Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright © Raven Smith 2020

Cover design by Julian Humphries

Cover photograph © Shutterstock

Raven Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008339951

Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780008339975

Version: 2020-02-17

Dedication

Rather than a dedication, it’s more fitting to start with two apologies.

Firstly, to my mum on account of how much I talk about my cock.

And secondly, to my husband on account of how much I talk about his.

Contents

1  Title Page

2  Copyright

3  Dedication

4  Contents

5  A Trivial Pursuit

6 The Fear

7 Emails

8 Hotel, Motel, Holiday Thin

9  Marathon Love

10  Croissant

11  The Fridge

12  People Taking Pictures of People Taking Pictures of the Mona Lisa

13  The Ghost of Christmas Past

14  Being Tall

15  Two Drinks-Drunk

16  Treasures Untold

17  Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover

18  Penis Poirot

19  Gays for Theresa

20  Napkins and Serviettes

21  If the Prime Minister Smelled of Freshly Baked Bread

22  Never Let Me Go

23  Kevin Costner Drinks His Own Piss

24  The Affair

25  Flesh Tetris

26  The Fagin of my Friends

27  What if Jennifer Aniston Isn’t Sad? (And Everything Else that Goes Through my Head in a Yoga Class)

28  Notes from the Brink

29  Will I Be a Good Dad?

30  Aperitivo

31  Acknowledgements

32  About the Author

33  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

List of Pagesiiiivv123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960616263646566676869707172737475767778798081828384858687888990919293949596979899100101102103104105106107108109110111112113114115116117118119120121122123124125126127128129130131132133134135136137138139140141142143144145146147148149150151152153154155156157158159160161162163164165166167168169170171172173174175176177178179180181182183184185186187188189190191192193194195196197198199200201202203204205206207208209210211212213214215216217218219220221222223224225226227228229230231232233234235236237238239240241242243244245246247248249250251252253254255256257258259260261263264

A Trivial Pursuit

Forrest Gump was wrong: life is nothing like a box of chocolates, it’s more like drunk-biting into a kebab on the night bus. You’re trying to Jay Rayner the different flavour profiles but they’re mashed between pitta and the top deck’s swirling while you grip your door key between your knuckles, refusing to black out before your stop. Is that a curl of doner meat or a piece of napkin you’ve hungry-caterpillared? Like a kebab, our lives have countless ingredients; the dominant flavours and hidden additives are interlocking, co-dependant parts, like a thirtieth-birthday Omega. Disparate life-stuff vies for our attention like listening to three podcasts and a voicenote as the sound of dial-up internet reverberates backwards on a Sonos. There’s a consensus that life and death and kids really do matter. But we’ve also Googled beach sandals and healing crystals and carbs in a mango. These things matter too, but in a different way to voter fraud or organised religion or melting ice caps. Those little pots of chunked parmesan at Whole Foods feel a touch frivolous when compared to famine. The Pizza Express dough balls don’t cancel out genocide. Having to queue for too long at a bar boils my piss, but gin and tonic is a welcome distraction from our current political hell. These small things are inconsequential, but we chase them. Our trivial pursuits.

It’s helpful to think of life as a Monet – a canvas layered with splodgy strokes. A masterpiece and a big old mess. There’s just a lot of stuff to consider: your height, your weight, your jeans, your genes. Your education, your privilege, your subscription to the New Yorker. Can you still eat avocados? Can you still eat salmon? Can you still drink tap water? Or Aperol? Or probiotic yoghurt? Ottolenghi, easyJet, immigration. Joni Mitchell, the McCanns, Kim Kardashian. #MeToo and the 5:2. Microbeads in the sea. A starving polar bear on a splinter of iceberg. Can you be a good person if you don’t devote your life to Greenpeace? Can you be a good person without an asylum seeker in your spare bedroom? Can you be a good person and still judge the dresses at the Met Gala? Is pink back? Is pink woke? Is pink naff because it got woke and then we ruined it? How do you even pronounce Moët? Are we running out of time? Are we running out of resources? Are we running out of waitresses because of Brexit? Life’s torrential downpour of dust-bunnies under your bed piles up on the surfaces like Miss Havisham’s attic.

And are you engaging with it all? Or just scrolling down the feed liking pics? Are you actually getting happier? Or just less anxious? Are you making a good indelible mark on this planet, or leaving a cavernous carbon footprint? Are you the change you want to see in the world, or do you just tweet about it? Are you a muggle, commuting through life with your eyes down on today’s paper? Are you a messiah preaching the gospel, or an obedient disciple? And when you finally get to the pearly gates of heaven, will that one viral tweet count for or against your entry?

Modern life is rubble. Shingle from the bottom of the ocean brought in by the tide. We comb the beach ascribing value to each discovery. Whether that’s eating McDonald’s or living vegan, Donna Tartt or emojis, David Hockney or Zoella, being healthy or being thin. These are the trivialities we chase, our aspirations outside of having kids and not dying. We pursue these trifles that are both soufflé-light and anvil-heavy. At times they’re as mundane as a Uniqlo sock, at others they’re as dizzying as a diamond earring. We’re riddled with choices like a gangrenous leg, but we don’t have to be binary between the profound or the irrelevant. They coexist. These things have a meaning but they are also meaningless, overshadowed by genuine disasters.

Each decision we make is a self-portrait, but like Elizabethans we commission painters who make us look better. We don’t choose stuff for who we are, but more for who we want to be, perusing a life we see as successful.

In most cases trivial pursuits aren’t a conscious act by the participant. They’re a complex, invisible system of influence, like the mafia. And quiet prompts steer us from the periphery of our vision. Like most fairytales, this book is based on a simple conceit: everything in your life is trivial, but also has enough meaning to pursue. The small stuff is straw, but like Rumpelstiltskin the straw is also the gold. Take shoes, for example. If you see a pair of shoes online you may ask yourself, ‘Do I want these shoes?’ It’s innocuous enough. But within that question you’re like Cinderella, a woman who transformed her whole life with the perfect shoe and partied hard and fell in love. But the question has doubt too. You’re the undeserving ugly sister coveting the shoe. Do you deserve the shoe, or the prince? Should you buy the shoe for some future engagement at which you’ll feel worthy of the shoe? Will wearing the shoe convince you and the people around you that you’re worthy of the shoe? And in this whole shoe-mess you’re also Prince Charming. You’re searching for the woman who wears this shoe.

Does that make sense? It sounds ridiculous because it is. And we’re all doing it all the time, with multiple decisions we make about our time and our houses and our baby names and our dick pics. A million micro-factors encouraging us to do more and be more. We’re all striving for something, whether it’s a great meal, or the right hand-soap, or a cute kid with tiny Birkenstocks (always the right shoe). Everything is a major or minor decision, made en route to this bigger portrait we’re painting of who we really are.

I heard on Woman’s Hour that life is a big U shape: happy childhood at the start, and happy old age, the middle a big sag where you mainly just work and eat, and worry about money and worry about food. This book, I think, is the bottom of the U, all the human existing that congregates in the reservoir tip before we hit the blissful slalom of old age. Sometimes the U is filling with water and we’re drowning rats clawing up the sides, other times it’s a hammock and we’re lazing on a sunny afternoon.

I lie awake thinking about a bag of crisps I opened upside down last year, but alongside that there are more frets. Is empathy in retrograde? Do we care more about ourselves than other people? Am I middle-class-signalling by shopping at Waitrose? What if I only buy own-brand goods there? Is that actually worse? How is time passing so quickly? How is time passing so slowly? Why am I tired all the time? On my deathbed will I wish I’d slept more? After I die will they make a twelve-part Netflix original about me? Who will play me if Meryl is busy? Who will play me if Meryl is dead? What is my legacy? What is my lunch? Do I fail every time I eat carbs? Or do I beat the system? Could I perform the Heimlich manoeuvre in an emergency despite never having been taught it? Why am I sweating when I’m sitting still? Why am I back scrolling Instagram? Why do I pretend to hate the internet, and that an analogue life is a more pious path? Is sass a superpower or an Achilles heel? Is charm real? Is charisma real? Are these traits you’re born with? Or do you cultivate them like a garden? Deep down in my soul, in the bit you can’t see in selfies, am I the cat bin lady, angrily and chaotically acting out at the world? Or am I the cat in the bin, manhandled without my consent? Am I the bin itself, passively filled by nearby drama? I’ve lost hours searching for rugby-striped bedding, which is as much to do with my religious love of John Lewis as it is about the reminiscence of being a closet gay in a rugby scrum at school. What does getting the right bedding really mean on my personal success scale? Do I even notice most of my achievements? Or are they all passing clouds? When I die, will some zany acquaintance insist everyone wears colourful clothes to my funeral? That would be really bad.

