’s not endearing. It would take very little to tip me over from awkward-defensive to completely-detestable.

There was a girl at school who picked up on this once.

It was the night we finished exams. At a bonfire party on the beach in south Dublin, she cornered me, with another girl.

Now, context: both of these girls intentionally cultivated ‘misfit’. I wasn’t in their gang, nor was I one of the vapid, popular pretties.

I was a bit… hard to place.

Well, this girl cornered me, with a pal and, bolstered by a few drinks, annihilated me.

“Why are you such a bitch?”

“Wh-what?” I was a bit shit-faced and half-smiling, thinking she might be joking.

She was not joking. Her eyes were cold, blue. Her nostrils flared slightly, scenting blood.

“No, really.” Mock scientific interest. “Like, it’s a really interesting question. Why are you such a complete and total bitch? Why do you think that is? Do you think it’s something in you or what?”

I was 17.

—

Getting the train back from Paris, I had an awkward encounter as we were waiting to board.

For reasons I can’t quite fathom, everyone stands to one side of the departures lounge in the Eurostar terminal at Gare du Nord, even if the train hasn’t been called yet. What this means is you can join the line but not be quite sure it is a line for the right train. You can’t be sure that you won’t, given a momentary lapse in attention, be swept away to the wrong train.

“I’m not sure if this is for the 11:12 train,” I muttered to my son.

“It is.” Said the woman behind me, authoritatively.

I turned to thank her and was dumbstruck. I knew her.

“Thanks… er… I know you.” Brain-mouth instant connection. Why am I like this.

She looked at me without any cognition, zero expression. It was definitely her.

Now that I’d started, I had to finish.

“…Is your name Jennifer?”

Well, it was her: the terrifying female partner from the law firm where I trained, now the head of the whole department.

Speaking of intelligent women, perceived as fearsome and detestable.

When we were trainees, everyone knew that the seat with Jennifer was the seat to avoid. You would be worked all night and well into the next day. You would be tasked with keeping track of endless documents. You would be the one in the office on Sundays.

There were rumours she once stapled a trainee’s tie to his folder, threw a book at another’s head.

It was a truth universally acknowledged that she had for breakfast each day one lightly-roasted and totally exhausted trainee lawyer.

When I qualified, I was seated with her associate, a woman a few years older than I, who had just returned from maternity leave. She had a neat bob, a perpetual sniffle and an absolutely relentless capacity to absorb work and churn out lawyerly copy at 3am.

A career as Jennifer’s lieutenant had turned her into an automaton—with a crappy immune system.

We had a mild exchange of pleasantries—what a funny coincidence this was, updates on the team and do please give my best to so-and-so.

She was nice. It was a pleasant moment. She’s not an irredeemable bitch: she’s just smart as hell, and ruthless at succeeding in her arena.

She wanted to do it. So she did.

I was left to ponder having escaped her team. I, it turns out, did not want it.

Now, all I can think of is the lost time: the hours, and days, and years of my life spent churning out pointless, forgotten documents for pointless, forgotten deals.

Thinking about, resenting all that lost time, makes me feel small, angry and mean.

When I left that firm it felt like escaping a dark cave.

—

In the lift at work, there’s a screen that rotates “interesting facts of the day”.

Once it said that there were 319.6 billion emails sent every day in 2021.

Almost 320 billion a day. Imagine that. 40 emails for every person on the planet.

Imagine all the treasures in those emails, and the stinkers.

Imagine all those crowded, empty hours and the empty, forgotten words, slipping soundlessly into the past.

Sometimes, sitting with my headphones on a call in the office, I imagine the building undergoing some calamity, not hearing the pop-pop of machine gun fire, still talking at the top of my lungs about interest rates or some such nonsense.

Like the proverbial toad in the pot, warming slowly, until I’m sludge.

Slowly forgetting everything that I’ve forgotten.

—

The past is crowded with lost hours. I have this sense of the world filling up behind me with wasted time, people I knew, things once familiar—but ultimately without any substance.

It’s a kind of claustrophobia. Like the kind you might get underground, in a cave.

Heading home, it feels incredible to flee from a crowded past into a quiet, unknown future.

—

No one gets more annoyed at your failure to be fulfilled by your job than other people who have allowed their dreams to lapse.

People acquire the capacity for careless evil when they stop caring, when the art in them dies.

Nobody is as angry as someone who let their dreams die—when faced with someone who hasn’t.

It’s because they turn to contemplate the riches of their own caves, and find there’s nothing much there—except bile, old emails and lost time.

I don’t want to become one of those quiet, angry people.

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The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied.

- Stephen King, The Gunslinger

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I’m really angry about the pub. Not sad-angry. Not cute-angry. Not quick-temper angry.

Rage-angry.

Slow-building, simmering, volcanic-caldera-when-the-gates-of-hellfire-open-and-weep-brimstone angry.

Everywhere I turn, I’m told: let go, relax, release your anger. Be at peace.

Accept your own futility.

And I get angrier.

It’s been awhile since I offered an update on the pub, hasn’t it?

That’s because I have no update to offer on the pub.

The pub is silent, the pub is still closed. It is coming up to a year of no pub.

What happens to an old building like this when it lies empty? It rots, slowly. Rainwater erodes slates and the kitchen roof folds in on itself. The building’s caretakers do nothing. Customers go elsewhere and forget it.

The world moves on.

I want to shout my rage to the world. I feel like I’m in a unique position to voice this particular rage. I happen to know (and loathe) how private equity works and I happen to live in a village where a private equity firm is strangling my much-loved pub.

Actually, that can’t be that unique.

This is the UK. Everyone works in or adjacent to financial services. Everyone has a pub that’s being fucked sideways into insolvency by private equity shareholding leeches.

