See this old and tired cow
Sick in mind and body both
Slouching through the undergrowth
of the forest, beautiful.

I’ve been relating to this verse lately.

It was one of many my grandfather used to recite to me. He’d slightly misremembered it, and I’ve since discovered it was by Ralph Hodgson. It surprises me to think there was a time in my early twenties after my grandmother had died but before my grandfather had, that, in between living it up, I used to go to Wandsworth Common and hang out with my grandfather almost every week. I’d leave my shop job, pick up shopping on the way and make dinner. He’d declare the bar open and we’d drink champagne and then I’d stay the night and go straight to work the next morning.

I can’t imagine doing that for anybody now.

I have been feeling sick in body and soul these past days in particular. I keep returning to a site of pain, as if expecting it to look different each time; to hurt less.

A blooming crater.

Sometimes, resolution doesn’t exist, even while the obsessional mind tries to fill potholes with cement that stays wet.

I’m mid-way through my sixth booze-free month. I have had one sip of some lovely pale ale and one sip of mead during this time.

At the weekend, I attended the wedding of some friends. It was medieval-themed and they really went all out. The weather was perfect, and tucking into a wonderful hog roast meal in an authentic medieval feasting hall in rural Kent, the sound of a hurdy-gurdy filtering in, I really was filled with a sense of wonderment—that two people with singular personalities could find one another in this world and end up sharing in such an iconic wedding vision.

There was an open bar, and I became aware around 6 or 7pm of feeling tired, and thinking how insanely drunk I would have likely been by this point if I’d’ve been drinking. How I may’ve made amorous advances towards someone inappropriate, or fallen asleep in the sun, or felt unable to continue participating.

That said, at times, I felt like there was no ‘filler’. I started to feel awkward, restless, to dissociate.

Once the DJs started, I felt better—comfortable on the dancefloor. But I noticed how I enjoyed dancing near people, but actually dancing alone.

It got me thinking about my relational patterns, and particularly the way I struggle in groups. That I prefer meaningful one-to-one connections and tend to feel disconnected in social situations that feel ‘diluted’.

I often find perfectly pleasant friendships and relationships dissatisfying.

To me, these feel like shavings of hard, unyielding butter.

I always want my friendships and encounters to be memorable, to weigh more, contain bonus material—a poem read aloud together, a sung song, a project, a photo shoot, a walk with a once-in-forever view, a new bird learned of, birdcalls through fingers, a picked flower.

Something that can be kept.

I want relationships that feel like they could last a lifetime and the sad irony is that often, they can’t survive the pressure of this desire.

My desires are not really compatible. I want a countryside home in the middle of the city. A deeply loyal open marriage. To be a wealthy poet.

Sometimes objects feel like freedom and at others, it’s the opposite.

A couple of years ago, I was evacuated from my home by police owing to a bomb scare. I felt ready to accept the loss (with the exception of my cat). Last Friday, Instagram temporarily stopped working. I initially felt panicked, and then disappointed by the subsequent fix.

Earlier that morning, waking in London, I found for the first time that there was nothing I really wanted to do in the city. No person or art exhibition I wanted to see. I walked along the canal, enjoying reading the names of all the boats – Progress, Daphne, Milton – possibly the best kind of exhibition. Vessels with various exteriors—floating imaginaries. I watched a cormorant diving in the canal, enchanted by its little wetsuit, its simple life.

I came upon a redundant hangover joke—a boat that was half-sunk and keeled over to the side. Atop the boat’s lifting bow, a moorhen had built her nest, and pottered there, happily it seemed.

WTF was my initial reaction followed by a sense of violated privacy, even though my account was public for all on Instagram to see. Though I had never thought my father, approaching the ripe age of 70, would ever have Instagram.

I considered what he might encounter—confessional sounding poetry, a few nudes. Nothing very exposing. I suppressed the full body blush that threatened to immolate me, before deciding there was nothing I could do about it but put the possibility of my father’s altered perception of me out of mind, hope he would not understand how to use the app and delete it soon.

A couple of days later, I’d done such a good job of forgetting he might see, (or becoming paradoxically subconsciously defiant) that I posted the poem below:

One weekend later, there was an extended family occasion. No sooner than the moment I disembarked the train and greeted my parents on arrival did my father tell me he’d loved my latest poem, and that he’d thought it was hilarious.

Tersely, I replied that my artistic persona was one ‘shaped by the freedom of existing outside the parental gaze’ and suggested he might do me the courtesy of an unfollow.

I recently went to the friends and family book launch of another poet whose father was in the crowd and seated at the front. Her poetry deals with highly sexual and abject subject matter. I was interested by this—the ability or inability of both child and parent, to recognise both the distinction between and total lack of distinction between art and personhood.

It wasn’t necessarily meant to become a series but every time I host it, I get a bunch of people saying ‘sorry I can’t make it this time, I’ll come to the next one’ which, although annoying, has created a fertile atmosphere of expected continuity. I’ve also started getting people nominating both themselves, friends and other writers, which is fun. One of my favourite things about writing is not knowing what’s going to happen, and it’s the same with readings.

One of the readers at the latest event was a poet called Harry Brooks-Kent, whose book Sick Notes reads as a series of excessively linguistically dense sick notes. They’re amazing on the page, and you kind of have to let them just wash over you, if that’s possible when reading. Live, they delivered the poems, fast, loud and with a lot of punk energy, firing on all cylinders in a way that immediately made everyone in the room sit up straighter and tilt forward with all their attention.

I also really enjoy sharing other writing at these events and this time it was Gertrude Stein’s posthumously published ‘love notes’ to Alice B Toklas, which sent me spinning into hysterics when I opened the first pages. The more you read, the more hilarious they get (imo!).

A flavour:

Baby, sweet baby

Baby my sweet baby,

Baby all baby all my baby,

Baby baby bay, that’s what you hear me say,

Baby all my baby all night and all day.

Baby sweet kissed baby, baby sweet baby,

Sweetly sleeping baby, unbathed but delicious

My baby, sweet baby clean baby all baby.

This is what I say, I love her all night and I

Love her all day and every day and every night

And in every which way and only she and

All she my sweetie

All you need is love!

I would like to honourably mention poets Maria Sledmere and Mau Baiocco (also of SPAM fame) who were the event’s ‘headliners’ even though there are really no headliners—they just travelled furthest to be there. It was a privilege to host them, as I’ve long been an admirer of their individual writings.

The audience genuinely seemed enchanted and inspired by their readings, asking me for precise information about them once the readings were over.

I met Mau in London just before I moved to Margate in 2022. They came direct off the train from Leeds with a big suitcase to catch me do a performance reading of a strange, sequential poem inspired by the art of Hilma af Klint with a homemade sonic backdrop in a shed that Café OTO grandly called its ‘project space’ and contained a double mattress that we all sat on.

It wasn’t a literary reading, but a music show. Some immensely talented people played that evening, and there were people in the crowd I’ve re-encountered in Margate and discovered they were there too…The serendipitous-magnetism of encounter fascinates me—its looping nature, the unpredictability of travel.

I guess I’m thinking about music too. I gave up trying to make or perform it in 2021 in favour of poetry and haven’t really picked it up again, though I’ve collaborated with multiple musicians and find myself regularly invited to read/perform in music-centric spaces.

At the last event I hosted, I noticed a healthy contingent of musicians (I rate) which made me really pleased. Letting the binaries slip. A couple of them told me they’d never attended a poetry reading before. I reassured them poetry readings were often terrible.

Which brings me to some thoughts on poetry vs music performance. There are very few poems I’d want to hear ‘on repeat’ although a couple do exist. It seems with music, a song’s strength often comes with its repetition. But I’m less convinced that’s the case with poetry.

This is really me saying I miss music, and if I’d spent the past five years pursuing it, maybe I’d be at a reasonably advanced stage of personal musical expression by now and I’d have written a song that makes me cry. I am rarely moved to tears by poetry. I like tears. In the rare instances it does happen, the poem becomes crucial to my personal identity. My internal inventory.

