This week I got one of the best emails I’ve ever received. It’s from a showcase event called BEAM, which puts 29 new musicals on a stage, for short excerpts spread over two days, and invites motley assorted somebodies from the industry to see what appeals.
Yesterday they announced their shows, with a short summary of each. The summaries are magnificent. All the shows were selected (from a pool of over 250) based on a ten-minute pitch, meaning most of them have an irresistible starting premise. To whet your appetite, I offer a curated top ten: from BDSM and pole-dancing to civil war and ukuleles, these are the most intriguing, mouth-watering musicals on show at the Oxford Playhouse next month.
Chosen: The zombie musical has, to the best of my knowledge, yet to be executed successfully (though executing zombies is notoriously hard). Chosen is set in a future where zombies have taken over, and follows an IT technician who accidentally kills the zombies’ prophesied ‘Chosen One’, and is left to save humanity herself. Scrumptious.
Flitch: I like a musical where I can’t begin to imagine how it would work (see Fun Home, Nine etc). In Flitch, couples must prove to a jury that they haven’t argued in a year, in return for which they win a flitch of bacon. How could a person possibly prove such a thing? How could you possibly write a musical about it? I don’t know but I want to.
Heavenly Bodies: Five elderly churchgoing ladies, fallen on hard times, begin renting their Sunday school to a pole-dancing group. With shades of Calendar Girls and an “inspired by a true story” to boot, this one also wins points for its stellar title.
Otto Weidt’s Brush & Broom Workshop for the Blind: A true story, Otto Weidt was a blind German man who employed Jewish workers with visual impairments to shield them from the Nazis during World War Two. Promising to interweave visual information into its dialogue, lyrics and sound design, this feels like a step forward for access as well as an extraordinary story.
Lovestuck: It’s hard to resist a show that opens with its protagonist “stuck upside-down between two windows in the bathroom of a guy she’s just met.” What might otherwise sound a regular romantic comedy is made mandatory viewing by this excellent teaser.
Ukulele Days: Duos of ukulelists, including “neo-ukulele sci-fi electro-pop” duo Cosmic Echo, battle it out to win first prize at a festival’s songwriting contest. I don’t know how I feel about that many ukuleles, but I know I want to find out who wins.
The Edge of Me: This is “a synth-pop odyssey following a young gay man who gets lost and found again in Britain’s BDSM underworld”, with an added twist when the protagonist’s “secret world goes public”. The promise of Fifty Shades of Grey-type tabooness with a killer soundtrack and maybe some well-written dialogue leaves this show dominating the programme.
Jingle Street: A jaded advertising executive wakes up to discover he can only speak in jingles. Chaos ensues. Wait, hang on, I don’t think this is a BEAM musical at all, is it? Isn’t this the show I’m writing right now, and taking to the Edinburgh Fringe this summer? Have I sabotaged my own article to publicise my show? That’s so disappointing. Tickets here.
Seashore Yuánfèn 海缘: “Fusion chef Lakshmi and local doctor Jingya try to quash their families’ attempts to find them partners by fake-dating one another.” A premise equal parts relatable and fascinating is made even better when we learn their parents have begun planning a grand Indo-Chinese wedding for them. Beautiful mayhem looks guaranteed. Let’s also get excited about the presence of Chinese characters in the title, an act of delectably exquisite indifference to anyone hoping to google it.
#50Days: A musical about the run-up to the English Civil War, set in the 1600s – already a high-risk game – but then put to a grime score? You wouldn’t risk missing the next Hamilton. Would you?
BEAM 2023 runs from May 28-29th and you can get tickets hereor read all the synopsis paragraphs here.
This is a repost of a piece I wrote for the ADC Theatre’s blog in May 2021, to hype my show ‘No Cash Left on the Premises Overnight’.
I think ‘playhouse’ might be the loveliest word in the English language. Two of the nicest possible things – play and a house – have been made one, unhyphenated as though it were the most natural thing in the world. The imaginative space of play married blissfully with the concrete space of house. The wildness of play tempered by the domesticity of house. Playhouse. The opposite of a workhouse, and surely a vast improvement on the poorhouse, the plague house or indeed the doghouse. What’s not to like?
It’s even a joy to say: playhouse, big long diphthongs and a hushed h creating a wild undefined midriff sandwiched by a playfully plosive pl and a snug sibilant s. I have no objection to the word theatre, but I do rather associate it with getting lobotomised, or tonsillected. Such things would not happen in a playhouse, site of all that is lovely. To think that the Puritans once tried to shut them down! It’s almost enough to put one off Puritanism altogether.
Still, the status of the playhouse is a vexed question even today. As a child, it’s considered acceptable to have one of these fine structures in your garden – indeed if you don’t, I’ve heard nobody comes to your eighth birthday party, not that I would know, or would even care actually; in fact I’m totally over it. But beyond a certain degree of maturity, you’re not supposed to go in the playhouse: you should be practising your cello, or studying for your exams, or do you think my Audi is going to clean itself? You’re supposed to tumble down into the real world, and do real, practical things, not the fantastical jaunts of the playhouse.
However: I have been let in on a secret. In Cambridge, home of the Ancient Mariner, Winnie the Pooh and the Flying Teapot, playhouses are for real. In my view the most real of all is the ADC Theatre, which bills itself rather delightfully as the oldest university playhouse in England. In a complex set-up it took me quite some time to get my head round, the plays performed are fictional, but the audience is real – they pay with real money (you can’t get in with play-dough) and eat real ice creams.
To my mind, the ADC epitomises what university should be about – a place you can try out a new skill, with the freedom to fail and the support to make a go of it. It’s a halfway house (a halfplay house?) between pretend and real, amateur and proper: a place you can pose as a play-man, a playmaker, a playwright – even if deep down you still feel like a mere play-boy. (Note to self: must remember to check whether any of these phrases have unexpected connotations.)
This week I am offering up my final play, my Hail Mary before I graduate – a musical called No Cash Left on the Premises Overnight. It’s unapologetically playful, a heist comedy that sends up clichés about bank robberies while trying not to fall into them. It has all the elements you’d want: a jaded ringleader, a gormless dunderhead, and also a chronically anxious burglar who’s scared of burgling things. We’ve got big, toe-tapping tunes, genuinely jocular jokes and, at one point, a rhyme on the word dachshund that I’m embarrassingly proud of.