And everyone has a newsletter too now, right? That’s the meal ticket. Everyone can have a Substack and be a writer! So can you. And you! Can’t sell your words? Sell community! Teach others how to Substack. Let’s all hold each other as we say nothing at all.

This isn’t unique. Surely it’s not just me getting waves of Insta-nausea on Notes these days?

“My subscriber count just hit bla-bla”.

Ask-me-anything videos.

(whisper it) Selfies…

I’ve written about the big business of selling community on Substack. I’ve written how annoying I find it when the same insider collective get plugged—by each other, by Substack, by noobs who expect that that’s what’s expected of them—regardless of the quality of their work.

The ones with the right connects? They write and get connected. Don’t worry, darling: Mummy is in publishing.

There seems to be a rash of Substack influencers with a background in women’s fashion and beauty. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Clearly there’s some cross-over in transferrable skills: ability to write click-bait-y headlines, sell people stuff they don’t need, write shiny fluff-words that evaporate instantly in the brain?

It’s nothing-content. Nontent.

Ponzi people peddle nontent to help others make nontent to help others make nontent. We can all stop creating and just consume in an infinite loop. No need to actually write anything unique or have a unique thought, just service the algo. Write less, smile more. Endless busywork, zero inspiration.

Except: DON’T.

This is the kind of gen-Ai shit we are about to (already are?) drowning in. You know why? Because it mimics us. You bet your ass gen-Ai can write the “grow your subscribers” bullshit better than you or I can. We don’t need more of it from real people who purport to be writers and creators.

Please. Stem the tide.

Say something real, about your life and your experiences. That’s what I want to read. Seriously. I’ll even pay you for it. I pay Lauren Hough and I pay Will Dowd and I pay Adam Nathan and I pay Suzanne Moore. You know why? Because they make me feel real things when they describe their lived lives.

That is what will have value, in the gen-Ai onslaught.

That’s the only thing worth paying for here, ultimately.

So, why am I getting so angry about the pub?

Well, this is why.

Stonegate’s financial troubles are all over the papers.

Remember Stonegate? You know, the private equity-owned PubCo that has my village pub by the balls up for sale.

Their financial troubles may be summarised as this: Stonegate needs to raise more debt. Stonegate is struggling to raise more debt. Stonegate might go bust.

You know why I think that is?

Because Stonegate over-valued its assets. Banks like to see a valuation report when they lend. Stonegate’s purported values don’t match its actual values, I reckon, and that is why Stonegate is struggling.

Why do I suspect this? Let’s take an example.

My village pub has been valued by an independent expert at about £365,000. That is its value as a pub business, assessed by a chartered surveyor and pub market expert, based on possible footfall and a detailed analysis of menu offering and pricing.

You know how much Stonegate listed my pub for sale? £495,000. That’s £130k more than the independently-assessed market value.

Now, hang on, because this is where it gets fiendish.

That number reflects a purely notional value that Stonegate ascribed to this asset on its balance sheet. Who came up with that number? Who wrote the valuation report? Which firm of auditors signed off on it? And continue to sign off on it?

Who knows.

Stonegate is owned by private equity firm TDR Capital. Remember those shadowy bastards with nothing at all on their website apart from Antarctic cruises under the guise of environmental social governance? “Private equity” means they are private. They don’t have to tell us a damn thing.

So let’s think about this notional value of my village pub on Stonegate’s (private, obviously) balance sheet.

This secret number is very important to Stonegate. You know why? Because that is the number it can spin into equivalent debt through a nifty trick called net asset value (NAV) financing. That means borrowing against the value of underlying assets in your portfolio. Put simply: the higher the value of assets on your balance sheet, the more you can borrow.

But here’s the kicker: if you sell an asset for lower than the balance sheet value, you will record a balance sheet loss.

Uh oh.

Hence the inflated asking price of £495k.

The pub was never worth that much, could never be worth that much as a pub and no one ever has even come close to that much money—except Stonegate, when it seemingly made up a notional value and spun it into borrowed money.

That is not the number an independent expert valuing the pub business came up with. That number does not make sense for a pub business in our small village.

So where did it come from?

Please pay attention. This is the important bit.

That number only makes sense if you don’t want to run the pub as a pub.

It only makes sense if you are speculating on the pure value of the land; if you are speculating that the pub can be sold as juicy land, redeveloped for juicy residential, in a juicy Oxfordshire village—in a country drowning in a housing crisis.

Now, our pub is designated as an asset of community value and West Oxfordshire council would never approve a change of use.

But Stonegate doesn’t know that.

What Stonegate knows is that there are loads of pubs up and down the country that don’t have a mobilised network of community support and many less vigilant councils that wouldn’t blockade residential re-zoning.

A community group that doesn’t want to speculate on land value and just wants its pub to be a pub? Forget it. You must play ball with a value predicated not on actual pub business but on fake real estate potential. Most can’t afford to.

Pub loss up and down the country is rife. This is why.

This is, I believe, malpractice on a national scale—by a company that professes to be in the pub business—of buying up pub assets and mis-valuing them on the basis of hypothetical residential use.

How is this legal? How can these asset owners sit on empty pubs, at made-up prices too high to be bought as a pub, let the roof fall in and wait, like slow poison, for a residential re-zoning payday?

The proof is in the sale paperwork, if you don’t believe me.

Stonegate insist on a clawback clause. What’s that, you ask? Well, it allows the seller a speculative share of any profits if a purchaser ever managed to get the land redesignated and developed for residential use.

Do you see what I’m saying?

This—residential, not pub business—is their value-spinning plan. Years after selling our pub, Stonegate could still bag profits if a purchaser managed to build some houses there. Stonegate aren’t valuing their pubs. They are speculating on land value, re-zoned for residential.

Are you still there? This is really boring, isn’t it?

That is intentional.

