The artist and writer Laura Grace Ford speaks of ‘the stain of a place’.
I understand this as referring to something so ‘lived in’ that you can never remove the traces it has left; spaces that trigger personal as well as generalised ghosts.
I’ve always found it hard speaking about my home town. Natives are fiercely defensive of it, whilst outsiders still utilise its Victorian reputation to ridicule the place.
I think its the same as the love you have for a family member. Love that you have no choice in. Unconditional love, that is inevitably mixed with hatred, resent and sorrow.
I have often flopped into my home town after a ‘try hard’ endeavour into a nearby city, to find myself met with a deep warmness and sense of community. Equally I have experienced my bleakest and most regrettable nights here, sat drinking by myself in bars that feel like the end of the world, and walking out into what have often felt like the saddest streets on earth.
I wouldn’t feel either of these things in a different place. Although I have built up affinities and affection for nearby towns and cities, the only place it has ever truly stuck to me is in their lonely exits, on train station platforms.
The ‘stain of a place’ finds its visual representative in the soot-stained terraces, the kind that gives all those born in the catchment of the London Brick Company the heebie jeebies. For there is indeed an malevolent aura: a revenge reaped on the sandstone of old river deltas that crushed Carboniferous plants into the zombie energy of coal.
This town has an ego the size of Manchester. It’s true. Perhaps it lacks the accolade, the history, the cultural icons, but it most certainly has a sense of itself that is usually only associated with a town that claims to have made ‘the modern world’.
Perhaps it’s the town hall? In relative terms it dominates the skyline like the Eiffel Tower or St Pauls cathedral (once did). Despite the criticism it received from George Orwell, who watched it get built whilst thousands of the town’s people lived in squalor, it’s legacy outweighs its conception – for it has a gravitational pull towards a kind of civic monotheism, successfully dragging countless ex-coal villages scattered miles around it into its orbit.
I am admittedly in a state of perpetual flight from its vortextual pull. I can find it suffocating. But it’s something worth recognising for its uniqueness, even in my difficult years of alcoholism and alienation where some make-believe West Country sanctuary perpetually calls my name.
Sometimes walking through the centre feels like I’m on an acid trip in a overly-familiar soap opera set. Sometimes it gets too much. But it will always be here with me now. I will always be part-hometown.
Sorry for being trapped in the 20th century dealing with the 21st.
And sorry for being unable to make any sense whatsoever – locked as we are inside the maddening house, where a ‘just do it’ Californian approach to life has left us all burnt out people on a burning planet.
Deep down we all desire nothing more than to ‘escape’ from inside the maddening house – yet we see the state violence inflicted on those beyond its walls.
Words such a ‘digital age’ or ‘social media’ feel vastly insufficient to describe how we have collectively been affected. We have been changed. There is some sense we have been rewired, and do not resemble what we once were.
There has been catastrophic breakdown in the conjunctive purpose of dialogue over the last 15 years. Debating has become everything, yet this inability for new understanding to arise from the dialogue overrides all the facts, all sense of being on the right or wrong side of justice. Indeed, sometimes the only joy to be found is to be so wrong that you can at least revel in nihilistic acts.
People are suffocating, ‘spiritually’, and all too often when they gasp for air we palm their mouths shut because of the problematic utterances they produce.
‘Wokeness’ isn’t a problem because it goes too far, but precisely because it refuses to go far enough. At best it castrates and polices a deep desire to ‘escape’ which lies under every aspect of 21st century life. At worst it becomes an top-down autocratic sensibility of a professional class with an acceptable face, who cannot allow our true desires to be realised because they can’t be honest and admit that they don’t really want anything to change (except the expectation that we will become just another smiling face in the corporate blob).
‘Elon Musk calls ‘woke’ a ‘mind virus’, but what many of the loudest ‘anti-woke’ influencers have shown us is how dangerous it is to be only ‘half-right’. We are all condemned to be half-right in this binarising breakdown of dialogue. But if we, with the arrogance of Musk, assume we are completely right, then we miss the point that we are all half-right but fatally half-wrong. ‘Woke’ doesn’t exist in a vacuum; if there is a ‘mind virus’ that splits the collective psyche, then two sides signals danger.
However, virus’s aren’t always bad in the long run. What we are left with is the task of rejoining and reclaiming the new through their rejoining – to escape the frozen images of affiliations afforded to us by the 20th century. Difficult, even mad to suggest. But what else can you do other than shout mad things when you’re locked inside the maddening house?