Like all good play, No Cash was undertaken with friends. I only met Ben James, the composer and true genius behind the show, about a week before lockdown began. Even though we’ve traded lyrics and demos and plot points virtually every day for the last fifteen months, opening night will still be just the fourth time we’ve been in a room together; I for one cannot wait to feel that giddy spark again as we lock eyes and everything else goes still. And Ben is just one collaborator – part of the joy of the playhouse is how it throws you together in kaleidoscopic formations with directors and producers, singers and dancers, stage managers and lighting designers, a plethora of plucky playmates. We get along like a playhouse on fire.
I’m hoping you’ll come and watch No Cash, in person or on a livestream, because that’s what keeps the magical play machine going: without an audience, it’s a playtest rather than a playgroup. And if you’ve never had the delight of getting involved in the play, I hope you know that every time you put your credit card details into adctheatre.com, you’re helping keep the beautiful beast in motion: the chocolate factory, the enchanted forest, the wonderland rabbit hole where we hang suspended, Schrodinger’s Cheshire Cat, neither grown-up nor child, neither amateur nor professional, neither reality nor imagination, but grinning all the while.
And then when it’s done, the curtain goes down on both No Cash and my degree. I suppose I’ll have to get a proper job – dad only pays me £2 for washing his Audi – but in my heart perhaps I’ll always be at the ADC. This playhouse feels like playhome.
It comes around as surely as summer follows spring. The release of new data showing birth rates on the wane, spawning a litter of hand-wringing articles insisting under-population disaster is on the way. A breeding cycle as beautiful as any Mother Nature can offer.
Tim Stanley in the Telegraph is convinced that “we must have as many babies as possible” to avoid “hurtling towards underpopulation”. The Pope reckons selfish people need to stop having pets instead of children, as though there is a difference. Tyler Cowen thinks it’s “the looming existential threat that no one is talking about”, though he talks about it on the opinion pages of Bloomberg: Tyler is so existentially threatened he can apparently no longer hear even his own voice.
I could add more to this tragic chorus. The general arguments tend to be that a declining population slows economic growth, and leaves a too-small base of young people to support a too-big bunch of useless old people who want healthcare and pensions.
My general feeling is that these arguments come direct from the free-market right-wing. Capitalism thrives best off a massive pool of poor people. Utopia under this philosophy involves every worker being totally replaceable with another – then nobody ever has the clout to demand a right that might impede the perfect motion of the free market. Imagine humans in big battery farms, packed in like hens, squawkers easily cast out, all working their heads off to avoid the chop. Perfection!
Capitalism wants this for you, and your children.
Here’s my hunch: depopulation might be one of the most wonderful gifts ever to fall into humanity’s lap. Firstly, a shortage of workers increases wages. That’s clearly disastrous if you’re a billionaire who needs a lot of poor people to man your warehouses, or to clean your holiday homes. But it’s excellent for humanity at large. Our labour will have a higher value.
Better yet, when workers are hard to replace, it incentivises the market to keep people wanting to work. Early retirements hurt firms, so they start to improve working conditions, offer more reasonable hours, free coffee – anything they can to keep employees satisfied. It’s even possible that human wellbeing could someday be valued as much by the market as it is by humanity – though admittedly that’s a distant dream.
A second thing happens when labour gets expensive: humanity starts to innovate. We look for ways to do things that don’t involve expensive humans. This can be good or bad for society, depending on how it’s harnessed. Robot surgeons are helpful for humans: we get readier healthcare, the NHS spends less, and medics can focus on the thorniest cases. Conversely, self-service check-outs have mostly just allowed big businesses to cut jobs and boost their bottom lines. If automation expands, governments will need to raise taxes on businesses to ensure the whole population benefits, rather than just corporate shareholders.
But innovation is fundamentally good for humanity, as you’ll know if you’ve ever used a dishwasher or light switch. People imagine social care will be impossible with an ageing population. But when a care worker costs £25 an hour, there’s a real incentive to invent machines that can do some of the work. That incentive dies if we keep relentlessly pushing out babies.
Established capitalists, of course, view innovation as a problem. The status quo is working fine for them; innovation causes casualties. The newspaper barons are being crushed by the internet; oil giants are still pretty mad about the solar panel. Even the Pope is not getting the buzz on Twitter that he did with his encyclicals in the 1700s. Who wants a new wave of technology to knock further behemoths from their perches? No wonder it’s big-shots like Jack Ma and Elon Musk who are sounding the alarm.
Sensible people shouldn’t heed the dire warnings from the establishment. A declining population will indeed cause huge shifts in society. But they’ll be shifts towards a greater value for the ordinary human, and improved technology that enhances lifestyles. Strains on resources, currently threatening to bubble over into war, will softly ease. A more stable population, rather than exponential growth, will allow our planet to settle, thrive, provide for all. Quantity of life will be sacrificed for quality. As on most issues over the past 2000 years, the Pope is best left ignored.
A group of adorable children threaten to devour the earth’s resources with their menacing thumbs.
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Some content on this page was disabled on October 19, 2023 as a result of a DMCA takedown notice from Linda Matlow Pix International,LLC. You can learn more about the DMCA here:
https://wordpress.com/support/copyright-and-the-dmca/
Disgracefully, I didn’t count all the books I read this year, but I can report that I accrued £51 in library fines at Cambridge Central Library, so it must have been a fairly good year. (When I joined, they told me fines had been suspended because of Covid. Then they un-suspended them without telling me. It was such a perfect public service con-trick I couldn’t be mad at them.)
It was a year of two halves: until June, finishing my degree, I read a tiny handful of books, over and over again, like a sad desert island boy. Then I finished my degree and, unchained, I read wildly, voraciously, recklessly – taking up multiple books, getting carried away like a dentist in a toothpaste shop. I haven’t read that way since I was about 12, when my bedside table became an unsustainable jenga game of half-read monstrosities. But this year it was just the ticket.