It is intentionally boring because it’s so evil. The devil, as ever, is in the details.

They are counting on you to be bored. They are counting on you not to pay attention. They are counting on being able to cover up this great harm to traditional pubs and local communities up and down the country, in the footnotes of a wash of administrative nontent. Vendor agreements, asset valuations, clawback clause nontent—covering up the truth of my empty pub, its modest business prospects and its incalculable value to those who love it.

While it sits on their balance sheet, it represents notional value—even if that value is just a fucking notion—that can be leveraged and turned into debt. Even if the pub is closed, it is worth more to Stonegate as an empty number on a balance sheet.

Stonegate doesn’t care if the pub is closed. Stonegate’s valuation is of nothing; it is valuation of a nontent.

Everything that makes the pub valuable—the people that cluster around its wooden bar, the fire in the grate, the board games at the side for kids and the apple trees in the fucking garden—can’t be priced anyway.

Stonegate would rather carry on the charade of the pub’s pretend value of £495k on a balance sheet in the Caymans than accept a reasonable offer and some actual money.

And now you know why, right? A lower sale would be marked as a loss, even if it was never worth £495k in the first place. Stonegate would have to eat a loss that it engineered. It won’t do that, so instead it cleaves rigidly to an inflated price that in no way reflects reality.

Even if leveraging it into debt on the basis of a spurious valuation based on hypothetical residence, rather than actual pub, would be FUCKING FRAUD.

That’s my theory, anyway.

You’re still bored, huh? Maybe you’re even rolling eyes at me. Chillax, Karen, what are you getting so bent out of shape for?

Laurie Stone wrote a Note recently about how, really, if we’re not getting angry—if we haven’t “exhausted ourselves with rage”—we are not writing what it is to be a woman in this world made for men.

I agree. I am angry way too often. I think of The Sopranos, Tony’s sister getting anger management therapy, the shame of “losing face”, letting your rage show.

We are told we should be zen and release our anger into the wind. Fail to do so and risk being labelled a Karen, mocked for your rage.

Hang on a second.

Who does it benefit, to stay quiet and well-behaved and un-Karen-like—except those who might be challenged?

There’s talk of going to sit in the beer garden when the weather turns nicer: a Kinder Scout of the pub. The gate is open and, even if it wasn’t, the stone wall at the back is knee high to a grasshopper. I vault it for apples in September.

I want to take back the pub. I want to nail this missive to the door. I want to pull a Luther at the Diet of Worms:

Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise.

I’m not religious but Luther was a real visionary, wasn’t he. He called out a bullshit system of papal indulgences and decoration of the spectacle for the illiterate masses.

He drew back the curtain and said: there’s nothing there.

Here I stand, drawing back the curtain on the nontent value-inflation of my pub and the value-inflation of writing nontent online.

Here I stand, biting the hand that feeds me.

If Substack’s value is based on people selling nontent about how to make nontent to other people to make more nontent, is it any different to the fake value of my empty pub?

Speaking of which, did you know that, apparently, Luther used to eat a teaspoon full of his own poop a day? Something to do with healthy gut bacteria. He was so ahead of his time.

Was it his thesis he nailed to the door, I wonder, or his faeces?

Or is that (forgive me) a load of crap? Did the powers that be just want to smear him, shame him and make him unappealing, like an angry Karen?

You decide.

Being this full of rage really does feel like a mouthful of shit.

Is it just another spoonful of shit on the muck pile, I wonder— or a considered thesis?

We certainly can’t all be Luther.

Not even on Substack.

—

A final thought: Joel and I were in the back garden last week. We live in a cathedral of trees. Enormous horse chestnuts, the odd linden.

The cherry blossoms and green leaves strain the light, make a stained glass window.

Butterflies adorn the spectacle.

“They’re so improbable,” Joel said to me. “Butterflies.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s amazing they’re alive. They’re like a living piece of paper that somehow has loads of energy stored up in it.”

He’s right.

What could be more powerful and have more energy than a piece of paper?

This word-paper of mine has loads of energy.

And I’ve got a lot stored up, for this fight, still.

—

TO BE CONTINUED.

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“And the smell of the air! I used to spend a week just breathing.” (Tolkien, LOTR)

“To me, a hike is like a six course meal with walking in-between.”

That’s Joel, halfway up a hill in Wales, around a mouthful of mushroom quiche. It’s getting colder the higher we go but he needs another calorie-fortification stop.

I’m impatient. Still many more miles to go.

Joel says I’m like a dog that needs to be walked. He’s a cat and will purr indoors for hours, in front of his computer. I get antsy and need to be taken out, frequently.

Like a dog, I lack guile. I want to romp outdoors and need only the barest encouragement to crap in a hedge.

If dogs are the dorks of the animal kingdom, that is me.

Speaking of which, I called Joel a dork the other day. He furrowed a brow.

“No one’s ever called me a dork before.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“It’s true. No one’s called me a dork.”

“Maybe not to your face….”

“I’m not a dork.” He insisted. “I’m a geek, not a dork.”

“Are you kidding me? That’s literally the dorkiest thing I’ve ever heard. ‘Um, I think you’ll find I’m a geek not a dork, so.. ’"

He shrugged. “It’s true. I’m a geek. I’m also a nerd. So are you. You’re a nerd—but you’re not a geek.”

“Yes I am!” A little offended by this. “Wait, what’s the difference?”

“A geek: that’s someone who’s into science and tech. A dork, well, that’s… you. Someone super awkward and dingus-y.”

I see where he’s going with this. “Ok, fine so I’m a dork but not a geek.”

“And a nerd. You’re definitely a nerd. We both are.”

“What’s a nerd?”

“A nerd is someone who knows a lot about something. Like, I’m a nerd about computers and you’re a nerd about books and words.”

