There are people whose voices are so distinctive that as soon as you are told to read something in their voice, you will find yourself reproducing their accent and inflections perfectly—in your head, at least. I’m a poor mimic and can’t imitate other people’s voices but I can ventriloquise them in my mind. We’ve lost two people recently whose unmistakeable voices were loved by millions: Dolly Parton and Sir Patrick Stewart. Their deaths were met with an outpouring of love from people from every point on the political spectrum.

When I log on to Twitter on such occasions, I feel united with all of humanity. A nineteen-year-old they/them with an anime avatar and a hammer and sickle and a Palestine flag in their handle made me cry with their tribute to Captain Picard. You can have a similar experience by going onto YouTube and searching for a clip from a long-running show or a classic song by a much-loved artist—here’s a personal favourite—and reading the comments. Art has the power to unite us because of a wonderful paradox: the more personal and intimate an expression of feeling is, the more universal it is. Just as, at a fundamental level, we are all composed of quarks and electrons, at a deep level, emotionally, with few exceptions, we are all the same. When an artist reaches inward, he reaches outward at the same time. If you go deep enough, you can access a network that links us all, a kind of London Underground of the soul.

Some actors are chameleons who can become almost unrecognisable in looks, voice and gesture if the role demands it. Others change little in their overall appearance and style of delivery. You recognise them instantly and with glee. I am about to rewatch the BBC classic I, Claudius and what I am looking forward to is not seeing how Patrick Stewart transforms himself into Sejanus but seeing Sejanus being transformed into Patrick Stewart.

A great actor is convincing in every role, but in every role, he is also himself. He subsumes all characters. In this, he shows us the breadth of human possibility. Patrick Stewart can be an ambitious, manipulative, amoral schemer like Sejanus because the potential to be a manipulative schemer is inherent in everyone. As Solzhenitsyn famously puts it, “The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every man.” Patrick Stewart is convincing precisely because he is consistent: embodied by him, each character comes to life because he is always so vibrantly alive, so very much himself. Every line sounds more convincing when he speaks it; language sounds more eloquent in his mouth; speeches feel more meaningful; Star Trek attains a Shakespearian grandeur.

I’m using the present tense here because, while Sir Patrick Stewart is dead, Captain Picard is immortal.

Many people have rightly noted that Picard is a model of the masculine ideal: dignified but never self-important; authoritative when necessary but also able to change his mind and happy to admit he was wrong; willing to take advice but ready to follow his own judgement; calm in a crisis; adept at diplomacy but prepared to use violence when necessary. These are also the qualities of a leader.

I’ve always considered myself a follower. While I’ve become an increasingly conscientious person as I’ve got older, I enjoy having assigned tasks, knowing what I need to do and then getting on and doing it. Even in Argentine tango, I don’t want to lead. I want to be on the dance floor, in the arms or on the payroll of someone creative, competent and responsible. I often fantasise about being in Starfleet Academy and the appeal is not just the adventure of traversing the galaxy but the comfort of being part of a quasi-military organisation. And yet, what I’ve realised in the wake of Patrick Stewart’s death is that there is a way in which I could be a (very minor) leader, through my voice.

“Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.” These words, often attributed to Rumi, describe different forms of leadership. I am neither lifeboat, ladder nor shepherd, but perhaps I could be a lamp—in fact, perhaps, in a much smaller way than a luminary like Sir Pat, I already am. Patrick Stewart inspired people through his voice. The words he spoke were not his own—indeed, when he played Shakespeare, he recited lines that had been spoken an untold number of times before. But writers also say things that have been said before. Shakespeare himself famously stole most of his plot ideas from others. What’s important is how the words are said. As Alexander Pope puts it in An Essay on Criticism:

True Wit is Nature to advantage dress’d,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d;
Something, whose truth convinc’d at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind.

I’ve always been unusually soft-spoken. I am unable to project my voice without straining. I cannot address a gathering without a microphone. I gave up on speed dating because by the end of an evening of multiple conversations in echoey rooms and bars with loud music, I am aphonic. A lot of people have complimented my voice, though: it’s breathy, sultry, sexy, I’ve been told. There’s a slight rasp to it as if I were a chanteuse delivering my songs with French insouciance and chain-smoking Gauloises between sets. But the flip side of this supposed sexiness is that when a camera probe painfully snaked its way up my right nostril and into the back of my throat, it revealed two tell-tale spots of chalk-white: vocal fold scarring. Now, I have to be careful how much I say, literally. I am masked up and nebulising several times a day, blowing bubbles through a straw and learning, I hope, how to use my voice more economically and effectively.

And that applies to my written voice, too. Writing can be hard: not many people want to put their words out there in public, especially now when they can simply let AI author things in their stead. The authentic voice is now rarer and more important than ever. I am determined to cultivate mine, to do my best to make a small number of people think ah, yes, that sounds like Iona; that’s an Iona way of expressing it.

This is what a writer can do: infuse things with meaning. Life is full of tea leaves and we have the kettle and the boiling water to extract their flavour. I can only aspire to have so much character and charisma that I can take four mundane words and make them evoke a universe of treasures to satisfy desires both subtle and gross.

Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.

RIP Sir Patrick Stewart, 1940–2026. Peerless actor, lighthouse, inspiration, benefactor to humanity.

Your memory will be a blessing.

In this piece, I’m going to write about an intrinsically private topic—something you would usually only know about if I confided in you as a friend. I am torn between the desire to share and the desire to keep quiet about this, since I don’t want it to change people’s perceptions of me.

As I often do when I don’t quite know whether to put something out into the world or not, I will take half-measures: I’ll paywall it. It’s the kind of topic that doesn’t lend itself to meticulously polished prose, flowery metaphors or multiple edits. It’s the kind of thing one writes about in bed, eating Turkish delight in lieu of dinner, getting icing sugar on the duvet and not caring. There’s a large glass of white wine now jostling for space with my glasses case and HRT meds, my hairbrush and eye mask on my bedside table. So without ado, now I’m all set up for writing: let us begin.

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Toowoomba feels like a cross between Los Angeles (albeit with much cooler weather) and an American frontier town from the days of the Wild West. From the centre of town, the four-lane highways stretch out towards the horizon, lined with squat bungalows and old-fashioned motels, with fast food joints like Red Rooster and Hungry Jack’s at the intersections, together with the odd branch of Café 63, a kind of diner with a view of passing cars and perhaps the longest menu I’ve ever seen, in a font that made me scrunch up my eyes, despite my glasses and with the “extras” helpfully arranged in alphabetical order from A for Avocado to Y for Yoghurt, Greek. In the town centre itself, stately old civic buildings with ornamental brickwork, stained glass details and clock towers alternate with vacant storefronts displaying “for let” signs alongside the usual establishments of small town decadence: gambling dens, gentleman’s clubs, vape shops, with some welcoming old-fashioned pubs and a few country goods stores. Instead of crinolined ladies with parasols and gun-toting gents in slouch hats and Errol Flynn moustaches (who would surely not be too out of place in this setting), we have the familiar mix of Aussies—Brits on holiday, relaxed, down-to-earth, no-nonsense—and a much more generous smattering of more recent immigrants than any English town of this size would be likely to have: tall, ebony Sudanese men, Indians galore (including half the staff at the aforementioned Café 63), Sri Lankans, Filipinos.