I always keep a notepad of little quote and moments that struck me; they seem to get more depressing and cynical every year, but it still seemed nice to share a handful from a few of the books that most charmed me in 2021. If you’ve read any, or if you’ve read something else you just know would enchant me, I would love to hear your thoughts.
“There are more people dead today than in the rest of world history put together.“
Don Delillo, White Noise(1985)
Don Delillo is one of those unusual writers who demonstrate on every page how frightfully clever they are without actually making you hate them. Whereas when I recite the periodic table on a night out, people unfriend me on MySpace. White Noise, a novel about a man terrified of dying who discovers a drug that takes away the fear of death, is full of delicious witticisms like the above, made all the more conspicuous by the daring absence of plot.
“Nana said, ‘Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.'”
Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007)
I picked up A Thousand Splendid Suns over the summer because a friend left a copy lying round, but it turned out we spent the summer botching a withdrawal of Afghanistan pretty badly, making the novel, which traces 30 years of Afghan political history, feel pretty relevant. It’s also just beautifully written and structured, weaving together multiple narrative strands to make something extraordinary. You begin crying with the first disaster on page 34 and you don’t really stop.
“That juvenile has become a pejorative is one of the saddest facts of our language.”
The Paris Review(Spring 2015)
When Eric Carle, writer of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, died in May, a bunch of people started sharing quotes from an interview he did with The Paris Review a few years back. It turns out the interview was a parody, but I still really like this sentence. Rest in peace, Eric.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Dayym he hungry!!
“What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do.”
George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion (1913)
I really got into George Bernard Shaw this year, and nothing beats his flawlessly crafted Pygmalion. This pithy worldview from Henry Higgins is admittedly tainted somewhat because it precedes a hugely unethical human experiment on our heroine Eliza Doolittle, but it’s still a nice turn of phrase.
Henry Higgins condescends brusquely to Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, which is technically George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.
“I’ve drunk so much prosecco I need a prosectomy.”
Me
Okay wait actually this is not a famous quote, this is just something I said, at Christmas. It seemed really funny so I wrote it down. No idea how it’s ended up in here. Let’s move on.
“If your head turns red it’s heavier, because embarrassment has a larger mass.”
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, The Discomfort of Evening (2018)
If you want to read a really unsettling book, The Discomfort of Evening is really hard to beat. It’s full of incest and animal torture but the writing is so exquisite at times it’s like every sentence is a poem and you don’t know what to do with yourself.
“Whether by death or dissolution, to fall in love is to make an appointment with heartbreak.”
Matthew Lopez, The Inheritance(2018)
Gosh, what a sad quote. Why is this in my top ten? Gosh.
Matthew Lopex picks up the award for Best Play at this year’s Tony Awards. In 2021 I received zero Tony awards: yet another humiliating snub.
“The older a man gets, the faster he could run as a boy.”
Inua Ellams, Barber Shop Chronicles (2017)
I actually got to see Inua Ellams this year, reading poetry at the Edinburgh Festival. The man was absolutely bursting with poems. What I haven’t seen is his play Barber Shop Chronicles, though it’s a lovely read.
“Even as an infant, he hated being held. Every hug is a small, soft jail.”
Richard Powers, The Overstory (2018)
In the year when we were finally allowed to hug each other again, it was nice to read this refreshingly bleak take on hugging. Foucault would have loved it. In a similar vein, David Foster Wallace has a quote that kissing is “sucking on a long tube at the other end of which is excrement”, which has the potential to change the way you experience intimacy forever.
“God, almond milk. Why??? For f*ck’s sake! My doctor tried to get me on it. Cholesterol. I said, mate, I’d rather have the heart attack.”
Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein(2019)
Frankissstein was one of the most deliciously inventive things I read this year: it interweaves the story of Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein in 1818 with that of a trans man living in the present day, with some startling resonances and a lot of wickedly funny lines. 2021 is also the year I started drinking oat milk in my tea and truly I tell you: I cannot tell the difference. Let’s save those cows.
If you enjoyed this post and would like to help me read more books next year, you can buy me a book from my cool new online wish list, from which I promise to bring you the very best quotes this time next year. It is urgent as I can’t afford to keep using the library.
It’s 9:30am on a Saturday, and there are two strangers at my door. The strangers enter my home and look at me uncomfortably until I leave. This small eviction is a microcosm of a larger one: I’m getting kicked out of my home. My landlord is in a ‘tight spot’ and has decided to sell the place I’ve been living with my wife these last twenty-one months.
The landlord, Steph, has accrued a total of £16,000 from us, at a rate of £750 a month. That’s £25 a day, or £1.04 an hour. Curiously, nobody reimburses us that pound when we’re expected to be out for an hour, so that strangers who can afford to buy a house can look round the house of me and Sophia, who can’t. If they did, we could have bought ourselves an ice cream, which wouldn’t have solved all our problems but might have been nice.
When we’d stayed a year at this house and our contract expired, we asked if we could get another year-long contract, to give ourselves some security. We were told that was a faff because of paperwork, and it’d cost us £96, whereas a rolling monthly contract was free. But we were told “Steph says you can stay for however long as you so wish”. This was a relief – that security meant we could work to make a home of our house, get to know the neighbours, put down roots in the community.
As it turned out, Steph turfed us out just nine months later. This will be our third relocation in three years of marriage. Every one was because of a bad landlord. In our first flat, rented from my college, we weren’t told in our contract that we’d have to pay gas and electricity bills (on top of the £1180 they charged us every month). We eventually took the college to a tribunal over the contract and won, but relations had soured badly enough by then that we didn’t want to stay much longer.
So we moved to a bungalow, just a mile up the road. This was let to us by Redmayne Arnold and Harris, who described it as ‘Furnished or unfurnished – landlord is flexible’. When we arrived, we found all the furniture had been removed and there was no possibility of the landlord returning it. We spent a few days sleeping on cushions on the floor while we waited for a mattress to be delivered, then scavenged for bed, sofa and chairs on Gumtree. It was a grim and expensive week. When we asked the landlord, a woman named Poppy who lived next door, to reduce the rent (£950 per month), given the absence of furniture, she refused. So when our six-month contract was up, we hightailed out of there.
