may-august 2022
Over the last 2 years I’ve written a monthly summary, to keep track of my favourite photos, the places I’ve been, the best things I’ve read and listened to, and the culture I’ve enjoyed the most. This year I have chunked these into 4 month periods because of the pressures of work, university, moving house, quarantine etc, but summaries must still happen otherwise I will forget. And everything I do online is some gesture towards not forgetting.
places I went and things I did
I finished my first year of my MSc with a lot of coursework and a big exam. Studying part-time this year has been brilliant and exhausting. I spent a month abroad, cycling in the Netherlands and travelling in Estonia and Finland and taking 100s of photos on a large variety of films, too many to edit or know what to do with. I spent weekends in Brighton, in Charroux, in St Albans hiding from the heat and at a Tudor tower in Essex. I moved house into a small and lovely flat in Clapton, I went to five weddings, organised two hen parties and gave one speech. I took a lot of author portraits, some for inside covers, and enjoyed all of them.
Haniah introduced me to the joy of small and silly watercolours. We painted one a day on our travels over the summer and several of my friends have since bought pocket sets from my evangelical PR campaign. It has taken decades to banish the fear of practical art activities that schooling inspires in a dyspraxic child with poor spatial awareness; messy paintings of joyful moments have really improved my life.
things I read and wrote about
I read a run of 9 fantastic books by women, of which my favourites were a horrible tale of a crumbling cinema and its workers by Camilla Grudova, a monologue from a queer monastery ghost spying on George Sand by Nell Stevens, and a retelling of the Trojan War by Pat Barker. The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex inspired a lighthouse obsession which has lasted me through the autumn. But the best reading experience was probably Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, a dreamy tale of summers in Finland by a lake, which I read during a summer in Finland by a lake.
I took most of my university holidays off studying due to being very tired, but I did do some interesting work with UCL’s Multimedia Anthropology Laboratory on digital exploration and preservation of Guarani and Kaiowá cultural heritage in Brazil, and worked with a student at the Slade School of Fine Art on a piece for a virtual exhibition on power and representation with the Museum of Data. Excited for both of those things to come to fruition.
things I watched
The only films that have stuck with me over this period were experienced at my beloved Castle Cinema round the corner: Possessor and Nope, both horrible and beautiful in different ways (the flying saucer IS the alien?? No one is doing it like Jordan Peele.) It’s been an incredible season of telly. New series like Sharp Objects, A League of Their Own and the best dramatisation of The Staircase murder I’ve seen thus far (I’ve seen all of them), and watching the entirety of Borgen for the first time. What a time to have an internet connection.
The only piece of theatre I would like to shout out is Magic Mike Live which I watched at a hen party. British theatre can learn some lessons from Magic Mike Live.
things I looked at and listened to
I loved photography exhibitions across northern Europe, particularly at Amsterdam favourites Huis Marseille and Foam, and a series on Estonian childhood in Talinn’s Telleniska Creative City. I got completely hooked on The Teacher’s Trial, one of the few pieces of true crime journalism that has actually brought justice for a victim over cheap thrills for an audience. And I watched England win the Euros at Wembley. That was pretty great.