The attractions of Toowoomba are not civic but bucolic. Up on a high ridge overlooking a basin of hills, it is approached from Brisbane by a winding road that gradually climbs through lush woodland in a coach journey that is the twin of the trip from Sydney to Canberra. The town has several lovely, landscaped parks. Queens Park with its extensive lawns and magnificent trees from worlds old and new: English oaks and London planes alongside Kauri, Bunya pines and towering blue gums; Laurel Bank with its classical nude sculptures, topiaried bushes and canopy of camphor laurel; and the Japanese Gardens with their picture-perfect red arched bridges and rows of cherry trees, currently adorned with china white, flamingo pink and magenta blossoms in our upside-down spring. In my photos, it could be mistaken for Kyoto: in real life, the nasal accents, the cones of soft serve dusted with pink sherbet and a squat tree whose branches are heavy with the plump white and black bodies of ibises (the ubiquitous bin chickens) mark it out as unmistakably Australian.

I’ve come here for the annual flower festival and every garden is a riot of chaotic colour, dominated by pinks, purples, oranges and yellows: primroses and dahlias, foxgloves and azaleas, Oxford-blue delphiniums, trumpet-shaped lemon-yellow clivia and—my favourite—endless beds of fluttery-headed citrus-coloured Icelandic poppies. In my head, I’m singing, “‘Oranges and lemons,’ say the bells of St. Clements.”

I am staying above the town, on an avocado farm. Beyond the fire break around the house, the vegetation is arranged in layers: a stand of bamboo, a plantation of squat finger lime trees, beyond them the avocado trees and beyond that the lovely forests of eucalyptus and pine and the line of blue mountains on the horizon. A glossy black kelpie with tan beard and eyebrows sits at my feet as I type and intermittently paws me for attention. I am once again staying at a farmhouse with a couple in their fifties: once again I am amid the prosperity amassed during a life of hard work and careful husbandry, in a home abundantly comfortable and welcoming—with a fire pit around which to drink champagne before slurping up oysters adorned with finger lime pearls.

What strikes me most about this couple, though—and strikes me with almost painful force, as I envy and long for such a thing for myself so much—is how much they love each other. And not just love, but are in love with a quiet intensity that must surely be rare in people who have been married for thirty years—though the romantic in me hopes that it is not too rare. They are very similar: slender, highly articulate, well-educated, worldly and yet very warm. The hallmarks of a lifetime in the armed forces are everywhere apparent in the high conscientiousness, bright alertness and discipline. Like-minded people often find each other, of course—that’s assortative mating for you—and they also, surely, grow more similar over the years and decades.

This is a difficult thing to write about for several reasons. For one, I am afraid of sounding corny or of making them seem saccharine or boring. “Every happy family is happy in the same way,” writes Tolstoy. But he was a novelist and novels require conflict. The course of true love never did run smooth—in a play. Where would be the drama in that? But luckily, in real life we do not have to serve the demands of a narrative structure.

For another thing, though, I am worried about seeming creepy, about making assumptions about the emotional intimacies of two people I barely know. Perhaps it has not always been this way for them: perhaps there has been more turbulence and strife in their long relationship than I would ever guess at. Perhaps I am idealising their marriage too much. Perhaps I am misinterpreting. But I don’t think so. It seems so obvious to me, so tangible—as little of a secret as the produce of the farm proclaimed on a sign at the entrance to the driveway: avocados, finger limes, rhubarb. It’s as palpable as the honeyed scent of the avocado trees when their tiny yellowish-green blossoms are open to the bees; it’s as blatant as the lipstick pink of the galahs’ feathered bellies, blushing as it catches the golden light of evening—the galahs, who fly in graceful low arcs and land delicately on fence posts, almost always in pairs. It’s in the way he reaches for her hand when they’re walking or places an arm around her shoulder and snuggles in under a shared umbrella; it’s in the tone of her voice when she makes a diminutive out of his name. It’s in a thousand little allusions—that’s when we met; we went there; we used to do that—said with a detectably warm note.

There on the high ridge by Toowoomba, above the steamy heat of Brisbane, where the wallabies lope along beside the red-clay track as we take our morning walk, love is flourishing. There is a rustle in a Morton Bay fig and amid the shiny dark foliage flashes of a vibrant emerald green and a mustard yellow are visible: two Wompoo fruit doves. A pair of Willie wagtails are fluttering back and forth to a nest atop the spindly bare branches of a deciduous tree. A king parrot flashes his scarlet undercarriage as he flits among the eucalypts, his queen close behind. Two kookaburras cackle at me from their perch side by side on a power line. Every creature seems to have its mate.

It’s too late for me to experience a life lived in partnership. The years have passed and the opportunities have been missed or squandered. I’m late to the feast; I’m the last one at the harvest. Now, I’m kissing only soft dog fur and the only ears into which I whisper “I love you” are the velvet ears of a kelpie. But I know my luck could change as quickly as the high-altitude weather shifts from grey drizzle to radiant sunshine. It’s the first day of spring and already the air is bright with promise. I will take it as a good omen.

The beginning of the journey is deceptively mundane. I hand the bus driver my 50 cent coin, which makes an old-fashioned clink as he funnels it into a slot in a metal change machine—it’s the first time in years that I’ve paid for anything without my mobile phone and the first in perhaps a decade I’ve had to fish out a physical coin. The twenty-minute drive takes us along an endless straight road, lined with box stores and strip malls. Only the ambient temperature hints at exoticism: half an hour after dawn on a late winter morning, I am bare-armed and already regret having slipped a superfluous cardigan into my bag. The ferry terminal is a featureless grey box and a queue of people sporting their unsmiling, vaguely jaded Monday morning expressions are waiting at a concession stand for their flat whites to be frothed.

But almost as soon as the ferry begins to nose its way out of the long channel of water, I feel the exhilaration building. We slip past cranes and containers—all the lovely accoutrements of a working port—and then out onto an expanse of electric blue, smooth as freshly ironed silk, except where our wake leaves the broad V of its furrow. As we glide out to sea, the view of the town emerges: the front of the hump of Castle Rock, the cafés and bars of the Townsville’s strand, which are laid out along a huge scoop of bay and peter out quickly into low-slung houses along an endless curve of sand. To both port and starboard, both ahead and behind, there are jagged ridges of smoke-blue hills; ahead, more lovely hills, this time forested, as our destination island approaches.

I normally pop my earbuds in as soon as I embark on any mode of transport. But although I’m halfway through an engrossing account of Mary Queen of Scots on The Rest is History, I spend the whole journey just gazing at the quiet blue. It’s remarkable: there is so little to see and yet my eye doesn’t tire of the loveliness of that colour. The journey is over in less than half an hour—it’s a shorter trip than my habitual ferry journey down the wide Parramatta River and into Sydney harbour. Yet it’s just enough time to stir those ancestral memories—fainter now in a world of commercial flights and yet even on a brief ferry that crosses this stretch of sea ten times a day, palpable. I feel it: that heady sensation of leaving the familiarity of land and setting sail on an adventure.

Magnetic Island is a place of wonders. Despite the tropical promise of a 33 Celsius winter day, the hills have an Italian feel to me: dry pale ground and discarded twigs underfoot and tall bare tree trunk ending in greyish green leaves—although of course this is the grey of eucalptys not that of olives and the conifers interspersed between them are hoop pines, not cypresses. Amid the muted grey-greens and grey-browns, the Kapok trees hoist their buttercup-yellow, open-petalled flowers towards the sky. In a fork among the branches of a tree adjoining the road, there is a mottled grey-and-white bundle of fur: koalas. The mother’s soft bottom is squashed flat against one branch while her forehead is resting against another, bowed, eyes shut. Her joey peeks out at us and then half-stands, staring half-quizzically, half-defiantly, like any human toddler. His ears are furry muffs.

