The Proust Questionnaire Revisited

I’ve noticed my original responses to the Proust Questionnaire from October 2015 (!!!) keeps getting the odd view. I went and had a re-read of my responses and thought hey, I’ve appreciably changed in the last nine years! Surprising, I know. I’m going to leave the original post up for posterity’s sake, but I’m also gonna do it again, for fun and profit.

Maybe I’ll do it every ten years or so?

Since I published the original post, I still haven’t read Proust. I’m lost in the depths of that first book. I’ve bounced off it a couple of times. I’ll get there in the end, I’m sure. I did with Ulysses. Maybe a lengthy prison stay, or a spell on the moon, will do it.

Find below my original answers and my updated ones in italics.

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• What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Bereavement. | Yeah, still bereavement.

• Where would you like to live?

Holland. | Haha, probably not. I’d pick London now, I think. Not forever. But I’d like to have lived in London.

• What is your idea of earthly happiness?

Peace, quiet, an engaging activity. | Still this, absolutely.

• To what faults do you feel most indulgent?

Indolence, overindulgence, impatience. | I’ve worked really hard on at least two of these faults! I’ll let you guess which ones. Now I would say I feel other people’s pain too keenly, and try to fix things where I should actually be sitting with the discomfort.

• Who are your favourite heroes of fiction?

Leopold Bloom. Stephen Dedalus. Sherlock Holmes. | Hell yeah, still these guys. I’ve read a lot of fantasy recently, so I’d probably add Conan the Cimerian and Severian from The Book of the New Sun.

• Who are your favourite characters in history?

Sigmund Freud. Jacques Derrida. Malcolm X. | What was I thinking? Malcolm X I’d still put on this list I think. How odd these questions are. Fiction gets heroes, real life gets characters? In terms of… character, maybe I’d pick this lad, Daniel Lambert.

• Who are your favourite heroines in real life?

My mother. | Such a cop-out answer, James. Dead, probably Boudica. Living, I actually can’t believe Diane Abbott stands up under what gets piled on her.

• Who are your favourite heroines of fiction?

Jane Eyre. Molly Bloom. Ophelia. | Still true. The eponymous Gwilan from the Le Guin story Gwilan’s Harp gets a shout. Looking this up I just realised I made a typo in my post including that story. This has been a useful exercise already!

• Your favourite painter?

Salvador Dali. | It’s basic but I still love Dali.

• Your favourite musician?

Lou Reed or Kurt Cobain. Can’t decide. | Still the same. Thurston Moore gets a shout because I liked his memoir.

• The quality you most admire in a man?

Patience. | Forbearance: being able to engage in cruelty, being encouraged to engage in cruelty, and choosing not to.

• The quality you most admire in a woman?

Patience. | Forbearance: being able to engage in cruelty, being encouraged to engage in cruelty, and choosing not to.

• Your favourite virtue?

Patience. | Forbearance: being able to engage in cruelty, being encouraged to engage in cruelty, and choosing not to.

• Your favourite occupation?

I could say reading and writing to try and save face, but I spend altogether too much time playing videogames. | Still true. I like going for long walks too – I’m a dull, dull man.

• Who would you have liked to be?

James Joyce. | Oh God no. I’m actually reasonably comfortable with who I am so this is a difficult question. Maybe someone like Andrew Carnegie, loads of money and a social conscience. Or Steve Albini. I’d like to see him fill out the Proust questionnaire.

• Your most marked characteristic?

Delusions of grandeur. | Oh no, life has beaten that out of me. Now I’d probably say an overactive sense of empathy.

• The quality you most like in a man?

Intelligence. The ability to hold a conversation. | A willingness to try it yourself and learn.

• The quality you most like in a woman?

Ditto. | Ditto.

• What do you most value in your friends?

A willingness to listen. | Patience, understanding, a shared sense of humour.

• What is your principle defect?

Inability to see things through. I answered the first five questions of this, then stopped. Came back a month later. Tempted to give up and log in to WoW. | I’m getting better at finishing things. Still not great. I am, however, prone to thinking through a situation, seeing the exact details and contours of a mistake I’m about to make, and making it anyway.

• What is your favourite occupation?

Them blasted videogames. | Ok, you got me, it is videogames. I played Disco Elysium recently and loved it.

• What is your dream of happiness?

Sharing my daily existence with the woman I love. | Aww, still true.

• What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes?

To not have met her. | Aww, still true.

• What would you like to be?

Myself without the character flaws. | Genuinely, myself. All my dream professions don’t make money any more so if you’re talking about jobs, don’t.

• In what country would you like to live?

Holland. | Germany by default because I speak a bit of German. I genuinely love England, or an idea of England, but it does really need to get its act together.

• What is your favourite colour?

Green. I tend to like darker shades of green, like emerald or British racing. | Still green.

• What is your favourite flower?

All that comes to mind is filth. | Stop it James. Probably snowdrops. Or bluebells.

• What is your favourite bird?

I don’t know enough about birds to have a favourite. I like all kinds of birds apart from magpies, I have taken a dislike to them after learning about how they eat the young of other birds. | Still don’t like magpies but the kind of ray gun noise they make is cool. I like blackbirds, great tits, pigeons.

• Who are your favourite prose writers?

James Joyce. William S. Burroughs. Thomas Pynchon. | I still love Burroughs but prose writer? Hahahaha. I’ve read a lot of Joan Didion recently and am blown away by the control she demonstrates in her writing.

• Who are your favourite poets?

T.S. Eliot. Ezra Pound. P.B. Shelley. Hope Mirrlees. | Same.

• Who is your favourite hero of fiction?

Leopold Bloom. | A repeat question. Did past me not have the wherewithal to edit this?

• Who are your favourite heroines of fiction?

Jane Eyre. Molly Bloom. | A repeat question. Did past me not have the wherewithal to edit this?

• Who are your favourite composers?

Beethoven, for Ode to Joy | Ode to Joy is good. Otherwise, Kevin Shields.

• Who are your favourite painters?

Dali, Picasso. | I like Picasso’s paintings and really don’t wanna look at them any more. I like Marcel Duchamp a lot (Nude Descending a Staircase).

• Who are your heroes in real life?

My mother, my grandmother, my sister, my girlfriend. | Same, but I’m kind of suspicious now of the idea of having heroes, because it’ll encourage you to wait to be saved, instead of trying to save yourself. Chris Packham does incredible work and stands up under such abuse. Diane Abbott likewise.

• Who are your favourite heroines of history?

Rosa Parks. Ada Lovelace. Aphra Behn. | Same. Add Boudica.

• What are your favourite names?

As full of self-regard as it is, I like my name a lot. I like Ophelia a lot, too. | My feelings haven’t changed. Trying to think of another name, Ellen sprang to mind. I don’t know where that came from.