A nerd about words. He is not wrong.

When I was a trainee lawyer, one of the (very few) female partners said to me:

“I’m going to let you in on a secret. Law is just reading and writing. If you can do that, you can do law.”

She was right, of course. Law is just reading and writing, of the most anodyne kind. Lawyers are word wizards, conjuring up limited companies and exclusions of liability out of the wordsmoke.

So, he’s right. There’s no denying it. Words are my magical power.

With them, I create worlds. I conjure wordsmoke. I can cast a spell that’ll make you hallucinate: see things that aren’t there and feel things that are. Worldsmoke.

Joel’s not finished his commonality theory of Geekery.

“Yeah, we are definitely both nerds. Think about it. I need glasses because I stare at screens. You need them because you stare at books. That’s such a nerd thing.”

This is true. I ruined my eyes as a kid, sitting up late reading with no light. I sought out dark, secret spaces to read. Places where no one could find me and disturb me. When I was tiny, that meant really strange places around the house: the cross-beam under the dining table, a pile of laundry, under the sink in the downstairs toilet.

Seriously.

I sat in that last one for so long with a flashlight and a pile of books that every member of my family cycled through the toilet, some of them twice, unaware they had an unseen audience.

Another time, I hid under the fold-out couch while guests were asleep on it and gravely listened to them have early-morning sex. No idea what I was listening to and I didn’t do it on purpose (well, not totally). I just wanted to be alone with my books.

When I got too big to fit under the loo sink, my best chance for alone time was outside. Under a bush, in a grove of trees, in tall grass. I still organise plants in my head, not by Linnaeus, but by which offered the best hiding place as a child.

A shady clump of ferns and bleeding hearts: ideal. Spruce trees with low branches that swept the ground, also ideal—as long as you remembered not to scrape the sharp ends of spruce needles.

Hydrangea bushes? Useless. The stems were too dense—unless a few bushes were planted together. These made child-sized gaps where I hid, with a book, for hours.

I still do it, as an adult. About a month ago, I just really wanted to escape and read somewhere quiet for ten minutes. Desperate.

Off to meet Helen for a run, I hid my book at the side of the house. I was thinking maybe I’ll have time for a quiet little sit-down with my book for ten minutes after we ran.

It was such a foggy evening that the pages curled up after a minute or two.

Helen was confused.

“Um, why did you bring a book?”

“I figured you would say no to a drink.”

“Yeah, I can’t drink tonight, I have too much to do.”

“I knew you would say that. That’s why I brought a book.”

As we ran, I told her about Joel’s software engineering books. He piles them everywhere, in mounds so enormous they pose a fire hazard.

“Every time I turn around, there are more of them. I don’t understand where they’re coming from.”

“Maybe they reproduce according to the Fibonacci sequence.” Helen is definitely a geek-nerd like Joel.

Another member of our pub committee rounded the corner on a bike, the excellent carpenter who reconstructed our village stocks.

He stopped in the middle of the road when he saw us.

“Why are you running with a book?”

Why indeed.

“Because I’m a dorky nerd.”

See?

This makes so much sense to me. Awkward, and a dorky nerd: that’s me. A nerdy geek about computers, but not awkward with it? That’s Joel.

True to my nerd colours, when we went to Wales last week for a hiking holiday, I packed not one but four books.

One of them was The Two Towers. I’m re-reading LOTR—you may have noticed a theme in essays I and II—inspired by John Halbrooks’s read-along. I’m honing a theory about Wales as Middle Earth. No disrespect to Peter Jackson’s vision, but Wales could have done a passable stand-in, if New Zealand hadn’t been available.

Also—is there a nerdier book than LOTR? It’s got it all: wordplay, songs, linguistics, history, geography, bio-ecology, even maps.

Whether it’s Middle Earth or not, Wales really has it made. I don’t know how they managed to pull this off but they have all the mountains. Seriously, all of them.

Not including Scotland (which is an entirely different kettle of peaks), between Wales and England, there is a clear winner.

In England, you stand in a field and, as the inimitable Bill Bryson once said, it’s Kansas with hedges. Cross the border into Wales and you’re in Middle Earth. Verdant forests, canted crags and rivers threaded with boulders the size of semi-trailers.

In a word: mountains. Many, many ups and downs. There’s so much MORE of Wales than there is of England. It’s packed into a small space, but rucked like a carpet and hiding worlds in every fold.

Kind of like a book, come to think of it.

Technically, almost none of these folds are what might be deemed official “mountains” in any other country. They would be swallowed up in the Alps. Almost none are over that magical 1000m threshold: just Snowdon, one of the Glydyrs and a few of the Carnedds.

You’ve probably heard of Snowdon—Yr Wyddfa—in Welsh (listen to the audio if you want to hear me make a gallant, ungoogled attempt at pronouncing that). But maybe not the Carnedds.

I’ve seen them hundreds of times without knowing what they were.

They’re the forbidding peaks you can see off the Irish ferry in Holyhead, from the train crossing the Menai straits that separates the Welsh mainland from the Isle of Anglesey. This island is famous for being the last hold out of Celtic druids during the Roman conquest. There are still Roman roads up and down the length of Wales where the centurions (the orcs) ran through trying to subdue the hills.

I imagine the hills flattening under their feet and rising again behind them as they passed.

There is a reason hold-outs—and dorks, clutching worn out copies of Tolkien—flee to the hills. The hills will hide you, and they are tough to subdue.

There’s a lot to be anxious about these days, even if it’s not the Romans.

Will Putin ping us a nuke? Why isn’t Trump in prison yet? Is there any chance he could possibly be re-elected, foreshadowing the end of the American republic and the triumphant reign of authoritarianism?

Who can say.

Come the apocalypse or WWIII or another Tory victory in the next general election, look for me in the hills.

