The matter of time + books and movies of February and March 2024 (JWletter #67)

Barns1 Comment

Hi friend,

I’m recovering from my second SARS‑CoV‑2 infection. New symptoms every day. Today it’s an ice-pick headache lurking behind my right eyebrow, ready to make my eyes water every time I stand up. Still I worry about work.

The kids have been brilliant the whole time. They got it first, a day on the living room floor watching Bluey from a horizontal position. Then they recovered and have turned that living room into a playground while Tara and I convalesce in the bedroom next door. A playground, which they tidy up before bed every night. Amazing.

I mean we used rapid antigen tests, and they came back positive. But every single one of them had expired. I’ve been trying for a while to get fresh RATs through the free scheme but I don’t think they’re a priority for this government. Apparently they remain funded until the end of June.

*

Richard Serra died. In 2015, I walked between the leaning steel plates of The Matter of Time at the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, the massive terracotta-hued forms reducing the pale ceiling above to a snaking river.

Tripped out by the way Serra’s art recontextualised and complemented the gallery, I did what anyone is urged to do in a small, enclosed void: I clapped. Its echo rattled down the length of the art and was quickly followed by footsteps, severe ones, approaching from the opposite direction. “No clapping,” said a uniformed attendant, before disappearing just as quickly.

I don’t know. Serra was a hard arse, but I think he would have liked that I clapped.

*

Two months of reading and watching here — quite some reading, mind you — so we’ll give the music a miss this time.

BOOKS

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017
by Rashid Khalidi, 2020
Very informative and insightful in its placement of Israel and Palestine in the 20th-21st Century politics of hegemonic superpowers (first Britain, then the USA) effectively picking a side, initially to deal with a domestic problem and then to serve regional interests. I would like to know more about the deeper historical and religious basis of the current debacle, particularly how faith places these groups at such violent odds. But this book isn’t about that; it’s about modern borders and wars and summit meetings, and all the while an oppressed and almost voiceless people struggling to articulate themselves.

Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet
by Hannah Ritchie, 2024
Here’s to humanity: the source of, and solution to, all of life’s problems. If all of Ritchie’s hopes and dreams for continued progress and collective capitalist action (i.e. declaring your values with your wallet) come true, you can bump this review up to five stars. Her persistent faith in people is suspect, but infectious, especially when it’s backed by data that seems on the surface to add up. If it all goes to hell, we can at least burn copies of this book for warmth.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
by Elizabeth Kolbert, 2014
Kolbert’s New Yorker-inflected style intrudes, and I was occasionally frustrated by having to remain on the surface of so many extraordinary tales of natural history. But over the course of the book, she does build a strong sense of what extinction is and how it happens, at species level and ecosystem level, through the scientific literature and first-hand reportage. Where Hannah Ritchie questions the value of sinking so many years into preserving the giant panda, and wonders whether those involved should be aiming for a surer return on investment, Kolbert observes the incredible things such people do and amplifies their hope. I think both points of view have their place, but with her passages about a committed zoologist’s attempts to give the Hawaiian crow a high quality handjob, Kolbert seems to me to get closer to the reality of preserving life on Earth — including that of homo sapiens.

Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
by Rebecca Solnit, 2004
Dense, didactic, a brief slog through scattered tales of successful collective action and eager calls to the streets. Solnit repeatedly refers to a Virginia Woolf quote — “The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think” — to reframe the unknown future many of us fear into simply its potential, which any of us can influence to be better. I am frustrated by my own cynicism and lack of action in the face of it, so this book was confronting. As she writes, hope can be confronting.

The Ice Giant (Mermaids Rock #3)
by Linda Chapman and Mirelle Ortega, 2020
A strong climate action message and hey presto, Linda Chapman just radicalised my kids. We were watching Derry Girls when I started reading this to them so half the merpeople have terrible Norn Iron accents.Conundrum

The Art of Excavation
by Leilani Tamu, 2014
I love the sense of scale in Tamu’s poetry, and in this region’s indigenous cultures more generally — which she makes even clearer in her endnotes: “for Pacific peoples the past is ever-present and is not about looking back but looking forward”. Tamu jokes that The Alcazar, a drinking den of yore, is so forgotten it’s invisible even to ‘the great god Google’. It isn’t; I just checked and found a few mentions, first among them a publication of Tamu’s poem of the same name. So in fact, the collective Samoan memory drawn on by Tamu is strong enough to live on not just through this collection but on the Internet as well. I keep thinking we of European descent could benefit a great deal from the collapsed view of time common to Pacific peoples, te ao Māori, and many other indigenous world views, in which ancestors and descendants are always watching and not shy of a word.

The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up
by Marie Kondo and Yuko Uramoto, 2017
One statement I take issue with in this book: “The true purpose of your home and your things is to bring you happiness.” Although I get the principle that objects are easier to love and/or discard if you frame the decision this way, and something here may be lost in translation from Japanese by using the word ‘happiness’, I don’t think it’s helpful to strive for something very few people can define for themselves. For me, happiness arises from a combination of choices and circumstances that often have little to do with objects. I would substitute ‘pleasure’, ‘satisfaction’ or even the ubiquitous ‘joy’ there.
Apart from that, KonMari’s method offers just the right amount of common sense and inspiration to help layabouts like me see and arrange their spaces differently. (NB: she will teach you how to fold socks, shirts, and skirts, but not pants.)

The Book of Love
by Kelly Link, 2024
As ever, Link explores some fascinating ideas here, building a familiar but increasingly bizarre world in which magic and its consequences are painfully real. Most interestingly, this magic can undo just about anything, but the doers and undoers — mostly teenagers in thrall to their new gifts — are affected by what they know has happened, and un-happened. Being teenagers, almost everyone is a trial to spend time with, and this skilled short story writer is unfortunately expansive here, particularly with dialogue. But the town and its secrets have stayed with me. After I closed the book, I felt like these characters, in possession of the most powerful knowledge and abilities, would just keep on living their fascinating and terrible lives.

Conundrum
by Jan Morris, 1974
Some wish chivalry were still alive and well; others are glad to see the back of it. This memoir of transition was written fully fifty years ago now, superbly written in her inimitably personal fashion and as critical a contribution to the literature of gender as anything since. But I couldn’t shake the feeling, in the post-transition chapters especially, that Morris’s ideas of femininity and sex differences are as narrow and patriarchal as the world she grew up in; lacking more visibly varied models, she happily slotted into the limits of the female role in society, relinquishing memberships with grace and delighting in having doors held open for her by gentlemen. You could take the view that Morris was always a soft, tractable, malleable kind of woman, and she’d just toughened a little while she waited to fully exist as herself. A fascinating read, very much of its time but never likely to lose relevance.

New York Drawings
by Adrian Tomine, 2012
Tomine is one of my fave comics artists for a few reasons. He’s fearless in depicting moments of unbearable awkwardness, usually involving himself. His drawing style is clean and easy on the eye, with an ethnographer’s eye for detail. Most of all, his subjects are nearly always doing something mundane and instantly recognisable, like smoking, or talking, or reading — so often they’re reading. In one single-panel strip, he illustrates an airport lounge full of delayed passengers, and every single one of them is looking down at a book. Nearly twenty years after it was first published, that piece feels both nostalgic and fantastical, like — imagine seeing that many people reading in one place! You wouldn’t even see that in a library!

Personal
by Lee Child, 2014
I started reading the book; the bad guys got what was coming to them; the end. A few hours of my life, successfully passed.

Gifts
by Ursula K. Le Guin, 2004
The Uplands are rugged and rustically captivating, sparsely populated by sorcerers with varying ‘gifts’ used almost exclusively to maintain or extend power. The stronger the gift, the more terrible the power, the greater that lord’s lands. Here we meet Orrec and Gry, coming of age in this benighted country, which means figuring out how strong their gifts, and hence their power, are going to be. And who they’re going to marry. You know it’s not going to end how they hope it will, but the steep, overgrown path Le Guin takes to get there fascinates and horrifies with every step, leading to a quietly remarkable conclusion. This book is about power first and foremost, but it’s also about making a virtue of its inverse — and, in my reading, about urbanisation. Because who wouldn’t want to live in the Lowlands, with their bureaucracies and taverns and honest livings? My favourite books tend to feature people in an unjust or dysfunctioning society finding another way. Add ‘Gifts’ to the list.

MOVIES

THE ZONE OF INTEREST
directed by Jonathan Glazer, 2024
A film about Höss family values and dynamics had to be perfect to justify its existence, and it very nearly is. My sense of horror at the Holocaust, numbed by the explicit film recreations of the past thirty years, is thoroughly recharged by Glazer’s sharp focus on the perpetrators. Their businesslike approach to operational delivery, their domestic routines and squabbles, their weird kids. It all cuts deeper because it’s familiar, and the ‘other film’ taking place in a truly appalling soundscape beyond the wall feels paradoxically nearer at this narrow remove. That aural film, including Mica Levi’s intermittent score, is as essential as anything you see, if not more so.

It’s a stunning realisation, performed with absolute precision and humanity by its two leads, shot, edited, and mixed impeccably. It’s the writing choices that give me pause. Was it necessary to go with Rudolf Höss to Berlin and spend so much time with him there, rather than hearing his reports over the phone from the family home next to Auschwitz? Did the mother’s guilt not feel a little contrived amid such chilly realism? Same goes for the (breathtaking) night sequences, shot in infrared: do they not distract us from what seems to me the central purpose of the film, which is that we are only a step or two removed from these devils? And in cutting to the present day, in a sequence comparable with the best of Steve McQueen’s HUNGER, is Glazer not finally submitting to impossibility of the task he set himself?

I write all this at a time when members of the Likud, their military funded by a hegemonic power, deny the existence of a Palestinian people. This film really could not be better timed. And that’s why my quibbles feel insignificant, because right now, we need art to reflect the cold reality that any group of people can be convinced to commit genocide against another. But I think its critical lifetime will be long, and will ebb and flow with the circumstances. Hopefully, one day, it won’t seem as necessary as it does today.

POOR THINGS
directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023
I’ve avoided Lanthimos since THE LOBSTER and find his style, in tone and craft, just as questionable here. Every exterior looks like Midjourney, the near-ubiquitous fish-eye lens blurs the edges of the frame, the oppressive score screams, “Oooohhh, isn’t this all so WEIRDDDDDD!” It’s a particular vision, consistently executed, that I happen to find thoroughly off-putting — as I did an almost entirely American cast putting on British accents (or, in Ruffalo’s case, a poor man’s Tyrion Lannister). Stone’s impressively physical performance carries the day, supported by snappy dialogue that deliciously illustrates how an assertive woman, dedicated to herself and others, can set the most outwardly strong men spinning. A long, occasionally fun and rewarding exercise, overtly feminist despite its surface perviness, yet inferior to dozens of other films that anchor themselves not just in the real world but in accepted cinematographic wisdom.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE — DEAD RECKONING PART ONE
directed by Christopher McQuarrie, 2023
Punishing. Stupid, cynical, boring, desperately long. Blame me for spoiling any of its charms by watching on a laptop.

10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU
directed by Gil Junger, 1999
COVID comfort watch. Still got it. The secondary romance makes no sense, but who cares when the dialogue is this good? Ledger and Stiles are perfect.

SHE’S THE MAN
directed by Andy Fickman, 2006
This teen romance adaptation of Twelfth Night lacks 10 THINGS’ balance of sweet and acidic but it does have a delightfully broad Amanda Bynes performance and Channing Tatum mumbling “I don’t know” a lot, so it’s a winner.

OPPENHEIMER
directed by Christopher Nolan, 2023
A friend of mine told me they think Nolan increasingly directs long portions of his films as if they are trailers. I see what he means here. Over three hours, you’re lucky if he (and Oscar-winning editor Jennifer Lame) holds a shot for longer than a second, and if he does, the oppressive score will be on hand to drag you forcibly towards the next scene. It seems to me that Lame’s editing owes a lot to Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter’s for THE SOCIAL NETWORK, which is in retrospect an enormously influential film and towers over most copycats cut to resemble a web browser session, including this one. OPPENHEIMER takes us continuously between at least three events at a time, Cillian Murphy’s bright eyes and oddly (for him) earnest smile knitting together a theory of everything most influential about the 20th Century, never settling on anything more ambitious than the obvious: with nuclear weapons, we finally have the means to destroy ourselves. Some of these sequences are surreally effective, but the film’s strongest notes consider the axis between science and power, with one memorable scene in the Oval Office making it clear under whose auspices all that time and money was spent, and who decides how its products will be used. So there’s an interesting, thoughtful movie in here — but so much more movie besides, too much.

Jdanspsing Wyksui + books, movies and music of January 2024 (JWletter #66)

BarnsLeave a comment

Hi friend,

The end of TinyLetter means more Jdanspsa Wyksui. I’ve been sending out a monthly roundup of my reading, watching and listening for a few years now, and while I liked TinyLetter’s naked simplicity, the JWletter probably always belonged here. So: welcome to the fold, you strange monster.

You can subscribe to all new posts using the little email form on the sidebar at the right of this page – or the one right underneath this paragraph. Type in your email address, click Subscribe, then confirm by clicking the link in your email. We’ve all done this before.

For those who have come across from TinyLetter: thanks!

For those wondering why they should subscribe to film and literature criticism from yet another a cishet white dude whose knowledge of most fields, including film and literature, rarely rises above that of the dilettante: fair enough. You might prefer to check out a few more varied and/or experienced voices who deserve a larger audience: Deepanjana Pal, Jazial Crossley, Dan Slevin.

In case it helps you decide whether to stick around, my reviewing style is to look for what’s different about a book, or film, or song, and be honest about how I personally respond to it. I read widely across time, genre, and author demographics, and I skew positive because I tend to look for the best in people and their work. Sometimes I phone it in. Very occasionally, I put the boot in (see: Tuesdays with Morrie, How High We Go In The Dark).

Okay, on with the books, movies, and music of January 2024.

BOOKS

Dartmouth Park
by Rupert Thomson, 2023

Thomson’s premise here is one that would have me walking straight on by, were it any other author: white man in mid-fifties, existential crisis, leaves wife, searches for meaning overseas, delusions of grandeur. (A clue: this novel will be released in the UK this year under the title ‘How To Make A Bomb’.) It isn’t that Philip is wrong — the design choices that created our modern societies are almost uniformly flawed, and something needs to change — but he is not the truth-teller he thinks he is. Thomson is such a good writer that you almost empathise with him, even as his actions from the get go reveal him to be untrustworthy; meanwhile, the world he wanders through, often aimlessly, is vivid in its characters and details, from the weathered setts and high balconies of Cádiz to the stark landscape around Theo’s house in rural Crete, not to mention the starkness of Theo’s existence. Thomson adds another layer of difficulty by formatting the story in verse, like what Bernardine Evaristo calls ‘fusion fiction’, which actually makes it easier to read than if it were in full paragraphs and sentences. I found it compelling, shot through with one memorable scene after another, though the ending was a little frustrating and relegates the character Philip treats worst to stock status.

We Are Here: An Atlas of Aotearoa
by Chris McDowall and Tim Denee, 2019

Magnificent. A point in time in the history of this land, seen from most imaginable angles. Perfectly titled and carefully curated.

Tell You What: Great New Zealand Nonfiction, 2015
edited by Jolisa Gracewood and Susanna Andrew, 2014

We have some bloody good writers in this country. There were only a handful of pieces I didn’t really connect with. Favourites were by Simon Wilson, Gregory Kan, Lara Strongman, Megan Clayton, Leilani Tamu, Tina Makereti, David Herkt.

Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed
by Paul Cronin and Werner Herzog, 2014

This is longer and more comprehensive than Herzog’s superb biography but covers much of the same ground. I questioned the need to read it at all but quickly understood that if Herzog is speaking (or writing), I’ll be fascinated, even if I’ve heard the story before. There is a risk with Herzog that everything mundane about your life, all your foibles and failures and everything you’ve signed up to in modern society, is rendered petty and pointless and you might as well quit your job and pick up a camera and make something ecstatic happen through sheer will. I know, but mate, I have a mortgage.

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
by Carlo Rovelli, 2014

The book I’ve been seeking for a while. Simple and elegant and very eye-opening for someone as ignorant of the basics as me. More accessible than A Brief History of Time. Probably still won’t seek out more detailed physics texts.

MOVIES

THE BOY AND THE HERON
directed by Hayao Miyazaki, 2023

I think THE BOY AND THE HERON owes many of its very positive reviews to critics’ love and affinity for Hayao Miyazaki — a true giant not just of the last four decades of cinema but of its entire history — and the worlds and wonders he’s gifted across a dozen or so meticulously crafted feature films. I wonder how a younger viewer unfamiliar with Miyazaki or his influence would respond to this one.

My guess is they’d at least be somewhat dazzled by the incredibly detailed animation; beyond that, they’d notice horror movie tropes throughout, particularly in the first half hour, and the video game logic that dominates the film once Mahito steps into the shadow world. He is a fundamentally blank protagonist, for a start, inexpressive even as he sprints through tunnels crumbling into the void. And that shadow world isn’t really a world at all; it’s a series of set pieces, generally populated by a different sidekick and a different set of villains, which Mahito must outwit so he can continue his quest. You can almost imagine a tutorial at the start of each episode explaining how to use the controller to achieve the movements and actions required to progress, or a series of hints to nudge you towards the correct solution. I don’t mean to invoke video games as an epithet, but there’s a limit to what you can do with character and theme when you’re bouncing from one grand edifice to another, especially without the rendering of open spaces between each, such as you’d find in the most recent Zelda games.

Miyazaki seems to have created this world to finally sign off. He is 83, and his films, which take years to produce, are like feats of endurance for everyone involved. There’s a grand-uncle character, also at the end of his life, who seeks a successor. But in the film’s denouement, Miyazaki seems to understand that no one else can keep up with his imagination and work ethic, no one’s going to carry it on in the same way after he’s gone. You could read Mahito as a cypher for Miyazaki’s son Goro, whose work as a director has consistently fallen well short of his father’s unfair benchmark. But I’m not sure THE BOY AND THE HERON is as simple as a rehashing of their (quite difficult) real-life relationship. It probably requires multiple viewings to see it from the necessary angles. Notice how I haven’t mentioned the heron, or the two mothers, or the mostly absent father, or Miyazaki’s seeming hatred of all birds.

I was a bit tired so I spent much of the film on the verge of nodding off. But like the critics, I’m a longtime Miyazaki fan, too, so at this film’s destructive climax, I really felt that this was the ultimate end (for real this time) of this great director’s artistry and imagination — and I couldn’t stop myself from weeping. My wife turned to me as the credits rolled and announced, “Well, that was incoherent!” Then: “Oh God! Are you all right?” I will be, love, because at the very least, we’ll always have MY NEIGHBOUR TOTORO.

MUSIC

An Unnatural History
by LYR
Bandcamp

Sometimes Spotify’s algorithms really get me. God knows why they dropped the careful intonements of Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom Simon Armitage, backed by musicians Richard Walters and Patrick J Pearson, into my ‘Popular new releases’. LYR (Land Yacht Regatta) aren’t popular, and they’re certainly divisive in this household, with my wife and children grimacing every time I put them on. Those of a weirder, weightier bent will be drawn initially to Armitage’s spoken word — which repeatedly references the fauna of Barnsley and its former Natural History Museum, which “disappeared under somewhat mysterious circumstances” — then to Walters and Pearson’s alternately mournful and rocking tunes that more than back him up. The effect is to amplify the power of written word and of song when brought together, but also to emphasise the permeability of time, connecting what once was with what now is — and even with what can be imagined. I’ve never been to Barnsley but this record makes me feel like I’m standing on Eldon Street, watching the Tesco bags and the fox cubs go by.

Wall of Eyes
by The Smile
Bandcamp

Jonny Greenwood’s unsettling strings and discordant guitars and piano; Thom Yorke wandering, again the unglimpsed seer (see also), one of the “grains of sand slipping through our hands”. Doors opening, doors closing, selves multiplying and vanishing. The aim here seems similar to their work with Radiohead: to twist the human world so its excesses, its muddles and its strangest expressions of love are in floodlights; to be cynical and earnest at the same time. I, too, am both cynical and earnest about this record, and about most of what Radiohead and its members have put out over the last ten years. For example, I see Yorke is back on his car crash stuff again in ‘Bending Hectic’, which starts quiet and builds to a crescendo over eight surprisingly short minutes. “We’re just riding on those things – we’re not really in control of them“: we’ve heard it before, mate, in ‘Airbag’, ‘Killer Cars’, etc. But those are great songs, too, and the perspective’s different here, and Tom Jenkins’ jazz-trained drums fit perfectly in a way Phil Selway’s more precise style might not. So I keep listening.

Things of 2023

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Front Page

An earth-coloured hill glows orange in the sunset light above a house with a grey steel roof, like a wave of dirt about to swamp the house.

As I write this on the first morning of the new year, it is pissing down outside — droplets visibly multiplying and scattering as they smash into the neighbour’s roof — but from my vantage point, looking west towards Kāpiti, the sky is all blue except a single rising tuft of white cumulus floating steadily north. Like the sky’s thinking two things at the same time. In the time it’s taken to write this paragraph, the rain has stopped.

I turned 39 in 2023, dad, husband, writer of emails, and I tried to change my mind to be more like that sky. To be comfortable holding all the competing narratives of contemporary society in my head, at least for a minute, and find a few clean toeholds on this precipice of climate change, recurring conflict, populism, and artificial intelligence, which I could use to write this entire post for me right here in the WordPress web app.

I have this one sometime friend who has a way of finding exactly the right words for your weak points so they ring in your head for years. When I messaged him for the first time in a while, he replied, ‘When did you get so sober?’ Mate, I’ve always been this sober.

As always, this wrap-up is mainly a record for me, but I think there’s something in it for everyone.

Books

A child sits in a green folding chair and reads next to a fairy garden.

Getting my father-in-law into Jhumpa Lahiri was a top achievement of 2023. So was reading three books by her, including Roman Stories, newly translated from the Italian she now customarily writes in, dark and disenchanting in a way her older stories only hinted at.

Those Lahiri reads pushed my 2023 reads by women of colour up to ten. I read 40 books by women and 22 books by people of colour. This is out of 65 books read in 2023. Ratios are improving. Smug righteousness expanding.

These books I loved:

  • Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin (2003) (re-read)
  • The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (2013) (re-read)
  • Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz (1977)
  • Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
  • Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (1993)
  • Every Man For Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog (2023)

Those re-reads early in the year were a treat, especially The Luminaries, which I felt more able to meet at its level than when I was first under its spell in 2013. I read it straight after racing through Birnam Wood, which I also really enjoyed. In The Luminaries, things start in a mess and steadily get sorted; in Birnam Wood, there’s hope at the start and absolutely none at the end.

A big thank you to Auntie Cheryl for introducing me to Eve Babitz, who writes the most interesting stories about the most vacuous people and situations. I’ve never spent time in Los Angeles or California but her ear for dialogue and talent for description almost convince me that I have.

Finally reading Austen was perfect for our anniversary weekend away. Pride and Prejudice is one of Tara’s favourite books; I knew the story but I didn’t know about Austen’s mastery of character, language, and tone on every page, her wit, her tenderness.

By contrast, finally reading Butler’s totally unsentimental near-future hellscape was every bit as much of a gut punch as I’d been led to expect, and more. There’s fire everywhere, most of all in the protagonist Lauren, whose drive towards change is as intense and ruthless as the scorched landscape around her.

But if there’s one book I’ll look back on most, it’s Herzog’s incredible autobiography, which is packed with incredible yarns and told with the narrative spark of a practised raconteur. No one could ever agree with Herzog about everything but I think most readers will find the perfect final pages hard to resist. Thank you Mummyji for putting it on my shelf.

These books I liked:

  • I’m Working On A Building by Pip Adam (2013)
  • Audition by Pip Adam (2023)
  • Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (2023)
  • Masters of Doom by David Kushner (2003)
  • The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (1983)
  • The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri (2003)
  • The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (2013)
  • Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri (2023)
  • Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary (1983) (re-read)
  • L. A. Woman by Eve Babitz (1982)
  • Tales of the Tikongs by Epeli Hau’ofa (1983)
  • The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (1963)
  • Black Vodka by Deborah Levy (2013)
  • Things I Don’t Want To Know by Deborah Levy (2013)
  • Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead (2023)
  • Beyond a Boundary by C. L. R. James (1963)
  • White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link (2023)

A decent list implying a pretty good hit rate from those 65 books, especially considering I didn’t actively hate any of them. You may however notice how my reading skews to this century, which I aim to improve upon in 2024. For the bored or curious, here’s my reading list.

A quick postscript for Sherryl Jordan, a favourite of my childhood and whose The King’s Nightingale challenged and fascinated me in 2021. She died on 15 December. The Juniper Game, with its telepathy and nascent sexuality, was one of the most memorable and influential reads of my childhood, putting some of my burgeoning feelings into florid language. Re-reading it as an adult, I was struck by how inappropriate and objectifying some of that language was, but that doesn’t make its impact on my young mind any less true.

Sport

A child kicks a yellow football in motion blur in the corner of a well-grassed country field.

The FIFA Women’s World Cup football tournament was held in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia in 2023. My kids became aware of it thanks to a McDonald’s Happy Meal promotion featuring Panini cards with players on them; score one for corporate sponsorship. They were particularly interested in ‘the red girl’, aka Spain captain Olga Carmona. Why? “Because daddy’s favourite colour is red.”

After New Zealand opened the tournament with a shock win over Norway, I was determined to ride the wave of public interest and get the kids along to the first match in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, between Costa Rica and Spain. A shout-out here to Anne, who scored us two free tickets, and to the official FIFA ticketing app, which had me shitting bricks with all its terms and conditions and restrictions.

Not content with ferrying the kids an hour south in mid-winter at night to sit on uncomfortable bucket seats for a couple of hours, I decided to up the difficulty by driving to Porirua and taking the train the rest of the way to the stadium.

“Are you sure about this?” said Tara, who had an assignment due, meaning I was solely responsible for the success or failure of the endeavour. “It’ll be fine, they’ll be fine, we’ll be fine, I’ll be fine,” I said, over and over.

We parked up and staggered over to the train platform in several layers of warm clothing, which we promptly shed in the stuffed and overheated confines of the train carriage. I found the kids a seat and crouched awkwardly next to them as they looked blankly at the sea of colour and noise all around them. Spanish fans, mostly.

We finally found pockets of space on the long, wide, concrete concourse leading up to the gates of Sky Stadium, or ‘Stadium’, as it was known for the duration of the tournament. I took the kids’ hands and we ran towards the floodlit temple before us, full of night time energy and the buzz of an international sports crowd. This was dampened somewhat by the confiscation, in an otherwise smooth entry process, of the off-brand water bottles I’d packed for the kids. The FIFA terms and conditions were always going to get me somehow. We stood with shouting people in the beer and wine queue for ten minutes to get two bottles of spring water for ten bucks.

Then we found Anne and Kazu and made our way into the stadium and up to our seats, way up the back under cover and with a little space on either side. I handed the kids their lunchboxes but they just held them on their laps as they took it all in, the flags and face paint and clothing in the stands around them, the brightly lit green rectangle a hundred metres distant from our elevated position. Kazu gave them little hand warmers to put in their pockets. Anne shared her lollies. Then the game kicked off.

It was terrifically one-sided. Spain put on a clinic and peppered Costa Rica’s goal from the outset, to the extent that the neutral crowd took to roaring every time the ball went into Spain’s half — so, about three roars in the first 45 minutes, by which time it was 3-0 to Spain. The Costa Rica goalkeeper suffered leg cramps later in the match.

During those long spells of Spanish possession and attack, the crowd satisfied its need to make noise through stadium waves. I would like to say the kids were interested in the football, but this was what they really remembered: watching the wave ripple around the opposite side of the stadium, as if thousands of hands became a single conscious entity, and then being part of the wave themselves.

I decided to drag us off to an early train rather than see out the full match and risk missing an even later and certainly far more congested train. High on the energy and wisdom of the crowd, they were disappointed to leave. As we disembarked from the train in Porirua, they spotted a huge poster for the World Cup. They talked about it excitedly, pretending it had been put up especially for them.

A few weeks later, after years of turmoil and controversy, Spain won the final against England with a goal from — who else? — the red girl, Olga Carmona. (Then the president of the Spanish football federation kissed Jennifer Hermoso on the lips during the presentation — Jennifer Hermoso, who literally ran further than any other player in the entire tournament, at the tail end of a glittering career in the game. #SeAcabo.)

Travel

A woman and a man smile in the foreground, with a view of pointed green hills of farmland behind.

Tara and I celebrated ten years together with a quiet August weekend in Te Rohe Potāe, the King Country. Our car playlist was so good I missed the turn-off at Bulls, so we ended up having our early afternoon tea stop at Parikino Lookout halfway between Whanganui and Raetihi on the winding, storm-battered State Highway 4. There was an exceptional view of rugged, pointy farmland clawed back from the ripples of ancient tectonic shifts, a landscape I particularly identify with Aotearoa. There was also the most extreme and bigoted graffiti I’ve ever seen, Nazi swastikas and all, carved with prejudice into the picnic table.

Our Airbnb hosts at Ōwhango showed us our digs, a rustic studio converted from a 19th Century jailhouse (how’s that for a metaphor?), then left us alone completely. We loaded more wood into the firebox and headed off to Taumarunui for dinner at the local Thai place and BARBIE at the Regent Cinema. The big table in the middle of the restaurant seated a group of women dressed in whatever pink clothing they could find, mostly pyjamas. “I wonder where they’re going after dinner,” Tara said.

The cinema was everything I’d hoped for. Family-run, thinning wall curtains and sagging sofas in the lobby, cracked leather seats in the auditorium, Nibble Nook. The only heat source was a vent above some underfloor radiators down the front, so Tara put on her woolly hat and warm gloves for the show. The women from the restaurant came in soon after us, waving and calling out to various folks who were already seated. I expected the image to be flat and the sound tinny, but they’d clearly put money into bringing the tech up to date.

The following day, we ate lunch at the outstanding Blue Hill Cafe in Ōwhango — it’s worth a detour — and went for a walk by the Whakapapa River. Apparently there are blue mushrooms in that bush. I saw one once when I was a child in the Kaimai Range over Te Aroha way and couldn’t believe this toy section thing sticking up in all that green. We didn’t see any this time.

A two-night stay, so for us, the above is a pretty relaxed itinerary. I read a book of New Zealand sports quotes compiled by Joseph Romanos. We sat in the spa a lot and lay next to each other by the fire, chatting.

