LRN No.13: bright ideas, beautiful things

Plus: deranged and overdressed on Zoom

Happy New Year!

My resolution for 2024 is to follow the light - to fill my year with bright ideas and beautiful things. That means smart people, and words, images, music and landscapes to spark the brain. The theory is, if you fill your conscious mind with high quality stuff, your unconscious mind will provide you with sparkling new ideas of your own. (In his book, The Creative Act, Rick Rubin describes a ‘Source’, a cosmic creative well that will fill you with ideas if you tap into it. I think it’s more likely to be neuroscientific than supernatural. I have no idea how it works, but it does work.)

I started by dragging my two kids around the Tate Modern on Wednesday afternoon. As I sat in the café stuffing sandwiches into their mouths, this appeared in the window right beside us:

If I believed in anything - which I sadly don’t - I might think this was an omen of good things.

When my first book, Sex Robots & Vegan Meat was published, it was 2020. Bookshops were closed, festivals were virtual, and all interviews were remote. (I got to be on Joe Rogan’s podcast from my living room, which also happened to be a building site at that time).

A launch party was out of the question. My publisher organised a Zoom for the five people who had worked on the book, but my Ocado order arrived early that evening, so my husband was unpacking the shopping in the background while I was having my moment. Anticlimax doesn’t begin to cover it.

(I did organise another launch Zoom for my friends, where I got dressed up for the first time in five months. It was clearly far too much excitement for my lockdown brain.)

Deranged, in my most glamorous dress, on Zoom

I have lots of events in the works when The Price of Life comes out. I’ll be at How The Light Gets In at Hay in May, and have nights planned at The Trouble Club, as well as bookshops around the country. I’ve got a bright shiny new events page on my website, listing everything as soon as I’m allowed to tell you about it.

Things that have caught my eyes and ears:

• The Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibition at the Hayward Gallery - the epitome of a smart person creating beautiful things

• Severance on Apple TV, at the recommendation of my producer, Conor Garrett, which is weird and intriguing and brilliant

• I was very moved by this long read on the life of Jordan Neely, the homeless man and Michael Jackson impersonator who was killed by a stranger on the New York Subway last year