Today, Steve Harley died.

Many of you won’t know who Steve Harley is, assuming that my Substack audience is probably composed of people under the age of 40. I do, because my dad was a huge fan of Steve Harley. My dad died two years ago. Steve was 7 or 8 years older than my dad, which is the perfect amount of age gap for someone to become obsessed.

Like most things in my dad’s life, though, everything about his love of Steve Harley gets buried in mythology, an inability to be vulnerable, and the haze of youth. Although Steve Harley was a man with his own life, his own dreams, successes, failures, loves and losses, I can only see Steve Harley’s death as an echo of my dad’s death.

Tumbling Down

At the tail end of 2020, in the small gap between lockdowns two and three, my dad came to pick me up. I wanted to spend Christmas with my family, feeling a rare pang of missing them (or maybe guilt) after not seeing them in almost a year. So I thought to avoid any potential problems, the second lockdown two lifted, I’d head to Kent. I had planned to get the train, but with trains feeling like a war zone in those days, my dad insisted that he’d drive the length of the country to come get me. That was pretty typical for him. A man who didn’t know how to say I love you, but did know how to drive a 600 mile round trip. A man who didn’t know how to say I’m proud of you, but did know how to tell me to do everything, chase it all, the sky’s the limit.

The drive itself wasn’t remarkable, except for the fact that by then I had already started pre-emptively mourning my dad. He wasn’t dying—I just had become so acutely aware of his age. In the years prior, I could feel his skin growing more sallow, his driving becoming slightly clumsier, things slipping away from him. In his 20s, he’d developed Crohn’s colitis in a pretty bad way and had almost died several times. Here’s where the mythology seeps in. In my head, he was in hospital for seven years, but where did that number come from? Does that match up with his life as it actually was? He eventually lived until 64, more than double the age he should have lived to, given how ill he had been. So maybe I had sniffed the scent of death on him, maybe a year of virus season had made me wary, or maybe I was just scared.

My pre-emptive mourning had given the drive a nostalgic haze well before it was worth it. Whilst we drove the 300-odd miles south, I made sure to quiz him on all of the important-yet-unasked things. You used to be one of the best people in the country at creating colours for automotive paints: how did you do it? Why was it that you didn’t go to art school, in the end? How long were you in hospital? How do we make sure your eye for colour outlives you? That Steve Harley gig you went to in an airplane hangar, where was that? When was that? All of the answers have faded to nothing despite my asking. Maybe the airplane hangar was Belgium, maybe it was the Netherlands, maybe it was Germany. Does it matter? Who is left of those days to tell those stories? My dad is gone, and so many of the people he hung out with were chronically ill.

Towards the end of the drive, going clockwise round the M25, the sun was setting over Essex. I suppose I was trying to force a memory, make a moment worth writing about. Everything was flooded by a gold-orange haze. The City of London in the distance, just before Dartford, just before we landed back on ancestral soil. This was around the time that I had used a trial of Ancestry to find my familial line going back to Harwich in Essex, so Essex felt like home in a way that it never had done before. From one homeland to another to another. Steve Harley has this live album, The Best Years of our Lives (Live). I had started playing it in a hope of connecting with my dad about one of his loves, and in a callback to an earlier moment I hadn’t appreciated at all.

When I was 15 or 16, we went to see Steve Harley live in Tunbridge Wells. I could think of nothing less cool than seeing this musician that no-one had ever heard of live. It was my first concert. It was a sit-down acoustic gig. I desperately wanted to be anywhere other than there.

Back in those days, I was wanting to be anywhere other than most places, particularly if they were with my parents. That was little fault of my parents: I was a teenager and my world was online, and being cut off from the people I cared about in a darkened theatre was not top of the list of things I wanted to be doing. At the same time, I was pretty obsessed with theatres generally. I was writing a first draft of a terrible book called Fresh Dawn which was an attempt to understand and process my own pain. It morphed into something else called Maison des Reves, because I was a pretentious 15 year old studying French. I was obsessed with the Royal Insignia in every theatre, DIEU ET MON DROIT written everywhere.

I was really trying not to have a good time. I was probably in the midst of an argument with my parents at the time, too, amidst one of the times that I was grounded forever because they’d found some weed that I’d been “holding for a friend” (that very common activity that people do). I sat through the concert with a thick glug of shame in my belly, feeling somehow disgusting that this was my first gig. I’d feel the same way when I had lost my virginity. Oh good, the thing I wanted to happen happened, but not in the way that I wanted. Steve Harley played a good gig, and I tried so hard not to enjoy myself. He closed the set that night with a performance of Tumbling Down, the final track on The Best Years of Our Lives. Acoustic with some violins. My soul stirred in ways that it hadn’t before. Some echo of my dad’s love for Steve Harley too, I guess. Mythology again: did he cry that night, or is that just my attempt to make a neat story of this all?

I played The Best Years of Our Lives (Live) in the car on that day in Essex in an unspoken callback to that moment, hoping my dad would meet and recognise my bid for connection. When Tumbling Down came on, I explained how much I loved it and how much I appreciated it at the time, aged 15. He didn’t remember that Steve had even played it that night. For a moment, he’d forgotten we even went to that gig. At the time I’d thought it was his favourite song, but I noticed in that moment that it was actually special to me because it was a moment that I had felt connected to my dad. A year or two later, my therapist asked whether I had connected with my dad over music, or whether I had started to like the music he liked in order to imagine that we were closer than we actually were. I think both things were true.

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The Best Years of Our Lives

My dad was a wonderful man with a deep capacity for love and an inability to express that love most of the time. I see many of his struggles inside myself, though I try to wear my heart a little more on my sleeve than he could. Sometimes I even manage to. Here’s where the mythology creeps back in: how do you know a person who could never show himself? How do you know a person in their absences, or their failed attempts?

In the myth of my father, in the story that I tell myself, he is a bright young thing full of promise and ambition and fear. He lives on an island (sort of), then goes to the Big Smart School on the mainland and can’t keep up and falls behind and falls in with a Bad Crowd and blows up a chemistry lab and gets expelled from school. First brick in the wall. I can only assume that he fell into a life of petty crime, the sort of crime that gets you a good reputation in a small town. Charming. Handsome. Constantly trying it on. Odd jobs. Eventually he tries to go to art school, because his first love are his drawings. He gets rejected. Second brick in the wall. He starts training to be a mechanic and going to dance halls and starting fights. In my imagination he is somewhat of a Lothario in this period of his life, flirting with every girl who will show him love, regardless of whether they have a boyfriend or not. He gets punched in the face a lot. Once he stops taking pride in it, it’s the third brick. He gets ill, fourth brick. I tell myself that slowly, he starts to build the mythology of himself: I am the man that could but then I couldn’t. I am the man that went too far. I am the man who deserves nothing.

In the title track of The Best Years of Our Lives, Harley sings: “Fresh-faced imbeciles laughing at me/I’ve been laughing myself, is that so hard to see?/Do I have to spell each letter out, honestly/If there’s no room for laughter, there’s no room for me”. I start to imagine this as my dad. The man who must be a joker, who must be useful, in order to be loved. Always looking for someone laughing at him. When he can’t see it, he has to make it. Just a verse later, Harley’s speaker gets more tender: “Since the last time we met I’ve been through/About seven hundred changes and that’s just a few/And the changes all tend to be something to do/But you’ve got to believe they’re all done for you”. I might look like a joker, but I’m desperately trying, and each of these tries is for you.

Whenever I had a major life event—normally a graduation—my dad would express his pride to me. It was one of a few situations in which he let himself feel a fuller range of emotions. You could tell he was about to cry because of what we referred to as his “silly voice”: as he started to well up, his voice would go high-pitched, but he’d keep trying to speak regardless. I can’t remember what he’d say to me, but over the years it’s got translated in my head to “eat the world”. He definitely didn’t say this. But he was expressing how proud he was of me. How the sky was the limit for me, how I should take every opportunity. I’d be in New York, Chicago, Montreal, Cologne, and he’d tell me to eat the world. Take every opportunity for everything it’s worth. What was in brackets behind that was: “like I couldn’t”. “Like I’m not worthy of”. “Do it for me, not because I’m living vicariously through you, but because you deserve it where I didn’t”.

The song’s constant refrain is “Oh, you’ll think it’s tragic when that moment first arrives/Oh but it’s magic/It’s the best years of our lives”. When my dad died, these words came to my head unbidden. I can’t reconcile that meaning properly. The tragedy of my dad dying giving way to the magic of being able to celebrate his life, perhaps? Were the best years of our lives whilst he was alive? I hope not, given that I have the majority of my life ahead of me. It’s a nostalgic song, but it’s filled with instruction, too.

Again, mythology: I think we chose this song to play at his funeral, but we went back and forth on so many Steve Harley songs that I can’t remember. Let’s say I did. My dad speaking to us from beyond the grave, maybe a hint that the best years are still to come.

Make Me Smile

Steve Harley’s stand out single, the one that you will know, is Make Me Smile. It starts with that jumpy, bassy riff, and gives way to Harley’s chipper voice (50 years ago, now).“You’ve done it all/You’ve broken every code/And pulled the rebel to the floor”, before the refrain, which you will know: “Come up and see me, make me smile/Or do what you want, running wild”. It’s been plastered over so many adverts over the years. I remember it on an M&S advert, but Google tells me it’s also been on Furniture Village, Carlsberg and BMW ads.

It’s really popular. It’s also probably as poorly understood as Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”. It sounds romantic, passionate. Come up and see me. Make me smile. It’s actually about the band splitting. Steve wasn’t a solo artist in his early days: he was actually the frontman of a band called Cockney Rebel. The original Cockney Rebel split, and then Steve reformed “Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel”. Make Me Smile is about his feelings about the band splitting up. He’s saying “go on, you go start your own band and then come back in a few years desperate to come back into the band, that’ll make me smile.

