Photo by Hayk Badalyan
Most of the creative people I know in the UK are resigned to an uphill struggle. Many work in a vacuum. The city is pocked with such voids. Sisyphus and his boulder have returned. Nor is it anything to do with finding the perfect landscape. No such place exists. Not to those chipping away at the cliff-face with their backs to the beauty. No—it’s all or nothing here, with little space for part-timers. And yet, as confessional Anaïs Nin said: “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
An ex-military friend, now a Buddhist, enters Monty Python territory when he tells me of Russian scientists creating a so-called squadron of bomber pigeons mostly for spying, though they could also carry small explosives. He reads this to me on the phone: ‘“A Russian neuro-technology firm have launched field tests of so-called “bird-biodrones” known as PJN-1,”’ runs the Express article. Until he sends me a link, I think he might be pulling my leg. In the end I am left to wonder if Steve Witkoff could make a good pigeon whisperer.
Pam Hogg was a ubiquitous, smoky figure across the catwalks and parties of the capital. She died only days ago in a London hospice. An anti-establishment fashion designer, an unapologetic queen of upcycling, and a former unsung musician, she used to pop up everywhere—from high-profile trendy weddings in celebrity chef restaurants, to ostentatious gallery openings on Hanover Square. What I liked was her Scots lack of impressionability when it came to other people’s wealth, right down to the fact she hated the way property could be used to throw rank—unlike some of her artist friends whose only reports these days seem to concern property.
Afghans in the US—it is only days since Brits were fielding criticism from Americans over the amount of Afghans in this country, overlooking the fact it was Trump’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in the first place that sent so many Afghans westward. Soon after 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an ex-commander in the notorious Unit 01, was hauled into custody for shooting two young National Guard soldiers in Washington DC, one of them dead, Secretary Noem must have regretted that Lakanwal was trained and equipped by the CIA, and that it was the Trump administration approving his asylum application in May. For what it’s worth, I remember local special forces in Afghanistan as small and neat.
I was dipping into Norman Mailer’s Cannibals and Christians again—something about the old Panther paperback’s proximity to the shelf behind. On one page “the little king” is ranting about the decline of the novel—the book a collection of writings from 1960 to 1966. “One rarely heard one’s friends talking about a good new novel anymore,” he complains. Is this true today? I have started Flesh by David Szalay. It is compelling. The artist is the real novel-reader: The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard her latest. I just want to write when I read. I have none of Mailer’s right and experience to describe the novel as “the Great Bitch in one’s life.”
I still miss my Scots friend who lived on Trinidad. I will never forget the day he and his brother took me sailing towards Venezuela. Were he still alive today, I wonder if we would do the same again, especially as Secretary of War Pete Hegseth reportedly told the US military to “kill everybody” when they targeted the vessel off the Trinidadian coast in early September, then ordered a second hit as two survivors clung to the wreckage, committing what some now claim was a war crime.
The truth is, many of us are extremely depressed about the rapidly changing relationship with the United States. As much because of the way this has filtered down to Ukraine—and the US’s apparent abandonment therein of sovereignty and law. I attended school in Scotland with Andrew Marr who has just written for the New Statesman:
We have all been caught short. And for all of us – whether relying on easily sabotaged undersea cables (carrying between 95 and 99 per cent of all intercontinental internet traffic and international data transfers), enduring persistent drone disruption at airports, or facing the threat directly over the Baltic – the world looks more dangerous after the American ultimatum. We have known for some time that we could no longer rely on the United States. But what, really, have we done about that?
I keep returning to this business of art. How it used to be the great enabler. How it stretched like a glorious challenge across the sky. I suppose it doesn’t help that I am in limbo. Four unanswered applications for visas and film permits in a troubled East African country later, and me and my team have got nowhere. I compare ourselves to a vehicle stuck in the sand with the wheels spinning and no forward motion. I wish I had more time for a creative life instead, so I could work on my novel.
I love any novel’s potential open spaces, though in my own case, I still don’t feel I can take any credit for them. It still has its three braided timelines. As the central character says to a mysterious figure in a midtown Manhattan bar:
“There was this one place I’ve never forgotten—where the sky just opened up, like a wound. Not from the war. Not from that stuff. I just had this weird sense that something was staring back down at me. Like the crack was an eye, or a doorway, or a question—and I was supposed to answer. I still think about it. I still try to understand it. I guess I haven’t found the answer yet.”
The weekend was crowned with a headline gig in Brixton for our daughter and son’s band. The artist is back in London, too. Both little studios have been pumping away. Not to mention my place at the end of the dining room table. The wolves are still at the door; that’s a matter of course. But I continue buying into the idea that if we can just keep things flowing, depth charges at the ready, obstacles are swept away.
I almost reached the end of this piece without mentioning the Budget. (“English problems,” as the great C. C. O’Hanlon would say.) Those who decry the government, of which there are many, hated it. Those who support the government, a dwindling number, were indifferent. Unite, the second-largest union affiliated to Labour, accused them of breaking promises to workers. At least more children are lifted above the poverty line. What remains, however, is still the nullifying fact that since Brexit, Covid, and Ukraine, the UK has been going down the pan. Happily, however, the continued hostility from Russia and the US has so far proved incapable of flushing us away.
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