I’ve said this before but Tara changed my life. As we reflected on our ten years together, I couldn’t believe how much we’ve packed in, considering how often I feel like I’m lazy and coasting. Tara drives this. She’s like Lin Manuel-Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton, never satisfied, always looking to the next new thing. The other day, we were at the beach and I remembered going to the same beach twelve years prior and just sitting on the sand, unsure of what to do. It’s because of Tara that I now see beaches — and forests and mountains and trails — as places of boundless possibility.

On that first night, when we returned from Taumarunui, the skies cleared to reveal a fuller expanse of stars than we’re accustomed to down our way. We stood arm-in-arm on the driveway for a few minutes as our eyes adjusted and pinpricks of light bled out into clusters and nebulae, alternately marvelling in wonder and bullshitting each other with made-up constellations. Our relationship in a nutshell.

Movies

A living room television showing a still from the film Super Mario Brothers.

IN CINEMAS

I saw eight films in a cinema in 2023. Here they are in chronological order, with five-word reviews and rankings in brackets. Same follows for everything else I saw this year.

  • BROKER: Kore-eda, you let me down (8)
  • SUZUME: Lush anime, fine wordless climax (6)
  • ROBOT DREAMS: Mechanised whistling, do you remember? (3)
  • ENNIO: Talking heads, three diverting hours (5)
  • HOW TO HAVE SEX: Consent need not be blurred (2)
  • BARBIE: Accidental Wes Anderson speechifying nothing (7)
  • GODZILLA MINUS ONE: Budget of only $15m, how? (4)
  • STOP MAKING SENSE: Talking Heads, 90 perfect minutes (1)

NEW, BUT WATCHED ON A LAPTOP OR TV

  • GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY: Looks expensive, no real value (meh)
  • RED, WHITE & ROYAL BLUE: Snappy dialogue in twee romance (eh)

NOT SO NEW

  • THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER (rewatch): It’s never let me down
  • EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (rewatch): Simple story a new way
  • THE MUMMY (rewatch): Hottest cast of all time?
  • PETITE MAMAN: Inner child work, concise, masterful
  • PU-239: Passion project never gets going
  • DREDD: Comically violent diving in slomo
  • BLINDSPOTTING: Verbal rhythms and racial undercurrents
  • THE NAMESAKE: Penn’s better as stoner Kumar
  • RIO GRANDE: It’s about vibes, not facts
  • BEVERLY HILLS CHIHUAHUA: Not as shit as expected
  • BILL BAILEY’S REMARKABLE GUIDE TO THE ORCHESTRA: I liked early Bill best
  • 21 JUMP STREET: Wacky, fundamentally conservative buddy comedy
  • 22 JUMP STREET: More gags, more Tatum mumbling
  • POKEMON: THE ARCEUS CHRONICLES: Kids’ choice every movie night
  • POKEMON: SECRETS OF THE JUNGLE: They didn’t like this one
  • LEGALLY BLONDE: “You’ve NEVER SEEN LEGALLY BLONDE????”
  • PONYO (rewatch): Strange, inventive, woolly, distinctive Miyazaki
  • WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT: Well-intentioned, progressively minded failure
  • JOUR DE FETE: A film that’s just silly
  • LES OLYMPIADES (aka PARIS, 13th DISTRICT): Audiard’s cheat codes dazzle again

Health

A wooden picnic table on grass in the foreground is shot to resemble a piece of modern art. The sun sets over the sea in the background. Two large trees are at the left of the image.

“You need to start taking better care of yourself,” said the counsellor. I knew this well enough already, but hearing a professional say it within five minutes of our first consultation made it the bright flashing light of my inner life. I have a tendency to put others’ needs above my own, and to self-sabotage in occasionally alarming ways during moments of crisis. I say moments because I’m fortunate never to have suffered any chronic mental ill health. But the acute nature of some of the moments leading up to those counselling sessions meant something had to change.

Start taking better care of yourself. Start, with the unspoken implication to continue. I successfully introduced regular breathing exercises and regular free writing into my routine. I continued to drink plenty of water and eat a relatively balanced diet. I made a few abortive attempts to introduce regular exercise and regular friend time; my health goals for 2024 are right there. Consistently restorative sleep is something for the longer term, when the kids are older and my wife’s sleep schedule aligns better with mine. It would also help if the cat didn’t leap onto the bed about 6am every morning to let me know her food plate remained mostly full.

The counsellor also recommended a solid chunk of time with no responsibility to anyone but myself. With Tara’s support, I booked a night in a holiday home out by the beach, filled a backpack and walked out there one hot April afternoon. I shut the curtains and let time stretch out more than it has in years. I watched two movies from start to finish and read an entire novel in one sitting.

This came in the middle of a week off work, and by the Friday, I felt like my long-elevated baseline stress level was coming down. Then Haku, the larger and fluffier of our two beautiful, stupid cats, got run over. I finished my week of stress leave forking over all our savings in an attempt to save his life, then signing the euthanasia forms and stroking his ruff while the needle went in.

*

Tara says Haku’s death was unquestionably the most difficult time of the year. For me, it was finally contracting COVID-19 at the start of February. Considering the tendency to discuss ‘the pandemic’ in the past tense nowadays, this note is appropriately buried well down the page. But it was the most difficult thing I faced all year and arguably its defining feature, unquestionably a contributor to my seeking counselling a couple of months later, though I was lucky not to develop anything like long COVID.

What I didn’t realise was that when I got COVID-19, Tara would have COVID-19 too. I always imagined simply a week off, shut away in some room of the house with books, a laptop and meals and snacks brought to the door. Instead, we had to tag team through the routine of caring for two young children and ourselves, both bitterly resentful every time we had to haul ourselves out of bed, denying cuddles to the dearest people in our lives. Other things I remember: sprawling for hours in a bean bag on the deck during the hottest week of summer; punching a door in anger when my kids were hurting each other again; the persistent scent of sea water deep in my nose.

Music

Collage of album covers mentioned in the text.

As the year ran out I found myself turning back to the first 2023 album that really got into my bones: CACTI by Billy Nomates. How’s that for an artist name that gives no fucks? Her working class pop pans back to pandemic lockdowns and spits in the face of anyone who dares question, most of all herself, but it’s also addictive and full of vivid imagery. She got a pasting after her Glastonbury set, which featured her singing and vibing in her inimitable fashion (“I feel like you don’t get to see a lot of un-delicate female movement,” she told The Guardian) and nothing but a backing track to accompany her. I think it kicks arse.

Someone else who came back stronger in 2023 was yeule with softscars. Another arty type who doesn’t like capital letters or punctuation, which usually puts me off, but their music, though still occasionally abrasive, is richer and smoother than 2022’s striking Glitch Princess. They operate even closer to the edge than Billy Nomates; that title is a reference to the remnants of self-harm, and in the bridge of standout ‘sulky baby‘, they sing: ‘I’m staring at you from the cliff / I’m looking down, I feel the bliss / I wanna jump, but I see your eyes’. The growing confidence and range in their sound suggests they’ll get even better if they stay this side of the brink.

L’Rain blessed us with a new album, I Killed Your Dog (if that puts you off, be aware she sings “I am your dog” on the title track). It’s hard to top the stop-you-in-your-tracks opening of 2021’s Fatigue, which made my world turn for months; eventually I warmed to I Killed Your Dog‘s gentler, jazzier rhythms, L’Rain’s groove still echoing with the 21st Century malaise I crave but more eager this time to leave the world behind and just hang.

There was also interesting new music from:

Clementine Valentine, The Coin That Broke The Fountain Floor, divinely inspired if patchier than their glorious last record as Purple Pilgrims;

H. Hawkline, Milk For Flowers, six full years since the brilliant I Romanticize and studded with a few fresh classics like the sprawling pleasures of ‘Denver‘;

Buck Meek, Haunted Mountain, whose solo work is way better than anything he’s done with Big Thief IMO;

and The New Pornographers, Continue as a Guest, who I clicked with in a big way this time. Track after hook-driven track I just couldn’t get enough of. I like that title, too, calling to mind half-hearted web browser sessions and general dipping of toes.

But what I really want to tell you about is the music I listened to while I was at work. Which means it was the music I listened to more than anything else this year. Because I’m invariably working with words and trying to shut out office noise, my work choices tend more towards instrumentals and electronica, which is what I’ve always jived with best.

It starts with Rắn Cạp Đuôi Collective and *1, heavy, pulsing, sweaty, and screaming, these guys throw a kitchen sink’s worth of sonic experiments at nine tracks and push the whole thing out the door at less than a half hour’s listening time. One moment it’s like a cloud, the next an electric shock. Perfect for dispelling distractions and knocking out that draft.

I was put off by the controlled feedback on track one of Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities by James Holden and removed it from my Spotify downloads without completing a full listen. Fortunately, a friend insisted I give it another go. It’s so well named and always puts me in a better frame of mind.

Montreal-based Maara took me back to the early 00s of house with The Ancient Truth. That bassline on ‘Just Give Me Time‘ is trance-inducing all by itself; add a propulsive beat, swirling vocal samples, and what sounds to me like iterations on calm surf rolling into shore.

Slightly more challenging — it got funny looks from my wife when I chose it during dinner prep, but she’d be grateful if she knew I could’ve chosen Rắn Cạp Đuôi — was Beta Librae with DAYSTAR. Beta Librae really conjures the thumping bass melodies and flashing lights of the club at 3am here, and I tell you what, I got some work done. (Not that it can’t be pretty.)

And Leon Vynehall released a couple of singles this year. One of them, ‘Duofade‘, came out on my birthday and is the best kind of Vynehall: surprising, innovative, but still a tune, calling to mind the best of Four Tet and Burial.

Finally, something I listened to more than most other music this year can’t be found online. Someday soon, Ashish Seth will rework the hour of unreleased material he knocked into a tentative LP and shared with me at the very start of the year, and I’ll be able to share the wealth. It’s as moodily evocative as ever and has some spellbinding, transcendent moments. Meantime, go and check out Firstborn.

Tech and Gaming

Two children play an arcade version of Mario Kart.

The internet was slow again, the mobile browser page wouldn’t load, so I smacked my Google Pixel 2 with the heel of my right hand. Childish, really, and far from the first time I’ve destroyed an innocent electronic device in a fit of rage.

Not to worry. I had my old Moto G 5 ready to pick up the SIM card and chug along with me. Then I tried to open a car door while holding it in the same hand and it slipped and landed face down on the concrete. Smash, but this one hurt a lot less. I mean it was a pure accident this time.

Time for a new phone, and you know what? The Pixel 2 was so perfect — small, affordable, great camera, powerful enough to do all the things I wanted it to — I decided to get another. So that’s what I have now.

Now, at the very end of the year, the speaker and microphone on Tara’s phone suddenly stopped functioning. It’s a damned shame but she does have a long-serving Google Pixel, and another Pixel 2 could be ours today for only $139. Watch this space.

Is it even a good phone, though? I guess it depends what you want from these things, which in our case isn’t much. Calls and texts; decent photos; YouTube; Spotify; podcasts; some quickly jotted notes. A bit of social media (ancient social media like Facebook and Instagram, not TikTok, although I think I’ve finally kicked X (formerly Twitter)).

The bigger question is coming fast: when should the kids get their own phone or screen-based device? There’s a movement to keep smartphones out of kids’ hands as long as possible, and Tara and I both like the sound of that, because how much have they added to our lives? And what would they have taken away from us if we’d had them when we were growing up?

The reality is always more complicated. The evidence suggests smartphones contribute to mental ill health in young people, but they’re also growing up in a world that expects them to be attached to screens at work and play. Right now, I can be comfortable knowing both of these statements are true, but there’ll come a time when we’ll have to set our stall out on one side or the other.

Politics

The year in news began with yet more images of Jacinda Ardern. Then competing images of Christophers Hipkins and Luxon. Now, images of Luxon, Winston Peters, and David Seymour. Day to day, I’m not sure who’s actually in charge, but their faces will saturate our front pages if they have anything to do with it.

The new government’s effort to reduce the amount of visible te reo Māori is a dogwhistle and a distraction from the deeper impacts when landlords and employers have restored powers of unilateral termination, not to mention the kettle of climate change being boiled harder and harder by more grunty cars, more farting cows, and more primary resource extraction. BUT — it is gratifying to see how te reo Māori persists undaunted, as if a happy majority didn’t even notice the government change.

Most recently, I noticed te reo front and centre in TV coverage of the Super Smash, New Zealand’s domestic Twenty20 cricket tournament. Finn Allen smoked another slog over the mid-wicket boundary and ONO flashed up on the screen, followed by SIX. This is just what we do now.

People

A family poses for a photograph in front of a railway crossing sign. One of the children is coughing.

Nora and Juney are now six. They go to school and forget all about us, then come home and demand afternoon tea. They finally fall asleep without one or both of us in the room. They read a bit, and count to a hundred, and ask whether this moment is actually a dream and whether you can still think after you die. As their conscious exponentially expands, I know less and less about them — and that’s how it’s supposed to be with kids. They slough away their dependence on you in fits and starts. If you’re doing it right.

Tara and I remain extremely fortunate to have her parents’ 24/7 support as we attempt to grow these small people into functional humans. Jeff has taken them to and from school all year, and he almost always agrees to another boing on the trampoline, even when he’s interrupted in the middle of cooking dinner. Cathy has been stuck in bed or on the sofa with long COVID all year, but still she puts her hand up to look after the kids if Tara and I need to go out for a bit. I can’t even remember what it was like before we all moved in together.

As for Tara, she has acquitted herself so spectacularly well in two years of part-time creative writing study that she’s about to embark on a Master’s degree and write a real-life book. She does need me to put the punctuation in the right place — commas almost always go inside the quotes, dear — but apart from that, the hard work and the talent are entirely hers. When she wasn’t upstairs all evening with the study door shut, we marked the close of each day with an hour or two next to each other on the sofa, distilling the day’s events, chewing over our existential crises, looking to the future, and watching Taskmaster. So much Taskmaster (thank you Ed).

In the final weeks of December, I was delighted to spend some time with almost every member of my close family. Thanks to Tara’s incredible skill at birthday present selection, I even flew Sounds Air to Nelson to spend a weekend with my dad. What a superb town Nelson is! Especially on my stepmother’s e-bike: a return trip to Saxton Oval on the Saturday, a ride along the green paint to the River Kitchen and the Suter Art Gallery on Sunday. I don’t get much time with my dad and hadn’t visited him in Nelson in the two and a half years he’d lived there, so this weekend was one of the highlights of the year.

And then one more year becomes one more year, as the song goes. I fear the future and try to suppress it with plans. I stack them up and watch them fall. But there’s always a few that slip through to fruition, imposing some shape on my memory. Past, present, future, all polygons and rhomboids in my mind, a teetering structure always on the brink. Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua. I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past.

Things of 2022

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Front Page

We Some of us tend to uncertainty. The first draft of this post had multiple questions in each section, and as I age, it seems I have more questions than answers, even about my own experience of the world. I know I am a husband, father, public servant, in roughly that order. Nearing forty and a little greyer still. I celebrated my fifth wedding anniversary, and my children’s fifth birthdays — yes.

I ate mostly vegetables. I got a sweat up about twice a month on average. I got accustomed to multigenerational living in a million-dollar house in an area of quintile 5 social deprivation, i.e. ‘most deprived’. (It’s probably more like an $850k house now.)

I’ve tried to strip those questions out to give my writing a more concrete foundation. The truth is I live, like all of us, on shifting sands, increasingly unsure I can trust my own senses, let alone the ground beneath my feet.

