2026-01-16
The words aren’t coming and usually that’s my fault. I wad up my sense holes with dopamine doped fluff and the ooze of it bungs up my brain. I lose the element of surprise so I can’t write anything interesting at all. The writing I have done in the last week or so has been the drip drip of mucus out from the congested sinus and onto the page. Scenes I’ve poked at move glacially slowly through their outlines without interest.
2026-01-13
For a week Berlin’s been covered in ice. It’s an inch thick on the roads and the bike lanes and the pavements, and it’s been there so long it’s black and mottled and hard like a mineral deposit. They don’t grit or salt here. There’s a dispute about who should do the gritting and the salting, between the city and the Ordnungsamt and the street cleaners they contract. Verdicts differ by jurisdiction so some neighbourhoods are slippier than others. Halfway along a bridge over the Spree there’s a border between two districts and sure enough there’s a crisp line where the sheet ice stops and the gritted slurry starts.
2026-01-08
This is kind of a brave book. The direct desperation and lack of composure of the narrator combined with the omnipresent situating of events in specific locations in London reminds me of a very particular time in my life. In the way that good writing does it reminds me of the good and also the bad and shameful that I’ve pushed down as the mistakes of a younger, stupider person. I have never made the kinds of grandiosely bad decisions that are going on in this story, nor was I ever quite sobeholden to the parasocial spectator culture but I remember all of it. I remember the acid feelings it gives you in your stomach. I wouldn’t have remembered it without this book. It’s feral. It’s a great excavation of the sexual desperation, the directionlessness, the feeling of London.
2025-12-30
We wanted to go see something; it was our first opportunity since we’ve been back in the city where cinemas are unlimited to us and where we’ve been like churchgoers there since the first winter we arrived. The pavements have been glazed with ice two, three times over, so we didn’d walk like we usually would. We took the bus and got off at Hermannplatz, walked up the sharpish hill to Neues Off. It’s always packed in the tiny little atrium there with small groups of friends chatting on the pavement outside, even in the freezing cold. Once we pushed our way through to have our tickets checked, it transpired I’d brought us to the wrong cinema and that we should be at Passage Kino on Karl-Marx-Allee. It is not the first time I’ve made this kind of mistake. We took the U-Bahn down there and still sat down before the movie started, comfortably.
Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
2025-12-27
I watched this with the in-laws at Christmas as part of a Richard Curtis runthrough. Coming after Notting Hill it was stark how poorly this film has aged in comparison. Perhaps it was never as good in the first place, but Hugh Grant is far more clearly a twat, Kristen Scott Thomas’s character is written as a complete moron, and neither of these in the endearing ways that the writer cracks later. Nevertheless, the Auden bit still gets you, but he didn’t write that did he.
The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lyse Doucet
2025-12-17
Although LyseDoucet’s [sic] habit of introducing herself as a background character with a huge wink to the stalls grated a bit after a while, I ended up very endeared to this book in the end. I remember live coverage of the war in Afghanistan on the BBC growing up, and the image of Lyse Doucet on some balcony with explosions in the background is strong in my mind. She’s a badass, and this feels like a relatively well executed diversion for her. The debt this owes to The Grand Budapest Hotel, or maybe that that movie owes to hotels like this, is clear.
Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible
2025-11-24
I finished reading this book on a plane to Amsterdam and in the end, it felt right to be reading it in aviation-land. It’s an airport read. I got what I wanted from it in that it gave a little bit of insight into the Russian media and political landscape of the 00s. I learned some new names and had my memory of others reinforced. That said, there’s a bit of self-aggrandising in here and there’s not a little bit of misogyny. Maybe that’s authentically what a slightly mercenary TV producer in Russia sounds like, though.
2025-11-23
I like a movie that gets out of hand like this. I’d forgotten until the opening credits that this was Ari Aster. Its marketing doesn’t have the trappings of the horror genre because the setting doesn’t have those traditional elements either. But this is definitely horrific, and effective. Its ideas are right on its sleeve but it still has interesting enough things to say about them that it works. There’s a streak in me, and I see it in others, to find the major questions of our time just aesthetically lame and to not want them to appear in my art for that reason. Coronavirus,screens and online radicalisation, fascism, division, all that crap is what I’m talking about. Nobody wanted to see a Covid movie for a long time and the first scene of this movie hits that point hard with a conversation about literal face mask policing.
2025-11-22
Watched as part of a triple-kino weekend in dark, freezing Berlin. This one at Rollberg. Maybe that contributed to our dislike; we always resent walking past Passage and having to climb the hill to the ugly shopping centre.
We both hated the ending. It was visually poorly executed and seemed like a reshoot, sound stagey, VFXey mess. It was also not really earned. Why is she tearing pages out of her notebook? She was never writing! Was it real or a fantasy or a delusion? Who cares.
The Good Apprentice by Iris Murdoch
2025-11-15
This went straight onto the Bad Smart People book list. I did find Midge in particular kind of absurd, like an even more extreme Thérèse Raquin, but I suppose we’re meant to find her ridiculous.