I’m not concerned with how we got here, I’m interested in the status quo. I’m not going to trace back to our penny-farthinged pre-internet culture, nor am I going to Charlie Brooker your future. This book will not tell you how to feel. When to cry. When to laugh. When to panic. You don’t get a gold star for reading two lines without checking you phone in between. This book is a buffet, but unlike the lukewarm salmonella-y kind, there are plenty of piping-hot takes. I will keep serving dishes as you Bruce Bogtrotter them. I have a lot of questions. Is being tall its own social currency? Am I the contents of my fridge? Does plastic recycling matter if we all still eat fish? Does yoga matter if you’re not filthy rich? Am I the Nelson Mandela of Grindr because I managed to escape it? Is this the long walk to monogamy? Will I ever be as hot as I was on my wedding day? Will I ever be as hungry? Is a bagel four slices of bread? Are vitamin supplements secret carbs? Are three cigarettes a meal? Fucking hell, Raven, a meal is a meal.

Raven Smith’s Trivial Pursuits answers some of these questions, and reflects on the importance of the least important things. A CSI dark light that shows you the ominous stains of our frivolous attempts to accomplish or attain. Tie a napkin round your neck, chérie, and I’ll provide the rest.

The Fear

As someone who’s never done a live sex show, I can say with confidence that nothing gives you performance anxiety like sitting down to write a book. When starting this book I was riddled with apprehension, the kind that paralyses you and freezes you mid-scene like porn on a bad internet connection. I’ve had intense jobs before, all the palaver of contract negotiation and emails flying back and forth like a gravel pit. A meaningful work project takes infinite energy and infinite patience, but the end result is worth every brave conversation, every 7 a.m. conference call, every stand-up argument across the open-plan office. The time I threw a shoe. The time I ‘humiliated’ the cleaner. That little slap for the intern. A meaningful project is worth settling out of court. But every work meltdown before today was a merry Morris dance, all belled shoes and ribboned sticks, compared to the actuality of having to write this book. I will never say I’m overwhelmed again.

Like a self-professed summer person, schvitzing in the corner with a wet top lip as the humidity peaks, I declared myself a book person, thinking it was a personality I could slather on like sun cream. But when summer hit I just felt sweaty and stressed like wilted salad leaves left out of the fridge. Writing a book about modern life while living a modern life is basically declaring yourself the puppet who wants to be the puppeteer. Not just a Pinocchio participant in culture, but an observer of all the strings that hold it up – Geppetto overseeing the whole dance with strategic tugs to the beat. My bravado simmered down and the doubt crept in the way a summer anthem infects your brain. Could I even write? What defines an essay? Could I pose a juicy question? Then illuminate an answer? Could I show the judges versatility too? Beyond that, could I do daring literary gymnastics like Shakespeare on a pill? If all the world’s a stage, was I ready to tap dance? Not sonnets. I didn’t want to write sonnets because they’re a bit old-fashioned. But could I write a book for normal people who just want a little jazz?

Writers have always held a particular allure, because they aren’t like regular people. Writers don’t just observe the world like it’s streaming on Netflix: they masticate the world, they ingest it, and it marinates, eventually thrown up as a warm flume of hot takes. Out of them trails a festoon of delicate-but-robust prose, like a string of knotted hankies from Fagin’s pocket. It felt bold to call myself a writer. More of a hypothesis than a fact. A thrill cut through with potential humiliation, like a beery teenage kiss. I feel like an interloper, climbing aboard the literary boat like the Somali pirates on Tom Hanks’s container ship. I’m the writer now.

But I’ve scrambled my brain. Social media and the news cycle and infinite scrolling have whittled my attention span down to a nub. So while I’m triple-screening I’m also plotting, or coveting, or consuming. Every waking second brings an avalanche of ideas to sift through like the currants in a Christmas pudding while you search for the coin. Ideas dangle before my eyes like Boris Johnson on that zipline. Worries and desires and regrets stack up in my head. The sheer panic that I didn’t fully cash in when I was a twink. The sheer panic that the Cosmopolitan cocktail won’t make a comeback like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. The sheer panic that my dad was so laid-back as a parent I just absorbed complacency like a human kitchen towel. Is shopping a religious experience? Or are gyms the new churches? Why isn’t there a Mumsnet for gays? Or a Grindr for meeting the best people at a party without having to wade through the bores?

Thoughts come as easily as teenage boys but bounce off just as quickly, refusing to stick around for a second date. I wanted to step back from the trillion passing thoughts and conduct them, or at least organise them into workable groups. To somehow jettison out of my head and orbit the mess, an astronaut weightlessly jotting down his observations. I began this book on a dictation app, endlessly pacing my kitchen ad-libbing into my phone like the Lenny Henry of Camberwell but without the Red Nose Day suit or the Premier Inn deal. The notes caught thoughts like the trowel that came with our litter tray so you can sieve out the cat shit. I covertly spoke to the app everywhere I went, like a portable confessional booth. Cut to me in the street counter-arguing a podcast on my way to yoga. See me gurn-whispering into my phone in the corner of a club. I would wake just before dawn, with bin-breath, and express groggy observations right from the heart of my subconscious.

Countless things materialise when you’re talking to yourself. One is that I say essentially a lot. And basically. And talk almost exclusively in metaphors. But a phrase jumped out of my notes: Everything is a distraction from death. I can be quite melodramatic – perhaps there’s a teenage goth hiding inside me, all black boots and cobweb make-up. I still embrace this death sentiment, because everything is a distraction from death. We can either focus on the inevitable conclusion, or distract ourselves, gawping at the football streaker before the match ends. We find a way to fill that finite space between cradle and grave.

Before I typed a word I procrastinated. Procrastination is my toxic boyfriend, a confirmed bachelor keeping me from committing words to the page. The first bout of research had nothing to do with books. I was more concerned with how writers dress. I searched pictures of them at their desks and bought caricature garments. Sartorially, Truman Capote in Venice won out, all laid-back white shirts and wrinkled cords. Capote once said ‘Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go,’ and I’ve always felt like that about my own personality: appetising and moreish at first, giving way to an overwhelming sickliness.

Wrinkled cords helped set the mood like a dimmer switch at a swingers’ night, but I still couldn’t sit down and type. Procrastination kept me scrolling pictures of Tripp Fontaine for hours. It helped me pick little fights with my husband by WhatsApping him pictures of his mess around the house. Procrastination was sous chef to the extravagant sandwiches I made for lunch that took forty-five minutes minimum to assemble. I produced pint after tart pint of ‘Raven’s Lemon Curd’ which I gifted to friends. I talked about writing a lot, saying ‘It’s just a numbers game,’ not knowing that that was a naïve lie. I quipped that I was an essayist, because even the word ‘writer’ became more and more loaded, a gun in my pocket about to shoot me in the foot. I decided that if I pretended to be confident I would become confident, like a birthday wish when you blow out the candles. In my most baller moments I convinced myself that I was the undiscovered voice of my generation, a phrase that leaves a metallic taste in your mouth like you’ve licked a fistful of coppers. I swallowed that acid idea down and let it settle in my stomach like Vesuvius ash. I watched my husband’s poker face as I told him I was the voice of my generation, looking for a fault, for a wince, some sign we were colluding in the narcissism. He never faltered, because he knowns when to pick his battles and he doesn’t want an arrow in the eye. Husbands can be very good at building momentum but they can also slam the brakes. This time he left me running like a car engine while he nipped in for a grab bag of Quavers to keep my blood sugar up. I sat in the passenger seat as the vehicle filled with toxic voice-of-a-generation-monoxide, breathing on the windshield and writing voiceofageneration in the mist. I said to my husband, ‘I have to believe I’m the voice of my generation to write this book, it doesn’t matter if it’s true.’ It felt empowering and deluded to say it, and thrilling to force him into secrecy. It was a pact that brought us closer, but I still didn’t write a word. Instead I wrote ‘voice of a generation?’ in an email and saved it to drafts.

Shifting from audio note-taking to actual book-writing was like the early days of a love affair: anxious, confusing, obsessive, joyful, exhausting, exhilarating. I felt like I was sixteen again: self-conscious, besotted and confused, trying to convince myself not to obsess. Each day I sat down to edit my muddled thoughts, rather than facing the expectant blinking cursor of an empty Word doc. The anxiety of a blank page was forgotten, and I couldn’t shut up about it. I could hear people getting bored with my book-fixation, but I couldn’t stop. The process was electric and fluid, a hazardous and insoluble mix. Lively and dampening. I would find myself so sodden with anxiety I wanted to climb into a bag of rice. Forever. Unlike a love affair, there is no reciprocity. You pile more of yourself into the book and nothing comes back out. You are doing stand-up into the abyss. Transmitting but not receiving. One hand clapping in an echo chamber of your own notes.