Actually, please don’t.

Day 1: Moel Hebog

Back to our trip. Day 1 was an act of vindication. Remember Moel Hebog last year? Where we got lost in, well, a bog and totally failed to climb in the driving rain, with wet ankles and no Garmin?

Well, this year it was sunny and we had not one but two Garmins. My new watch is a Garmin. It is a wearable and I (mostly) love to wear it. It has a solar battery that lasts for 22 days. The sun charges it.

Probably in a few years it will feed innocuously on my lifeforce. Somehow it will suck energy from me, charge itself as I whizz round all day, serving it.

Maybe my use will be measured in my ability to stay fresh and untired, as I charge and serve my wearables.

In that case, best stay fit, with some Welsh mountain climbing.

We all but ran up Moel Hebog, wearables blinking, ankles fresh and dry. We met a couple halfway up. He was from Iowa so I joked this must be the biggest mountain he’s ever seen.

He blinked benignly.

“Not really, I used to live in Colorado.”

Fair enough.

“Now we live just over there by the Carneddau. We walked up from there today.”

That’s a long walk.

We talked about our adventures last year on Tryfan. She told us sometimes they watch the local mountain rescue channel. Tryfan accounts for about 90% of all rescues in Eryri.

She said there was one guy recently who had a boulder the size of a Hilux land on him. All you could see were his legs. His buddy pulled his legs and out he came, because there must have been a gap under the boulder.

Lucky, I thought.

He was pretty messed up and his buddy—a big black guy, covered in his friend’s blood—ran down to flag someone on the road. No one would stop for him. Eventually, he got phone service himself and was able to call mountain rescue.

On their recommendation, we decided to make the walk circular. They showed us where you could follow a steep loop to where the trail peeled off along a drystone wall and then down into a dense forest.

Don’t believe me Wales is Middle Earth? I swear it.

One moment you’re among crags at the entrance to the (slate) mines of Moria, expecting goblin-men to issue from a broken maw of the mountain. The next, you’re descending to an elven dell, stepping lightly along a babbling brook into the woods of Lothlórien.

Joel and I played at being wood elves, jumping from rock to rock and running as smoothly and lightly as we could.

“I feel like an elf.”

“Why do you think we can do this? I reckon it has a lot to do with where you grow up, what your brain trains on when you’re a child.” He’s such a software engineer. He thinks everything is about how our electrical, wired brains are programmed.

In this case, I agree. “It’s like what I said before about the difference between people who grew up in the country and people who grew up in the city. You can tell a lot about someone by how they walk downhill.”

“Yeah. If you grow up in the country, your brain trains each night on this data: walks, stepping stones, rocks under feet, how logs roll.” He is such a geek, he really does talk like this, I swear.

“That’s true.”

“You don’t even have to think about it. You pick your steps on autopilot, not even aware of the variables. Your brain just does it, each step perfectly calibrated. I bet your brain even has a back up for each step too, like what your counter-balance will be, if that step fails.”

For every step, a fall-back step in reserve.

A final descent through—I swear—Mirkwood (look at the picture if you don’t believe me) and we were back at the car.

The turn down to the village where we were staying was ambitious: it was basically a fold back upon itself at 270 degrees.

“I like this village,” I said to Joel.

I did. Little stone houses on the edge of cliffs, at a crossroads. It had a friendly feel to it.

“There’s a pub.”

The sign said: “Quality Food Pub”

The nerd in me objected.

“I think they missed a few words.”

“No way, that’s everything you need to know. All questions answered. Is there a pub? Yes. Do you think it has food? Sure, but is the food any good?”

It’s the sign of the Prancing Pony. Maybe Butterbur is in there, with a forgotten message from Gandalf.

Joel was hungry again and declined to join in my speculation. We were on a perilous journey across Middle Earth and his supplies of lembas bread were dwindling.

Day 2: Carneddau

Big day. I woke up the next morning really excited, like a fucking puppy. Time for the Carneddau.

We packed a lot of extra food—sandwich each, a large mushroom quiche, pockets full of Snickers—and parked in the very last spot at the campground.

The trail starts on a fairly undemanding but consistent incline for about two miles up to a lake. Then, a set of near-vertical chossy switchbacks ascend to attain the plateau. We scarfed the mushroom quiche for power and started up.

You can do the Carnedd loop either way—as is custom with loops—and we met a whole stack of people picking their way down the switchbacks towards us. One woman walked a dog on a leash. Adventure dog.

Everyone asked if we were heading to Llewelyn.

“Yes. How was it?”

“Freezing and really windy on the summit.”

Thanks, good to know.

When we got to the ridge, there was a big jumble of rocks between us and Carnedd Llewelyn, the first summit. At the bottom of the pile, a teenage girl sat looking morose with her dad and brother.

Unsolicited: “it’s really windy over there.” I sensed an argument had been in full swing before we pitched up.

“Thanks, good to know.”

Back to this pinnacle of rocks, I was perplexed.

“My watch says the path goes straight over the top,” I said to Joel. “That can’t be right.”

But it was. A short section—maybe fifty feet—of Grade 2 scramble.

Now, it’s fine. Joel and I are both climbers but I generally prefer to have climbing shoes and a rope for these kind of moves, in this kind of wind, above this kind of airy exposure. I took a deep breath, summoned Frodo and Sam navigating the gullies on Emyn Muil, and locked on. Left hand on the arête, high right boot and we were up and over, just a long rocky plateau up to Llewelyn’s trig point.

The cold was startling. A few hundred feet below the summit, we put on all our layers. A briskly moving older chap coming from the other direction approached and told us, again, pretty windy up there. I warned him about the scramble he would soon have to descend (even hairier than going up) and he scoffed.

“Wait ‘til you see the gullies on the other side, now that’s spicy.”

