The Tepid Take

There's quite a few things that carry the lofty label of a “soundtrack to life”, often with an attitude far too flippant for such a beautiful, all-encompassing idea. So is it the birdsong on a winter’s morn? Is it the sound of the M5 from the Lickey Hills? Is it the Sound of Music DVD played on repeat from your ailing grandmother’s old TV set? Basically, what I’m trying to say is that it’s statistically unlikely that the "soundtrack to life" is any one of the seven albums that I’m about to list; but for better or worse, they were the ones that I got caught up in this year. I’m going to try and explain exactly why these albums got my attention and why they should get yours too. But I will not even countenance that they might be the soundtrack to anyone’s life, even my own; for pete’s sake, one of these is by Radiohead. Leave it. So, without further ado, in no particular order: 1. Thunder, Lightning, Strike by The Go! Team People still talk about The Go! Team.

This piece was originally published in CityMetric in 2019. The London Borough of Haringey is hardly famous for skyscrapers. Its tallest structure is Alexandra Palace, not just because it’s sat on a big hill, but owing to its vast radio mast, installed when the BBC used the Palace for early television recording in the 1930s. Since then, most developments in Haringey have been smaller-scale; quasi-modern housing estates and balcony-laden mid-rise flats. Barring Stratford, the same is true of most of outer London. Given that Haringey is loaded with conservation areas from Highgate to Crouch End, perhaps it’s better they’ve kept things squat. But on the opposite side of the borough, it’s a different story. In Tottenham’s Hale Village, developers Anthology are creating a vast tower, part of a new residential development centred around Tottenham Hale station. Originally planned to be 18 stories high, the tower, christened Hale Works , is now expected to be 30. A nondescript block of glass a

Some sitcoms are more successful than others. Some run their course and never come back – like E4’s Wasted, which never really got the cult status it deserved. Some only get a short run because their creators have bigger ambitions – like Edgar Wright’s Spaced, which got the cult status it deserved, about 20 years ago. And some sitcoms – like Peep Show or Fresh Meat – have this immense staying power. One of the things that I think crafts a great sitcom, one that can retain viewers from series to series, is a sense of emotional resonance. Fresh Meat was definitely funny and occasionally also cruel, but it mixed light comedy with tension, creating difficult situations out of overarching jokes. Student sleeping with her professor? What if she falls in love with his son, without knowing they’re related? And then loses both of them, dealing a crushing blow to her academic career? You could argue that the first half of that synopsis is amusing, but it’s backed by the cutting counterpoint o

I am reading The Last London. I am trying, faithfully, to enjoy it; to wrap my head around the way Sinclair’s territory wraps around himself. I enjoy, after examination, the segments where Sinclair dissects the changing face of London, irrevocably altered by migration, different kinds of waves, economic necessity and economic greed. His walks – often bolstered by their aimless quality – encapsulate a newfound ethos in the latter-day capital: people feel lost. London’s minorities written out of its history. London’s homeless ignored, no matter how they seek to cry for attention. Walking through a park and feeling alone, upon remarking that the place is “a site of elective infantilism: mature adults on psychedelic skateboards bopping to earworm infills”. “Cell phones cancel surrounds in their addiction to a false intimacy”. I feel a generation (or more) divides myself from Sinclair, and I am an amateur of the trade he’s plied for fifty years: writing. But I sensed that generational g

This isn’t the first time I’m cosying up to The Elder Scrolls V. I’ve played a touch of it since the last piece – a cripplingly sentimental attempt at explaining why I love that game so much. Since then I wouldn’t say my opinion of it has soured – more that I now understand it, and its endless list of flaws, so well that it stops being a majestic open world sandbox and becomes an attempt to optimise every stat and bypass every invisible wall. When I boot it up, I feel like I’m one of those League of Legends champions, playing the game as a full time job and thereby, inexorably, being unable to either “play” it or really consider it a “game”; like asking Gareth Southgate for a kick-about right after getting metaphorically kicked out of the World Cup, these things stop being fun when we really pour ourselves into them. I’m not writing this in an attempt to enjoy Skyrim more – I’d be much better off dropping my as-yet-unconfirmed future pay cheque on a new game. Instead, I’m writing it