I have basically no stories about Make Me Smile. Like all good breakout successes, a true fan would never be caught dead listening to it. It was one of the first songs I learnt on my bass when I was 15, but that’s about it. In the days after my dad died, I was busy taking care of myself, dropping all of my work as much as I could, going for long walks, just… feeling, I guess. I was in Newcastle city centre, walking to a therapy appointment, and a car drove past blaring out Make Me Smile. You’d recognise the riff anywhere. I wanted desperately to make it a sign, some communication from beyond the grave, but if that was my dad it’d be something more eclectic: Mr Soft, or Psychomodo, or Sebastian. Or, honestly, David Bowie or Pink Floyd. It’s all mythology. Bricks in walls, songs that don’t mean things, or trying to read everything as a Blackstar-portent of death.

I wanted to see Steve Harley live once more. I knew he was in his 70s, so I’d have to be quick off the mark with it, but I didn’t take a chance when I had it and now the chance isn’t there. But we can make cathedrals of our grief, thinking that we need to construct grand ceremony to make it matter. That we need to know the person inside of the mythology, or that we need to go to a live show to hear the songs that mattered to the person that we loved. But it’s all still there. The marks they made, the way they touched the world, everything we did and didn’t know about them.

I didn’t know Steve Harley. I only knew him and his music through my dad, and I don’t know how much I can say that I knew him, either. Or how much any of us can say that we know each other. But I know the marks he left by the marks my dad left. And those definitely make me smile.

Festering

I’m working on a novel. Technically, I’ve been working on this novel since September, when a new idea came to me with the sentence:

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The very first time your mum lets you out on your own—properly on your own—you spend most of the day in the too-shiny-for-its-age shopping centre.

I then proceeded to write about a shopping centre that wouldn’t be out of place in the background of some vaporwave video on YouTube, and a house that was haunted by… something. A little while later, it started to grow connections in my mind to something I’d written a year or so earlier:

I am twenty-six and on the 17:32 from Edinburgh to London when I get the news that my dad is definitely going to die.

Like that, a protagonist started to form in my mind, and I started to shape a work of horror around it. A story that would let me explore all of my gnarly feelings about class and hometowns and marshes and Thatcher and stagnancy. About moving away from a place but it changing in your absence. The note I have from when this finally clicked for me is “What happens when you go back to your hometown and it’s not the same place you remember… but literally?”

I wrote a first chapter—or a few first chapters, I guess—and submitted it to a mentorship scheme that with any luck I’ll hear back from soon. The novel is called Festering right now, based on the title of a zine the protagonist finds in the story. It’s a a work of gothic horror exploring haunting, trauma, desire, class, and identity. The protagonist’s mum dies and he reluctantly returns to his decaying hometown. The town is eerily different, and buried memories begin surfacing surrounding his best friend’s death when they were nineteen—who somehow seems to be alive.

I’ll probably keep writing about the writing process here, because I think it’s interesting, and it gives me a chance to talk about writing without always just sharing a whole work.

In the past few days I’ve been writing a section where the protagonist (as yet unnamed) meets up with an old friend from school who now has a job in corporate London and is insufferable as a result:

“You can’t be thinking of moving back for real. You love it here. And I’m sure on your salary—”

“What can I say, sixty k doesn’t go as far as it used to. I probably won’t, you’re right. There’s just a bit of a pull… especially since Dad retired. I’d love to just kick it with him down at the golf course on a Wednesday night. I know it’s only an hour away, but the hour counts!”

I think I’ve finally found how to write dialogue that progresses the plot, which is thematically resonant, and does actually sound a bit like humans actually speak. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to people’s conversations on the metro into town and jotting down interesting snippets and I think it’s helped a lot.

House of Mirrors

I’ve written poetry since I was… thirteen, I guess? Either thirteen or fourteen. Of course, that was the kind of cursed poetry that you see thirteen year olds write, full of lazy metaphor and loud feelings. Things like:

Your lies
Deceit
Absorbs me
Until I am nothing more.

The kind of poetry that is important as a way to develop a style and a voice and, if you’re me, an ability to actually feel your own feelings. Over the years, fortunately, I honed my ability to return to and edit a poem, rather than letting it just hang there as an archive of a feeling.

I started to take my poetry a little more seriously in 2019, when I realised that I was actually sitting on a lot of poems that thematically spoke to each other. Granted, some of these were still feeling-poems and needed a good edit, but I started to think about compiling them into a collection. In 2020, I worked on a first version of that for Dreich’s chapbook competition. It was a heavy-handed concept at the time—that every poem contained the phrase “and yet, you”. It didn’t really land. I’m glad it wasn’t published.

Over the course of the Lockdown years, I started to rework the collection to be more about the idea of a year that never ends, a reflection on the feelings of having lost time at a foundational moment in my life. It wasn’t about the pandemic, per se, but more about all those experiences which make us feel like we’ve lost time. I could never quite find the angle with that version of the collection, though: it wasn't sure if it was a pandemic poetry collection or not.

More recently, I’ve reworked this into House of Mirrors. House of Mirrors is a poetry collection that explores my relationship to home, the self and the body, and intergenerational trauma. It’s an attempt to reckon with my own existence, and what it means to be a person trying to break generational cycles whilst also being flawed and imperfect. The title comes from the idea of the collection as a reflection of different versions of myself as I grapple with the central themes of the work. Repetition of patterns that are slightly different each time feature in many of the poems as a way of showing the gradual movement to make a different self despite doing the same things over and over. Ultimately, the collection is hopeful that change is possible—that we can change the patterns lodged inside of us across generations—even if it takes some time.

More on House of Mirrors or the thinking behind it soon. For now, I’ll leave you with a poem from the collection, “The smell of home”.

The smell of home

Your homesick first term over, embrace the smell of home. Musty walls, essence of dog. Boiling vegetables all through the night, a kitchen sauna peeling back the paper. Embrace the smell of home, as it fills your nostrils with feelings you tried to forget, spikes in your back from the worn-out mattress. Was it always like this? Were the walls always slick with whispers and the bedrooms spilling onto the floor? “Can I cook tonight?” a pot of someone else's stock is simmering on my stove. I never taught you this. whose gentle caress taught you to hold a blade like that? who taught you that beans could be fatty salty creamy morsels of love, not just something to throw on a potato? you deftly chop and expertly sauté. this pot is filled with your freedom: fennel bringing sweetness chilli bringing heat parsley bringing freshness that I never knew could be there. when I was your age, I could only busy myself with surviving. stock was a cube. but as your new life bubbles away on the stove, I can’t stop my resentment rising— “you’re making such a mess”.

For some reason, New Year’s remains important to me. I almost don’t want it to. Ever since I can remember, I’ve found the turning of the year a moment to set intentions for the year to come. The time from around the 19th to the 2nd is earmarked for a bunch of different kinds of reflection. The solstice as a chance to call in the new year and get rid of the old one. Christmas as a chance to celebrate with the people we love. New Year’s itself as… sort of… the same again with more alcohol? In the end of year I’m trying to have, New Year’s doesn’t have a defined role except “booze”, and as a person trying to have a much more conscious relationship with alcohol, that doesn’t feel like much of a purpose.

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I remember being a nine year old and wishing—not making a resolution—to get a girlfriend that year. And then the year after. So on, rinse and repeat. I was a lonely kid, obviously. At the turn of midnight, my parents would open the back door to let the bad luck of the previous year out, and open the front door to let the new luck in. They’d plant pennies under our front door threshold to bring us money. Watered down versions of a first footing, I guess.

When I was a teenager, my New Year’s mostly consisted of getting upsettingly drunk at the house of someone whose parents were out for the night. Aged fifteen, bottle of Southern Comfort shoved into my hands the second I got to the party, I found myself drunk for the first time, belly turning sour on half a bottle of SoCo and chicken and bacon pasta. Snapshots of a dramatic evening: the house with three sheds, the locked bathroom door, a girl trying to jump out of the bathroom window to avoid anyone knowing we were together, being sick in the bath because someone needed to use the toilet, making promises for the new year on a strangers kitchen floor eating soggy toast to sober up.

Aged sixteen, I kissed someone on New Year’s Eve and found myself in a five-ish year relationship. The already powerful moment of the turn of the year also became an anniversary. Sometimes with others, tied at the hip whilst we saw our friends; sometimes alone, quiet and uneventful dinners in Canterbury or Her house. One year we went to the Penny Theatre and actually Went Out for New Year’s and we found ourselves fizzing with Prosecco back at our friend’s house at 2am, filled with two dinners and the hint of something better coming around the corner.

Then a string of confusing and strange ways to end the year. 22 and drunk (but not drunk enough) at the party of an 18 year old work friend of a friend. I spent the whole night trying to flirt with a guy that had been invited because I thought he was cute, only to find my then-straight friend who had invited him was flirting (more successfully) with him instead. I walked twelve miles home rather than stay there. Then 23 and too drunk whilst my best friend vomited a yard of Strongbow Dark Fruits. 24, 25, 26 and a dinner party.

Now it’s time for something different. I’m a facilitator and a games designer—there is absolutely no reason for me to not host a New Year’s party or event that isn’t intentional, grounded, and reflective. Tomorrow, I’ll be hosting THE DYING LIGHT—a game or ritual to end the year with intention and power. Maybe you want to run it at your New Year’s party—or maybe you want to spend some time with it in these first few weeks of the year. Either way, I’d love to hear what you make of it.

You can download a text-only PDF of it below, or scroll down to read it in your browser.