• What is it you most dislike?

The necessity of earning money. | Oh God yes.

• What historical figures do you most despise?

Hitler. Reagan. Thatcher. | I wrote this in 2015 and had no idea Johnson and Trump were coming. Dominic Cummings was also pretty easy to hate. Politicians have to be able to lie, but an inability to tell the truth is unconscionable in a democracy.

• What event in military history do you most admire?

The defence of Stalingrad. | That was a pretty impressive one. I don’t tend to think about military history. When I’m over 40 I am sure I’ll get way too in to WW2, but I’m not there yet.

• What reform do you most admire?

The liar who decides to stop, and does. | People don’t really change. This question now makes me think of political reform. Having watched the social safety net get systemically attacked for a decade plus at this point, the postwar consensus looks more and more like a bright spot against a background of complete dark.

• What natural gift would you most like to possess?

Either a musical ear or the ability to easily learn languages. | Same. Perfect pitch would be great. I’d be so annoying. You’d lean back in your chair, it’d squeak, I’d say “That was an Ab” and feel smug, you’d grunt, and in my head, I’d know the grunt was a D#, but I’d not say anything, because I know when not to push it.

• How would you like to die?

With no foreknowledge or apprehension of the fact. | I wouldn’t like to, there’s too much I want to do.

• What is your present state of mind?

Still thinking about packing it in and logging on to WoW. | I have moved on; I don’t play WoW any more. I’m tired but glad I’ve got something to work on this evening.

• To what faults do you feel most indulgent?

Impatience, anxiety, frustration. | I worry too much. Always have, probably always will.

• What is your motto?

Scheisse passiert. | “You can’t make people do things.” I know it’s not catchy.

Some Thoughts on Keeping a Commonplace Book

You’re at a dinner party (or some other similarly sophisticated get-together). You’ve had a couple of drinks, you’ve finally loosened up, you’ve forgotten that you spent Friday afternoon showing Craig from marketing how to read a forwarded email and that you’re going to have to spend a good chunk of Monday doing it too. You wanted to be an artist. You’ve got the humanities degree to prove it.

The conversation takes its turns. Your friends tell you about a conference they recently attended in San Francisco, opportunities they might take to develop a game in Toronto, leadership vacancies.

You tell them about Craig.

Of course, they discuss the housing market.

Finally the conversation moves towards something you might know about; culture. Someone mentions having seen a play, or read a novel, or seen a film adapted from a book. And you’ve read it, you’ve seen it. The book was better.

They ask you what you thought of it.

“Umm, it was good. I really enjoyed it. I need to read the rest of their work.”

Trenchant insight right there.

Me writing this blog post

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I’ve read a bunch of classics and can remember only bits and pieces of them.

Take Moby Dick for example. I remember being weirded out by the continual shifts in and out of it being formatted like a play script. I remember the chapter on making rope. I remember… this bit:

Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-labourers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

I’ve read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and can remember only two things; the image of him straining to read by a bit of dull light filtering down a prison hallway, and his advice on preventing burglary:

A light on for the burglar to see is the very best single means of protection. One of the ideal things is to leave a bathroom light on all night. The bathroom is one place where somebody could be, for any length of time, at any time of the night, and he would be likely to hear the slightest strange sound. The burglar, knowing this, won’t try to enter. ‘It’s also the cheapest possible protection. The kilowatts are a lot cheaper than your valuables.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

James Joyce is one of my favourite writers and I can’t remember much of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man except for the classic moo-cow opening and the bit about forging in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race.

I realised what I hadn’t been doing was taking proper notes.

Take a look at my copy of Ulysses for example, loads of notes, and it’s easily the novel I know best. Taking notes helps you think and helps you remember, and there’s loads of different ways to do it.

The copy of Ulysses I used while I was an undergraduate.

I journal, and some of my thoughts on my reading go in there. I’ve started keeping a spreadsheet where I put a one or two sentence review of every book I finish. This blog plays a part in me actually remember my reading and making some use of it, too. I’ve been endeavouring to keep more personal notes and to make them useful and share them.

I’ve also started keeping a commonplace book.

I’ve known about them for a long time, but in my recent drive to just take more notes in general, I decided to give it a go. I came across the idea again while researching Zettelkasten, which I ended up not trying because it just looks like too much work, whereas copying down the odd quote I found interesting seemed manageable.

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Some Things I Enjoy about Keeping a Commonplace Book

• It makes me feel like I’m back at uni, a bit. Anything that makes you feel ten years younger is worth doing.
• It did increase my comprehension and my recall. I tried my best to treat my books the way C.S. Lewis suggests; like toys. Flipping back through them at the end to look for quotes I wanted to copy down helped me recall what I’d read and cement it.
• The copying down fixed the ideas further, and also acted a little bit like a gym for my fingers. Hunter S. Thompson said he learned a lot about writing by literally copying out great works of literature to see what it felt like to copy those words down, to feel them being written by his own fingers. Keeping a commonplace book is microdosing this effect without having to type out The Great Gatsby.
• It’s a great way to form connections and stockpile material for blog posts.

Some Things I Wish I’d Known about Keeping a Commonplace Book

• Leave a few pages at the start for a table of contents. Leafing through the whole thing to find notes on a particular book might increase your memory of what you’ve copied overall (see my point above in “Some Things I Enjoy…”), but in the moment it it just frustrating. You want that quote for a blog post. You need that quote for a blog post. Your blog post won’t be complete unless you find that bit you copied from Moby Dick where he talks about how much he loves squeezing sperm.
• Don’t be overzealous. I remember my first year of uni – people would take way too many notes, me included, up to and including writing down everything the lecturer said verbatim. I think the first book I took notes from for my commonplace was The Winds Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose (see my reviews here and here). You know what le Guin is like. I underlined every other sentence and then copied it all down dutifully. This lead to…
• …me feeling bad about finishing books, because I’d then have a load of work to do. I know, right? Do yourself a favour and don’t introduce any more friction into your reading experience than absolutely necessary. Selecting what bits are resonating with you and that you want to remember is an important part of the process.

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To be entirely truthful with you, keeping a commonplace book hasn’t been a priority for me the last few months. I’ve finished five or six books without worrying about copying any quotes down. I think the most useful part of the exercise might actually be taking the time to have a flick through a book when you’ve finished it, just to refresh bits of it in your memory while it’s still recent.

This is a particularly good tip for e-books, I think. (I read this somewhere and can’t remember where, sorry.) Part of the reason we have an easier time recalling information from printed text as opposed to reading on a screen is that printed text engages our spatial and tactile memory. You remember a quote saying a certain thing, but you also remember it being in a footnote on the bottom right of a page, and not having many pages left in your right hand. That can be lost with an e-book, but you can re-engage that sense by taking time to flip through an e-book before reading it in earnest, making sure you highlight and create notes, and then going back through checking those highlights and notes when you finish. (Again, I read a post to this effect somewhere and now cannot find it, because, as you see, while I am engaged in improving my note-taking practise, it isn’t perfect. If you recognise this advice as your advice, please let me know and I’ll credit you.)