The first sentence was the hardest, like pissing out a Sylvanian Families badger. I wanted to write something both humble and heroic to send out into the universe on a golden record. Something to misquote in the history books. Whatever I wrote would be a deliberate stain, an unsightly skidmark on new underwear, asylum seekers in Chipping Norton, pineapple on a pizza. Each sentence had to be written in red Sharpie that won’t Cif off the fridge. Everything felt finite and irreversible. I was Nicole Kidman with a prosthetic nose (to make her look more Virginia Wolverine) lining her pockets with rocks and silently entering the water. Dragged to the bottom by the weight of the project. I cracked my knuckles, ready to expel magnificent observations and sparkling wit. Prose was constipated. I felt a hydraulic pressure to reveal something mundane that coincidentally-on-purpose tapped into a relatable zeitgeist below the surface of culture. A personal anecdote that would ripple out and touch countless lives. ‘Let them eat cake’ for the podcast generation, penned by Carrie Antoinette. The full-frontal exposure of my thoughts was daunting, like trying to open a tin of beans with a sharpened stick. It went beyond stagefright. The fear was a fatberg meandering the tunnels of my veins. I was the ninety-nine people in the room who didn’t believe in me. All I had was wrinkled cords.

But then I wrote a sentence. An OK sentence. An everyday, palatable sentence. It wasn’t Let them eat Huel, but it was good enough. And then I wrote another. I could nurture the seeds from the dictation app into seedlings, like a black Monty Don. I had paragraphs. And they were my bricks. I had blueprints and foundations, but I couldn’t think ahead to the house I was building, because that was something for other people to peer into and walk around and judge. I was not ready for colour schemes or wallpaper or Kirsty Allsopp. But brick by brick I cornered off a little part of the world of my own. The wind changed direction and the skeleton of a building stayed standing. No huff and no puff. No subsidence. I have a tendency for complacency so I didn’t look back, I kept my spirit level and I just kept writing.

Daytimes dragged, but similes Jackson Pollocked out of me late at night over Deliverooed Ben & Jerry’s. Writing is like sex or exercise: you can overthink it, and spend too long getting down to it, but you hit a critical frenzied point and it feels amazing afterwards. Euphoric, near-orgasmic bouts of writing usually surface at 10 p.m., when I’d rather be having actual sex, when the black coffee is tepid and the ice cream is drinkable.

I found myself nit-combing my personal history, larvae and debris repurposed for chapters. Sometimes the writing is so hard I’m chiselling my own gravestone with my bare fingers. At other times an idea pours out like hot lava escaping a volcano and wiping out entire cities in its molten path. The book cannot be stopped. As easy as vomiting after you’ve eaten candyfloss and ridden the Wurlitzer: it’s a simple equation of being overfull, and then shaken like a martini. The words projectile. Other times it’s like puking on an empty stomach. All that straining and retching for half a mouthful of spit. I forced up metaphors for weeks, a form of verbal bulimia. Dehydrated and ruined, I considered calling NHS Direct. Thought-provoking copy can be extracted by careful caesarean, but you’re not just the patient. I’m one of those Victorian surgeons you read about who operated on himself while trying to keep all the other organs ticking.

I’m gagging for a vacation from myself. A vacation from thinking. And from thinking about thinking. And thinking about the quality of my thoughts. And from worrying that I’m not thinking enough at all. Six weeks in the Bahamas in a medically-induced coma would suit, although I’m sure I’d find a way to dictate a few lines. Freddie Mercury said the show must go on, but how can anyone ever have gone through this process and not fallen to pieces? How can writers roam the earth without sinking into the quicksand of their own doubt? The fear gets louder: You are not cut out for this. You’re indulging yourself. You’re only here as part of some diversity quota. You are undeserving.

The sweetest escape is booze. I long to get annihilated by drink. Kamikaze drunk. George-Best-roaring-with-laughter drunk. Scarface high, but drunk. Hold-my-hair-back-and-paint-the-pavement-with-warm-tequila drunk. Lean-in-and-kiss-my-mate drunk. Lean-in-and-slap-my-mate drunk. That feeling of only being drunk, nothing in your head except Don’t fall over, don’t throw up. Weekend at Bernie’s-walk-home-because-no-Uber-will-take-me drunk. How do you solve a problem like tequila? I want to forget the seams of the chapters, the lyrics of the lines, the shape of the prose. Drink until I’m out of credit and can’t send and receive text. I want to lose my voice and store it in a shell on the sea witch’s neck. I want to wake up on the beach and comb my hair with a fork.

I don’t get drunk. I don’t wake up in A&E with charcoal round my lips. Like any good pessimist, I sit very still and worst-case-scenario plan. The dystopian Mystic Meg of my own life.

I can see a future where people tweet me about the book with concise little takedowns like What the shit? and Who commissioned this garbage? It’s manageable at first, because I’m a big boy, and if I can handle bastard sewer rats wandering round my kitchen I can handle a few tweets. Initially I’m low-key proud, because trolls are a byproduct of fame, and this is clearly my fifteen minutes. A few aggy DMs cut to the bone because underneath the Acne bomber I’m a soft-shell crab, so despite sensible advice from people I love and trust, and specific case studies to the contrary, I engage with these haters. I fire out pithy tweets that immediately get torn to shreds by the rabble like chicken in a burrito. I feed these trolls giant nuggets of retort and morsels of badly-worded self-defence. The trolling is relentless in a way that can’t be wittily anecdoted at dinner parties. People look at me with the head tilt you do when you know someone’s recovering from the flu. Some troll sets up a bot that tweets each line from the book with ‘Cancel culture do your thing’ scribed underneath. I get massacred for using words like scribed. I’m too laboured a writer. Or I’m too brusque. I’m too noisy. I’m too cautious. My vocab is in the gutter. The book is left on the shelf like a curio. It’s a novelty shrunken head, forgettable for all but the original owner. I become synonymous with Mondays, the worst day of the week, but my book somehow makes Mondays even shoddier. Out of the blue Kate Moss says I’m worse than the easyJet pilot she called a basic bitch. The celebrities pile in. Gordon Ramsay, a man who once said he would electrocute his children if they became vegetarians, calls me a six-foot turkey. I bring out the vitriol in the kindest of stars. Oprah threatens to dangle me over the balcony like Michael Jackson’s son. Things reach fever pitch when Lena Dunham says she feels sorry for me but misspells my name and Jon Ronson tweets that I should be scalped. So you’ve been publicly shaved. The book is translated into Braille solely to exfoliate people’s callused feet. ‘Ravening’ is added to the Oxford English Dictionary, defined as ‘writing a shit book’. Tabloid hacks delve into my past and reveal I’ve been counting my age in Geri Halliwell years and I’m not even half-Jamaican. Piers Morgan calls me Ja-fake-an.

Book people will of course hate the thing, pulling apart my janky prose and grammar. My one-liners fall flat like Christina Aguilera at the Grammys. The Paris Review sucker-punches the book as ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. This hurts me more than the time my mum shut my fingers in the car door in south London. The Guardian blocks me. The New Yorker ghosts me. Radio 4 holds a minute’s silence rather than platform me. Diet Prada runs a week-long campaign comparing my writing to other writers who’ve made better points about identical subjects. Private Eye has nothing to satirise. For the first time in history the Booker committee decides to award a prize for the worst book published this year. Guess who wins? Somebody somehow hacks my Google search history and the world knows how often I investigate eyebag surgery and patterned shorts and synonyms for ‘amazing’. The shame is deafening. Charlie Brooker calls my book laughable. Zadie Smith calls me a twat. David Sedaris calls me literary roadkill. Despite this, I refuse to believe the book is shit, such is the ego of a man who’s survived. I will die on this hill (the hill being unsold copies of the book).