Travel

I think we’re finally getting family holidays right. Sojourns of years past have been marked by squabbling and exhaustion and long days in the car are giving way to pleasant jaunts with shorter squabbles, generally cheerful weathering of inconvenience… and, yes, long days in the car. Hard to get away from those in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Certainly the kids’ (and consequently our) improved sleep is a big part of it, which is true of all aspects of life. But it’s all so much purer and more acute on holiday, where you’re cut loose from the cradle of habit and routine. Clothes in bags and a sandy piles on the floor rather than the usual drifts flowing out of baskets in the living room, bedroom, hallway. Washing cutlery as you use it, not piling it up in the sink.

In February, Lake Rotoiti in the Bay of Plenty. Omicron was surging but we went anyway. We walked out of our caravan, crossed the narrow road to the playground, and crossed that to stride into such inviting water, which seemed to offer not just its own cool shallows but also the reflected contents of the skies above. It rained and drizzled half the time but we kept going back in anyway, cavorting and laughing and floating like a perfect sitcom family, tracking sand back into the caravan afterwards.

We came in from one such swim after the Rotorua Redwoods tree walk, settled in for afternoon rest (them: laptop, me: ebook), then ate some dinner and got ready to drive back for the much-anticipated Redwoods Nightwalk, which promised colourfully lit trees and “34 exquisite lanterns” to brighten the final night of our holiday.

The kids leapt into their car seats and waited while I hunted for the car keys. I hunted, and I hunted, and I hunted; the keys were nowhere. I thought back to the way we’d bounded straight from car to lake when we’d gotten back to the caravan that afternoon. Surely the keys hadn’t stayed in my pocket? Surely they weren’t at the bottom of that huge lake, concealed in the surface reflections by day and in the dark by night?

After an hour of searching, and swearing, including with my phone torch in the water, we gave up and took the kids back in for bed. They were upset but handled it pretty well. Weathering inconvenience, or parental failure.

I set an early alarm and slept fitfully, knowing failure to locate the keys meant a substantial bill to cut a new one, and at the very least, a late departure for home. When the alarm went off at dawn, I crept out to comb that lake. But first, another quick check of the ca-

Ah. There they were in Juney’s seat. Right where her bum had been for the duration of the previous night’s frantic search.

We didn’t get to the Redwoods Nightwalk this time, but we did get to drive home.

*

In November, a week in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland. COVID very much around once more, but we didn’t get it this time either, although Tara picked something up early and had to miss our ferry ride across to Devonport. The kids loved the dry sand at the playground and, a few metres away, the wet sand and wavelets of the beach, studded with many brilliant shells and objects that they collected for close to an hour until it was time for possible the worst fish and chips I’ve ever had. Then back to the ferry with heavier legs and darkening circles under eyes via a last toilet stop.

They were just about to haul the gangway back on board when I realised I didn’t have the tog bag, which also held their drink bottles and other small items that would be missed. “We can’t wait,” said the captain. So off we went to get the bag, and back to the playground for ten minutes, and back to the ferry once more, kids “actually happy to play some more”. Eventually we made it back to the central city and trudged ten minutes to our absurdly central accommodation, fuelled by lollies.

I know I only talk about the times things go wrong but as a parent, I am rarely prouder of myself or my children than when there’s a balls-up far from home and we find a way to get through it.

Books

These books I loved:

  • The Books of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • On Warne by Gideon Haigh
  • We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
  • Trust by Hernan Diaz

Very occasionally, a book comes into your life that’s not only addictive and a formal marvel but also changes how you see the world. Trust is one such book. Diaz’s meticulous research into early 20th Century capital and finance shows, but more than that, so does his deep reading of novels and autobiographies of the time, all of which are reflected in Trust’s nested four-part structure. I read it twice in 2022; I also listened to a two-and-a-half-hour interview with Diaz about how he pulled it all off. For a book that’s so much about the artificial creation of value, it was worth every second.

These books I liked:

  • My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
  • To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara
  • In the Margins by Elena Ferrante
  • How to Loiter in a Turf War by Coco Solid
  • Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
  • Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage by Heather Havrilesky
  • How to Stay Sane by Philippa Perry
  • Small Deaths by Rijula Das
  • A Line Above the Sky by Helen Mort
  • The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka
  • The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters

Of these, To Paradise is the one I find myself thinking back to most often. Yanagihara’s clean, methodical prose masks some pretty half-baked thinking — but it does get you thinking, and it’s propulsive in moving the narrative forward. Side note: I read To Paradise on the back of a famously negative (and in my opinion quite unfair) review by Becca Rothfeld in the Times Literary Supplement: “so unusually terrible that it is a sort of anti-accomplishment, the rare book that manages to combine the fey simplicity of a children’s tale with near unreadable feats of convolution […] There is nothing to recommend it to anyone.” Well! Sign me up!

I would also like to recommend Foreverland to anyone in a long-term relationship. It’s frank, funny, and takes away all that societal pressure to be the perfect spouse.

These books I found disappointing:

  • The Secret History by Donna Tartt
  • The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks
  • Railsea by China Miéville

Three giants of my reading life above. I’ll return to them all, but probably not to Tartt, whose rich plonkers irritated me from page one.

This book I actively hated:

  • How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

A thoroughly exploitative catalogue of grief in which children are subjected to particular suffering as shortcuts to provoking an emotional response, never realistically rendered, their suffering a footnote to the lessons we must all take from the nobility of their often grotesque deaths. It’s the Tuesdays with Morrie of speculative fiction.

But here’s the real story of my reading in 2022:

Screenshot of successful Goodreads 2022 Reading Challenge showing 56 books read, with goal of 52 (108%)

Whoa yeah. And I owe it all to my children, who one day wandered away from the picture books at the library and into the junior fiction section, and suddenly we were onto chapter books — particularly:

  • Andy Griffiths & Terry Denton’s Treehouse series
  • Kiwi author Stacy Gregg’s Spellbound Ponies series
  • and most of all, the Secret Kingdom, churned out at a rate by a pseudonymous collective of hired guns known as ‘Rosie Banks’.

It’s incredible to watch my kids’ faces grin and grimace with the action as I read each book to them. And the way Juney will stare off at some version of events in her mind’s eye while Nora fixes her gaze on my face, watching the characters speak through me. They live for stories.

Don’t ask me why, but when I read them their first Secret Kingdom book (Wildflower Wood if you must know), I accidentally gave Summer the voice of Moss as played by Richard Ayoade in The IT Crowd and now I can never change it. You can probably guess which of Ellie, Summer, and Jasmine is the kids’ favourite.

Music

Best Hardcore Album AND Best Album Under 30 Minutes AND My Favourite Record of the Year:

It’s so solid all the way through, and so manageable at a tick over 26 minutes, I might just listen to it again right now.

Best Prog-Rock Album AND Best Album Title:

I had to listen to this because of the title, which so succinctly describes how my biggest weakness defines me. The music is relaxed and jazzy and has room to breathe, with lyrics that revel in ambivalence, simultaneously railing against our collective inertia and allowing us the joy of relaxing into it.

Best Glitchpop Album AND Most Uncomfortable Listen:

Glitch Princess by yeule

Much of yeule’s lyrics are about a disconnect between self and body, how they hate that their emotional scars are printed all over it. Their keenness for you to join them in their discomfort will put as many people off as the autotuned vocal snippets and chopped-up machine noise, I’m sure. I was quite happy to sit with it.

Best Synthpop Album AND Most Assured Album By Someone Who Kind of Hates Making Music:

Laurel Hell by Mitski

She almost swore off music altogether a couple of years ago, eaten up by being “a product that’s being bought and sold and consumed”, and yet here she is with music that seems to know exactly what it’s doing, summing up the world in the space of a song, leaving you wanting more.

Best R&B Album:

Three Dimensions Deep by Amber Mark

Everyone else will be picking Beyoncé here but I once again failed to get into her music. And anyway, I have Amber Mark to take me beyond the stars, shaking her head and breathing the obligatory “damn, I fuckin’ made it”.

Movies

IN CINEMAS

Three weeks apart in April-May, I had my only cinemagoing experiences of 2022 — and what excellent choices they were.

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE tries so much — visually, tonally, thematically — and pulls off almost the lot. I laughed, I cried, I cringed. I shook my head in disbelief. The high-concept plot, asinine gags, and fight scenes are all fine, but the first 20 minutes of the film are among the most thrilling I’ve seen in years, featuring the always excellent Michelle Yeoh sucking you right into the whirlwind of Evelyn’s daily war: taxes, customers, gay daughter, ailing dad, sweet but ineffectual husband. Fundamentally, it’s a film about parents and children — about how you just want your kid to fucking LISTEN, or how you just want your mum to actually SEE who you are and take you seriously for once. But it piles so much more on top of that, which would choke and flatten most films but somehow elevates this one. Loved it.

AFTER YANG also sets up a narrative crackling with possibility. What a fulfilling sensation it is to get to the end and find out it’s basically about people being nice to each other, and trying really hard to understand each other, and keeping what’s good about humanity alive in an increasingly tech-driven world, rather than any drama based on withheld or concealed information. I thought about it for weeks afterwards.

NEW, BUT WATCHED ON A LAPTOP OR TV

Putting the above in the top two slots, here’s a quick ranking of other new-to-NZ films of 2022:

  • 3) THE LOST DAUGHTER
  • 4) THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD
  • 5) THE RESCUE
  • 6) SUMMER OF SOUL (…OR, WHEN THE REVOLUTION COULD NOT BE TELEVISED)
  • 7) THE BOB’S BURGERS MOVIE
  • 8) TURNING RED
  • 9) TITANE
  • 10) LICORICE PIZZA
  • 11) SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS

Liked the top four a lot, didn’t particularly care for the others, which is the first time I’ve said that about a Paul Thomas Anderson film. Men may be shit but is that reason enough to run off with a boy, who is unfortunately becoming a man, at the end?

NOT SO NEW

And some highlights from my other viewing of 2022:

  • DEREK DELGAUDIO’S IN & OF ITSELF
  • FREE SOLO
  • EMMA.
  • SOUND OF METAL
  • THE PEANUTS MOVIE
  • COLUMBUS (rewatch #3)
  • MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD (rewatch #2)
  • BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN

I recommend watching any of these, but I had the most fun watching EMMA. That’s how you do a period comedy-drama.

If for some reason you want the full record of my 2022 viewing, here’s the Letterboxd link, where you can also follow my reviews in 2023.

Health

2022 was the year of dodging COVID. I think. Our house saw everything but a positive test: high temperatures, snotty noses, deepening fatigue, gastroenteritis on repeat. And my mother-in-law in the annex had no sense of smell for six months and still can’t walk fifty metres without feeling wiped out for the rest of the day, her well-worn impression in the sofa nearly always occupied, her neurologist convinced she has in fact had COVID. But still: no positive test.

In 2023, we will surely get COVID, whether or not we continue to mask in indoor public spaces. As someone in my orbit said: “Everyone should just chill. Just get over it, accept it. It’s here, it’s not going away.” (Update: I’m posting this in mid-February because we’ve had COVID, already.)

*

One Sunday night in approximately September, I struggled to sleep. And it’s been the same every Sunday night since.

Many people over the years have told me of their nightly battle with consciousness and their increasingly desperate attempts to flee it. Every time, I would think: I am so lucky. With rare exceptions, I’m out within ten minutes of my head hitting the pillow. I may be up in the night with unsettled kids; I may be awake too soon when the alarm goes off. But getting off to sleep has never been a problem, until now.

Sleep is so fundamental, it affects everything else in your life. We know this. So, suddenly, I’m analysing the impact of anything I do that isn’t sleep. Sunday night is the main offender, so is it work stress, or perhaps weekend sleep-ins throwing off my routine? Am I eating or looking at my phone too close to bedtime? Are my exercise habits insufficient? Do I need my spouse there in the bed with me? Do I have the right pillow, the right blanket, the right mattress? If I could just get the variables perfect, I could sleep fine.

I mentioned this to some older colleagues. Oh, yeah, they said. Sunday nights are trouble. I was more horrified than relieved to hear this was a common affliction because it made me think I was destined to fall into this pit and never get out, just like everyone else. They advised me not to look at the clock at all once the sun goes down and to try melatonin, or ibuprofen. I haven’t — yet.

Sports

Something about small amounts of indoor football.

Something about volunteering at the Women’s Cricket World Cup, the joy and hope of Amelia and Jess Kerr’s embrace after icing a big warm-up chase against India, the despair of the White Ferns’ tame and fearful exit on home soil.

Something about Lionel Messi completing football at the 2022 FIFA Men’s World Cup. That no-look 30-yard pass through his marker’s legs for Montiel to run onto and score, the sort of genius that makes two goals in the final seem insignificant. As ‘McNizar 24’ put it in a YouTube comment that has garnered over 2,700 likes: Did you realize that in every moment of football, there’s always have Ronaldo and Messi.

Tech and Gaming

My stupidest ever life event happened in 2022. On an otherwise unmemorable afternoon in late October, I completed my 1000th match in New Star Soccer, a football game for mobile phones, thereby achieving the game’s final award.

I first played New Star Soccer as a browser game in 2011 — and I played it a lot. But a succession of low-end laptops failed to render its very limited graphics without microsecond pauses, and as gameplay is based around fast clicking, I became too frustrated to continue various long careers in the game.

Then, in 2021, I downloaded the mobile version, which suffers no such glitching. And so: 1000 games, completed at a rate of about three a day. I told Tara of this monument to wasted time and she was shocked: “You play a mobile game? And you’ve played one thousand matches in it?!”

The longitudinal nature of this achievement, combined with the lack of challenge in the gameplay beyond about year three in the game world, meant there wasn’t much of a dopamine hit when the awards screen ticked over to 100%. And as soon as I finished that final season, I retired and stopped playing the game completely. It gave me a final score:

You, like me, might be wondering where this ranks me globally. Well, I’ve googled a few times but am yet to find the New Star Soccer community online, so am unable to tell whether this is an okay score, a good score, or a great score. Which means there’s a remote possibility I’m the world’s greatest ever New Star Soccer player.

*

Through the YouTubers Zero Master and decino, I rekindled my childhood fascination with DOOM and discovered a world of untold riches in its still-strong modding community, coming up to 30 years since the first game’s release.

Through playing many cooperative games with Tara, I deepened my love of the Nintendo Switch console and actually almost want my own Switch.

People

I was confined to barracks for much of 2022. As I say: high temperatures, snotty noses, deepening fatigue, gastroenteritis on repeat. You don’t want to be taking that shit out into the world. And for a few months there, when Omicron was first on the lash, we stayed home to protect ourselves and particularly my vulnerable mother-in-law. Even the kids, who would come to love their kindy days once we arbitrarily decided it was safe to send them. It wasn’t good for any of us mentally, spending all that time at home. But it kept us apparently free of COVID.

Now the kids are off to school and really becoming themselves, full of more questions and ideas than ever.

I didn’t get around to tying this post off neatly. Didn’t actually complete it, if you look at the rushed placeholder content above, the paucity of images, and this anticlimactic conclusion. Still: time passes, we carry on.

Things of 2021

Barns2 Comments

Front Page

At The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt

Time stretches and collapses. Some things fade as soon as they happen. Others burn themselves into our vision until we look at them again. Our post-pandemic future seems too far off to imagine, 2025 at least before we can say we’re through it. Three whole years! But our future of climate catastrophe is here, now, and threatening to make our lives unrecognisable by as soon as 2030, certainly by 2050. Then: someone clicks their fingers and it’s already been three months since the last phase of that work project, the one that was going to kick into gear again next quarter, so it’s time to review the plans for implementation. But then, I’ve felt every second of the six months since I last published a podcast episode, always aware that I wasn’t working on it, or on any of the dozen or so other projects I have on the go, including this post.

