In June I was asked by Rich Mix to put together a list of resources staff and the public could use to aid discussion and activism around dismantling racism in the UK.

This is a very loose Films With Great Backstories: another lockdown special, if you will, because not by accident did I spend many, many hours in these past few weeks thinking about mis-direction and how much we can ever trust our leaders.

On the last day of 2019, the brilliant Zing Tsjeng posted an Instagram of how she had spent the year learning to grow and cook her own vegetables. Now the caption is almost alarmingly prescient…

I joined TikTok on the day my first client shut.

I don’t think I can write about now coherently, or in a way I won’t want to change later, because there is no distance. As much as it is tempting to do so.

A few years ago I gave a talk at Generic Greeting’s birthday party in Manchester about ‘things I wish I had known before going freelance’, and at the time I promised myself I would put that advice online too, so here we finally are.

Later that summer we drove out in Ana’s converted police van to the lakes. Conscientious Germans were always leaving notes on that van, guiding her on how to look after it (“fuck this yet again” Ana would growl, scrunching the dutiful notes into the gutter), and Ana was keen to get it out of the city after it had failed whatever the equivalent of an MOT is in Germany.

I hadn’t seen Ana in two years, but she met me at the airport dressed as Vivian Ward from Pretty Woman, with a sign for Kit De Luca in her hands.

A week after I got fired, I had to put my dog down.

I’ve left a lot of best friends and home towns. I’ve closed a lot of bedroom doors for the final time, their contents long shipped off to a new four walls. But I’ve never cried before leaving. I don’t know if I’ve ever cried more in front of anyone.

It's late in the morning, half nine, ten maybe, and the sun has forced its way through the half-closed shutters. There's a beam of it on my face, which feels tight from the heat yesterday, and the drinking, and the salty food, and I suppose the dusty city streets of Barcelona. But this isn't what wakes me.

Here's the thing: we've been oversold on happiness. It isn't everything, it shouldn't be your be-all-and-end-all, and when it stops being that, a general state of fair-to-middling contentment becomes far easier to locate.  

I was 29 and needed glasses for the first time and had to stop eating anything sweet at all because it hurt too much and I suddenly realised I was at that peak age maybe day or month where everything was the best it could be and the deterioration was beginning.

I was sat in the back of maths, our last lesson of the school year, with my best friend, Tracey, and a heavily amended list of names shoved beneath my exercise book.