Have you tried keeping a commonplace book yourself? Do you have any advice? Is there anything I’m doing wrong? Please do say in the comments!

Some Thoughts on 2023 – A Year in Review

It’s been a hell of a year and I’m knackered. I’ve put off writing this post until I either completed my reading challenge or knew I absolutely wouldn’t be able to. The other day I just squeaked over the line having finished my fortieth book. How did I do it? I read a couple of chapbooks last week to make sure I got over the line, because as arbitrary as it is, I’ve completed the challenge for the last ten-odd years and didn’t want this year to be the time I failed it. I need a bit of constancy.

It was a struggle because I started a new and very challenging job this year and because I was also going through the stuff I discussed in this post. Let’s look at the top five most viewed posts I published this year:

Dinosaur Jr. at the Garage – Celebrating 30 Years of Where You Been?

What You End Up Missing

Some Thoughts on William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy

Some Thoughts on Thurston Moore’s Sonic Life

I Think I Thrive Under a Lack of Accountability

I’m glad some of these pieces proved popular. I posted some personal essays on this blog that I originally wrote for my Substack before giving up because the vibes were off. (I should listen to myself more often.) The concert review at the top was borne out of an impulse to make sure I take more notes. I’ve been to some excellent shows I can barely remember and feel sad about now. My review of Sonic Life was quite popular too, but I do know a lot of Sonic Youth fans.

I’ve got no idea how that mid-year accountability post was so popular. I can barely summon the energy to look and see if I kept to my word. Oh, ok then, but later in this post.

And the top 5 overall this year:

Some Thoughts on le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies

So, You Want to be a Dick-head?

Ender’s Game and the Hitler Comparison

So, You Want to Read Ulysses?

Some Thoughts on Len Deighton’s Game, Set, and Match

No surprise here – some of my higher effort and more quality posts – but that top one on Legacy of Spies is odd. I’ve noticed it getting a lot of views on and off and only recently realised it was driving a lot of traffic to my blog. I just checked and it turns out it’s on the front page of Google if you search for that novel’s title. Go me!

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The Resolutions.

• I want to read more classics.

Yeah, this didn’t happen. It’s fine.

• I want to write with less fear, exactly what I want, for myself.

I’m trying. Still trying.

• I want to spend more time listening to music.

I have been. Or at least, I feel like I have been. Need to wait for my last.fm to update to know for sure. Plus I went to a gig this year and want to go to more next year.

• I want to be more present.

I’m working on it.

• I want to keep going for walks.

I have been – I’ve got a psychogeography project that I’m deciding what to do with, plenty of material ready to go. Remember what I said about less guilt? I’m a white guy with a beard and I like walking. It was only a matter of time before I used the word “psychogeography”. I make no apologies.

• I want to more actively consider what I can do to make the lives of those around me better. I want to widen my definition of “those around me”.

If only you knew.

• More writing by hand. More journaling. More sketching situations and dumping my brain.

I have been, and it’s been great. Been journaling regularly, started writing with pencil again as well for a properly analogue experience. I’ll be writing an essay about that soon probably. I fell into the world of pencil blogs this year, particularly Polar Pencil Pusher, and ended up treating myself to some fancy pencils. It’s great. I need more hobbies and it’s cheaper than golf.

• Fewer new projects, some considered work on old ones.

Whoops.

• More rest. Less guilt.

I’m trying.

• I want to read the books I already own. We have books at home. More frugality, consideration of purchases, using what I already have.

I’ve ended up buying more books. I always do. I am aware of this and am trying.

• Make the most of opportunities I’ve already been given, see them for the value they have.

I’m trying.

• I want to watch more movies.

I did! I went to the cinema a bunch. I did the Barbenheimer thing and I loved it. Saw the new Mission Impossible as well.

• I do not want to start a TikTok or pivot to video.

I still haven’t.

• I want to read more books by women (that I already own).

I read ten books by women and twenty-nine by men. Sorry. I’m aware of it.

• I want to read more books in translation (that I already own).

Of the forty books I read, five were in translation. It’s fine. At least I know.

• I want to submit more of my poetry.

I got lazy with this because I was super burned out by the end of the year, but I did get a poem into an anthology from Civic Leicester this year, which I am still super proud of!

• I want to spend more time with friends.

I’ve tried to say yes more but see previous comment about burnout.

• I want to read something a friend has recommended (that I already own). 

There’s a few books on the pile that friends have loaned me. I’ll get there.

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There you have it. It is what it is.

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If there’s one thing I’m glad I decided to start doing this year, it was just taking more notes. More journaling, general notes, that kind of thing. Writing things down does help you think and it helps you fix things in your mind.

There are things I wish I remembered or had more extensive notes on – going forward I’m taking as many notes as possible.

I have my reading journal in a notebook which I’m using to track the basics about what I’m reading, but I’ve also started a spreadsheet that I’m using to keep more granular data in a format that I control and that isn’t at the whim of a billionaire who might decide to blow up the platform for the hell of it.

(What’s happened to Twitter should give us all a lot of pause and make us think about where we keep our data, and what technology we chose to use.)

I really like the reading spreadsheet I put together. I’m using it to track:

• Title
• Author
• Author’s Gender
• Translated By
• Translator’s Gender
• Year Translated
• Year Originally Published
• Year Published
• Publisher
• ISBN
• Genre
• Form
• Format
• Pages
• Source (as in, where did I get the book from)
• Date Finished
• Difference In Year Between Original Publication and Edition I Read

I know Goodreads do their own end of year thingy (here’s mine), but like I said, my spreadsheet can be more granular, and I control it. It’s how I figured out the gender split in my reading that I talked about above. Some more interesting stats include:

