The tweet that made cry
I was on my way to the hospital for a cancer check when I saw something on Twitter that made me cry. I don’t often cry about Twitter. I do sometimes get sucked into Dantean circles of idiocy. I did on Sunday, after saying something on Sky News that seemed to drive a lot of Tory party members slightly mad. I responded. You should never respond. And then wasted a big chunk of my Sunday in an online rabbit hole.
I think we can safely say that no one will be saying on their death bed that they wished they had spent more time on Twitter.
But the tweet that made me cry was this:
I was on the 106. I was wearing an FFP3 mask, which is, apparently, pretty good at blocking out potentially lethal airborne pathogens, and also at making glasses steam up when you suddenly feel a pricking at the corner of your eyes. I was grinning underneath that mask. I was smiling and crying and wanting to yell out for joy.
I didn’t, obviously, but I did Google the interview Caroline Sanderson had done with me the week before, and had just finished scrolling through it when the bus arrived at the hospital. In the interview, she describes Outside, the Sky is Blue as “a magnificent family memoir” which “recalls Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood or Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, but has a quiet power all its own”.
Would someone put those words on my gravestone, please?
I was taught by Lorna Sage at UEA and was at the launch for Bad Blood in 2000. I reviewed Alexandra Fuller’s memoir for The Observer the same year. Twenty-one years on, I have finally written a family memoir of my own.
A non-fiction Book of the Month in The Bookseller is not a Booker Prize. It’s not a Costa Prize. My dear friend and former colleague Arifa Akbar
has just been shortlisted for the Costa Biography Prize for her wonderful memoir, Consumed and she couldn’t deserve it more. I’ve read it three times, most recently for the podcast interview I did with her a couple of weeks ago. I found our conversation fascinating and genuinely inspirational. It will be out on Friday.
This newsletter is about “the art of work”. A very broad theme, obviously, but the world we live in is largely made up of our work, or the work of previous generations. All my life, I’ve been obsessed with the role work plays in our life, what difference it makes to other people’s lives, and how we can find some satisfaction in doing it, and perhaps even some meaning and joy.
I’ve got to be honest. I miss the camaraderie of an office. I miss having margaritas on the roof, as we used to do when I was running the Poetry Society, or nipping over to the The Gun for a bottle of Sauvignon, as we used to do when The Independent was at South Quay. I miss going to fancy breakfasts and lunches, and film screenings and parties. I miss being asked to leap on a plane, for an interview or feature. I miss being asked to go, by the travel desk, to the Maldives, the Seychelles, Iran or Cambodia. I went. I took it in my stride. Yup. Lovely trip. Next!
Spending days ploughing through emails no one pays you to read doesn’t have quite the same lustre. Nor does grappling with tech disasters. Nor do meetings where you watch yourself age live on screen. Bloody hell! What happened to my face? And how did it happen so quickly?
All work involves plenty of stuff we don’t particularly enjoy. I don’t like admin, email, and being my own IT support. But I do like freedom, and that’s the price. In last week’s podcast, mathematician Christina Pagel was endearingly honest about her own work.
She’s a mathematician and Professor of Operational Research at University College, London. The first female director of the Clinical Operational Research Unit at UCL and a member of Independent Sage, she has been one of the most prominent scientists in the media during the pandemic.
And when I asked her if she liked being the boss, there was a pause. “No, not really,” she said. “There's a lot of bureaucracy that you have to deal with and budgets and fire safety and all of that stuff, which I just don't find particularly motivating.”
I know the feeling. These days, I’m only the boss of myself (and often not a very good one), but I can’t stand the bureaucracy. Does it make anyone’s heart sing?
What makes my heart sing is writing from the heart. That’s what I was able to do, when I finally sat down to write Outside, the Sky is Blue.
There have already been some lovely advance quotes, which have made me very happy. If you do decide to read it, I hope you’ll find some joy in it. It’s not out till February 17th, but you can order it here.
What also makes my heart sing is talking to other people about what they have done, how they have done it and what they want to do next. That’s why I launched my podcast, Work Interrupted and now The Art of Work. I’ve had some truly wonderful guests. You’ll find the full list on the website, here. When I wrote to you the other day, MailChimp blocked the link to the podcast, for some reason, which is why I’ve moved this newsletter to Substack.
(I hope you like it, but if you don’t, please just click “unsubscribe” and you won’t hear from me again.)
There’s a lot of gloom around at the moment. I think you can safely assume that our government isn’t cheering me up. But sometimes you almost have to laugh. If you can stand the embarrassment, watch this clip as an example of someone turning “the art of work” into a sh**-show.
And think of his face when that sh** finally ricochets against a fan and hits him.
Yup, lots of gloom. But lots of joy as well: in a cup of coffee, in a Florentine, in a phone call with a friend, in a delicious glass of Viognier, in a walk in the park. This, we still have. And outside, as I write this, the sky is blue.
Looking forward to reading your book in 2022!