There are birds too: raucous parrots many and various, the lovely rainbow lorikeets that can be found everywhere in Australia, of course, but also kingfishers, perched in pairs on high branches, gleaming spearmint and turquoise. Hawks ride the thermals far above. And, as I round a corner, a wallaby with its round ears like a cartoon mouse, looks at me for an instance from its perch on a rock and then bounds away. From the summit of every hill I climb, there is a long sweeping vista around the island, overlooking beach after scalloped beach. In the distance, I can see twin ferries crossing the smooth water, one in each direction, and on the far horizon, those fairytale blue mountain ridges.

The road from the walking track to the bay meanders down into a picturesque suburbia of broad empty roads and thick springy grass verges. Backpackers in crop shorts and singlets are drinking iced lattes at a small cafe across the road from the beach. A line of banyan trees fringes the sand, which is empty except for a single family, some way off. I scramble into my bikini from inside my tent-like kaftan (this is Australia, country of prudes) and walk into a sea barely cool. There’s no shock of cold as the water laps at my thighs and belly. I swim a few dozen strokes back and forth before just lazily treading water, with my goggles pushed up to my forehead, so I can view the world from literal sea level. From here, it looks like a present, wrapped in a crinkly azure foil, carefully smoothed out by meticulous fingers.

The first glimpses of Townsville from the airport make it look genteel but unremarkable: an expanse of sprawling car-centric suburbia that could be anywhere in Middle America. But the Australians are a centripetal people and here, as elsewhere, everything is centred on the coastline. This is clearly the best time of year to be here, while the sun is warming but not yet ferocious (and it’s still chilly and grey in much of the rest of the country) and the sea is free from jellyfish (“marine stingers” is the official designation—a characteristically casual Aussie turn of phrase) so you can swim anywhere along the enormous crescent of coastline, rather than only within nets. Yet Townsville has the feel of an off-season beach town, a charming, sleepy, unspoiled vibe. There is a huge “rock pool”—a misnomer for what in Sydney would be an ocean pool, a man-made structure, walled off from the open sea beyond, but with expansive views out across the cobalt blue to the wooded hills of Magnetic Island. A freestanding building that looks like a swimming pavilion houses Juliette’s Gelateria. At night, its cherry red logo glows invitingly and it’s equipped with deckchairs looking out at the endlessly beautiful sea vista.

At the weekend, there’s a little more bustle: a few people are drinking beers on the covered deck of a beachside bar; the main drag of the esplanade is busy with electric scooters. But even on a Saturday, after walking just a little further around and out towards the tip of the nearest cape, up the gravel paths of a small promontory and over a raised wooden walkway, I am alone. And from that vantage point, I see just a single line of houses along the coastal walkway, looking as if they could be swept up and cleared away as easily as a child's lego blocks. As so often in Australia, I have a sense that the modern constructions are perched lightly on the landscape: fragile, recent. It’s easy to imagine what Captain Cook must have seen as he sailed along past this place in 1770—he would surely not be too astonished if he were to gaze out at Townsville today from the 9.30am ferry from Nelly Bay.

Townsville is a place of expansive views. From the first floor of the café above the Rock Pool, from the modest hill at Jezzine Barracks, even from the two-metre elevation of the wooden walkway that leads out of town and begins the long, inviting path to Cape Pallerenda, you have a panorama: the big C curve of the coastline, fringed with yellow sand, the turquoise water and the hills in front, behind and to either side. You never lose the sensation of being poised on Australia’s salty, scalloped edge. The views are best, though, from the top of Castle Rock—a kind of miniature wooded Uluru that dominates the city skyline, its lopsided hump reminding me of the boa who swallowed the elephant in The Little Prince. On the drive up the slopes leading to the beginning of the walking path, we pass through a genteel suburb of decorous white slatted-wood Queenslander houses that front the ocean, enjoying views that have made them the most expensive real estate in the country outside Sydney. Then the climb upwards through the wooded slopes to the summit is steep but brief. I’m looking down to find my footing when a loud rustle of foliage and a familiar thumping cause me to look up to see that I’ve startled a mob of kangaroos who are bouncing off into the thicket.

The wildlife is all around. Wallabies are everywhere: in the park opposite my hosts’ house, on the university campus—everywhere there is a grassy patch larger than a front lawn. I watch one stand nonchalantly in a tangled patch of long grass as a Pomeranian yaps at it from a fenced-in backyard. I spot the doll-like face of a joey gazing wide-eyed at me from one wallaby pouch; from another pouch protrude two spindly legs, like the poles of a tent hastily stuffed into a canvas bag. Elegant stone curlews in their restrained brown-and-grey plumage strut around everywhere from parks to car parks, in pairs, trios and quartets. There are streams full of turtles who are clearly regularly fed as they swim up to the bank to greet me hopefully, their little bug-eyed domed heads poking up above the water. And in the warm air, there are more flashes of electric blue that echoes the colour of the ocean but this time dauntily trimmed with black: Ulysses butterflies. Slung into the V of the branches of a tree, we spot a dozing carpet python.

Townsville has a down-to-earth charm and a kind of frontier town vibe, with abundant utes, leathery-skinned men in cowboy hats and more members of the male sex sporting moustache-and-sideburns facial hairstyles and old-fashioned sleeve tattoos than I’d seen in a while, down here in prissier, more pretentious Sydney. And while the avocado toasts were ubiquitous—as throughout Australia—there were a lot of people eating mince and hot pies and display cases at cafes were more likely to be stuffed with sausage rolls than with Dubai-chocolate-filled mochi cronuts. I met a Bob Katter look-and-soundalike at every turn—and even went on a date with one, though that did not work out well, sadly, as I was already planning my new life in a tropical paradise with my Queensland man.

There were also many Aboriginal people around town—looking like normal, gainfully employed and upstanding citizens. One such lady operates the ticket booth at the ferry; I encountered another drinking a long black at a local café; a cheery guy at the Sunday market sported his own colourful sweatshirt and cap, adorned with indigenous designs, and chatted happily to us about his business. The few Aboriginals I had previously seen in Australia (most of them in Adelaide) had been lolling on the street dead drunk and looking homeless and destitute. I add this not as a political statement or judgement of any kind—I can’t begin to even get a grasp on the complex causes of the problems facing that community let alone suggest any possible solutions. I just want to note that I really liked encountering some who seemed to be flourishing and it was the first time I had had that good experience.

What most struck me in Townsville, though, was the casual abundance of Australia: it was a drier, less lush and sodden part of the tropics than I was expecting, but it was still unmistakably opulent. Before my visit, no one told me what a breathtakingly beautiful place it is. People even shrugged at the idea when I told them I would be visiting, as if to say Meh, it’s nothing special. Just your basic paradise. Australians have grown blasé about the idylls on their doorstep. If there’s one thing I hope I can do it’s to tell them in words, to show them in my wide-eyed gaze, just what a gorgeous, enchanted land we live in here.

“Your husband is cute,” I told a friend recently. (People usually like to hear that their long-term spouses are attractive.) “Oh,” she said, “I don’t care about that. I’ve never cared about how people look and I would hope that he doesn’t care how I look either.”

I’m often told that looks are unimportant, that in choosing a partner you should disregard appearance and focus on their more profound and meaningful qualities: personality, character, intellect. Like most advice, this is an appropriate admonition for some. If you find yourself picking based on looks alone, if you’re often seduced into relationships with attractive but empty-headed, flighty or even cruel people because you are defenceless against a pretty face, then clearly, you should reprioritise. Likewise, if you’re overly concerned about what the world considers beautiful, if you expect your partner to conform to some external beauty standard, then you might need to reconsider. But the idea that physical attraction can be overridden or ignored in the choice of a partner seems wrongheaded to me.