Where we live. If you’d like to buy our house, or just come look round, visit https://tinyurl.com/4s536jx8 (we love to do free advertising for our landlord!).
If you’ve never rented, you might not realise how bad the whole setup is. In Cambridgeshire, as in most of the country, housing is in such high demand that there is no need to be a good landlord. If you steal a tenant’s furniture and they leave in protest, you can just find another tenant. Oh and by the way? You have like a thousand pounds of their money at your disposal. Poppy memorably took a chunk out of our deposit for scratches around the front door frame. The scratches were caused by us moving furniture in and out of the house she’d failed to furnish.
Sophia and I are exhausted. We’re tired of packing up all our belongings at unpredictable intervals. We’re tired of viewings and forms and letting agents. We’re tired of the feeling you might be shunted out at any minute. We’re tired of landlords.
It’s hard to believe we’ve just had three bad apples in a row. You start to suspect the whole barrel might be rotten: that something about being a landlord, owning a property you don’t intend to live in and glugging constantly from the money-tap it becomes, might make you an arsehole. Or else it’s the other way round: only arseholes become landlords, while better people give their money to charity or lend to small businesses or buy model trains or something. At any rate, the system seems broken: the capitalist model is failing to give tenants stable or affordable housing.
In 2019 (an election year) the Tories announced plans to ban Section 21 notices, or ‘no-fault evictions’, the mechanism by which Sophia and I were evicted. But then they didn’t. If they had, we might not have spent the last six weeks stressing about becoming homeless. Good legislation might also deter the most deplorable people from becoming landlords, allowing them to sink their money into blood diamonds or people trafficking instead.
Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much appetite for changing things. It probably doesn’t help that 28 per cent of Tory MPs are landlords themselves. But the impact that the small group of private landlords has on everyone else is devastating. By one conservative estimate, buy-to-let landlords have prevented some 2.2 million families from owning their own home. Research shows that a third of people my age will still be renting as retirees. Imagine – being 65 and unable to decorate your own walls. It’s absurd. Change is long overdue – but the will to make it happen is lacking. And I can’t help – this blog took me an hour to write and I have to go and give Steph her £1.04.
How do you come up with the idea for a hit musical? We all know the normal way: you go on holiday, read a biography of an American founding father, listen to a lot of rap, then take MDMAs until the two merge into one. But deprived of access to both holidays and stimulants, I instead tried starting a massive Google Doc. Together with my beloved friend Ben James, we generated some two hundred ideas, in the law-of-averages assumption that one of them must be good.
The eventual end-product was a show called ‘On Your Bike’, that’s currently playing in Edinburgh at the Fringe. It’s funky and feelgood, and critics are already calling it “full of bikes”.
But nestled away, in the depths of my Google Drive, is a sad and sorry document where all the rejected ideas loiter. They sing mournfully to one another and reflect on what might have been. In honour of those lost musicals, I am proud to present a list of ten which did not make it but remain forever in my heart.
1. Very Small Time Machine
An eccentric inventor has invented a time machine! Unfortunately it can only go forward in time by about ten seconds. It takes around ten seconds to boot up too, so its effects are quite limited. But what might we learn about ourselves when we step into the time machine? Based on a first draft, absolutely nothing, but maybe extending to two hours will open up possibilities.
2. Boudica’s Husband
You know how SiX looked at Henry the Eighth and wondered what life was like for his wives? Well, this show chooses to reclaim the sadly untold story of Boudica’s husband. He also was, surely, a man of hopes, dreams and sassy dance potential – all gloriously brought to life in this show. At last: a musical where the oft-silenced voices of men can truly be heard.
3. All’s Wall That Ends Wall
A fresh take on Shakespeare’s greatest play, but with all the characters reimagined as walls. Alternative title: Wall’s Wall That Ends Wall.
4. Cloudy With A Chance Of You Suck At Your Job
Ernie is a young weather forecaster who’s just landed his first TV job – trouble is, he just can’t get anything right. Every time he forecasts sunshine it rains; a major village picnic had to be abandoned because of his incompetence, and Mrs Smythe ruined her best socks. Ernie puts his head down and resolves to be the best weather forecaster he can possibly be. Unfortunately, he still sucks. Eventually he discovers there’s been a massive conspiracy against him to make sure he always forecasts the weather wrong. The Illuminati know society needs villains and they’ve set Ernie up to fail, to deflect attention from Capitalism, an evil new system of state-sanctioned theft they’ve devised. Devastated, Ernie tries to expose the massive conspiracy, but no-one will believe him. In the final scene he perishes in a lightning storm he did not forecast.
5. Jaws: The Musical: The Musical
A musical about people trying to make a musical of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Mostly just ten people running round shouting ‘BUT HOW DO WE GET THE SHARKS ON THE STAGE?’.
6. Thank You For Coming To Our Musical
An avant-garde new show that consists of 90 minutes of thanking the audience for attending the show. Favourite numbers include “Thank You For Coming To Our Musical” and “Our Musical: Thank You For Coming” as well as the heart-breaking ballad “You Are Welcome”, sung by a randomly-selected audience member, or by the stage manager on days when no audience members can be located.
7. Twist!
It’s the classic Oliver Twist story, but with a twist! The twist is: zombies. Zombies everywhere.
8. Who Let The Dogs Out?
If you love the band Baha Men, best known for their 1998 hit single “Who Let The Dogs Out?”, you’re going to love this jukebox musical based on their songs. Because Baha Men didn’t have a lot of other hits, it’s mostly just the song “Who Let The Dogs Out?” on loop, along with a vague subplot to do with some dogs. One critic at the workshop said it forced him to really re-evaluate his priorities in life, which is surely what art is for.
9. Jesus Christ Super Starlight Express
It’s your favourite biblically-themed rock musical, only everyone is on roller skates, and yes, the disciples are all trains. If you liked Jesus walking on water, imagine how much you’ll love him skating on it.
10. Asbestos Is Best!
When the famous asbestos magnate Aston Bestolli contacted us about making a musical to rehabilitate the sadly slandered reputation of asbestos, we jumped at the chance, and also at his money. Unfortunately Aston has since perished of an unspecified lung condition, but the anthemic tune “Old Fridges Are My Favourite Fridges” lives on.