• The oldest thing I read was published in 1863 (Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life).
• I’ve read thirteen books published in the last decade or so, which isn’t bad considering I have a friend who constantly disparages how old my reading tastes skew.
• I’ve read twenty-one non-fiction books this year compared to twelve novels. I’ve definitely been reading more non-fiction deliberately as I’ve made a conscious decision that I’m not that interested in writing fiction at the moment. It took me a long time to realise I could write about real life, and I’ve taken more of an interest in reading about it, too.
• The longest book I read was A History of the World in 100 Objects at 707 pages (it was excellent and I highly recommend it). The shortest was Antinous by Fernando Pessoa, which was twelve pages in print and I read to bump my stats because I didn’t want to fail my reading challenge.
• My spreadsheet makes the average length of the books I’ve read this year 247 (and a bit) pages. Goodreads makes it 250.
• Of the forty books I read, sixteen of them were published by Penguin. No other publisher came close.
• I read twenty-one paperbacks and eighteen e-books. I tell people I don’t have a preference and will read in any medium, and it’s nice to see it come out in the stats.
• I read one hardback (the excellent Sonic Life). I prefer paperbacks and the stats show it.
• Of the physical books I read, the most common source was the library. This’d be higher but I don’t work in a library any more. Of the e-books, six were from Google Play (it’s a good source) and five were from Kindle. Nice and balanced.
• I only read one graphic novel this year. I tend to binge them when I do read them – I just haven’t been in the mood.
• My top three genres 1) History 2) Science Fiction 3) Essays (essays got a late bump because I read two Joan Didion collections). I’m still not sure about recording genres. This might get more specific later.
• I feel like I flit about and don’t read systemically and I can see it clear as day on this sheet. There were only three instances of me reading books by the same author back-to-back, and only a couple of clusters when it came to genre.

All in all, it’s really fun having a year of reading data at my fingertips like this. I’ll probably do a post on starting your own spreadsheet. It’s really easy.

But enough stats, what about feelings?

I deliberately don’t record a score on my own spreadsheet because I don’t care. If a book makes me feel something, it’s not going to boil down to a number. I journal about it, or I try and remember Scott Hanselman’s principle about not wasting your keystrokes and I type it up into a review to clarify and fix my own thoughts before sharing them.

I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole watching YouTube videos on software development this year. I’ve bounced off trying to learn to code a few times, but the principles and ideas involved still fascinate me. Scott Hanselman in particular is a really good example of how anything can be interesting and you can make anything engaging. This talk about him migrating his website to a new host is just fantastic storytelling any way you slice it:

But again, to my feelings. The best book I read this year, the one I enjoyed most? Probably Speedboat, which I knew I’d love and put off reading because I knew I’d only be able to read it for the first time once. I realised it affected me deeply because I put it down and immediately wanted to write a novel in slavish imitation.

Sonic Life is a late contender for favourite read and my favourite non-fiction one. I’m a huge Sonic Youth fan. I was always going to love this one.

The biggest surprise was Stanley Tucci’s autobiography Taste. My partner got loaned it by a friend and I picked it up because it was yellow and looked fun – and I came away with a fresh perspective on the lives of working class Italian Americans in the middle 20^th Century, as well as a lot of insight into Italian cooking, and food in general.

The biggest disappointment was probably Antwerp by Roberto Bolaño. I’ve wanted to read him for a while and picked this out of the library because it was short. I’ve since learned that his estate are strip mining his extant drafts for anything remotely publishable regardless of its real merit. The Hendrix Estate Manoeuvrer. Antwerp, in it’s sub-Burroughsian meanderings, falls into this category. I’ve got a copy of 2666 and I’ll read it one day, and I know I’ll like The Savage Detectives when I do get around to it.

I’ve read a couple of Joan Didion Collections in the past month, The White Album and Slouching Toward Bethlehem, in that order. I do see what all the fuss is about now. Wasn’t expecting her to be as funny as I found her.

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Here’s another end of year reading data tool someone just linked me, and here’s the graphic it put together for me. It’s great, check it out!

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I joined a D&D group this year which is still going strong. It’s a hell of a lot of fun and I suggest anyone try a TTRPG if they haven’t. I was a bit worried I’d struggle but 5E is so simple compared to what I remember of AD&D or 3E. I’ve been reasonably diligent about writing up and posting my notes from that campaign. They’re mostly for the benefit of myself and the group, but they’re here if you do want to read them.

I’ve been a bit hot and cold on social media in general (my new phone gives me screen time reports and the only thing worse than knowing I’ve spent six hours on Football Manager is knowing I’ve somehow spent six hours on Facebook), but I have been posting on and off on my Instagram accounts, a bookish one and one where I mostly post photos of empty spaces like someone who has a problem. Follow them if you like.

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A post shared by James (@jimreadsbooks)

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A post shared by Liminal Jim (@jimliminal)

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There you have it. I accomplished a lot this year. Learned a bunch, too. About myself, about life. Picked up some new skills, honed some old ones. If I really look at it objectively it’s going ok.

See you next year!

Some Thoughts on Thinking about the Roman Empire

There’s an account on Twitter (I’m not calling it X) whose tweets I found interesting, but I always felt icky about following. I didn’t think I could quite trust them or their motives. They’d post threads analysing ancient buildings and texts – stuff I was interested in and wanted to know more about. It seemed innocuous.

What made me suspicious was that their avatar was a marble statue.

I try and be reasonable. I didn’t see anything in the tweets that put me off as such, but after a while I listened to my gut and unfollowed.

I poked my head back in Twitter the other day to see what was going on. Someone retweeted the aforementioned account in to my timeline.

“I wonder what kinda stuff they’re posting now,” I thought to myself.

Yeah, they’re explicitly fascist now. It’s all memes about homesteading and videos of men working on oil rigs, the comments full of people talking about “this is what they took from you.”

Well, at least their mask is off, I guess?

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I was reminded of this experience the other day when I saw all the news stories about how often men think about the Roman Empire. Apparently quite a lot, and with some disturbing implications for the future of democracy.

It made me take stock. How often do I think about the Roman Empire? Not very often. There’s a lot of classical texts I want to read, a lot of stuff translated from Latin is a part of that, not because of it’s Roman-ness, just because it’s part of the canon. I’ve read some Stoic stuff and found it interesting if not useful. (I might be misunderstanding it, but I’ll just say that I think some things are not meant to be endured).

The other thing I think about, and quite a lot, is Fallout: New Vegas, which I am certain is among the best games ever made and is definitely my favourite, and which features a faction that deliberately apes the Roman Empire… as a means to take territory, enslave people, and generally commit crimes against humanity.

Caesar, the leader of this faction, is one of those guys who thinks about the Roman Empire all the time. He was previously a man called Edward Sallow, and he was a linguist who was captured by a hostile tribe. (He was a member of the Followers of the Apocalypse before this. Basically post-apocalyptic anarchists. Don’t get me started on the embittered leftist to alt-right pipeline). The organisational structure of the Roman Empire was something he used to dominate those around him, and, once he had gained power, find new peoples and territories to dominate. He dresses it up with lots of fancy talk about Hegelian dialectics and historical synthesis, but the real and true core of his ideology is to accumulate power by any means necessary, the Roman Empire serving as window dressing.

Edward Sallow would 100% have a Twitter timeline full of fascist guys with marble statue avatars, and would have one of those accounts himself. He’d have a firmer grasp of the primary texts, at least.