I’m cramming it in as I inch towards 40. But it all falls away in dutiful bliss whenever my family need me, which is most of the time. My salary goes up and we still struggle to save, but also in 2021, I came into a life-changing amount of money and spent it all immediately. As Aotearoa prepares to join the rest of the pandemic-ravaged world, every aspect of life seems less certain, less sacred, than ever, at the same time as needing to hang on to all of it as long as possible.

The hard part is not knowing what to do next. It was all so simple: they told us what to do, and it worked. Now we have to figure most of it out for ourselves. I suppose we always did, but not like this. Never so new and strange and unsettling, for so many millions.

Property

It was the year of selling and buying houses in New Zealand, and we too sold our house and bought a new one. Nine incredibly stressful months throughout which we didn’t know if we’d made the right decision, or if we would ever find the right place. In the end, we found the best place we’d seen in three years of open homes, and somehow we got it. Even better (for us), we seem to have sold at the height of a rising market and bought just after its peak.

You don’t need to hear about my crocodile tears for all those people struggling to pay the rent while I bank a ludicrous capital gain. Our experience fits almost perfectly with Bernard Hickey’s analysis indicating the New Zealand Government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic to date has seen one of the biggest transfers of wealth from workers to landowners in the history of New Zealand. Very little about it is fair.

What does this mean for us, day to day? There’s a budget and it’s fairly tight. We now live with my parents-in-law, wonderful people with whom we now have to share space, and that is never easy, no matter how wonderful anyone is. Most of all, we all have a home for the foreseeable future, as everyone should, and we have the luxury of thinking five, ten, twenty years ahead, with this roof over our heads at the heart of it.

Health

While trying to teach the kids how to pause and breathe deeply to come back from the brink of fury, Tara realised she was only coaching them at bad moments, immediately after the altercation. And I realised I was doing the same thing to myself — and barely doing it, once in ten lows if that — when I needed to be doing it a few times a day, regardless of mood, because every time I do, it helps. Like drinking water.

No, I’m still not doing it a few times a day. Nor am I meditating, of which I’ve known the extraordinary benefits and potential for otherworldly experiences for a full decade now. Or writing in a journal and getting all those thoughts out of my head, which I used to be really good at. As for going for a run… come on. At least I still drink loads of water.

*

Tara doesn’t want me to die, so she got quite exercised about getting me in for another skin check this year, which I knew I needed. A bunch of my moles were itchy for a couple of months before I finally agreed and booked in with retiring dermatologist Dr Jennifer Pilgrim. What a name! And my mother swears by her.

I disrobed and she looked carefully over my skin. “I see you’ve had a few removed already,” she said, looking at the enormous scars on my back from when I was 16, a memorably unpleasant experience of 160 injections and an hour on a half on a table while benign (though large) moles were removed. “I hope whoever did it has improved since they did these.”

Back at her desk, Dr Pilgrim said, “I don’t see anything I’m worried about. But you need to keep getting checked regularly, and I won’t be doing it.” She gave me the names of a couple of big skin clinics first and told me absolutely not to go to them. “The amount of moles of unusual appearance you have, they’d take one look at you and see the dollar signs and start hacking bits out of you.” Which is more or less what happened to me in my teens, though it was free butchering by the public health system in that case. She sent me away with a couple of names and wished me all the best.

On the way out, as a special treat, my mother was coincidentally in the waiting room, waiting for her skin check. We had a good yarn and I drove home. A few days later, histology confirmed she had a melanoma. So go and get your skin checked.

*

As for COVID-19, we are still only a little way into this thing. The “it’s just a bad flu” crowd seem to be winning and you can all get back to work. I still don’t know exactly how bad it might get in the long term and I don’t think anyone does, even if it’s likely industrialised countries have passed the peak. So let’s socialise outdoors where and when possible, keep wearing masks after we’re told we don’t have to, and normalise sharing vaccination status.

Politics

The absolute audacity of me, a well-meaning liberal with an asset in my name and a solid family network nearby, to think for a second that climate change is the only political issue that matters now. If your rent’s just gone up another hundred dollars a week, or your boss insists you come to work despite being immunocompromised, why should you be thinking about anything beyond survival, today?

Politicians have to constantly examine risk models and make decisions based on what would happen if they made a different one. It must be really hard, especially when anything mildly deviant from the status quo is likely to see them relegated to the opposition benches at the end of their three-year term. While I would like them to make sweeping changes to reframe the way our society works and where value is placed, I understand why they don’t.

All of which doesn’t change the fact that nature and science are indifferent to policies that “build permission”. Sorry to be writing so vaguely and gravely this year! It’s just the times. I’m too burnt out to have a laugh.

Books

Some classics at Pop and Nana Ange’s house

I read 55 books in 2021. 25 were written by women. 8 were written by people of colour. So I still don’t think I’m reading widely enough. Luckily, the remedy is simple.

But here’s what I find interesting: I thought those numbers were way higher, as if each book by a woman was worth 1.5 in my mind, or each book by a person of colour worth 2. I read ‘One of Them’ by Musa Okwonga AND ‘Raceless’ by Georgina Lawton, so I thought I was doing okay. It goes to show the extent to which white men are the default, invisible in their firm grip on the lectern. And it goes to show you can always try harder.

I also stuck almost exclusively to the last fifty years, reading only three books published pre-1971. A pity, because time travel is one of the main reasons I have a reading list. I did however read a lot of new books, despite being a curmudgeon, so it was nice to be up with the zeitgeist for a change.

Some lists and selected reviews from the books I read in 2021.

Loved

  • The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin (1971)
  • The Five Gates of Hell by Rupert Thomson (1991)
  • Embassytown by China Mieville (2011)

From my review of ‘Embassytown’ on Goodreads:

Ursula K. Le Guin gave this a glowing review in the Guardian, and even a few pages in, it’s easy to see this as a successor to THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS and Miéville foremost among her inheritors. And here I am, wondering why I’ve resisted him for so long. A novel about language, and ideas about language, and anthropology, and wrestling with change, and genuinely alien aliens, and thrilling and packed with ‘holy shit’ moments to boot? Like, you’re lucky if you get one such moment in a novel, but EMBASSYTOWN has at least five reveals that blew me away. The sentences are purposefully dense, such that I had to slow down and occasionally re-read to make sense of them, but in a manner that absolutely fits the material. And as I got closer to the end, I slowed down even more — because I didn’t want to find out what happens. I wanted to keep finding out what happens. For as long as possible.

At the most basic level, this is a novel about changing your mind — how that’s possible, though scary, and can be very much to your advantage. How information can bring the possibility of freedom, and how language is the conduit between your mind and that freedom. But it’s about so much more than that as well. I loved it.

One of many ‘holy shit’ moments in ‘Embassytown’

Liked

  • Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett (2001)
  • Guts by Raina Telgemeier (2019)
  • The Illustrated History of Football: Hall of Fame by David Squires (2016)
  • Footnotes: A Journey Round Britain in the Company of Great Writers by Peter Fiennes (2019)
  • Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh (2020)
  • Night Waking by Sarah Moss (2011)
  • We Run The Tides by Vendela Vida (2021)
  • Border Crossings by Andrea Karim (2021)
  • Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships by Robin Dunbar (2021)
  • Times Like These by Michelle Langstone (2021)
  • The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing by Sonia Faleiro (2021)
  • Revenge of the Lawn by Richard Brautigan (1971)
  • Meg by Maurice Gee (1981)
  • The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin (1971)
  • Everybody: A Book About Freedom by Olivia Laing (2021)
  • Barcelona Dreaming by Rupert Thomson (2021)

From my review of ‘The Good Girls’:

I was stunned by this book’s central revelation — one of those reading moments where images and ideas flash so quickly through your brain as they coalesce into a briefly coherent picture. I could see Katra, UP, India. I could see journalism and politics. I could see feminism and patriarchy, rich and poor. I could see abject hopelessness, even pitch darkness (if it weren’t for the light Faleiro shines). I could feel my distance from everything that happens in the book, things that could never have happened to me, and yet also feel a sense of connection to the girls and men at its centre. I saw everything and saw that I knew nothing. All of which comes on the shoulders of Faleiro’s astonishing feat of reporting, her clear and insightful prose, and the dots she joins to make some sense of it all. It’s her picture I’m seeing, and I’m glad of that, because as always, she has something compelling to say. But the picture fades; I play Nintendo with my wife and read other books and stop thinking about India, patriarchy, poverty. Until I read another exceptional book that excavates it all once more and makes me see, just for that brief moment. It goes without saying that you should read the blurb for this one and think twice before pressing ahead with it.

Hated

  • Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (2011)

From my review of ‘Ready Player One’:

The masturbatory fantasy of the dominant species in the gamer subculture-turned-overculture — i.e. the white male, fan of Kubrick and Tarantino and Kevin Smith and several other white male directors whose names you could easily guess, fearlessly definitive in his defence of the narrow Pantheon of arts and artists that define not just his personal taste but Taste itself, entirely uncomprehending of women, blind to all but the broadest strokes of identity, concerned in passing with notions of equality but lacking the complexity of thought to see any bumps in the road to utopia once the obstacles to his own wants are removed, ultimately just fine with the capitalist doctrine because money can and will solve everything.

I love how Cline sees the beloved genius at the centre of his story — a dead programmer who fashioned a globally significant game (and eventually a reality-defining quest) after his very favourite films, music, and games — as a benevolent Tastemaker rather than a fascist intent on narrowing all minds down to his level. […] because people like Cline take their taste so insufferably seriously, I also find it very funny. But then I think of Gamergate and the abuse of Kelly Marie Tran and remember that a belief system centred around pop culture worship is actually dangerous.

Here’s what I’m reading in 2022.

Music

Dancing to Orchestra Wellington and the Signature Choir playing ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ by Queen

My biggest habit change in 2021 was to listen to more new music, following the list of new releases on Metacritic and keeping an open mind. Perhaps I should focus habit formation on health and mindfulness! But I could argue the mental stimulation and sanity brought by wide listening, reading and watching promotes good health. (Couldn’t I?)

I managed to mostly keep up until about September, at which point the house hunt and attendant mental strain had me reaching for the gold I’d already discovered, or The Field’s back catalogue. Because that’s how all but the most carefully trained brains work with art, but especially music: to seek out that which is familiar and comfortable, maybe very slightly surprising, but not so much that you have to work to get into it. The catch-22 being, if you can’t get into something if it isn’t familiar, how do you get into anything? So, I’m proud of the effort I made for three-quarters of the year — and look at the gifts I received in return:

Album I listened to most

  • Fatigue by L’Rain

Top ten favourite albums, in order of release

  • Introducing… by Aaron Frazer
  • Yol by Altin Gün
  • Fir Wave by Hannah Peel
  • For Those I Love by For Those I Love
  • Frontera by Fly Pan Am
  • Fatigue by L’Rain
  • Animal by LUMP
  • If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power by Halsey
  • Screen Violence by CHVRCHES
  • HEY WHAT by Low

Top fifteen favourite songs

  • Ride With Me by Aaron Frazer
  • Yüce Dağ Başında by Altin Gün
  • Fir Wave by Hannah Peel
  • The Shape of Things by For Those I Love
  • Leafy by Dry Cleaning
  • Avalon by Rhiannon Giddens & Francesco Turrisi
  • Orion From the Street by Field Music
  • Pop Star by Tom Jones
  • Church Girl by Laura Mvula
  • Two Face by L’Rain
  • Gamma Ray by LUMP
  • Big Appetite by Liars
  • I am not a woman, I’m a god by Halsey
  • Lullabies by CHVRCHES
  • Battle by Andrew Hung
  • All Night by Low

Biggest discrepancy between Metacritic rating and my level of enjoyment

  • Dead Hand Control by Baio. Loved it.
  • Or Carnage Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. I think Skeleton Tree was enough Cave to last me a few years.

You may notice the lack of rap or other historically Black genres on there, and lack of metal or classical (or psytrance. Metacritic is limited, and I would love your suggestions for how to spread the net wider, but I think the biggest limitation with my habit change isn’t access to music (or lists of music) but in when I have time to listen to it — and that is when I’m at work, or when I’m in the kitchen. I want something to drive me on if I’m working or cooking, or something to luxuriate in, not something with quick wordplay or intricate drum fills. Mid-tempo, ideally, with indistinct lyrics (if any). That narrows the range down.

I try to take it easy on myself, though. You’re never going to listen to everything, or read everything. But if you make an effort to listen more widely than you usually do, you will be rewarded.

Follow along with my music discoveries in 2022:

Movies

Still from BO BURNHAM: INSIDE, which I watched in four? five? instalments

You all seem to have so much time to watch stuff. My brother visited the other day and went through his Plex account, rattling off dozens of titles he’d watched lately, including several multi-season series. Everyone else is bingeing Squid Game or Succession or whatever. Almost always, my response is the same: haven’t seen it. I am lost to books (and my children) now.

These are the new-to-NZ films and TV series I watched in 2021:

  • NOMADLAND (good)
  • WANDAVISION (sigh)
  • LUCA (wet)
  • BO BURNHAM: INSIDE (inauthentic)
  • VIVO (yawn)
  • IN THE HEIGHTS (long)
  • THE POWER OF THE DOG (mannered)
  • ENCANTO (trying)

None of them were very good, NOMADLAND aside. Sorry to Power of the Dog fans (the rest of my family + festival juries) and Lin Manuel-Miranda fans (my wife) in particular.

These are the new-to-me highlights I watched in 2021.

  • BABETTE’S FEAST (1987)
  • COLUMBUS (2017)
  • LITTLE WOMEN (2019)
  • VAI (2019)

I had plenty to say about COLUMBUS, a masterpiece of precisely drawn and observed connections between people and places, in my Letterboxd review. It’s right there on Kanopy for many library card holders to stream for free, but I am now a proud owner of it on Blu-Ray as I continue my campaign to raise awareness of a terrifying possibility: the streaming services may remove access to your favourite films and shows at any time, for any reason. So buy the disc or the file, store it safely, and enjoy it at your leisure with the smug superiority of one who knows they have directly supported the artists.

Sport

Cricket

Cricket

Travel

The Picturesque Garden at Hamilton Gardens

Early in our relationship, I told Tara of the wonders of Hamilton Gardens. She gave a sly, sideways grin, obviously disbelieving that anything with ‘Hamilton’ in front could never be wonderful, and said, “Sure.”

I mentioned it a few more times. Better than the Wellington Botanical Gardens. Better than any municipal gardens I’ve seen. Quite possibly the best free (for now) attraction in New Zealand. Tara would smile and nod, seeing a sweet country boy loyal to his origins, failing to hear the gospel in his faith.

Every summer since the kids were born, we go on a road trip holiday. A couple of times, we’ve skirted Hamilton, and I’ve tried to build in time to visit Hamilton Gardens. But we never managed it. “Next time eh, dear?” Tara would say, genuinely disappointed for me, but with a hint of that sly grin.

Finally, in 2021, we had a whole day to get between our shitty glamping tent in Raglan (it was next to a noisy carpark, a noisy water pump, and another tent full of three noisy drunkards) and my dad’s place in Auckland. Could it finally happen?

“I’ve deliberately avoided looking up photos,” said Tara.

“Good,” I said.