This piece was originally published in CityMetric in 2019. It’s 2019 and, if there was ever any doubt that the climate emergency wasn’t the existential issue of our times, it’s fading fast. Low-lying island chains are playing hide-and-seek with the sea, people in Iceland are writing eulogies to their favourite glaciers, the Great Barrier Reef has pulled a sickie and on top of all that this year looks to be the hottest on record. What a scorcher, they’ll say in the UK. It’s as if we think countries like ours are somehow predisposed to not being entirely blown to bits by extreme weather; instead, we get the benefits. To us a warmer climate brings up-and-coming Surrey wine and a good excuse for a balmy stay-at-home holiday, Somerset Levels be damned. But the UK already has proof of the damage the climate can do – a drowned city lost for good, our own Atlantis, the victim of shifting seas and a dangerous fable for any low-lying town that remains. They called it Dunwich, Anglo-Saxon for

“A seed of professionalism” is the unspoken proverb behind my latest email address. Fifth of its kind, it followed a series of particularly ridiculous, egregious examples that did an excellent job of helping me stand out from the crowd, in exactly the wrong way, when I tried to become an adult. Begone, victoryoverdignity@ymail.com ! Farewell smoothandawsum@yahoo.co.uk ! And let’s not even speak of cledmundo@yahoo.co.uk , a childhood favourite and unexpectedly good portmanteau. I don’t have the foggiest why my young self was such a big fan of Yahoo’s email service; now I despite it. What came afterwards was a professional, name-centric address accompanied by a slightly more casual one inspired by an obscure brand of soap I liked without being as silly as the above. Both of these were Gmail accounts, the service owned and operated by Google that integrates so effortlessly with all their other services. One of these email addresses now more or less forms the glue that interfaces ever

In Postcapitalism, Paul Mason dissects the challenges facing the late capitalist system and explains how contradictions in its inner workings could lead to its total collapse. One of the key ideas he expresses is that the economies of developed countries are increasingly trying to sell things that we are not used to selling – personal care, basic errand-running, and, most pressingly, information. The sale of things that are infinitely replicable, from machine blueprints to open source software, poses a serious issue for the capitalist system. This is because these “goods” touch on the idea of “zero marginal cost”: the idea that it costs no more to produce 1 copy than it does to produce 1000, and costs for 1 copy trend towards zero as renewable energies grow more efficient. This looks a lot like the onset of what the cool kids called “fully automated luxury communism”: as things steadily require less and less labour value to produce, their costs tend towards zero, and if the theoreti

This article was originally published in CityMetric in 2019. In the early 1960s, Harold Macmillan’s government commissioned a report intended to modernise Britain’s railway system, and to make it profitable for the first time in ages. Victorian “railway mania” had generated some of the most impressive railway routes in Europe, but it had come at a cost: early investment in railway infrastructure had grown and grown, even in areas where it was economically unsustainable. The changing transport habits of the post-war period proved the final straw: by 1963, fully half the train stations in the UK only brought in 2 per cent of the revenue, with many routes running almost empty trains at a heavy loss. This problem, outlined by the report, was not controversial; indeed, it was factual. But it was the solution, proposed by the now infamous Dr Beeching, that proved so radical: closing almost half of the United Kingdom’s railway infrastructure for good. The “ Beeching Axe ” has been loathed by

This piece was originally published in CityMetric in 2019. There are 14 railway terminals in London. That sounds like a lot, even by the standards of London’s 8 million strong population. For context, Beijing has just six terminals between its 21 million people. So if you decide where to live based on the obscure metric of “number of railway terminals per million people”, London is doing really, really well. But it’s such a bother, isn’t it? Making the inconvenient, interchange-laden journey from Liverpool Street to London Bridge, for example, is the price we pay to travel cross-country; changing in Central London is the norm for many a journey, even though it’s expensive, inefficient, and adds to the footfall at stations that are already stereotypically congested. In fact, as is so often the case, there’s actually a pretty sensible explanation for why London ended up with so many railway stations, even by European standards. As pioneers of the industrial revolution, Britain was the