Back in reality I type onward, telling myself you only have to write the first draft of your first book once. Perhaps I’ll look back on this time and laugh, like the time I shat myself in the park on the way to work. Slowly I take more breaks. The world outside the space between my nose and the screen bleeds back in. I loosen the screws on my timetable and word-count. I turn the internet back on. I go to Egypt and I don’t write a word and the sky doesn’t come crashing down. I watch Bring It On in the bath. I bleach the loos and feel a genuine sense of calm but I don’t bother with the sinks because it’s a faff. I feed my cat M&S smoked salmon. I stop thinking about the book all the time, and the strikethrough of my anxiety Morse codes into intermittent dots and dashes. I decide whatever the outcome I’ll always be tall. I write a chapter about being tall. It pretty much writes itself. I watch Leon for the first time. I read digestible fashion clickbait which should be forgettable but I find myself thinking, ‘I’d better be reincarnated as a French woman, so help me God.’ I rewatch the Blackfish documentary and think, ‘It could be worse, I could get murdered by a killer whale in front of a bunch of kids.’ Perhaps I’ll be revered in retrospect like Van Gogh or Robbie and Kylie doing ‘Kids’: not respected enough at the time, but post-reactively iconic. Along with my mood, my prose loosens up like it’s taken stool softeners. My coach suggests I write my own eulogy, which I roll my eyes at but it helps because it’s all big-picture, blue-sky thinking. I’ve decided it’s bad taste to have my corpse Dita von Teese-floating in a giant novelty martini glass at my funeral, so I want to be dressed in my going-out top and Gucci clogs and burned like a Viking on a pyre of my own belligerence. That would suit me just fine.

Emails

I know it’s a humblebrag to say I get a lot of emails and I don’t care. I get a lot of emails. I get so many that I now open them to check for urgency and mark them as ‘unread’, an action I’d like to adopt when I’m being cranky with my husband. Your washing’s been on the radiator for three days. Mark as ‘unsaid’.

An email is always critical for the sender. Falsely flagged as hostage-situation urgent. Only a handful of these inbox delights ever need immediate attention. Technology and productivity have collided, creating a Wild West shootout of hyper-efficiency, where every cowboy touchtypes in bullet time and shoots off a round of emails. Recent etiquette decrees that those on the receiving end must apologise for not replying instantaneously. ‘Sorry for the three-minute delay in getting back to you …’ Any reply outside of a few hours is insulting and you deserve to be hexed or to lose a finger like the woman in The Piano, clacketting away at your keyboard for eternity. If you reply to an email outside of twenty-four hours, the email doesn’t even exist, it just turns to foam on the waves like Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid when she can’t pull the prince. Rapid-retort emails are the boarding school biscuit game, everyone bashing away trying to get their response out as quickly as possible. Efficiency culture makes us demand things harder, better, faster and stronger, with no margin for error. For all correspondence, we expect the laser precision of a surgeon’s knife and the professional finish of a wedding cake.

My fingers automatically type hollow platitudes that keep colleagues and suppliers lubed for the working day. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve replied ‘Amazing!’ when the work is adequate. Amazing! keeps the wheels turning. There are more amazing words for Amazing! – Stunning!, Superb!, Magnificent! – but they reek of motivational speaker. Using superior words can make you sound like a nervous Carol Vorderman on a first date with a jittery bag of consonants. Too thesaurus. Too composed. People can smell the bullshit. But Amazing! is timeless and suggests an emotional exertion that isn’t really there. Like blue jeans, Amazing! never goes out of style. Like sex, Amazing! is good as long as you’re getting it. Amazing! is the bread on a shit sandwich of getting your own way. Pop an Amazing! into an unflinchingly direct command and people think they’re helping you out rather than following an order. When your life flashes before your eyes as you die you mainly see instances of the regret and pain you have caused others, but you also see the people whose days were Wonderbra-lifted by a well-placed Amazing!

I’ve read that flowery emails with too many platitudes are less effective, and that women use this more apologetic lexicon, whereas men just say what they want. In a bid to be assertive I eradicated shriek language from my prose, taking my email tone from giddy teenager in love (‘Amazing! Raven xx’) to the intensely militant guy in Full Metal Jacket (‘I need this immediately, as per my last email’). Taking the sweetness out of the emails dropped the blood sugar, and made people feel like I was having a pop. I could almost hear them paralysed at the computer as they received the command, and then scurrying about like frightened church mice. I sort of enjoyed it at a dictator level, but even my inflated sense of self has a boundary. Colleagues felt stressed and inadequate, like me when I lost my virginity. Nobody wants the feeling of deflowerment every time they get an email. Amazing!s were reinstated like a hymen.

Most email communication is superfluous – anything truly urgent happens on the phone, or in the hay-fevered cross-pollination of a conference call, multiple voices and three-second time delays creating an apocalyptic hellfire like when the Ghostbusters crossed the energy streams. You don’t email 999. You don’t email a boiling pan of water off the stove. Britney didn’t email her hair off. Emails are never truly urgent.

Things that are urgent: towels when you get out the bath; chinese food when you’re hungover; diet Coke when you’re thirsty; Jesus’s cross at the crucifixion, or a coffin at a normal funeral; mini quiches at a wake; butter on a jacket potato the moment it comes out of the oven; extra security protocols in action films when people think they have enough security protocols; unlimited patience at Heathrow Terminal 5; Advil PM on a long-haul flight; and Toblerones from duty free. A Starbucks bathroom is urgent when you need to piss. As is masturbation before you sit at a computer all day. Sex when you’re horny is an immediate need. Though not having sex immediately is its own thing too. I can convince myself I urgently need more vitamin supplements or new pants, but I’m aware that’s just my consumerism talking. I don’t want to sound like an emotional wellness coach, but we urgently need friends when we’re sad. I’ll go all-out and say cake when you’re sad, too. And kittens when you’re at rock bottom. You need money when you’re broke. Or family heirlooms to hock. Or the balls to cat-burgle a stately home, or to Anna Nicole Smith an older man. You urgently need to watch Antiques Roadshow if you feel even the slightest bit depressed. It always helps.

What’s never urgent is an email. The vibration of a notification is an ambush, striking at any time to jolt you out of the task that had your attention. Notifications can swirl and engulf you like the bees that killed Macaulay in My Girl. Endless connectivity is the plague of our century. Ring-a-ring of roses, a pocket full of WeTansfer notifications and breaking news alerts and calendar reminders and the family WhatsApp group. Alerts build in a crescendo that floods all of your senses like a bad case of food poisoning. And we secretly get off on it. We’re being alerted to our own sense of importance and need for attention. We welcome the false adoration. It’s more than a dopamine hit. The closest thing to an orgasm is turning your phone on after a long flight and flooding the basement with notification vibrations. A reminder that people know you exist. It fortifies our sense of importance. We’ve convinced ourselves we need to be constantly connected, like those heinous couples on Oxford Street who would rather clothesline you than let go of each other’s sodding hands. This is the Braxton Hicks of intimacy. Connectivity making us feel connected, responding to notifications, not people. A false idol of togetherness.

Our egos are bolstered by notice-me-fications, and reinforced by being busy. The culture of being busy isn’t a new idea, but I-could-be-doing-more-to-enrich-this-moment is a new pressure. Like a parent at the Tate shoehorning culture into their kid, who just wants to draw. We’re trying to find a deeper, multifaceted meaning in every moment. When I was a kid we’d make stained-glass-window biscuits: a shortbread frame with a boiled sweet that would melt in the oven and flood the frame right up to the edges. And that’s our new endeavour: trying to fill every day right up to the edges. Like trying to pack a fortnight’s clothing into your carry-on. We’re adding depth, adding texture. Texture is the right word because it’s not about doing more stuff, it’s about each life experience having a deeper colour and a coarser consistency, and meaning more because of these things. Like a gin and tonic, but the gin is made by artisanal West Country virgins and the tonic is the expensive stuff from Waitrose. The lemon is Sicilian and cut with that knife we got in Japan, darling, do you remember? Think of life as spaff of MasterChef velouté, and we’re all Marco-Pierre White wannabes examining the subtler flavours of the sauce rather than drinking it down like piglets. We’re actively seasoning every second we’re awake. In any moment’s respite from our densely-packed milliseconds we consult our to-do list, the modern prophet for structuring our time.

To-do lists are basically notes we write to ourselves that remind us we exist and have purpose. A list of obstacles that cleverly distracts us from the realisation that regular meditation won’t scientifically let us leapfrog death. The humble to-do list keeps existential worries at bay. A to-do list is a breezy nursery rhyme of irrelevant tiny tasks, the lightest of gestures, that keep things ticking forward: Pick up dry cleaning. Put down my phone. Hydrate. Trivialities maketh the to-do, as grandiose statements are left for rom-coms when people refuse to forever hold their peace at a wedding. These are things to-do, and when they’re to-done we add more. An infinite scroll of distraction, like when you need to leave for work but you can’t resist the constant refresh of your news feed. To-do lists represent an evolving, inescapable validation of how we spend our time. The fetish of being so busy we can’t stop to think about mortality, every instant of the day chronically stuffed to the brim like a foie gras goose. We’re choosing to be forever occupied, like a toilet at a house party.