He asked where we’d come from and I, a bit inarticulate with cold, indicated down towards the lake and the road.

Doesn’t even know the names, I could hear him thinking. “That lake-y thing?” he mocked.

I took it with uncharacteristic good grace. I was too cold to tell him to fuck off.

Then we were up in the clouds at the summit, in wind that could tear a jumper from your hands and carry it 100 feet away in a blink. Behind the windbreak, eating mackerel and tomato sandwiches, I felt very hardy and very, very British.

The cool thing about the Carnedds is that the toughest bit is just getting out to them: they’re pretty remote and not really visible from the road. But once you get up on the plateau it’s just a little stroll across to bag three of the Welsh 3000s peaks—Llewelyn, Daffyd and Pen yr Ole Wen—before you descend off the plateau, down the fall line of water and scree to a river, then fields, then the road.

As you circle the ridge you also get Tryfan showing off from every angle, away across the road. Tryfan over the shoulder, Tryfan straight on, Tryfan sideways. God, she’s a looker. Never was there a more appealing ridge of climb-me stone. Tryfan is the spine of a stegosaurus. It’s the dorsal crest of a long submerged sea creature.

Dodging snow patches as we climbed up the gentle ridge to Dafydd, our next peak, I looked back.

Through a break in the clouds, we were on the edge of an enormous snowy cliff.

This is the angle on the Carnedds I’ve only ever seen from the train. It’s called Ysgolion Duon in Welsh, a vast expanse of vertical rock visible only from the Anglesey side.

The name means “the black ladders”. We were up above it.

Notice any linguistic similarities? Ysgolion and Osgiliath, the old city of Gondor? Remember the Argonath, the statues of ancient princes marking the entrance of Gondor? Up above the black ladder cliffs of Ysgolion Duon stand the peaks of David’s cairn (Carnedd Dafydd) and Llewelyn’s cairn (Carnedd Llewellyn), named for two ancient Welsh princes.

I told you Wales is Middle Earth.

We didn’t linger on Dafydd. As we started across to Pen yr Ole Wen, our third and final peak, two very young lads (late teens) came up the other way. They were wearing normal trainers and sweatpants.

“Careful!” One of them said without preamble. “Deep snow down there.” He was wet to the knees.

I was concerned but Joel was not.

“We’ll be fine.”

I warned them about the exposed scramble and asked if they were planning on doing the full loop. It was getting late.

“Yep, we have a torch.”

We wished them well and parted. I worried about them to Joel.

“Did you see what they were wearing? They were not prepared. At what point do you take responsibility for people when they are not prepared and ill-equipped for unknown dangers?”

“They’ll be fine. They’re young and the clouds on Llewelyn are lifting.”

But still I worried.

I checked the local news later and the next day just to make sure there were no reports of two young lads lost up on the Carnedd plateau. Nothing. They were fine and, next time, they’ll probably wear waterproof boots.

Incidentally, this is how we learn and change. Nobody is ever changed because they decided to change or because someone told them to change. They change because they live through something and it changes them. That’s it.

“I love doing stuff like this with you.” That’s Joel, on the last leg of the walk down to the car. “I don’t know many people I could do this with.”

“Yeah, people who would want to do it, you mean.”

“Seriously, it’s like you, me..” He named his sister and her husband. “And that’s it. Oh, and like, army people.”

Did I mention Joel was in the army? I don’t think I did. When he was 17, he thought he might want to be in the Parachute Regiment and spent a year training, running backpacks full of weights around Dorset trails.

Then he shipped off north for basic training but they kicked him out after a few months because he has Reynards. It’s a circulation issue: his hands become useless when cold. I think it may have something to do with his ever-present need to snack but I’m not a doctor. Good with words, bad with blood, me.

After the Carneddau, we were both starving. Not, like, a bit peckish. Like, gnaw-your-own-knuckles-red hungry.

There’s a whisper of Indian away down in the south on the way back to our lovely Air BnB. Will it be closed on Easter? Will they—as is custom in Wales—refuse to serve us food after 7pm?

No, it’s open and the food is hot and smells so delicious we order a curry each plus a plate of tandoori prawns and three veg curries on the side.

The waitress looks at me over her glasses and cheekbones.

“Just for the two of you?”

“Yep.”

“It’s too much, I think.”

“It’s not. I promise. We will eat it all.”

Well, we ate it all. It was so good, we scraped the bowls out.

The owner came out halfway through to praise my order.

“I said to myself, now, this is someone who knows how to order in an Indian restaurant. This is what I would order myself. I mean, tarka dal….!” He practically chef’s-kissed my order.

I sat back, full of curry and disproportionately pleased with myself for being able to order curries better than people in rural Wales. He doesn’t need to know I lived in Asia for five years.

When the waitress came over to clear the table, I gestured at the empty bowls: read it and weep.

She asked if we were staying in the village.

“No, we’re staying in Aberllefenni.”

“What?”

“Aberllefenni.”

Her puzzlement built.

“Aber…llefenni?” I tried a different pronunciation.

Another stern look over the cheekbones.

“I don’t know it.” Her tone said if she doesn’t know it, it’s not a thing. “Whay-yer?” (She means where but is Welsh).

“About ten miles that way.” I gestured.

“Oh….! Aberllefenni.” An entirely different arrangement of vowels and diphthongs. “I know it. I used to live in the village just before it. You know the one at the crossroads. Back in the 60s, 1966. I lived in one of those houses halfway down, on the left.”

Well, it turns out she used to live in that friendly village, the one I like, at the cross-roads, right next to the Quality Food Pub.

She told me back then it was all Welsh. Now, she said, it’s mostly English. She said there are still some Welsh but they’re all old like her. All the children, the young people, have left. No jobs.

I think that’s a real fucking shame, I said, with characteristic candour.