There might even be a secret wisdom in your intuitive response to someone else’s physical presence. I’m increasingly convinced that some important assessments that our minds make are not accessible to conscious awareness. Evolutionary psychologist Rob Kurzban’s excellent (but misnamed) book, Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, provides many examples of such processes. I suspect these include not only instantaneous responses—the so-called Type A thinking that prompts me to leap back in shock when I spot the coils of a snake beside a walking trail—but more complex, multifaceted calculations. Perhaps the lack of physical attraction to someone is a signal that shouldn’t be ignored, a sign that you are not compatible at some molecular level, that your offspring would be weaker and less likely to survive.

But in any case, whether or not it’s appropriate or good that we are not attracted to certain people, for most of us, it’s unavoidable. And I, for one, find it extremely painful. It’s the cruellest irony. I am longing to meet someone, but just when I do meet a man who seems ideally suited in many ways—kind, sincere, ready for a relationship, intelligent, cultured, prosperous; someone with whom I have a great deal in common, with whom I could surely build a rich, enjoyable and comfortable life—that spark of physical attraction is stubbornly absent. Surely, I can’t help feeling, I can somehow generate it, if I stack those logs into a clever pyramid and scrunch up enough paper for kindling, I can coax out a lick of flame? But the kindling is waterlogged. Despite its well-deserved reputation for sunshine, no city is more stubbornly gloomy and sopping than Sydney amid a flurry of wet winter days, when one clattering downpour follows another. And despite my own greedy, open-mouthed and sticky-fingered pleasure in physical intimacy, no one is more stubbornly reluctant, more averse to sexual closeness than I am when my pilot light is out.

There’s a well-known cartoon about the double standards people—and especially women, generally the fussier sex—apply with regard to sexual advances from those they fancy versus those who don’t appeal.

I don’t think it’s quite right for the kinds of cases I’m talking about, though—unless the Human Resources department I’m calling is located within my own brain. I feel zero offence: all my annoyance is directed inward. Sometimes it may come across as a prickliness towards the person concerned, an inexplicably grumpy mood—but the real focus of my irritation is myself.

I’m keenly aware of my own disadvantages on the dating market as a 56-year-old woman. I’m also painfully conscious of how rare certain qualities I value are among my cohort—in particular, a love of reading. Anyone who loves books—even those who currently have little time for reading but used to read in the past—has a different outlook on life, a broader, richer, more intellectually sophisticated outlook. The traces of that are clear even after everything they have read has been forgotten, visible as a tide mark of water on silk, depositing a patina like the teddy bear softness of a favourite pair of jeans, creating a comfortable, inviting familiarity. Encountering such a person always makes me feel that I can relax, that I don’t need to explain myself, that even if we don’t have the same points of reference, haven’t perused the same authors, don’t share the same favourites, we both know what it means to see life through that prism, to have a parallel world of imagination to draw on, to know what it is to experience things twice: once in reality and once in description. And just as I can tell if someone is a good tango dancer without seeing them make a single move, just by the way they carry themselves and embrace their partners, by the posture of their body, upright yet perfectly relaxed, I can tell if someone is a reader before they have made any references to books or writers, in the way they talk, in the way they listen.

Can a meeting of minds ever become a meeting of bodies? Of course, this can happen. But I think that’s usually the result of overlooking or not realising a burgeoning physical attraction. When the body is quiet, indifferent, tardy, the mind can lead the way. Desire can be a slumbering beast, a sleeping beauty waiting for the glass coffin to be jolted and the apple in the throat dislodged. This is much less likely to happen when the body has already firmly pronounced its veto. William Godwin tells of having fallen in love with his fellow writer Mary Wollstonecraft (author of the celebrated early feminist work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1798) before he met her or even knew what she looked like, purely from her writing. The writer I most admire is Samuel Johnson. I am deeply in love with his perfect blend of sharp intelligence, devastating humour and profound compassion. But if Johnson came to life again and courted me, could I date him? Could I let this man whose words have been such an important part of my life, become so enmeshed with my memory and imagination, be intimate with my body? Could I have sex with Johnson? Frankly, I don’t believe I could.

A friend told me that she once stayed out late with an attractive but louche younger man and ended up on his couch, fully dressed still, but receiving a back massage from his well-oiled hands that had slipped up beneath her T-shirt. “I’ve got to go now,” she told him. “Stay,” he coaxed. “I can tell your body wants this.” “My body isn’t the boss here. I am,” she said. And left. I love that story and have thought about it often. I don’t buy the advice that you should always trust your body. As writer Helen Pluckrose once put it, “Of course I don’t trust my body. My body wants to sit on the couch all day, drinking wine, eating chocolate and smoking cigarettes. My body is an idiot.” Whenever I meet a man I otherwise like very much but do not feel attracted to, I’m reminded of just what an idiot my ‘body’ really is (or, in reality, some part of my mind that feels more intimately connected to bodily sensations and desires). But while I can stay off the couch and avoid daydrinking, this is an area in which its imperative commands cannot be disobeyed and its veto is too often absolute. This idiot rules me. I wish it were otherwise.

Once upon a time, in ancient Persia, so the legend goes, King Jamshed ruled over a vast empire, stretching from the frozen wastes of Siberia to the scorching sands of Egypt. From Babylon to Rhodes, from Persepolis to Thebes, Zoroastrianism was the religion of the peoples living around the huge crescent of lands in which wild grains grew and hunter-gatherer nomads were turning into pastoralists and clustering into the first settled human habitations, the first towns and cities, the beginnings of civilisation.

Jamshed was so close to the Zoroastrian god that he had not a vizier or a first minister but an actual angel as his counsellor of state. That angel warned him of a catastrophic flood that would sweep the globe and, in preparation, instead of building an ark, the Noah of our story brought one male and one female of every species up to higher ground, to wait until the waters receded, which they did—pleasingly, fittingly—on the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere, the only part of the globe then known to man. That first day, as the people and animals scrambled and slid down the slopes onto the spongy, muddy flats that had so recently been ocean, they declared the beginning of a new time, a new day, Jamshedi Navroze, the day the Iranians still celebrate as their new year.

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But people who are good at spinning yarns are not always good at maths. Perhaps it was just that not enough was known about the Earth’s exact speed and trajectory. How could it have been? These were a people who still believed in a geocentric universe in which the world was encased, like a Russian doll, inside sphere upon crystalline sphere. Or perhaps the makers of the calendar were simply seduced by the delights of symmetry. But either way, they divided their year into twelve months of thirty days each and the days of those months were not numbered but had thirty unique names, just as the days of the week do.* When they realised that this arrangement did not fit the reality of the changing seasons, they added five days to the twelfth month. This added up to a year of 365 days. You might think that that remaining quarter day, which completes the Earth’s orbital cycle of 365.25 days, would not be missed. But over time, of course, the calendar slipped ever further out of synch with the tilt of the Earth’s axis and the human New Year lagged ever further behind the natural one.