“I don’t want to spoil it for myself.”

“Good!”

We were cooking in the car as we drove up, fresh from another of the many miscommunications you have travelling with young kids. Hot, tired, frayed around the edges. I slathered everyone in sunscreen and in we went. Under the tension, I couldn’t wait to see the joy on their faces.

We started with my mum’s old favourite, the Japanese Garden of Contemplation, where one of the kids wet themselves. A good start. We moved slowly through the English Rose Garden and the Chinese Scholar’s Garden, separated at first, all trying in fits and starts to connect with the stunning flowers and ponds and sculptures, and to reconnect with each other. Nora and June cuddled the dragons at the entrance to the Chinese garden while Tara and I looked on with forced smiles.

The American Modernist Garden changed the mood. Tara and I stretched out on the sun-loungers while the kids took their shoes off and romped around in the pool their cousins used to splash in a decade and a half earlier. Everyone’s smile came back.

And then into the ones that are still new to me but almost twenty years old now: the Italian Renaissance Garden, the Indian Char Bagh Garden. The kids were gushing over the colour, the columns, the cherubs. And into the actually quite new Fantasy Collection, every one a winner. Delight at the enormous wheelbarrow in the Surrealist Garden. Freestyle singing on the stage at the Chinoiserie Garden. Thoughtful chin-stroking at the Concept Garden. Identifying all the items on the long afternoon tea tables in the Mansfield Garden. The Waikato River snaked along beside at all, every glimpse pointed out by the kids: “River! There’s the river again!”

I turned to Tara as we dragged ourselves back to the car three hours later with weary legs and full hearts.

“Well?”

An exhausted smile. “Amazing! Yes. Best gardens in New Zealand. Hands down.”

People

I posted a picture of one of my children on Instagram in late December. My brother in Dunedin commented, ‘Looks like you have a big kid on your hands!’

They are getting bigger, that’s for sure. Unique, increasingly independent, but strongest together. Full of words and always coming up with koans that make them seem a lot older and wiser than they are. Confidently tackling climbing frames at the playground that would have freaked the shit out of me at their age (and still do). Helping us assemble flat-pack furniture. Still keen for a cuddle most days, and sometimes all day.

I have been with Tara for eight years now, and we’re just past the point when more than half of that has been with kids. They are our life’s work — but so are we, also strongest together, and always trying to be a little bit better together. She is about to push herself outside her comfort zone in a new way, going back to school to study what she has always wanted to study, and I am very excited for her — and a bit proud of her for taking the leap.

Four years of the “four family”, as the kids put it. Now, with my parents-in-law on the other side of an internal wall, we’re six. It’s a new stage of life for all of us, with losses and gains that will in time be forgotten. We will endure and make the most of it together.

Together. Perhaps the biggest change we made this year — at least as big as moving house for the impact it’s had on our lives — was moving the kids back into our bedroom. It had been three years of trying to get them to sleep happily in a separate room, then their own rooms. Seemingly endless nights of sitting with them for an hour or more at bedtime while they slowly worked themselves into sleep. Letting them into our bed in the night when they inevitably cried out for us. We listened to the received wisdom that they have to learn to self-soothe, and as parents, we had to have our own space. Then we went on our summer holiday, and found ourselves all sleeping in the same room a lot, and it was so much easier. And we were like, why aren’t we doing this all the time?

Time — stretching, collapsing, intangible. Bringing the new, the strange, the unsettling. The worst of times, like the best, are always passing away.

coffee cup and backlit computer keyboard with title 'The Floor'

The Floor: Episode 1 – DVDs

Barns3 Comments
The Floor: Episode 1 – DVDs

That’s an audio file, there. Click the play button and you’ll hear the first episode of my new podcast, The Floor, which builds short and sharp narratives around internet comments.

Okay, maybe not sharp. Pretty loose and silly, actually.

Episode 1 is about DVDs. They are mouldering in drawers, lonely in their piles, dying to see the light once more — and that’s just in my house. Wait until you hear what people on the internet have to say about them.

I’m having a lot of fun making this podcast, and while the very idea of basing a creative project on my voice is an unsettling one (who on this Earth is completely comfortable with the sound of their own voice?), I have been told I have the right timbre for this sort of thing. So here we are.

Each episode will be around 15 minutes and released every week or so. My wife says I’ll be lucky to get one out every four months, but we’ll see about that. You can subscribe to the RSS feed from the hosting site at Podbean or directly from the XML file. I’ll also share each new episode in a separate post here on Jdanspsa Wyksui.

I owe thanks to Haszari for the theme music, to @nubelsondev on Unsplash for the logo art, and to Ed Haszard Morris, Rua Haszard Morris, and Joe Lees for beta listener feedback and production support.

Let me know what you think in the comments. I promise not to feature your words on the podcast. Not until the 100th episode spectacular, anyway.

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Episode 1 – DVDs features comments from the following articles:

‘United they stand: The people behind our last video stores’ (Stuff.co.nz) 

‘Streaming a Movie Uses Less Energy Than Watching a DVD’ (Smithsonian Online)

‘Best Blu-ray player for 2021’ (CNET)

The game is gone

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Teenagers playing football | soccer in the rain in Brazil with game icon on desktop
‘Teenagers playing soccer in the rain’ by flickr.com user Marlon Dias

I’m one of those bores who still plays Championship Manager 01/02, a football management sim that came out in 2001, as you’ve probably guessed. There’s a few thousand of us around the world, all orbiting around the champman0102.co.uk website, where volunteers faithfully update the game data in line with each new season — data we then mostly ignore in favour of the original databases (3.9.68 for a smoother game experience and the Super Greeks, the roguish 3.9.60 for crashes and bugs like an Australian season that repeats forever and the cheat player Tó Madeira).

The main reason I continue to play is inertia. I loved the game back then, it has continued to run on all systems I’ve had since, and it’s been available as freeware for at least the last ten years, with the added bonus of pro bono updates from the champman0102 team. But what I really love about it is the potential for romance you’d never see in the real world, short of Leicester’s fairytale Premier League win in 2016. Right now, I’m managing Queens Park Rangers (real life: perennial second- and third-tier battlers, recently sponsored by failed gambling/fraud enterprise Football Index) in a tilt at a second consecutive Premier League title. I got Q.P.R. promoted from Division Two (then the third tier of English football) all the way to the Premiership and now have them as the upstarts of Europe. I have former Ballon d’Or winner Ronaldinho up front alongside Luke Beckett, whose real-world career peaked at Stockport County. All this on a shoestring budget, with most players bought for less than £2million and a wage bill a fraction of Man United’s or Chelsea’s.

That’s what’s really fun about Championship Manager 01/02: taking a small team and leading them to glory over a long period. I’ve tried managing Liverpool or Barcelona; you can sign whoever you want and win the league right off the bat. Boring. Back in school, I created an absurdly talented team based on my 2nd XI teammates, then watched as we won every game at a canter. No challenge, no fun. But I still remember taking over German minnows TSV Aindling, with no money and not even any players (how do you have a football club without players?), then dragging them to the top of the Bundesliga. Likewise Izarra, a tiny Basque club, who I took through the ranks to ultimately disrupt the Barca-Real Madrid duopoly in Spain.

The impossibility of these scenarios is what makes them so intoxicating. Except it did happen in real life, more or less, with Leicester City. A League One (new name for the third tier, in case you hadn’t yet realised the absurdity of all the rebranding and tinkering with the football ‘product’) club in 2009, Leicester’s Premiership victory a mere seven years later came on a millions-strong wave of goodwill from across the globe. They were 5000-1 outsiders; who doesn’t love a genuine underdog? Never mind that they were got there on the back of Asia Football Investments money, which is pumped in by King Power International Group, which has a duty-free monopoly in Thailand thanks to its close ties with the Thai government, which took power in a military coup and has messed about freely with democracy and freedom in Thailand. Still a fairytale, damn it.

The fact that Leicester, with all that money and the soft power of a foreign state, could still be a beloved football underdog shows how messed up football has become. They were nothing next to Manchester City (plaything of UAE monarchy) and Manchester United (got big by winning everything, got bigger by prioritising shareholders over football). Or Chelsea, or Arsenal, or even Spurs.

And they were nothing next to Liverpool — my beloved Liverpool, who had their own plucky underdog success in the Champions League in 2005 and finally claimed a long-desired Premier League crown in 2020; a fandom I inherited from a football-mad stepfather. Despite not winning much for a long time, Liverpool remained a ‘big club’ because of the fandom of people like us, most of which originated in a period of extraordinary English and European dominance in the 1970s and 1980s. All of us with pound symbols above our heads. So in came the American investors — first Hicks and Gillett, Jr., then Fenway Sports Group — to tap the brand. THIS MEANS MORE, bellows Liverpool’s slogan of today: “more than win or lose, more than going to football, getting together in the pub and going home”. But also more money.

Today, those six clubs — Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, and Spurs — joined six more from Spain and Italy to announce a breakaway super league to commence next season, with a few others to be announced. They’ve been threatening it for years; it seems the time has come. There will be no promotion or relegation; just the moneyed elite, duking it out in perpetuity, although they say they will still deign to grace their domestic competitions. The Premier League, La Liga, and Serie A have some questions about that.

Also today, I join many other fans of these clubs from around the world to say: good riddance. Go and roll about in your banknotes while your bored princelings follow the script on the pitch. For it will have to descend into WWE-style plots to maintain any interest. Yes, Liverpool too. Football will be improved by your absence. Without the distraction of your constant agitating for more money and power, football will lose the outlandish transfer fees, the relentless packing in of fixtures, the Instagram beefs, the laughable branding and merchandising. Imagine! It might actually be about football again. I’ll do as I’ve intended to do for years and follow Cambridge United as they yo-yo between League Two and League One on a single-camera stream with jerky highlights. Or go to watch Stop Out in a blustery July southerly next to that brown industrial creek in Seaview.

I know that isn’t how it’ll go. The breakaway league will be more powerful, more visible, and a lot richer. It’ll poison the rest of the game with diminished resources and a new, power-hungry elite, among which Leicester might well be at the forefront. In which case I’ll go back to Championship Manager 01/02 and pretend there is still some romance in football.

“I decided that there was a place for me and my music”: Ashish Seth on ‘Firstborn’

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Album cover of Firstborn by Ashish Seth. Stylised art of people looking up at tall trees

I see Ashish Seth as a kindred artistic spirit. We both wrote for The NRI, an online magazine active in the early 2010s, and I spent a lot of my writing time listening to his Problem Child EP, which he released under the Mustardapple moniker.

As is now common for people linked across countries — Ashish in Canada, me in India (and then New Zealand) — we became Facebook friends, where he often posted heavily edited photographs with enigmatic captions that struck a chord with my love for art that’s off-kilter and opaque but still recognisably of this world. These photographs were often linked to a blog post, often a poem, sometimes a new piece of music. Transient vignettes of a life filtered through multiple artistic disciplines.

Like most other artists, Ashish does none of this professionally. How do you find an audience for your self-produced music in the Spotify era? (Or for your self-published travel memoir?) Through hustle and grind, mainly, sinking hours into promotion and research for a few more eyes or ears on your stuff. Those hours are hard to find when you work full time. It’s hard enough to find time just to make the art. So there are legions of us out there, toiling away at projects that will likely never generate widespread appeal, driven to write and chop and edit despite this fact. We know it’s for us more than it’s for anyone else. A necessary release of pressure. A therapy.

That said, I suspect I’m not the only person in Ashish’s orbit to connect with his music. I loved the Problem Child EP for its cinematic feel, especially ‘The Faceless Hero’, which to me evoked one person’s minor life-and-death struggle; a kid standing up to bullies in the projects, maybe. The tracks were raw and rough-edged, probably ripe for re-editing to smooth out the sharper sounds — but I liked its unpolished feel.

Ashish’s recent full-length album, Firstborn, released under his own name in the wilds of 2020, has a richer and more refined sound. This is the work of a musician whose production ability has evolved to match the sounds he wants to make. It is as sample-heavy as his earlier tunes but the samples now serve the song without drawing much attention to themselves. Again, I find myself listening to the whole thing on loop as I work — albeit at my day job, rather than at home working on my own projects. There’s a comfort to the way it flows from one track into the next, and a comfort in the cut-and-spliced melodies, which stand out enough to keep you engaged but never to the cost of the overall piece.

Firstborn was produced between approximately 2013 and 2015, then shelved for five long years. It’s a concept epic of syncopation and reverb, and the fantasist in me wants to say five years of fermentation gave rise to those rich echoes and overlaps, even though the reality is they were always there by Ashish’s design. He questioned that design, though, weighting his first full-length album with expectations he didn’t think he could meet. So he put it into the archives and had to coax it back out five years later. For all his doubts, it sounds to me like the work of a clear artistic voice.

There are other voices, though. A long list of collaborators could fill the liner notes. I’m not talking about Hemant Badya, whose guest vocals anchor the meditative ‘Aum’ at the centre of the album, but about the many other works sampled, all of which hint at a clearly universal struggle: I could be better, do better, but how? Among them: Death of a Salesman, Cutty from The Wire, ‘Passing Through’ by Rare Bird, F Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line about American lives not having second acts. Ashish is tallying up evidence across years and art forms to prove that anyone who tells you’ve they’ve got it all figured out is full of shit. He himself seems to be ‘looking for an answer’, as the refrain of ‘Somehow’ goes, and finding only the persistence of the question.

That ultimately seems to be a comfort, to my ears anyway. ‘Give Up’, the penultimate track, starts out gloomy and ends with hope; to me, it’s the hope of acceptance, not resolution. Of prizing the act of creation and claiming its inherent worth. But I’ll let Ashish tell you what he thinks. Then, listen and decide for yourself. It’s 100% free (or pay what you want) and freely available, so you might as well.

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Your new album is called ‘Firstborn’. Why?

I called the album Firstborn because it is my first completed work. That’s the practical, uninspiring reason. It just seems like the simplest title. The artsy, literary, reason for the name is because the album, in a way, tells the story of a first-born child. I love concept albums so I tried to do that here. I am the first child in my family, with a younger brother. The expectations, experiences, and general anxieties of being the firstborn, or being the first one, or of being born and having arrived, all echo in the album’s story. So, in a way, the title suited the theme and underlying narrative of the album.

I also hope to release more music in the future so the title was is an apt signal for the start of something new.

What were you hearing (or not hearing) in Firstborn when you shelved it in 2015?

I don’t know what a lack of confidence sounds like but that’s what I was hearing when I shelved it. I don’t have a background in music or playing in a band. I don’t have any musical training. I play guitar but just for fun.

Unfortunately, it took a long time for me to get over the mental barrier of what’s considered legitimate music. The traditional notion of playing in a band, basic song structure, and the old teachers in my head prevented me from seeing it as a piece of music. Then there were the copyright issues.

Eventually, perhaps after seeing how liberal music has become, I decided that there was a place for me and my music.

What changed in order to convince you it was worth putting out into the world?

I wanted to move on. Start something new. But I knew I couldn’t until this project was complete. It’s been strange, surreal times. The pandemic. Something about that compelled me to look at it again. As I said previously, I think with platforms like Spotify, Bandcamp, and Soundcloud, artists like myself feel a lot more confident that there is a place for the type of music we make.

Sunrise through curved window with trees in distance
The World in a Globe by Ashish Seth: “Horizon lines confined to the slope of the hemispheres. Every good feeling is choked with a little fear.”

What software/hardware did you use to make Firstborn? It’s quite sample-heavy, right?