Hotel, Motel, Holiday Thin

There are so many songs about summer the other seasons get jealous. Luckily climate change is a great leveller, and when it’s finished we’ll have a forever nuclear winter and no seasons at all. In the meantime we can listen to ‘Summer Holiday’ and get excited for a vacation, no more climate-change worries for a week or two. Saying you love to holiday in Britain is a lie and you deserve to get mad-cow disease. Going on holiday never, ever involves driving down the M25 with all your stuff packed tight in the boot like Stan’s girlfriend in ‘Stan’, your only respite eating the sad, ulcerous motorway food that’s been reheated at the back of a garage followed by the empty calories of a Toffee Crisp. Somebody’s always crushed into the back seat with their knees by their ears pretending to be jovial. Inevitably a Fathers for Justice guy dressed as Batman blocks the dual carriageway to protest a court order. Hours pass. You piss in a layby. This is not a holiday.

Board the plane without thinking of the carbon footprint, and join the annual tradition of Brits abroad. Shakespeare would have loved the ease of an easyJet out of Stansted, penning sonnets and a tragedy or two. Maybe even a Luton haiku. Holidays are important because they heal wounds and knit bone. The bumps and scrapes of daily life are cured, like Jesus and the lepers. Room service is couples therapy. Breakfasting on beer is CBT. Reading a beach thriller is deep psychoanalysis. When everybody is spending in euros your family becomes like the von Trapps, all matching outfits and sing-alongs. Bridge over troubled daughter. Your pent-up aunt is a breeze. Citronella is an aphrodisiac, and it’s clinically proven you have better orgasms by the sea. Feta is a superfood. So is ouzo. There are no drawbacks to being away.

Summer is all about deliberate emptiness. Vacations are Dalí landscapes with all the clocks melted, but there’s an open bar so you can drink rum and spend a day warm on the sand. In a lifetime of hyper-erranding, a scheduled period for us to go fallow is a must. Beached interludes see us unchained from the shackles of to-do. Just one day out of life. Time with nothing in it, like Oliver Twist’s pockets, lolling on a sunlounger in the hourless vacuum in a flask between the tea and your hand. Rest and sleep deep, like the blackout void you had at the staff party sponsored by a tequila brand. Commit for a week, maybe two, just until my skin turns brown then I’m coming back to you.

Mini-breaks are not holidays. They’re the crippled boy from ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ who isn’t allowed into the cave of real travellers. Mini-breaks are person number three in the human centipede of travel. If travel is a trifle, mini-breaks are in the basement, below the sponge fingers at street level – gelatine from a cow’s hoof, maybe. Mini-breaks take you in and out of a city in two minutes, like teenage intercourse. The pace is stressful, more stressful than all the tabs currently open on my computer. Mini-breaks are just the tip, like when straight men sleep with other men. I bite my thumb at mini-breaks. Looking into my crystal ball I can see your mini-break’s future: dashing about like Supermarket Sweep. Smelling stressed because you are. A cultural hit list, Sophie’s Choice-ing between the modern art museum and the Sistine Chapel. A rip-off gondola. A rip-off rickshaw. One bite of gelato. A star turn at the Acropolis. A single finger in the Bocca della Verità. Thirty-six hours later you’re mini-broken on the tarmac back at Gatwick. Shakespeare’s sonnet still a first draft. Mini-break people are the kind of people who think a guy who caught their eye once on the tube is in love with them and then put an ad in the paper trying to find him again. They pen little poems about that fleeting moment for the rest of their lives. The kind of people who believe in short-term, showy romance and buy their girlfriend roses while she waits for them to propose. People who say they get their ‘smellies from Boots’. Basic couples dragging their basic luggage across the globe adhering to the artificial signifiers of love.

I hate mini-breaks but I’m also addicted to mini-breaks. They’re shit, but my God they’re convenient. They’re like countershock from a defibrillator when your pulse stutters. A daytripper global citizen. Venice is literally sinking under the weight of us, but we engage in a personal fallacy: I’m not part of the problem, I’m not like these other tourists, when I’m here I’m having a unique time, I’m having my own personal cultural experience. I’m not a mini-breaker, I’m a big breaker in a condensed timeframe. We all want to see the world, but none of us want to leave our creature comforts behind. I’m happy to go halfway round the globe, but I won’t give up my San Pellegrino. A cavalier romp on the high seas full of mystery and adventure please, but with a vegan option at dinner. Scott of the Antarctic but comfortable hotel slippers. Indiana Jones and a hot shower. I want the pretence of quill-writing extended witticisms by candlelight, but in reality I immediately go into meltdown if Google Maps can’t find me in three seconds.

It’s hard to beat a city by the sea. Cities by the sea are like theme parks where you’re tall enough for all the rides, freer than their landlocked counterparts, which sprawl ever outwards like a self-levelling screed. You get the metropolis and the marine in one mouthful. Barcelona hits the sea. Manhattan hits the rivers. Rules help control the fun, but there’s always something naughty about the nautical.

Getting away from it all has a familiar formula. Booking a holiday is a rain dance for more work. A festival of burnout before you’re out of office. The moment you book your vacation your workload quadruples, constipating in a bottleneck. Usual hassles will need more hustle. You’ll have missed an initial on a contract and be embroiled in the Puccinian saga of re-signing and rescanning. You’ll spend hours on the phone because you did something really bad to a Virgin Media representative in a previous life. Every meeting you take will be commandeered by a Bob Geldof character on a forty-five-minute tangent about Africa, and you cannot morally interrupt an Africa tangent. Your side-lover becomes irrationally demanding, begging to take you to Madam Butterfly and boiling your kid’s bunny. You start to receive threatening handwritten letters from the guy you thought you killed on the road after drinking heavily at your graduation party last summer. He has a hook for a hand. All of this you will juggle alongside booking hotel reservations, airport transfers, internal flights, the yellow-fever jab, the ever-so-romantic love in the time of cholera jab, the cult classic rabies jab, passports, travel visas, insurance, additional phone data, insect repellent, miniature shampoo, maps in English, maps in Arabic. Trust me on the sunscreen. Don’t forget your toothbrush. Don’t forget your plug adapter. Don’t forget your plug adapter. Don’t forget your plug adapter.

This overabundance of work can make you pre-holiday sick, but exhaustion is the price for escaping, an evacuee of regular employment. You earn your leave by running on pure adrenalin and repeating to yourself, ‘I’ll sleep on the plane, I’ll sleep on the plane.’ You need to be dead-body-tired to feel you’ve earned the trip, otherwise you’re an indulgent self-serving monster, one step away from women who lunch. Don’t slog hard enough and the undercurrent of opulence will drown you. Your body will wash up on a beach of gold bullion, rubies foaming at your mouth. You don’t deserve a life of all play and no work and shuffling your kids off to boarding school like Baroness von Schraeder. Your life will be brunch-time golf and lunch-time facials and three-martini afternoons. All the scenes on Mad Men when they’re not at the office. Vacationing is your self-care dialled up to eleven, like when Madonna started Wellness with Kabbalah. But you can’t be all work and no play, it’s biased. You’re yin with no yang. Fish without chips. Sandpaper with no rough side. You’re one Chuckle Brother. A single Olsen. I don’t want to sound dramatic, but after a particularly savage bout of pre-holiday work I developed what I’m certain was either pneumonia or lung cancer or both (I was too scared to Google my symptoms). Before a transatlantic flight I downed a depressingly gendered ‘ManFlu Shot’ at Heathrow. I do not say this lightly, but it saved my life. After the fish course, I slept deeply for seven hours and sprang into JFK like Tigger on six espressos. It would have saved hours if they’d sent a Manflu Hot or Shot after the Thai boys in the cave from the get-go.

It’s glorious to swap the rat race for a queue at the ice-cream van, but the biggest holiday taboo is a winter body on a summer beach. You must get in shape by any means necessary. ‘In shape’ means you but a dress size smaller, or with more muscly arms, or just after the stomach flu. The ‘in-shape’ regime begins months before the vacation, as leisurely as the poo you have when nobody else is home because you have time on your side. You will simply eat less and move more. Part of the problem with eating sublimely all day – quinoa porridge and a light lunch of carrot tops – means you’re clucking for a pint of lard when you get home. Your naughty inner toddler wants ice cream for dinner, like the French aristocracy in Les Misérables. I creamed a cream. You allow this gastronomic transgression because the holiday is weeks away, but you begin to panic as take-off looms closer. Will you fit through the departures gate? You want a hot body? You better work bench. You hit the gym hard. You write Hotel, motel, holiday thin on Post-its above the treadmill. You survive on laxative tea and egg whites. After all the militant work and a dash to the airport, you break your fast with a takeaway baguette at Luton airport at 6 a.m. Auf wiedersehen, Prêt. You ‘accidentally’ drink the tap water in a grubby restaurant for a restorative bout of diarrhoea.