I’ll begin audaciously by saying that nobody destroying communities up and down England over the past week likes themselves.
To be even more audacious, I’d say that every one of them secretly hates themselves.
I know the signs. I know the politics of self-hate: a reality of hopelessness where only vengeance and bullying bring joy.
You hate yourself so much that the politics and cultures of hope appear to be laughing in your face.
Even if you’ve been disenfranchised by an economic and political system that has reduced your quality of life, nothing makes you as bitter and resentful as seeing groups of people who seem to get joy and pride from their lives.
And pride is an important word here.
Provoked by the horror in Southport, the current shambolic scenes may be directly racist, but this is also indirectly a rage against communities such as the LBTQ.
This is because what we are seeing is a protest of shame versus pride. And by extension death-drive versus life-drive.
All these peoples’ proclamations of ‘national pride’, of being ‘true England’ are wishful thinking: they feel part of nothing. What permeates their lives is a lonely shame.
On one level they act out the shame caused by a brutally binary meritocracy of neoliberalism that produces an atmosphere of humiliation for those who don’t fit on the ‘guest list’ , on the other hand they blindly invert a collective shame over our nation’s colonial history into a zombie-ish celebration of it.
We laugh at them, us ‘woke’ folk. We mock the ‘pathetic’ existence of those fat bald thick cunts, with beer bellies sticking out of stereotypically low-brow clothing. The endemically self-conscious Left performs the highly problematic shift from understanding social reality through environmental causality to the finger pointing of individualist condemnation, and spits in the face of these ‘deplorables’.
BUT….
What if you think like a Leftist, see reality like a Leftist, yet at the same time know that you feel the same shitty feelings about your life as the far right ‘morons’?
That’s my issue….
I have spent my 30s onwards battling to remain on the same pitch as the Left, and it’s entirely down to how I have felt about my life.
Perhaps it’s all due my early adult life mental health and confidence problems that meant I struggled to leave the environment I grew up in?
Even wording it like this sounds terribly judgemental. But it’s what’s expected, right?: to move on and out? And ever since then I have felt increasingly caught between two increasingly distinctive cultures who increasingly despise one another. At best I feel alienated from the communities I once thought I should belong to, and at worst judged by them.
But in-between this, I do feel like I have been afforded an insight I believe is rare now: an ability to understand the ‘why’ on both polarities – as deranged as the ‘whys’ may have now become.
I am seeing people from the nearest thing I can now call ‘my home environment’ who are by and large decent and intelligent people being pushed down a self-pathologising worm hole, where their identities are sieved down to leave only the most jingoistic and reactionary nuggets.
Maybe this has been happening for a long time, but it is only clear to me in the wake of the 2010s.
I saw myself as vaguely part of a ‘Millennial left’. We were ‘post-historical’ children. We were promised a world free of struggle and upheaval. However, after the disillusioning experience of New Labour, and the despair of Cameron’s Britain, 2010s’ Corbyn’s Labour promised to resuscitate the ‘another 21st century’ that we all still mournfully carried like an undead child inside of us.
But between 2019 and 2020 we saw the demolition and exhaustion of what, to many of us, felt like such a necessity that the concept of losing felt impossible.
Bereft of this, I have battled to feel part of anything. I have felt increasingly like a pensioner-before-their-time, watching a world that no longer looks back at me.
It’s been so hard to feel any sense of connection to the current progressive movements, and increasingly easier to feel alienated from them.
I trust my conscience. I trust myself never to get sucked into the ‘other camp’ in this increasingly binary way of identifying. But I still believe my own pain, of feeling decreased life expectations, and increasing loneliness, under a ‘structure of feeling’ that suggests that I no longer matter, is the same pain that is producing the people I have seen acting like ‘bell ends’ on cell phone videos this week.
The images are very similar to the footage of angry middle aged drivers jumping out of their immobile vehicles to tear Just Stop Oil protestors from the ground. We mock these ‘bigoted’ people, but what an active Left fails to often understand that these people, systematically bought-off with 1st world pharmacons, cannot but know what is happening to the world, but also know that due to the fact that they are part of nothing bigger than themselves, and thus have no pride, that they can never be in a position to do anything.
Hopelessness hits us all differently, and we all perceive our fortunes from the vantage afforded us in our formative years. Alas, people born in the UK to culturally assimilated family still have a formative vantage defined by privilege based in future-gain. It is an extremely painful experience to watch it slowly erode before your eyes, and ultimately before a world that justifiably has no sympathy, no matter how much you protest that your family were working class and weren’t part of ‘the empire’.
