“Our lives are no more than the sum of manifold contingencies, and no matter how diverse they might be in their details, they all share an essential randomness in their design: this then that, and because of that, this.” - Paul Auster, In The Country of Last Things

When I started this newsletter I was 24—pretty young. Time moved slower then, and I did more with the twenty four hours in every day. Just over ten years later I am now old enough that months have become short, and whole years are even now at risk of becoming just a click of the fingers. I started this newsletter in 2015, shortly after I had begun working at a company that made and managed videos for YouTube. I sacrificed my salary a bit to take a job there in order to attempt to transition working life away from drudgery towards meaning—with mixed results. For around 8 months, I worked there, moving numbers around excel spreadsheets and issuing copyright takedown notices on online videos on behalf of television channel operators, taking solace from the inanity of the day-to-day work by being in an Shoreditch office that had complimentary sugared cereals and a table tennis table. I remember playing lots of music on a small Bluetooth speaker and feeling generally like I had walked onto the set of Nathan Barley. I wore pinrolled selfedge denim and matched my socks to the colour of my t-shirts. There was a middle-aged executive who wore a Supreme tracksuit. Why I started this newsletter then, I can’t really remember. But I know that the first five or six subscribers—all still receiving this (hello!)—were all people who worked there.

Prior to this, as well as a short period on unemployment benefits, I had worked three jobs: a summer job that involved looking after children with autism, a contract position as a postman, and then my first “graduate job” working for a recruitment agency that focused on finding placements for "c-suite" executives. Those first two jobs were pretty good, and both quantifiably useful (parents need a break, mail needs delivering.) The third one was pretty miserable, a "bullshit job" as David Graeber would memorably term jobs that do not need to exist: a role that was totally unnecessary for the wider world and in service of a microcosmic one I was unable to remotely relate to. The people were very nice, but the hours dragged mercilessly every day and I was taught a comprehensive lesson in my year-and-a-half working there about what it is to have a job that you wake up dreading going to. In these ten or so years since I started that YouTube job (and this newsletter), I've had three more jobs (promoting a online network for filmmakers, marketing for a film festival, editing magazines for a film company) plus a spell as a freelancer in which I tried to write things (for almost no money) while doing contract marketing (for a bit more money). At one point, during the pandemic, I quit one of these jobs, going against the (sane) advice of just about everyone around me. That felt hairy for a while, but was ultimately fine. That said, I have very little idea of what the next ten years of work will look like for me, given I am in a sector (the arts) that is notoriously precarious, and a field (media) that is in constant crisis. The prevailing feeling I have is that employment, when you take privilege out of the equation, is about luck and persistence, as well as being comfortable sacrificing pride and accepting that capitalism will denigrate you and that is largely part and parcel of being a world citizen who needs to earn money. The other primary observation I have is that it is futile to compare yourself to anyone else because everyone is playing a unique game that has a totally different ruleset. My current employment came about after crafting and sending in more than 150 job applications to various places, and the interview in which I landed it was the tenth I had during that period of employment-seeking. I think I have applied to somewhere between 500 and 1000 jobs in my lifetime. Such experiences do not giving you the feeling that you hold much power, but, other than that I have very little to complain about. The place I have reached is not one I would ever have thought possible, so it is interesting to reflect on that and other things that may or may not have changed over this ten year newsletter period. Most things you are advised not to do are ultimately fine to do. The world moves so fast that any advice applicable to one generation has no bearing on the world the next one is born into. 

In those same ten years, Arsenal—the football team I have supported since I was seven years old and my friend's older sister told my friend and I that we "had to be gooners"—have not won the league, or much else besides a few FA Cups and the odd Community Shield. When I was very young, they used to win things, and one year even went a whole league campaign without being defeated. They have now won the league again, for the first time in twenty two years and following a slew of successive seasons coming second, and it is the sort of thing that, much like sending out a silly newsletter that has now somehow reached 100 sendouts, makes you think a lot about time and its passing.

