Dear Emily (the year in 5 minutes)
another year, another godot
Dear Emily,
alright seatbelts on. shouldawouldacoulda. been primrosing the hill here. the early hours of 2024 in rooftop saltburn blur: unsteady high kicks. lights. minarets. panic i’ve lost the docker cap you got me, but ananya’s wearing it. the next day we walk in the atlas mountains. clothes smoky from the fire in our room. you scale the scree in fake balenciagas. the altitude bets frankly on a static front page and i’m folding what could be clouds into what could be pastry. back in london, the xmas trees are beggared brownly on the pavements. murdered on the dance floor. hollie orders temporary tattoos of sophie for her hen do. richter’s drawn-out colour beams remind me of a stretchy synth sound — perhaps the phrase ‘rainbow road’, as in the mario kart map. grandma dies. i insist on a bamboo urn for her ashes, feeling snobby for not wanting the one with stock imagery of a meadow that my 9-yr-old sister chose. jeremy allen white is on the billboards.
february, ferry to france. rodin’s burghers of calais are surrounded by a fair. the big swinging arm ride emits the doppler sound of screaming. jude is desperate to grab a baby yoda soft toy with the claw crane. select the half-incisor and towel down the luggage rack. a prick of blood found near whitsable. i write ‘a male nude aerily pale against jetstream blue, reclining while in freefall or in utero’. compared to grandma’s, grandad’s ashes are heavy. bury them both under the wet sand, grass.piano.farmer on what3words pretty soon this descends into a list. read this piece, there are a lot of people trying to monetise noise, think i’m one of them. a framed picture of a petit forestier truck hangs above the photocopier at assemble’s yard. mae’s book is published. it’s a leap year.
Joan Didion:
At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day’s events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best. What is the business about “shopping, typing piece, dinner with E, depressed”? Shopping for what? Typing what piece? Who is E? Was this “E” depressed, or was I depressed? Who cares?
1 march, i board a train west. a seagull eats jack b’s sick outside laser fusion in bristol. he has to go to bed, misses the second day of his stag. a company called the house of illuminati casts a sixteen-year-old girl as ‘the unknown’ — ‘i tried to imagine what a man living in the walls would be like’ — who hides behind a mirror, scaring several children, before police are called. rose discusses mattresses. stumbling from a pub, i take photos of you, billy and hollie and brightly lit st pauls colludes with a couple of old street lamps to evoke the friends opening credits sequence. mum meets her long lost half-sister for the first time. emerald fennell waits for a cab outside vanessa garwood’s opening at pm/am.
Don't think you'll get away, I will prove you wrong
I'll take you all the way, boy, just come along
Hear me when I say, heyyyyyyyyyyy
in april i listen to hostel by fiona mcfarlane to go back to sleep but it keeps me up. piglets. sabrina carpenter’s ‘that's that me espresso’ bobs like a yacht in port. scout out house of annetta with jonathan as a prospective venue for ‘the works’ in october. blackened wooden beams. you spot two grey hairs in my sideburn. joe to the top floor of the wetherspoons, stansted: ‘my best mate’s getting married.’ in zagreb, jack p upside down in his zorb legs flailing like a strange pineapple. jack b and sophie get married at the saltdean lido.
1 may, new york. megan dodges a glass bottle falling outside a bar. polly takes me to lunch in chinatown, then to the christopher wool show in a skyscraper staring down the valley of wall street. crivelli, cranach. meet mike at the 169, a dimes square dive bar and a republican lawyer walks into the smoking area, like a parody of one of mike’s blog posts:
So what’s your plan? Are you gonna have a family or are you just gonna keep tweeting?
on my birthday, cinco de mayo no less, we have negroni bianci at dante with polly. bump into eleri and alex on the street and get margaritas. uk, piers morgan interviews the baby reindeer woman. billy and i start therapy for the gq piece. eloise explains taylor swift. william cobbing does my portrait. rishi sunak calls a snap election in the rain, dwarfed by the wooden lecturn, drowned out by ‘things can only get better’. my mum accidentally runs over my foot dropping us off at jack p and emily’s wedding in totnes but it’s fine. the room laughs at mine and joe’s speeches. toasting the seeds for miso eggs, i start making eyes and a mouth, nigella in sesame.
june. hawk tuah. love island starts. watch fallout, dune, feel hope, despair. a freak heat wave hits athens the day we arrive to see dana schutz’ show. sigmund freud stands on the acropolis and casts his eyes upon the landscape. so all this really does exist just as we learned in school! tall cypresses go broccoli melancholic in the gloaming. i finish miranda july in gallipoli, puglia, where they have foetuses in formaldehyde and a christmas shop all year round. bellingham scores an overhead kick in the 95th minute.
july. trump’s ear is shot off. kamala is brat. you can’t kid me that this long sentence is half a bruise on my thigh because sean pumped the ball up too much. meet mae before five-a-side on election day. she’s wearing labour red and off to whitehall. the tories are gone, you can plug me back in. rapid eye movements opens at sid motion gallery. jude plays with an orange origami dragon while we test ‘the works’ at assemble’s yard. mum, lisa and v visit and watch the disco sailing in the olympic park.
august, folkestone. you, ananya and i swim off hangovers in the cold, bright sea. the gq piece is published. there’s a flailing inflatable ghost on a rooftop in shoreditch. white boxing gloves on brick wall. jack b performs.
september. find a big black marble by the curb. a man confronts the shadowy phalluses at the marlene dumas pv. rose’s show opens. luke and lydia get married. jack b and i post suburbiludes. activists soup van gogh again. start intermezzo.
october. sand pours through the floor of house of annetta. i learn how to mash up songs on ableton, spend hours making noughties monstrosities. jude stays for the weekend. he’s off baby yoda, now on phil foden: invent the character ‘baby yoden’.
november. we celebrate our anniversary, the best ten years with you, toast to more eras than taylor. meet my long-lost auntie.
december. eat bread and butter at corner7. watch anora with renee. learn the phrase ‘vanishing caloric density’ which describes foods like wotsits and popcorn that melt in your mouth. compare spotify wrappeds with billy, hollie, jack b and sophie in the shakespeare’s head. that light when we get off at exeter central. all our friends are pregnant. film the fishes at pets-at-home. mum’s under the weather but the beef is blissful. play mario kart with v. on the way back to london, typing this to murder on the dance floor. we’re in charge of picking up chips and dips to bring in the new year with billy and hollie, chris and ashley. you’ve got on your new lipstick. you look beautiful. gonna turn
this house
around
somehow.
all my love
godot
xxxxx