I’ve been having a bit of a crisis of confidence with this newsletter, hence the radio silence. Back in April, Buttondown inexplicably deleted several long-time subscribers from my list, including my own sister, and for the six weeks since they’ve been seemingly unable to do anything about it. I like to tell people that I write this newsletter for myself more than for anyone else, but it turns out that I do care quite a lot whether people are receiving it, and this uncertainty has paralysed me somewhat. I’m still working on getting everyone reinstated. Thank you to anyone still here after this protracted downtime!

I’ve also been wanting to do a Hits and Misses for Kala Festival — held in Dhermï, Albania, two weeks ago — but certain elements of the weekend made me think twice. First off, my engagement with the festival was hardly comprehensive: I only arrived on Saturday morning, when proceedings had already got underway on Wednesday; and I left early, on Monday night, when the music actually runs through Tuesday. Further, during my time there I didn’t see everything — I didn’t go to the Yacht Club stage at all, and I only went to the Cove during the day. I did go out to the Gjipe beach party on Monday, but not for the full runtime. And I only did one sunrise. It feels a bit uncharitable to sum up a festival having barely seen half of what it had to offer.

I felt this even more strongly after dinner on Sunday night, when one of the founders of the festival introduced himself and mentioned he enjoyed reading my festival ‘reviews’. Of course this made me more self-conscious about potentially ‘reviewing’ his festival. Not that I mind too much about causing offence with what I write here. I generally assume it won’t get read anyway, and in the few instances where I have in fact caused offence in the past, when I look back at what I’ve written I stand by it. But in this instance there was the spectre of potential offence in the moment we were talking, and he could probably see in my eyes that I was recalculating exactly what I would feel comfortable saying about his festival.