The league was won not at the home stadium on May 21st, against Burnley, in the penultimate game of the season, nor away, at Crystal Palace, in the final match of the competition on May 24th. Instead, it was won when Manchester City drew 1-1 with Bournemouth on May 22nd, meaning that City could no longer achieve the same number of points as Arsenal. The nature of the victory does not matter in the slightest. Nor does the fact that it has come in a season during which Arsenal have not been playing the beautiful football I encountered, and came to love, when first watching them, circa 1998, when Arsene Wenger (“The Magician”) became their manager. What mattered was that at last we had won, after much torturous hoping, praying, stressing, and sweating, and after all the ups, downs, and 'what if’s?' that make up a sporting season. The French football journalist, Philippe Auclair said this on The Guardian Football Podcast, sharing his feelings via a voice note sent in the immediate aftermath of the victory: "Is it joy? I suppose it's a form of joy but it's more a kind of relief that the pain is over. It's like walking for hours and hours, climbing up hills, and there's always a new hill to climb, and then you fall and then you get up, and you fall again. But you finally get there, and you sleep afterwards in a warm, hot bath. With a glass of wine, it's delicious." His description is correct. It’s more relaxation than elation. Winning felt as much like a celebration as it did a big, collective exhalation, localised entirely within North London.

At the moment that we won the league I was on the London Underground. I had been at home, not watching the City game for fear of jinxing the outcome, but still following the text updates on my phone closely. Just before half time, Junior Kroupi had scored for Bournemouth, meaning that City would need two goals in the second half in order to not hand the title to Arsenal. I remained pessimistic, but when it got to 70 minutes and City were still losing a part of me started to dare to dream of an Arsenal victory that evening. Until February of this year, CQ and I had been living just off the Holloway Road, a fifteen minute walk away from Arsenal’s stadium, but now we are in Turnpike Lane, close enough still but now a ten minute tube journey away. So I got on the tube to go to the stadium, presuming that some fans would congregate there to celebrate should Bournemouth somehow be able to hold on through the game’s conclusion. I said to CQ, “I’ll probably be back in ten minutes,” assuming City would somehow still score both the goals they needed to stay in the race. But by the time I was on the tube and about to lose phone signal it was still looking increasingly plausible that they might not get their comeback. There was one other guy on the train in an Arsenal shirt. He was also twitching and furiously refreshing his feed, praying to unknown deities for confirmation of the victory. A message came through. Haaland had scored in extra time. My heart sunk, but they would still need another goal to clinch it. As the train pulled into Arsenal station, me and the other guy got off and started striding towards the above ground world of phone signal. My messages came through first, with the confirmation that we had done it. I told him so, still not quite believing it myself, and he hugged me and then ran down the tube tunnel screaming “WE’VE WON THE LEAGUE” at various disinterested commuters heading home on what was for many just another Tuesday evening.

After that, I walked from the station into the ground, pacing alongside a few fans, all of whom were childlike and totally giddy. At the front of the stadium, more people were gathered, singing, dancing, waving flags, popping champagne, and letting off flares and fireworks. It was just a few people at first, maybe less than three hundred, but before long, the crowds were massive. Apparently 150,000 people spontaneously gathered at the stadium that evening, and the atmosphere was amazing. Strangers hugging strangers. Friends spotting each other from afar, running and coming together in relief. Kids on their dad’s shoulders. Plastic replica league cups. Just totally wholesome catharsis and cross-generational, cross-class, inter-racial, unity. I’ve read lots of reflections since on why it was so great that evening, and while few of them are able to put into words something that is perhaps better felt than intellectualised, I did find this one note on Arseblog’s “reaction roundup” moving. There, Andrew Allen writes: “After standing in the middle of it all for a while, watching the fireworks and strangers hugging and chanting, I took myself off for a quiet moment. I sat on the steps by Block D, where I’ve entered the stadium for the last 20 years, and had a little cry. To the lad in the 93/94 shirt who was sobbing nearby, that hug was special, man. I hope you enjoyed your night.” I saw quite a few grown men crying that night, and across that first evening and then the second celebration a few days later when the team lifted the trophy, I probably hugged more strangers than I have in my whole life before it. People were just free and happy. At the second celebration, some guy saw me taking photos, grabbed my camera, and said “one of you in front of the Emirates!” Then some other random fan ran in and put his arms around me as he took the shot (above). “That’s reem, mate,” he said, giving me back my camera and disappearing into the sunset.