Many centuries later, when Persia was Islamised by the sword, a small group of Zoroastrians left for India. These exiles, like exiles everywhere, were highly conservative, nostalgic for the old traditions. They clung to the customary calendar until now we Parsis celebrate our New Year, the Shahenshahi Navroze, in August, a time that is not a beginning of anything, a time of harvest, of the hazy dog days of summer in the north and here in the south, winter’s crisp, bright, sunny last hurrah, its last chance to nip at my naked toes when I do my morning yoga on the balcony, the last outings of my woollen beanie, the last opportunities for Sydney’s ocean breezes to rouge my cheeks on the morning ferry. An August New Year is more fitting down here than it is in India, sweltering in the pre-monsoon heat. Spring is in the air here and new beginnings feel more meteorologically aligned.

But of course, every beginning imposed by human will is artificial. We choose a moment at random and we declare: here we plant our marker; here we place our starting blocks; here we draw our line in the sand. “Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning,” writes George Eliot at the beginning of her novel Daniel Deronda:

Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars’ unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backward as well as forward, divides his unit into billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off in medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story sets out.

Since Eliot wrote those words in 1876, of course, science has established a beginning of cosmological time—the Big Bang, the moment when the stopwatch started and where there had been nothing, there was something: the New Year of the Universe. This cosmic beginning is unimaginable to me. To move from the macro to the micro, the beginning of my own existence—while imaginable—is hidden from my consciousness. Like the universe, when I began there was no I, just a plucky little spermatozoon delivering its precious cargo to a waiting egg, a puddlejumper docking onto a giant space station where the hatches opened and the crew strode out onto the promenade, ready to change everything forever.

Like many people, I cling to the illusion of the fresh beginning that a new year offers. I leap on every new year I can find—from the midnight chimes of 31 December to the lamps of Diwali and the red lanterns of the Year of the Snake. I’ve made many false starts in life; I’ve had several fresh beginnings. I’m on my seventh country, my fourth continent, in a place where in past centuries many people began their new lives, whether in sorrow—torn from everything and everyone they had ever known and loved, lurching across the wide ocean towards servitude in a land of unknown hardships—or in hope—with gold in their sights or sunshine or simply the excitement of the new. Here, amid alcoholics and petty thieves, many made that fresh state and prospered, just as my paternal ancestors the Parsis were to prosper in the new land they sailed to when they left their native Persia and crossed the Arabian Sea in wooden boats or made the arduous trek on horseback across the Hindu Kush.

Once again as the New Year begins, I hope this is the place in which I will flourish; I hope this is the year in which I will flourish. Our New Year falls in the middle of the calendar year, in the middle of the month, in the middle of the week. Every year, I find myself confused as to its exact date and have to Google it several times. The arbitrary nature of a New Year is therefore always crystal clear to me. As is the fact that this specific date will whoosh past like a Doppler shift, without altering anything. And yet, I feel optimistic. I’m alive; I’m healthy; I have my wits about me and I live in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Life has many pleasures in store, both known and unknown. I have high hopes for the year, a vehicle straight from the showroom with that new car smell. My ride around the sun at over a hundred thousand kilometres an hour is here. I’m strapping in. Let’s drive!

*I’ve simplified this story quite a lot. You can find many more detailed version online: here, for instance.

Note: The ten days preceding Parsi New Year in mid-August (it falls on 20 August in 2025) are known as Mukhtad and are traditionally a time to commemorate and commune with beloved people who have “passed.” An audio version of this post can be found for paid subscribers here.

Introduction

I wrote the post that follows in 2017. It was an extraordinary year for me. I had never known physical terror before (nor have I since) but in that year, I experienced it three times. I had an episode of severe anaphylactic shock. I was ambushed on the street (an experience I describe elsewhere on this Substack). And I nearly drowned. The drowning episode inspired the name of this newsletter. I tell the story here.

So I had a keen, bright appreciation of the privilege it is to be alive on the day I describe below. I still do.

As for the dead—my parents both died before I hit puberty, within a couple of years of each other. My life would probably have been very different if they had survived. But other than that early tragedy, I’ve been surprisingly lucky in how few deaths there have been among my intimate circle. Only one other person I was really close to has died on my watch: indefatigable dancer, enveloping bear-hugger and inveterate dad-joker, Bruce Chadwick. I’ve commemorated him on this Substack, too.

Half my life has been spent communing with the dead. The composers of tango music and the musicians who interpreted their work were my companions for many hours of almost every day of a full decade of my life, when I lived in Buenos Aires and spent most of my time dancing Argentine tango. A DJ is a necromancer, summoning the spirits of the undead crooners, allowing us to party like it’s 1949.

And other dead voices have played a huge role in my life. I spent half a decade digging old journals and papers out of archives and rare books rooms and winding my way through microfilms like an old-fashioned film projectionist in the gloom of Cambridge University Library, often reviving the memories of journalists long forgotten, whose work was considered ephemeral trash at the time of writing and is now of vital historical interest.

Ever since I could read, I’ve been in the company of the long deceased—Jane Austen, Samuel Johnson, George Eliot, Henry James and others like them have been my companions, their words a ball of string to guide me safely through life’s labyrinth, even when its passages were especially dark and serpentine.

And among the host of the dead, I also count my paternal ancestors: the plucky Parsi traders and merchants, visionaries, overachievers, high in intelligence and resourcefulness, who built Bombay. Si monumentum requiris circumspice.

It seems fitting that Mukhtad falls at a bright sunny time of the year—and though it’s winter here in my upside-down home, the light is luminous today. I feel blessed in my friendly dead.

To reach the Saher agiary (Zoroastrian fire temple), I turned off the main street, where a guy squatted on the pavement, rinsing his Dixie-sized chai glasses in a bucket and followed a water bearer, his spindly walnut-brown legs protruding from a lunghi, bare torsoed, with a huge round silver-plated jug balanced on his head and another rotund jug precariously hooked in between elbow and waist. At the top of the lane, I entered a surprisingly homely courtyard, with washing strung at one end, and old men sprawled lazily in chairs, newspapers cracked open across their legs. The Bombay sky was dove grey and topped with a thick froth of slate grey clouds. The monsoon had lingered this year and there was a cool in the air. Spots of rain were dappling my glasses, so my world was adorned with tiny glinting freckles.

I knotted a triangle of headscarf over my hair, the one that makes me look half elf, half Russian babushka. On a brick shelf, there was a pot-bellied jug like the one the water carrier had brought and, bobbing in the water itself, a smaller cup—mother and daughter, Russian dolls. I poured the water over first one hand then the other and daubed my forehead and the back of my neck. Then I sloughed my shoes off awkwardly, hopping around. I’d forgotten to loosen the fastenings and it’s taboo to touch them with your hands once you’ve entered the agiary space. “Entrance for Parsis only” the sign warned, in both English and the squared off curlicues of Gujarati.

Inside, they were commemorating the dead.

I walked around the small space first, touching my hands to the picture frames then to my forehead and solar plexus. A priest looked out at me sternly from a black-and-white photograph, his shoulders draped with a paisley shawl. There were several likenesses of Zoroaster. But my favourite was an engraved mirror with an etching of him in black and white and silver on the glass, his thick curly hair and Dr Who-like scarf trailing like pennants, a lighted taper in his hand.

There were wooden benches around the walls and I took a seat. People were reading from small prayer books. An older lady sat with her head bent over a parallel text: Avestan on one side; Gujarati on the other. Two children were standing dutifully with folded hands. The men, children and old women sported velveteen caps; the rest of us the babushka cotton headsquares.

In front of the fire, there were two sheets laid out like picnic blankets, with cross legged priests at each corner. In front of the chubby priests in their white outfits, which look so much like surgical scrubs, a set of silver platters surrounded a lit brazier. The silver plates each held an apple, an orange and a knobbly guava. There was a tray of jasmine blossoms. Orange flames licked the air.