*
If this article somehow made you want to watch ‘On Your Bike’, you can see it at TheSpaceUK at Surgeon’s Hall Edinburgh, every day at 5:25pm until August 28th.Tickets: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/on-your-bike.
I read 86 books this year, which must be a personal best. Thanks, lockdown. Am I a little disappointed not to have hit a hundred? Of course I am – but as Boris Johnson will tell you, 2020 was the year of the missed target. At least my shortcomings aren’t leading to any deaths. If anything, I may be saving trees?
Anyway, with so few people on hand to have their ears singed by my red-hot literary takes, I thought I’d share a top ten on here. If you’ve read any, or choose to read them after this, I’d love to hear your views. If you’ve read all ten you win a special branded Joe Venable hat (terms and conditions apply).
10. Grief Is The Thing With Feathers – Max Porter (2016)
A weird, magical little book, barely over a hundred pages, telling the story of a father of two who loses his wife and is comforted by a crow. Yeah like an actual crow. It’s wonderfully strange but does that rarest of things – managing to make something comprehensible, even beautiful, from the wreckage of bereavement.
9. Fun Home – Alison Bechdel (2006)
You might know Bechdel because of the Bechdel Test, which measures female representation in fiction using three questions: Is there more than one female character? Do they talk to each other? About anything other than men? Try it out next time you watch a movie. Anyway, her Fun Home is a brilliant read – it tells the story of Bechdel’s childhood, coming out as a lesbian and losing her dad – all in the form of a graphic novel. I hadn’t read a graphic novel in years, but was enchanted by its wit and heart, and the soundtrack to the recent Broadway musical it (absurdly) spawned. It also passes the Bechdel test, which is nice.
8. Circle Mirror Transformation – Annie Baker (2009)
This play is a little work of genius. It follows a drama class with five students, performing those weird little exercises drama students do. As they fall in and out of love with each other, the dramatic exercises increasingly encroach on real life, and vice versa, until you’re agog with bewildered delight. Magical.
7. Revolting Prostitutes – Molly Smith and Juno Mac (2018)
I don’t change my mind very often, because I’m extremely stubborn and ignorant, but this book left me no choice. It lays out a case for decriminalising sex work, showing how prostitution laws achieve nothing and harm vulnerable people. It also shows how the Nordic Model – a much-touted framework that criminalises the buyer rather than the seller of sex – manages to make things worse too. With dangerous Nordic Model legislation coming to the UK Parliament in January, it’s a great read for anyone keen to get informed (alternatively, here’s Juno Mac’s brilliant TED talk). It will also make you really, incredibly angry, and quite keen to abolish the police.
6. The Mirror and the Light – Hilary Mantel (2020)
I thought about leaving this one off – it became a kind of cliché, with every middle-class person in the world owning a copy – but decided it would be churlish, because it’s really a wonderful book. You get so deep inside Thomas Cromwell’s head that when he’s executed you kind of feel a bit like you’re dead. Big 2020 vibes.
5. Iphigenia in Aulis – Euripides (like 407BC or something)
The mean people at Cambridge made me read all the ancient Greek tragedies this year (Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides), along with loads of stinkin’ Shakespeare. Anyhow, I can report that Iphigenia in Aulis is the best. Agamemnon, on the way to the Trojan War, needs a favourable gust of wind and is told he’ll get it if he sacrifices his daughter. Does he do it? Course he does. Destined to become a Christmas favourite.
4. Heroes of the Fourth Turning – Will Arbery (2020)
Four Conservative Catholics stand round discussing theology for a couple of hours. One of them has an excruciating disability that throws a very uncomfortable light on everything the others are saying. But it’s a lot more entertaining than it sounds, and an out-of-the-blue final-page monologue will take your breath away. It missed out on this year’s Pulitzer Prize to the thrilling new musical A Strange Loop, which is also well worth your time.
3. Every Brilliant Thing – Duncan Macmillan (2013)
This is a play about a boy whose mum has recently attempted suicide, so he tries to write her a list of “every brilliant thing” in the world to cheer her up. They range from silly to profound (“Having dessert as a main course.” “Watching someone watch your favourite film.” “Friendly cats.”) Funny, poignant, life-affirming – yes please.
2. Motherhood – Sheila Heti (2018)
A woman deliberating on whether to have a child decides to flip a coin. Actually quite a lot of coins. As a huge fan of coin flips, I appreciated the vision. This dazzlingly brilliant book will make you laugh and make you think and make you realise how nice it is not having children. A future classic if ever I read one.
1. Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga (1988)
This book really took my breath away. It’s a coming-of-age story about a girl in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), from a poor family, who’d like to go to school but is instead confined to the home while her brother gets an education. Until the brother, rather satisfyingly, dies. Nervous Conditions drew me into a completely different, foreign world, while also telling a story of childhood that felt familiar, and made me somehow nostalgic. It shows you how universal human experience is, but also how extraordinarily different – that’s the power of Dangarembga’s lyrical, intoxicating writing.
If you enjoyed this blog, you may also like My Daily Routine at Cambridge, which is also very erudite and learned, as are you, dear reader – a person of taste, I perceive.
This week I finished watching Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit with my beloved first wife Sophia. Normally I try to ignore Netflix shows that everyone’s talking about, learning my lesson after Tiger King, a festival of ethically moribund voyeurism so grubby I had to bleach my telly after viewing. But The Queen’s Gambit seemed loftier – it was about chess! – and I can’t deny it was fun to watch.
If you haven’t seen it, The Queen’s Gambit is about an American orphan, Elizabeth Harmon, who discovers she’s amazing at chess and becomes an ace international player. The show’s central and indeed only trick is to show her turning up at tournaments, where everyone underestimates and belittles her, only for her to beat them. The show continues this line even when it’s demonstrably no longer plausible, including in the final episode, when she is already US champion but a minor Russian believes she’s “not a significant player”, before receiving a swift thrashing.
A still from The Queen’s Gambit. Approximately 70% of the show is taken up with Anya Taylor-Joy making this face. I love it.