Let me be clear, the folk at these protests terrify me. I saw a group of middle-aged white blokes yelling ‘England, England’ in the face of a man of seemingly Asian-descent a few months back, and it sent the shivers down my back that emanate from memories of playground bullies: “get out of sight, before they get you!”.
But I also believe that I identify with their pain, even if they (most likely) don’t even recognise their suffering. It is obvious from the footage on display that the majority of the people we can see are living piss-shit lives.
Whether they are the consequence of what we have valued in our society for the last 40 years, or just because every society must, by some mathematical equation, have to produce a certain number of angry fascists, I still feel that in my worst moments of shame and self-hate I wake up with the same residual despair and disgust as people who, on the street, are my enemy – more than with people who are factually on my side.
I’ve put a lot of work in at my studio a lot of the last 4 days, and I am very pleased with the way things are going from the perspective of the artwork.
However, the ache from neglecting other aspects of my life has been creeping in. These are aspects of my life that I admittedly continually try to circumvent because they are trapped within lifestyle equations I don’t know how to solve. I was consumed with the concerns that I’m going down the same self-isolating path, where, no matter the quality of the artwork I produce, life doesn’t improve.
With this in mind, I looked at my pushbike that I sometimes store in my studio when I get the train home.
I recalled the heavily-memed H.G Wells’ quote that “Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future”. Because, interestingly, what is often overlooked is the standpoint of the cyclist. Ten minutes on a bike (as long as there’s no gale-force wind, winter rain or road rage) and you no longer despair in YOUR future.
I weirdly find jumping on my bike one of the hardest acts; a mind-set will doggedly refuse to evict itself, and sees the bike and feels threatened.
Emotionally, I was crying out for this bike ride home, and, importantly, I needed to go the longer route, due to what I would see there.
…and what I would see was my own actions; actions that I find it ever-harder to recollect as the pressures to have at least some material stature of as an adult aged 40 has slowly washed away the significance of the more passionate artistic acts that punctuated my 20s.
The above quote was anonymously submitted to a project I co-led as part of a collective project way back amidst the ‘Corbynista’ heat of 2018 (or so it seemed) that promised to not only wipe out student debt, but the inherited shame of countless millennials.
I suspect I know who wrote it, and I am comfortable saying so, because we have admitted that we share very similar feelings, as we persist and persist as artists often in the ‘dark matter’ of culture, now irretrievably captured and rewired by the social media artist-subjectivity which includes all content creators.
Likewise, I often struggle to feel proud about all the things I have done.
Even when I cycle I am vulnerable to achievement-obsessed thinking, and even as I cycled as fast as I could up and over the ridge of hills that separate the drainage basins of the river Calder and Dearne and recollected how much I love this area in summer, it was only as I descended past the Yorkshire Sculpture Park that I forced myself to stop and observe the fruits of things I had done.
This area sits on the boundary of South and West Yorkshire. Unlike North or East Yorkshire, which will no doubt conjure an idea and cultural identity defined by either the coast, the ancient or the rural, West and South Yorkshire were seen as industrial, and in turn are now identified as post-industrial.
The problem with the notion of the post-industrial is that it is easily conflated with the notion of ‘post-historical’. Together they can habitually collude in culture, politics and the psyche to create a sense that the march of time stood still at some point in the final years of the 20th century. Indeed, this vague point has created a perception of a default moment, which perpetually feels like it was only yesterday.
This frozen clock is perpetually and rudely arrested by a conflicting reality, of an acceleration of tech, tensions and other things on a global scale. But also on a local scale. The default mode cannot understand the level of development going on, as the infrastructure bows under the pressure.
This is quite a lengthy way to explain the geography of this area. Yet, between the haphazard sprawl of West and South Yorkshire, there still remains a curved gap of land which is still largely rural. The Yorkshire Sculpture Park sits at the middle of what can seem like a little oasis, which rivals the rolling green landscapes of Dorset or Devon.
The above image is of an oak sapling I planted back in 2006 with the help of a friend to dig a hole in the dark of that graveyard week between Xmas and New Year. The image at the start of the blog is of this sapling now as a tree in 2024.
I had called this project ‘Green Graffiti’. In my very early 20s I had my fair share of naive creative spunk, I knew little about the larger art world. It was a year before I began to work at the Sculpture Park itself, which, in-spite of the invaluable educational aspects of the experience, was also an experience that dented my confidence to put myself out there as an artist – I’m still trying to counter an internalised narrative that I’m not the ‘right’ sort of artist to be in the art world.
