Googling furniture in Armageddon

How to deal with reality when your leaders don't

Tory leadership debate, seen in an art gallery in Dijon

“Humankind,” said T S Eliot in The Four Quartets, “cannot bear very much reality.” He wrote this in his poem “Burnt Norton”, first published in 1936. He had, of course, lived through one world war and was just a few years ahead of the next. Critics have argued about what exactly the poem is about, but I think we can all agree that reality can be a bit much.

I’ve spent most of the summer running away from it. Or perhaps I should say running away from Britain. I spent the whole of June on a solo road trip round Sweden (and wrote a bit about it in my last newsletter). I spent the whole of August in Umbria, with a stop in Dijon on the way there and back.

This, by the way, is not how I usually spend my summers. Much though I’ve sometimes longed to be an 18th-century gentleman on a permanent Grand Tour, I don’t have ancestors who could fund it. (It has always sounded so much more appealing than being a lady who lunches.)

My trip to Sweden was meant to be research for a book. Perhaps it will be. Perhaps it won’t. Unlike the woman who will be running our country from next week, I find it hard to muster certainty on anything. I wanted to see if Sweden felt, on balance, like a more civilised country than the UK. Do things work better? Are their politicians more trustworthy? Is social democracy, in the country that pretty much invented it, alive and well?

The short answer is yes, generally, yes, on the whole and yes, sort of, but it’s complicated. That’s about all I can think of to say about anything these days. It’s complicated. On the one hand this, on the other hand that. It’s not a message that hits the bestseller charts, or one that gets you elected.

On the lunch front, by the way, I reverted to childhood. On our visits to Sweden every summer, the ones I describe in my book Outside, the Sky is Blue, we largely lived on bread and cheese. We gazed in envy at the blonde families on the ferry, queuing up for salmon and meat balls. My mother would whip out the stripy cool bag and hand round the cheese rolls she had made at least a day before. On my road trip in June, I lived on cheese rolls and cinnamon buns. I’m surprised I didn’t come back with scurvy.

In July, back in the UK, I tried to eat like an adult, albeit one who’s very keen on cake, wine and crisps. I read the news. I answered emails. I spoke at a conference. I did some book reviews. I chipped away at the admin mountain that just seems to grow every day. I tried to talk about the news on the Sky News press preview without just lying down and howling. Sometimes, I wonder if I should just replace my face on Zoom with the emoji of Munch’s scream.

And in August, I ran away again. Those of you who have read Outside, the Sky is Blue will know that I’ve swapped my minuscule flat in a medieval watchtower on a Tuscan hill for part of a rambling farmhouse on an Umbrian hill. Italy is my birthplace. It’s in my blood. It has also got a lot of very, very cheap property. You can buy half a farmhouse for the price of a bedroom in London. Which is exactly what I did.

When we arrived, it was full of insects. I’ve never seen so many insects. Armies of spiders and ants, swarming clouds of wasps, a hornet’s nest in a crack in the wall. We spent several days lunging at cobwebs, like Don Quixote tilting at windmills. It was hard work. It was hot. Nearly 40 degrees kind of hot. We had ordered a paddling pool to help us cool off, and waited in for it, day after day. I ended up tapping away at my laptop while standing in a washing-up bowl of cold water and ice.

When I say “tapping away at my laptop”, that makes it sound as if I was working really hard. I meant to. I really did mean to. I brought boxes of books and files. I had a schedule mapped out. I had a review to write, which I did write, and notes from my Sweden trip to write up, which I did write up, but I also had a house to furnish and this suddenly seemed more urgent than all the books and articles I might want to write, and the climate emergency which had even my Italian neighbours muttering about the heat, and the energy crisis, and the geo-political crisis, and the political crisis unfurling in the UK, which is, I believe, technically called a shit-show. Oh, and the actual shit-show in our rivers and on our beaches, which will make wild swimming, well, even more wild.

The key thing I can tell you after my month in Italy is that there are an awful lot of furniture websites. Our nearest town used to be known for its furniture, but now you have to go online and order it from factories in the north or south, and somehow try to persuade the couriers they use to deliver it to your door. (“Oh, the couriers never come up here” one neighbour announced airily, after we had waited eleven days for the paddling pool I had by now christened Godot.)

The other thing I can tell you is that Italian furniture websites are very absorbing indeed. The furniture traditionally found in Italian homes is called arte povera or poor art. It’s simple, rustic, sometimes painted. There’s one website that does it in hundreds of different colours and masses of different finishes. Test me on the colours! Test me on the finishes! Test me on the wardrobes that are 45cm deep! Test me on the bedside tables we will just be able to squeeze in the tiny bedroom! Test me on it all.

You could also test me on the coffee machines in Trony and the Vermentinos in Gala. Just don’t test me on the news.

I know, of course, about the Goldman Sachs prediction that inflation will rise to 22%. I know about the forecasts from Cornwall Insight that the energy cap will rise next April to £6,616. I know that Covid infection rates are due to hit record levels in the autumn. And that around two million people are now living with long Covid, but that they/we are just meant to pretend that the virus has gone. I know there’s a war in Europe that’s killing mothers, fathers and children. I know there’s shelling near a plant that risks nuclear disaster. I know there’s a man in the Kremlin who’s happy to slaughter his own teenage boys and see millions starve.

And I can’t do a single thing about any of it.

Like you, I have to watch a poundshop Thatcher hurl insults at our allies while pretending that the answer to everything is tax cuts. Like you, I have to watch a poundshop Churchill tell Brits so worried about their bills that they are ending up in A & E after attempting suicide that there’s a “golden future ahead”.

Perhaps it does look “golden” when you’re about to sign a seven-figure deal for a memoir about how you “got Brexit done”. For the rest of us, not so much.

I don’t know what you call the heart-sickness that grips you when you know your country is on the brink of terrible times. I don’t know what you call the mix of impotence, anxiety and rage. All I know is that art helps. Books help. Sunsets help. Googling online furniture helps, or at least it makes a nice change from wincing at a woman in a TV studio spewing cliches in a tight blue dress.

Reality will hit that woman in about a week. Winter is coming, as Game of Thrones fans like to say. I prefer to quote Eliot. “A cold coming we had of it.” These have been cold, dark years on the political front and now there’s a cold, dark winter ahead. We will have to get through it as best we can and then, as Eliot didn’t quite say, fight to get those fraudulent fantasists out.

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Sky News

I’ll be back on Sky News reviewing the papers on Saturday 10th September and on Saturday 24th September (at 10.30pm and 11.30pm).

Coaching

Now that I’m properly back in work mode, I’m taking on a few more coaching clients. If you’d like to find out more about my coaching, do look at my coaching website, here.

The Art of Work podcast

There will be a new series soon. Watch this space…