Yesterday, a week after that sunny Sunday, we had the Champions League final, which my dad and I watched in the Emirates stadium on the big screens. I won’t say much about that, because we lost the game, but, I’ll long remember two things from it. One was the bedlam in the crowd after Kai Havertz scored in the sixth minute. My dad and I jumping up and down, soaked in beer and atmosphere. The other was everyone walking out of the stadium at the end with a mass solemnity that was familiar and oddly comforting. One guy said to his son: “We have been through worse than this.” He was right to say it, and it made a montage play in my mind of the many losses, setbacks, and injustices that this crowd has been through over the years. What an insanely unifying thing sport is, such that so many people can all embody the same shared narrative. You can’t have the good without the bad, and the best moments are all the sweeter because of the suffering that is following a football team that has been through it all, together, and is now, finally, coming out the other side smiling.

And today, we had the parade, with hundreds of thousands in attendance (and possibly even more than a million, if estimates are accurate). It was kind of unreal to see so many red shirts all over London, but I think somehow I preferred that first spontaneous celebration to today’s organised one. There was something memorable about the delirium of that evening, the way the city seemed almost to break apart in a collective elation, and how it, by chance, also saw in a weather change and the arrival of the kind of heatwave that seems always to activate London and make it more electric. At the parade, I stood at the intersection of Hornsey Road and Seven Sisters Road (less than ten minutes away from where we used to live), and waited patiently for the players to go past on the big buses. When they did, this man (below) that I had made friends with and I both climbed up on the railings, him keeping himself steady by holding onto my shoulder, and enjoyed that all too brief, intense moment in which the buses go past and the atmosphere reaches a critical mass of intoxicating red smoke smells, shouts, and airhorns.

Since we won I’ve been reading bits of The End, a book by Tom Watt which collates oral testimony from Arsenal fans and players about going to Highbury Stadium in the years from 1913, when it was opened, through to 1994, when the standing areas were replaced with seats in order to comply with the legislations imposed after the Hillsborough disaster. In his introduction he summarises the appeal of watching football well. Talking about some of the “afternoons and evenings” spent at football grounds in which “the most intense experiences of [his] life” have happened, Watts writes: "These are dangerous moments: complete disorder of the senses, no fear, no control, no law of gravity. Hundreds, thousands of hours of boredom, frustration, anxiety and disappointment—watching Arsenal, living your life—then, at that one big moment, the big hand covers the little hand, the counter says: 00:00, and the whole bloody lot goes off. You and thousands of others are out there together, the same mind—no mind—just blind, screaming, effortless delirium.” It’s a great description, and, I think, also gets at the main thing I have taken from ten years of growing older and 100 newsletters written about nothing (and everything.) Life is lots of small things, totally asinine in isolation, that together start to bond like atoms colliding, such that the meaning they hold starts to get larger through the affinities one thing brings to another. And the older you get, the more meaning those small things have because of the compounding histories informing them, such that the most meaningless things are those that become the most emotive. Work is work, life is life, and death is death, but in between comes a million seemingly trivial things that you eventually realise are not distractions but instead the substance of existence. And they matter most when—like football and like Arsenal in particular—they bring people together rather than ostracise them. “I'm a reasonable man,” Watt writes, “but enjoying football is the art of forgetting that from time to time. The point is that, of course, it doesn't matter. It's just the most important thing there is."