So far I’ve been having a frustrating start to the year. I’ve had work published elsewhere, which I’ll link below, but everything I’ve been working on for this newsletter has wound up needing far more time than I realised. It’ll be worth it eventually, but it’s been infuriating, so I decided to take a break and write about something that happened this weekend. 

Title to be sung to the tune of this, obviously.

On Friday evening, a stranger asked to take a photograph of me. I was in Shoreditch, killing time while I was waiting for my wife.  A friend of work had called me while I was in a pub. It was too noisy to talk, so I headed outside. 

The only place I could find to sit nearby was in the company of William Shakespeare. His statue was occupying one half of a backless seat, and after I’d begun to feel physically sore, I’d ended up leaning back against the side of his torso with my legs propped up on the rest of the bench. 

I’d been amused by this for a couple of minutes, but I was too deep in work-adjacent chit-chat to think much more about it by the time this guy approached me. He told me I would make a cool picture, and asked if he could take some photos. I nodded, and returned to my conversation.

A couple of minutes after he left, I thought: why on earth did I agree to that? I spend most of my life being terrified that a contextless picture of me will go viral beyond my control or knowledge. Yet here I was, freely giving express consent to some passerby to take a picture of me. 

When Shoreditch was at the height of its reputation as the hub of London’s creative scene in the late 2000s, my internet friends were desperate to hang out there. They were all very fashionable, and I wasn’t. Occasionally one of them would report having been stopped by a street fashion photographer, and despite my professed disdain for fashion, I’d feel miserable at knowing I’d never get that validation. So maybe that had something to do with it. 

Once I’d remembered how terrified I was at the prospect of strangers on the internet paying attention to me, I tried to figure out what was interesting about the composition the stranger had seen. I knew it wasn’t my style. I’d been in the office that day in my usual head-to-ankle Uniqlo, but if I’d submitted my outfit to their website’s customer photos I imagine it would have been politely declined for failing to exude the effortless nonchalance of their models.

Currently, it’s a roll of the dice whether I remember to comb my hair, and this week has been particularly low scoring. And my one concession to date night with my wife was wearing my best socks (black with a design of multicoloured ice-cream cones, supposedly chosen by my very small niece and even smaller nephew).

Which left me with the only feasible alternative: the image was framed as a juxtaposition between commerce and art. City slicker propping himself up on the Bard, too enthralled with his pursuit of filthy lucre to notice the rich cultural heritage around him. An inherently derisible figure; the perfect fuel for post-Banksy satirical photography.

It doesn’t matter that I was on the phone to a fellow entry-level administrator - which no one looking at the picture would realise - and that high-flying businessmen don’t tend to have accidental mullets. I did end up panicking about the idea I’d become meme shorthand for a kind of person with whom, in reality, I am in diametric opposition.

But then I met my wife at the restaurant we’d booked and we ate five portions of lasagne between us. And by the time we left, I was too full of pasta and cheese to have the sense of self-importance necessary for irrational panic. If it does become a meme, I hope I never find out.

Thanks for reading! Like I mentioned above, I have finished two longer pieces this year, and I have some other exciting news.

I wrote for Non Threatening Boys about exploring gender dissonance through songs by men written from the perspective of female characters (Substack subscribers only). I also wrote an essay for Lunchtime for the Wild Youth’s 2007 issue - I decided to write about both Year Zero by Nine Inch Nails and A Guide to Love Loss and Desperation by The Wombats.

The exciting news (well, exciting to me anyway). On April 29th, I’ll be giving a talk at Small Talks, a new social event inspired by PowerPoint Parties. It’s at the Coin Laundry in Dalston. It’ll be the first time I’ve really done any public speaking since my ill-advised stand-up comedy days, and it unexpectedly sold out in a couple of days, which raises the ante a bit. But I’m still excited. There’s a waiting list on the event page.

My talk’s provisional title is In the Shadow of the Cathedral of Shit: Thamesmead and the Psychogeography of Sewage, but I promise it will have jokes. I grew up in Thamesmead, and while there’s been a reappraisal of the area in recent years, I really want to talk about how weird it is growing up in a place both figuratively labelled as a crap town and literally associated with shit. But unfortunately I love coming up with pretentious titles, so that’s what happened there.

That’s mostly it for now. But last thing: I assume everyone’s heard it already, but I’ve spent most of this year so far repeatedly listening to David Byrne’s cover of Driver’s License by Olivia Rodrigo. The only thing I’ve been doing more frequently than that is trying to get a second-hand ticket to his London shows and failing - I can’t manage to convince the website that I’m not a bot because I’m doing them too quickly. Really funny that I can’t get a ticket to a David Byrne gig because I’m being too autistic.