---

Another aside: A few weeks ago, the unthinkable occurred. My father followed me on Instagram, which seemed both horrifying and absurd. I brushed it off, followed back a few days later trying not to think about all the sad poems I’d posted, the nudes.

I thought it unlikely he’d master it.

Last week, I posted a comedic poem about my cunt.

Last weekend, there was a big family gathering.

The moment I stepped off the train, my father commented on the poem, said he thought it was great.

Am I too old for humiliation? I noticed I barely reddened.

I said my artistic persona was shaped by the freedom of parental lack, and politely suggested he might’ve committed an encroachment.

F/Mortifying. I decide.

I miss music, but I love poetry. I generally attend a lot of author readings. It’s hard being a poet in a memoirist and novelist’s world, but you don’t always get to decide who you fall in love with.

Feel like I may soon reach my contemporary fiction limit.

My social media limit.

Need some weird new job to be invented where I get paid a liveable amount to just hang out in gardens and talk to people about anything. Hireable (non-sexual) companionship for wealthy retirees?

Or even better, for wealthy trees.

After thirteen, 
my mother didn’t see her father.
I never met my grandfather.

Grief is a plastic sweet wrapper
blowing about somewhere in West Wales.

Near a ruined abbey
close to the border,
we crossed the river three times
to get to school
in another country—
each bridge a construct.

My Welsh teacher was often absent.
I learned how to pass notes
under tables to a crush.

I never learned to say I love you.
I got as far as
Dwi'n hoffi sglodion
which is one way to survive.

My father drove me to see friends
but I didn’t like to ask—

I drank until I felt home,
till all the trees merged
into a single murky texture.

At seventeen, I passed my test.

Repeatedly woken
by morning knocking 
on the car window.

Laddered tights.

A dead bird—
a sky glitch.

Passing and succeeding
squabbled over meaning.

Sometimes, I hear Welsh bands on the radio
and expect to understand.

The river was tidal. 

I’d been feeling the need for a break for a while.

One of the main things that stopped me from putting a pause on things sooner was a strong sense of social pressure. Coming from a family of wine drinkers, it felt hard to decline in their company, and harder still to ‘confess’ my non-drinking to people who seemed to expect me to play the party girl, the yes person, the last to leave; people who seemed disappointed if I wasn’t.

I remember a few years ago, a friend’s boyfriend was standing at the bar on a night out and asked if I wanted a drink. I was just in the zone between being tipsy and being drunk. He must have sensed hesitancy, because he offered to get me something soft. In the moment, I hadn’t even considered it an option and for some reason, I can’t forget it — it felt like an act of kindness (softness).

Back in January, I felt I had to admit to people that I wasn’t drinking, while now I feel comfortable asking for a coke, a blood orange San Pellegrino, a Club Mate, a Lucky Saint.

I’m starting to realise more and more that many people I know don’t drink, or only drink a little—like a new member’s club I didn’t know I already had access to.

I’ve started saying no to things—leaving events when I’m ready, declining invitations to perform at literary readings I can’t afford transport to rather than attending out of a sense of obligatory gratitude or fear of FOMO. I’ve started to notice when I’m giving too much in exchange for too little, and to stop myself texting back or offering more than a vague gesture or text deserves.

For example, someone with whom I was romantically involved a few years ago recently messaged after several years of non-communication saying they often thought about me and that they probably ought to have acted on their thoughts. But they didn’t say what they had been thinking or what they would like or want from me. They didn’t acknowledge the good thing we briefly had going back then, or really articulate regret for letting it go; or express any comprehension of the way their behaviour might’ve (and did) hurt me.

Yet, I softened. I wanted to reply fondly. If I had had a single sip of rosé, I feel sure I would have replied. But I hadn’t and I didn’t, and I know this was the right course of (in)action—an act of self-protection. Hopefully the first of many.

I don’t need alcohol to have a good time. I mostly drink when I’m trying to make a bad/boring/stressful time better. So far this year, I haven’t needed booze to enjoy my brother’s wedding, dinners at friend’s places, road trips, sunsets, poetry readings, daily things… Every day feels potent and psychedelic.

I haven’t switched off alcohol and become instantly happy or healthy either. I’ve been eating more sugar than ever. Chocolate is my vice. And coffee, and staying up till 3am night after night but not being able to call it insomnia because I didn’t attempt sleep.

This reminds me of caterpillars in chrysalises—that metamorphosis is not a beautiful process. Before they become butterflies they self-ingest and turn to goo. Some of their essential parts remain intact and reconfigure. It makes me wonder how much of a slob I might need to become before I feel ready to build myself back up.

~

I never previously registered the role of shame in my life, and how it fed my vulnerabilities. I didn’t really think I was harbouring any, but I see now that shame has dogged me for a long time.

From teenhood, blacking out itself almost became the adrenaline rush. Like jumping off a cliff and hoping for the best.

There have been many times when I had no idea where I was or who the people I was with were, or whose clothes I was wearing; often knowing something bad had happened but not what. Times when it was obvious — as recently as 2024, waking with a missing tooth and the disorienting sense of having been concussed.

The most extreme time was when I was 27, and I regained consciousness in intensive care, having been brutally attacked in the street while drunkenly travelling home. Even though I knew the attack wasn’t my fault, it was humiliating to stand up in court and explain to a jury that there were many details I couldn’t recall, including my attacker’s face. Yesterday was the 9-year anniversary of that day—a date I note every year, and even that wasn’t enough to bring about a change. Because deep down, I think perhaps I felt it was something I deserved.

And I think that’s also why, subconsciously, I’ve allowed and enabled people to mistreat me, even while knowing I deserved a lot better.

Last October I went out and drank too much. Something happened I regret. I’m not a ‘good’ person when I drink, even if I usually remain non-volatile. I forget context, I forget other people’s feelings exist.

Until these past months, I hadn’t confessed this shame to myself. But now, being able to start confronting it, I can feel interior transformations in motion.

I hate the idea of cliché, of becoming, and by that I fear I mean happy. It’s tempting to hold onto pain when it’s formed such an essential, othering element of your identity. But, I think, when it comes down to it, I’m almost ready to shed. I like myself and I need to start proving it.

It’s a nice feeling to be goo—unglamorously optimistic.

My relationship with reviewing has historically been a little fraught. I briefly attended Sheffield University when I was 18. Within a few months, I became the film editor of their pretty decent student newspaper and I also wrote music reviews in exchange for free gig tickets and CDs. Sometimes I’d be so drunk by half-way through a gig, I’d have to get whichever new friend I was with at the time to write the second half.

I transferred to a different university in second year and stopped all that (not the drinking, just the reviewing).

I began again when I moved to London after graduation, as a means of scoring free gig tickets. I enjoyed it, and established a blog where I began offering up my opinion on all sorts of arts and culture events. I didn’t suppose anyone read these reviews, which was an error I learned the hard way after I criticised an art exhibition of a family member I deemed inaccessible. (lol, facepalm emoji etc.)

It hadn’t occurred to me that it would be read by the artist, but it promptly was, and caused a rift. I refused to delete the post at the time but it knocked my confidence and later, I quietly deleted the blog altogether.

In 2018, I established a new, secret blog, compelled once again to write a review in response to an exhibition I’d seen by an artist who had committed suicide. The review was read by someone who had been a friend of the artist. I know this because they emailed the associated account and told me. They were complimentary about the review. Another person got in touch to ask if I knew the artist’s horoscope so I returned to the artist’s friend and discovered the answer. There is no record of this birthday available online.

Since then, I’ve only posted on the blog four times, averaging one review every two years, which feels like a sustainable pace for a sporadic critic. Strangely, and it’s only with hindsight, I notice three out of the four artists I’ve written about committed suicide. For me, i think this has less to do with ‘the dead can’t answer back’ and more to do with having the audacity to opine on the work of a dead person, emboldened by my cloak of anonymity.

A few years ago SPAM Zine invited me to contribute two short reviews to their annual ‘Deep cuts’ feature. It felt like a lovely, non-intimidating opportunity, rendered easier by the celebratory rather than critical emphasis.

