on the incoherent illusion of coherence
Behold! I have had a thought.
Hello!
Hi! I hope you’re well. I’m alright. I’m sorry I did two very silly newsletters in a row - as you know I usually like to mix it up a bit more than that - but I was soooo busy for most of the past month and apparently being unhinged is my comfort zone.
I’m now less busy and so was able to write something non-mental, which hopefully you will enjoy? I guess we’re going to have to see.
A column
I don’t really remember writing Honourable Misfits, because my life wasn’t real back then. It was the first lockdown and I lived in this tiny one bedroom flat, which nominally had a number of rooms but a negligible amount of actual space. It was like living in a doll’s house; I’d wake up in the bedroom and walk three steps to the corridor then two steps to the kitchen, and after that it would only take seven steps at most to get to the couch in the living room, on the other side of the flat.
I lived in the doll’s house alone and I was working on a book which was very formulaic. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t fun per se, but you know. It was one short biography of an eccentric member of Parliament after another. Every day of my life was exactly the same, for weeks on end. As a result, I didn’t really form any memories in that time. I think that’s meant to be normal, and why people had such vivid dreams during the pandemic.
The brain doesn’t like it when absolutely nothing happens to you, so it’ll just make some stuff up to feel alive. Or something. I don’t know, I’m not a scientist. What I do know is that, at some point while doing my research, I realised that politics had changed in a pretty major way in the past fifty years or so, in a way that seemingly no-one had noticed.
I spent hours and hours reading about all these old timey politicians, from the 17th and 18th and 19th and early 20th centuries, and the one thing a lot of them had in common was that their views made no sense. You’d have this one MP who, say, campaigned hard against slavery, but hated anything to do with the working class, and also had deep concerns about the way the Irish were treated, while actively wanting discrimination against women to go further.
This is a made up example, to be clear, but so many profiles of them read like that. It would have been entirely impossible to place these politicians on anything even vaguely resembling a modern political spectrum. Hell, it would have been impossible to predict what they made of X, even if you had access to their views on A, B, C and D. Of course, many of them were kooks, but not all of them were stupid or unfit for office.
Instead, I really do think I managed to stumble upon this shift which happened so slowly and perniciously that no-one really noticed it happening. I finished the book and kept that morsel at the back of my head, fully intending to do something with it at some point. That was four years ago, give or take a few months.