I’ve been consuming a lot of media recently about the 1960s. It wasn’t on purpose – it just sort of happened. It started a few weeks ago when I went to visit Vic in Bristol for a summery nostalgic weekend and on the way there on the three-hour bus I listened to a song in my headphones – I forget what it was exactly, maybe She’s So Heavy or Her Majesty or something – but it was a Beatles song, and I decided to look it up on Wikipedia.

What followed was a three-hour rabbit hole of songs and information, mostly following the trajectory of Paul McCartney. The rabbit hole continued that night; lying on Vic’s fold out sofa bed in her seaside house – my friends are starting to own houses now – I stayed awake reading about the Beatles and their cultural impact. I never realised how much, well, impact they had. I never knew how many of the things they did were being done for the first time – the hair, the suits, the chord progressions, the experimentation. So many songs they wrote started entire genres.

What fascinated me even more about the Beatles, and specifically about Paul McCartney, who I have decided I prefer to John Lennon – John Lennon being the more aesthetically iconic of the two, but Paul, for me, being where the real musical wonder made roost – is how so many of their decisions now seem so obvious. In a world of short hair, growing your hair long seems a downright obvious way to stand out. In a world of twee guitars, turning up the distortion and making a racket seems only logical. In the midst of the Cold War, writing Back in the USSR as a giant cultural rug-pull is a totally sensical response. The gigantic, everlasting piano chord(s) at the end of A Day In The Life – give any group of teenagers a piano or two, let them tinkle about for an hour, and watch them inevitably fall into the habit of hammering keys and letting them ring for as long as possible. The shrieks and whoops – the cracked voices – the doom-rock interminable refrain of the last four minutes of She’s So Heavy – yes! Yes! It makes so much sense.

I think I’m drawn to the Beatles because, insanely, on some level, part of me looks at them and thinks: I could have done that. And I know that’s ridiculous. When I watch them being witty and silly in interviews, when I see them tuning guitars in the studio, when I read those lyrics, I think: that’s not out of the question. Given enough time – monkeys, typewriters – I could have thought of that.

But of course noone did think of that. Genius, I think – at least in an artistic sense, because I know fuck all about science and maths – is simply the ability to see something which does not exist yet. To imagine beyond the world as it exists. In retrospect nothing seems like genius. A cardboard box has six sides. Of course it does. Any idiot can count box sides! But somebody had to be the first to do it. If nobody had invented the concept of six yet and I threw that out there ten thousand years ago*, I’d have been harpooned on the spot for being a wizard.

*I am aware they did not have cardboard boxes ten thousand years ago.

The genius of the Beatles is their ability, I think, to give us (me) that feeling: I could have done that. Granted I wasn’t born yet, so it’s not a completely fair course, but even if I’d been the same age as Mister McCartney in the 1960s I must admit, however begrudgingly, that I’d probably have been clicking my fingers to whatever big band noise was on the radio at the time, and dreaming idly of making an even better big band song.

I’ve been reading Joan Didion recently – Slouching Towards Bethlehem – and embalming myself in the atmosphere of the 60s. What a time. Things were new – things were changing. Things are changing now, too, but I don’t know how to capture it in any meaningful way. In my early twenties, around the Berlin days, I used to dream aloud to my friends about my desire to capture the zeitgeist, somehow – to become one of those great and serious writers who give voice to their generation. A naïve, teenage goal, I suppose. Of course I never got close to that sort of gravity, even in my best pieces. I didn’t – still can’t – see far enough. I can’t see through the veil of things; I can’t zoom out enough from the mess and frustrations of my own life and look at the world with wise eyes and make comments on it. I’d love to – but I can’t. I am coming to terms with this; that my writing might never be ‘important’. That I am not the one. That I cannot be a ‘serious writer’. I might be a good writer – I think I’m quite good at it – but my contribution to everything, if I ever make it onto some larger sort of platform, will be something quite different. Whimsy – I’m good at that. And I guess that’s alright. But I sort of hoped, somewhere far back in my mind, that one day I might transform into some Che Guevara type figure. It’s embarrassing to type that, but it’s true: I wanted to be like Che Guevara, like Joe Strummer. I wanted to be profound and mysterious and enigmatic and esoteric. But you can’t want to be those things; you either are or you aren’t. And I aren’t.

I’ve come to realise I’m going about it wrong. In hoping to one day morph into one of those serious writers (while not making any sort of concentrated effort to make that happen — and not even knowing what that would look like if I decided to), I’m not leaning into myself. In fact I’m leaning away from myself, and the more I strive for it, the more it recedes before me, like a carrot on a fishing rod held before my nose – if I just stopped chasing it, just relaxed a bit and enjoyed the view, maybe it would swing back my way. The serious writers were great because they weren’t trying to channel anyone else. They channelled themselves – they had faith, I guess.

Bob Dylan – last night I watched A Complete Unknown. It’s an alright film; I don’t particularly believe it deserved the Academy Award nominations. But what stuck with me is the stark beauty of Dylan’s lyrics. And again, when I read his poetry later that night in bed, I found the same feeling: that irked, bitter sensation — I could have done that.

Nobody knows who I am, though. In ten years I’ve written enough to fill ten, fifteen books here – and four actual books elsewhere – and yet, for all intents and purposes, I’ve not done anything. What mark have I made? Not any. I want to make a mark. At least, I think I want to make a mark. I can’t think about it too much – trying to find a big audience, trying to get known – because if I do it freaks me out. I watch people walking past bookshops, looking in the windows, and I imagine one of my books in there, people leafing through and putting it back on the shelf with nonchalance – or worse, people half reading it and feeling it’s a drag and abandoning it – or worse still, leaving a scathing Goodreads review calling me a know-nothing idiot with a child’s perspective on things, tainted by privilege because I’ve not suffered enough for my feelings to be worth a damn – and it makes my organs huddle together.

But still – I want to make a mark. I think. Don’t think about it. Just try. And if people like it, that’s good, and if people don’t like it – don’t think about it.

I always feel as though there’s a great party going on somewhere, a party full of established literary people, people who’ve done things, all standing around with champagne flutes discussing– I don’t know what people holding champagne flutes discuss. But it’s a party I want to get into, even if I’m not sure I’d like what I found inside. But that’s the thing: I just want to know what that’s like. I can decide if it’s for me later – I just have to know.

I’ll never be a heavy writer, I’ll never be cerebral; I’ll never make Oxford graduates stroke their chins. But I suppose I ought to begin the process now of accepting that that’s just not what I’m meant for (I don’t believe anyone is meant for anything, really, but you know what I mean). I think if I’m going to contribute anything to the world, maybe I can leave all the serious writer stuff to the serious writers. I’ll never be Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I’d never be Joan Didion. I’ll never be Jack London. But fuck – what if that’s totally fine? If I write silly books and silly diaries and I get them published one day – and they make people laugh a bit, brighten their day somewhat, or even if people just read them and think ‘oh cool someone feels the same way I do about this specific thing’ – that should be enough. That’s really nice contribution to have made. We can’t all be everything, but we can be ourselves. Not a revolution, not some great electric shift of the zeitgeist – Bob Dylan switching on his Stratocaster at Newport – but a pleasant afternoon of reading: that’s what I’ve got to offer.