Bits #17
Things to read, watch, listen to, chew over
Sometimes I think I’d be happier if social media disappeared in a puff of smoke and then I bear witness to Hugh Grant on his Eras tour, the unhinged toilet girl take on “You have been the light of the day” and vintage VB with an epic hangover and I am reminded of what I live for. What’s even better is that 2 out of those 3 memes aren’t even new: they just keep on regenerating, like memetic media forever has and ever will. I could live without them? But I’d really rather not.
Via Emily Stochl this week, a delightful picture of The NY Review of Books offices. I couldn’t work like this as I need a clear desk to focus, but I love the abundance of scholarship contained in one single photo!
Saturday afternoons are the new Saturday nights, according to the chief exec of Stonegate, which owns more than 4,000 pubs and bars. David McDowall revealed that at Slug & Lettuce (good times) the busiest hours have shifted from 9-10pm on a Saturday to 3-4pm. By the time 8pm rolls around, many punters are heading home. There’s also a new trend ‘zebra striping’, which involves alternating alcoholic bevs with soft drinks, to mitigate the hangover the next day. (Might try it, tbh.)
I’m a night owl, but with the price of alcohol in a cost of living crisis compared to the relative good value of Netflix, it doesn’t surprise me a bit — especially with Gen Z, the new cosy gen, coming of age.
As regular readers of this letter will know, I adore commitment to niche endeavour and considered silliness, and so I cannot get enough of this post on Total Rec where Rufina tries a Reddit hack whereby you simply enter “any random ‘white girl’ name” +15 into the discount box of particularly “influencer-pilled” insta-brands to find that, more often not, it works. KATIE15? “Usually works wonders”.
Not entirely sure of the ethics of it, but it’s a very funny blind-spot to road-test. It’s also a facet of a much larger conversation - that I’m never not interested by - about the value of consumables, discount culture and the psychology of online persuasion.
Another Substack I am delighting in at the moment is The S is an 5 by writer and comedian Stevie Martin, who has that McIntyrian ability to make anything funny, even paint drying, especially, perhaps, paint drying. Here she is on the food restrictions of a comedy tour:
“One of my least favourite things about gigging - apart from travelling for ages to perform to twelve people who thought you were Steve Martin etc - is that you often can’t get good food without going to wild lengths. I got Pho delivered to the train platform moments before departure in Bristol once, but they hadn’t provided cutlery (and there was none on the train due to the crumbling of British infrastructure) so I had to use my eyeliner and lipliner as chopsticks which didn’t work so I ended up drinking it with a very wide mouth in order to catch the chunky bits and ruining both the eyeliner and lipliner.”
This is an incredibly affecting (and enraging) interview with Mark Ward, a victim of the contaminated blood scandal, by Michael Segalov for The Guardian. Writes Segalov:
“In the 1970s and 80s, more than 30,000 British patients were treated with contaminated blood products teaming with harmful pathogens – a lethal scandal on a national scale. Ward, 55, a haemophiliac, was one of 6,000 bleeding-disorder patients. He was infected with HIV, multiple strains of hepatitis, cytomegalovirus, Epstein-Barr virus, parvovirus B19 and others. To date, at least 3,000 people have died because of a litany of institutional failures, covered up for a generation.”
Ward, who was given Factor VIII aged 8, without his parents consent, was told that the new treatment would increase his life expectancy, which his parents had previously been told was around 21, due to his haemophilia. The cruel irony of his parents then being told ever so casually - shouted across a parking lot by a nurse - that their son had contracted HIV: the cure being, in fact, a poisoned chalice. Can you imagine the heartbreak? And then the stigma - the shame laden on to a young boy who had already had to cope with the life-long fear of every tiny knock causing a fatal bleed - of having HIV, in the 1980s. Ward (and this is truly despicable) was allowed to remain in school for only as long as no-one knew that he had HIV. If anyone found out, said the headteacher, he would be kicked out immediately.
Ward is now 55, happily married, the founder of Haemosexual and the author of a memoir, Bleeding Famous. He has dedicated his life to fighting for justice for those affected by the infected blood scandal, which makes people look at him with pity, as if he were a pariah — and he makes a particularly moving observation to the photographer who asks him to smile for his portrtait in this piece:
“Usually, I’m asked to look miserable and solemn in photographs. It’s always darkness, death and destruction. It made a nice change this morning to be allowed to look happy for your pictures.”
The inquiry into the scandal was 6 years long and the compensation is soon to be paid out to the 6,000 victims — or rather, those who are still alive. I doubt any sum of money can make up for the institutional failures that allowed Factor VIII - “which was made up of plasma purchased on the skid rows of America’s big cities from addicts, prisoners, those experiencing homelessness and sex workers, all with a high risk of being HIV and hepatitis carriers” - to be injected into 1,250 haemophiliacs, less than 200 of whom are alive today. Their stories deserve to be known.
Couple of event notes!
I will be in conversation with Kaliane Bradley - author of this year’s beset-selling debut, The Ministry of Time, soon to be adapted for telly by A24 and Normal People writer, Alice Birch - for the last in my year-long series for Reformation, #RefReads (sniff sniff) at the Reformation store in Covent Garden on 9 December. Come along if you’re in London! Tickets are free and there will be wine AND canapés.
I will be taking in part in Childline’s Merry Little Christmas Show alongside some other lovely NSPCC campaigners, on the 10 December at Cadogan Hall. Tickets are £40 and will include alcohol and snax, with all funds going to charity.
For the paying subscribers of this letter, a little perk (bc you deserve one!) I will be doing a reading/ chatting with whoever fancies chatting to me at the Substack Christmas Carols on December 16 at a beautiful (and currently secret) London location. There are 6 of us - I’m not allowed to say who, but they are some of my absolute fave writers - and you can find the link at the end of this post! Again, tickets are free and again, there will be wine.
Going into 2025 (Jesus, how has that happened) and I’m really thrilled to be interviewing Oliver Burkeman on 31 January for How To Academy at The Royal Geographic Society. I was gutted when Burkeman’s column for The Guardian ended (I recommend bingeing the archive) and overjoyed when he went on to write two excellent, bestselling books: Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and Meditation for Mortals which we will be talking all about.
I watched the Martha Stewart doc and it’s as good as everyone says. She’s a remarkable woman - America’s first self-made billionaire - but I wouldn’t want her life for all the tea in China.