So the show is essentially in the genre of Harry Potter, or Spiderman, or even Hamilton if you like – the orphan-genius-bildungsroman. It’s a fantasy, allowing its viewer to vicariously experience the thrill of being talented, feted, extraordinary. I’ll be honest: it feels nice. Additional feminist satisfaction comes from the way all the people she beats are smug, ugly men. No element of Harmon’s fame goes undepicted – we see the front covers of Time magazine, the swarms of paparazzi, crowds gathered outside tournament venues to beg autographs.
The philosopher Roger Scruton believed fantasy couldn’t be art – that art had to do something higher than just letting us imagine how cool it would be to be famous. But Scruton was also a racist homophobe, so it would be unwise to attach too much weight to his views. There are some great works of art that are effectively fantasies, powered by our rooting for the underdog protagonist – like Wolf Hall, or the Sword in the Stone, or the book of Daniel.
But the problem is: this is all The Queen’s Gambit does. There are vague gestures towards bigger themes, but they sort of drift away. Harmon’s addiction to alcohol and drugs comes up a lot, but the tidy resolution is that she gives them up and becomes better at chess, like a 1930s morality story. There’s an early interest in exploring the plight of orphans, but given its main character becomes terrifically rich and successful, we leave with the impression that orphans are basically going to be fine – if anything I’m not sure why Dickens made such a big deal about them?
Setting the show in the 1960s seems like an effort to engage big Cold War themes, the intense political drama of America and Russia squaring up, eagle and bear. Again, there are obligatory references to this – Harmon sometimes defies her fellow Americans by refusing to denounce Russia. But it’s only a skin-deep exploration. The much-maligned musical Chess, by Tim Rice and Abba’s Bjorn and Benny, probably offers more sustained political insight than this show.
Of course, it’s fine to have a show that only does one thing, where bigger themes are subordinated to a clean, linear, rags-to-riches storyline. But I don’t feel like it’s great TV. The level of hype feels disproportionate.
I’ve concluded that perhaps the reason it’s so popular is that The Queen’s Gambit is easy to recommend. Not just because it’s nicely shot, with an eerily attractive lead and delightful period detail – but because it’s about chess, the world’s quickest shorthand for the sphere of the cerebral. Unlike Tiger King, I can tell my friends about The Queen’s Gambit and they think I’m incredibly sophisticated. ‘Wow, I didn’t know Joe would be into something like chess,’ one might say. ‘Yeah,’ replies the other, ‘looks and brains – he really is the whole package.’ ‘That’s so true. I feel a fool for underestimating such a handsome man.’ They both sigh melancholically: ‘If only he wasn’t married.’
But enough excerpts from my forthcoming Netflix series. The Queen’s Gambit is a fun fantasy – a breezy way to pass seven hours – but it doesn’t quite match up to its fantastical hype.
Every word of this blog post is true. However, nobody ever believes me and I have no evidence. Make of that what you will.
Sophia is cycling behind me. We are on our way to meet Will. I am also cycling. Will is Sophia’s brother, a good man. We will have fun. We will also have coffee. (I will have tea.)
Will (artist’s impression)
There is a woman in the road. Her hair streams in the wind like a flag. Across the road all kinds of scraps of paper and cardboard blow from her handbag. She chases them around in the road. It is chaos.
I stop and help pick them up. Sophia stops too. Poor woman. I gather a wodge of papers and hand it to her. She thanks me and takes them.
“You okay?” I check. I am keen to hop back on my bike. We are late. Nobody wants cold coffee (tea).
Suddenly I realise the woman is crying. She is maybe 25. She wears a lot of make-up. I feel sad because she is crying.
The woman explains. She has lost her phone and her wallet. Her parents are away in Argentina. She lives miles from here and has no way of getting back home. She points tearily into her bag. ‘I’d just bought a box of motivational postcards,’ she says.
I tactfully conceal how much this irony delights me.
I tell her it’s okay, it’s okay. Sophia agrees. What could we do to help? There is a bus, it transpires, but it’s like eight pounds.
I have no cash on me. Sophia rummages in her purse and finds a fiver. The woman is appreciative, but it would not be enough.
‘Well,’ I say, ‘we could walk to a cashpoint and get some out!’ I am very clever and often come up with these solutions. I can tell Sophia is impressed by my quick thinking.
We set off to the cashpoint in town. But the woman has a problem. It’s so far to the cashpoint in town. There’s one a little closer, if we walk away from town. Her feet are tired. Could we go there instead? I point out that since the bus stop is in town, she’ll have to head there anyway. And I think the two cashpoints are equidistant. Secretly, I want to go to the town cashpoint because it is on the way to Will. The coffee (tea) isn’t getting any warmer.
The woman relents. Off we head. We talk on the way. Her name is Anna. She’s in Cambridge to look at a house. She lives ages away, which is why she needs to get the train home. She did go to the police, but they didn’t help. ‘It’s been so upsetting,’ she says, ‘I’ve cried off all my Chanel make-up!’
Why did the phrase ‘I’ve cried off all my Chanel make-up’ not register as strange with either of us? I am not sure. I’ve since realised that all of this – the Chanel, the parents in Argentina, the motivational postcards – is done to appear middle-class. Middle-class people help other middle-class people. But if they suspect a person is working-class, they become suspicious. They do not help. This is sad and a problem. I am part of the problem. We keep walking.
Sophia breaks off to go and meet Will. I proceed with Anna to the cashpoint on Sidney Street. Anna’s real name is Demi, but she doesn’t tell me that. While I withdraw the money, she writes her email address on a piece of paper. I can email her and she can pay me back once she’s home. ‘It’s just thirty-two, maybe thirty-four pounds for the train,’ she says.
Thirty-four pounds is a lot more than eight pounds. And it’s a very high fare for a bus, though she’s also mentioned a train. All of this I find very suspicious. I take out £40 and hand it to Anna. She hands me a piece of paper bearing her email address. She thanks me heartily.
A woman is looking at her. ‘Excuse me,’ says the woman to Anna. ‘Are you the woman who lost her car keys?’
I raise my eyebrows.
Anna is so sorry. It’s true, she says – a while back she lost her car keys. This lady gave her money for the train home. Somehow, Anna forgot to pay this woman back. But the minute she gets home, she will.