(An aside: I recently saw Oppenheimer and it is excellent. My favourite bit in the movie, apart from the vast silence that follows the Trinity test, is the bit where Oppenheimer is at a gathering of fellow travellers. He gets ribbed about some finer point of Marxist orthodoxy and counters by saying that he’s read all three volumes of Das Kapital, in the original German. Chevalier quips that that makes him one of their best-read comrades.)

Plenty of other factions practise slavery in the wastelands of the Fallout games; Caesar’s Legion is just the one that comes up with the most complex justification for it.

Ok, maybe not more complex than Vault City.

I think it’s a real strength of the Fallout games that if you genuinely agree with this kind of perspective (or you are playing a character that does), then you can enact that ethical stance in the game. You can side with the Master in the first Fallout, and you can join the Legion in New Vegas. I mean, there’s much less content on that side of the game; it’s clear what the developers felt strongly about (or focused on based on a tight deadline and what they thought the majority of players wanted to play), but it’s there if you’re on the right of the political spectrum and the ideology genuinely speaks to you.

And that isn’t to say that it’s all one-sided “democracy good, fash bad” storytelling. The democracy in New Vegas, the NCR, has pretty much all the same problems our modern day democracies have (it’s an expansionist gerontocracy that is unduly influenced by special interests and a monied class). They are the thesis to the Legion’s antithesis, as Caesar would put it, and they’re in the Mojave with as much consent by the governed as the Legion are, which is to say, none. They do have slightly more progressive gender politics though.

I also don’t have an answer for the kind of, misdirected masculinity?, that this cultural moment around the Roman Empire represents. What kind of environment have we built where people feel so out of place that they want to return to a time of slavery and death sports?

Or maybe it’s just at the forefront of people’s minds because it’s hit TikTok, and this impulse has been around for a long time. Swords and sandals have always appealed. This is just the latest manifestation of that. And Gladiator is a fucking great movie to be fair.

When I think about the Roman Empire, I think about New Vegas. I love it. It’s my favourite game. Go play it if you haven’t. Or watch these videos if you need more convincing.

I still intend to read some Roman texts, and I’d love to have a proper run at Gibbon one day, but if I do, I won’t be thinking about how cool it would be to live in Roman times, I’ll be thinking about Edward Sallow.

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¹ Header image source: https://fallout.wiki/wiki/Caesar#/media/File:FNV_Caesar_infobox.jpg

Some Thoughts on Not Wasting Your Keystrokes

Recently I came across a great idea that I’ve been talking about with everybody who’ll listen – Scott Hanselman’s exhortation to not waste your key strokes.

I love this idea. It speaks to my own impulse to write so I leave something of myself behind. It isn’t purely selfish, as the idea is that if you know something, and you’re in a position where you’re going to tell someone about it, it’s better to work that knowledge into a shareable form that’s accessible while you’re not in the building and then send them the link, rather than putting it in one email to one person. Thus advances humanity.

Think about the amount of times a Reddit comment from ten years ago has saved your ass. And then think about the times you’ve been screwed at work because the only person who can answer your question just went home, or quit, or is on holiday.

Or died.

Single points of failure really suck.

I’d already kinda come to a similar conclusion myself. I’ve had this blog for over ten years now and part of the reason I started it was to share some knowledge while it was still fresh in my brain. I remembered how impenetrable Ulysses was before I finally made some progress and decided to write my undergrad thesis on it. I didn’t want that knowledge to sit on a shelf somewhere, so I whipped it up as accessibly as I could and turned it into this blogpost. Ditto my post on academic essay writing; a lot of my friends were asking me for advice around that time, so I thought why not do a post.

(I am not an expert, I’ve just shared what I know, whatever that is).

And I remember hearing about the Sims reading list and not being able to find an easy copy of it. I ended up finding a photograph someone had taken of a page in the manual and posted to Twitter. It definitely wasn’t on Goodreads back then like it is now. Still, in the spirit of sharing, I transcribed it and threw it up on my blog. It got linked to under a Super Bunnyhop video which is like, a career highlight for me. A few other people have found it since and hopefully it’s been of use to them.

I try take and share notes at work as often as I can. I take the notes for my own benefit (if you think your memory is flawless you’ve just forgotten how bad your memory is). But if I’ve got them, I might as well share them. And I work in a sector where outcomes aren’t always obvious; being able to demonstrate change is really important. A trail of notes helps me do that, and sharing the notes means my colleagues can spot patterns that have eluded me.

Then there’s my D&D campaign journal. We’re a few sessions in and I’m already finding the notes from earlier sessions invaluable. It’s nice to know the name of the blacksmith, and keep track of what your character owes their party. And it’s up on a blog, so other people in the group can access it as they please. And if anyone else finds it entertaining, then great!

I used to really love sites like GameFAQs and Everything², and I was really sad that I didn’t have the skill or the knowledge base to contribute to places like that at the time. I’m glad I’ve found someone who has put a name to this impulse.

So yeah, don’t waste your keystrokes! Writing what you know is the first thing people tell you for a reason, but consider what you know that you could share, for the betterment of humanity and our collective knowledge, the way the internet was supposed to be.

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1. Header image source: https://negativespace.co/white-keyboard/

So, I Joined a Dungeons & Dragons Group

And I’m loving it.

We’ve only had two sessions so far but I’m having a blast. I’ve rolled myself up (ok, stat arrayed myself up) a human barbarian who is totally not Conan. In fact, I’ve accidentally reverse engineered Conan. I designed a guy with a mercenary/military background, who has a really sharp sense of fairness, and who now wanders the land until he witnesses an injustice, where he will, with a cold rage, despatch the people who would exploit and abuse those weaker than them.

A bit like Jack Reacher.

Who is pretty much Conan the Barbarian.

Oh well.

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I’ve had an interest in D&D ever since I played the original Baldur’s Gate, along with the other Infinity Engine games Icewind Dale and Planescape Torment, and learned about the ruleset behind all the mechanics. What the hell is THAC0? Why is a lower number better for armour? I didn’t really have an appreciation of what tabletop D&D looked like. I didn’t know any elder nerds who could guide me. I hung around at the Games Workshop a bit, and I collected and painted a bit of 40k, but otherwise D&D was mostly a computer game thing for me.

Some friends and I got invited to join a tabletop group when I was in my late teens. They were playing 3.5e. We were joining to replace some players who left, I think? I just remember being given a character that someone had been playing before me. It was a dwarven monk that was basically fitted out to wrestle things to death, and also, he was mute.

I can’t imagine how *annoying* that must have been for the DM. This was my first ever TTRPG experience, and I was having to figure out the 3.5e grapple rules. Yeah.

Had loads of fun though. I remember nothing about that campaign, except, through a combination of careful argument and good rolls, one of the other players launching me in the air to grapple with a dragon.