THE DYING LIGHT - A game or ritual to end the year163KB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownload

THE DYING LIGHT

A summary

THE DYING LIGHT is a New Year's party based on more than aimlessly drinking until the clock hits midnight. It's a chance to end the year well and call in the next one surrounded by the people that matter to you.

THE DYING LIGHT is an evening of two halves: THE END and THE DREAM. In THE END, you will let go of the year that has just been—all of its bullshit and pain and crap. In THE DREAM, you will imagine and dream the year to come.

In THE END, you will gather around a fire pit (or other source of fire) and let go of the year that's been and burn your regrets and burdens. Towards the end of this phase, you should all eat dinner together (either make it beforehand or order it together), and then you’ll transition into THE DREAM. In THE DREAM, you’ll set intentions for the next year.

Towards the end of THE DREAM—before midnight—you should all leave the place you are gathered and walk to a natural place that might give you a good vantage point of fireworks. Think beaches, hills, rivers. If there’s no good vantage point, you should just head to somewhere that makes you feel contemplative. When midnight hits, crack open a bottle of something, celebrate being together, and when you’re all ready, head back to the event location. You’ll collectively choose THE FIRST FOOT, then the hosts will announce THE LAST CALL and you can all have one last drink together, round out your evenings together, and then everyone can head home. All costs for THE DYING LIGHT should be split equally—including drinks, food, and transport home.

Attendees

You should invite as many people as it is feasible to. These should people you love and cherish, or the people they love and cherish.

Materials

• A lot of index cards (some will require preparation, see next section)
• As many pens as attendees
• Something to make fire with
• Something to put fire out with
• A meal, either cooked or ordered
• A natural place you feel contemplate in, or which has a good view of fireworks
• Regular event-hosting paraphernalia (seats, cups, drinks, snacks)

Preparation

• Write “THE THRESHOLD” on an index card

• Prepare as many index cards as there are attendees with the following “THRESHOLD QUESTIONS” written on them

  • What kept you small this year?

  • What was the biggest decision you made this year?

  • What was the biggest change you experienced this year?

  • What caught you off guard this year?

  • What are you most proud of this year?

  • What moment of this year took your breath away?

  • What hurt you this year?

  • What did you learn this year?

  • What did you risk this year?

• Prepare as many index cards as there are attendees with the following written on them:

  • WISH

    What do you wish the other person can let go of in the next year?

• Prepare as many index cards as there are attendees with the following “STEPS” written on them

  • Something I will love about myself.

  • Something I want to achieve.

  • Someone who will support me through rough times.

  • Something I will dare to discover.

  • Something I will have the power to say no to.

  • Something I will make my surroundings cozy with.

  • Something I will do every morning.

  • Something I will pamper myself with regularly.

  • Somewhere I will visit.

Order of service

THE END

THE END should ideally take place outside, gathered around a fire pit or other source of fire. If it isn’t feasible for this to happen, it should take place in a comfortable, reflective space, gathered around some candles with a bowl of water nearby. THE END is based around processing and letting go of the year that has just been.

ARRIVAL

As everyone arrives, greet them, ask what they’d like to drink. Explain that you are running THE DYING LIGHT so things may be a little weirder and more unconventional than any New Year’s party they’ve come to before.

When everyone is sat at the fire, ask everyone to share an experience they have had in the past year that involved the drink they are currently drinking.

When everyone has shared a story, play “The Dying Light” by Sam Fender. Once it has finished, read the following aloud: “The light of this year is dying and THE END has started. We are living in the final moments of this year, when anything might be possible and the world is more suggestible to our power. Over the course of this evening, we will let go of the year that has just been, and find the most tender, hopeful parts of ourselves as we imagine the year to come. We will make new friends and cherish old ones. We will sink deeper into what it means to be alive here and now and we will sow seeds into the ground of the new year.

Now, we begin the ritual by entering into THE THRESHOLD.”

Burn the card that reads “THE THRESHOLD”, signifying the opening of the door to possibility.

THE THRESHOLD

During THE THRESHOLD, you should play low tempo, contemplative music with a repetitive beat. This can be popular music and doesn’t have to stick strictly to this rule, but you’re trying to create a reflective space. Think slow jazz, vaporwave, lo-fi, that sort of thing.

Read aloud the following poem:

“From out of the chaos, a quiet
filled with aether. A thin place filled with the breath of gods.
Here, we might dream a future for ourselves
and burn a past.
We heed the call coming forth from the void
and find that somehow we endure,
here to stand another year.
We stand upon this blood and dust
to remember the flavour and smell
of possibility, nostalgia, regret.
Who were we in this past trip round the sun?
What were we feeling as fires raged
and cold filled our lungs?
What did we do when our last desperate shreds of self
seemed to escape us?
We call upon the dying breaths of this year
to cross into the threshold,
to pay tribute to all that has been and gone
and to chart a path forwards into the fog of the next. “

Explain to each attendee that they will spend some time in THE THRESHOLD preparing themselves for THE BURNING by talking to someone they haven’t spoken to much before. Ideally these should be one-on-one conversations, but if there is an odd number there can be one three.

Hand out the THRESHOLD QUESTIONS card to each pair/group. Explain that they should ask three of these questions to each other. Each person in the pair should ask different questions, i.e. when a question has been asked to one person it cannot be asked to the other. If anyone doesn’t want to answer a question, they can choose not to and must not be asked why they don’t want to. When a person is answering a question, the question-asker can only speak to ask further clarifying questions—they cannot give commentary or advice on the question-answerer’s response.

After each person has asked and answered three questions, tell them to turn to the WISH card and speak their response to each other one by one.

As the conversation dies down, check back in with the group. How is everyone feeling? Did anything about their partner’s responses surprise or interest them? Could they relate to their partner’s experiences?

Then, read the following text aloud: “Our worlds are stories that we tell ourselves to keep ourselves small. But we didn’t write these stories. They told us these stories, over and over again. They broke us and told us they had the only story: that life is nasty, brutish and short; that this is the best we can ever get.

But stories can always be told differently. Different characters, different journeys, different endings. Sometimes we forget that new stories are possible, and we find ourselves lost and alone. To build a new story, we must first release the stories that are not our own. We have to release this year with all its grime and rust. Now, we begin THE BURNING.”

THE BURNING

Change the music in some major way. It doesn’t really matter how, just shift the vibe. Hand out three index cards per attendee.

Read the following text aloud: “In THE BURNING, we will externalise the baggage of the year by writing down three words onto three index cards, one word per card.

On the first card, you should write down a word that symbolises your lowest point this year.

On the second card, you should write down a word that symbolises what might still haunt you about this year.

On the third card, you should write down a word that symbolises your most peaceful moment this year.”

When each person has written all three of their cards, have them approach the fire, say “This year has changed me, and for that I’m resentful/grateful, and now I let it go”, and drop the cards into the fire. Each person can choose to say whether they are resentful or grateful. The person who is running the game/ritual should start, to give an example. There doesn’t have to be a particular order to how people go up to the fire.

Once everyone has burned their cards, ask if anyone wants to share a story that’s related to one of their words. If no-one wants to, that’s fine.

Let everyone know that we are coming to the end of THE END. Once we end this portion of the evening, our attention will turn to the year to come. Knowing that, open the space to free conversation. Read the following text aloud: “As we approach the year’s final breaths, we need to cleanse ourselves of all that remains. Until the fire dies, or we get too cold, we will stay here, talking about the year that lays behind us. At any point, anyone may extinguish the fire to end this portion of the evening. They are the flamekiller, and they remind us that all things must end—whether good or bad.”

Once someone extinguishes the fire, everyone should head inside. That ends THE END. You should now eat together without the structures of the game/ritual. If you are cooking, go cook. If you are ordering food, go order. THE DREAM should begin after everyone has eaten and everyone is feeling kinda sleepy.

THE DREAM

Read the following text aloud: “We have said goodbye to the past year. We have eaten our last meal of the year together, filling ourselves for the last time this year. Now that we are nourished, we can turn to the matter of the future.

You have probably felt the winds of the future many times before without ever realising. A moment where something new and exciting has happened, and you feel your heart about to leap out of your chest. That feeling you get when you are deeply self-assured and self-confident after doing something that is out of place for you right now, but contains the seeds of who you might become.

The nervousness you have when you move somewhere new. That ache you have inside of you when you finish reading a book that speaks to the very corners of your soul. In these moments, the boundaries of the timelines become porous, the world itself becomes thinner, and you can feel the cool wind of the future on your face.

Inside of THE DREAM, we will spend time imagining the next year together, and prepare ourselves to step into that world.

But first, to dream, we must SLUMBER.”

SLUMBER

In the SLUMBER, everyone will enter a state of meditative reflection. Ask everyone to close their eyes, to take a few breaths however feels comfortable to them, and to get comfortable. Ask them to think of the food you have just eaten together, and to feel it sitting in their stomach, beginning to digest. Ask them to think of the things they burned together on the fire, the words that described the year that has been, and how they let go of that. Ask them to remember themselves before they started THE DYING LIGHT, and what they imagined they might be stepping into. Finally, ask themselves to remember themselves at this time a year ago, just a few hours before the turn of the year. Where were they? Who were they?

Now, ask everyone to try to imagine themselves a year from now. Where are they? What is the room they are in like? Who is there alongside them?

Space each of the following questions out, giving people time to reflect. In a year from now, what is the greatest love you have felt that year? In a year from now, what does your body feel like? In a year from now, how have you shifted?

What is one word you want to sum up the next year? Keep saying this word over and over in your head. Say it ’til it feels numb.

Bring everyone back into the room gently, and ask them to write that word down on an index card, fold it up and put it in their pocket.

Once everyone has written their cards, ask if anyone wants to share the reasoning behind their word. If no-one wants to, that’s fine.

THE STEPS

Read the following text aloud: “We cannot reach that place we are hoping to reach by this time next with will alone. We need to find build THE STEPS to get there.”

