The mushroom cloud that erupted over London was exactly the colour the government made cigarette packets a few years ago to discourage smoking. Fireball would instantly vaporise hundreds of thousands! screamed the headline. This, apparently, is what Vladimir Putin has planned for my city. Nuclear destruction, and soon.
I immediately closed the tab, thinking, Oh my fucking god. But my second thought, right afterwards, was - if my imminent fate is ‘vaporisation’, I really need to start that substack.
I’ve always wanted to be a writer, and I have written, copiously, reams and reams of pages of thoughts and dreams and memories. But my writing has always been private. I’ve quite literally never shared any of it - though as an adult I discovered my mum had in fact read my teenage diary, and enjoyed it. “Darling, don’t make that face. It was very good! You should be writing!”
It’s been years since I wrote fiction, my creativity always cauterised by internal critiques - boring, stupid, no one cares, etc. And in general, when it comes to words, I’ve always been shy. Balancing my need to write with a desire to remain invisible, through my job I found a way to express myself in writing that involves me never having to express myself in writing. As a podcast producer and journalist, my work has been to shape other people’s words and thoughts, putting my own spin on ideas without having to claim them as my own.
But for a while I’ve been feeling a need for that to change. A desire to put myself out there, along with my silly, funny, dumb, weird, sad, hopeful observations about these silly, funny, dumb, weird, sad, hopeful days we inhabit. Maybe it’s because I’m about to get evaporated. Or maybe it’s because I have something to say, and I want you to hear it.
I don’t really know what the shape of this substack will be when I’m finished with it. I have ideas; things I want to think through on the page. Short essays, prospective titles. Hell has a basement, and it’s full of bed bugs. Against good taste. The weirdness of pyjamas.
Who knows if I’ll write those, but I want to write something. If a novel’s going to take too long, and I want to contribute more to the annals of history than an Instagram story, then this substack might be the place to begin.