june 2023
In June everyone’s windows crack open and we are suddenly made aware of all the things our neighbours have been doing throughout the year that we were previously ignorant to. The woman next door is learning to DJ, for example. An 11 year old in the flat opposite is attempting to learn Bella Ciao on the piano and occasionally getting very frustrated. Upstairs have two small children with very loud voices and a tendancy to tantrum. It is nice to get a window into the multiplicity of lives lived mere metres from us, and also nice that glass and walls remain less porous the rest of the year.
Corners of home on my Yashica T5.
June has been a cyclone of work and fieldwork and travel and life. A gorgeous week in northern Norway with friends where we did not see night again til we touched back down in the UK. I ran my first race surrounded by 8 year olds. I watched the sun set over Brixham, the new tidal bell bonging over a pod of dolphins in the distance. I squeezed in the kind of Big London Day I haven’t had in ages,with coffee in an old Victorian toilet and a photoshoot and two exhibitions and a train to Brighton for golden hour and a sea swim in the morning. I saw two more of my author portraits in inside covers, which brings it up to four this year (I am very chuffed about that).
And yet. Not enough sleep and not enough headspace and the febrile sweaty atmosphere of summer in the city fosters a strange chaotic energy. My bag is snatched when I’m having dinner near the office, and I have to replace my locks and cards and IDs and work laptop. Every train I take to Devon for fieldwork is either cancelled or delayed, the seat reservations functional not once, the platform announced 2 minutes ahead every single time with resulting stampede across Paddington. I forget names and adjectives in meetings. I lose my sunglasses on the Victoria line and get very severe food poisoning on a night out that causes me to miss a friend’s wedding. I get very stressed and tired.
I wouldn’t want life to appear perfect for the internet after all.
“She is an enemy of information. She prefers to spend her days staring at mashed potatoes.”
From Eli Goldstone’s deliciously weird Strange Heart Beating, about a man widowed by a swan that has stuck with me since I read it in one travel day.
june favourites
book Boulder by Eve Baltasar, a slim and brutal novel set in Iceland exploring love, sex and parenthood (sort of)
art an installation on queering arctic exploration at Tromso’s Polar Museum, a welcome antidote to a TERFy note left in the visitors’ book
film OG The Wicker Man, watched at a Weird Walks screening at the Rio with the audience hooting at the musical scenes
performance A Playlist For The Revolution, set in the midst of Hong Kong’s 2016 protests and somehow justifying a 2.5 hour running time (which I never say)
podcast the Caroline Calloway episodes of Celebrity Memoir Book Club - someone stop me from spending $69 on her cursed “luxury first edition” book
TV the space episode of the new Black Mirror - horrid, spooky, fantastic
newsletter Huw Lemmey’s newsletter utopian drivel which is currently charting his experience of an extended Camino de Santiago