The woman looks profoundly unimpressed. I suddenly grasp why Anna preferred cashpoints further from town.
I look at Anna. ‘I think you’d better give me my forty pounds back,’ I say.
Anna walks off, heading into the heart of Cambridge. I follow her.
At this moment, I get a text from Will. Sophia has told him our little adventure. ‘Joe, she’s a big old phony!’ it reads. ‘Don’t give her anything!’ This was not good timing by Will. In the moment, I misread ‘phony’ as ‘pony’ and am confused.
I keep following Anna, down deeper and deeper into Cambridge. I’d just like my money back. She keeps crying. She says she needs the money to get home. She’s stranded! I almost believe her but I am now a very jaded cynic and don’t. We keep walking. She calls me a stalker and threatens to call the police. I do not think that she will do this.
We pass a Big Issue seller. The Big Issue seller beams at Anna and says hey. Anna looks absolutely furious. I wonder whether the Big Issue seller did this on purpose.
Suddenly, she crosses the road. I follow. Then, a propos of nothing, she opens up her notebook, in which she had put the money, and allows all four tenners to fly out.
At last. This bizarre fever dream is over.
The wind catches the banknotes and I scurry after them. I pick up two of them and another man picks up the other two.
‘Thank you,’ I say.
I hold out my hand.
The man runs off.
I chase after him. Anna chases after me. I realise she is friends with the man, who is homeless. I want to tell her I admire how clever this arrangement is, but I am busy following the homeless man. He’s not really running, just walking fast. I stride after him. He strides into the Grand Arcade, a shopping mall on St Andrew’s Street.
The Grand Arcade, with Ted Baker to the right.
Anna is grabbing at my rucksack, grabbing at my coat. ‘Stop it!’ she screams, loudly. ‘What are you doing?!’ I am confused, but then I realise. She is hoping someone else might see and intervene. This would prevent me from running after her friend. This too is clever. I manage to shrug her off and keep walking.
The man ducks into the first shop. It is Ted Baker. I follow him in at pace. The shop assistant looks at my flushed face.
‘That man took my money,’ I say.
He looks at me, hesitant, as if hoping I might change course and decide to buy a coat. I do not do this.
Ted Baker has another door which leads back out onto the main road. What a clever man! He is running rings around me! He gets to the second door and pushes. I am right behind him. Then he pulls. The door doesn’t open. I am stood right next to him. We both look at each other. It’s not like I can do anything. He tries the other door and it opens. He heads back out on to the street. I follow. Anna is still following me.
Now a weird stalemate occurs. Anna and the homeless man stop running away from me and just stand. I wonder if I have passed some kind of a test. The Ted Baker test. I keep asking for my money back. They keep telling me to go away.
I have a brainwave and ring 101, the police hotline. I tell Anna and the homeless man I am ringing 101. They don’t look like they love this.
The 101 lady is unhelpful. She keeps telling me to step away from the situation. Shut up, 101 lady! Stop inciting Cowardice when I am being Brave! Where is your Blitz Spirit, 101 lady? Is this how we won World War Two? Did we “step away from the situation” at Dunkirk?
Not realising what a miserable time I am having with the 101 lady, Anna gives me back one of the two remaining tenners.
‘There, you’ve got your money back. Now get away,’ she says. I can tell she would really like me to go away. This is understandable. I politely point out about the other tenner. The 101 lady tells me to step away from the situation. I am now more mad at the 101 lady than I am at Anna.
Finally, several minutes after our stalemate began, the homeless man takes the other tenner out of his pocket and hands it to me.
‘Taking money from a homeless man,’ he says with contempt. ‘I hope you’re happy.’
I feel that this is an oversimplification.
*
After Anna and the man go away, the 101 lady and I have a nice chat. I tell her I got my money back. I am quite smug. She says that is good. She says that generally, there is nothing the police can do if I have given over money of my own free will. This strikes me as odd. She advises me in the future to never give money to anyone who approaches me. I thank her for her miserable, horrible, stingy advice and hang up.
*
Anna got caught. Her photo was in the paper, about six months later. Her real name is Demi Sanghera, and she lived a five-minute walk from me. We could have had her over for coffee (tea).
It is sad that she got convicted, because Demi was an artist. Her performance was dazzling, irresistible, brilliant. But it is also good, because if people go round pretending to be stranded when they aren’t, it means if anyone is ever genuinely stranded then no-one will help them. Nevertheless, it is sad that Demi found so little support through honest means that she had to resort to dishonest ones. On this we can all agree.
Demi was given a five-year suspended sentence, meaning if she offended again she would go to jail. Three months later, she was convicted of stealing jackets from TK Maxx. But the judge was lenient and didn’t send her to jail. This is good.
*
I see Demi one last time, in December 2019. I am canvassing for Labour, ahead of the General Election, and pass her in Arbury. It is dark and cold and damp. She is explaining to a young woman about how she lost her car keys.
I lick my lips. ‘This woman is a con artist,’ I reveal, spectacularly. ‘Recently she told me she’d lost her phone and needed money to get home.’
Demi doesn’t look at me. The woman nods. ‘I thought it seemed a bit weird. Thanks.’ She walks off.
‘Vote Labour!’ I call after her, because I am a right-on guy.
I return to the campaign office and tell my Labour friends about Demi. We all have a good chuckle. Then we head out again in someone’s car. As we drive, we see one of our canvassing team on the pavement, deep in conversation with Demi. She is rummaging in her purse. We beep our horn frantically. The canvasser hands over a fiver. Demi melts into the night. I am crestfallen. Is this tragedy? Comedy? Poetry? Art.
We can all agree, however much we may pretend to the contrary, that being forced not to see other humans generated the best and most enjoyable twelve weeks of all time. Life briefly became almost bearable, unimpeded by the tedious affectation of affection for our neighbours, colleagues and families. The natural human desire not to come within six feet of anybody was suddenly socially acceptable, even smiled upon. There were no parties, no overlong church services, no poetry recitals. At no point did you forget the name of a long-distant friend, or get caught by a colleague in KFC while alone with a Family Bucket. Nobody cajoled you into being part of a sexy car wash. For the first time, you were free.
