2025 notes selection

happy new year!

I just thought I dreamt about babies, but then remembered it was Terminator 2, which I watched, not drunk but certainly not sober, last night.

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Gull on the fields by the marsh turning in the yellow light against the dark clouds, ‘twinkling’. (Or glittering? sparkling?)

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Sobering up from seeing H. In the shower, phrases in my head: tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Savon d’alep.

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I feel sad about the intensity of work that went into the novel at some points. Was rejected yesterday evening by —, which doesn’t surprise me, but I’ve come to want nothing but success for it.

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How to make this book more honest and less pretentious and simply work better?

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Frost on the roof, a lovely moonscape.

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Frost again. Against the pastel trees and bushes the birds – a jay and a woodpigeon which keeps diving for food and then dashing away – stand out. Both in their own pastel tones looking very fine, the jay in particular.

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Some kind of ‘message’ from UC – they have started putting jobs in my journal. I woke up and saw the notification and wanted to write to them to tell them to stop sending these because it would mean I would stop paying attention to their messages.

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Last night dreamt that I was given permission by Fitzcarraldo to say that I was longlisted. Still no word from either agent.

Later: Two minutes after writing this I got an email saying I had been shortlisted – slightly uncanny. Soon after reading the email I had a clear fantasy, nearly a hallucination, of the taste of a particular kind of meat in my mouth, but now I cannot remember what it was. Not bacon. Steak, lamb?

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The sky is white but brighter than it has been. I began to imagine leaves on the tree. It’s the 20th January – not yet the time to say that this winter hasn’t been that bad, but perhaps, after all, it is the time. I suppose P. is the main reason.

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Woke in the night to a bright room, outside orange, everything past the garden obscured in fog, through which the light pollution was shining. But now no sign of it and I wonder if it was a dream.

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Dream of having left my old yellow rucksack on a train going north from Leipzig. The sudden freedom of having almost no stuff.

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Dreamt of accidentally ending a voice note to P. with ‘I love you’ and having to redo it.

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Keep hearing but not seeing geese overhead. Wingbeats and calls.

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Hungover. Sun has come out; perhaps I can make my film today after all. Last night walking down the road to get champagne, suddenly it ‘sinking in’, ran all the way to the wine shop.

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Train to Liverpool. Frost in fields melting from field to field, now only in the shadows. I wonder what the people of Watford make of the fact that so many people must see their fields and their houses from the train and this represent something to them that has nothing to do with Watford, but the relief of going North, or the dread.

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Just crossed the Mersey, low, mudflats visible. Someone at the reading last night said they envied what landscape meant to me. I felt not quite a fraud but a convert.

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Should I leave in 10 mins to go to mass at the Pugin church 25 mins away or go to mass at the church in Wallasey at 7pm, which is more like 45 mins away. These kinds of decisions are why I do not go to Mass.

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Woke up as always explaining things in my head to the DWP. To the job centre staff I mean.

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M. mortified that I saw her outburst as a model; but it was helpful to see that someone could be full of feeling and still themselves, not beyond love.

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Made the mistake of discovering another job to apply to. It’s an addiction!

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Hard to comprehend that the financial insecurity is over, at least for the next few months.

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Last night, light rain as I left P.’s and walked to Dalston, and then on the walk from the bus stop, newly wet ground and blossom on the turn.

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Waiting for an email. And amazing to think that where in the past that feeling, that I might get an email that solves all my problems, brings me simultaneous love, recognition, money – this is now real, it happens, I was even sent a ‘love letter’ from the Dutch press.

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On walk: went to the Thai supermarket. Yellow cat darting about. Yellow catfish in the freezer.

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I think heterosexuality, no, not heterosexuality but the couple – I look at it and say, is this it. Rebetiko in this café suggesting as an alternative a life in intense sensory experience, or whatever.

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Yesterday, edge of Havering, England flags and union jacks, a kestrel in the wind over a flat, low school. And then starling scattering from the treetops from the edge of the wood which bordered the school, the kestrel again, hovering now in the deep blue sky.

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H. last night, asking how to cultivate humility. I said to have such a high opinion of oneself that one could only ever fall short of it.

