Free money (and many books)

Behold! I have had a thought.

Something to think about

A column

One of the most vivid memories I have of my first few months in London is of watching a reasonably handsome man making some notes in a little notebook. We were all hanging out in a big house in Loughborough Junction, which felt like the wilderness to me. I lived in Whitechapel back then, and still wasn’t used to the scale of the city.

Still, I spent a lot of my time on buses, crossing the Thames, as one of my only friends in town was going out with this boy, who was in a band. The band wasn’t especially successful but their gigs were amusing. It was 2009 and they’d play in small venues in Peckham, before the overground made Peckham a place where actually successful people spent their nights.

During the days, the boys would loiter. We were university students, so we loitered with them. We were all skint; there wasn’t much else to do. On one occasion, they taught us their trick, which was to walk around Borough market and politely take sample after sample after sample. By the end, you’d managed to get enough food that it counted as a lunch, just about.

But anyway - back to the notebook. The handsome man was on the dole, and he had to make notes, every day, of the steps he’d taken to look for a job. He never spent any time looking for a job, at least as far as I know, but he seemed to enjoy progressively building what was effectively a work of fiction.

In the end, he and my friend broke up, because he found someone else who was blonder and quirkier than she was, and that’s what things are like when everyone involved is under 22. I lost touch with them for a while, then noticed, some years down the line, that their band had made it. They hadn’t reached proper, mainstream fame, but had got a couple of successful albums under their belts, and managed to tour more or less around the world.

I’d forgotten all about them until recently, when I found myself reading about Rishi Sunak interviewing Elon Musk. At some point in their chat, the PM said that he wished people would be more willing to give up "the security of a regular paycheck and be comfortable with failing" to start companies. I found it infuriating.

It’s pretty clear that millionaires taking a punt on a start-up aren’t the same as pretty boys sharing a big horrible house near Brixton, but they exist on the same continuum. Only a small minority of people are willing to take massive risks without the assurance of a safety net. Others will need to rely on consequential personal savings, or cash from the state.

Of course, trying to make the case for generous benefits specifically so that people can loaf around, waiting for inspiration to strike, is political suicide. The Conservatives wouldn’t dream of it, because they do not believe in it; some people in the Labour party might, but you will never, ever catch them saying it out loud. If they did, they probably wouldn’t win another election in any of our lifetimes.

Luckily, I have no intention of ever standing for office, which is why I can now say: I think benefits should be more generous, both in general, because everyone deserves a decent life, and specifically because creative people should be able to loaf around, waiting for inspiration to strike.

For balance, I will also say that people with jobs should, if they get an idea that is good enough, have easy enough access to money in order to make their idea happen. I have seen people in my life try to apply for arts grants before and it seemed about as fun and straightforward as jamming a beaker up your urethra. Getting money in exchange for a good idea should be easier than that.

Crucially, you wouldn’t even need to be spraying billions of pounds around. All you need is for people to have enough breathing space to be able to look around, and have a proper think. I know this for a fact, because it happened to me when everything else fell apart.

As the pandemic hit, my career essentially disappeared overnight. I covered Westminster politics as a freelance journalist and suddenly there was no Westminster politics to cover anymore. I topped up my income by doing public speaking at various events and well, those suddenly became quite scarce.

I received a few thousand pounds from the state, over the course of a year and a half, and out of them, and the free time handed to me by the lockdowns, I made a lot of things happen. I wrote a book proposal - a process that is unpaid and takes several weeks of full-time work - then wrote the book. Using the last bit of the advance from that book and some of the money the state sent me, I wrote another proposal. Then, using the last bit of that advance, and some more of the state money, I wrote a novel - something you also need to do unpaid, and which takes many months.

After all that, I used up the last dregs of the money I’d got to set up a website, through which I paid other writers. The two non-fiction books did well and the novel and the website did not. It isn’t the result I would have hoped for, but it was fine. I can live with a 50% hit rate. 

In the 18 months since that money dried up, I have not worked on a single big, ambitious, mad project. I no longer have the time, disposable income, or mental space to come up with anything.

