a warm, high place
#5
Remember when I said in January that I was going to be better at writing this newsletter? Let’s pretend I didn’t say that.
It’s interesting what moves me to actually sit down and write – usually it’s a piece of art I’ve engaged with which has particularly moved me. Or something particularly harrowing happening in my life. In this case it’s Jez Butterworth’s The Hills of California, which I saw on Friday after a friend raved about it. I booked a £50 front-row seat about a fortnight ago which was a steal for London theatre (I paid £25 for rear stalls at Long Day’s Journey into Night at the beginning of March and left at the interval because it was so fucking awful, what the hell were you doing Patricia Clarkson?) I’m not sure why there were still tickets because from what I understand it’s been well-received. I suppose among the older crowd there’s an “It’s no Jerusalem” quantifier but I think Jerusalem is good not great anyway so I had no such reservations. I went into this play intentionally not knowing anything about it as I wanted to be surprised, and I was delighted to discover the working-class Blackpool setting, which is close enough to my own upbringing across the county boarder that it felt comfortingly familiar. It’s also, as is the Butterworth way (for his plays at least, if you want a laugh look at his screenwriting credits), acerbically funny and quietly devastating, doing for the Mamas and Papas’ Dream A Little Dream what Jerusalem did for The Prodigy’s Invaders Must Die.
Anyway, I’m not a theatre critic (despite two of these newsletters partly being about plays I’ve seen) but I connected a lot to The Hills of California, which is about topics I generally have an interest in: girlhood, regret, stardom, sad women, awful men, and the ache that exists within some of us to move far, far away from the place where we were born. I found it a cathartic experience, in a similar way to Infinite Death in January, though they’re very, very different in style and staging. There’s something almost a little stilted and strange about Baker’s dialogue which I adore – I’m not really familiar with her other work (I did see her film Janet Planet in February though, which I loved) but I would love to speak to her about neurodivergence, because her writing echoes my own experiences of living in a crowded brain. Butterworth is more maximalist I think, busier and noisier. I saw a review complaining about the ‘chit-chat’ in The Hills of California and how long it takes to actually understand what’s happening, which I think is kind of bullshit. Do you really need everything spelled out for you? Just sit there and lean back. Another play complained about how poorly the male characters came off. It will not surprise you to learn a man wrote that criticism. It will also not surprise you to learn that I found the male characters pretty true to life.
On the subject of media: I watched Big Mood over Easter, which is a new dramedy on C4 starring Nicola Coughlan and Lydia West as Maggie and Eddie, two best friends on the cusp of 30 who are dealing (sort of) with their shit in Dalston. Maggie has Bipolar 2, which is actually what they thought I might have for a bit before they shrugged and said it was BPD (and probably ADHD, maybe ASD, jury’s out). It’s an easy watch, six 30-minute episodes, getting gradually more Real as various things happen to Maggie and Eddie – kind of a cross between The Inbetweeners and I May Destroy You in tone, which sounds cursed, but it works.
It’s all very middle class, which did make me eye-roll because I think some good British working-class mad lady representation is long overdue (the only two I can think of are My Mad Fat Diary and Poppy Shakespeare which is not a dramedy) but I think the show nails the mania/depression cycle of mood disorders. It’s also got a banging soundtrack – the Self-Esteem drop was a bit obvious but I felt very perceived by Azure Ray’s Rise making it on there. It’s obviously very different to The Hills of California, but it did occur to me that both are about women in their 30s grappling with the passage of time and arrested development and this question of what to do with the past (a phrase Alice Rohrwacher used to describe the prevailing question in her films, The Wonders, Happy as Lazzaro and La Chimera).
I’ve had regret on my mind a lot lately, thinking about all the ways I wish I’d done things differently. There are some things beyond my control, but that doesn’t mean I don’t see them as failings. I try not to live too much in the past, I know it’s a foreign country (thank you, LP Hartley, for a line I think about often) but sometimes it’s difficult not to. I will never be as young as I was yesterday, as beautiful or alive.
We were cleaning out my grandpa’s bungalow at easter because he’s gone into a nursing home due to his dementia. We didn’t sort through stuff when my grandma died other than her clothes, so this is a pretty mammoth undertaking, and one done under the rough circumstances that we have to sell the house to pay for his care. (Did you know it costs, at minimum, £800 a week for a care home place in the UK and there is no access to help with these fees until the resident has less than £3000 in total assets? I love living in this country with no social services! It’s so great.) We discovered my grandma kept every letter and card she ever received – boxes and boxes of correspondence, from as far back as the 60s. It was kind of remarkable. Boxes of pamphlets and paperwork from holidays. We used to travel together a fair amount so a lot was from trips I’d taken with her. Innocuous receipts and bus tickets. She was a magically sentimental woman. I’m fully aware I get it from her.
She’d saved the cardboard sleeve from a box of biscuits. Nothing special – just a small souvenir I brought back from my first trip to Los Angeles in March 2020. Grandma had written this on the sleeve in her tiny handwriting, and that I came back from the trip early due to Covid. I showed my mum and said incredulously “Why did she keep this?” before I threw it in the bag with the rest of the recycling.
I thought about it for the next week. It was truly nothing special. The wrapper from a box of biscuits you’d buy at any supermarket. I had completely forgotten I brought them back a box of biscuits to begin with. That cursed holiday, which I’d been really excited for but ended up being precisely the week Covid shut the world down, was three months after she was diagnosed with cancer. She died in March 2022, two years after the Los Angeles trip. Two years ago, now. I miss her a lot, and I remember writing in November how that grief comes to me at the strangest times, in the strangest ways. The wrapper from a fucking box of biscuits.
But I know why she saved it. I didn’t need to ask my mum. She saved it because she loved me, because she was proud of me, because she lived a little through me – she was always the one who loved hearing about my work and my trips and we had a pretty regular letter correspondence when I loved. (I have kept all the letters she sent me but I haven’t been able to bring myself to read them since she died.) Even though she wasn’t especially into film, she fostered my love of cinema, recording films off the telly onto VHS and later DVD to give me just because she thought I might be interested. She took me to see my first plays, operas, ballets. She took me to France and Italy. We were more alike than I ever realised while she was alive and now I understand why watching her die hurt so much. It felt like I was losing a kindred spirit.
Was I an idiot to chase a dream career rather than a practical one? How hopeless should a hopeless romantic be? Every week it gets harder to make a viable living in London and I joke a lot about packing in a job I love but the jokes aren’t as funny nowadays. If I have to tell my employer I should be getting equal pay as the other editorial staff one more time I think I might lose my tenuous grasp on my sanity for real. Then I see mediocrity thriving and how BAD a lot of art is, and I think, Christ, why do I bother, why do I care? Maybe I would benefit from a cheerful lobotomy! Perhaps that’s what my YouTube habit subconsciously is.
Boys who broke my heart are holding hands with girls who make them happy now and I scrunch my nose when I skip past them on Instagram because I’m alone. I’m always alone. I’ve dedicated everything to my job, and told myself that’s enough, but when you enter that period of your life where everyone is getting married and having babies, the weight of being alone is heavier on your spine, even when you have brilliant friends and family as I do, and you’re generally a self-sufficient person who hates the idea of being pitied or being as predictable as to whine about being single in a world not designed for it. I am lucky in so many ways, but as much as I try to plaster over it, there is an ache that doesn’t settle, like an old wound in the winter. I know some of that is societal pressure, but at the same time, it’s hard to not long for a closeness in your life that seems to come easily to others. I haven’t experienced a great love story yet, and I know it might still happen, but the hourglass is losing sand and I’m getting itchy feet.