People get evangelical about the correct way to pack a suitcase, dishing out tips like a Sunday sermon. As with organised religion, your own moral compass is usually enough. Trust only your own instincts. Pack your bag and go. You’ll always have too many long-sleeves and not enough pants. A linen suit is dashing, but will never see the light of day. I always pack multiple white T-shirts, because it’s not a question of if you spill on then, just when. I always want to look like I’ve been on the road a while, and acclimatised to the temperature, rolling from Greek village to Greek village absorbing acquaintances and atmosphere and chatting to really old locals in bars. I want to give off the romantic air of a man of the world, not a two-week tourist, so I need my outfits to appear a little lived-in, but also hardy and practical. Shorts with enough pockets for my compass and penknife and luxury leather wallet. A neckerchief to stop condensation running down my spine. I want to look like the sort of languid person who can play ‘Nowhere Man’ on guitar (I can’t), and has a lot of stories to tell (I don’t), with a girl in every port (nope). He smokes rollups. He nurses half a beer. I don’t wear shorts because it’s sunny, I wear them because of Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, Italian beaches with Picasso, and Howard Carter when he discovered Tutankhamun. Or the sexy police chief from Jaws. A Myspace top eight of men’s legs traversing the globe. I want to be an archaeologist, not a holidaymaker; a zookeeper, not a backpacker. To have a purpose beyond touristing and tanning. I don’t dress for mai tais at Soho House. I honestly don’t. I don’t dress to lob coins in the Trevi Fountain or to pretend to push the Tower of Pisa over. I nod to historic pioneers and grafting ancestors and the ever-so-problematic colonialists. This is my truth. When I travel I also want the bulky, irritating thirties luggage that takes several bellboys to manoeuvre to your suite, and I want someone else I employ to quietly slip them a crisp note for their troubles. A monogrammed trunk is the final boss of vacation packing, but it’s a bugger to lift. I love saying I’m low-maintenance and then packing a month’s worth of skincare into a leather weekender for an overnight stay thirty-five minutes from my house. I wish I knew how to quit you, Retinol.

Some people want to fill the world with silly little love songs. These people don’t get cheap flights out of Luton at 4 a.m. You need to dull the noise. The first thing I do when I get to an airport is head to that fishy rotunda of high stools and order white wine. It’s always near the diminutive Fortnum’s. The wine is expensive and unnecessary, which is the exact mood of any vacation. I sip Sancerre until I’m rehabilitated from the systematic abuse of check-in and security. The first thing I do on the plane is order a bloody mary. I don’t like them, but that’s beside the point. People who drink bloody marys are default dashing fifties bachelors. I read that the Queen drinks a gin and Dubonnet before lunch, a glass of wine with her lunch, and a glass of champagne before bed, and I follow this triptych hourly as I fly. After this concoction of booze you have a wonderful flight, even in the middle seat with the worst turbulence. Wherever I am in the royal booze cycle I always down a glass of champagne before landing. At the hotel I order a martini as dry as my face when I’m fake-crying to get out of trouble. With a twist. Olives on the side. Not crisps. I sleep till noon the next day.

I always say you’re not on holiday until you’ve got drunk twice and had sex twice. The way you achieve this is carte blanche. People get horny in prickly heat. One cousin will emerge from a cloud of Impulse with newly budded breasts and you’ll all pretend you haven’t noticed. After you’ve done all your selfies for the day, spritz your facial mist and lie back and think of nothing. Read whatever you want, too. The trashier the better. When Amazoning holiday reads copy Rihanna singles and alternate between nuanced, emotional hard-hitters and banging classics. A dishevelled, carefully undone mood permeates each sunlit second. Like a bag of chips, the perfect beach hair has just the right amount of salt. You get butterflies in the stomach from too much heat. The smell of Piz Buin mixes with Malibu, blowing through the jasmine of your mind. Your face hurts from smiling. You’re that person. You pat aloe vera on peeling shoulders under a paper-thin top you Febreze every night. Batman’s utility belt, but full of suntan lotion and aftersun. Swimming naked. Dining in jelly shoes. Sex is great, but have you ever had three ouzos in a taverna? You’ll have a series of crushes on inappropriate waiting staff. By all means shag the kitchen porter if you can shake the image of where his hands have been. You momentarily commit to single-use everything – napkins, straws, lovers. Non-stop daiquiris. Non-stop dancing. Non-stop dick. Catching crabs is a thrilling game of jeopardy, rather than a worry. Sand gets into every nook and cranny and you just laugh. You get sick on the coach from too many windy roads.

You’ll mainly eat crisps. The occasional salad. Three different varieties of crisp in a bowl is a type of salad. But when you travel it’s imperative to visit the first McDonald’s you see and sample the local delicacies. The one in the airport doesn’t count. In Japan I detoured a press trip to a Shinjuku Maccy Ds for a 4 a.m. tasting menu. The green Fanta was excellent, a supernatural gunge colour signalling how desperately bad for you it must be. A tonic for my barbed-wire throat after refusing the microphone at karaoke. The giant spicy chicken nugget was more of a question than an answer, essentially a deep-fried disc of salted enigma that still perplexes. But the carbonara fries changed our collective lives. Carbonara fries immediately feel like a bad idea, like the people still wearing pun versions of Make America Great Again hats. Carbonara fries doesn’t even sound Japanese, does it? But there comes a point in every young man’s life when he must rethink all he holds to be true. Bittersweet and strange, finding you can change, learning you were wrong. Our preconceptions of carbonara fries: an unnecessary union, defamation of two sublime and independent dishes. A cut and shut car. A bootleg, flying in the face of God. But in this instance God is Nigella Lawson and she’s silently sobbing. Lo! Behold! the greatest dish on the planet. The ‘chefs’ at McDonald’s have reinvented the wheel. On first taste carbonara fries assault your very humanness. An explosion in the mouth like throwing water on a chip-fat fire. An immense salty jizz of translucent sauce fists great punches of parmesan into your gullet like an overzealous lover grabbing you by the throat when the safe word is ‘more parmesan’. It’s just the most needlessly cheesy foghorn, blasting cheese down your chest into your guts and soggy in the wrong places like drunk sex. The sauce is stabbed through with heroic shards of bacon like angry bees span swarming half a grapefruit but the grapefruit is a potato cut into matchsticks and fried to perfection. We finished the lot humming ‘Food, Glorious Food’, and we Ubered back to our hotel, happy as pigs in shit (that were gladly sacrificed to become the bacon on carbonara fries).

At some point you have to come home from vacation, because you miss your clean white linen and your fancy French cologne. Head back to the absurdities of everyday life and the sinkhole of adult responsibilities (similar to kids’ responsibilities if they had to pay taxes). But before you board easysqueezyJet you need to deliver the ultimate humblebrag: a postcard. Postcards, the worst invention known to humanity. Worse than the atomic bomb or Chewits or belly shots. There are two types of postcard. First there are the picturesque twee tableaus of model villages sent by undersexed Wes Anderson Oxford alumni whose specialist subject on Mastermind is Hogwarts. The second type of postcard is the chunkily sexual teenage-boy-who’s-never-seen-tits-in-the-flesh innuendo postcard – an archipelago of women’s arses in neon thongs, men basking in the shade of an obese woman, a man’s penis wearing sunglasses. To be honest, I sort of love those unwoke postcards. Feel free to send me those, but if you send me a Wes Anderson postcard may someone with the flu lick your Ryanair tray table. You do not wish I was there. You are atoning for your own enjoyment. Sorry to be that guy, but have you ever read a postcard that stayed with you after ten minutes? Be honest. I don’t mean a MoMA postcard with compact-but-touching emotive script. I mean a list of taverns and tourist traps. Again, sorry to be that guy, but can you think of a single postcard you’ve been sent that touched you? A dramatic postcard? Or an arresting one? A postcard so illuminating and eye-catching and staggeringly surprising that it inspired awe? A transcendent postcard, both humbling and sensational? Impressive in its subtlety, yet awe-inspiring in its nuanced articulation? A postcard that reminded you how great it is to be alive, like the Scrooge ghosts or that lumpectomy that came back benign?