Hand out three index cards per person, and give them THE STEPS. Ask them to select three steps of their choice and write the answers to them on an index card.

Once everyone has written their cards, ask if anyone wants to share a story that’s related to one of their steps. If no-one wants to, that’s fine.

THE MARCH

Identify a natural vantage point near to the event location that allows you a good view of potential fireworks. Ideally this would be something like a beach, a river, a hill, a park. If there is no natural vantage point, instead head to a natural place that makes you feel contemplative, like a woods.

Let everyone know that they are approaching the beginning of THE DREAM becoming real. Knowing that, open the space to free conversation.

Read the following text aloud: “As we approach the year’s first breaths, we need to open ourselves to all that is ahead. Until [specify a time that will allow you to reach the natural place before midnight], we will stay here, talking about the year that lays ahead of us. At that point, we will all leave the house and head to [natural place].

There is a Scottish tradition known as First Footing, which states that the first person to cross the threshold of a house after midnight on New Year’s will determine the luck of the household for the year to come. THE DYING LIGHT shifts this: the FIRST FOOT will be the person who we all collectively decide we want to shift our love and attention towards to ensure they have the best possible year. This might be because of something you’ve heard them say tonight, something you know, or a gut instinct.

When we leave [natural place], we will start talking about who we think should be FIRST FOOT. By the time we get back to [event location], we will have chosen the FIRST FOOT. Whoever is chosen as FIRST FOOT has to enter [event location], light a candle, and welcome each person individually to the year.

Until then, let’s see this year in!”

A NATURAL PLACE

Welcome the year in however feels right to you all. Crack open a bottle of something and celebrate being together. Let people do whatever they want to bring in the year. When you’re all ready, head back to the event location.

On the way back to the event location, ensure people start discussing who they would like to be FIRST FOOT.

FIRST-FOOT

The FIRST FOOT should be chosen, light a candle inside the location, and they should welcome each person to the year.

Once everyone has been welcomed to the year, the hosts should announce LAST CALL.

LAST CALL

Read the following text aloud:

“Too often we mark a moment and spoil it by letting it spill over and out. We think that we’re having a good time and that time can never be ruined by having more of a good time. But as the flamekiller reminds us [gesture towards them], all things must end.

It’s LAST CALL, I’m afraid. There’s no rush to leave—far from it—but your next drink should be your last, and you should savour it as one of your first moments of the year. Whilst you’re drinking, feel that drink filling you with energy for the year to come—think of it as all your hopes and aspirations. Then, when you’re done, feel free to leave in whatever way feels comfortable to you. The last drop of your drink will finish your time with THE DYING LIGHT. Have a good year!”

The music should be upbeat, raucous party music. Think cheesy, think classics. Whatever people need to see in the year in style.

Once everyone has left, the hosts should sleep well knowing they have set the people they love on the clearest course for the year ahead.

There are few things I enjoy more than a city in the early hours of a crisp, cold morning. There’s a really distinct serenity to them. If it’s cold, it’s probably autumn or winter, so the sky is either the most beautiful shade of orange you could ever imagine, the most tender blue that a sky can muster, or a sea of grey clouds bringing a sullenness to everything. I love each of these equally. I love nothing more than lacing up my shoes (who am I kidding, I’ve probably slipped on the same already-laced pair of shoes I wore yesterday), heading out and just seeing a place come to life. That doesn’t mean I do it as much as I’d like to, of course. But I love it when I do it.

A few weeks ago, I woke up on a crisp, cold day in Glasgow. I’ve only visited Glasgow a handful of times, but it’s fast on its way to being one of my favourite cities that isn’t Newcastle. As I stalked round the city centre streets in the morning, I was so desperately aware of how much I come to know a city by seeing its patterns—this guy opens his shop at 8am, and then takes the bins out after he opens up; these children are always on the same metro; the magpies always fly over my house around 6:30am. I love the sense that I’m attuning myself to its rhythms, its heartbeat. I love the first train of the day, the laziness of the station, the hazy tiredness of everyone. I love watching people go for sunrise walks, compelled to witness the beauty of a day birthing itself.

I started writing this a few weeks ago when I was in Glasgow, but the right words wouldn’t come to me. Right now, I’m writing from the road, pitched up in a camper van by the Atlantic Ocean on the Moroccan coast. How fitting that I find the words to talk about home whilst I’m thousands of miles away from mine. Those of you who have been following me on Polarsteps will know it’s been a difficult experience, whilst also being absolutely beautiful and eye-opening. I find travel exceedingly complicated, and I am feeling that so sharply right now. I am loving my trip, and also I am merely tolerating it. I love experiencing new cultures and tasting new foods and meeting new people and also it drains me endlessly. I am so sharply aware of how much more I love a trip in retrospect than at the time. Over the next few weeks, I want to chew on the question of “why we travel” with you, but I want to ground it first in its opposite: “what can be found in the places we call home?”

I’ll be working through each of the three places that I have called home in reverse order. I can’t promise that there’s a clear message waiting for you at the end of all of this—I’m sure there’s going to be contradictions and hypocrisy and waxing lyrical about things I like. I can promise you, though, that I will do my best to show you the texture of the places I am speaking about. What it’s like to be there, to drink a coffee there, to get lost there. In doing so, I hope I can show you something about what we call home.

Newcastle

I get off the train, and I am hit with the sights and sounds of city. It initially puts me off. I took a sleeper train from Falmouth, arriving in London at 5:30am when the sparks that power the city have just begun to fly, before heading northbound on the first train. As I stepped onto the Virgin train my immediate thought was god this is nicer than the sleeper. The South West always gets the worst of it. Nameless towns flew past as I headed north. Town, farm, farm, pylon, town. I got into the city stupidly early, and as I got off the train, I definitely didn’t have a distinct sense that this would be my future home. I had a sense that I hated this place.

I struggled to connect with it, to find the version of me who might walk these streets and feel their resonance. I walked up Grainger Street and Northumberland Street and was unimpressed. Years later, when I visit Manchester for the first time, I feel myself swallowed whole by the Arndale Centre in much the same way. I was certain that this was a place that was utterly devoid of feeling and character. Sure, Grey’s Monument was cool, and there was a metro system supposedly, but I really couldn’t see myself living there. I had the interview—the reason I was there—and before stumbling to my hotel I sat on a bench outside of the Civic Centre. This place is soulless, I thought to myself. There’s nothing here I like. The campus was nice I guess, but the city itself was just Pret after Greggs after Starbucks after Five Guys.

When I was a teenager, I stumbled on the psychogeographic work of Guy Debord and the Situationists, and without really understanding it, I fell into the world of dérive-ing. Derived from the French for “drift”, the dérive is an unplanned journey through a space (normally a city) in which the drifter has no goal or destination in mind, and moves deliberately through the space. This may be moving intentionally with the space, paying attention to terrain and architecture and seeing which ways the landscape wants you to move through it; it may be against the space, deliberately defying the intentions of planners; or it may be by following arbitrary rules like ‘only make right turns’ or ‘follow red cars’. I first dérived in London, after a The Fault in Our Stars book launch event, and found myself intentionally lost in Kensington and ended up at the Saatchi Gallery where I saw modern art for the first time, which embedded into me a deep love for art. The power of the dérive.

So I dérived my way from the Civic Centre through to Jesmond and the very street that I’d come to live on later that year. Jesmond’s architecture is so different than the city centre, it’s like moving into a different world just by crossing through the underpass. A portal to some other place. As I circled the streets nearest the metro and walked down Osborne Road, I realised that I could probably live here. The next day, on a train out of the city, I got an email offering me a place on the PhD programme and accepted just as the train pulled away from the station. As I was still anxious to move north from coastal Cornwall, though. When I finally moved up a few months later, I used the same strategy to find my feet in a new city: I tied my laces and got walking.

I had an anxious first night in my house share, because I wasn’t sure whether I would get on with any of the other eight people and felt socially exhausted just considering making friends with them. The next morning, I walked ten minutes from my house to a coffee shop that no longer exists. I filled my infrequently-kept journal with all my worries and hopes. I felt dislocated, which is fitting, given that I had literally been dis-located. Moving is the most disorienting of experiences. In the weeks afterwards, I quite literally found my feet, memorising the contours of the city with my shoes. I walked down to the Quayside in my first week and found the Baltic Gallery for Contemporary Art, basking in the exhibits and thanking my lucky stars that I finally lived in a place with an art gallery. I stared at all seven of Newcastle’s bridges from the viewing gallery and knew this was a view that I would return to, over and over again.

I let go of my fear of my housemates and learned what Jesmond Dene was like with them, just minutes away from our house. Over the course of that year, it became our go-to place for a walk: when hungover, sad, pissed off, lost, bored, we’d get lost in the reaching trees, crumbling water mills, and ambling river. The first time we walked to Heaton was because our housemate wanted to go to a BYOB Indian restaurant and drink port, and another housemate cried as she told us that she thought her dog was going to die. That first time in Heaton felt like going to an entirely new world, though the bring-your-own-port may have had something to do with that. A year later, I would move to Heaton and learn its streets and parks and pubs better than I had ever known Jesmond.