I mostly used Ableton Live and some other VSTs and patches to create the album. I’m really into sample-based music, repurposing, recontextualizing, cutting and pasting. Unlike hip hop producers who dig crates for vinyl to sample, I dug the internet. I pulled sounds from my library of music, all the music I collected before streaming became the new way we listen to music. There are some guitar licks and bad keyboarding on it as well. I tend to throw everything at the wall.

Back in 2009, I began producing music with DAWs like Sony Acid Pro and Soundforge. I’ve always been very music-minded and these new tools, instruments in their own right, made the medium accessible for me. I began obsessively trying to create unique sounds and imitate artists like J Dilla, Burial, and DJ Shadow. I’ve always loved hip hop and sampling as a form so I just buried myself in trying to mimic those guys and do it myself. I knew a bunch of producers who were making beats for MCs and initially thought about doing that but it never appealed to me. I preferred finished songs that could stand on their own. I wanted to create a record with the dense samples of Endtroducing…… and the distant ethereal quality of Untrue by Burial. You can probably hear some of their influences in it.

Do you have a favourite track on the album?

My favorite track is “Dreamcatcher.” It was the first track of the album and the one in which I really felt I’d gotten better as a songwriter.

I really love the strong beat of ‘Give Up’, the catchy string sample, the playful percussive stutters in the final stretch. It seems hopeful and decisive in a way that most of the other tracks don’t. So why is it called ‘Give Up’?

As I mentioned earlier, I envisioned the whole album as a story. This song is the climax. “My Own Church” is the denouement. “Somehow” is the end of the dark second act. I think a part of me wanted to be subversive and ironic. “Give Up” starts very doomy, as if the narrator of the song or character has come to the end of their rope and has lost all hope, until he sees a glimmer of inspiration which he carries to its logical conclusion. The ending is meant to be a hiccup in the road towards the end of the goal you’re trying to reach, and it ends on an ambiguous note. It is up to the listener to decide.

Impressionistic bubbles in light green and dark blue haze
Cover for ‘Space Opera’ by Ashish Seth

You write, take photos, and make music. There’s probably other art in you that I don’t know about. Which medium did you love first, and which do you love most?

The medium I loved first, and still do, is writing. That’s my first love. I’m an aspiring novelist. I completed my MFA in Creative Writing two years ago and have been working – chipping away is the better way to put it – on my first novel. Being able to express myself creatively is a critical aspect of my life because it fuels me. And I think a creative life, beyond whatever an artistic life is, requires the constant pursuit of creating.

I’m currently reading Moby-Dick. I try to read the classics. Certain truths ring true through the test of time. I found a quote in this book that kind of represents a mantra I want to follow. It’s a quote I read recently so it’s not something I’ve always had – I’m not trying to be pretentious – but it resonated with me and reminded me what it’s all about. It goes: “[t]hough I am but ill qualified for a pioneer, in the application of these two semi-sciences to the whale, I will do my endeavor. I try all things; I achieve what I can.” I try all things, regardless of my aptitude or skill because I have to in order to get where I want to go. The book Moby-Dick is such a tome of knowledge on a whole bunch of things, most especially whales. It can be a slog but when you step back to consider the wonder with which he writes about whales, not the authority, it kind of boils down the truth that perhaps life is a struggle to comprehend and the only thing you can do is try if you want to participate in meaning making. By trying, who knows what can be achieved.

You’re also a teacher, which I imagine demands a lot of you. How do you make time — and room in your brain — to make music (or art more generally)?

This is the ongoing struggle – balancing these two parts of me has never been easy. Carving out spaces of time is really difficult, especially of late. Balancing the two areas of my life is something I’m constantly figuring out and getting better at. But every so often growth spurts of creativity will make it happen. You can only plan. I try to carve out time for my craft every day. I start small, five minutes a day, to ten, to fifteen, and eventually momentum builds. Finding a discipline and relentless passion to keep going in the face of it all is the real artistic battle.

Ice-covered trees in dark orange glow
‘Rickety Thicket’ by Ashish Seth: “A rickety thicket of trees looking humid against the red sky. Except it can’t be humid because they’re coated with a translucent layer of ice. Ice storm 2014 in Brampton.”

On your website, you mention the period during which you made Firstborn as a difficult time. How did that colour the music?

I was going through an existential crisis. I don’t wish to say much more on the particulars. I wrote the bulk of the tracks at the end of 2013 in a frenzy of productivity and just poured all the despair into it. Whatever was going on, all of that colored the music, in the sounds I sampled, the structure, the mood. I think if anything was captured, it was that. And out of all that, an album came out.

Also on your website, you once wrote that “if you sit with an idea for too long [it] loses creative vigor and nothing seems natural”. But Firstborn has undergone a rebirth of sorts after five years locked away. Do you have other finished or half-finished projects sitting in a drawer that could be worth another look?

I think that’s what happened with this album. Everything takes so long to finish that you wonder whether it’s even worth doing and then at the same time you’re wondering whether the creative ideas you’re trying to reach are just you getting in the way of yourself. I take so long to get things done. I can say that also about the novel I’ve been working on.

But then when you take a step back or put a significant amount of time between the work and yourself, and grow in the interim, and then come back to it, you see it with different eyes, hear it with different ears, and you realize that perhaps it was fully finished when you left it. I think all creative people who work on something for a long time are constantly wrestling with the work, trying to figure it out, negotiating with it, churning it, molding it, and by turns, it molds them, forces them to consider new avenues, grows with the happy accidents that occur in the process and that we leap to put our name on when we see worth to them. And in the end, the totality of it all, the successes, the misfires, the signature it ends up taking on, what it sounds like, feels like; all of that is in some ways an illustration of the struggle of who you were putting it together, and once you understand that, trying to get it perfect makes no sense. It is what it always was. Once I came to terms with that, I had to accept it and move on, lest it sink me and prevent me from growing past it.

I’m glad I went back to it with fresh eyes and ears. Seeing the joy it brought to my loved ones was even sweeter.

Things of 2020

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Front Page

IMG_20200404_092312679_BURST001I am ticking all the expected boxes of my thirties: marriage, house, kids, minor existential crisis. I earn more money than ever before, more than I ever imagined I could be earning, and through a time of increasingly precarious employment at that, and I can confirm that shooting past the median wage does not in itself bring happiness. But I am content most of the time, rarely low for longer than a few days.

Our amazing house needs work. A lot of work. So many people come to help us but still it overwhelms. Meanwhile, my brain fills up with writing ideas waiting for the time to be put down. The kids are growing up so fast. My wife and I do our best to make time to look at one another. In lieu of close friendship, I read books. And I try to stop sometimes to take notice of the world around me. Check out all my privilege, for God’s sake.

Like no other year I can remember, 2020 defies easy summary. It was all so new. I got so accustomed to it being 2020, with all the twisty connotations that number came to represent, that I couldn’t believe it would ever be 2021. And yet, here we are, spinning along the same unfamiliar trajectory. Anyhow, here are 5000 words trying to make sense of what I saw, felt, heard, did.

Health

IMG_20200406_103709SARS-CoV-2 spiked its proteins into all of us in some way or another this year. I am one of the lucky billions not to come into contact with it and develop COVID-19, largely because I live in an island nation that took an elimination strategy in fighting the pandemic. Meanwhile, millions died around the world, and as I write this in the days between Christmas and New Year, much of the world’s humans are still not safe to go out.

My most repeated phrase about COVID-19 has been ‘we’re only five minutes into this thing’. With the vaccine rollout commencing in other countries — mostly for rich and important people — I might now admit we are a couple of hours in, albeit with a concerned finger pointed at the new, more infectious mutations and steepling case number rises in certain countries. Say we are all vaccinated or otherwise immune, though, and the spectre of COVID-19 recedes into the past. Do we carry on just like we used to? Arguably the real triumph of New Zealand’s COVID-19 response was the resultant flattening of influenza infections by 99.8%, meaning 500-odd people didn’t die who in any other year would have. So why are sick people still coming to work, sniffling and sneezing and unmasked?

The answer, usually, is they feel like they have to. Their workplace doesn’t have extensive sick leave, or doesn’t allow them to work from home. More broadly, paid work is what our society is oriented around, and the inability to carry it out is a personal failing, not a social failing. So people keep showing up when the obvious choice should be to stay at home. You’d need a lot of resilience and financial backing to fight and change this.

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In the middle of the year, I went to the dentist and had a wisdom tooth removed. For a month afterwards, I kept remembering the dull feeling of the machine grinding through numbed tissue and bone to cut it out – especially the sounds, a sharp, whirring ‘screee’ and the gurgle of my blood and saliva being suctioned away. I’d never undergone a procedure like this and was surprised at how it could simultaneously be less taxing than expected and also indelibly violent. That ‘screee’ is my sound of 2020.

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IMG_20200405_132619It seemed you couldn’t move in this fragmented year without hitting another message about breathing, grounding, centering, practising mindfulness. You’ve got to look after yourself. It’s okay to look after yourself. Everyone was saying it, from the Prime Minister to my favourite podcast hosts. I was saying it myself, writing comms after comms reminding fellow staff this is not normal and we understand how you feel and here are some tips to help you through these unprecedented times. It began to feel hollow after a while. But the alternative, ignoring the struggle, would be worse. In the meantime, I continued to ignore all the advice, doomscrolling first thing and jamming headphones into my ears at every opportunity.

In June or so, I saw a helpful infographic about the places we hold tension in our bodies. My unconscious mind turned it into a how-to guide: in addition to neck, shoulders, and jaw (got those sorted already, thanks) I tensed my abdomen and held air in my lungs, forcing it back out with my eyes darting and unfocused, taking in anything except what was in front of me. I downloaded an app that had a little animation to help you breathe deeply, and halfway through the first minute, I was surprised to feel my eyes welling up, as though this app had unlocked some complex emotion that had been trapped all year.

It seemed to be a year of struggling to breathe for most people I know. And no one I know got COVID. Looking back, it may have been a year of seeing exactly how poorly we were taking care of ourselves, so that we can learn and try new ways. A year of genuine mental health awareness. More likely, that’s just me having my own epiphany, and you all have been there or have it to come.

About two months ago, having spent the entire year and probably the ten before that responding to ‘how are you?’ with ‘I’m all right’ or ‘I’m okay’ or ‘Not bad’, I started saying ‘Good’, regardless of the mess of home and work tasks clouding my head. Because it is true on many levels. I am here, and my body is able, and my mind is bursting with ideas, and I go home each to day to people I love. By saying ‘Good’, I am making a conscious effort to iron out the petty doubts and worries of the day or week. I am reminding myself that my life can be summed up with the most basic positive. ‘Good’ is an affirmation.

Politics

We have been coasting in the era of capital for long enough. Or struggling, more likely. Day to day, week to week, month to month, trying to make it all add up, trying to stay above water. The ruthless few get all the cream and most of the milk, too. The investor class gets their imaginary money in carefully structured bank accounts to work for it while they retreat to the beach in sunglasses. A privileged few scramble their way onto the property ladder and watch their asset grow in imaginary value (hi!), finally safe from the churning wheel of rent and inspections. The Earth slowly burns in an ash cloud of rainforests and boiling seas.

This awful moment brings it all home. We’ve known where the inequity rests, and the various pandemic responses show the value of collective effort and inclusivity in opportunity. We might just have the social and political capital to finally do something about it at the highest level.

So what did we do? What blueprint did our leaders offer, what vision did our democracy of three-year terms lap up with gusto?

Books

IMG_20201020_123057360A book is a beautiful thing. It’s full of promise before reading, and also pleasant to hold, which it will always be. After reading — if it was any good — simply looking at it brings words, characters, and ideas flooding back. In your mind’s eye, it now represents all it contains. And it retains the promise of hours of possible reading, or re-reading. It doesn’t matter if it’s your book or someone else’s, or if it was borrowed from a library. The book has all the same potential.

I spent quite a few spare moments in early 2020 flitting from one charity shop to another buying piles of secondhand books, especially those on my 2020 reading list. Five-years-ago me would’ve been confused: why gather so many of these objects when you could get almost all of them from the library or the internet? Even current me is a bit confused, for the same reason. But I live in a big house now, with a set of bookshelves just for me, and I want to fill them. I want to look at the spines and sense that potential. I do however resolve in 2021 to focus my buying in books I know and love, lest I end another year with another pile of books I’m never going to read. I have enough of those in my annual reading lists (here’s 2021, if you’re interested).

Here, in reading order, are some books I particularly admired in 2020.

HUNGER by Knut Hamsun (1890)
DEAD PEOPLE I HAVE KNOWN by Shayne Carter (2019)
NVK by Temple Drake (pseudonym for Rupert Thomson) (2020)
FIERCE BAD RABBITS by Clare Pollard (2019)
HOWARDS END by E. M. Forster (1910)
THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE by C. S. Lewis (1950)
ON WRITING by Stephen King (2000)
NOTHING TO SEE by Pip Adam (2020)
THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS by N. K. Jemisin (2010)
RUFUS MARIGOLD by Ross Murray (2019)
HELLO MUM by Bernadine Evaristo (2010)
USE OF WEAPONS by Iain M. Banks (1990)
MOSHI MOSHI by Banana Yoshimoto (2010)
BEN, IN THE WORLD by Doris Lessing (2000)
UNDER THE SKIN by Michel Faber (2000)
PRODIGAL SUMMER by Barbara Kingsolver (2000)
SURFACE DETAIL by Iain M. Banks (2010)
THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020)
OWLY: THE WAY HOME by Andy Runton (2004)
FIRST CONTACT by Soni Somarajan (2020)
CHINAMAN by Shehan Karunatilaka (2010) (re-read)
AKISSI: TALES OF MISCHIEF by Marguerite Abouet & Mathieu Sapin (2014)

My favourite of these was THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE. I’m still so taken with it, and I’ve noticed a cult of fellow readers spreading the word on Twitter and Facebook. Those that love it REALLY love it. So here’s my review, initially posted on Goodreads and shared in my monthly email newsletter. I hope one or two of you track it down and read it.

THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE
by Kim Stanley Robinson, 2020
 Let’s see if I can do this. The effects of escalating carbon emissions will lead to human catastrophes of extraordinary scale – heat waves, inundations – and when the representatives of affected countries turn up angry to international symposiums and throw their numbers of dead on the table, the world will take notice – but it won’t take action until there is mass financial disobedience, the simple refusal to pay trillions of imaginary dollars owed, at which time the entire financial system will collapse and be reborn under the auspices of central banks trading in currency backed by carbon sequestration. They will only be following the money, true, and money will still rule everything, but the money will now have a sound moral and ethical underpinning. In the meantime, those who hang on to the old ways and power structures — the shipping and airline industries, for example — will be hit by violent acts of highly organised eco-terrorism on a mass scale, some carried out by dark wings of international organisations, whose commitment to a lasting greater good will accept a few million dead if it gets the point across; this in addition to targeted assassinations of the most obscene polluters and pursuers of inequality. Socialism will finally overthrow capitalism in this way, ushering in public ownership of all the basics — home, food, water, job, energy — and a comfortable minimum standard of living mandated through democracy across much of the world. All this but all that carbon has still been burnt, the glaciers are still melting, so some very expensive geological interventions will be necessary: drones to recover the Arctic with sea ice, pumps to draw water up from underneath glaciers and spray it on top so it freezes again, dye sprayed in oceans and over land to reflect more solar rays back into orbit so the sea doesn’t boil so soon. Then there’s the ever-multiplying eco interest groups reforesting and creating larger habitat corridors and generally giving more of the planet back to non-anthropocentric ecosystems, leading to government-backed schemes to buy whole towns out and move their populations to the suburbs and let fauna wander their deserted streets unbothered. A more equitable society is the result, and a more equitable planet, in which humans might endure for longer than they otherwise would have.