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Complete gender crisis at the moment about writing and thinking. My inability to understand Hegel makes me less of a man, which, when I force myself to think of actual men, many of whom do not understand Hegel, is not about men per se but some idea of masculinity. H. said this. That masculinity for me was just what was harder. That it was a system of antagonisms, consisting just in the antagonism itself – his attempt to connect back to Hegel.

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Evening. Lovely patter of the woodpecker on the big tree.

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Dreamt of four wooden blocks covered with dead and live moths, moths struggling out of their casings as I looked, and I pressed the blocks together to kill them, smearing the resultant paste off on the edges like one does a peanut butter knife.

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The podcast, afterwards, talking about Stifter’s life, and I didn’t say how reassuring I found the fact that he was a provincial school inspector, for all that I am not one, and his misery, for all that I do not have any.

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Keep having thoughts where I imagine having to teach a child certain things. For example, I have to show them how to wash and keep clean a shallow wound, and thinking of how idiosyncratic my own method is. Really visceral sense last night, watching Akerman’s film about the tall jolly man who won’t leave her apartment, of not wanting to be pregnant.

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Three people surround me, eating very noisily, masking the conversation behind me which, some minutes ago, was about how Germany offered a model in how they had learned from their past.

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Dreamt I saw a “cherubim harrier”.

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Later, after 750 words of review written, remembering that as I tried to fall asleep the owls kept me awake, the hooting frantic and hoarse, as if straining their voices. Was it P. who recently said that obviously Marxists love work, they spend all their time writing books.

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Buzzard already at its post, I hear from the magpies rattling.

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It’s time for an email, from — or from —, come on now.

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I have become over-familiar with the buzzard and find it distracting. Sitting in the tree causing bother to everyone.

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Coach from Cornwall to London. Yellow sun very bright on cornfields in Wiltshire, Berkshire. Amazing mist at the beach, shifting in patches, and the waves cresting more frequently, white lines disappearing backwards. From the sea our little encampment invisible, and the rocks at the sides. Then when we went to the bar immediately the mist began to go and all the relations became clear. No writing, no reflection, for days. It was good. I was glad not to be T., who was reading Dostoyevsky. To be idle and just hold hands with my lover. In London now, Chiswick or near enough. Delicate clouds in the sky with dragged blurred lines.

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Yesterday reached a point of perfect stasis. 2 hours to tutoring on the bus, 1.5 or more back. Lay on my bed reading the LRB on my phone and every 5 minutes checking my email and whatsapp, then ran out of energy for the LRB and so just looked at my open email app, willing someone to send something.

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7 or 8 crows in the tree. The garden smells of rotting plums, but also something like lilac.

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Was woken by a wren so loud I thought it was my alarm.

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Just listened to the BBC programme using Iona Opie’s recordings and suddenly remembered the boredom of the playground a child and the hope every day of it being wet play.

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Woke at 6 to rain. Redid alarm until 8.15, by which point the cat was wet and hungry. The poor thing was hiding in the children’s fairy shelter in the garden and ran very fast into the kitchen when I opened the door on spec. Didn’t write but immediately started googling to find a pamphlet about avoiding left-antisemitism from 2018 or thereabouts.

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5.30 on a Friday, the point when I realise that it’s not this week that the money is coming, nor the email that tells me what my plans are. And the freedom of the weekend from email-checking.

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Smashed a glass last night while watering – I saw it fall over and begin to roll and it had never occurred to me that it might not stop, and might, when it landed, smash everywhere.

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QM confirmed I do not have a job next year, which depressed me. I managed to dye E.’s pyjamas pink, just before I got the QM email. So I don’t know if yesterday’s mood of failure was more my domestic failures or academic ones.

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Housesitting at G.’s, the haze of the dirty windows and the vertical wall of the flats opposite, a whole street of people to watch. Bare grassy area in the middle, playground with a very high fence. I can’t see the seats of the swing, and so can only ever hear it squeaking.

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Saw G.’s hair clip and suddenly experienced the feeling, hard to describe, of being a 10- or 11-year-old girl, perhaps a little older, Year 7, the intense quasi-erotic pleasure of owning a set of small Claire’s Accessories hair clips.

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F. says the robinia in the garden may have to be cut down and this has made me want to move out.

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The foxes at night are loud and have complex fights, perhaps also with other animals. I thought they had attacked a cat. Magpies on the ‘lawn’. And the chirrup of the martins. Sycamore rustling.