The problem is, no matter how small your handwriting, postcards are only ever a tiny morsel of the full trip experience. Thirty degrees of the 360. You only ever get a manageable highlights reel, like GCSE Bitesize. The bare bones that basically say ‘Ate stuff, saw stuff.’ And it’s incredibly hard to escape the latent boast or the ingrained gloat in such a short form. Teensy bits of paper lack depth. There’s a reason the Ten Commandments weren’t written on A5. There’s a reason we don’t protest with postage stamps. Postcards are the preserve of a bygone era, when people couldn’t show off their lives on Instagram. We’re so digital now that seeing someone’s handwriting is like seeing their nutsack. Their signature has a perverse intimacy. Postcarding is a dying art, like falconry or plumbing, because we’re conditioned to expect more from short-form content. It’s difficult to read something short that isn’t an instant-laugh meme or doesn’t want you to buy something. We’ll be sorry in the future when all the digital data gets wiped by the Rihanna hacker in Ocean’s 8. The digital world will disappear, the Cloud will disperse. We’ll clutch our postcards to our chests and fondly caress them. We’ll dig out the Yellow Pages and meet in person. Our attention spans and short-term memories will come back.

Until then, wear white to show off your radiation burn while the Macarena plays softly on piano.

Marathon Love

When you first meet someone it’s a like a starter’s pistol going off. Bang bang he shot me down. The energy is electric. A rush, a surge, a sprint forward. You start pelting headlong like a blinkered horse. Running like a tap. Running like Obama for president. Running like clockwork towards an unknown finish line. Each little spark of discovery igniting more passion. Pining for their newness, their novelty. Scientists say it’s all projection – that we see mainly what we want to see, mixed with a few matching pheromones, like the Sorting Hat put you both in Hufflepuff and you both wear CK One. A biological fuckery. Truffle pigs sniffing each other out like gourmet fungus. But honestly, who cares about the science? Once you get the scent you tear downhill, risking a nosedive that will mash your front teeth onto the pavement. Race through the halcyon opening numbers. First date, first kiss, first finger. Luck be a lady every night. When you’re a gay you get the added frisson of who will pay for dinner and who will top. It’s a thrill ride, like a ghost train with manageable scares because it’s not too serious yet. You’re not all the way committed. It’s a cushioned kamikaze and you’re bolstered by the energy of the new. New car, new girl, new ice, new glass. You’re whipped into a sandstorm frenzy, never waiting long enough for the dust to settle, tearing forward like pingpong balls in the updraught. Venice is for lovers, so you go for the weekend. Let’s punt in Oxford. A weekend in the Lakes. Did my heart not love till Slough? Paris in the spring? And flowers are brilliant. Une douzaine de roses, s’il vous plaît.

The aggressive romancing you do to snare a partner is textbook and contrived and naff. That’s all part of the fun, because in the early days of a love affair, in romcom world, the impossible is made possible. The workaholic boss ends up with the office temp. The ugly duckling emerges from behind her glasses and bags the coolest guy in school. The nerd gets the girl. Life before was flat, but love reinflates your tyre on the side of a dual carriageway. Falling in love is brilliant. You are Jake Gyllenhaal coming back down the mountain after getting his cheeks clapped by Heath Ledger. Beaming like the Cheshire cat. It’s like when your Instagram post is doing numbers. You manically sprint through this phase, pausing only for a Lucozade Sport and hand jobs. You forget simple things because your head is full of him. Or her. You don’t keep up with the current political hell (there’s always some). You run out of food at home. You have sex in daylight, arrive at events late and just-showered. You throw out compliments like the guy feeding penguins fish at London Zoo. Turtledoves working out how to spend Christmas. Their cute foibles are still cute. The word prenup just a whisper.

Fall in love. Stay in love. These are the rules of life. There’s very little grey area. No margin for error. Do not get left on the shelf. Do no old maid. Do not Grey Gardens. Fall in love, stay in love. The mantra is a maypole for your entire existence that all the other ribbons plait around. I will fall in love and the rest will fall into place. It’s fantastic to become incredibly successful at a job you love and eat the food you love and see the world. But all that is noise outside of the fall-in-love mantra, an unmoving maypole to dance round.

As the first wave of tsunami love subsides you find yourself attached. Tethered. Coupled. Staying in love. That’s not a bad thing. But it’s not a sprint either. It’s more leisurely. A foot taken half off the gas. Being in love isn’t like falling in love. It’s more of an inert gas that forms around you as a couple, and sometimes a few drops of condensation fall. There are glorious months, or even years, when you still posture with money, booking exotic faraway trips and non-invasive beauty treatments. You still get on famously. The falling in love part tends to take your mind off everything else, but real life starts to ebb back in as time passes. Your heart rate de-escalating after intercourse, lying in the dark, remembering that email unsent in drafts.

I need to go back in time before we go forward in this piece. If you want my future, forget my past. In retrospect, all the young dudes I slept with in my youth were stepping stones en route to my husband, but I didn’t know that so I mourned each of them like those old women on Kos in all black. My lovers were a series of false starts, a lengthy warm-up. None of them were tonics. These guys were mouthfuls of dry gin and bitter lemon. We’re all, I think, attracted to a danger of sorts when we’re young. There’s something about the invincibility of youth that makes us desire instability, the destabilising rock of rock ’n’ roll. We love the idea that musicians act insane offstage. That their creativity comes from eccentricity, some brain alchemy that distinguishes a true creative from mere mortals. Michael Jackson, David Bowie, Madonna. All somehow other. All somehow flawed (sometimes fatally), a fissure running down the middle of their excellence. We’re never satisfied with stable, we want a peculiarity, we want a fault line of danger.

Dating bad boys is a real thrill, there’s no denying it. But bad boys grow into bad men. I was magnetically drawn to guys who seemed like they never slept, in tight jeans and billowy seventies blouses under leather jackets, as was the rage. Complete idiots were catnip. Bleeding arrogant two-bob cunts turned my head. The fucking hours I clocked up obsessing over men that didn’t fancy me at all. I really should invoice them.

Most relationships start online now, so I always think of those early endeavours as traditional and even more chaotic because every decision was based on gut feeling and adrenalin. Every great love story tells you drama is the key to happiness, but that approach tends to leave you single, with a clapped-out adrenal gland. I dated countless Tybalts we both thought were Romeos. I once dated a kleptomaniac. It was short-lived, on account of his deep, bleeding wound of despair over the death of his sister, clumsily staunched with stolen H&M belts. He’s fine now, by the way (I’ve always been a little bit too self-involved to be a proper ‘rescuer’). Another boyfriend was a more sensible choice, but choosing sensibly is in itself doomed, because snuggles in your twenties are not cool, and I wanted to be swept off my feet. Staggeringly, two of my exes ended up together, proving you can re-gift ex-boyfriends like unwanted scented candles. I’m being flippant, because I was properly devastated and it took fucking ages to stop picturing them rutting. My smile is my make-up I wear since my break-up with you. Like the assassin bug that wears the corpses of its victims as armour, these experiences built quite a nice shield to keep me safe. I zipped any signs of vulnerability into my skinny jeans, layered up my blouses, and kept drinking.

There are two types of love. One that makes you cry a lot and feel very alive. The other makes you feel totally safe. Great relationships, in my experience, contain very little drama but still a great deal of feeling. They make for bad telly. Anthony and Cleopatra on Gogglebox doesn’t quite work. Dating the wrong type of guy is all very thrilling before the coin flips and it becomes incredibly tiring. I was exhausted when I met my husband, and my patience for bullshit was paper-thin. We had just the right amount of dicking about. And he’s still the most matter-of-fact person I know. It’s been a full decade since we met on the top deck of the night bus. A ten-year lease. A decade of us. Cut me open and count the rings. I remember being ten years old, so I guess our relationship can legally be arrested and can remember throwing up jelly sweets at Alton Towers. It can be measured in food fads, and the meals I would cook for him regularly and faux-casually. The cottage-pie years, the ratatouille years, the meat-zza years (revolting, but I was more anti-carbs then).

The cottage pies started about six months into the relationship, when we lived separately and I wanted more of a commitment, and the pies reflected that desire to seal the deal – we once had cottage pie with a cauliflower cheese topping. In one dish. These are the stupid things you do for love when you’re in a low-responsibility professional role and can be on the bus home with Waitrose mince by 6 p.m. Nowadays we get a boughie little organic veg box delivered on a Wednesday, which my husband has no idea what to do with. He’s from the school of cooking where you buy all the ingredients at the same time to make the meal, which I find infuriating and irksome and desperately attractive. I’m from the significantly more pretentious school of kitchen goddessing, where true cooking means being able to rustle something up out of nothing. We always have a stack of eggs, and I believe you can grate pretty much anything into a frittata if you chase it with enough cheese.