But, of course, I am part of the problem. I didn’t tell her we were staying in an Air BnB run by an English couple.

Day 3: Cadair Idris

A rest day, of sorts. We decided to do a small one, just up to the lake under Cadair Idris for a dip and then back.

Incidentally: can we take a minute with how Cadair Idris is basically Caradhras, said in a hurry? Or do I need to cool it with the LOTR parallels? I do? Well, fuck you. This is my essay.

Anyway, unlike its LOTR counterpart, it’s always sunny on Cadair Idris. I swear, it’s a little microclimate sun trap.

We walked up Cadair Idris stairs. It flattens out eventually and arcs towards a gorgeous lake in the arms of the corrie. By the time we heaved up the trail to the lake—a very steep never-ending set of stone steps beside a series of waterfalls—we were baking hot and gagging for a swim.

One problem: just before the lake appeared over the ridge, we came upon two young guys, about a hundred feet in front of us.

Now, I’m not shy but I’d rather not buckle down for some nude swimming in broad daylight right in front of strangers. A little distance, please.

We waited to see which way they would go.

They paused to consult a map and stopped. Then they veered back to the path and then off it again, looking puzzled.

Just trying to be friendly, I called:

“Are you looking for the lake? It’s just up there.”

He looked annoyed. I could see it in an instant.

He was annoyed I had noticed his uncertainty. He was annoyed not to appear well-informed at all times. He was annoyed—most of all—to be advised in the out-of-doors by a girl.

He answered in a scoffing tone, as if I was a moron.

“Yeah, one of them.”

One of the lakes? Now, forgive me, but I’ve been here before. There are not many lakes. There is one lake and it was not five minutes ahead. In fact, this particular area is defined by the singleness of its lake. There is literally one path and one lake. Everything else is vertiginous rock.

But his fragility was so intense, the poor kid.

I shrugged and said “ok”. I was really keen for my swim before I cooled down and, also, fuck this ridiculousness.

We found a spot in the sun behind some rocks, where the slope peeled away suddenly and the water was instantly, unfathomably deep.

This lake is very deep and very cold. I know how cold it is because Joel and I get in it naked every time we climb Cadair Idris.

It is as cold as snowmelt off Caradhras. It is cold enough to freeze your bits after ten seconds contact.

It is cold enough to scare a piss back into you. I speak from experience.

Day 4: The Rhinogs.

I’ve already written about how much I love the Rhinogs, so won’t go into that again.

Last year, we did Rhinog Fawr (Big Rhinog) so this year I had my eye on Rhinog Fach (little Rhinog), throwing in Y Llethr (The Hill) for good measure.

The Welsh have a lot of mountains to name so I don’t begrudge them an occasional lack of imagination.

It wasn’t to be: crappy weather blew in just as we crested The Hill so we bailed off the intimidating scrambles up and over little Rhinog. Next time.

Anyway, walking down off The Hill, we followed a line of boulders atop a hidden river. I never saw the water but could hear it, close enough to touch.

I was looking up across the valley at a slope, as near to vertical as a slope can be. There was a gray line running down it at about 80 degrees and I couldn’t quite work out what it was.

It didn’t follow the fall line so it couldn’t be water or scree. It couldn’t be a trail because it went straight up the cliff.

I enlisted Joel.

“What’s that, do you think?”

He looked. “A wall.”

“No fucking way.”

“Yes, it must be.”

“Not a fucking chance. It’s vertical. Who builds a wall up a cliff? No fucking way that’s a wall.”

We argued about it for twenty minutes. He got out his OS map but couldn’t convince me. It started to rain again.

A farmer and his young son and sheepdog came by on a quad bike. He smiled at us, so I called out.

“Please can you settle an argument?”

He wrapped an arm around the dog to stop him jumping off and gave me a cheeky smile.

“Long as I don’t start another one…”

I blushed. Charmer. “What’s that?” I pointed.

“The hill?”

“No, that line there. He says it’s a wall,” I gestured at Joel, “but I reckon there’s no way.”

“Way-ull.” Said with about sixteen syllables and a grin. “Looks like you’re going to be the one doing the washing up then.”

“It’s a wall?”

“It’s a wall.”

“No way!”

“Oh yeah. Those old farmers, they’d build walls anyway-err. That’s your bit of the mountain, that’s my bit. They’d divide it all up.”

He shaded his eyes from the rain and peered across the valley.

“See that scree slope there?” He pointed off to a remote scree slope on a lofty peak. “See the line up the middle? That’s a wall too.”

Black-laddered cliffs, rivers you can’t see and walls to nowhere. Wales is magic, even if it isn’t Middle Earth.

—

Back in the car, a cover of that old song by the Goo Goo Dolls came on. You know the one.

“And I don’t want the world to see me…”

I sang along and said to Joel:

“I bet you don’t even know this song.”

“I know this song.”

“Not the original though, that came out before you were born.”

“No it didn’t. I was like one.”

“Fine, it came out before you knew you had toes.”

“I knew I had toes. Babies know they have toes. If you pinch a baby’s toe, it cries.”

“Yeah but it doesn’t know that’s its toe. It doesn’t go: ‘hey asshole that’s my toe.’”

—

Two drives. Four hikes. That concludes this six-course meal.

Being outside is food. It’s an Ent-draught, drinking the air and tasting green water. Joel, on the other hand, still needs food. He needs his six-course meal, interspersed with some walking.

I know we’re different. He’s a geek, I’m a dork. He’s a cat, I’m a dog. We see things differently.

Ultimately? Just a couple of nerds, walking in the hills.

—

Back in London, I passed an old couple on the street. They were both tiny, white hair, barely higher than my shoulders.

He was nuzzling her face.

“I’m so lucky,” is all I heard him say as we passed.