So. I found this book utterly compelling, to the point that I need to find some sceptical reviews (edit: found one here) to pick holes in Robinson’s science, which is explained in frequent short chapters and seems sound. These crash courses are so frequent as to comprise about half the book; reading it is like going on a curated Wikipedia tour on climate change economics. There is plot dropped in, often revolving around the titular Ministry and its head but also darting in and out of dozens of other communities across the planet — refugee camps especially — and it is propulsive enough. But it’s the way Robinson constructs his utopia in asides that drew me in so thoroughly. I’ve never read anything like it.

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Sayip Shock book jacket front and back coverI also published a book in 2020. It’s called ‘Sayip Shock: Three Years in Kerala’. You can buy the ebook for $0.00 or more at Smashwords, or get the Kindle version or physical book on Amazon. Credit to Athul Chathukutty for the amazing cover design and to Tara Dench for the back cover blurb.

Music

As in 2019, I fixated on one album early on and hardly listened to anything else. And as in 2019, it was an album from 2019: ‘Perfumed Earth’ by Purple Pilgrims. They were the third-billed act of three at a big Arts Festival concert I attended the weekend before lockdown, where Weyes Blood (fav artist of the year before) had second billing (you what!) and Aldous Harding was the main act (I left early).

I’d never heard of Purple Pilgrims before. The levels were wrong, the bass drowned them out, they veered occasionally into ethereal floaty pop cliché (billowing tunics and yogic movements), but I’d heard enough to try them in the headphones — and then in the car, and while I was cooking, and while I was washing the dishes. It’s one of those albums with no dud track; I’m Not Saying doesn’t fit with the others so well, but it’s still a really good pop song. Big synths, beautiful and slightly off-kilter guitar and vocal harmonies, killer lyrics that hint at true love and darkness. Ancestors Watching was my most-played track of 2020 (ignoring all the hits from the musicals mentioned in the Movies section below).

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Aaron Tokona died in June. I spent two weeks listening to Let It Go and Calling On on repeat. Like thousands of other Kiwis, I imagine, screaming “like I’m suffocating” at the climax as they finished off the dishes.

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It was a great year for new music, according to Vulture and Wisconsin Public Radio. I surfaced from under my Purple Pilgrims-shaped rock in about November and blasted through a number of acclaimed releases. Dua Lipa, Perfume Genius, Phoebe Bridgers, BC Camplight, Ariana Grande, Moses Sumney, Rina Sawayama, Fiona Apple, Four Tet, Ital Tek, Laura Marling, Yves Tumor, Beatrice Dillon. Each album tried a couple of times, then left alone. I liked most of these, could’ve loved some of these, but not now.

A few new albums somehow got through to me. EOB’s Earth was catchier and deeper than I initially realised. TENGGER’s Nomad gave me the sense of a pleasant bush walk, with harmonious synths over trickling streams. HAIM’s Women In Music Pt. III brought my favourite new chart pop in years, although it is very much a summer sound, despite the often cynical and self-flagellating lyrics, so it took me until December to actually get into it.

Then there was The Soft Pink Truth’s ‘Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?’, named for a Bible verse in which Paul the Apostle is fed up with everyone carrying on as they always have in comfort that their Lord will forgive them. Drew Daniel wanted “to make something that felt socially extended and affirming”, and there are several ecstatic moments that make me feel warm inside. But I hear a rough, hard edge through it all; the shimmering bells of ‘Go’, the horn blasts of ‘Sinning’, the major chord call and minor chord response of ‘That’. Not that any of this matters in isolation. It’s the cumulative effect of the album that gives these moments their power, especially in the context of #2020, where some other power is behind the wheel and you’re not sure where you’re headed. Thankfully, ‘Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?’ has a happy ending. I go straight back to the start and go through it all again.

Finally, Ashish Seth’s Firstborn saw the light. It was finished in 2015 and shelved due to the artist’s lack of confidence in the material, then released in 2020 for free, with little fanfare. It gave me many hours of listening pleasure and is layered enough that I’m still noticing new things months later. It’s particularly good to write to. I’ll post my interview with Ashish soon.

A playlist of songs by the artists discussed:

I’m trying something different with music in 2021, following the release calendar more closely and updating a playlist with my favourites each week. Here’s that playlist. Follow along with me?

Movies

IMG_20200408_103859902It’s all online now. I went to the cinema once in 2020 (PARASITE). Our household subscribes to five different film and TV streaming services:

  • Netflix
  • DisneyPlus
  • SKY Go
  • Kanopy
  • Beamafilm

I have never before had immediate access to so many films I want to watch. I try to make sense of them by dutifully adding preferred titles to my watch list, rather than letting the algorithm decide for me, and I pile up 50-odd titles on each service. Of them, I’ve only comprehensively combed SKY Go for content that interests me; each of the others could have dozens or hundreds more films I might enjoy.

Maybe I should give in and follow the algorithm. I’ve spent far more time researching and adding to my watch lists than I have watching the titles on them. I don’t have a lot of time to myself, true, but when I go, and I open up one of the lists, I’m immediately paralysed by indecision. Invariably, I close the tab and go back to my book.

The nadir of this behaviour was SHOPLIFTERS. Kore-eda Hirokazu is one of my favourite directors, one whose films I make a point of seeing. SHOPLIFTERS appeared on the SKY Go one day in 2020 and I thought, yes! Finally!! I get to see this modern classic, Palme d’Or winner, the film that finally brought Kore-eda to wider recognition! I’ll put it on the watch list.

It disappeared off the platform three weeks later. I had not watched it.

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Not that I didn’t watch a lot of movies in 2020. I just watched the same ones, over and over. In March, my wife instituted Movie Night on Tuesdays, which quickly expanded to Saturdays as well during lockdown. The four of us took turns choosing what to watch, and because my children were two years old, we watched the following films several times:

  • HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL
  • THE CAT RETURNS
  • COOL RUNNINGS
  • HAMILTON
  • FROZEN
  • MOANA
  • THE MANY ADVENTURES OF WINNIE-THE-POOH
  • Any of the Julia Donaldson shorts

And I am not complaining. I am in fact incredibly proud of my children for taking to THE CAT RETURNS and COOL RUNNINGS, which are slower-paced than most modern fare (in fact, they seem to respond better to more sedate viewing than flashy, heavily edited films). I’m not even complaining about HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL, whose catchy and knowing songs have become central to our household’s shared set of references (see above). Varsity-age me would’ve been appalled I’d gotten into HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL. To be honest, so would last-year me. But here we are. Never been a better time to let the sunshine in.

And then there’s HAMILTON, which we all took to so quickly. The kids know the words to most of the first act. It’s still our default car music. HAMILTON is an imperfect masterwork, harmed by its absences but gloriously elevated by pretty much everything that’s there. It works on a number of levels for every second of two and a half hours, with great tunes delivered by incredible vocal performers. I didn’t see how a musical about the founding fathers could be anything but cringeworthy — then I watched it, these people of colour claiming the problematic past for themselves, and I got it.

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These are the new-to-NZ films and TV series I saw:

PARASITE (good, but enormously overrated)
UNCUT GEMS (Safdies with another bleak, high-tension gift)
DEVS (formally superb, some interesting ideas wasted on a dumb plot)
THE GOOD PLACE: Season 4 (blasted through the entire show in a couple of months, a great initial gimmick built on and sustained to make the defining sitcom of the era)
ONWARD (lesser Pixar but still very enjoyable, and another difficult landing superbly stuck)
HAMILTON (still an obsession several months later)
PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE (stunning, with two moments of spine-tingling movie magic)

There’s one other film I saw for the first time in 2020 I’d like to mention specifically, and that’s FIRST REFORMED. It’s as bold and brilliant as all the reviews at the time suggested, and dovetails nicely with my favourite book of the year above. Whether or not he gives up in the end, the economy with which director Schrader and star Hawke drag so many of our current social and economic demons to the surface is — as Rev Toller says at the moment of his awakening — exhilarating. In case you’re not getting it, we absolutely must do something about the many ways in which we are destroying our planet. FIRST REFORMED asks: what would you do? How far would you go? And could it ever be enough?

Sport

My favourite sporting moment of the year was when Jürgen Klopp, manager of my beloved Liverpool, who won the league at a canter for the first time in decades, conversed with some fans as he entered the stadium.

Traditionally, sports fans have mythical power, especially in football. They’re the reason for it all, the ever-loyal brotherhood (because they are mostly men). Their deification has graduated from sporting custom to the strategic plan — because to alienate them would surely be economic suicide (although the board at Manchester United have made a fine fist of running a football club with only the shareholders in mind). It’s normal, therefore, for coaches and players to show willingness to engage with fans as they enter the stadium; to give them a quick high five as they run down the tunnel, for example.

In mid-March, a week or two before the Premier League was suspended indefinitely, and a couple of weeks before New Zealand’s level 4 lockdown commenced, Klopp was having none of it. As he strode out with his players, he looked up at the faces of the fans stretching their arms out, hoping for brief physical contact with their heroes — including the wunderbar German manager who had delivered the team’s greatest success since the 80s. He did not indulge them. Instead, he bellowed, “Put your hands away, you fucking idiots!”

And that’s why Liverpool won the league. Klopp wasn’t there to muck around. Every detail would be analysed, every drop of effort expended to the most efficient purpose. And when tradition stood in the way, Klopp shoved it aside. None of his players contracted COVID-19 until after the season was over.

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During lockdown, I completed 100 keepy-uppies for the first time in my life. I’d break off from the relentless stream of work a few times a day and do two or three attempts, usually getting to about 40, before bounding back inside to the juggling of Word documents. Eventually I got to 80 keepy-uppies, then 90 keepy-uppies, then 100 keepy-uppies. No one was around to see me do it.

I reflected on the wonder of practice; how you can improve a skill simply by repeating it. And I reflected on talent, and ambition; also during lockdown, a friend who plays proper football at club level achieved the ‘around-the-world’ trick, clockwise and anticlockwise. I had as much interest in following suit as I did in perfecting ball tricks when I was in high school, which is zero. My natural talents are to pick the right pass and shoot accurately from distance, not to showboat, and I am content to ply my trade in lunchtime indoor five-a-side every few weeks.

That’s a far cry from the lofty sporting ambitions of my childhood, when I imagined myself a dual international in rugby and cricket. But I’m satisfied I’ve found my level.

Travel

IMG_20200406_084120Ha ha ha. Well. We managed our usual summer holiday in February, to Hawke’s Bay, during which I got sick and we argued a lot. There were some great moments too: descending the grand staircase in an old convent/school we stayed at for a night in Featherston, days on the beach in Waimārama, and particularly our visit to Splash Planet, which begat a long and pretentious blog post.

You move around the world and colour in the parts you see. You flood your senses and your mind and try, sometimes desperately, to commit them to your memory. But you can never hold onto them as they were, because your memory is fallible and the world’s constant physical change is undeniable.

There were also two joyous weekends at holiday houses in Foxton Beach. And an expensive night in Auckland during which I ate one of the best (certainly the most expensive) meals of my life. We in New Zealand were lucky to be able to do all this without fear. I wonder when we’ll be able to rock up to Tokyo or Paris again.

People

IMG_20200726_161331352Tara is everything to me. She’s my love, my rock, my inspiration; a source of frustration; my comfort at the wordless end of an exhausting day; my partner in the biggest work of our lives; my favourite cook; my cheerleader; the one who will stare daggers at me or look away in disgust, the one who will look at me with pure openness the way anyone would long to be looked at. I will ignore her sometimes in favour of my phone; other times I follow her around the house like a silly little dog. Long-term intimacy has brought almost everything out of us and I would say we love each other more than ever, even with all the worst parts of ourselves left in. We may never sand those rough edges off. Life is probably more interesting with them.

Whenever anyone asks me how the kids are, I try to talk about the things they are doing, rather than ascribe personality traits that may change next week. But they are getting to the point where the things they do are their personalities, in a way. June builds towers out of anything, but especially blocks, and is quite happy to spend two hours in her room each afternoon stacking Duplo on her desk until she can’t reach any higher. Nora wants to be around people as much of the time as possible, and if she can’t be around people, she’ll hold birthday parties for her toys. Both are generally quite shy but increasingly surprise us by introducing themselves to a shopkeeper with confidence. Both want a lolly, right now. They started kindergarten in 2020 and can now use a potty and a toilet; guess which was the bigger milestone in our view. I ignore them sometimes in favour of my phone, too — sometimes you have to if you want them to get to sleep, or to discover the world in their own way — but as much as possible, I try to be with who they are today.

If and when Tara’s parents move in with us, and if we have another child, the times of our little unit of four will come to an end. I’d miss it, of course, but changes like these would bring at least as many gains. Ask me again a year after it happens.

We had the usual visits from far-flung family generous enough to make it to us because we can’t afford to make it to them right now. My dad and stepmother from Auckland, my brother/sister-in-law/niblings from Dunedin. We spent time occasionally with family who live locally, and I always came away thinking ‘we should do that more often’; same goes for the few friends we saw sporadically. But it was a year of focusing on the family unit, especially during those two months or so between March and May. In the worst times, we felt horribly isolated. In the best times, our days seemed crammed full of joy and wonder. I can’t do any of it justice.

During lockdown, I would stop work through the middle hours of the day — approx 1130-1400 — to play with the kids, have family lunch, and put one of my children down for an early afternoon nap. She’d stretch out in my lap, on her back looking up at me, and smile as I rocked her from side to side with my legs, humming songs from MOANA and HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL and FROZEN. The smile would fade, the long blinks would eventually begin, then she would fall asleep. I can easily imagine looking back at the end of my life and thinking, that was as good as it got.

IMG_20200405_115010

I was going to

Barns1 Comment
bright cracked desert from above
Image by Vincent Burkhead via unsplash

Hey!

Sorry, only just getting around to replying to you.

Sorry, only just getting around to clearing my inbox.

Sorry, only just seen this.

Sorry!

I kept meaning to get back to you but I’m just so swamped at the moment.

I kept meaning to respond but life just got in the way.

I had intended to reply much sooner but, you know.

I swear, I thought I’d replied to this!

To be honest, I wasn’t sure how to respond.

To be honest, I didn’t know if I had anything to say.

To be honest, I’ve had a lot going on with me lately.

But enough about me!

That sounds like such an incredible experience.

That sounds really interesting.

That sounds great.

You’re so inspiring!

How do you find these amazing things to get stuck into?

How do you feel about that?

How do you find the time?

I’m literally dying, please help!

The kids are fine.

The kids are good at the moment.

The kids are keeping me busy.

Oh my God, the kids!

Lee is doing well too.

Lee is pretty good.

Lee is Lee.

You must come and see us sometime!

Hand tucking hair behind ear.

Hand held up with fingers outstretched and palm toward camera.

Hand closed in a fist.

Hand on heart, I will try to reply faster next time!

It’s so good to hear from you.

It’s always exciting to see a message from you.

It’s such a pleasure to read your writing again.

Honestly, I don’t know how you do it!

Hope to hear from you again soon.

Hope you are all looking after yourselves.

Hopefully it’s not so long between messages next time.

Take care!

Thanks,

Cheers,

Goodbye,

Love,