Within weeks of moving to the North East I know more deeply than any of my friends who have lived here for years. I could tell you every curve of Jesmond Dene, the quickest way into town from our house, the strangest nooks at the far end of town, and the right turning to get to Tynemouth by car. A friend tells me her dad always told her “the country’s not that big; if you get lost, keep driving until you hit water”. We must be lost a lot because we find ourselves hitting water so many times in this first year. Years later, I move out to the coast, and map that land with my feet too. We sign for a flat in Tynemouth and the very next week, I find myself pulled to know every inch of the way from our current house to our new one. I scoot to the coast. Yes, you read that right. I scoot for eight miles. It’s fucking ridiculous. Don’t do that. Or do, because it is ridiculous, and what is life for if not the ridiculous? I see in-between places, which I always have a soft spot for. Here is a park that no-one uses, here is the nature park next to the motorway, here are the wide-yet-somehow-empty streets before Meadow Well. Just me grinding the wheels of my scooter to absolutely nothing. Two years before, I walked to the coast on a random day and listened to Wild by Cheryl Strayed and found some resonance in a woman who processed her grief by putting one foot after another on the Pacific Crest Trail. Our bodies breathe easier when we are in movement, perhaps. The world around us tells us stories before we even know we need to hear them.

But I’ve been making some assumptions in all of this, haven’t I? I’ve lived in the North East for six years now, which is a good amount of time but it’s still pretty far off being someone who grew up here. I’ve walked and scooted and cycled and driven so much of this place, but do I know it? What does it even mean to know a place? Do I know a place just because I can tell you where the right turning is, or something about its history, or because I tripped and scraped my knee and spilled blood there? The places we call home certainly can hold us. Their consistency and familiarity can help us through hard times—or turn us towards nostalgia and make us terrified of change. Change is of course inevitable—that place you loved four years ago might not exist anymore, might have changed for the worse, or might have changed for someone else’s better. But are places ever static enough to claim we know them in the first place?

Next week, I’m going to tell you about a small coastal town called Falmouth, the three years I spent there, and the time I went back and tried to find the version of myself I left there.

A previous version of this featured on my blog and in Lost Futures volume 4, thresholds. This is a revised and updated version. It’s definitely not perfect. There’s a bunch of clumsy phrasing, and I think in some places it reads like I’m a 1975 fanboy or hater of modern technology with the way it problematises most of modern living. That’s not my position at all—it’s just easy to take shots at the small moments of life that aren’t necessarily fulfilling.

This piece contains discussions of hopelessness, bullshit jobs, feeling like life is pointless, loneliness, alcohol and substance use, trauma, unlived potential, right-wing scapegoating (i.e. of refugees and trans people), casual homophobia, implied reference to sexual assault, blood, sex, and relationship breakdown. If any of these things would be harmful or distressing for you to read right now, skip this one. It is all relatively surface level and nothing becomes the focus of the piece (except perhaps hopelessness, loneliness, and unlived potential). The piece is not related to self-harm or suicide.

You are waiting. You’re not quite sure what for, but you always find yourself waiting. For the train, for the tube, for the mortgage documents to get signed off. For the microwave to finish reheating your lunch. For your Amazon package to arrive. For someone to finally fix you. For that therapist to have an open spot. To get your ADHD assessment. You are waiting for something that will either call you to arms or tell you to lay them down. Until then, you are a statue, patiently locked in prayer. Hoping, waiting, commiserating.

You are waiting. Whilst you wait, you fill your time. With drama, Hinge, mobile games, TikTok. Your job. You know your job’s shit. It’s definitely one of those ‘bullshit jobs’ you’ve heard so much about. You could disappear and no-one at your work would even notice for a week, you’re pretty sure. You spend eight hours a day opening and closing spreadsheets and PDFs. You send emails. You receive emails. You go through the motions of ‘life’. You go to work, don’t do anything that you think is meaningful or important, and then you come home. You don’t really mind not doing anything important, because you’re not bought into the whole ‘having a career’ idea anyway. It would be nice if someone actually spoke to you like a person, though. You make a meal that requires no effort: jacket potato, oven pizza, tortellini with a stir-in sauce. You absent-mindedly stroke the packaging of your dinner as if it is the face of a loved one. You stand in front of the fridge eating individually wrapped slices of cheese whilst your dinner cooks, and by the time it is ready, you aren’t hungry. You eat it anyway.

You are waiting. New job. New people. You think you might even like your job. This is much worse. You have trapped yourself with the belief that you are truly willing to be here. You thank the gods every day for blessing you with this work. You’ve found your calling. Your purpose. You’re making a difference. You’re helping people! You tell yourself you’re doing something worthwhile every time you stay longer hours, every time you work at the weekend, every time you miss your partner’s birthday because there’s this grant / project / client coming up. You have taken the master’s tools and are doing a great job at keeping the master’s house standing. You think it feels better like this. And your colleagues… you think they might even like you! One of them had lunch with you the other day. You didn’t talk, just stared into the distance eating your meal deals, with the occasional mutter about something inconsequential. Three pound fifty now, it’s madness. Yeah. Can’t believe it. My heating bill was a hundred and fifty—

You are waiting. In the small moments the doubt creeps back in. You weren’t put on this earth for anything, were you? There’s no point in this. No point in the endless toil. ‘I do not dream of labour.’ You feel better than you did before but also sort of the same? It’s still individually packaged slices of cheese, food that reminds you of being seven, the occasional high-effort meal to remind you that you’re worth it, the occasional Uber Eats / Deliveroo / Just Eat delivery to get you through the week. You’re desperate for some fate to press itself to you, to stitch itself underneath your fingers, for some golden moment to tell you that you are the chosen one and there is some success waiting for you that you could have only ever dreamed of. But that’s not how the world works, darling. That fate is already there, swirling in the aether, ready for you to grasp it. You are waiting and drowning your sorrows in the worst Wetherspoons until the end of time and you are so far from yourself that you don’t realise the fate is already in your hands, pressed to your fingertips. Condensation dripping down the glass into divinity. Your god-hands pick up your pint, drain it, and leave.

You are waiting. On a Sunday you speak to your dad out of a sense of necessary routine, keeping up the rhythms of life with the people you ‘love’, but you have never really connected. All of the appearance of life but none of the vibrancy. You go to the pub or sit in his garden and have a barbecue and you meet his friends and they’re all the same as him. So many unspoken words sitting in the lines on their faces, so much distance between them as they sit in the booth or on the bench. Once, you saw two of their hands touch as they went to pick up the same chicken wing and they lingered a moment too long, and there was some real hope in that moment until one called the other a ‘bender’. One day, out of nowhere, on a quiet night in July, your dad reaches across the timeless gap and places a stiff hand on your knee. “Don’t be like me, son. You’ve got to make something of yourself. Chase your dreams and eat the world and make something new. Don’t be like me.” You don’t know what to say at first, before you mutter a nonchalant “I will”. You are shaken to your core but still you are waiting.

You are waiting. Saturdays with the lads. Sometimes you go to the cinema to break the routine of pub and footie and endlessly swiping. “Shall we go to the Three Pigeons this week instead?” Change it up. The same loop of people whose unlived lives sparks up for one brief hour a week, when the haze of booze gives way to the closest thing they can get to vulnerability and intimacy. You find yourself watching The Breakfast Club on repeat and wish you had ever had even one moment of connection like they have in that film. You watch films like The Truman Show and Inception and they feel like a memory, like you’ve seen them before. They’re stirring ancient parts inside of you: rusty cogs of godlike creation. You watch TV shows like Westworld and LOST and Twin Peaks and - there’s something out there, isn’t there? If only you could leave. You have a stirring sense that the world might be right outside your house and you would never know. You are waiting and you cannot leave. You play games like The Stanley Parable and Disco Elysium and you wish someone would just show you the door, too.

You are waiting. The economy’s gone to shit and you can’t leave your house and you guess this is just it, death and taxes and all that. Now the economy’s gone to shit and you can leave your house but you can’t afford to. Now the economy’s gone to shit and you can leave your house and you have to because you can’t afford to heat it all through the night. Now the economy’s gone to shit and it’s the fault of refugees. No, trans people. No, the EU. No, the left. Choose a new scapegoat to get you out of your head. Choose a new enemy that you can get high on crushing. Choose a new idol to put on a pedestal, some new god to save you. A new person to be disappointed by. Another celebrity you used to love committed an atrocity live on TV, but you post comments underneath the videos ‘cancelling’ them talking about how they’ve been really misunderstood. You ignore your god parts. You are filled with a sense that the world will soon close in over itself, seal us all into the vacuum, and you’re excited. You’re excited for when you won’t have to spend the energy to breathe through this anymore. You’re kept up at night with the question of the universe’s expansion. If it’s expanding, what is it expanding into? You know the answer is more about the space between things increasing. You want the answer to be ‘into the outside’. You want to go outside. You can’t remember what that’s like.

You are waiting. When you were young, people tore holes in themselves in front of you. Poured blood and trauma onto your new trainers. First your parents, then your lovers, then your best friends, then your enemies. You were sad then, older than your years and full of grief, but part of it excited you. Like you were alive for the first time. It wasn’t just the brains on fire or the bloodshed, but the idea that there could be something else. That life didn’t have to be death and taxes and boredom; we could opt out, find something else. We could fuck off the job and the buying a house and the marriage and I don’t know, live in a commune. No, live on the road. No, live in New Zealand. Live anywhere but here. Live somewhere other than the small town that’s built us into these awful people who keep stabbing each other in the back. You’re older now, but you try to resurrect the feeling by going to six festivals a year, bonding with strangers whilst you take pills and stay up until far-too-late having Deep Meaningful Chats by the fire. You think this is it, this is the new world, this is the way of being that I have craved my entire life, and then you have a sales report due at 10am Monday, a presentation for Wednesday. Dead Moments of Change. The new world slips out of view, lost in the haze of work.