On one side of the room, a long L-shaped sideboard was laid out with silver vases containing long-stemmed blush-pink roses (oddly, while India is full of strongly perfumed flowers, these, like many blooms that are fragrant in the west, are scentless here). The priests were chanting in resonant monotones, almost together, not quite, overlapping like a badly-directed choir, hypnotic, sounding out the nasal diphthongs and many sibilants of a dead Persian language, open vowels rhyming, long-drawn out aaan aaan aaan aaan and au au au aus hanging in the air, with the smoke.

The fluttering ash reminded me of another end-of-year ceremony, back in Buenos Aires, where people tear up the pages of their diaries and calendars at the close of the office year and send the fragments fluttering down from their windows, whirling through the sultry summer air like a miraculous December snowshower. At year’s end, we burn away the old to ash, we rip it up into joyful showers of confetti; we remember our dead, both real and figurative, with long-stemmed roses—and then we let them go.

I set some intentions for the new year, as I sat fanning myself with one of the square paper fans they laid out for us, eyes tearing up a little from the smoke. I had new projects ahead. I was the subeditor of a digital magazine (I’m now the editor); I had a podcast; I had been interviewed several times. I was putting my words out into the world and curating other people’s words and I wanted them to be enriching. I hoped those words could promote calm, reason and sincerity in a media world of hysteria, partisanship and posturing. And I wanted to be less anxious, more focused, less scattered on the wind like the ash and paper.

I could have died several times that past year. Buffeted by the waves, storm tossed on that morning in Sri Lanka when I thought I might drown; mottled crimson all over and puffed up like a cobra, throat closing with anaphylactic shock just as I was helped panting onto a hospital bed in Breach Candy; and on a street in Andheri, trapped in a circle of hostile men, the most terrifying experience I have ever had.

Life is fragile. I will never take it for granted. I want to take each day one moment at a time and show up fully for each of them. I want to make this new year count.

I used to have superb verbal recall. When I was in my twenties, one of my party tricks was that if you gave me a line from Hamlet, I could recite the next three lines. Now, I can’t even read my own poetry aloud without a printout to jog my memory.

In some ways, this is a blessing because it enables me to revisit books and films with almost the enthusiasm of a new reader. I read my way through Agatha Christie’s entire oeuvre in my twenties; now, thirty years on, I can reread most of them—with the unfortunate exception of her masterpiece, And Then There Were None—with unbroken suspense. I have completely forgotten who dun it. In another thirty years (if I live that long, Ahura Mazda willing), I will probably have forgotten the perp of And Then There Were None as well.

Occasionally, as I sit down, hoping to indulge in the intense pleasure of discovering a literary treasure that I’ve somehow happily failed to read, I feel a disquieting sense of déjà vu. Once, while I was living in London, I humble-bragged to friends that it was extraordinary that I hadn’t read Goethe’s Faust. The spine of the copy on my bookshelf looked disconcertingly wrinkled, but I put that down to having perhaps purchased it second-hand. But when I slid it out and opened it, I found every margin scribbled over with my tell-tale handwriting. Notable passages had been underlined with a wobbly hand and as I leafed through, a few old Post-It notes, faded from highlighter-pen yellow to narcissus yellow with age, fluttered out, having lost their adhesive a decade earlier. When I was an academic, the old joke went, “Read it? I haven’t even taught it”—a quip that shows that even Eng Lit professors aren’t immune to the impulse to pretend to be too cool for school, insouciantly winging it, rather than swotting away with the nerds. Personally, I always did read the books I taught. Though, as in the case with Faust, I am fully capable of both reading and teaching something and then completely forgetting it.

As the old saying popularly attributed to Maya Angelou has it, “people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” This, for me, is true of books as much as of people. But sometimes, the feelings they arouse change on a rereading. I first read George Eliot’s epic society novel, Middlemarch, as an intense and earnest adolescent. When I picked it up again, I found that, while I rightly remembered the book’s emotional depth, Eliot’s humour had completely eluded me, as a stroppy teen with no sense of humour of my own at all. Similarly, I first read The Lord of the Rings, during the sexual awakening of puberty and intensely eroticised the relationship between Frodo and Sam. As the contemporary jargon has it, I shipped them. I was surprised on a later reading to find that the book is not simmering with barely repressed homosexual passion. (This probably says more about my teenage fantasies than you really need to know.)

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In fact, I generally either forget—or worse, misremember—so much about the books I read that I should probably revisit most of them. Perhaps the most book-rich period of my life was my undergrad degree. I read, as we called it back then, Eng Lit, which involved devouring a series of classic works, in chronological order, “from Beowulf to the present day,” as the prospectus grandly announced. At this point, it feels like false advertising to say that I’ve been schooled in the best literature in the English language. I was schooled in it—but am I still, given how much I have forgotten? Perhaps, some like other certifications, degrees should have an expiry date. In an ideal world, we would go back to uni every ten years or so and repeat the curriculum.

For most of history, most literate people possessed only a small number of (highly prized) books. The Clerk (scholar) in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387–1400) had twenty tomes ranged on the shelf above his bed, a number of which he was proud. Books were meant to be returned to again and again, scrutinised for fresh meanings, scoured for daily inspiration in the way that religious texts still are for believers. Huge advances in printing technology, coupled with the end of pre-publication censorship and government monopolies on printing in the 1690s, significantly changed that situation. For the first time in history, people began to complain not only that some books were shoddy but that there were simply too many books, full stop. Books were no longer valuable items to be treated with reverence. As Lady Mary Wortley Montagu told Jonathan Swift in 1734, “I’m glad you’ll write; ’twill furnish paper when I shite.”

I am primarily an extensive reader—ranging freely, retaining little. And strangely, how enthralled I am with a book doesn’t always bear any relation to how long I am able to recall its contents. For about five years in the early 2000s, my leisure reading was almost exclusively popular science, especially evolutionary biology. Two books in particular stand out for the intensity of the pleasure they gave me: H2O: A Biography of Water by Philip Ball and Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet by Oliver Morton. I vividly recall walking around for at least a week, in both cases, in a fervour of excitement at the astonishing inner workings and qualities of two mundane things: the water in my glass and the grass growing in Coram’s Fields, a five-minute stroll from our flat. I still remember vaguely that chlorophyll, like haemoglobin, is a ring-shaped molecule with a metal ion in its centre (magnesium in plants; iron in us). But I can tell you nothing more about how photosynthesis works. I remember only this impression of the layered quality of existence, of the secrets that lie hidden below the scale of human vision, like a teeming, bustling metropolis, concealed by high walls.

The first generations to live through the shift from intensive to extensive reading—from lovingly dogeared Bibles and works of the Classics to lending-library novels and flimsy newspapers read and discarded at coffee houses—battled the inadequacy of human memory with commonplace books, in which they would jot down their favourite quotations together with any striking thoughts that the books prompted. It must have been a comforting habit, giving you the sensation of making your book your own, weaving them into the tapestry of your mental world.

I do none of these things, but I clearly do have a strong nostalgia for personal cultural reference points. Like many people, I find these in science fiction. Sci fi and fantasy take place in alternative worlds and therefore their creators have to build those worlds from scratch and for a certain kind of person—and I’m definitely one such—the allure of those worlds is irresistible. Narnia is always there; you have only to open the wardrobe. As a child, I loved watching the series Mr Benn. Each episode begins with the protagonist entering the dressing room of a costume shop and trying on the outfit handed to him by a mysterious, twinkly-eyed shopkeeper. And each time, he opens the dressing room door to a new world that fits the outfit he’s now wearing. A cowboy’s stetson and spurs transport him to the Wild West; a chef’s whites take him to the kitchen of a queen; a spacesuit turns him into an astronaut. The clothes make the man. I recognise this format from the sci fi shows I love as an adult: Mr Benn is what sci fi aficionados call a Planet of the Week show.

