The Tepid Take

This is a piece I wrote for a life writing competition earlier this year. I don't have anything to show for it, but I liked it enough to zuzh it up and share at year's end. I hope you like it too, and here's to a merrier 2021... Pinned at the north end of the street I grew up on, the hill on London Road banks down, sharply, giving way to the River Gipping half a mile down the road. In the valley it creates, you can see miles to the west; the tree line is barely geography’s watermark on the blurred bound of the horizon. And there they rose up, stoic: four great silos, greyed out by time and bad business. It’s six months ago and I’m walking upriver. Something I used to do for adolescence’s sake, now an imitation, trying to draw nostalgia out from the undertow of adulthood. The Gipping is slack and in algal bloom. Just beyond the final railway bridge towards the edge of town, there is a path that veers right into a steep hillside of fresh weeds. I climb in expectation and find

1: YOU'RE MY FAVOURITE NOTIFICATION There was a time when I had a Tumblr account - it was back in 2015, when I was in a retrospectively up-to-snuff relationship with a reliance on memes, references and other moment-to-moment signs. "You're my favourite notification" was a simple text post shared on the site, and it was one of those very memes. Customarily, we both liked, reblogged, and shared it ourselves. In doing so, we were recognising an appreciation for one another among a flurried fog of other visual cues. It was a kitschy message, but right for the times. In the gaps between the real and the simulated, between the relationships that exist and don't exist, between online and offline, it's almost impossible to maintain an identity. If I wanted to coin another phrase , I could say that notification fog has given way to notification fugue. They say that millennials have a problem with personal communication, but the truth is that personal communication has

1. MY KINGDOM FOR A BRUNEL      It can often feel like the United Kingdom is eternally haunted by some Victorian spectre: from foreign relations, to architecture, to things wrapped in pastry, so much of the country harkens back to an imperial institutional dream - and it is a dream.      The railways of Great Britain, among the oldest in the world, are haunted in the same way. But they also suffer more recent spectres: British Rail, the state-run provider of passenger rail transport in Great Britain, has been dead for barely twenty five years. Now, the country runs a compromise. The tracks themselves sits in the public sector under Network Rail, following the dire safety concerns of privatised Railtrack. Meanwhile, the train operating companies (TOCs) and rolling stock companies (ROSCOs) are private tenders.      Crucially, however, Great Britain and the UK are not one and the same, and it is Great Britain that has part-privatised rail. Across the sea in Northern Ireland, there is one

Last year, I wrote a blog detailing the albums I’d listened to throughout the year and the importance of developing a relationship between music and events. That we do so much better when we build our own recollections, as opposed to shoehorning the ones Spotify can provide for us. I’m doing it again this year with a slight of obligation: a sense that there wasn’t so much music this year that moved me. The Guardian called it “ the lost year ”, but I think a better term is “year in stasis”. Friends have told me how they spent the year in general and lockdowns in particular listening back to their summer favourites. Radio presenters have covered their favourite songs in every colour, from Craig Charles’ Funky Forty to Cilian Murphy’s Songs from Under the Stairs . For my own sake, in the unholy combination of a due return home and an undue expanse of free time, I have regressed to the music of my teenage years. Maybe I’m not the only one: being left to your own devices, not knowing how

“Come in later. Leave earlier… Even if you feel you don’t need to, I need you to. It’s good optics ”. I’m not the biggest fan of Industry – the BBC’s new drama, co-created with HBO – but I do like its incisive cynicism. The above quote is spoken by a manager, to her subordinate Gus, after Gus’ co-worker, Hari, has just died. Hari dies from working for roughly 72 hours straight, and the response from management is that his immediate colleagues at work should work fewer hours. But not for their sake. For the sake of the company. For the company’s optics . So the company can be seen to be acting on mental health. Gus is expected to change himself to solve the company's problem. The company culture won’t change; they’ll just change their  optics and then, once things simmer over, return to crushingly long hours. Gus privatises his losses. No one else carries his burden. It’s like he is being held responsible for the death of his friend at the hands of … is there any other way

1. BAIL OUT TfL, BAIL ON CROSSRAIL Sadiq Khan can count himself lucky for the latest bailout package TfL has received from the Department for Transport. Not because it is particularly large or unprecedented, because it isn’t, but because it was a particularly hard-fought battle. Despite being prepared to offer an immediate bailout to train operating companies, the government was not prepared to issue an additional bailout to TfL unless they agreed to substantial changes. These included scrapping the Zip and Freedom passes (forcing under-18s and over-60s to pay for travel regardless of circumstance) and the extension of the Congestion Charge (which I’ve already explained would be a poor policy decision). The demands posed by the DfT are exceptional themselves given the amount that TfL makes back from subsidy; compared to other transport networks, under normal circumstances, the London Underground makes back 1.2x its costs in revenue. That's incredible compared to the New York s

2005. Summer. Dad is drinking one of the beers he calls "stubbies" because they come in squat little bottles. He is sitting on a blue sofa in a burgundy red room with yellow carpet and I am ignoring the in retrospect unforgivable clash of colours by directing my eyes squarely at the television which, given that this is 2005, is roughly a billion feet deep. It is a good size, though, to display that summer's diversion of choice. In the coddled doldrums of the school summer holidays, I have - off the back of a frankly incredible experience with my friend's Sega Genesis - jumped onto the Sonic bandwagon. As a precocious brat at the time, I don't remember thanking my parents enough for buying a chunky Xbox and a copy of Sonic Heroes to play on it - but I took to video games like a duck takes to skydiving, which is to say it was laborious and perhaps ill-considered. The remainder of my memories from that summer are patchy: I might've gone to a wedding (painfully

This morning the dawn has not-quite come and so the Saturday night hangover is present in the clouds: even though it is ostensibly morning and the to-ing and fro-ing ought to be beginning again, the signs of the night persist: up-lit buildings, cars with their headlights on, and, most clearly, the cold and the dark and the rain. Like a barrier against the coming of the day. Like a barrier against any light breaking through. Sunday is in stasis. Every time I look out my bedroom window the world will have grown a little brighter until, finally, it is really day, like it happened without my permission. And then, sooner each day as the winter nears (5:00, 4:30, 4:00) the dusk will come around too, and I won’t realise it’s night until I go and check and confirm: yes, it is night. The preponderance of the daily rhythm is torn apart by the machinations of the ever-available 24-hour clock and a desk that happens not to face the window… Herbert Marcuse noted that mass media and consumer culture