It is a shame because I got to experience, for a short period of time, what it feels like to either be wealthy or to live in a place which believes in its people. I am glad I had those years - not many people will ever have them - but they were far too short. They also happened by accident, while the Treasury was held at gunpoint by a global catastrophe no one understood quite yet. 

The grants were a blunt instrument and that’s what made them great. The amounts weren’t calculated by people worried about losing even a few stray cents, and no-one was there to scrutinise the ways in which everyone spent every pound. There was freedom in there, and it allowed many people to write that book they’d always dreamt of writing, or start drawing, or pick up that instrument they’d not played in years.

My novel wasn’t published but others were; a lot of art and music and whatever else was created, and some of it flopped and some of it succeeded. Imagine how much more could have been made if more people had been given that money and that time! Imagine how much could be made now, if we didn’t feel that every bean ought to be accounted for!

Sunak’s comments to Musk infuriated me because he was, despite himself, responsible for the best creative years of my life, and he now runs a government trying to tighten benefits even further. He sees people unable or unwilling to take risks and believes that it is because of their personal failures, not his. He wants the donkey to trot but refuses to show him even the hint of a carrot.

No-one in their right mind would ever argue for more public money to be sprayed around so that good and great things may eventually get made, but I’m happy to give it a shot. I think they should spend the money and see what happens. Some of it will be wasted but that’s fine. Not everything works all the time. You’ve just got to have faith in people, and choose to believe that letting them try is always worth it, no matter the cost.

Some very specific book recommendations

Right, so: while I like the idea of book recommendations in theory, I feel like people - myself included - often end up typing up a list of titles and authors and leaving you to deal with it, which isn’t actually that useful.

I wanted to make a useful list of book recs, for once, so here are some very specific ones:

• “Christ my brain is broken at the moment, really struggling to focus on books but would like to gently get reading again, looking for something that’s maybe a bit silly and light but still gripping”

The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden - Jonas Jonasson

• “Christ my brain is broken at the moment, I really want to read a series of fun books that are proper page-turners but not stupid either, need some solid plot but don’t necessarily care about the prose being occasionally clunky”

The Thursday Next series - Jasper Fforde

• “Hmmm everything seems bad in the world at the moment, I want some proper escapism, maybe some fantasy, with a heist-y plot, something YA-adjacent in vibe but that I won’t be able to put down”

The Six of Crows Duology - Leigh Bardugo

• “You know what I’d love? An aggressively charming collection of short stories about nothing in particular, preferably by someone who can really, really write”

Slow Days, Fast Company - Eve Babitz

• “I mean it’s not for everyone but ideally I’d fancy reading an insanely long, quite mad, sprawling book about a mental rich European family at the turn of the 19th century, written by someone who is naturally very funny but probably never heard of editors”

Before My Time - Niccolo Tucci

• “Scratch that actually, I want a short and sharp book that’ll pull me in from the first page then stay with me for a long time, and that’s technically bleak but so compelling it’s never depressing”

Ablutions - Patrick DeWitt

• “I want to laugh! Life is depressing and I just want to have a good time reading a book that’s both entirely vacuous and written very sharply”

Fabulous Nobodies - Lee Tulloch*

*maybe one for the girls, gays and theys this one, but you do you

• “Tell you what - it’s been a while since I last read a memoir that managed to be, in equal parts, hugely entertaining, very thought provoking and quietly devastating”

PriestDaddy - Patricia Lockwood

• “I’m in the mood to be charmed by a novel, I’d like some queer magical realism set in Lagos, I want little stories that read like old fairytales but brought into the modern world”

Vagabonds! - Eloghosa Osunde

• “I’m in a bit of a weird space and I’d like to read about yearning for eras and empires gone by, I want some nostalgia and some sense that life doesn’t always go your way and things aren’t always good, preferably with some hauntingly good prose”

Embers - Sandor Marai

Isolde - Irina Odoevtseva

Precisely one fun fact

Did you know that, during the Hundred Years War, one of the main French slurs for the Brits was “les goddams”, because they just would not stop swearing? I did not know that. I find it quite enchanting.