So it’s fitting that we chose this location to plant this tree.
Around the corner I encountered the roadside area in the image below.
Back around the winter of 2009 and 2010 I would receive my wage at the Sculpture Park on a weekly basis, in physical cash. I would go and collect it on my day off. But in my rucksack I would carry a few saplings each time. Since I left the sculpture park nearly 5 years back, these trees have become a woodland.
Why is all this important? Because it’s important to see things we have done to the closest thing to an innate value they hold, and not via the social comparisons that have been harder to avoid making as the pathways you’ve taken earlier in life begin to look more defined and firm in their hold.
There are many things I regret from my 20s. But what I don’t regret are my creative acts that perhaps wouldn’t have occurred if I was a little more aware of a larger art world of people already ‘in the know’.
Fast-foward to 2024, it’s impossible to be naive. Even in 2006 you really had to go looking for news, unless it was on the television. Art exhibitions and opportunities were still primarily advertised on flyers.
But sometimes just doing something like getting on a pushbike can push away the weariness of the overbearing ‘knowingness’ of our times. And things just are, and aren’t jostling for primacy 24/7.
Describe your most memorable vacation.
1993 was a year that was crucial in forming my sense of futures and pasts.
9 years old, my dad had become a teacher, an historic unprecedented feat in family history.
We now had a car and my parents decided that they no longer wanted to go to my grandparents’ caravan in an area of the English coast now associated with bleakness (The Lincolnshire coast).
For the first time ever my parents said we were going to a place I’d never heard of: Cornwall.
After throwing up after a 7 hour drive, I recovered to find my 9 year old self in paradise.
Like my first experience of seeing dinosaur bones in a museum I felt like what I was experiencing was both unreal and the preserve of important, TV people.
The beach at Perranporth was like a fever dream where I’d suddenly taken the place of somebody in a film. I didn’t realise cliffs could look so dramatic and the sea could be so blue in England.
The week before I’d just seen the film Jurassic Park. I was a vessel for the euphoric pop music on the radio stations. All of this added to what I look at with so much life, and concern about why I have been able to replicate such good vibrations as an independent adult.
All memory is worked upon backwards – they are private sculptures that are never completed.
Today when I think back to spring/summer 1997 the ambient backdrop is the b-sides from Radiohead’s OK Computer, which I didn’t actually hear until the 2000s. I heard bits of OK Computer and The Prodigy’s TheFat of the Land at the same time on a holiday journey, and they gave me what I’d come to understand as ‘future shock’; a vision of a place we hadn’t quite arrived into yet.
Because very little music, as great as it may well be, has felt ‘futuristic’ ever since, this moment has a gravitational pull that drags later encounters backwards into its orbit.
My personal accounts are difficult to separate from the fact that a pervasive structure of feeling in British culture seems to be one haunted by the ghost of 1997.
As Labour come back into power this week, all focus is on 1997, eclipsing all other Labour election victories. Despite the Labour party being the biggest party in Western Europe when Corbyn was leader, despite most people not really believing that this current Labour Party can deliver the structural changes much-need by most of the country, a kind of narrative remains fixed around this idea that if we can just get back to how things felt in 1997 things can be ok again.
I think it was the writer David Graeber who said that ideology works not by believing in the dominant narrative about life, but by believing that everybody else believes in it. We know the world is very different to 1997, we know what happens when private sector funding of public services was done before (for example), we know so much isn’t working and isn’t going to work, but yet we cling to threads of the governing discourse because if everybody else does then surely they are right?
Trying my hardest to chip away at the retroactive alterations made to my memories of 1997, I still recall a euphoric atmosphere that permeated all aspects of life. Even as a 13 year old I still obsessively looked for connections, and when my local football team gained promotion to the Premier League for the first time, and then a rock star ‘man of the people’ became prime minister, the future momentarily looked nailed on to the better than the past.
Did I know much about the damage that Thatcherism had done to towns like my own as a 13 year old? There’s definitely much that I’ve sown onto these recollections afterwards, but you couldn’t help but be aware that a lot of bad stuff had happened around here and things could be a whole lot better. But unlike how it feels as a 40 year old after 14 years of feeling like I’ve been punched in the stomach, 1997 was almost a momentarily transcendental release from the weight of past through the Messianic rock star, Blair.
