In this particular December, there’s not a whole lot to talk about; in fact, for most of this year, I’ve had about three things to talk about and I think at least two of them would stop the conversation dead in its tracks.
But regardless of the year and its quality (or lack thereof), end of the year blogs, round-ups, top tens, retrospectives and all the rest are as inevitable as regional panto. Well. If only.
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The pantos are few and far between this year but there’s still a proliferation of the former – not that I’ve read any of them. I’ve written about it before: I love end-of-the-year lists, I love how celebratory they are. But this year they seem a bit… desperate. The determination with which people have tried to sing the praises of new attempts at things rings a little hollow. I’d normally keep a couple of notes in my phone to keep track of my favourite things so I’d have something to draw on when writing this, but I stopped list-keeping back in March.
Having said that, there was some great theatre in the first couple of months of 2020. I loved Alistair McDowall’s all of it back in February, a scatter-gun of a play encompassing a whole lifetime performed with serious rigour by Kate O’Flynn. I loved work.txt on one of my damp trips to Vault festival, especially when things didn’t go quite to plan and we saw all manner of contingencies deployed – it remained totally alive and completely communal. I similarly adored Trainers at the Gate, which now I think about it was the first time I went into a theatre thinking that maybe they wouldn’t be open for that much longer.
I loved those things mostly because I remember how it felt in my body to experience them; the detail has evaporated far quicker than it might normally, but I remember being sat in each of those audiences and racing to keep up with O’Flynn, singing My Heart Will Go On with everyone else at that performance of work.txt, and holding my breath with Nando Messias and Nicki Hobday as they hung from the ceiling in the Gate.
There was one particularly distracted day at the end of February when I think I spent the whole day at the BFI; three Tilda Swinton films in quick succession (Orlando, Michael Clayton and Caravaggio), by the end of which I was reeling and inspired and all those things when you see a great film, let alone three of them back to back. It was one of those impromptu ridiculous things that now seem totally alien, those experiences that very much feel like they belong to another lifetime entirely, not to be overly melodramatic about it.
Since that hard stop in the middle of March I’ve only watched a couple of livestreamed shows; This House as part of NT at Home, which involved a lot of texting my Gran as she was watching at the same time. There was also My White Best Friend, courtesy of the Royal Court, with the always-compelling Lucian Msamati. My favourite almost-theatre of the summer was the film of Simon Stephens’ Sea Wall with Andrew Scott; thirty-five minutes that took my breath away and genuinely knocked me for six.
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It’s a strange adjustment to realising that almost everyone has spent this year in some degree of loneliness and depression. It’s the norm. The actual act of swinging your legs out of the bed in the morning (sometimes not till after the morning) seemed like an effort not worth undertaking. I couldn’t tell you what I did between mid-March and late May, not in any detail that might be meaningful. I walked the same walk, I had the same phone calls again and again, I returned to books I’d already broken the spines of, I listened to music that I already knew back to front. That’s the outline but it’s not actually what happened. I don’t think my brain even bothered to put any of that stuff in long-term memory. I can, if I try, put a song on and locate where I was when I listened to it, or what I’d done that day. Whether I’d done any work or whether I’d stared at the pile of books on my desk and listened to Rumours for the seven hundredth time instead.
My main task during (the first, love that we have to specify now) lockdown was to write my masters dissertation, which was on the exceedingly cheery subject of genocide. Not exactly the most enjoyable couple of months of my life: waking up, rolling over, and being confronted with the stack of books with grim titles on my bedside table. When the first, second, or on a good day third thought that passes through your head in the morning is Hannah Arendt-adjacent, it’s not going to be a fun day. But the two texts that I spent the most time with were Sven Lindqvist’s ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’ and Philippe Sands’ East West Street; both extraordinary books that are genuinely worth your time, neither are impenetrable academic works, rather they’re enthralling with strong narratives and prose that glints, darkly.
My other reading suffered, quite a lot. This is the first time in years I’ve not managed to even break fifty books in a year, I’m stuck in the mid-thirties. I did love Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, which is an exquisitely beautiful and poetic exploration of the Cairngorms, a region I knew nothing about and now feel like I know incredibly intimately. Shepherd’s sensual descriptions conjure images from the kind of expertise that cannot be faked, and her evocations more than justify the title of the book as living, even the water as she describes it seems to be an alive, sensual thing.
