more things I've been doing in 2024
An update from the second slice of the year, if the year was divided into thirds like a monstrous pie chart, on a stone grey Monday of brown leaves swirling around the car park below our flat. Some pictures, some things I’ve read and watched, places I’ve been and words that have stuck with me.
Pictures mainly from little and large weekends across spring and summer. Art and friends and protests in London. Amsterdam, to celebrate my cousin turning a quarter century and to cycle with friends (the Dutch countryside fulfils all my cycling criteria: flat and in constant easy reach of a snack). A night in a shepherd’s hut in Sussex with our bikes visible from the end of the bed, a perilous seaborne approach to a lighthouse off the Isle of Wight and a bittersweet final visit to a hotel of many memories. A bat safari on punts as the sun set over Cambridge. A second year of camping in churches with long-suffering friends. Weddings and weddings and weddings, the orange glow of a cigarette after dark in a sprawling country garden, the neon glow of a petrol station through a Travelodge window.
And a Big Summer Holiday to Sweden, which is the perfect summer holiday - the third in our annual Nordic holiday tradition (we're running out of Nordics). Cities and islands and sauna cabins and hunting down Kro(o)ks in a small town museum in my ancestral homeland. Bun after bun after bun, light on the water, pastel coloured apartment blocks and cycling through the forest. I shot four rolls of film and I love so many of the pictures that I’m struggling to know how to treasure them best - they may form the photobook I’ve promised myself I’ll make this year.
There is certainly a vacuum left by the end of part-time study, which I started by filling with an intensive evening Arabic course which stretched me a great deal. (I have signed up for the less intensive version for the next stage.) I have enjoyed a gentler pace of research, with interesting public engagement including running a workshop in London Data Week and presenting at a data roundtable. I’ve shot a lot of 35mm and little else, although I did stumble across another author portrait in print in a book I absolutely loved.
About 2/3 of what I've read between May and September, bar books donated to Queer Book Club, Swedish island cabins, my apartment block foyer, a stranger I met in a bar after having read the final page on the bus there etc
More success with our personal library’s 1 in 1 out rule, as well as landing on a genius solution of buying more shelves for our bookcases and arranging via length - interior design innovation as side effect of the London rental market. Variety definitely broadened by queer book club and joining a local bookshop's book club, although no one is as ferociously critical as I would like. (Yet.) I read about graveyards (then wrote about them), about building a Nordic island cabin while staying in a Nordic island cabin, two very different books about two very different Dutch houses and their jealous owners, about a doomed 19th century Polar expedition blended with time travel and the institutionalized colonial mindset of the civil service. A really great run of them.
“Recording is to be at a distance. Watching someone else dance is no good, even if it does swell the heart for a moment. I want to be in the spin, not sat on the bed watching.”
At the start of 2024 I resolved to return to one of my great loves, and watch some more cinema. I bought a membership to my local indie and invested in MubiGo, both of which have been game-changing for Big Screen Time, as well as for exploring some of the liminal second screens of otherwise familiar cinemas. (A memoir in itself.)
On a recent visit to the Institute of Contemporary Arts, site of my first full-time job in London, I was reminded of how I used to spend most evenings after work in the dark embrace of its cinema as staff members were allowed to watch as many films as we wanted for free. Imagine! I spent less than a year at the ICA, but what I learned from my colleagues, from the artists I interviewed and the exhibitions and films I saw there, has lasted the nearly-decade since I left. As have several friendships formed. It’s a special place, and remains a radical place in lots of ways, as evidenced by Rheim Alkhadi’s current exhibition. It also serves the cheapest aperol spritz you can find in central London.
I take fewer of these than I did as a Tumblr teen.
other cultural highlights
film Kneecap, which promptly made me book to see the band live and fire up Irish on Duolingo so I can sing along; Holy Spider, a horrible and impressive Iranian film; Crossing, a love-letter to Istanbul and queer community performance Multiple Casuality Incident by Sami Ibrahim at The Yard, which I think I could have seen five times (but left it at two); The Secret Garden as the sun set over Regents Park art Preece & Hepworth’s love/art affair in Lewes; Jack Lowe’s glass prints of women of the RNLI at the Maritime Museum; sunlight on beautiful objects in Kettle’s Yard; unlikely exhibitions on queer Arab identity and the Nakba at Stockholm’s Archaeology Museum TV reality TV! I Kissed a Girl, The Traitors, Love is Blind Sweden and UK (I maintain that Love is Blind is unmatched in cultural insights)
“I always have the feeling that when the story ends, maybe the whole world will end; I wonder if the world even exists when I don’t tell about it.””
It’s harder to remember these last four months than the previous, as my camera roll is sparser and my social media use sporadic. I took a break from Instagram over the summer and only half returned, though I’ve enjoyed posting more of my 35mm backlog as it gathers physical and digital dust. I’ve archived digitally less but I’ve shot more film, updated my moleskine scrapbook and didn’t miss a day of our watercolour journal while we were travelling. Something about reassessing the value of a tangible record, probably influenced by the algorithmic decay I see every day across the internet - the “enshittification” of the online world. I’ve not examined the thought fully yet. It could also be because my phone camera cracked and I only just replaced it. Who could say.
Physical records of a week in Sweden
So there’s the second in the 2024 real-time-archiving trilogy. I’m looking forward to the final third of this year. Next month we’re going to Japan! I can hardly wait. And I’ve found myself longing for frosty mornings by the river despite our wet summer, and the smell of woodsmoke from the barges. I yearn for a rollneck.