I’m off to Toulouse today. Well, I’m flying there. I land at 9pm, ish, and when I walk out of the airport Seth will be standing there, just like he was last year in Avignon, just like he was in Tasmania. Then we’ll climb up into his van – the one he converted into a mobile home three years ago – and drive to his new apartment, in a town called Albi. It has a very nice brick cathedral, apparently. Seth tells me about it every time we speak on the phone.
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On Mafia Dons and Tropical Fish
When I think of younger, bolder periods of my life, I often define them (in my own head) as phases, or chapters if I’m feeling particularly sentimental. There’s been a lot of distinct periods, each sharply defined.
Continue readingOn Emperors and Dirty Wizards
Back in the day, people with desks (rich people) used to keep little skulls on them – or if not skulls, then little macabre figures carved from wood or ivory. These miniature corpses were known as memento mori, which translates from Latin as ‘remember that you have to die’. I’ve got one on my desk too – although not really on purpose.
Continue readingOn The Whole ‘London’ Thing, Which Probably Seems Quite Sudden But Was In Fact A Very Considered Decision
I don’t remember whether I already wrote about why exactly I came to London, or how. I like these diaries to have some narrative sense to them but I often worry they don’t, because I write them so sporadically and unevenly. So – here’s the abridged version of the whole London thing, for the sake of clarity.
Continue readingOn Interior Design and The Brilliance of English Grass
I can’t remember what I wrote on this site about my trip to Latin America last year. I think I wrote good things – or at least, 90% good things with the usual ‘wahey’ shenanigans thrown in. In truth though, and certainly upon reflection, I didn’t love the trip. I definitely loved bits of it, like standing on an erupting volcano and swimming in a warm bioluminescent sea, but there was a heck of a lot of slogging to get from good bit to good bit – and not just slogging, but dangerous slogging. Like the bus ride to San Cristobal: a nightmarish twelve hours careening through dark mountain passes, being pulled over every hour by ominous squads of ‘police’ who wore revolvers but no visible badges. There was a lot of that. There was a lot of other stuff that sucked too, which I never wrote down and don’t really like to talk about.
Continue readingOn Juggling and Denzel Washington
Started learning to juggle. Dunno why really. It’s just cool, isn’t it? When you discover that someone you know can juggle, you always find them a bit more interesting – a little bit more mysterious. Because who in their right mind learns to juggle? What’s the benefit? Surely it takes a very long time to get good at it – and who has a very long time to do anything these days, let alone whap a trio of soft balls endlessly from palm to palm? And then there’s the practical stuff: how did they learn? You never walk through the park and see a would-be juggler at the outset, teetering around with their neck craned skywards and arms windmilling, balls flying everywhere as they grimace and whisper ‘oh fucking hell’. If you see someone juggling in a park, they can already juggle well. Who trains them? There’s something a tiny bit magical about it.
Continue readingI Intended This One To Be A ‘Year In Review’ Type Thing, But I Immediately Got Carried Away Talking About How Much I Love Teaching
Because I don’t have any better ideas, I’ll begin by describing the room I am in. It is a bedroom. It is a bedroom in my mum and stepdad’s house, in Bardsey, in Leeds, in Yorkshire, in England. It wasn’t always mine, this room: it used to be Charlie’s, back when he was finishing Sixth Form and I was away gallivanting. For many years, I had no permanent room in this house. That’s changed now: this room is largely considered to be “Dan’s’ room”, because for the last year or so I’ve been living in it. Nice to have a room.
Continue readingAK ’23 | Last Legs Pt 2
Shit. How deep had my sleep been?! Annie’s flight was 11am, and we’d been intent on staying awake all through the night ahead of it. We’d failed, obviously – and as an extra kicker, apparently I’d been irretrievably catatonic. After everything – our three week adventure – we hadn’t even been able to say goodbye. My stomach twisted with guilt and confusion. Surely not. How?!
Continue readingAK ’23 | Last Legs Pt 1
On our final day together, Annie and I spent the afternoon in a relaxed fashion: we found a cafe near Leah’s place and sat down to write and eat cake. It was a trendy, young place, Scandi-chic, far less intimidating than the bistros of central Paris with their chalkboard menus covered in dense, illegible scrawl. On one of the cafe’s exterior walls, facing a sidestreet, somebody had spray painted a vaguely left-wing proclamation in French, translating roughly as ‘down with fascism!’. A little further down the street, someone else had written ‘hipsters fuck off’.
Continue readingAK ’23 | The Destroyer of Molluscs
We did Paris stuff on our second day in Paris; tourist bits, lots of walking. I love walking in big cities – doesn’t matter how far. I love walking anywhere, just trundling along chatting and looking at things. It might actually be my favourite thing to do, now that I think about it. I’m 30 years old and I’d genuinely rather take a one-hour stroll through a park than spend five hours in some swanky rooftop bar with a pool. Annie is not as fond of walking as me, which is why I always have to lie to her about the distances it says on the map.
“So how far is it to this cemetery?”
“It’s just, uhhhh…” I glanced at my phone: 43 minutes to Père-Lachaise. “Another twenty mins or so.”
“Ugh.”
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