Later: I don’t usually love foxes but the way this one just trotted delicately across the lawn, like a deer, entranced me.

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Yesterday, buying pigs cheeks for the meal with N., I was sending her a voice note about discovering they were still attached to the head, and all of a sudden remembered a scene from a dream, in which I was cutting open a live animal, a rabbit or cat, as a form of punishment; it had something in its belly, whether pregnant or a tumour or something it had eaten that I wanted. The scalpel did not cut cleanly and kept snagging. At first it squirmed but then it lay still, accepting its fate, and I felt uneasy. I told myself not to be squeamish, for if I couldn’t stomach the implications of meat eating then I would have to stop eating meat.

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The leaves of the sycamore by the window in the wind, much louder than the rain has yet been.

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The creature was possibly a lamb! In the dream. Why that matters I don’t know.

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Walking through park in Bethnal Green, wind, plastic bags and leaves blown about and then pigeons too, as if blown by the wind, but then I grasped that they were coming together in a flock around a man, who smiled at me and said rice, good rice for them.

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W[estern] H[ouse] M[artin]s in a field in their hundreds, diving + swirling, like insects.

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‘What do you do if you need a poo in an English country garden’ in my head – desperate for a wee but everywhere a bit exposed.

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Imagine a life without regret, without feeling there is a ‘best’ or ‘right’ way that I am always seeking + missing.

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At the house meeting F. and H. relayed what the tree surgeon had said about the robinia, and said that we would still have the tall canopy because its child was growing in someone else’s garden behind it. I look out and there it is – seen as if for the first time. But our tree is perfect because it is so bare, so easy to see the birds, who perch happily in its twisted branches.

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Dreamt the Collins bird app had been updated and made more cutesy and accessible and thus rendered completely unusable.

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Just read some of my notebooks from 2022 and worried they are worse now. Is this because being in love – not the right phrase, really – being in a relationship – not a very nice phrase – forces one to stop making oneself a character.

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H. was saying brightly and with a touch of hysteria that she was feeling very sentimental in the autumn weather. I feel more untouched by the weather than for a long time. Is this because of P.?

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Spilled a vile peanut butter milk stout I found in N.’s fridge and it got on the keyboard. Nothing affected aside from the backspace key, which is now extremely sticky and hard to press. I immediately see this as in some way – deserved, appropriate etc.

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Read the end of John Burnside’s memoir and was quite affected by it. Then started reading Helen Garner’s diaries. If she is still in in 2027 people will get something out of the novel. I hope.

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Invitingly lit train sheds and lights like at Center Parcs all along the lines just outside Crewe.

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Walked back from Rainham Marshes the back way, that I would previously have been terrified by, I was rewarded by a barn owl, perched on a fence post a few metres away, which I saw and was so surprised by, its unreality, that it took me a second to grasp what it was, its face more like an illustration than reality. Reminded writing it that I of course have seen a barn owl close up, at the owl campsite in Norfolk. It flew off into the pink and gold light that was coming through from the Thames by the Tilda factory and the huge cylinders. Everything about it was as it was meant to be.

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Armpit hair plastered upwards damp after the shower reminded me in a repulsive moment of the way the large yellow spiders in the bathroom hold their legs at rest, pressed together in front and behind.

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Characteristic smell of the house, burning garlic in the morning, astringent.

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Remembered that I hadn’t known what to say when I got to the drinks and so tried to sell J. a tea towel.

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Dreamt of a minibus full of babies. I tried to help them on but the bus driver said I didn’t need to. I looked again and could see that they were doing it themselves: one baby, very young, very slowly manoeuvring itself across the passenger seat with tiny spidery hands. P.: ‘You really know how to have a baby dream!’

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Grey-white day out. Was reminded of how I texted H. to ask if what I write here is ‘alt lit’. ‘Only if you publish it.’

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At P.’s desk. P. asleep. The duvet is spilling out of the duvet cover when I look over at him.

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Two children in Belair Park screaming at crows to go away, over and over. I wondered if they thought they were unlucky. Or rather, I worried that they had grasped that they were unlucky and I had been oblivious.

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Aeroplanes lit up gold in the sky over Brockwell Park. In the light everything was different, almost flattened; for the first time, coming down the path, I saw Herne Hill, that is, I could see the rise of the hill as I looked over, I could see the church, neither of which I had ever noticed before from there.