I am still trying to catch up with the classics. The other day, I gave The Wire a go for the first time, having never watched it before. While I appreciated the detective story set-up of intrigue and bluster, what really struck me about The Wire was how the police officers on the upper floors were willingly using typewriters to do their work. The first series of The Wire was released in 2002; computers were commonplace but it wasn’t yet kitsch to use a typewriter with added irony or absurd to use one without; the typewriter was on the turn. Now, a standard office not populated with ubiquitous screens – be they desktops or the laptops of the employees themselves – sounds truly ridiculous. Personal computers and the World Wide Web are integral parts of our waking days, they’re how we store information, how we access it, and how we process it. Even books, the standout stalwart in the face of a digital onslaught, are today drafted on computers. This is the sort of truth that we all kn

We are alarmed, we are all alarmed. Even Francis Fukuyama, who once declared that the neoliberal consensus symbolised the end of history, has refined his beliefs in the face of identity politics and the populist wave. The commentariat as it exists today is happy to decry what it sees as the end of common sense politics, relenting to extremism, the end of a nebulous representative democracy. Of course, this has yet to come to pass, but it’s a tangible fear nonetheless. Today I want to explain why Spain’s Pedro Sanchez is the most brazen exception: why he holds high the torch of social democracy, currently the proudest branch of the Reformist tradition, in the face of increasing political hardship. I want to establish through a brief analysis whether there’s something special about Spain, or whether it’s all down to Sanchez himself, complete with wily consultants and remarkable jawline. Pedro Sanchez has been the Prime Minister of Spain since 2018, when a moción de censura (vote of

If you visited the Tate last December, you'll have noticed the giant iceblocks out front: their gentle melting a testament to the decidedly un-gentle process of climate change. These resolute bergs, nicked from the Arctic itself, were installed by Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing, to raise awareness of the precarity of human life on earth. This “ Ice Watch ” could melt away just as easily as all our hopes and dreams, if we don't prevent catastrophic, irreversible climactic change, which is what we're still hurtling towards like some vindictive planet-sized Titanic impersonator. There was something about the frigid blocks that bothered me, though. The installation was sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies, not a dangerous organisation in itself, but one built on the back of high-risk financial speculation and investment banking: economic structures symbolising the very weak points in late capitalism that leave us teetering on the edge of climate disaster. The irony (i

This piece was originally published in CityMetric in 2019. Pretend for a moment that you’re travelling in the London of 1932. You’re taking the Piccadilly Line northbound and alight at Gillespie Road station. The name should be obvious: it’s inscribed in bespoke brown tiling on the platform. But that 31 October, following an intense campaign by the eponymous football club, the London County Council changed the station’s name to Arsenal (Highbury Hill). The area’s growing association with the name “Arsenal” ended in a lengthy negotiation that changed maps, signs and train tickets alike. Football had acquired so much power that it changed the name of not just a Tube station but an entire suburb, even before the era of Wenger or the Emirates. Now the spectre of name changes is on the horizon once again. As Tottenham Hotspur FC inches closer to completing its new stadium, the club is clamouring for a  renamed Overground station . Despite the fact the new stadium is located on almost exactl

Hello! Back from the dead after finishing my dissertation, of which you can read a jazzed-up version here . This piece, however, is on something completely different, a topic I've dabbled in that remains close to my heart: the Tube Map. Aficionados amongst you are probably already aware that the newest iteration of the Tube Map is different to the old one. Okay, it'd be weird if it wasn't. But the difference with this one is particularly radical and novel. It meant adding a kink in the characteristically straight Metropolitan Line at Finchley Road, and it finally admitted that Camden Road is dead close to Camden Town. This piece will argue that this particular change is momentous, more momentous than most of us realise. Not just because it added another level of pseudo-ergonomic complexity to the car crash that is the complete Tube Map , but because it could revolutionise how we use the Tube. In 2017, on the cusp of my mediocre "career" as a journalist,