Oh, I also remember how frustrating it was not to be able to speak. The group had decided on an RP thing before I joined where another player knew sign language and so did I, so I could “talk” directly to him, and then he’d relay it to the group. The DM eventually took pity on me and decided to give me back my power of speech through a demonic bargain with what turned out to be the BBEG. I can’t remember if the debt ever got called.

It annoys me that I can’t remember anything about this campaign, and I daren’t have a look at any of my journals from this time. This was a period in my life where I was otherwise Not Happy. My journals probably don’t have anything about this campaign anyway. Probably just complaining about a girl.

So this new group, this new campaign, I am determined to take lots of notes. I’ve got a nice fresh notebook I am using exclusively to capture our tabletop sessions, and I am recording the dates and session numbers. I am not logging every action, just taking general notes the way I am trying to in other contexts in my life. (See my post on keeping a journal, and keeping a reading journal. I really need to get on my post about keeping a commonplace book).

I am also considering taking part in this group to be storytelling practise; D&D is just storytelling after all. The rules give it structure and the dice give it a frisson of unpredictability, but really, what you’re doing is telling a fantastic story with a group of friends. I’ve enjoyed the fantasy I have read (Book of the New Sun was boss and of course I love Tolkien), and I’ve got more on my shelves too read, but I’ve never really tried writing it.

So I’m writing up my notes from my character’s perspective. A bit of backstory, too, but I intend to flesh that out more as the campaign goes on. I’ve been reading up on West Marches campaigns and I really like the idea that it can be really valuable to your group to keep a record, but it can also be fun to see how you’ve perceived events, what was important to you and what wasn’t.

I also really, really like Scott Hanselman’s ideas about not wasting your keystrokes. I absolutely see the value in writing something up just for myself, but if I intend to share it, I could just share it among the WhatsApp group, or I could put it up on a blog to make it more accessible and allow other people to possibly get some enjoyment out of it too.

So that’s what I’ve done. You can read it here. There should be a new post every couple weeks. I’ve put it on a separate blog because I’m not sure the people who read this one (all three of you) are interested in a D&D 5e campaign journal. But hey, if you are, let me know, I haven’t spent any money and could always change where I’m posting. I’ll probably be writing a bit more about D&D on this blog anyway, as it pertains to SFF, as I want to do something on Appendix N/E.

I’m already having to stop myself buying a new set of dice every week, and am thinking about maybe running my own game for my family. Soon I’ll be looking at new games. There are some Fallout TTRPG systems I’d like to try…

Do you listen to music when you work?

I do, but not always. I tend to want to listen to an album, and an album is a commitment, so choosing an album can get in the way if I’ve had an idea and need to start getting it down right away. I struggled to start this piece because I wanted to try write with music in the background and I couldn’t decide what.

I settled on Dopesmoker, because I haven’t listened to it in a while and there aren’t too many words in it.

I struggle trying to write and listening to something with a lot of meaning in it that my brain is trying to decipher, willingly or not. It’s dangerously close to multitasking, and you can’t really multitask, only switch between tasks, and at a cost.

I wouldn’t have thought about this, except that I’ve done things like practise scales on the guitar while watching YouTube, which does kinda work, at least for muscle memory. I’m sure there’s someone out there upset I wasn’t paying proper attention to the intervals.

(It’s me, who is terrible at identifying intervals, lamenting my past self. I’m the one who is upset.)

Oh YouTube, something I absolutely cannot do while I write. I tell myself I can, and then I hear an interesting bit and want to see the context, and bam, I’ve alt-tabbed. I can clearly see the insidious influence that Facebook or Twitter have had on me, but I’m starting to think YouTube has hooked me deeply in a way I never expected.

Maybe if I was a painter, or a sculptor, I’d have an easier time listening to music while I work, the contexts not clashing as much. I don’t really have any visual art as part of my overall creative practise and I probably should.

My most vivid memory of drawing: an art class in year 8 (I was about 13). The homework? To draw a picture of your house. So I did, I got out a ruler, and I planned it out, all straight lines and right angles, just like my house actually was.

The feedback was one sentence.

“Do not use a ruler.”

What can I say, I was using methods I thought would best capture the form I saw. I wonder how many other kids broke out a ruler. Probably a lot. I think of myself as a reasonably creative person but apart from this anecdote and a memory of an excited discussion about Metal Gear Solid 3 with a classmate who’d picked up a copy before me, I have almost no recollection of these classes.

Nothing highlights my personal growth to me more than how I feel when I think of all the free, state-mandated education I had access to and didn’t take full advantage of.

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Sometimes I’ll grab a notebook and sit by the backdoor in my kitchen and write. I’ll leave the back window open so I can hear the birds, wind, trees, children, my cat meowing to be let in. I’d leave the door open, but there’s a neighbourhood cat who keeps trying to get into our house. We love him, but he isn’t our cat.

There’s a passage in Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas where she describes how she liked to write to the sounds and the rhythm of Paris around her. She’d drive to a busy, central street somewhere in Montmarte, crack the window a bit, and proceed to get out her notebook and write.

“She was much influenced by the sound of the streets and the movement of the automobiles. She also liked them to set a sentence for herself as a sort of tuning fork and metronome and then write to that time and tune.”

From the Project Gutenberg Australia edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Similar to what people try and do in coffee shops I suppose, although every time I try it I just end up daydreaming and people watching – which can be useful to the work in general, but it is emphatically Not Writing.

The urban environment tends to be most fruitful for my writing when I’m walking through it, not sitting in it.

Maybe if I was a luthier, I’d be able to listen to podcasts while I worked, the way Ted Woodford does.

I can’t recommend Ted Woodford’s channel highly enough, by the way, if you have any interest at all in stringed instruments.

YouTube might suck up a lot of my attention, but it’s also given me a window into the lives of people I’d always had a curiosity about but would never have been able to see. What does the day to day life of a luthier look like? Well, now you can see, and that’s pretty fucking cool, even if it means you’re not writing.

Ah who am I kidding, I’d find some other way to distract myself. For a long time I toyed with the idea of writing a series of essays on albums I associate with certain games. For example, around the time I got a copy of Resident Evil 4, I also got The Smith’s Singles and the Melvins album Houdini.

Yeah, what a combo, right?

Any time I hear a major Smiths song now, or any song off Houdini, I have a vivid sense memory (kinda like the one I wrote about here) of that summer I spent playing Resident Evil 4.

I coulda made this even more granular. Back in Vanilla World of Warcraft (or Classic now, I guess), levelling took ages. If you were a newbie, you might spend weeks in a zone. So, for example, around the time I got my first character, a dwarven warrior, to the badlands, I’d also picked up a copy of White Light/White Heat, and I now inextricably associate that album of avant-garde New York rock with a zone in a videogame.