You are waiting. For some princess in shining armour to save you or some knight that needs saving. Someone whose lips or hands or body might save you. Someone whose love could fix you, tell you that you’re not this filthy broken thing. You are waiting for the appropriate amount of time to pretend that you’ve cum. You are waiting for the appropriate amount of time to break up with her, because it’s her birthday, so it wouldn’t be the right time. You are waiting for your body to stop aching whilst never doing anything to make it ache less. You are so concerned with your aching spine that you never stop to ask yourself what it’s trying to tell you. You never try to hear the lessons of your body. Instead, every single second of your damn life you are waiting. You never look up from your phone to see the exit signs hanging above your head. You step over the trapdoors to the underworld without seeing them, close the fridge on the portals to another world. You never stop to understand that the way out is everywhere—it’s in your fucking hands—you just have to make it. You are waiting for nothing and nothing will come, over and over. You are a god grown lazy. You contain the power of ancient things—to love and heal and form new life—and you spend all of your time working out the quickest bus route home. You are a god and you spend your precious life trying to work the Trainline app.

You are waiting for some spark to awaken your circuits, bring you back online. You feel these glimmers of some other world and turn away because you are afraid of having to build the world you want. You want someone or something else to eat your fears for you and make your dreams come true. You are waiting for someone else to be doing what you should. You are hoping that someone else makes the new world whilst you scroll Rightmove. You are waiting, and you will never stop waiting until you hear the call that is coming from inside the house. Your heart is begging you.

You are waiting.

You are waiting.

You are waiting.

Pick up your god-self from the sofa, turn off the TV, put down the book, stop checking your emails every two minutes, hold the hands of those you love and take the exit. Build new worlds with your ancient hands.

I spent my early uni life intimidated by the people in the TTRPG and gaming societies, desperately wanting to be like them but not feeling like I had enough knowledge, like I could only participate once I knew enough that I didn’t look like an idiot. I joined the Zombie Society, which involved termly games where ‘zombies’ would try to infect players by touching them and players would attempt to kill zombies with nerf guns, but I was put off by a dominant environment of toxic masculinity. Instead, I resigned my nerdiness to obsessively watching the PAX sessions of Acquisitions Incorporated, marvelling at these idiots playing this wonderful game. I tried a few episodes of the then-new Critical Role and couldn’t quite get into it. When Titansgrave came out in 2015, I couldn’t wait for each new episode. And then, of course, Stranger Things happened, D&D 5th Edition exploded, and a plethora of third party content, actual play podcasts and Twitch streams began to dominate the gaming landscape. It slowly became cool to play or talk about D&D or TTRPGs more generally.

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And still, I didn’t play or run a game of D&D.

Lessons from ‘modern’ board gaming

In 2018, I finally discovered ‘modern’ board gaming. I had moved to the North East and was visiting York with my partner Chloe, and we happened upon a shop called Travelling Man (completely oblivious to the fact that I had walked past Travelling Man in Newcastle on my walk to the station that day). We spent some time perusing the board games in there, and we both decided to buy one: Chloe bought the modern classic Pandemic, and I bought the bloated deck-builder-turned-RPG that no-one has ever played, Apocrypha. Clearly one of us made the better choice.

We played Pandemic on the train back, quickly getting to grips with an incredibly cleanly designed game systems ever. Each turn, you have four actions that you can use in one of eight ways. Your character has some special modifiers that makes them better at one or two of those actions. At the end of each turn you draw two cards and then infect the number of cities indicated on the infection tracker. If you draw an epidemic card things get worse. If you manage to cure every disease, you win. Everything about Pandemic captivated me and made me realise I was hooked on a new hobby. That year I bought a plethora of games and played Pandemic with a lot of people.

Apocrypha couldn’t be more different than Pandemic. Where Pandemic was clear and effortless to play, Apocrypha was like walking through mud. I admit, I was partly drawn to it because it was big and expensive, and I was trying to become comfortable with actually spending money on myself. I loved the tone of it—gothic magical realism, oozing small town Twin Peaks vibes. But the game was a mess. Every meme you’ve ever seen about your friends introducing you to a new board game was true about Apocrypha. It was so confusing the designers released supplementary rules for it online. I’ve played it a handful of times, primarily alone. But Pandemic and Apocrypha together taught me a clear lesson in what game design could be—and what it shouldn’t be.

Later that year, I picked up Fantasy Flight’s Edge of the Empire starter set, a Star Wars RPG focussed on life outside the mainstream Star Wars world, of crime, bounty hunters and droids. I ran a few sessions for my housemates at the time, and we had fun, but I still had this sense that I absolutely didn’t know what I was doing. I think in part I just didn’t understand the larger mechanics at play, why the game worked or how to develop an interesting and immersive narrative inside of it. I guess I was still scared of D&D—with its huge and expensive core rulebooks—so I went to Star Wars, because I knew and understood Star Wars, at least.

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That year, I took some of my learning about games and applied it to my MRes project, based around understanding how to design digital peer support systems for young people with experience of homelessness. I made a pretty terrible design fiction, loosely wrapped a world around it, and imagined that somehow that could be considered a game. It couldn’t. I had to pivot my project and ended up running workshops where participants would work through a workbook I had created—where they created a character/persona from several positive or negative characteristics, and then worked through a series of prompts based around events that happened to that character that year. I didn’t have a good enough understanding of game design at the time to recognise that that was much more of a game than my design fiction had been. This could probably the bones of a pretty decent solo journaling RPG.

After (the) Pandemic

Throughout the pandemic I was living with Chloe and our friends Nat and Rachel. We spent a lot of that year playing games to pass the time. Ironically, one of our main pastimes was Pandemic: Legacy (Season 1). Legacy games are linear campaigns of a board game, in which players work through a variety of scenarios and their actions in one session live on to the next session. Eventually we had to stop playing because it got a bit too real (“we need to set up exclusion zones over there or the virus is going to cause a string of outbreaks!” didn’t feel quite the same anymore), but I couldn’t ignore the itch anymore for wanting a longer term narrative game where actions had consequences. I spent some of the pandemic building an idea for a Star Wars homebrew setting using D&D 5E, but abandoned it because I still didn’t understand how story, puzzle design, game design, and level design all come together.

The missing piece of the puzzle came in 2022 when my friend Paul gathered together a group of first-time players who really wanted to start a D&D group. The missing piece was ‘seeing someone else do it’. So in July 2022, the Stonehill Six came together in a campaign of The Lost Mines of Phandelver. Over about sixteen sessions, we bonded together as a group, found a new pattern for our Tuesday nights, and built some semblance of a community. Every Tuesday, we knew we were going to eat together, spend time together, and play in our stupid made-up world together. My first time actually playing a full campaign of D&D was everything I imagined it could be—a way to build community, to deepen relationships, to care for each other, and to confront the monstrous ghosts of your past when you accidentally name someone in your backstory Agatha (who shares a name with the Banshee in Phandelver). I became a little bit obsessed, obsessing over optimal character builds, spell synergies, and multi-class opportunities. My highlight of that campaign was still the moments we were trapped in a Agatha’s house, desperately trying to escape from the spectral form of the Banshee, when I decided that I was the person that had led the party there, so I was willing to die for the rest of the party to get away. Luckily, I didn’t have to. But the desire—and the immersion—was there all the same.

In the intervening years, I’d developed a much richer understanding of games design. Of course, I was already a designer drawing from a lot of different disciplines (interaction design, service design, experience design and visual design chief among them), but from 2018–2021 I’d spent a lot of time honing my skills, playing board games, and developing a few games of my own. Mostly these games were for research. These included It’s Our Future, a gameful way of helping people who have never met each other before to identify issues in their lives and imagine and build shared futures, and fractured signals, a playful self-reflection tool using tarot cards. Neither of these really scratched my itch for a game that felt like a game, though.

Paul got a job in a different city earlier this year and our Phandelver campaign came to an end, but we were all firm that we wanted to keep our Tuesdays the same, though, and so in March of this year I started DMing my first D&D campaign. After ten years or so of wanting to run a D&D campaign, I was finally embracing it. I had been building a world in the background for the past few months and started to create an adventure within it. I was knee deep in every video about how to DM for the first time—which honestly, I didn’t need to watch but it becomes a bit of an anxious habit sometimes, consuming content to avoid being vulnerable. My players were dropped into the continent of Eschator, a place that was in a tentative peace in the aftermath of the wars in the Crowlands between the Crowtouched—a religious group who warned of an oncoming change that would shake the world—and the Coinstewards, a profiteering hyper-capitalist ‘utopia’. Eighty years ago, massive climatic shifts had affected the dwarven homeland and the entire population were made refugees. Some fled north, into the Lazaran Mountains, and continued their path of mining and resource extraction to find a way to reverse the freezing of their homeland. Some fled over the water, to the south of Theladria, and developed new technologies to harness the power of the waves and live more symbiotically with nature. Yes, it’s a very thinly veiled attempt to do climate and capitalism in an RPG, but sometimes these things die through subtlety, you know?

The party was The Storm Commission, a group of people who had responded to the Queen’s call for people who were willing to investigate the recent wild magic storms that had begun tearing their way through the continent. Over another sixteen weeks, the party investigated the cause of the storms, how they might stop them, and most importantly—who was behind them and what they wanted. It turned out that one of the leaders of the dwarven settlement in the Lazaran Mountains was approaching the end of his life and wanted to see his homeland of Bastion restored at any cost, and so was attempting to open a portal to another plane of existence to secure the help of Fire Elementals to melt the ice in Bastion. He didn’t care about the cost to anyone else to see the dwarven homeland restored. Little did he know, he was being manipulated by forces far outside of his control—the presumed-dead wife of one of the player characters, trapped in another plane and desperately trying to return. We decided to run our campaign in arcs, and there’s no rush like ending a four month arc of play with the players stuck in another plane of existence, one betrayed by their wife, another finding out their memories had been wiped thousands of years ago, another embracing their magic with the help of their ancestor, and the last finding out that they hadn’t accidentally made themselves a cyborg years ago, but they were chosen by a god to be their champion

I had a lot of chances to find what worked for me and what didn’t. A lot of how I thought I might want to run D&D (or another TTRPG) turned out not to be what I wanted. I loved building intrigue and suspense for my players, and dangling puzzles in front of them to solve. I loved making physical props, using my design skills to give them a piece of this world. I loved seeing them theorise and try to work out what the hell they should do next. And I loved nothing more than seeing how they would do completely chaotic things, things I never could have planned for in a million years. In our sixth session, one player used a magical item I had developed for them with a random effect and caused the entire continent to shift its terrain, causing earthquakes, severe weather events, and mountains to spring up out of nowhere. The rest of the campaign was marked by this—people displaced, helping one another, or capitalising on the crisis. I realised, though, that what I enjoyed most about this was developing mechanics, finding new ways to play the game itself.

