october & november 2023
Months that have slipped into each other. Still no film developed; off it all goes to Germany this week.
The weather turned, at last. The welcome shock of the first really cold day after weeks of wearying, worrying heat. Leaving the gym with sweat turning to ice on my skin; mist hanging low over the canal in the morning, swans cutting through like actors through stage haze and the smell of wood smoke from the boats. Evening frost has been bedazzling the white leather coach flytipped outside our bin stores, tiny clouds of breath shrouding the foxes under the car park lights.
I have spent time with people I love in London, Brighton, Amsterdam, Belgium and Germany; I worked a lot and it was exciting and interesting. I gave notice to be civilly partnered, I sang karaoke, I booked savings-draining travel to new places, cooked new food and read and went to films and art and to the theatre.
And mainly, above and beneath and around all of these things, I feel fundamentally changed from weeks and weeks of despair and grief and rage which is difficult and unwise to try to convey. Also hope, also solidarity extended and received. Marching in all manner of blocs under all manner of banners, shared smiles on the tube, challenging and affirming conversations in unlikely places.
“You know when you’re dancing, and the edges of your body feel more permeable? Like you don’t feel so contained anymore? That… that is the best feeling in the world.”
I sat behind two young dancers on a late evening train from London to Brighton. The response to this description was that this feeling is called a “dance flow state” - I love witnessing someone realise in real time that a visceral personal experience is in fact one widely shared.
favourites
books every single book I read was a winner - A.K. Blakemore’s incredible second novel The Glutton, space sci fi graphic novel The Hard Switch by Owen K. Pomery, Jordan Peele’s collection of black horror short stories Out There Screaming, Real Life by Brandon Taylor, and one of the most skillfully drawn characters I’ve ever met on a page in Magda Szabó’s The Door
theatre tears and laughter in The Making of Pinocchio at Battersea Arts Centre, good theatre and better theatre gossip over post-show drinks at the NT
art Francis Alys’s videos of children playing games across the world at Wiels, Brussels; Isaac Julien’s beautiful films at Kunstammlung 21, Dusseldorf
films horror shorts in packed out late-night London Film Festival screening at the Prince Charles Cinema and Practical Magic in a blanket fort at home
TV The Expanse, like all space sci fi horribly politically prescient
podcast I Hear Fear from Wondery, well voice-acted horror is hard to find
newsletter The Pickle from Vashti Media, a vital voice for the British Jewish left from which I continue to learn a huge amount