Again, this is likely because I had no reason to feel out of breath as a 13 year old. But it’s also a sign of how different reality now is.
The Corbyn era was also about 1997 but not in the same way.
Although Corbyn, the man himself, may be more associated with a post-1945 social democratic politics, the ‘momentum’ that pushed the movement along was also born in 1997.
Yet, unlike the mainstay of the progressive wing of the establishment, in parliamentary politics, business and media, it wasn’t trying to set the clock back to 1997. Whether it was ever made aware or not, a movement dominated by people in their formative years in 1997, people for whom Blair’s “education, education, education” speech momentarily meant something, we were undertaking something that Tom Whyman in his book Infinitely Full of Hope, called Applied Hauntology.
Hauntology, lazily or simply (on my part) characterised as the present moment being haunted by the past through ‘lost futures’ that never materialised, is here progressively activated.
If you were fortunate enough to assume that you were guaranteed a life of expanded horizons, university, new experiences, and a better quality of life than your parents and grandparents, the 1990s embedded an expectation of life in you that, by the late 2000s returned as a form of unworked-through grief.
Far from merely being a Western Consumer attitude of the late 20th century, it permeated old industrial areas, which, although traumatized by post-industrialisation, believed help was on its way, and it was all underpinned by the cultural exuberance born from what Francis Fukuyama called ‘the end of history’, a moment after the end of the Cold War, and East/West divides, when just for a moment it looked like we could collectively ‘do this’, and make a more peaceful world.
As wafer thin as the grand narratives of the 90s may have been, they gave young people a vision of a better life, and a better world to come in the Millennium. Jeremy Corbyn’s surprise election to be the leader of the Labour Party seemed to open a door, that seemed to connect directly from Millennials optimistic expectations and a future that looked workable, bypassing the encroaching sense of dread of reality in the 2010s.
It was a moment when a generation applied hauntology to almost reactivate the lost futures that culminated around the year 1997.
In 2024 this momentum has been squashed, exhausted, and what we have again is an obsession with trying set the button back to 1997.
And to be honest, I’m not crushed. It’s a relief to get the Conservatives out. And, maybe because the Tories have exhausted me so much, I’m not as quick to condemn this new government as many are. Every little improvement makes big changes in life. As if some of this creeps back into everyday life, perhaps the ability to feel the idealism inside oneself will come back too.
I’ve done a lot of these virtual retrospectives on here. But why not another?
Whatever the future looks like, even if it’s a continuation of the same but worse, the last 14 years have certainly been something that deserves attention as it potentially comes to a close.
Roughly from 2010 to 2024, I’ve stuck specifically to the drawings just to have some kind of cohesion.
‘Global Ghetto, 2024’ marks the centenary of the defeat of fascism‘The index for child well-being“I want none of this”‘The logic of neoliberalism’‘Ill equipped’“Achieving and getting things done”‘The planet’s mental illness’‘The place of dead ends’“A psychic time-bomb’‘A privatised implosion’‘…coils tightening’‘Whilst we were in the Eternal Now…’‘Not humanly possible’‘Five MORE years’Sad, LONELY, Frightened’‘THE LONG NIGHT OF A NEEDLESS STORM’£$[We]€$[Can’t]$£[Take]£€[Any]$€[More!!]$£ ‘Rot_in_silence’‘Hope of the nihilized’Stuck in the sediment of sufferingThe manifesto for the just-about-managingDead ethics hysteria‘we want to live!’A New Spring has sprung’When they came for me I felt nothing’NauseaAll of your gods are pounding my headAll those promises…‘Endure the night of this world’‘Back to normalism’We’ll make bones of you‘The ever-aftermathRunning on GaslightHistoricide/who made the monster?
I’m not as sharp as I was in the 2010s (although, who is?)
Wounded and winded by the personal and political over the last 5 years, improvements to my general quality of life as I entered middle age became the only real priority.
The mental gymnastics involved in trying to understand why people in my milieu think and vote as they do, in the hope to make some sort of progressive bridge, contributed to the aforementioned injury.
I instigated participatory art projects with my friends in an artist-led collective, to try to do my best to circumvent the trigger labels, and to ask how people really felt about life. It was a DIY project that received little attention, but I saw it as contributing towards a memetic grey matter of information that was slowly transforming the world over social media – and, as violent as the dialogue was on the senses, it was undertaking the impossible-yet-necessary from the bottom up.