Maybe I will write that essay.

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Header image courtesy of Karolina Grabowska.

“Truth be told, I think I thrive under a lack of accountability.”

I am not normally very good at keeping to resolutions, if I even bother to make them in the first place, but I have resolved this year to live more intentionally (which isn’t on this list, ffs James). I am trying to do things because I want to do them and not because I’ve always done them, and really prioritise and make space for things that feed my soul. Which is very wishy-washy, but it’s 2023, and we’ve all been through a lot.

This is not an exercise in punishment or criticism. This is simply me having a look at things I wanted to do back in January and see if I have made the space in my life to do them. If I am doing them, great. If I’m not, why not? There could be a challenge involved, or maybe further reflection has led me away from the desire.

Maybe I’ve been playing too much Hearthstone Battlegrounds.

(I’ve kept track of what I’ve been reading for the last ten or so years using Goodreads. This year I decided to start my own spreadsheet to track my reading, and also a paper reading journal. You should keep a journal. Elon Musk can’t buy it and ruin it.)

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• I want to read more classics.

This resolution has instantly made me notice an issue with my spreadsheet that I am going to correct. I’ve been recording the year of the editions I’ve read, but not the year those books were originally published. This is why we measure and reflect, right?

That said, by my quick reckoning, I’ve read some modern classics, like some Gertude Stein, James Joyce, Kerouac, Renata Adler, but nothing published before 1900. So I’ve not held up this resolution so far, really. That’s fine.

• I want to write with less fear, exactly what I want, for myself.

Hard to quantify, but I’ve definitely been writing with less of an eye on what I think might be publishable and just getting it out and worrying about it later. So, yeah kinda.

• I want to spend more time listening to music.

I should’ve made this easier to quantify, but I don’t have last.fm pro. I did listen to more music in 2022 than 2021, and I’ve been consciously trying to put music on instead of playing YouTube videos in the background. So, maybe.

• I want to be more present.

Hard to quantify, but I definitely feel the universe has been a bit more open to me than usual. I’ve had a few experiences to that effect.

• I want to keep going for walks.

It’s my main form of exercise, pretty much. I haven’t taken much time to go out walking just to walk, but I have had a lot on with a new job and some personal stuff. I can work on this one.

• I want to more actively consider what I can do to make the lives of those around me better.

I try. I volunteer a bit. I’m helpful when it’s obvious to me how I can be helpful.

• I want to widen my definition of “those around me”.

Between volunteering and my job I’m more part of a community than ever and I really like it.

• More writing by hand. More journaling.

I have been. I’ve been keeping a regular journal, a reading journal, a commonplace book (that I need to write a post about), extensive notes at work, and also a personal scratch notebook I keep on me. It’s been pretty useful!

• More sketching situations and dumping my brain.

Yep, been doing this. Maybe not as often as I should, but still. Ties in with the note taking above.

• Fewer new projects, some considered work on old ones.

I started a new writing project a couple months ago, sorry. But, it’s closely related to some notes I was pulling together last year, so it kinda doesn’t count? For the purposes of these resolutions, blogging is “considered work on an old project”. I’ve had this blog for over ten years!

• More rest. Less guilt.

A WIP. I read Rest is Resistance and it really bought some things in to focus for me.

• I want to read the books I already own. We have books at home.

Of the twenty three books I’ve read so far this year, five have been from the library (which is fine). I have bought some books this year. Quite a few books. It makes me happy. I don’t think stopping entirely is ever gonna work for me.

• More frugality, consideration of purchases, using what I already have.

I get a book out of the library if I can – if I can’t, I try get it on sale as an e-book or get a used copy. I haven’t spent too much on other hobbies really. I still buy things, but I know things won’t make me happy on their own.

• Make the most of opportunities I’ve already been given, see them for the value they have.

WIP. I’m in the right place.

• I want to watch more movies.

I haven’t done this, but I did watch True Detective, and I’ve seen a couple classics movies this year I never had before, like All the Presidents Men, and An Officer and a Gentleman. Maybe I should start a Letterboxd but I don’t know if I have another social media profile in me.

• I do not want to start a TikTok or pivot to video.

Well, I haven’t.

• I want to read more books by women (that I already own).

Of the twenty three books I’ve read so far this year, six have been by women. I could be doing better. Ice was a particularly highlight.

• I want to read more books in translation (that I already own).

Of the twenty three books I’ve read so far this year, two have been in translation, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and Bolaño’s Antwerp. I’m chipping away at Proust as well, the Moncrieff version. So, could be doing better.

• I want to submit more of my poetry.

I just haven’t had the capacity. Which is a roundabout way of saying I’ve deliberately let this ball drop. I still would like to sub more things in general, but it isn’t as important to me as just doing the work, so I figure if I’m making progress, on something, anything, even if no lit mag would ever touch it or I would never dream of subbing it, it’s fine.

I did sub something last year that got published this year: I wrote a poem about Bretton Library and it appeared in Civic Leicester’s Welcome to Britain anthology. This is a big win fellas.

• I want to spend more time with friends.

I have. I’ve tried to do things at weekends. I’ve made a conscious effort to stay in touch with people from my last job, and to make sure I’m in regular contact with people I value but can’t see all the time. I’ve just joined a D&D group for the first time in a long time.

• I want to read something a friend has recommended (that I already own).

A friend lent us Stanley Tucci’s memoir, Taste, and it was exquisite. Her husband has lent me The Shortest History of Germany by James Hawes and I am looking forward to getting stuck into it. But I didn’t already own them. Hmm. I’m gonna have to work on this one.

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There you have it. I wouldn’t have bored you with it except a lot of them ended up relating to reading or my creative practise in general, and you might find it helpful. Did you have any resolutions? How are you doing with them?

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(Speaking of measuring things, I did start a Librarything this year and I had a blast cataloguing my collection. The breakdown it provides is really interesting, even if it did confirm things I could mostly tell at a glance. Will do a post on that, too, once I’ve got my thoughts together.)

Header image source: https://www.hippopx.com/en/measuring-tape-measurement-tools-construction-instrument-of-measurement-construction-industry-ruler-141092

Some Thoughts on “Low-Value Degrees”

I sent this letter to The Guardian the last time there was a lot of chatter in the news about low-value degrees, degrees with poor graduate outcomes, mickey mouse degrees, whatever you want to call them. I had actually intended to post it here but didn’t get around to it, so here it is, in lightly edited form. 

It comes back to my mind because the conversation has wrapped back around again and the government continues to exert pressure on universities when it comes to humanities education. 

I still have the passions that led me to study English Literature and still apply and develop the skills that I learned on that course in my day to day life, both personally and professionally. My circumstances have changed a fair bit since I sent this letter to The Guardian and I now think it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that I earn a living entirely by the things I learned and abilities I sharpened at university. 