And there was Summer, thank God there was Summer. The final instalment in Ali Smith’s extraordinary Seasonal quartet could not have been more eagerly awaited. A beautiful story on its own terms including episodes from the 1940s that are among the most distressing things I’ve read (this is a compliment) as well as the hyper-contemporary strand that has been the Seasonal quartet’s hallmark, it also allows moments from its predecessors to fall softly but firmly into place and into relief. I’m forbidding myself from going on and on about it, anyone who followed me on twitter for that fateful week in August has heard enough.
I did slightly better with telly, but only slightly. I’ve still not seen Normal People and to be honest I don’t think I have that kind of capacity right now. I was riveted by I May Destroy You, and it was a testament to the craft of the thing that I watched the whole series with a finger anxiously hovering over the space bar to pause it at a moment’s notice – which I did frequently – and it lost none of its intensity or momentum. Even in the jittering and unforgiving hands of a viewer it was insistent in its singular focus.
I was probably even worse when it came to new music, Dame Taylor Swift excluded, though I loved A Hero’s Death, Fontaines D.C.’s follow up to last year’s extraordinary Dogrel. It has all the force of their debut but with a fuzzier sound and a considerable helping of doo-wop. Which was definitely not what I was expecting but is definitely not unwelcome. A Lucid Dream has the scale of those huge tracks on Dogrel, but my favourite might be Oh Such A Spring, a small uncharacteristically melodious song that sounds like it belongs in an empty concert hall. It occupies the Songbird slot; at the end of side A so the needle can be picked up from the dead wax again and again, before you flip it over and that insistent title track fills up all that empty space.
For me, the discovery of Lockdown, Part Two: Perestroika was The West Wing, and I’ve worked my way through over a hundred episodes in about four weeks. Don’t ask. There is something totally irresistible about it, yes, that dialogue, but honestly the thing that I expect was appealing when it premiered twenty years ago and remains so now, is that The West Wing almost fetishizes the competence of its characters. In that world nothing is sexier than someone who is intelligent, quick with a thought, and bloody good at their job. I’m obsessed. So obsessed I nicked what appears to be Sorkin’s favourite episode title for this blog post. I think my favourite moment (and I’m only halfway through season five) might be the screwball comedy that ensues in the thirty seconds before the Presidential debate, including an evil cackle from Stockard Channing and a brilliant fall-on-your-face from Allison Janney. Or it might be any moment with the brilliant Marlee Matlin scream-signing her way through Sorkin’s endless sentences. And I’m also listening to The West Wing Weekly, too. I’m a terminal case for which I offer no apology at this time.
In other words, there are things that I’ve loved this year, but trying to access any insight for a blog post has proven to be ridiculously difficult. Everything that I did love seems to be about reaching back to something else rather than actually trying to engage with the present – not least because what was ‘the present’ was changing all the fucking time.
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My Grandad – Papa – died in October. Not Covid related, thankfully, and I had got to see him (from a two-metre distance, masked) a couple of weeks beforehand. But the funeral was an attempt at something, not a proper funeral. There was no wake, which was somehow worse. It’s not a particularly Scouse thing I don’t think to have an open bar at the wake, but I missed it for a multitude of reasons. I have clear memories for example of being five years old, being at my other Grandad’s wake, standing on the stage at the local British Legion and rallying everyone to sing happy birthday to my Dad, whose birthday was the next week with the full approval and encouragement of my Gran. There’s a need to celebrate, and we have been denied that this year in a wealth of iterations.
I knew my Gran was going through his things and I made one request; there was a book that had lived on the table next to his chair for many years that it turned out didn’t mean a lot to anyone else, but that I loved. It was Schott’s Miscellany, published in 2002 but you wouldn’t know that from the state of its coffee- and nicotine-stained dust jacket, or its content, which was a collection of trivia that went out of date minutes after publication. The list of Bond Villains ends with The World is Not Enough, the most recent Untimely Pop Star Death is Kirsty MacColl’s, and my favourite of the Chat Room Acronyms is RTBM. That’s “Read The Bloody Manual”, if you don’t have a copy of Schott’s Miscellany to hand.
But my favourite page is a collection of Samuel Johnson quotations, mostly because Papa had circled his favourites. Of these, the one we clearly both took to heart is “Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o’clock is a scoundrel.”
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There’s an interview with Ali Smith where she quotes the dying Hendrik Wergeland “kiss next year’s roses for me.” Because yes, there will be roses.
Photo of Lorenza Mazzetti from the BFI National Archive.
HarryRMcDonald 