That said, I loathe straplines like I-D’s ‘we’re not critics, we’re fans’ (or something like – have they erased that from the search history?). I was appalled to hear that Time Out were phasing out any negative criticism. Nobody or thing ought to be above criticism, and to put forth an opinion first is, in my opinion, brave. Especially since once it’s out there, and people respond, it’s liable to evolve

I enjoy reviewing books on Goodreads occasionally. I am gratified to find I am more compelled to review when I feel positively towards a book than negative, which is interesting given that these days, research indicates people are roughly ten times more likely to leave a review unprompted when they’ve had a negative experience.

People revel in leaving negative reviews online. I was sent into a state of deep hysteria on discovering people had left reviews on Trip Advisor of all the parks and carparks in my local area. One general review of the town was particularly funny to me and I decided to read it out aloud at the event I host. I’ve included it beneath the book reviews.

I was thrilled to have an admittedly pretty basic unpublished poem of mine extensively slated on Reddit this past week; thrilled to read how passionate many people are about what they believe a poem ought to be. I love Reddit as a space where people can express openly. I particularly enjoyed this Reddit dispatch from a Soho Reading Series event.

Returning to Goodreads, I felt a sense of guilt when I left the first review of a novel. It was still a few months out from its publish date but I had an advance copy, thanks to my local booksellers who sometimes save books for me they think I’ll like. I’d enjoyed the author’s previous book so it was a good bet but I honestly thought the book was bewilderingly bad and underwritten. Having, with trepidation, dropped my two cents, I returned to the site several months later and read through the almost unanimously bad reviews, wondering if it was a precedent that I had set.

I wondered if a second site ought to be established called badreads.com

The interesting (to me) thing is that I can read a one-star and five-star rated review of a book and agree with the views of both. It’s a wonderful public display of the spectrum of personal taste.

Last summer, I briefly dated a man whom I noticed had rated a pamphlet by me five stars (yay!), and several months later, when it didn’t work out between us, brought the rating down to two stars (boo). This was staged in a minuscule theatre in my mind, tiny red curtains opening and closing on the different star ratings while all the action took place off stage.

Perhaps an impartial opinion disclaimer button ought to be added?

Neither of the books reviewed below appear when searched in Goodreads, but Nell Osborne’s novel Ghost Driver was just named joint winner of the Queen Mary small press fiction prize, which has prompted me to revisit. I wrote the review before I’d met Nell in person. When she came to Margate to read some of her brilliant poems at the most recent edition of my reading event, I told her I’d written a review. I was almost on the verge of reading it to her when I caught myself and thought I’d better review the review first. It’s different once you’ve met a person. Should it make a difference? As it is, I haven’t changed anything.

I found out ahead of Nell’s visit that one of her publishers at Moist Books (—an excellent press very worth checking out) turned out to be someone I first met in Oxford as a teenager and who I hadn’t seen for many years. We spent a lovely day as a trio hanging out. I like the way things come back around. I like writing my feelings down and returning to them.

Damage by Taos Lopez (The Creative Writing Department, 2025)

No copyright

No ISBN

No Material

is what it says on the interior jacket cover. Flashing my shiny new copy of Damage to a prominent British poet, he comments, ‘That looks like a book that doesn’t want to be read’. I concede it’s an objet d’art, with its wraparound cover image of burning palms in (probably) L.A. and no titles. My interest is piqued by The Creative Writing Department – its somewhat anti-popularity approach to literary publishing.

But Damage does want to be read.

Damage is a noun and a verb. Damage is never one single thing. Damage is beauty and trauma, poetry and / or novel. Damage is cliché, and Damage defies definition. Damage is written in the first person by an unknown narrator and Damage is (superficially) about the object of the narrator’s affections attentions. Damage is a refrain and a mantra, every sentence loaded like a cap gun with a pellet of rapid-fire catharsis. Bang. Bang. Bang. Damage is annoying and damage is addictive. The protagonist is addicted to and dominated by Damage. Sometimes Damage is unnervingly on the nose. Who else here has broken a tooth for love? Damage is on the tooth. Most people know a girl called Damage. Damage is doctrinal and Damage is arrogant. Damage is theatrical, and enjoyable to read aloud down the phone to a brother on the other side of the country at midnight. Damage is a get-out-of-jail-free card. Damage is 214 pages long, and perfect bound. Reading Damage, a question emerges — is Damage a person, or a projection? What’s definite is that Damage is a dangerously indulgent piece of literature. Will Damage cause long-term damage to your psyche, or were you already damaged in the first place, seeking shelter in Damage? Fuck around with Damage and find out.

---

Ghost Driver by Nell Osborne (Moist Books, October 2025)

Moist Books has carved out a distinctive niche, publishing writers like Susan Finlay, Nadia de Vries, William Habib Kherbek and Victoria Brooks—authors whose writing exists at the intersection of philosophy, art, queer theory and humour. Into this roster slips Nell Osborne with her debut novel, Ghost Driver.

I enjoyed reading Osborne’s recent slim volume of poetry, Thanks for Everything (Monitor Books), so was curious to see what her prose would be like. I found the writing pleasingly elegant, articulate, with Gwendoline Riley levels of sharp, cool observation and wit.

The novel centres on Malory. While more charismatic than such a name might instinctively evoke, Malory emanates a faded aura, and, as the novel unfolds, there’s a creeping sense of a person allowing themselves to be slowly erased.

One source of this is a lover: non-committal yet brilliant, callous but compelling. The couple’s interactions depict in crystal HD the mechanics of male entitlement and the resulting diminishment. In one scene, when Malory nervously asks him to hold her, Osborne writes:

Her voice came out so politely, as if she were asking a work colleague of Father’s to pass the ketchup at the dinner table of her youth.

Osborne renders this not just as a personal dynamic but as part of a wider Kafkaesque landscape, where patriarchal, institutional and capitalist systems obfuscate any clear path toward success, intimacy, or selfhood. Yet, beyond that, she probes at something deeper, knowing, possibly deliberate. She writes:

Beneath the feeling of needing and losing – of making oneself small and humanitarian to the point of victimhood, so others could be temporarily bigger and implacable to the point of masculinity – there was already such an undercurrent, a heartlessness.

Reading the book, I felt an uncanny shiver of recognition. I became convinced I knew the man who inspired the lover. This thrilled and disturbed me, compromising any possibility of objective distance, transforming the reading experience into an act of active obsession—an insidious achievement, I applaud with disoriented enthusiasm.

---

The Tripadvisor review I found when I was trying to see if anyone had listed my event and searched ‘Is it Dirty?’ + ‘Margate’:

Such a shame. It is DREADFUL!
Review of Margate Main Sands
Reviewed 6 August 2024 by 241dellad

What a shock! I went about 30 yrs ago and it was dire then, so I thought it may have improved since then. We were staying near Sandwich to traveled over, to look at Ramsgate and Margate. Ramsgate is a very sad place now, but Margate is diabolical! HOW THE HELL HAS IT BEEN ALLOWED TO GET THAT BAD!!!!!!
We parked [for free on a sunday] in the multi story, and walked through the shops to the beach. The whole place is a dive! We got to the beach, saw what was going on there [on a very hot day] and the amount of rubbish, dog mess etc, turned around, went back to the car and left! 10 minutes in total....and we will NEVER return!
What the hell are people seeing who are writing these great reviews?
This was a beautiful, Victorian seaside town and in the 60’s when I used to go with my mum and dad, it was lovely!
How can you drive a couple of miles up the road and find lovely little sea side towns and villages that are well kept and seem to have people living/visiting who actually care about the places, yet this place seems to be used as the toilet of Kent?
That is what it should be called.....the
Karsi of Kent.
Who ever is responsible for Margate should be thoroughly disgusted with themselves!!!

