Category: jotter

When I cook for myself, it’s never photo worthy. I tend to cook for taste and texture rather than presentation. I like the food to taste of itself. I tell myself it’s a deconstructed omelette Arnold Bennett, but it’s really just potatoes baked in Cornish smoked salt, smoked mackerel fillets from a smokehouse in Devon, three eggs from my own chickens and finished with a chive salt I made using Maldon sea salt and chives from my garden. In my head, I’m absolutely Hannibal Lector in the HANNIBAL show, only I’m wearing a Wrangler heavy work shirt.

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My internet generation has a ton of (aching, bruised) muscle memory for communicating and reading in several windows and apps across a couple of devices simultaneously.  The new silence has my muscles twitching, yelling that we’re being lazy. Waiting for my muscles to learn peace.  I read a thing the other day saying that the drop-off in new Twitter users is down to the fact that it’s now so loud that it’s lonely.

Yesterday was a night of sushi and sake with my daughter, and today I’m watching the last of this summer’s butterflies flit across the garden.  Fat bees sail the lawn at blade-tip level like ageing galleons. Here I am, still just watching the world go by.

Think of it like rubbing painkillers into the internet.

(Note written 21 August 2015)

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…the artist, as Wyndham Lewis said to me, “is engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is aware of the unused potential of the present…”

…most jokes tend to have this minority quality or irritation quality, just as games people play often tend to have a rather destructive and violent quality. But a put-on, therefore, tends to be a way of hurting the public. It’s an act of aggression against people. And I think that a writer, when he picks up his pen, has to put on his public that way. If he has something to say, it’s going to hurt.

— Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews by Marshall McLuhan

I’m not sure how many things I started as an act of aggression — probably a few when in my twenties, because a certain kind of terrible hack naturally goes for straw men and imagined enemies, and someone more interested than me could doubtless identify them. We write the things we want to see, that we believe are missing. Unused potential.  

Is that hurting the public?  Maybe some of us believe we’re goring someone’s ox, or want to.  Being Edgy is still a thing, after all. But I’m not convinced that writing, even writing to disturb, is an act of aggression, even in a writer’s “punk” phase. It’s an act of addition. An act of revelation.

(And then I realised that, in a sense, so is skinning someone, so I went and made another coffee.)

(note written January 2016)

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Autumn rules: after 5pm, only touch the phone if it’s a text or an email worth reading. Stop picking the damn thing up just to have something to mess around with. You’ve owned a smartwatch since the days of the Pebble Time precisely so you could triage incoming without opening the phone. If you need to look something up, use the damned Rabbit. Autumn and winter are for reading books on the sofa with a drink.

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The fog is so thick out here you can touch it. It’s like pushing through fine chilled gauze. The air is sweet and soft, and everything beyond the garden fence is an abstract of diffused light and faded charcoals.

I wish it would last for months.

(note made January 2017)

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There is great pleasure in taking out and washing all the winter clothes from wherever they landed in July (which is when summer started, we pretty much skipped spring this year). Each one has the promise of crisp days, woodsmoke and hot food. This one, here, this is for sitting by the sea in a clean cold breeze, and then coming back to a warm home with coffee and music in it.

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What I need is a post-death internet service.  This is something people have been talking about a lot over the last few years. I don’t know if any true solutions were found for the thing that, this morning, I think I’d like the most.  A year after I die, I’d like to post to Twitter or something. Hell, who even knows if Twitter will be there by then. He said, as if he were likely to outlive any internet service.  Maybe it should go to my newsletter system instead.

But: just a message, a year after I die. Saying, hi, I died a year ago, but I just wanted to tell you something.

Which, yes, is unsettling enough on its own, I know. It’s not unamusing to me, obviously.  But.

Hi.  I died a year ago, but I just wanted to tell you something. I loved being with you all, and I hope you’re all making the most out of life, because we only get one go on the ride. Hold on tight.

(note originally written September 2017)

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I finally saw The Milky Way, the other week.  A bit of it.  I’d never seen it before — never actually seen that many stars at one time before.  The night after, I saw the Northern Lights for the first time.  Well, a bit.  It was white, and dilute.  But clearly there.  The others in my party had seen them the night before.  I’d gone to sleep early and missed them.  The photos the next day were luminous, electric green curtains.  What I saw was more like smoke.  It was still riveting.

The reaction to seeing something extraordinary is always to try and photograph it.  Not least because a photograph will always last longer than memory, and will in fact trigger the deeper experiential record of memory.  But, sometimes?  I almost missed the moment of my daughter’s graduation because the phone camera’s focus weirded out at the last second.

Why bother trying to photograph the Milky Way when I can just lay on my back in a Norwegian forest at night and stare at it until it fills my eyes?

Sometimes, you don’t take the photo.  You just live it.

(note written October 2017)

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