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“ … and they will read our diaries to find out what we were … ”

Joel and I had a fight the other day about AI. Not a debate: a fight.

I’m reading Bleak House at the moment — a novel about a protracted argument — so this seems appropriate. At least the Jarndyces were rowing over a pot of gold. We had a fight about AI. What a thing to fight about. What dorks.

I’m kidding, of course. Joel is my thought partner. With him, I think externally.

But the thing is we really do disagree about AI.

I don’t… like AI. I don’t trust it. I have yet to be impressed with its output, apart from in language translation. Everything I read from ChatGPT sounds like plausible word-murals that run on and on, sentence after plausible sentence, without telling me anything. “Blah-di-bla is an important cultural phenomenon because… so-and-so is one of the most important historical figures of the 20th century… It was a time of great social change …”

Yawn af.

I am generic, benign narrator. Hear me roar whimper something bland and inoffensive into the conventional wisdom echo chamber.

And the photo or video garbage? Joel showed me an Internet thing (believe the kids call them “memes”) of a slip-on fake finger above a six-fingered hand.

“Wear extra fingers,” it says. “Photo and video evidence will be inadmissible as it will appear to be AI-generated.”

Ha-fucking-ha.

It was supposed to be a joke. I tried to laugh. But it wasn’t funny. I could hardly breathe.

You can deep-fake me doing bad things. I can do bad things, whenever I want, and just claim it’s a deep-fake.

You’ll never know what’s real and what’s not. No one will. Maybe it won’t even matter, because the fake stuff will be more real to more people than the real stuff.

Now, Joel loves AI. ChatGPT is basically a third member of our relationship. He asks it everything: what to cook, where to eat, how to say “green beans” in French. We’ve talked about this before. We differ big time. He thinks, one day, AI will be conscious and function just like us. I don’t. Which of us is right?

Joel was raised in a homeschooling Christian family and is now the most dedicated atheist you’ll ever meet. He thinks we (humans) are nothing more than an intricate web of clicking machine parts. We perceive and think and exist and have sex and fart and blink and close our eyes to be transported elsewhere only because each atom in each cell is oiled just right and talks to all the other oily parts just so and they all click and whir in harmony, until one day — pfffft, bang — they don’t.

And we blink out, like a pixel on your flatscreen. Never to exist again.

I am a rational person. I can parse a sentence and flip a document like a pancake. But I can’t explain why this doesn’t sit right with me.

A collection of machine parts? Surely I am more than my machine parts.

I had laser eye surgery about 12 years ago. It was the kind of laser surgery where they tell you to lie back, keep you wide awake and do all the surgery on the surface of your eye, no cornea-cutting.

Numb to my, well, eyeballs, I watched what looked like panes of glass or translucent ice being pushed across the surface of my eye. It was exactly like lying at the bottom of a swimming pool, watching disturbances ruffle the surface.

Those machine parts of my eyeball had nothing to do with me. I was way behind-beneath-inside them.

Do I believe in God? No. Do I believe in “souls”? Probably not.

I believe when this run of consciousness is run, we’re done. Whatever we’ve put out there, whatever we’ve worked on, for better or worse gets added to humanity’s great sandpile.

That — right there, whatever’s left behind — is the something of me that sits apart from the oily machine.

“Take what it is you do. That’s how you’ll be remembered when your travelling days are through.”

Do I believe ChatGPT can contribute to the sandpile? No.

That’s what we were arguing about. It was about art.

“Is ChatGPT art?” he asked. Not talking about its output, mind, but ChatGPT itself.

Joel said yes, thinking of the code that produces it.

I said no, ChatGPT is a tool. It may be well-crafted, the code even written in aesthetically pleasing ways — but it has been created with an optimisation metric in mind. It’s optimising, improving, helping us do something. That makes it, fundamentally, a tool, not art.

Shout me down. Go ahead. “Tools can be art. Craftspeople are artists, etc.”

Well, sure.

But a tool performs a function — art is the extra. Hell, it’s right there in the name: exTRA.

Art is the feeling, not the function: the emotion layered on top of the function.

ChatGPT can process all the novels ever written — and it can process all the secondary literature that’s ever been written about those novels. It can tell me who exactly Mr George is in Bleak House and why he seems to know Esther (no spoilers please, I’m neck deep).

But until the woman nursing the dead baby makes ChatGPT feel something, it has no capacity for art. It can’t add anything exTRA.

We could argue the point until the cows jump out of Guernica and come home, until Jarndyce v Jarndyce is resolved.

Where ChatGPT is a conventional wisdom echo chamber, art challenges conventional wisdom. They are diametrically opposed.

Art communicates a feeling, an emotion. It shakes you out of convention, makes you feel what you wouldn’t otherwise feel. Tools can do that, sure, but if you use them to cut wood, eat your breakfast or answer a question about green beans, they are — primarily, at root — tools, not art.

What about a novel? A novel is pure art. A (good) novel doesn’t pretend it has any job to do — it puts you behind the eyes of others and makes you feel. It is all exTRA: time-wasting, inefficient. Women’s books, goes the traditional perception: un-serious books without a serious purpose.

“As long as there’s a world we’ve got to sing those folks the truth.”

The only truth is everyone’s truth: not some condensed, consolidated bland approximation — but the noisy mess of everyone’s contradictory truths at once.

Plus a little exTRA on top.

Which is why ChatGPT will never be art. It’s why all of the essays telling me who so-and-so was and about places X, Y and Z with no individual perspective are bland as fuck and boring to read (not that I read them — straight to unsubscribe).

As ever, Lauren Hough said it already:

So, actually, maybe I do believe in souls after all.

Just don’t tell my atheist boyfriend.

On an entirely different note, here’s an awkward old offering from the annals you might have missed. On this day last year:

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