A few thoughts on the ‘blind’ element of the show: What comes across in every season is that people are able to forge strong bonds with one another having never caught sight of each other. Without the self-judgement of one’s own appearance getting in the way and the nothing-to-lose starting premise, participants in the show or ‘experiment’ as they call it, enter the space fairly emotionally open. But ultimately, physical chemistry does matter and what the show tends to oversimplify is that neither love nor physical attraction depends on physical appearance.

To assess someone’s attractiveness on their physical appearance alone is indeed a shallow enterprise. Yet, the challenges couples face once they’re united go far beyond the intensity of an initial, undoubtedly intense, emotional connection. They have to discover whether they are actually compatible—whether they align on everything from lifestyle choices and values, to everyday routine, to sexual preferences and attachment style; all factors that tend to affect physical chemistry, and all things that they remain ‘blind’ to until they have the opportunity to get to know one another outside a controlled environment.

Every season, it feels like it’s a miracle if even one couple survives the process (/ordeal) all the way through to the end, let alone getting to the point of setting up house and home together. Yet it has and does happen.

During my skip-through of the latest season, I paused for longer than usual to watch one particular scenario play out. The couple I’m focusing on are Chris (apparently aged 33, although based on behaviour and babyface, I had him down as about 24) and Jessica, a 38-year-old physician.

Following their first physical meeting, the couple initially appear smitten. But, in subsequent episodes, although they are aligned on some major things (like not necessarily wanting to have children) you start to get the impression that there are things about Jessica that are beginning to put Chris off. Perhaps, for example, her taste in home décor, which he comments is heavily oriented towards gold and snakes, and her excessive walk-in wardrobe. ‘You have a lot of clothes’ he says, wide-eyed, looking a little scared. Jessica is clearly someone who’s comfortable with and settled into her own lifestyle, a lifestyle that Chris can’t perhaps see himself enjoying. From the outside, it looks to me like Chris gets the ick.

And from this point, when he stops being able to see a future with Jessica, he simultaneously stops being attracted to her. But, perhaps unable to explain to himself what has happened, he refocuses his attention on the superficial rather than their actual incompatibility, beginning to drop hints about how his usual type is a woman who works out every day and specifically, “does Pilates”.

Relaying these thoughts to Jessica directly, you see flickers of anguish appear on her face, hurt dilating her pupils. You see her silently question herself, her own desirability. You witness the self-esteem crushing impact of emotional immaturity and cowardice taking effect in real time. It’s excruciating to watch.

From then on, Chris destructively spirals. During a reunion with the ‘pod squad’, while still engaged to Jessica, and several too many drinks deep, Chris announces repeatedly that he doesn’t “give a flying fuck” and proceeds to disclose to some of the female contestants that Jessica is not his type because she doesn’t work out or do Pilates. Almost immediately after this, he brazenly comes on strongly to Bri, another female contestant with whom he previously shared a connection before she coupled off with emotionally secure Connor—a cast member with whom, up until that point, Chris has been ‘bros’.

Having irrevocably broken bro code, offended not only the woman he’s engaged to but womankind herself, and pissed everyone else off with his drunken belligerence, Chris is recast as the season’s cartoon villain.

~

So, fast-forward to the season’s ‘reunion’ episode—during which the status of all the relationships is revealed—I am truly amazed to see Chris on-stage. I appreciate he was probably contractually obliged, but I’m still impressed he actually made it.

Typically, these episodes make for uncomfortable viewing with almost a year separating season filming and this one-off, during which time various things have played out, including break-ups, new partners, marriages and even pregnancies…Hostility is to be expected, although I can’t recall a reunion episode quite as awkward as this one.

Jessica, seated on the opposite sofa, flanked by supportive pod squad women, still appears emotionally shaken by the experience.

Visibly red-faced, given more physical space than the other cast members, and regularly negatively alluded to in the first half of the episode, is Chris, who you almost start to feel sorry for. When Connor—unmarried, but still in a relationship with Bri—is asked what he thinks of Chris, Connor responds ‘I don’t think of him’.

The camera moves cruelly between cutting comments and Chris’s reaction to them. His role for this episode is one of humiliation and he accepts it; he doesn’t become defensive or aggressive. Instead, he endures the deserved comments, the deserved mockery, and the deserved audience laughter.

Following a confrontational excavation of his behaviour on television, the hosts ask Chris if there’s anything he wants to say directly to the other cast members, and to his credit – without making any excuses for himself or his behaviour – Chris takes responsibility and apologises to the three cast members he hurt.

What makes these apologies feel genuine is that he recognises and names what it is he is apologising for, the actions that caused harm—whether it was putting someone in a difficult situation, betraying someone’s trust, or doing them a disservice by not being honest. He acknowledges that he needs to work on himself and that he wants to take the necessary steps to behave better in the future.

It seemed to me that his apologies were taken as intended and accepted. I don’t suppose he expected anyone to instantly re-friend him as a result. Forgiveness doesn’t equate to restored friendship. A genuine apology, in my opinion, should be given with no expectation of reciprocity or return, but the acknowledgement inherent within an apologetic act can do much to repair, restore civility and mutual humanity. And, vitally, it enables people to move on.

As the words come out of his mouth, I think I detect Jessica’s shoulders lift. She thanks him for his apology.

It’s always frustrating and bittersweet to be the person who helps someone learn a lesson you’d rather they needn’t have had to learn in the first place, yet I do believe forgiveness is something people want to give and are often ready to, given the opportunity.

Watching Chris, I felt wishful—for all the apologies left unsaid, from others towards myself, but also apologies I might have made. And then, on a societal level, a wish for a kind of recovery from the pervasive sense that to apologise is to admit wrongdoing—and that wrongdoing is unrecoverable. This is what I disagree with.

In the moments following, I noticed the way my compassion for Chris slowly began to restore, like water trickling into a toilet cistern.

It was gratifying to hear that Jessica has since moved on with another cast member, Haramol, who was sitting in the audience. When passed the mic, he made an impassioned speech (paraphrased here): “We call this an experiment. But to experiment with a woman’s heart—to awaken a woman’s heart with no intention of following through—to me, that’s like a sin!”

I hope it works out for them. Perhaps I’ve been infected by the sun, but I’m feeling optimistic.

Still moist, I rescued frogs
embroidered with the names of defunct domains
while adoring dragonflies sought my chin’s shade.

Later, I was diagnosed with vicious, flashing eyes
and a slow-moving scandal arose
from which eyebrows never fully lowered.

Finally, men came with diggers
to clear the space. That was upsetting.

But I turned my losses into glossy paintings,
clawed my way back to gauzy underwear.
People want secrets they alone 
can uncover.

These days, I prefer my lovers metaphysical—
macho, bridal, and unlikely 
to roughen my long-term silkiness.

An actual man waves in my direction 
while a building repeatedly collapses around him.
He doesn’t register 
my sighs.

This is why I endure girl dinners.
Meat and mints—a Roman mosaic of mental leaps;
that space between wanting 
and having.
 

1

Rain, rain.
Misery, misery.
Last night: warm music, 
warm people. A drifting bus—
Its destination: I’m electric.
I too was on a bus, recalling
the soft toy cheetah 
at Ikea, Oxford Circus. 
The surprise
of a cab driver stopping
to let me cross. The Cheetah 
slung on my shoulder,
stirring my inner-mother.
Then overriding…I can’t
Live Laugh Love 
because, capitalism.  
The people I love most
are not the people 
I see the most.
Reading Mary Ruefle 
in the bath, wishing 
I could be cool 
I turn on the cold tap.
I want too many things—
pearls of bath sweat dripping.
The snow moon 
brings memories of 
blanket coverage. A cold 
reprieve—dream of simplicity, 
of kissing freely.
A teenage boy hurtling 
down a hill on a bike 
at high speed 
and not crashing.
Untested miracles.
Tomorrow will be the third.
Anything could happen 
or not.
I’m just being realistic.
How many memories
of memories can you unbox?
Of course, I went to work.
The rock exists for moss.
Until today, I hadn’t seen 
how easily romance 
can be transmuted
into admin.
I didn’t wear make-up
and the world mirrored
my lack.
I have to say,
I’m pretty comfy right now, 
scrolling backwards, 
freeing up space 
for theatre.
In the kebab shop,
a man gives me flowers
(no reason),
still humming
Monday Monday. 