I digress. This chapter would never end if I mentioned every time I fell more in love with him, so we’ll skip past any more saccharine reminiscing of our particular love sprint. We got married for the only reason gays get married: as a piece of homonormative propaganda to wind up the other gays. Fast-forward from the sprint to the marathon, reality biting so hard as you knuckle down, saving your cash and energy for important life stuff. A cat, maybe, a mortgage, a kid. All the living you do between vacations.

A long-term relationship is like following a very complex Agatha Christie novel, knowing you missed key plot points earlier and they’ll come back to haunt you. There are red herrings and false clues, but you don’t get the luxury of a library in your house or art deco architraves. You can’t skip ahead, there are no spoilers, and you either die on the last page or break up. P.S. When I die my last will and testament is just a schedule to feed the cat and instructions for smuggling my ashes into the meals of my enemies.

Of all the things I ever wanted for my life – marriage, kids, unlimited access to shortbread – I never thought it would be this much hard work. I thought you could fire up the engine at university and leave it running all the way to middle age. Keep your head down until retirement. ‘My whole life will be a banquet!’ I thought. After a hearty breakfast of education I’ll take a gap-year palate-cleanser and coast in a fulfilling job until all the pudding at the end. I’d discard healthy eating and exercise just before death. Burn my body in the house like Gilbert Grape’s mom. I planned to muddle through the stodgy mains and fudge the edges. But there’s been absolutely no fudge since university. It’s like running Charlie’s Chocolate Factory without sugar or cocoa solids and having to turn a profit while the stakeholders gather outside with pitchforks and an effigy.

The banquet of my life is not a bad night out at all, but the main course hasn’t appeared, so it’s all £4 carby sides. My blood sugar’s low and the kitchen keeps sending out the same dauphinoise that’s somehow both too boring to unconsciously ingest and too rich to stomach. You and your partner sit across from each other, very much at the same table but often eating from different menus, electricity crackling between you. You are in a mood for three days after you use Google to win an argument and find you’re wrong (the meaning of architrave, for example). He tells you you look fine and you silently seethe for the entirety of July. He sends you a Spotify playlist but he knows you’re Apple Music. How could he not know that? Does he not know you at all? Is this burning an eternal flame or building up resentment?

This bit in the middle is meant to be the hog-roast years. I thought I’d be on autopilot as I dolloped apple sauce on my baps and asked for more crackling. But this era is majority graft with short breaks when I get drunk enough to briefly forget the exertion. Five or ten years ago everything I wanted only took half a day to achieve. I quit smoking in two hours. I stopped wearing skinny jeans and buying the Sun. Now my life is conversely both hyper-slow and hyper-convenient. I can have a meal delivered to the door in thirty minutes, but we can’t find a womb to incubate heirs for love nor money (don’t get me started on how much that costs). I can get a chin-up new outfit to my door in four hours, but I can’t legally move an inconvenient wall in my house that’s definitely hollow when I knock on it. All I really want our love to do is to bring out the best in me and in him too. But we also need to save for new floors. And the womb rental. Life gets in the way.

Everything is protracted and repetitive and doesn’t move you forward, like Gareth Gates introducing himself on Pop Idol. It’s like someone is constantly playing the first note of a concerto for two years. Or not even that. It’s like when the entire orchestra is playing the same hum note in the warm-up. I just want to hear a few bars of the concerto. When we moved into our château I never thought I’d wake up every day in a cold bedroom because no matter how many times I bleed the upstairs radiators the one next to the bed is only ever half full. It courageously gasps out little wheezes of lukewarm air, but they’re immediately absorbed into our unvarnished splinter-ridden floor (we have to wear shoes right up to the bed, which is not sexy, let me tell you). The room isn’t draughty per se, but there are fissures between the window pane and the frame, so sometimes you’re hit by a laser-precision dart of cold air, like somebody’s blowing on you through a plastic straw. These fissures also let in sound. I hate the foxes on my street keeping me awake all night with their screeching. I’m certain Fantastic Mrs Fox is being penetrated in an orifice she’s not accustomed to using that way, which makes a noise like a thousand wet balloons griping at once. And the binmen are just pure noise. Worse than jazz. There’s also the Uber driver who regularly stops outside my house to piss in a bottle and throw it into the gutter. I don’t have the balls to knock on the window to scare him off like a pigeon. I’d love to shut the world out, but the innards of my house are no sanctuary. There’s a matrix of major and minor jobs that need doing before we get to the windows. Here’s a verbatim forward from my husband: Fwd: Our quotation is £695.00 + VAT for the 1 x Party Wall Awards, 1 x Notices and 1 x Condition Schedules. It’s impossible to sprint through an email as dry as this. It’s like trying to rollerblade through treacle.

Marathon love is an Eton mess of experiences and emotions – all your meringues get smashed, but they’re still edible. Life is random paint-strokes of grievances and appreciations that build the masterpiece of any union. You have to stand back to see the full picture, but close scrutiny shows the work. At the frontline it’s a committed slog, the kind of graft you don’t write about because it’s much easier to mention sprinting off the night bus into each other’s arms, or Pancake Day, or anything but the quiet dramalessness of a good marriage. Marathon love is a fractured metatarsal you can still walk on and nobody offers you a splint so you hunker down and try not to kick up an unnecessary fuss. Over the course of a marathon there are good bits, great bits, transcendent moments of fully dilated pleasure, but they’re glimpses of grout between slabs of hard graft and patience and trying to be your best self. Relationships are a perpetual Monday night: the pub is uneventful and complaintive and nobody ever calls time. One part of you loves the quiet, the other part of you wants taking to the end of the week already, to the merriment and noise and overstimulation.

Inevitably, a unique knowledge of your partner builds like couture, perfectly tailored to the other person. Partners can be stubborn to the point of self-destruction, like an animal refusing to board Noah’s ark. Partners can be disagreeable, like a budget flight. Partners are both the North Star guiding you through all the bullshit, and the bullshit itself growing like damp. Partners are the only people who really know how to push your buttons. Partners are the only people who should really know how not to. Partners know the little in-jokes, and can divert the oncoming storm of an argument. Between the sunny spells, resentment can build up like thin layers in a good wok. It doesn’t matter what he’s cooked tonight, because you can always taste that one forgotten anniversary. Every innocuous comment has micro-subtext. Every fart is Pompeii. Every other gift is the Joni Mitchell CD from Love Actually. Somehow marathon love is both super-intense HIIT workouts with no recovery periods, and the quiet, exhausting seasonal nothingness between Christmas and, erm, wow, it’s Christmas again. Where did the time go? Why don’t we have proper floors yet? Somewhere in the middle of this you ideally smash like the avocados you prepared for lunch, and keep tabs on world events and culture. Keeping your eye on the ball is exhausting. The biggest decision used to be where to have dinner on Friday or when to take a shit without the other person knowing how long you’ve been gone. (Honestly, nail the shit schedule as early as possible.) Suddenly you have to decide whether your kids’ names are too classic or too pretentious, and whether they’re going to be organically reared or privately educated.

A long-term relationship is a bit like a Netflix binge: you keep watching each scene, but sometimes you’re not fully following the plot. You’re committed to seeing out the series, but the drama in front of you maybe doesn’t have your full attention. I get the nagging suspicion I’m going to Gone Girl my husband because he doesn’t appreciate me. My ego needs stroking like a tabby. I want to be noticed the way hardcore Americans stare at you if you don’t stand up while their national anthem is playing. Oh, bae can you see by the dawn’s early light. Longing to be objectified like the early days. Salad days are manageable, but decades of dauphinoise are tougher. You try and shake a depressing thought: I would happily go to bed on an argument, but I wouldn’t miss my skin regime for anything or anyone. Does that mean I care more about my pores than about my husband?

Ten years in and nothing ever goes horribly wrong. And nothing goes stupidly right. Nothing’s changed, I still love you. Marathon love is nothing like Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy. It’s not Bonnie and Clyde. It’s not even Kylie and Jason. It’s Saturday at kids’ parties as forty toddlers come up on party rings. It’s Sundays at Sainsbury’s. It’s enjoying being apart. It’s being together in silence. It’s singing at the top of your lungs in the car. It’s biting your tongue. It’s picking at your feet in broad daylight. Marathon love needs different sustenance from a sprint. It needs the nutrient-rich compost you only get from being agreeable and listening, which sounds easy but isn’t. The sprint is always short-lived. Live fast, die young. A marathon takes time. Look how far we’ve come, my baby.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.