I have my intensive reading texts, my Holy Books to which I always return: the works of Jane Austen and George Eliot, Shakespeare’s sonnets and even individual poems and short pieces of prose: “God's Grandeur”; “Ode on Melancholy”; “Of the Characters of Women”; Rasselas; The Left Hand of Darkness and perhaps most of all, “Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show.” These aren’t necessarily the works I feel are objectively the best. They aren’t even works associated with any particular moment in my life. But they are works that have become an integral part of my mental furniture, creaky old rattan chairs, armrests shiny with use, seats gently indented with the imprint of my bum.

But above all, it’s sci fi that I turn to when I want to revisit, rather than discover. Shows like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5 are my intensive reading, my Bibles. I’ve been through multiple full rewatches and have watched certain specific episodes again and again. In real life, while I won’t pass up a chance to travel or to see old friends who live abroad, I’m not aching with wanderlust. If some all-powerful being planted invisible force fields around Sydney, attuned to my personal DNA, and I knew I could never leave this city again, I would not be unhappy. Perhaps that's because I want to go further than anywhere this world has to offer.

But the longer I continue writing this essay, the more familiar these arguments are beginning to sound. That old uncomfortable déjà vu is creeping up on me again. I’m sure I’ve made these points before, I’ve used this imagery, these examples before. I’m looking forward to my friends growing old, so that I can tell them my rambling anecdotes a dozen times and recycle ancient jokes, taking full advantage of the amnesia brought on by senility. But in the meantime, I’d better stop here, since I may have said everything in this essay once—may even more than once—already. If so, it’s been a pleasure to say it again. My poor memory takes the tedium out of repetition for me. That’s the joy of forgetting.

The last three men I matched with on dating apps were not men at all—they were bots. In two of those cases, it was immediately clear to me that the responses I was getting to my attempts at playful chit chat did not pass the Turing test.

“I would like to get to know you,” the words in my chat bubble said. “Would you like to get to know me?” When I responded in the affirmative, the lines unfurled onto the pace lightning-fast, as if robot fingers were flashing across the keyboard at superhuman speed:

In my free time, you can find me immersed in a good book, cheering on my favourite sports teams, or embarking on a road trip to discover hidden gems. I’m also a dance floor enthusiast, spinning and swaying to the rhythm with abandon, even if my moves don’t always hit the mark.

In the third case, I was temporarily fooled. The guy seemed very considerate. He had certainly read my profile and was responding to specific details I had posted there, asking careful follow-up questions about work and hobbies. But something seemed a little off, a little pat. And when I asked, “What do you do for a living?,” the response was, “That’s fascinating! What an insightful thing to say! I would very much like to know what you do for a living.” Looking back at our previous conversation, I saw that all the rejoinders I had thought showed genuine interest in me were actually a mixture of sycophancy and rephrasings of my own words.

I’m not the only person to have noticed that the apps have become infested with such bots and to feel rage and despair at encountering them so often. It feels like the very worst kind of teasing. I am a digital Tantalus, clutching at branches laden with fruit only to find myself repeatedly grasping thin air. At the very moment at which I most long for human connection, I am offered a hollow simulacrum. I already feel like a fool a lot of the time when I’m dating—foolish for getting my hopes up only to be stood up or ghosted. This makes me feel doubly foolish. And it sews distrust among those of us who are human. Anyone of us could be a Cyclon! And you never know when “All Along the Watchtower” will start to play.

It feels like the worst possible manifestation of a wider phenomenon that has been worrying me for years: the increasing shift away from real-life, person-to-person human interactions.

There are many things I hugely appreciate about the increasingly online nature of our world. It means, for example, that instead of trekking out to an office every day, I can remain comfortably ensconced at home, browsing the fridge for leftovers if I get peckish, taking a cat nap if I’m drowsy, pre-listening to podcasts and recordings (part of my job) while walking Cookie through the local park, stooping to pet every silky-haired cavoodle we pass (they are legion in our genteel Sydney suburb).

The easy accessibility of the digital also means that I retain at least a tiny thread of connection with friends from past stages in my life, from whom I am now separated by tens of thousands of miles of land and ocean. And it means that I can interview fascinating people I would never otherwise have been able to make contact with. I’ve even used social media to amass a real-life group of friends. Thanks to my work, I have a lot of Twitter mutuals and if I see that someone who seems simpatico is based in Sydney, I arrange to have coffee in real life and we generally end up becoming offline friends, too, who see each other in the flesh at least periodically—and in many cases, often.

So, yes I love the geographical freedoms and enlarged sphere of acquaintanceship that technology brings, in enabling us to communicate across wide distances. I even feel close to some people whom I know only as disembodied text on a screen. But such things can only be a supplement to real-life intimacy. And its ease and immediacy make online communication all too ready a replacement for physical presence. Since our time and energy are finite, we humans evolved to take short cuts wherever possible. Those who preferred to meander along by the scenic route were probably bred out of the gene pool eons ago.

It erodes our social relations when, instead of calling someone on the phone or meeting up with them for a drink, we content ourselves with sending a WhatsApp message or commenting on a Facebook post. But alongside this attenuation of our interactions we people we know in the flesh, there is an uncanny valley of conversations with interlocutors whom we will never know, of threads of text that seem like a sheet woven from spider-silk, a translucent pico-layer of reality, beneath which is the abyss. And it’s at the times in my life when I’ve been at my most vulnerable—looking for a job, looking for a companion—that possibilities have proven most ghostly and insubstantial.

A decade or so ago, I was working as a editor and translator. There were many different online agencies that offered to pair up freelancers in those fields with jobs—sometimes for a small fee, though most were free of charge. The more “reputable” ones set various translation tests and exams and even held Zoom interviews. I was repeatedly told that I had aced the tests and that they would be excited to pair me up with commissions soon. Soon, I was signed up to dozens of such agencies. None of them ever resulted in a job. Thankfully, I now have a job I love—but finding love has itself become a thankless job.

In his book A Universe from Nothing, Lawrence Krauss imagines life in a distant future, when the universe has expanded to a point at which it is impossible to even see the stars across the vastnesses of empty space, leaving the inhabitants of any future Earth to look up at a black sky. I found this vision terrifying and beautiful and wrote a sonnet about it.

We are alone. Our warp ships have not found
On any planet other than our own
Life forms except bacteria. All around,
Beyond our mega galaxy, a zone
Of nothingness extends: without a star,
Nor radiation, plasma everywhere—
A universe in which Zorbanians are
The only sentient species. But I hear
A crazy scientist claims that long ago
The universe was more compact; and near
Enough to see, they set the sky aglow
Our stellar neighbours, our red-shifted brothers
Until the dark force tore us from each other.

In many ways, technology has shrunk the globe. In the world of Jane Austen’s novels, thirty miles of muddy, rutted country road can be an impassable distance. A different county can be a world away. The hundred-odd miles that separate Mansfield Park and Southampton keep Fanny Price from seeing her own parents for eight years—and is probably a longer journey than Austen herself ever made. By contrast, I have crisscrossed the world dozens of times. But yet technology has kept us apart because it has made it possible to replace warm breathing human beings with mere words and images on a screen. Like the dark energy that is scattering the stars, we seem sometimes to be accelerating away from each other. Or worse—there may not be an each other; behind the pixels there may be no human consciousness at all.