It is a perfectly fine thing to want to study Computer Science, and I am grateful every day that I had access to computers early enough in my life that using them feels natural to me, because they sure are an important part of life today. But so is being able to communicate with people, and I am grateful to have those skills too. 

One last thing. To a lot of people, Boris Johnson is the platonic ideal of a Prime Minister: when they think of who best embodies all the most important and difficult to cultivate qualities that make an effective leader in the modern world, it’s him they think of. 

And he studied classics, and quotes Homer every chance he gets, in the original. 

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My English Literature degree has not made me rich. I have a lot of friends who did degrees in Computer Science that are now, by my standards, very wealthy. 

Would I do anything differently?

Absolutely not. 

The three years I spent studying for my degree were a constant process of interrogating my own perspective on the world, and engaging with other people’s perspectives. It is common to make connections at University. I would wager the connections made on humanities courses are the deepest. The works we discussed and analysed dredged out things we didn’t know about ourselves and would never guess about each other. I’m a better, more empathetic person, and the skills I learned in those seminars I use every day. 

Those aren’t the only skills I use every day. The ability to not just question, but to question to an end, is immensely useful in navigating our current cultural landscape. Knowing what a headline is really saying: very useful. Detecting bullshit in a tweet: very useful. Being able to clearly get my point across to a local representative: yeah, that’s come in handy a few times lately. 

The further I get into adult life, the more I realise I’m privileged because I have the ability to just compose an email. I can think of what I need to say, write it down, proof it quickly, and be done with it. I have come across enough people who can’t do this to make me really value my own ability. If I need to write a cover letter, I can just write one. Copy for a product I’m selling? I can do it. Hybrid blogpost and response to The Guardian? Yeah. 

I also enjoy books more. And not just books, but every kind of media I engage with. People like to think of Literature courses as being a place where you can learn to be terminally over-analytical. Well, they teach you all sorts, you don’t have to go through the rest of your life needing to puzzle out why Dickens made the curtains a certain colour. But being able to read The Waste Land and know what some of the references are about; that is a fantastic feeling, even if it’ll never make me a penny more. Life has to be worth living, and by God if my degree hasn’t given a lot of meaning to my life. 

I will probably not be able to retire to the south of France. Fine. I know enough to know that some of this is down to my own choices, and some of this is down to the fact that I live in Peterborough. We chronically undervalue the arts, we don’t worry about creating jobs in the arts or paying people much if anything to work in them. That’s the issue. Not the arts degrees themselves. We’ve always undervalued “soft skills”.

Life isn’t all about money. I learnt that doing my English Literature degree. 

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Header image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ghozt_Tramp_-_Business_Communication_Duplicat_model.jpg

What You End Up Missing

And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses.

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff

I never expected to have a madeleine moment at a urinal, but that’s the thing, you can’t “expect” them. 

In the course of my work I spend a lot of time at community centres talking to people and just generally being in the space and being pleasant. I really like it. It’s proper community work which I never thought I’d be good at, let alone enjoy. The other day I ended up at a centre that I spent a lot of time at during the height of the pandemic, because my partner was the manager there during 2020. 

A lot of these places didn’t really close during the pandemic because of their food provisions. Basically, if you were a food bank, community fridge, or something similar, you were an essential service with Key Workers (remember that?), and you could stay open to help feed people: a service that was more in need than ever because of the economic turmoil that the pandemic caused. The one my partner worked at was a community fridge, which meant that they had an arrangement with someone who would help them collect surplus food from supermarkets to be distributed by the centre for free, and anyone could turn up and get free food without any checks or referrals. 

And they did, every Wednesday afternoon, loads of people, more than my partner could reasonably handle on her own, and her staff hadn’t been unfurloughed yet, so myself and her daughter would go help out. We’d been furloughed as well, and all lived in the same house and could walk to the centre, so we weren’t really increasing the infection risk or anything like that. It made sense. 

I did a bit of everything. I’d help move crates, sort food, take out trash, clean, help with crowd and COVID controls (‘Two metres please sir, two metres remember?’), be an extra body in case anyone was being antisocial (which did sometimes happen because it was June 2020 and everybody was way past the end of their rope), and just generally be a pair of hands. 

And at the time, I didn’t really like it. 

I mean, the world was ending, I was alternately scared and bored, I didn’t know whether I’d have a job to go back to. (I did, but not without some aggro, as the charity I worked for collapsed due to the pandemic). My grandmother had died in February and I didn’t have any time to process it because the world was in lockdown a week after her funeral. I had never seen anyone die before. I was just generally not having a good time. Nobody was.

It was a long, hot summer too, and I was doing a lot of physical work helping out, so I drank a lot of  water, so I had to use the lavatory a lot. Above the urinals in the men’s room at this community centre, there was a chart, placed there by the boxing club based out of the gym on the other side of the building. It was a chart with examples to help you estimate how dehydrated you were based on your urine colour. And I read it every time. It was right there, with no other distractions, and an enforced lull. I read it tens of times. 

I went back to this community centre for work a few weeks ago and it was perfectly nice. I love the staff, I love the customers, it was mostly the same, but when I went to the toilet and saw that chart, the whole sensory memory of that summer came flooding back. 

The heat in general. The boredom, the anxiety. The hot dust that’d get disturbed when we started setting out the crates of food, because we only opened once a week for the food distribution which was the only thing we were allowed to do there. The smell of rotting fruit, because if we had some left over and couldn’t find anywhere to take it and give it out themselves, we’d have to bin it, and they weren’t collecting commercial bins often at the time, so there’d be weeks worth of bananas liquefying in a boiling metal bin, and it got to where my partner couldn’t even bear to stand in that general area and smell it, so it was my job to take the rubbish out. In one of the corridors you could smell the same air freshener that Jangro seem to supply to every public place, one they also supplied to my own workplace that I still wouldn’t go back to for a couple months. Air even wetter than the atmosphere outside because at the end I’d have to sweep and then mop, while I said to myself well at least I am doing an honest day’s work. 

Not least of all, the faces of the people who’d come through every week, all of which I now know and am happy to be in the same community as, some of which would go on to become good friends and acquaintances. It provided me with a sense of connection that, even in the middle of it all, that first COVID summer, I did not know how badly I needed. 

It all came back to me, and I missed it. 

Never thought I’d end up missing the height of lockdown. 

Reflecting on it now I can’t help but be glad I got the opportunity. I got to do something I wouldn’t normally have done and it connected me with a community and a way of working I wouldn’t have experienced otherwise. I can draw a direct line between that sign above the urinal and the life I live now. It’s not as romantic an image as as the young Proust dipping a madeleine into a cup of lime flower tea, but the effect was much the same. 

(You should volunteer, by the way. It’s good for you.)