Which my nearly 19 year old daughter said to me when she was maybe five or six and I told her about climate change for the first time. April is a more rain, more rainbows month. The kind that’s more winter than anything else at the beginning and by the end, if you’re lucky, is full blown spring.
This year, we were lucky.
April’s my birthday month, feels more like the start of the year than January does, with its insistence on being the month of two faces, an eye to the past more than anything else, but April it fresh shoots and green bursting from the trees and blustery skies on their way elsewhere please and the month began with seven tiny Egyptian goslings in the park and ended with seven still there; I’ll take this and make it into an omen.
Recently, I have become a tyrant, wanting to outfox time. I have decided I can slow it down. I have decided the way to do this is to fill it as much as possible, so that a day can be stretched to appear to be three. It is easier to do this in the summer, when there is a distinct before work, work, after work. It is much harder to do this in days where the dark barely lifts. But sometimes, this cunning means I forget what it was I filled the days with, and what use forgotten days? I fear this is a lifelong problem. As a child my diaries were bad but regular, I took many photographs of the same thing, day in and out. So many my mother would beg me not to. I drew things. I collected things. I caught insects and kept them under glass slides. I think now that this was all about time, catching it, controlling it, keeping it in its place in relation to me; wanting to hold it still, not letting it go.
Once a month, I think, I will write down how what I’ve done in the month. A round up of the month. What I’ve seen, heard, read, listened to, watched, eaten maybe but not obsessively, although I used to write down every mouthful I ate, which took the chronicling too far. I found those food diaries recently. The instinct was to throw them away but the better choice was to keep them. It helps, sometimes, to see how far you’ve come.
SAW
This month I’ve been head down with work, which really interfered with things I like doing, like seeing things. I feel really art starved at the moment. Woodlands and the park and the sea are great, but they don’t make me think new things. I wish they did.
At the beginning of the month, I went to the Yoko Ono at the Tate Modern. I didn’t know much about her work other than the obvious John shaped elephant in the room. The exhibition is dauntingly vast, I’d say leave a couple of hours and don’t do what I did and attempt it with a hungry seven year old as company. Although, that turned out to be the best part. Estella demanded a sandwich from the member’s bar beforehand, I said no, those things are MARKED UP. So when it came to the wishing tree at the start of the exhibition, she enthusiastically took up the chance to write a wish I wish my mummy would buy me a sandwich now. The sandwich dominated each chance for audience participation, by the time we arrived at the bed in, Estella caustically observed that she bet they were served great sandwiches in bed. In the section where there was the chance to give thanks to your mother by pinning a note to the wall, Estella simply wrote I hate my mummy. She will not buy me a sandwich. She’s now decided to make her own installation, surprisingly titled The Sandwich Tree, during which she will fix sandwiches to a tree and eat them while the audience watches. I think Yoko would be proud.
In terms of the work (I told you it was overshadowed by a sandwich, in much the same way this is) I found her earlier work the most interesting. After John it became too sentimental, and perhaps would have seemed radical at the time, but viewed now, it felt a little trite and repetitive. It’s beautifully curated though, and the standout was CUT PIECE, which still endures as a perfect testament to the way we consume art, and what we demand and take from our artists. Her influence on Abramovic is clear. Even Estella forgot her hunger during CUT PIECE, demanding we watch it over and over and worryingly, enacting it at home with dress making shears and an old vest.
I caught the tail end of The Cult of Beauty at The Wellcome Collection. I’m not sure if it was because I’d rushed there straight from a long train journey, or if it was just badly curated, but it felt crowded and a little bit high school art project. I couldn’t find anything very radical or original in it. I’ll caveat that with excepting Juno Calypso’s photographs which evoked both the eerie and the weird in truest Mark Fisher sense. The labels to each piece really annoyed me, they seemed to be mounted on some kind of holographic cardboard which didn’t help with the high school exhibition feel, and just made it seem a bit cheap. Clearly six hours travelling before an exhibition isn’t the ideal way to view it.
HEARD
I chaired the launch of Phoebe Stuckes DEAD ANIMALS (Sceptre), an uncanny debut, full of menace and foreboding. Phoebe was great to talk to, we covered a lot of ground including our unease at the label sad girl lit, how calling something transgressive says more about the person calling it that rather than the work itself, and pushing the horror trope forward.
The following week was the launch of the University of Hertfordshire’s visiting writers programme at the Horse Hospital, an amazing venue that still retains an equine feel - don’t ask how, I was fevered that night, food poisoned to near death, or so I was convinced - and since I’ve dreamt twice of horses, but that’s another story. Amy Key read from her Notes on Blue, Keiran Goddard from I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning (one of my favourites of the year, so far) and Victoria Adukwei Bulley from Quiet. Quiet’s such a special collection, I can’t stop thinking about it. The whole night had another worldly feel; blame the horse ghosts, the bad lighting, the rain, the cheap wine, the fever; whatever, a good night.