W. H. Auden once remarked, “The best reason I have for opposing fascism is that at school I lived in a fascist state.” I used to cite this often: my own all-girls’ boarding school—at least from my admittedly jaded perspective—was a cross between the army, a nunnery, a prison and the island of Lord of the Flies. This characterisation isn’t quite accurate. I do not remember ever feeling real fear of anything that might happen at school. There was no extreme brutality, no tortures, no dread. And—unlike life in fascist state—I was always comforted by the knowledge that at some point school would end and the rest of my life would begin.

In many ways, I think I was lucky that school was an all-female environment. Outside of juvenile penitentiaries and secure psych wards, girls don’t tend to beat each other up. And, while a few of our housemistresses had a mildly creepy manner, outright sexual abuse of children is also much rarer among our sex. I do remember one housemistress, who referred to us as her “little birds.” Her favourite task was telling girls about The Facts of Life, which she preferred to impart one on one. She would creep into the dorm after lights out on theatrical tippy-toes, with one finger to her pursed lips miming a need for secrecy, and plop her plump body down by the bedside of that night’s victim, whom she would inform, in a sing-song voice, about menstruation, pregnancy and sexual intercourse, while gently stroking the girl’s hair. Finally, she would gently placing a couple of panty liners and an applicator tampon on the bedside table. “I’ll just leave these there,” she’d say, “for when you need them,” patting the little pile for gentle emphasis. At the time, I found her behaviour painfully embarrassing and I tutted inwardly at the fact that most of us had already started our periods and were in no need of her guidance. Now, in retrospect, she seems mildly paedophile-coded. But she was not a threat and, as far as I know, no one suffered more a bit of shame at her attentions.

School—unlike a fascist state—is clearly temporary. There’s a clear end-date to look forward to. I was always comforted by the knowledge that at some point this would end and the rest of my life would begin.

However, the school definitely did have a few things in common with an authoritarian state. For one thing, the school’s prefect system entailed older girls exercising power over younger ones and this power was often exercised in completely arbitrary ways. Giving some children authority over others is rarely a good idea. When I was thirteen, I read William Golding’s novel The Lord of the Flies, scrunched up in a ball against the cold, gripping the radiator, in one of the window seats in our school library. I will never forget the thrill of recognition. This leafy campus in the London suburbs was our jungle island. I never became a prefect myself, never put on what I, with the histrionic sensibility of a stroppy teenager, thought of as the jack boots.

Perhaps the worst physical thing to happen to me at school was a “boot-room bashing,” as we called it, though it took place not in the actual boot room—though we had one, complete with metal scraper to remove stubborn mud from our boot soles—but in a downstairs cloakroom with exposed heating pipes that burned your hands if you unwarily grasped hold of them. Despite the sinister possibilities for scalding people that the room’s odd climbing-frame structure of pipework suggested, as far as I know, that never happened. It certainly never happened to me.

Instead, what took place in that boot room, in a weird parodic version of something out of the show Benny Hill, was that your bottom would get pinched. I was subjected to the full version of this only once. Two girls held my arms while a third knelt down behind me and, with vicious little fingernails, pinched my flat prepubescent buttocks hard about a dozen times. The physical pain was made worse by the taunts. According to girlhood lore, this treatment would destroy the elasticity of your skin forever. Once pinched, a bottom could never regain its bounce; you’d be a saggy buttocks for life. I didn’t fully believe this—but nor was I confident enough to be certain it was untrue. I quietly vowed that I would never go to Italy—a land where, I had heard, you couldn’t walk down the street without men pinching your buttocks a dozen times per block. Our buttock-pinching wasn’t sexual, though: it was pure sadism, a nasty little sting. It happened to me a few times outside the boot room too. You had to be careful how you stood and who you stood next to, if you didn’t want a girl’s pincer fingers to land on your fleshy parts like a human horse fly and administer a nasty sting.

Another aspect of totalitarian rule is, of course, the arbitrariness of its punishments. The clearest example of this at school happened during my first few years, under a housemistress who loved her fire drills. With the casual unkindness of the young, we nicknamed her The Toad. She had two large dogs—whose glossy fur we were not allowed to touch—who had been trained to bark at the sound of a man’s footsteps (The Toad always pronounced that word as if it were written in italics.) We had a regimen of chores to do. The younger girls would have to weed the “patio” (a crazy-paved area that divided each schoolhouse from the semi-circular lawn we called the garth). It was unpleasant work, tugging the long tap-roots of dandelions out from between the gaps in the paving stones. It was hard to get a purchase on the slippery stalks and our knuckles would be skinned by the rough edges of the concrete. But at least it was obvious when the task had been done: no one was going to replant dandelions into those narrow crevices.

Our nighttime task was easier to undo. We had to empty the small dustbins in the prep room and TV room (so-called even though there was no TV in there and we weren’t allowed to watch telly anyway). After they had been emptied, they had to be lined with newspaper, which was to be carefully folded over the rim of each dustbin like the beginnings of an origami swan. Then the empty bins were hoisted up onto the top of our lockers (which didn’t lock, of course, since you were not allowed to have any secrets from Matron) and we younger girls trooped upstairs, as we had to be ready by for our bedtime inspection by 8.30pm, before lights out at 9. But since the older forms didn’t have to go to bed for another hour, the older girls would toss their snotty tissues and sweet wrappers nonchalantly into the already-emptied bins. And when The Toad came round for her nighttime inspection, she would find those bins unemptied. And, as punishment, she would call a fire drill later that night.

In my memory, this happened most nights—though it can’t have been that often. I do know that on one particular freezing night, we had three fire drills at half-hour intervals. At some point in the small hours, our dreams would be interrupted by an earsplitting ringing, like an old-fashioned bell but at ten times the usual volume. The fluorescent ceiling lights would be flicked on at once and we’d stumble downstairs half-blinded, pulling arms through terrycloth dressing gowns and shuffling on slippers as we went, out onto the grass of the garth, to line up in number order (we were assigned numbers at the beginning of each year, based on height; in my first year, I was one of the very shortest and assigned the number three). My toes would slowly grow numb as the damp from the grass seeped through the cloth of my slippers. “Step forward Number Three!” The Toad declaimed on one unlucky night when I was the scapegoat. “Girls,” she thundered, emitting a cloud of frozen breath, “we are here right now because This One did not empty her bin!”

She must surely have known what was actually happening, have realised that we younger girls were not simply refusing to empty the bins as an act of pure defiance.

I don’t mean to imply by any of this that I was traumatised by my school years. As I’ve mentioned here before, I was remarkably immune to teasing and bullying. I took a snobbish attitude towards the other girls (and towards most of the teachers and staff, too). I genuinely didn’t care about so many of the things that the other pupils at my school seemed to be obsessed with: fashion and make up, cigarettes, pop music and boys. Every year, on Old Girls’ Day, when the school filled with nostalgic former pupils, our schoolhouse was abuzz with gossip as the girls graded, critiqued and envied or pitied the adult women who were revisiting us, on the basis of two things alone: how thin (or otherwise) they were and whether or not any accompanying boyfriend or husband was fanciable. I didn’t care if I was despised by a group whose values seemed so shallow. I wasn’t a a dandelion poking my head out from amid slabs of crazy paving, waiting for a schoolgirl hard to twist and tug me out by the roots. I was a dormant seed, encased in a nut-hard integument, waiting for the right conditions to germinate.

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