I’ve got a vegan haggis guilt-tripping me in the fridge I haven’t cooked. A solitary Burns night celebration seemed like a fun idea when I was feeling whimsical in the first aisle at Aldi. I got invited to a friend’s birthday Burns Night celebration but I couldn’t go. I think I’ve celebrated with friends every year for the past three or four times otherwise. I love it—taking it in turns to read a verse of Address to a Haggis.

I am not vegan but meaty waste makes me feel more guilty. Perhaps I’ll test it tomorrow.

The smell of red wine is the greatest challenge.

It doesn’t help that I really love booze. Both the taste and the idea of it. I love juicy pale ales, I love whisky, I love tequila, I love mezcal, I love G&Ts, I love wine. Part of my decision to embark on a creative writing masters was probably my interviewer telling me that study days often concluded at the pub, and that it was usually very convivial. I love conviviality.

Last year I intended to do dry January but failed at an early hurdle. Looking back, it wasn’t just the booze, but all sense of personal intention, as if I didn’t really have much faith in my own intentions at all, or any reason to have any.

This year is different because I’ve learned that my intentions are rooted in real needs that I have—the need to honour and protect my life, my body, my desires and my spirit.

Since I’ve come this far, I’ll restate, I intend to continue my not drinking streak for at least five more months. Six months at least, because I feel that gives me time to experience a different mode; a different way of being. I might decide it’s a better way to live.

Like many people, I get anxious in social situations.

Typically, at first booze lessens this; it creates a pleasant, fuzzy protective barrier between me and the spatially disorienting starkness of my surroundings. Sentences get to go on their own journey. One second I’m talking with a stranger. The next I can feel their breath on my ear, while they whisper something the people around us can’t hear. This all seems like a natural succession of events. I laugh at things that aren’t funny. The more drinks, the further the plot advances.

But too often I have lost the plot, and never got it back intact. The winter before last, I woke with half my front tooth missing. I’d been sad, and I hadn’t been looking after myself. For weeks afterwards I felt concussed, disturbed and paranoid. I hadn’t really drunk that much – a few glasses, but I hadn’t eaten dinner and I was tired, and I was vulnerable. It can feel shameful to admit vulnerability after a certain age. Shameful to have not learned my lesson. About lots of things.

So I’ve decided to try and take that pressure off. I don’t want to punish myself, but to test if something else is better.

Mostly it is.

One challenge so far was hosting a literary event entirely sober. I wouldn’t normally drink more than one or two during, but afterwards, the need to relieve my interior tension was an absence I keenly felt. Similarly a few nights after, I spontaneously collaborated with a musician that became far more of an intense performance than I expected. I experienced an electricity I doubt I’ll forget, and afterwards adrenaline coursed through me, heightening my awareness of my own sobriety; my discomfort with being.

Without anything to drink, unless I catch a conversational wave, my faculties for small talk exhaust relatively fast, and I find myself restless and keen to leave; to end the story before it begins. In that kind of situation, it’s hard to tell whether I’m boring, or bored. Possibly a little of both.

This makes me realise that I’m allowed to leave. That I don’t always have to find out what happens in the end, or transform the dull into delight.

Sometimes it’s nice to just wake up in bed and carry on with life.

There’s more I could say, but I’m bored, or boring. Think I’ll go to bed.

P.S. I’ve got a new chapbook out with Salò Press—a Norwich-based small press who were very lovely to work with. It isn’t made up of stand-alone poems so much as one long sequence or surge. Writing it made me laugh. It made me cry. I hope it makes people laugh. It’s meant as a kind of ragged celebration.

The last seven years I’ve counted myself lucky to spend it with friends and usually wake beside a lover, or lay.

Okay, I wasn’t totally alone. I had my purring cat beside me, shmooshed up against my leg most of the evening. I picked up my brother’s flu at Christmas and arrived back home in time to greet it. It wasn’t that bad. A fever. I quite enjoyed the drama, impressed by my body’s sweat facility; and the excuse to stay in bed.

At midnight fireworks began going off on the beach and I watched them through the window, holding up my cat, who seemed interested. I was surprised by how non-momentous midnight felt.

Just before I left town for Christmas, I began writing an essay about the film Sorry, Baby, directed by Eva Victor. I felt I could’ve written at least 5000 words on why it was so well written and realised—the subtleties and wounded humour; the care shown in storytelling trauma.

But I couldn’t finish. It felt too heavy. I’ve started to realise I have a high threshold for pain. I don’t mean I feel it less; only that I tolerate it for longer. I realised I didn’t have to keep writing the essay, so I stopped. And then I started to feel better. Sometimes you don’t have to finish a thing.

This is the kind of thinking I’m approaching 2026 with—embracing a sense of lag, incomplete and imperfect contentment; and of not wanting to compete with my selves all the time.

I borrowed some books from my parents’ house by Iris Murdoch, André Gide and Dorothy Parker, and reading them in the in-between time, I felt myself getting back to a teenage version of me. It felt nice.

On Friday evening, I braved a storm – rain and wind almost blowing me into the road – to get to a drawing workshop led by artist/dancer Ted Rogers (who also writes funny, charming poems and has read at the night I run in Margate).

The space was lamp-lit and around 35 adults of all ages attended. We had to walk around the room shaking one another’s hands and greeting each other. That kind of thing doesn’t embarrass me any longer. I really enjoyed that part. Then small groups took it in turns to improvise different entities and become models. I got to embody a sad slug but the pose was called and given two minutes just as I had lowered to a squat with my arm tentacle raised upwards. 1 minute in, as my legs began to violently quiver, Ted came to my rescue, positioning a stool beneath me so that I could keep holding the pose.

After this, everyone in the class formed an amoeba movement, slowly moving forward to melancholic classical music, extending our fingers towards a soft box ‘sun’. I was near the front and when I tilted round to look back, everyone looked so sweet and silly, fully committed to being part of a human amoeba in a hybrid movement and life drawing class, that a wave of emotion swept over me and I felt tears pricking my eyes.

I don’t know if it’s because so many terrible things keep happening in the world, but I feel intensely affected by the smallest positive demonstrations of humanity at the moment.

The next evening, some friends and I booked out the front row of our local cinema. Really we were too close to the screen for it to be comfortable but I think I managed to ice the experience by paraphrasing lines from The Dreamers about true cinephiles needing to be at the front to receive the image first. We were there to see Hamnet, which was simultaneously distressing and cathartic—possibly a sort of emotional enema for people who tend to bottle things up. I don’t. I wept freely. Most of us had wet faces when the lights came back on. There was a beautiful moment right at the end of the film that reminded me of the amoeba.

I was grateful I got to cry about a film with friends.

I walked around naked
or 
felt like people could see through my clothes.
No matter how much I layered up,
I was shivering.
A friend said it was my nervous system,
another said it was anger,
that I was shaking with rage.
I trembled so much
I wondered if I had early onset Parkinson’s.
I spent hours in the bath—
the only cat-free zone
after the initial curious paws at the porcelain lip.
I thought about my breathing,
I considered breath.
I liked seeing mine in cold air.
Chat GPT said: 
‘The warmth you’re feeling towards them
is your warmth’.
My Raynaud’s worsened.
I went to Mexico.
Ran into people from my town,
my past.
Every day, I wrote,
awake before six, and continued 
until winter returned
or I to it
and my fingers whitened.
I stood up, performed my words.
Dampened dirt to mud and sculpted meaning.
Drafted intense, over-long emails
and didn’t send them.
When it comes to that at least 
I like to think I’ve learned something.
I turned on disappearing messages. 
I hid my story. 
I couldn’t delete forever. 
I ran.
I ran backwards.
I stopped running,
incapacitated by the dream of rosé.
Spent summer squirting,
decided bodily functions are vulgar,
that bodies are vulgar,
vowed to become vulgar 
then abandoned the idea,
became an idea,
became a poem
according to three men.
But I couldn’t see me
anywhere in them.
One man cradled my face,
and wearing a tragic expression
informed me of my own intelligence,
which felt like an insult.
I gained backstage access.
Reviewed my resolutions,
my desires,
failures.
Repeated errors I’d sworn not to make,
my mouth a blade 
that cuts thorns before bloom.
The dent in my forehead deepened.
I listened to Get Free 36 times,
aspired to get free,
to stop surrendering 
all self-made boundaries 
that leave me formless 
but not. 
In the end 
I got too tired of my obsessions 
to obsess over them,
let them be published 
and turned the pages.
Confronted with my own sexiness
I have to deal with the idea 
I am my final girl 
walking through an ordnance survey designated bog
wondering how I got t/here.