I did an event for Ava Anna Ada with James Endeacott and Richard Norris. James clicked immediately with Ava Anna Ada, deciding that I must be quite quite mad to have made those women up, and proceeded to get to the heart of the book very quickly. It was day of the eclipse, after I walked along the seafront in the rain around 1am, feeling pretty lucky that the people who do get Ava Anna Ada, really get it.
READ
I’ve just finished an early copy of THE LAST SANE WOMAN (Verso) by Hannah Regel from Verso Books. I love Verso’s list and will pretty much buy anything they publish, but it’s unusual for them to publish fiction. Regel’s prose is immaculate, cleverly cutting between past and present through a series of one way letters, to tell the story of a potter and the woman obsessed with piecing her life together. It’s a neat device that never gets in the way of the story and if the prose, which is wholly its own, evokes anyone, it’s Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. A lot of books can feel trend led, as if in acquisitions meetings boxes are being ticked, and I get it, it’s a commercial industry, but this book felt real, it has substance and its own identity and I know I’ll reread it. It is a serious book, without feeling like it takes itself too seriously.
I was also lucky enough to spend a day with some very old books. So old they had to be placed on beanbags before I was allowed to open them. I’m now transcribing parts of them. Although it sounds like hyperbole to say it, it feels like the greatest honour of my life to be working on making what I am. There’s a lot to be said for choosing creative fulfilment over happiness, although sometimes it’s easier to write that than live it. But I’ll remember those old books and diaries and the language used for a long time and I think somehow the satisfaction of those days is something that not much else can replicate. I want to do it again.
WATCHED
Baby Reindeer in the same way everyone else did. What I loved about it was that the narrator made no narrative sense whatsoever and in failing to be a logic driven character absolutely nailed the near impossible cycle of trauma and the difficulty of breaking free from it. When The Last Days was reviewed one of the most surprising - to me- pieces of criticism was that the critic didn’t understand why I hadn’t chosen to leave the religion sooner. I think Baby Reindeer went some way to explaining how abuse perpetuates more abuse. I probably should’ve nailed that better in The Last Days, but we outgrow our work, and it’s a rare author (and likely a lying one) who says they’d not change any of their book.
ATE
In an interview with the Paris Review the interviewer remarks with surprise how much Louise Gluck, famously anorexic, loves food, but all anorexics are gourmands she replies. She’s right. You can love a thing and have a complicated relationship with the thing. In fact, it’s necessary, what’s love without trial?
Acme Fire Cult, Hackney
Birthday lunch with friends. I was recovering from Covid, we over ordered but it was worth it. Overall a relaxed vibe, excellent orange wine (who the fuck am I and why do I talk like this), all the food’s cooked over wood, and the air is full of the smell of woodsmoke. Thankfully it’s my favourite smell. The bread with marmite butter verged on the obscene, oozing with butter and marmite, demanding a knife and fork to eat it, it was very very good. Also chicken wings like nowhere else, and London does wings well.
Jolene (Finsbury Park)
Or big Jolene, to differentiate it from Jolene on Newington Green. More pizza driven than its smaller counterpart it’s perfect for a sharing lunch. Between us we had one pizzette, lamb ragu, and a bean, pea and ricotta salad. It was just the right amount to mean you didn’t need dinner. Swerve the Banksy after, the local council have ruined it, put up loads of Perspex so you can hardly see.
Kapara (Soho)
A Tel Aviv restaurant serving some great middle eastern cuisine. We shared hummus, mussels, lamb, and greens. Great service, and beautiful interiors, just the right side of busy on a Thursday when soho can often be unbearable.
OTHER BITS
Went to Glasgow and Edinburgh on a research trip. Increasingly I’m drawn to the west coast. I think being back there for the solstice last year helped. I love archive work, there’s something clandestine about rummaging around in a dead person’s diaries, and the unexpected letters that turn up too. I went there expecting to discover one thing, but history doesn’t work like that, and the dead have made everything more complicated, but that’s what’s fun about working with biography.
I started writing my next novel manuscript. I have been working for the last few months on what I thought would be my next novel. But I am a very slow thinker, it takes me a long time to know a character and suddenly, I realised where to take something I started working on 17 years ago and have kept going back to since. Clear as day, there it was. I know the characters now. A lot of writing isn’t just knowing what to write, but knowing when it’s ready to write. I told my children the premise for this novel, Alexander says it’s a horrific idea for a book, Avery said it’s disturbing, and Estella simply smiled and said tell me more. I think I’m on to something. So the other manuscript must wait until it’s not such a new idea and I know it better. I often wish I was quicker and more intelligent, but we are what we are. It’s another constraint maybe.
And then I became tremendously ill. And that’s how the month ended. But more rain, more rainbows.
I swear you crammed more into April than I did the entire year, AND you were unwell! Clearly, I need some life lessons Ali, but hesitate to ask if you have capacity to take on a disciple...