What’s next: getting started easily

My love of making new games mechanics has translated into TTRPG design that goes outside of D&D, finally. I’m currently working on a couple of games that I hope to release in the next few months. These all started life as things that I did for our weekly Tuesday TTRPG night, but I began to realise that they were being held back by D&D, not improved by them. Right now, I’m working on an as-yet-untitled-teen-slasher RPG, which I’ll be running for the first time this Tuesday. It started life as a hack of Dael Kingsmill’s Teen Slasher 5E classes, and drew upon elements from the games Kids on Bikes, DIE RPG, and Ten Candles, but I’m trying to give it life outside of each of these now. This game is trying to find a satisfying way to create a one-session slasher RPG that feels genuinely scary, which embodies the feel of the slasher genre, and which facilitates players to quickly make characters and a world together that can be played in immediately.

Perhaps because of my own journey of wanting to play RPGs for so many years but never quite feeling like I could get started, this is one of the things I’m most passionate about as a games designer. I want to make games that people can get started with easily. That’s not to say there isn’t a place for huge, crunchy, or complex games—but more to say that in the age of one page RPGs, the return of RPG zines, and a wealth of cheap or free content on itch.io—there’s such a space for games that people can pick up and start playing in seconds, or hacks which make other games easier to get started with. We’re also doing this at fractals co-op, where we’re using our games design skills for clients, helping them to think about how to build closer relationships, tackle complex problems, and create shared understanding through games.

Besides my slasher RPG, I also have two games on the backburner that should take centre stage in the next few months. One is a heist-themed RPG, based around an obsession I had earlier this year with heist movies and their incredibly specific structure of planning, flashbacks, and complications—and the other is a fuller game, a simple RPG that uses tiled cards to build a town. I’m calling this last game “Starting Town”, and the idea behind it is that it would be equal parts “my first RPG” and town generation tool for a longer-form RPG using another system, if you wanted. The three of these games each represent a different approach to doing TTRPGs to me. The slasher and heist RPGs are two genre-heavy pieces that seek to replicate a particular kind of mood and draw a lot of inspiration from movies, whilst Starting Town is a take on a traditional medieval fantasy setting, hopefully making it easier for people to start with something like D&D, Pathfinder, or even an Old School Revival game like Dungeon Crawl Classics or Shadowdark (though I think they’re a lot easier to start with anyway). You’ll be hearing more about these games as I hash them out over the next few months, and I’ll talk you through some of the way that I make decisions about them, charting some of my journey in designing them. For now, though, I’m going to get back to writing the slasher, so that I’m ready to run it on Tuesday.

A trip back to 2015-kieran

Today, I received an email from LiveJournal.

You have received a virtual gift for your 8 anniversary in LiveJournal

I get these emails intermittently. I’m a person that’s had a lot of LiveJournal accounts over the years—it’s probably the first place I really started to hone a writing craft in some form, really (but mostly being a place that I Did My Feelings Out Loud as a teenager). This particular one caught my eye though, because I absolutely did not recognise the username. As I always do, I clicked onto the account and tried to determine what was happening in my life when I felt the need to make a new LiveJournal account. 2015-kieran’s explanation?

I’m caught in a bit of a tricky situation, and I guess that's why I find my way back to this corner of the Internet. I'm settled, again. It's not often that settlement is an issue, but the fact is I'm not really used to this - I've spent a great deal of my life questioning so much of what makes me, me, and defining myself externally that it's very confusing for me to actually have a chance to consider who I am based on my merits. I'm struggling (in a good way) to live a life that is congruent with my values, which it took me a long time to reach.

Ah. So yet again, this was another of my attempts to work out my life through the written word. 2015-kieran goes on to explain that he spent most of his teenage years thinking he was a bad person, how he’s really trying to do better by becoming a vegetarian, eating organic food, and “advocates the stripping of power relations”, whatever that might mean. He’s trying to understand how to feel safe with feeling safe, how to relax into comfort, but also how to want more for himself. He longs for academia but is disappointed by it:

I was really getting on with this idea, even thinking about potential dissertations… how we can attempt to use radical democratic theory to transform social relations, but… I just feel a little bit flat. I don't know why - it just felt sort of underwhelming, and it made me question the whole idea of going into academia.

As Kae Tempest says in their song Lessons, “The lessons will come again tomorrow/If they’re not learned today”.

Year on year, the same pattern. Start writing (LiveJournal, WordPress, Tumblr, LOST FUTURES, a thousand half-finished notebooks, Substack). Name and acknowledge every other attempt that has come before. Stop writing. Gear up for the next round of the cycle.

Eternal return

Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra is weird, right? Most of you won’t have read it, and I’m sure you’re going to agree with me from the outset, because of the perception that you have of Nietzsche, and perhaps of all philosophy. The reason that Zarathustra is weird is because it uses a relatively outdated philosophical style, of communicating novel philosophy primarily through narrative. Rather than a reasoned, ‘logical’ attempt to set out a basis for his ideas, Nietzsche sets out to tell a series of disconnected stories of the titular Zarathustra as a way to advance his own philosophy. We’re not here for a full treatise on Nietzschean philosophy and the ways that it’s been appropriated by fascists, though. We’re just here for one weird story stuck in the middle of Zarathustra, “Of the Vision and the Riddle”.

In Zarathustra, the protagonist has some big revelations then tries to tell everyone about them, and everyone’s like “yo buddy, chill out, you’re being weird”. He journeys on, keeps trying to do the same, heading back to his mountain cave to become more of a pompous arsehole in the interim. One day, he’s journeying back, and this dwarf jumps on his back and is trying to really get to him, telling him he’s the pompous arsehole that he is, that he must fall flat on his face because of that. But then, the man has a vision of a gateway. Behind the gateway is an eternal road, ahead of the gateway is an eternal road.

Then something happened that made me lighter, for the dwarf jumped from my shoulder, being curious; and he crouched on a stone before me. But there was a gateway just where we had stopped.

“Two paths meet here; no one has yet followed either to its end… They contradict each other, these paths… But whoever would follow one of them, on and on, farther and farther — do you believe, dwarf, that these paths contradict each other eternally?"

"All that is straight lies," the dwarf murmured contemptuously. "All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle."

What is happening in this bizarre excerpt is Zarathustra coming to terms with the main thing he’s been running from this whole time—Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence. Put in a simple enough form to quickly explain in a post that is thoroughly not about Nietzsche, eternal recurrence puts to us the question: “if everything that has happened has happened before, and everything that will happen will happen again, how can we live through the present moment with the minimal resentment of our eternal selves?” How can we make it so that when we eternally return to the same moment, we don’t say “fuck, I’ve got to do this bit again”?

I was obsessed with the idea of eternal return when I first learned about it—funnily enough, just a month or so after I wrote the post on that LiveJournal. It really represented a moment of change in my life, because for the first time I understood that every single action we take has a deep importance to it; could I live with the decisions that I am making right now if I have to re-live them for eternity? As is often the case, though, I took the idea too far, burning myself in the next two years on a certain brand of activism that was mostly centred on outrage and shaming people for their decisions. We’ve all been there.

But there’s a very real way that we live Nietzsche’s eternal return without its metaphysics. Our patterns play out constantly, re-presenting us with an opportunity to act differently.

Why do we write?

Everything has happened has happened before. Everything that will happen has already happened. So of course, 2015-kieran has already commented on this:

Another issue that I'm facing at the moment is how to not make this blog post sound exactly the same as similar posts to this that I've written before. I'm overly defining myself, and I'm not sure why it matters, but I suppose I've always used LiveJournal as a method of external reasoning. It helps me articulate what I'm thinking.

Why is that I’m drawn to writing as a way of processing? And why is it that I’m drawn to writing about writing as a way of processing? This seems to be one of the questions that I’m drawn back to repeatedly. Take, for instance, this post from January 6th, 2019, where I talk about a post I made on December 25th, 2014, where I talk about a post that I made on a blog from 2011. The lessons will come again tomorrow if they’re not learned today.

The reason that these questions come back, though, is because we change. The lessons come again to give us a chance to learn them, and this time I’ve done a lot more living and writing. This time I come at the question of “why do I write about writing, and then stop writing?” having written an 100,000 word thesis and having read and thought about the idea of writing as confession and expression a lot more. Most importantly, I come to this having read Melissa Febos’ Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative.

I think there’s a certain self-consciousness that comes with a post like this; posting something like this as your first or second post always screams “I don’t know how to take up the literary space I want to take up”, “I don’t know who I am to make the claims that I’m making”. Febos’ essay “In Praise of Navel-Gazing” echoes this process of self-interrogation:

Who was I, a twenty-six-year-old woman, a former junky and sex worker, to presume that strangers should find my life interesting? … My own story wouldn’t leave me alone. It called to me the way I have since come to recognise is the call of my best stories, the ones that most need to be told. So I wrote it. And it was urgent, but not easy. In order to write that book, I had to walk back through my most mystifying choices and excavate events for which I had been numb on the first go-around.

