Good grief

This week: the *other* worst president in US history, and some comforting maps of the world’s rail network. But first: I am not writing about the news.

This is the part of the newsletter where I normally try to find some kind of take on the week’s events. I had a whole bit planned on how the lack of a language of solidarity in British politics was making it harder to address the current national crisis. Or maybe I would have abandoned that, in a fit of rage about the absurdity of the Home Office trying to make itself look cute by granting a passport to Paddington Bear, as if those films aren’t the antithesis of everything the Home Office stands for, and as if anyone in this country who fell in love with an actual human Peruvian wouldn’t have to navigate seven circles of hell just to get the basic dignity of being able to live with the person they loved.

But as these last couple of years have really brought home, things don’t always turn out the way you planned. Sometimes, my brain just won’t play. 

I’m not sure what’s triggered this latest crisis. Perhaps it’s something to do with the changing of the seasons, which brings an urge to hibernate and a confrontation with the fact the person I most want to hide away with is not going to be available any time soon. Probably it relates to my birthday last week, a day that should be about celebration and which brought a piece of news so fantastic it comes with an embargo, but to which my immediate response was to choke up, because I’ll never be able to tell her.

Whatever it is, a few nights ago I couldn’t help but notice, as I was cycling somewhere by the lower reaches of the River Lea, that the dusk had the exact same quality I remember from a November in my youth, that winter when my sadness meant I slept so late each day I felt like the sky would never be light again. Yesterday morning it was like that grey had got inside my head, a darkening mist between me and the world, and in the hour I’d set aside to write before therapy I instead found myself sobbing, less quietly than I’d hope. Which is not a brilliant state of affairs at the best of times, but is somehow made all the more bathetic when you’re worried it’s going to get you thrown out of the Dalston branch of Pret.

I’m deflecting with jokes, partly because my mother reads this newsletter but also because, well, that’s what you do, isn’t it? When people ask “How are you?” they don’t actually want to know. It’s just a rhetorical question, the thing you say after “hello”, and people are not generally in search of an honest answer. And anyway, the worst of it soon passed, for the moment. I saw my therapist. I cancelled my plans and made time to see a friend, the sort you can break down in front of and know that that’s okay. I felt well enough to do some work instead of just self-soothing by reading years’ old mailing list posts about Doctor Who. 

And sure, I kept breaking down again – at songs, memories, the sight of my dog, but not, oddly, the email containing genuinely slightly ruinous news from the housing association which owns the block in which I live. But y’know, First World Problems. Mustn’t grumble. Worse things happen at sea. I got on with my day.

It’s been a while now, I know. And often, I’m sure, I’ve seemed – been – conspicuously, ostentatiously, performatively well. Sometimes this is real. Sometimes it is not.

But the thing about grief I never got before is that it’s not a straight line, or a curve, but a wave form. I sort of imagined, before all this, that it would be linear: things would be bad, but gradually they would get better; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. But those stages don’t happen one after another, but pile onto you at random; you can be triggered by anything or nothing at all, and the pain of everything you’ve lost and the hole it left behind can still hit you like the first time again. Sometimes, when you think you’ve turned a corner, you run straight into a wall. 

Sometimes, you are more aware than others of a future stripped of all landmarks and meaning.

Sometimes, you can get good news, and all you can think of is who isn’t there to tell.

Anyway, that’s why I didn’t feel like writing about the news this week. 

Something I have noticed in those moments is that there’s no point trying to listen to audio books or podcasts, which is what I’m normally doing should you spot me wandering around town. My brain won’t take them in, any more than it’ll let me come up with A Take. So instead I listen to music, which as ever does a far better job of capturing feelings than mere words ever can, and just occasionally the shuffle function throws up exactly the right thing.

Anyway, rest assured you’ll hear my good news just as soon as the embargo’s over. And I am – I really am – going to be alright again, in a while. Here are some things I wrote before the sun went down.

Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1995

You know how I occasionally like to promote my mates’ books, as a way to disguise quite how much time I spend promoting my own? Here’s the woman with the best laugh in podcasting, Miranda Sawyer:

My book is called UNCOMMON PEOPLE: BRITPOP AND BEYOND IN 20 SONGS and the idea behind it is to expand the notion that 90s UK music was just Oasis, Blur, Pulp and maybe Suede and explore a more Select magazine approach to the mad creative explosion of the era. 

There are 20 tracks, which means 20 chapters on the people who made those tracks, plus bits exploring the music press and what it was like being a pop writer back then; where ‘Britpop’ came from and why nobody involved actually wants to be associated with the name; and what changed so that alternative music could suddenly dominate the mainstream. Also, how women were treated, and how dance music also broke through but we forget that. Pop videos! Festivals! How the idea of who could be a popstar expanded! 

The book is out tomorrow. The 20 chosen artists are: Suede, Oasis, Pulp, Blur, Elastica, The Verve, The Manics, Radiohead, Garbage, PJ Harvey, Sleeper, Tricky, Edwyn Collins, Ash, Stereolab, Cornershop, The Chemical Brothers, Underworld, The Prodigy and Supergrass. You can read an extract – on Blur vs Oasis, and why Underworld’s Born Slippy is a Britpop classic – in the Observer here, and order a copy here.

Oh yeah and while we’re talking about books, here’s something I forgot to mention last week: I was on Monocle’s Foreign Desk podcast chatting about (a rare departure this) borders. You can listen here. Or buy the book that got me the gig from Waterstones, Amazon or my US publisher, The Experiment.

Me, on sale in New Canaan, Connecticut.

Half-forgotten president of the week: Andrew Johnson

Lived: 1808-1875

17th president: 1865-1869

It’s tempting to feel sorry for Andrew Johnson. He isn’t the most famous or successful President Johnson. (Hey, hey, LBJ!) He isn’t the most famous or successful president named Andrew, either. (The other, Andrew Jackson, came first, has an annoyingly similar name, and gets to be lionised for creating the Democratic Party, even though one of his main achievements in office was an enormous act of ethnic cleansing.) When I fed his name into my phone’s search function, it suggested two footballers, a golfer and a funeral parlour in Plumstead, before considering I might be looking for the president: hardly anyone even remembers that this guy existed. 

On the other hand though, he never bothered to win an election, threw former slaves under the bus during Reconstruction and came extraordinarily close to being impeached, all of which feels like an extremely strong case to think f*ck that guy. 

Terrible hair, too. Image: Library of Congress/public domain.

When last we spoke, Abraham Lincoln had just won the 1860 presidential election for the new anti-slavery Republican party, without even being on the ballot in most of the south, leading a bunch of southern states to break away. The result was the US Civil War – you’ve probably heard of that¹ – which was just approaching its conclusion at the time what was left of the United States held the 1864 presidential election. Lincoln won a second term in a landslide, beating his Democratic opponent George B McClellan 55% to 45%, and carrying 22 states and 212 electoral college votes compared to just three and 21 for McClellan. (Lincoln also, incredibly, won the recently recaptured confederate states of Louisiana and Tennessee, but their votes weren’t counted.) All looked set for four more glorious years.