Clearly, the easing of lockdown jeopardises all of this. It puts under threat what I would now describe as the true British way of life. As a steadfast patriot, I will not stand by and watch this happen. For I am proud of our country, of its green and pleasant mills, hills, and Churchills, of its commitment to abolishing the slave trade, of its previous commitment to starting and then continuing the slave trade, of its later tradition of ignoring its starting and continuing of the slave trade by focusing on its eventual abolition of the slave trade, and also our proud tradition of not talking about the slave trade – the slave trade which, I hardly need remind you, was a trade in slaves which we, former traders of slaves, initiated and continued. The slave trade. The trade in slaves.
Apologies, I think I got a little carried away with my British patriotism there. Anyhow, to see off this looming threat to our happy antisocial way of life, I’ve come up with these Ten Great Excuses for Not Socialising Even Now Lockdown is Over – all tried and tested and proffered now for the good of the Great British Public.
1. I No Longer Speak English
This is a great excuse partly because it is true. Across twelve weeks of seeing and speaking to no-one but my wife, we found our language had evolved so comprehensively that we were unable to communicate with normal people. When you haven’t called anyone anything except “pumpkin” or “chipmunkle” for three months, it’s very difficult not to use them when addressing friends and lecturers. We also began placing a B on the end of all words ending in vowels or Ds, such that basic conversations include the phrases “How are youb? Goob thankyoob! Whatchoob wanna doob?” As well as being a great excuse, this saccharine new dialect has the added bonus that if anyone does somehow coax you to their party, once it’s over they never want to see you again.
2. I Am Now Too Fat To Get Out The Door
Lockdown has not been kind to any of us, apart from weirdos who used the time productively to become fit, which I personally feel should have been banned. My experience of sitting constantly on my backside, and of not having been more than five metres away from a biscuit tin since February, has certainly helped me bag a few extra pounds, which I think will help in the forthcoming apocalypse. Obviously I haven’t had reason to try and get out my front door for some months now, but I very much suspect I am too large, and even if not I think it was wise of me not to risk my self-esteem by trying.
3. All My Masks Are In The Wash
This one is gold dust – an excuse so bullet-proof there’s almost no way past it. For me, this is the new ‘All My Pants Are In The Wash’, which I famously used to get out of Holly Woodley’s ninth birthday party (Burger King – no thanks). Better yet, my mask-washing may be planned out some days in advance, meaning the future tense – ‘all my masks are in the wash that day’ – is also viable, putting this on a par with the iconic ‘I’m washing my hair that day’ which Holly Woodley so effectively used against invitations to my sixteenth and seventeenth birthday parties (Portsmouth Textiles Museum was, in retrospect, a mistake).
Haven’t managed to get all your pants in the wash? No problem! Masks are the new pants.
4. I Have Not Yet Watched The Movie Liar, Liar
If you haven’t seen Jim Carrey’s raucous laugh-out-loud screwball comedy Liar, Liar, then you are a fool with a pathetic, woefully incomplete life. Tell any invite-dropping friend you haven’t seen it and they’re absolutely guaranteed to say: “You fool! Don’t waste one more second – forget the party and watch that film!” If they don’t, you know they are no friend of yours. You will lose kudos for exposing the embarrassing fact that you passed x years of your life without watching the sensational side-splitting Jim Carrey comedy Liar, Liar, but honestly you only have yourself to blame for that.
5. My Wife Says I Can’t Go
This was already a great excuse before lockdown – all my friends believe my wife to be an onerous, ogreous killjoy who slaps down all my very sincere and earnest efforts to get to their parties. Since lockdown, however, the excuse has had the fresh advantage that no-one can bump into my wife to check out my far-fetched stories. Did she really superglue the locks just moments before I was on my way out to Wetherspoons with the crew? Why, irrefutably.
6. My Eyes Are Now Lasers
Always likely to yield follow-up questions, but telling your friends that your eyes are now in fact lasers prone to slicing violently through everything they gaze upon is, other things being equal, a very reasonable justification for not attending a party.
7. I Cannot Forgive You For Not Visiting
Cast yourself as the victim and your friend as a fickle, fair-weather flunkbag by framing their very responsible failure to swing by your house during the national ban on house-swinging as an irremediable betrayal of friendship. In the event they did somehow visit during lockdown, might there be other things you cannot forgive them for not doing, such as not writing letters, not remembering your birthday, or not varnishing your porch chairs?
8. I Have Been Downgraded By A Government Algorithm
It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but then neither did the government algorithm. This excuse works best if you were state-schooled, but if you’re northern, poor or just generally unwashed it’s also pretty plausible. Don’t forget to sign off your text by saying “Long Live The Glorious Algorithm!” or the Boris Police will come get you.*
9. You Have Got Covid
Why do excuses always have to begin with “I”? Rip up the rule-book by letting your party-hosting friend know they in fact have Covid. In the event they doubt this, place a quick call to the NHS’s Test and Trace service, and they’ll arrange for a trained professional to ring and break the news all over again. In an ideal world, this excuse will not only free you of the tedium of the party, but ensure the entire event doesn’t go ahead, resolving both your FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and DOGO (Dislike Of Going Out).
10. I Am Hunting For The Vaccine
A truly philanthropic option, much like the popular ‘Soup Kitchen’ storyline I used to successfully avoid watching all nine of the Transformers films. In what way am I, an English Literature student, hunting for the vaccine? Let me turn that question around, Sally – in what way am I not hunting for the vaccine? How could anyone ever say that reading literature isn’t seeking to cure mankind’s sicknesses? Framing is everything, but believe me when I say it’s entirely possible to leave your friends tearfully apologising for even inviting you to an event that might have distracted you from your planet-saving labours, irrespective of what those are. You’ll never have to leave the house again.
*It is Priti Patel with a stick.
Great American patriot Donald Trump hunts for the vaccine.
If you liked this blog, you may also enjoy my recent tale How I Snuck Into Cambridge With A Fake Reference, a true story of a man named Voseph Jenables who gamed the Oxbridge system and won, sort of.
Apprentice Joe 