In summer, I keep the door open, and consciously make eye contact with passers-by, encouraging entrance. It can be intimidating entering an art space at the best of times, and worse when the space is small, showing at first glance work that looks like it might challenge or alienate, and with a human there, waiting to judge one’s reactions. I try to be the opposite.

When I first began working at the Serpentine Galleries as an invigilator in 2013, some of the most rewarding moments in my life occurred. Older people would shuffle in and passively express disdain, grumbling under their breaths that it wasn’t their ‘cup of tea’ or that it didn’t ‘look like art’ to them.

It really didn’t take much to draw them out. To smile and ask what it was they didn’t like, to validate their initial reaction, to invite them to notice new things, to provide access. I remember two particular visitors who I felt sure radiated a new glow as they departed after our conversation. One had asked me what made ‘a crummy old sofa so special’. And I had said ‘Nothing’ before I invited her to touch it and discover that it was ceramic imitating leather, which I remember she found astonishing.

Another time, a woman with Motor Neuron Disease in a chair arrived at the gallery ten minutes before we were due to close. I felt bad that she’d made it all the way there and concerned that she would not be able to get much from the show in the time she had, I offered to give her a whistle-stop tour. It happened to be an exhibition I found fascinating—A Cosmos, by Rosemarie Trockel. When she left, the woman informed me that I had ‘made her month’, and the glow from that encounter has never quite left me.

In winter, I keep the door closed. The light is bright inside and as the daylight dulls, I feel more and more exposed and less inclined to make proactive eye contact through the tinted glass.

Earlier in the day, a young boy with a young girlfriend had tapped on the glass and mouthed ‘What is it?’. ‘The book or this space?’, I replied. ‘The place’, he said. I opened the door and informed them that it was an art gallery and that they were welcome to come in and have a look if they wanted. They seemed keen on this novelty and ventured in. They must’ve been about 14. The girl held a bunch of roses. ‘I like your flowers’, I said. ‘I bought them for her’, the young man said. ‘They’re beautiful’, I said. They appraised the art swiftly but thanked me with sincerity before they left.

So now, back to the man.

He wore an expression I perceived as a cynical smirk, caught between a smile and a scowl. He hunched a little. He strode into the gallery as if to conquer it.

He glanced cursorily around, with an air of suspicion, before asking if there were any particular themes.

I said ‘Well, what do you think?’

He made a couple of noncommittal noises at this, so I suggested that there was a great deal of paint in the exhibition.

I began to reach for the press release, but he stopped me. I’m paraphrasing, but he said something like the work had failed if I had to read out the press release. I posited that sometimes a press release added little if anything, while at other times it might provide interesting context.

I read out some excerpts from the release about the domestic, but while I enjoyed the experience of reading aloud to a stranger, I started to find the words flimsy excerpted, which seemed to prove his thesis.

Seconds later, he shook his head as if waking from a short trance and said ‘Well, I don’t see much in it. I see this kind of thing all the time. It’s very easy to do painting like this. There’s no wit or humour in it. I can’t see much creativity in it’.

I expressed that I might disagree somewhat, that I saw a lot of energy in the work, and that I could imagine the studio – the difference of a paint-splattered studio environment, and then the work extracted and strategically placed - objects in conversation with each other.

‘Now you’re using art school speak’, he said before asking if I myself was the artist. I was somewhat surprised and amused by this speculation, in the wake of his having spoken with such spiky candour. I confirmed I was not, but I that, having spent a few hours with the work, I felt warmer towards it than when I arrived.

I asked what kind of art he did enjoy, to which he stalled momentarily before offering that he liked Jackson Pollock; that there was lots of energy in that kind of painting.

‘But this’ he said, had ‘been done before. Many times. It’s all been done’.

‘So do you think we should stop making art, if we’ve plateaued, or do you not think it’s more an urge than we really appreciate? Must we always be conquering new ground?’

He wasn’t sure.

I asked if he also enjoyed the work of Lee Krasner, but he had never heard of Lee Krasner. I explained that she was Jackson Pollock’s wife, and an influence on him.

I asked him if he had seen any recent exhibitions that had moved him. He seemed to struggle to answer this question.

I offered that I had recently visited The Tate and seen the Lee Miller exhibition.

He didn’t know who Lee Miller was. I explained that she had been a lover of Man Ray and also a famous photographer; a war photographer who had taken that picture of herself in Hitler’s bath.

At this, he seemed to know who I was talking about, nodding ‘Of course’.

I asserted that I thought she was a very talented artist, one of the most iconic self-portrait artists, and that that exhibition had moved me very much.

I asked him if he was someone who expressed himself creatively, and he told me yes, he was a painter and musician. When I pressed him (gently) on what he tended to make, as if trying to brush off the question, he said ‘Oh, classical mostly, and landscapes’.

I asked him if there were any contemporary artists he liked. He said he couldn’t think of any contemporary art that he had enjoyed.

I asked him what he thought of Tracey Emin, and he said, ‘she can’t draw’.

I passionately disagreed with him on this point, offering her expressionist style and consistency as evidence, and the caveat that it might simply not be to his taste.

He said, ‘At the end of the day, all that matters is whether you like it or not’.

I agreed with him on this point, and said, ‘I do like it’.

He said, ‘I’m entitled to my opinion’.

I said, ‘You absolutely are’.

Then he repeated that he could see ‘no wit and no humour’ in the paintings in the gallery.

I suggested that the artist may have had fun during the painting process.

Feeling we had come full circle, I collapsed into my seat and took my book back up, signalling the conclusion of the conversation, and mercifully he took the hint.

He promised he would be back to see a future exhibition, and I quipped that I would look forward to our next debate. At this, he smiled and left.

About an hour later, I noticed him striding back in the other direction. Catching my eye, he smiled widely and began waving enthusiastically.

I waved back.

And I keep coming back to this image of extending my body, my limbs, from the core to the fingertips, of following through, or seeing a project through; of setting a goal and doing my best to achieve it.

Of swimming in a bright blue swimming pool.

A few years ago, a fairly well-established poet suggested that I was not going to ‘write a poetry collection by mistake’. I thought this was an interesting comment, and not necessarily true. I think I have written two poetry collections, and a short book of prose by ‘mistake’ or at least with no set vision for what they should specifically be ‘about’. I began posting on Substack just under a year ago, and have posted more than thirty times.

I suppose my thinking was/is, write now, edit it into something later. I’m not sure this approach has served me well for one of the collections, which has become unwieldy and a little hard for me to confront, like the weeds in my backyard.

I notice this scatter-gun approach to writing mirrors my approach to other things, like shopping – buy something when you realise you’re hungry, or like relationships. Fuck until we realise we’re in love.

I received a beautiful wedding invitation in the post a few days ago, featuring woodcut wedding crows. It’s a special one – from my older brother and his partner. They’ve been together for more than ten years and they have two children. I’ve known my brother’s partner even longer than he, because we all grew up together and she and I used to be in all the plays and concerts and choirs at our comprehensive school. I love going to stay with them, and then when the kids go to bed, getting drunk and ending up playing songs together.

I’ve been invited to write and read a poem at the wedding, which is commonly what poets get asked to do at weddings. I quailed at the suggestion, because my poetry tends to stew in the domain of romantic failure and is often very short — one-night-stand poetry. The idea of writing a longer poem feels like being asked the question I somehow quite often get asked of why I don’t have a partner.