… the resistance to memoirs about trauma is always in part—and often nothing but—a resistance to movements for social justice.

… I don’t mean to argue that writing personally is for everyone. What I’m saying is: don’t avoid yourself. The story that comes calling might be your own and it might not go away if you don’t open the door. I don’t believe in writer’s block. I only believe in fear. And you can be afraid and still write something.

Oh, look. It is a post about “writer’s block” after all.

Every single attempt I have made to write publicly—whether on LiveJournal, WordPress, Tumblr, in my own publications, or on Substack—has been an attempt to tell a story of some kind of trauma. Sometimes its the trauma as it’s happening—as my earliest LiveJournals were, essentially recounting and making sense of abusive relationships as they were ongoing—and sometimes it’s been a story of healing and recovery, trying to notice the ways that my life has become different inside of spaces of safety. Struggling to write is, for me, always an attempt to avoid myself, to hide from the complicated or messy.

Making something new

The main place that I diverge from Nietzsche on eternal return is I see it as a sort of challenge. Yes, there’s the question of existential resentment, and trying to live the richest version of our lives (whilst accepting that we can’t often do that). More than that, though, there’s the question of how we can break out of the loop. How can we make something genuinely new? If we’re stuck on the long road of eternal recurrence, how can we make a new path?

Those of you who are close to me will know my love for a certain kind of media: Twin Peaks, The Matrix, The Truman Show, Westworld, The Stanley Parable, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In some way, each of these pieces of media are concerned with the question “how do we do something different, when everything is fixed on such a set loop?”. Neo breaks out of the Matrix because something new happens. Stanley leaves his desk because all of his co-workers had gone. Truman arrives at the end of the painted clouds and finds a door. These are stories about something new becoming possible after a long stretch of the same.

In Mark Fisher’s 2009 book Capitalist Realism, he poses the problem of capitalist realism, the idea that capitalism has become so hegemonic, so dominant, so entrenched, that it is now easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. By the end of the book, he poses the question of what we can do about this, how we can break out from the “grey curtain of reaction” to find new “horizons of possibility”. Having just spent five years writing a thesis about methods to make these new horizons, this time around, I’m coming to these eternally recurring questions with a new set of tools. I know how to make something new from the same loops. Essentially, I think this means that this time, we’ll get past the second post, because I know why I’m writing and I know how to do this differently, now.

At the end of Kae Tempest’s Lessons, they sing:

You would think that over time
Our lessons would be learned
But time and time again, we find
Our lessons have returned
And even though we've sworn repent
And promised no repeat
We find ourselves back here again
With the same old ragged drum to beat
Saying, how many times must we be shown
The outcome of the pattern?
How many times must we be shown
The outcome of the pattern?

I think it’s the last time. Until the next time.

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June 2021 was still filled with pandemic haze. We were well on the route to the government’s ill-advised removal of all social distancing measures but not quite there yet. We could see people again, post-vaccination, but it still felt remarkable. I had been working on my thesis in earnest throughout the lockdowns—the narrative for the whole thing had been locked in for a while, at that point—but I had only recently finished collecting data in April 2021, with my fractured signals project. For me, writing a thesis during the pandemic looked like being cooped up in a living room with three other postgraduate students all trying to complete theses. Four desks huddled up in the same place that we played Golf with your Friends on the PS4 and watched endless amounts of Grey’s Anatomy.

This got… tedious.

Whilst the early lockdowns were hard (I’m a person that loves to be around their friends and in community), there was also a relief from the relentless pace of everything. Since the start of my Master’s (and honestly, for ever), I’d been grinding away, desperately trying to do bigger and better research projects, to find my voice, my style, my methods. I was doing far too much. I was trying to prove myself, though I’m not sure if I quite knew to whom I was trying to prove myself. I spent half a year doing an ethnography of a small charity, then proceeded to start working with two more charities and hop between months of ethnographic observation, design work, and essentially doing youth work at the same time. In August 2019, I took on my biggest project to date (a one hundred person workshop) with only two months to develop and deliver the entire thing.

Now I can see just how stupid this was. At the time I was oblivious. Not tuned enough into the protests of my body, perhaps; ignoring the back aches, lack of sleep, and racing heart in favour of doing something bigger and better. The onset of the pandemic—whilst tragic and full of lives pointlessly lost by the mismanagement of public health policy at the hands of the government— meant I broke that cycle, finally heard the call of my body, and could drop more deeply into understanding what I needed.

Inevitably, I found myself making use of every spare moment, addicted to the churn of overwork. I started EXIT Press with some friends, working on the first volume of LOST FUTURES from November 2020 to January 2021 (having never used InDesign before); I started freelancing, trying to make sure I had some financial buffer for when I inevitably ran out of PhD funding; and I took my artistic practice seriously for the first time thanks to the help of Julia Camerons’ The Artist’s Way.

If you’re not familiar with The Artist’s Way, it markets itself as a 12-week course to “discover and recover your creative self”. The isolation, fear, and sheer boredom of the past year had driven me to want to reconnect with my creativity, to loudly embrace it rather than only drawing on it when I could justify an academic project centred on creative methods. I didn’t complete The Artist’s Way—after a certain point I found Cameron frustrating, and the book bore the marks of being from a different time—but I embraced enough of it to find that creative spark inside of myself again.

I realised that for my entire life, I had been what Cameron calls a “shadow artist”:

“Shadow artists are gravitating to their rightful tribe but cannot yet claim their birthright. Very often audacity, not talent, makes one person an artist and another a shadow artist–hiding in the shadows, afraid to step out and expose the dream to the light, fearful that it will disintegrate to the touch.”

I had been more content to engage in art and creative practice through the facade of academia, which almost seemed to provide a set of rules by which I could engage in art-adjacent activity without having to actually put my whole self on the line. Easier to comment than create; easier to create through a set of rules than to embrace the wilderness of doing anything.

On the 8th June 2021, I had an amazing session with one of my freelance clients. I had been helping them to think through their strategy for power and influencing. A brief around understanding systems change more deeply became a beautiful conversation about understanding the limits of power, how to exert it, mapping zones of influence, and how media interacts with this. We chatted about Stuart Hall’s theories of encoding and decoding, of emergent strategy and how to plan firmly but loosely, of Brene Brown’s ideas of vulnerability and belonging. It was fulfilling. It helped affirm to me that I had a valuable practice as a facilitator, movement organiser, and critical friend. And I was getting paid for this!

On the 10th June 2021, I got comments back on a publication I had in for review:

“This is great , here are three extensive sets of changes we want you to make, can you do it in two weeks please?”

The second I received that email I felt something bubble up within me. Something that had been brewing for so long—ancient, even—was finally clear. The email came, I turned to my partner, and said “I’m leaving academia”.

I’m sure this was a relief to her, as she’d seen up close for years what the academic grind had done to me, how it had sent me all over the country in search of a validation that would never come, how it made me unavailable and distant. I’d never felt so certain about anything in my life. I knew in my bones that this wasn’t what flourishing felt like. I had such a great session on the 8th—felt purposeful, knowledgeable, skilled; and then to be made to churn out extensive changes with no consideration of my existing workload… that wasn’t what I wanted as a reality of work and life for myself.

(This isn’t a post about fractals co-op, but incidentally I noticed in checking the dates for this post that our first in-person fractals meeting was just two weeks after this. It’s nice to be able to see in retrospect how these patterns coalesce, when you’re so oblivious to them at the time. It’s nice to have that different reality of work now. )

Of course, any good decision will be immediately tested. Just a week after I made this decision, a friend got in touch to ask if I was interested in being a named post-doc on a grant they were putting in. I grappled with my decision for a while, but came down on the side of continuing to stay out of academia.

It’s not easy to be out of academia when you’ve still got a PhD to finish, though. Those of you who know me will know that I had an incredibly disrupted PhD experience (eight supervisors! A parent death! A grandparent death!), so despite being “close to finishing” in June 2021, I was still “close to finishing” in June 2023.

Even though I’ve got a few endings still ahead of me, having submitted my PhD finally means I can actually feel like I’ve left academia. That I’m on The Other Side. Of course, I’ve been dreaming of and building The Other Side for the past two years too, building fractals co-op with my fellow worker-owners and exploring different kinds of artistic projects through EXIT Press, but every new thing would stretch me thinner. Making me less able to focus on building the connection and intimacy that I want with the people that are close to me. Unable to focus on my artistic practice in the way I’ve longed for since the early days of the pandemic.

In September, I ran a project called The Museum of Lost Futures with a friend and collaborator, Mwenza Blell. We created a museum of possible pasts and futures and invited forty people who are close to us to come through its doors, and face its questions. What haunts you about your world? What must crumble for you to have the life you need? People were simultaneously speechless and full of words. People cried, and spoke tender words to people they care about deeply. They shared visions of the future they had never managed to articulate to their closest confidantes. They left filled with mourning and hope, new worlds sitting on the tip of their tongues. It seems fitting that the last days of my PhD were filled with people imagining brighter futures for themselves and finding a way forward towards these.

On Friday, after submitting my thesis at midday, I was walking down Northumberland Street in Newcastle. One of the first places I remember from this city. When I came to interview for my PhD in 2017, I stumbled up this road, feeling lost in a city I didn’t yet know and wondering if it was for me. On Friday, I walked down Northumberland Street and felt like I was able to notice things again. To see the world in Technicolor. To pay attention to what needs to be focused on.

I opened my notes app and scribbled down some hurried lines of poetry, the first I’d written in months.

Too many blogs and newsletters start with a mission statement. I haven’t done that here because as far as possible I want to cut the crap and just write the things I want to write and share those with you. Above all else, I imagine you’ll want to subscribe if you’re interested in me or my work, rather than any specific pitch on ‘what this newsletter will be’!