But then I remembered writing typewriter haikus on demand at a corporate event at Kensington Palace, unimaginative rich people’s title suggestions. One of them was “A love that lasts forever – for my darling wife”. Momentarily stumped and reluctant to submit to the clearly desired cliché, I ended up writing:

A love that lasts forever – for my darling wife

Our love is like a cat
stretching
on an endless mat.

I realised that I can turn my lack of long-lasting love into a refrain, or constraint. I realised I can write a comedy set. I realised I can approach a request any way I like. And not just in relation to writing.

I lay in bed thinking about how important my brother and his partner are in my life and how lovely their relationship is and I wept. I realised I will not be able to avoid weeping at the wedding, and that I will have to build crying into the material.

Besides, I have written several ‘longer’ poems this year – some of which I’ve even managed to keep mostly private, which is something I’ve been grappling with – what I keep for myself, or at least for a time. How vulnerable I make myself, how much I expose, what makes writing feel held. I’m working on it.

I’m less concerned with form now that I’ve decided that the right form will eventually make itself known, and I shouldn’t stop writing while I wait. I’ve worried that I might have adopted an If-you-don’t-try-you-can’t-fail attitude. But the reality is, I do try, with work, with people, with love.

Especially when it comes to love, and I’m tired of that now. It’s drained me. I’m a husk. In 2026, I’m going to take time away from social media, booze, sex and romantic questing; from overextending my time, my energy. I’m on a personal wagon, on a secret mission.

This sounds negative, but I mean it as a positive and simply as a difference. I want to observe some personal boundaries and challenges, and articulating it publicly, sometimes helps me actualise my intentions – like quitting a job, moving to Margate, going to Mexico, or getting a cat. If I say it aloud, if I feel like I’m not the only one upholding my expectations, I’m more likely to succeed. I suppose it’s a kind of placebo. But placebos often work.

I found my 2022 resolutions the other day, relayed here…

• Swim, run, walk more

• Write more

• Fuck more

• Send more postcards

• Drink more water

• Microdose mushrooms

• Move out of London

• Go on holiday

• Get into audiobooks

• Get into Björk

• Get a therapist

I ‘achieved’ 9/11.

P.S.!!!! My first ‘full-length’ book of poems was recently published by If a Leaf Falls. I’m really happy with how it’s turned out, from the edit to the cover design to the typesetting, and very grateful also. A lot went into it (and taken out of me, lol). Thank you to everyone who has already bought a copy, spent time with the poems and said lovely things to me about it <3
There is a launch event happening in Dalston, London on Friday 12 December, from 6-8:30pm in case you happen to be about and would like to come.

DEAD BUTTERFLY DREAM 


It’s smart to unsubscribe from archetypes. 
Mostly, my arms don’t bend back.
Tragic life stories are overrated. 
I can strike out stupidly at any given moment.
I perform humiliation better than anyone. 
A man asks me out in a dream
then looks sad because he can’t 'put me in a box'. 
I laugh because he doesn’t have a box. 
I’m sold as seen.
I accept the second drink. 
I’m the same as anyone else
trying to stay present. 
Slippery. 

----

LONG WINTER AHEAD


Sunsets slip between my thighs.

A love of skin tones is only the surface of it.

Soft furnishings.

An internet guy says ‘morose’ is a sexy word. 

I mouth it like a mantra. 

Morose. 

I hear the church and visualise its vast bell.

The bell trolls my dreams. 

I want to touch it. 

I insulate voids with tissue-thin poems 

that mildew,

open and close cabinets.

Co-star advises me to fall in love with a dead writer.

White vans move through rain

one after another.

At the Lee Miller exhibition at the Tate, older women drifted through the rooms with a kind of spatial obliviousness. Whenever I tried to get close to one of the smaller photographs, I’d feel an elbow graze me, as if we were all magnetised to the same six inches of wall. It wasn’t particularly busy. I kept stepping back into the centre of the room, waiting for a clearing, then drifting toward whatever run of images had opened up. One of the rooms I doubled back to, wanting to spend more time alone with the works.

Miller was an OG selfie queen. What I love best about her self-portraits is that they don’t feel tentative. They test and challenge, but with an aesthetic that’s confident, leaning into their own glamour; fully conscious of their power, their effect.

I began taking self-portraits at a young age, around 14, using the self-timer on a digital camera. I’m not sure where the compulsion originated from but I think it had to do with wanting to be seen through my own lens. Many years later, I read something by the photographer (turned writer) and former model Lina Scheynius that resonated with me—loosely paraphrasing, the fact that she didn’t love her own image when she modelled for others, and that when she took her own picture, she could recognise herself.

I always find this interesting, because to me, self-portraiture is no longer about being seen. It’s as much about not being seen, or rather, curating what gets seen. For me, it’s similar with poetry. Music was and perhaps always will be my first love. I’ve never felt more moved than hearing a beloved song live, or more euphoric than when I am on-stage singing. But it didn’t feel sustainable to play in bands where I didn’t get to write the music, or had to fit lyrics to the instrumental.

In 2021, I remember being on stage at the Scala and the thought running through my head, This isn’t how I imagined it. At one point, I began making my own brand of DIY music, using bass, acoustic, synth and other experimental sounds, and I think, if I’d carried on, perhaps I’d have something interesting by now. But then I shifted, I chose to focus on poetry—a single instrument, no equipment necessary.

In the final room, reading about Lee Miller’s PTSD—and particularly remembering a documentary I saw many years ago in which her son Antony Penrose spoke about growing up with someone who seemed difficult, alcoholic, unaware of his mother’s life’s achievements and tribulations—I began to well up. As I gazed at the image of Lee Miller, suppressing actual sobs, I felt an elbow nudging my side.

I walked from the Tate to the Strand, enjoying the dark river, the rain.

At the traffic lights at Westminster station, one pair of office workers began talking about the Traitors final and it caught like wildfire. Suddenly the lips of the entire commuter crowd were saying the word ‘traitors’. I mouthed along, to feel something.

In Waterstones Piccadilly, crouching on the floor, thumbing poetry, two young men swirled into the section, the first young man announcing with theatrical enthusiasm, “It’s screaming at me”. I looked up to see him making a beeline for Lana Del Rey’s poetry book. “I recommend it!” I chipped in, with out-of-towner friendliness, and he seemed to take this as a sign, whirling away to make his purchase.

Still raining, I walked along the Strand, congested with suited men’s umbrellas.

I recognised a few literary faces at the magazine launch party, some faintly radiating social climber energy. I hoped I didn’t give off the same. There were people I could have introduced myself to, but I didn’t. I’m beginning to like anonymity, the option of withholding. Still, I ended up in some warm, open conversations: editors, fiction writers, a journalist I felt oddly at ease with. Total anonymity wasn't an option, since I was one of the designated readers.

When I made it to King’s Cross, I’d just missed a train and had an hour to kill before the next, so I stepped into The Queen’s Head on Acton street, a favourite old haunt. Outside, two men were talking about the low salary of a curatorial role currently being advertised at the Courtauld. I sipped my half-pint of pale ale in the rain, feeling local. God, I miss London, I thought to myself. Land of hook-ups you can order like a takeaway, of multiple somethings happening every night of the week.

Then I felt guilty, like I was cheating on my town. I recalled a time two weeks previously, on Hallowe’en: a visiting friend and I stood on the beach beside an archipelago of bonfires and, along with masked strangers, we participated in a Pauline Oliveros-esque sonic meditation led by Charlotte Church. Then we screamed, screeched, yelled and hollered at the sea’s cusp. A characteristic idiosyncrasy.

The last train was slow, and I had to change at Faversham. The train was delayed. I worried I’d be stranded, exhausted and tipsy from strong cocktails in Faversham, but the connecting train had waited.

On the short walk home, I noticed a man walking weirdly fast behind me. I half-recognised him, though didn’t think we’d ever spoken—good looking but he seemed drunk. He asked if I’d come from Wetherspoon’s.

“At 2am?” I joked. I tried to walk off casually but he crossed over and followed in my direction: I said lightly, “Oh you’re going this way?” trying to conceal my fear.

“Yes”, he nodded, keeping pace.

Seconds later, he asked if I wanted to go to his place, just as we were passing my house. For a heartbeat, I considered walking on, so as not to reveal where I live, but I couldn’t think where to walk. “I’m drunk and tired and I need to go to sleep” I said. “Goodnight!” latching the creaky iron gate fast behind me. Seconds later I saw him walk back in the other direction, a sheepish expression on his face. Of course, he had lied.

This isn’t what I wanted to write about, but it’s where I’ve arrived. I was supposed to be on a second date this evening, but I cancelled because I felt overwhelmed. I’m still processing. This is the sixth or seventh time since living in this town that I’ve felt preyed on, intimidated, or like my boundaries have been overstepped. The man last night appeared drunk, so I could choose to regard the encounter as seedy rather than sinister, but the reality is, I was frightened.

I don’t need to be any softer.

Every day I woke blearily to a bleak feeling, as if my psyche was being smothered by a grey blanket. Or like a heavy chest sinking—the deeper I swam after myself, the pressure became greater, more painful.

I abandoned myself and wandered around feeling light, like a shell.

Aside from going to work, I felt disabled. A collapsed tent letting in the rain. I couldn’t do much except ride the dark wave, spiralling along the way. The few nights I did go out, I drank too much and made regretful choices that left me feeling terrible.

I felt alienated from my own writing, like it had betrayed me. Time disappeared is if to a vortex.

A mysterious pool of water kept reappearing in my bathroom. At first, I thought it might be my cat, protesting against his litter tray. I mopped it up and cleaned but it reappeared again. I thought it was coming from beneath the floor. I don’t know why I assumed that. Eventually I looked up and saw that the ceiling was black. Upstairs, I located a leak in the pipe beneath the kitchen sink.

A few mornings ago, I dreamt about a swan—the swan’s neck silently extended and looped around my own. As it began to tighten and strangle me, I woke up.

In the coffee shop, I ran into my beautiful American hairdresser, who asked me how I was. She seemed to sincerely want to know so I told her I hadn’t been sleeping well. With deep sympathy, she said, “Too much screen time?” I nodded. “Not enough time reading?” I nodded.

I’ve tried to be soft with myself. I’ve taken a lot of baths.

Last week, on a lunch break and went to the nice bread shop café. I sat at their dining table with a daytime candle in front of a wall of sunsets painted by a local artist. I ordered a sandwich: gorgonzola with pear, honey drizzled between thick slices of fresh sourdough. It struck me as the gentlest sandwich I’d ever tasted.

Talking has helped. I haven’t been alone. A few days ago, a close friend and I read new writing aloud to each other on the phone.

Reading aloud feels like a kind of tonic. I’ve read Louise Glück’s poem October – in her beautiful collection Averno – aloud five times this month. I don’t always read poetry to relate to it, but this sequence has really captured so well how I’ve felt, it’s been like a touchstone.

The first time, when I reached the end, I wept. The second, I’d been on a long walk with a friend. We walked through miles of post harvest fields, littered with onion husks, and when we arrived finally at a pub in a village menacingly decorated with St George’s flags, I read the poem.

I’ve read it aloud twice more since. I liked learning that Glück wrote it as a stand-alone sequence two years before it became part of the collection. The final reading I recorded, and have embedded here.

A few days ago, I started to feel myself hatching out of the depressive chrysalis cocooning me, and moving towards an incline.

At the weekend, I babysat for my friend’s little boy, which reminded me that I am capable; that I have the capacity to care for other things and people.

I’ve began leaving my phone upstairs at night. I’ve returned to reading poems by Mary Ruefle – my emotional support poet. I appreciate the soft, paper stock covers.

This morning, post cervical screening, I bought myself some flowers.

Later, my plan is to sponge the blackness off the ceiling and make a lentil dahl. I need to start being nicer to myself. I remembered the phrase: “do something today you’ll thank yourself for tomorrow”.

I am going to buy some lip balm.

October, by Louise Glück

Sometimes, no matter how many layers of metallic paint you apply, it cannot arm you in a real sense, against real emotional pain.

A relatively small thing can shatter the glass sculpture of your feelings and then there’s nothing to be done but to collect up the shards, in a frenzy of blood and splinter glint.

Scrolling through your phone for hours on end in a depressive stupor can lead the mind to thrash around like a half-doused trout in a small bucket, but – in whatever form it takes – you have to wait it out, wait for something to change. In my case, that usually involves the passage of time, a few astonishing sunsets and genuine absorption in an activity of some kind.

Occasionally, an object of desire forms in my mind. This week it was a black diamond, or okay, a black crystal pendant, or obsidian pendant, or black heart obsidian pendant. And after travelling that far on Google, it occurred I already own a black heart pendant. I remember the last person I slept with while wearing it, years ago. I can still feel the sensation of it, thudding against my chest. So, all week, I’ve had a note on the side that says ‘find the black heart pendant’. It could just be there on the other side of the room, but I haven’t tried to look for it yet, and perhaps that’s because I want to preserve the memory a little longer. Once it’s in my hand, it will lose that lustre.

The main source of these recent tears has been anger with myself—for getting caught in a feedback loop instead of prioritising my emotional health and wellbeing, and being shown painful evidence of that in an unguarded moment. I always remember the story of the strong man who died from a punch to the belly because he wasn’t expecting it (even though Google now tells me that story is factually inaccurate). My own body reacted badly to this latest update. Where is the tongue-in-cheek emoji?

Mistrust adds a skein of greyscale to the world, muting thunder, passion. The police arrest peaceful protesters. Why do they do this? It’s nonsense, born of fear.

I read something this week from the actor Aimee Lou Wood. Paraphrasing, it was about formerly responding to bullying behaviour by making themselves more likeable or reacting in a way that might inspire admiration, and that she’d decided to stop doing this. I realise I need to take a leaf out of her book. I am not likeable to all people, and I’ve got to stop acting like a person who could be. I realise how I have pandered to cruelty, carelessness, or simple indifference. I’ve misplaced my own care, affection and attention for too long.

A guy (boy?) I had an ambiguous relationship with from the age of 19-21 telling me I ‘lack content’ has haunted me long into adulthood. Notwithstanding the obnoxiousness of telling a young woman that she is essentially inexperienced, the implication was that I lacked substance or depth. I’ve thought more recently about what it means to be or have nothing, and that that might be something he and many other people might find truly terrifying. To me, superficial, small or trivial things are vital. The layer of top soil. But they are conjurable. How does a person ever make a thing?

Perhaps the real fear is removing everything and finding nothing is all there is.

I’ve been looking through old photos, listening to musicians I’ve loved since that time, reconnecting with a younger me, who is surprisingly full of compassion for me now. One of my all-time favourite musicians, Molly Nilsson, released a new record last week titled Amateur, which includes the beautiful track How much is the world? I’ve been listening to it on repeat walking along the beach at sunset, and it fills me with a sense of shared joy, love and sadness. I found this nice, suitable-for-now text in the bandcamp description:

The word “amateur” originates from the Latin word “amator,” meaning “lover” or “admirer”. This Latin term is derived from “amare,” which means “to love”. The French adopted “amateur” from Latin, and the English then borrowed it from French, initially retaining the sense of someone who loves or is devoted to something. Over time, the English usage of “amateur” also developed a meaning related to a lack of professional skill or experience.

She is playing in London tonight, and recommend trying to get a ticket. I can’t afford to go, otherwise I would be there getting euphoric.

A good friend emailed me recently and asked me if I was in love. The answer remains, and will always be yes.

Content warning: nudity, contemplative pauses, bath sounds, internal commentary externalised etc.

I actually redacted a couple of TMIs in the end and decided not to email this out - it felt a bit pushy to send my actual voice directly to inboxes.