How old that all feels…
Yet, I’ve awoken this week to find out that Farage’s Reform party are getting close to overtaking the Labour Party in the voting intentions for Barnsley North, the constituency where I live.
The title quote, playing on the famous quote attributed to Marx’s interpretation of history, feels the most adequate to the current situation.
I will hold my hand up and say that I had sympathy for some of the motivations for voting Leave in the 2016 EU referendum.
It was ugly, it was racist, but it was also justifiably angry at a political orthodoxy that presented everything as being fine, when it clearly wasn’t for many people, for many reasons.
That this dissent was easily activated through racism, through scapegoating immigrants, was just as much the fault of culturally liberal politicians and institutions who endorsed inclusivity and tolerance whilst subscribing to the economically right-wing agenda (neoliberalism) that is at the root of so many of our problems.
Brexit was and has been a tragedy.
Reform is its return as farce.
Around the time of the 2016 results, I genuinely thought that the racism and xenophobia could be deactivated if a politics that genuinely served people, and moved away from an economic system that was tearing up the social fabric around us. This never happened: the main progressive alternative was demonised and the general population gaslit into believing it ‘unelectable.
The farce of Reform is the farce of not learning from our recent past. Both the electorate, who cannot see that Farage is nothing but a wrecker in the service of disaster capitalism, and the political and media establishment who did everything they could to prevent an alternative that may, may, have just tended to needs that are once again being exploited.
There’s clearly so much at stake. During the last 14 years we have experienced a horror show, and despite the potential epochal collapse of the Conservative Party, the path before us is far from reassuring.
But I just cannot find something that pushed me forwards for so long: my political pulse.
Where did it go?
Half way through these 14 years, exactly 7 years ago, we almost had a government that pledged to bring about the kind of 21st century we once expected in those childishly optimistic moments of the late 20th century.
A collective energy had built around the unexpected Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and even when the Tories under Teresa May managed to cling to power after the 2017 GE, there was a sense that the near future was on our side.
I have never been as directly politically engaged as my conscience suggests I should. An adult life devoted to thinking about the state of the world, making art about the state of the world has been matched by an inability to know how to be, both with others and with myself.
From my observations the average political activist doesn’t make themselves, but is made – often by where they end up in their early adult life, what community they become an adult in, university or otherwise.
Likewise the politically disengaged are made and do not make themselves, by the same factors, or, more so, by the lack of them.
I found myself in the middle, literally. Between larger towns and cities where I would more frequently come into contact with politically active bubbles. And the more politically disengaged culture of the people I grew up around and still lived around.
This political disengagement was formed in two stages. The first was that a lot of people were traumatised by the post industrialisation of the 1980s, especially round here, because of the Miners Strike. Secondly, the design for life had shifted massively. New build housing estates encouraged us to focus more on the nuclear family than the community, and retail parks encouraged the same.
Around this time, my political mind was formed from personal distress, a deep questioning born from an inability to cope in my own skin. It was born in isolation rather than collectively.
It certainly strengthened my thinking and artistic direction, but it didn’t necessarily do anything to strengthen any sense of being part of something; I found the heated disagreements that would erupt with people I’d grown up with, or the disdainful reactions to my residual provincial town lifestyle habits in more urban bubbles eventually too stressful without a support network to ease it.
To deal with this, I found myself perpetually trying to square circles and circumvent divisions. This was aided at the time by an almost Millenarian conviction that a more just and equal world was coming, which would brush all minor differences away.
I, like many, have yet to properly recover the person I was before the 2019 general election and the conditions during the pandemic eviscerated any conviction that a better future was imminent . I could never have imagined the 2020s would have felt quite like this.
I, again, also like many, have felt more isolated and cut off since the aforementioned events. Whether it is a lack of ability to go where I once went, mentally and physically, or just a kind of brain damage caused by losing faith, I no longer find it easy to feel my political pulse.
With this in mind, the election next week feels pretty much like laying in bed, knowing you have somewhere important to be, but not being able to motivate oneself.
And I want to be. Christ, whatever happens, to likely see the back of 14 years of Tory rule, horrible nasty rule, should fill my heart. I want it to. But at the moment I don’t feel anywhere near the amount that I want to and know I should do.
I’ve finally got a studio space. It’s in Wakefield, the next town down the road. It’s a little more than I was wishing to spend, but after a series of difficult years that have forged a kind of internal inquisition into my devotion to my work, I now feel like I’ve got a concrete commitment to make this work out.
However…
Sadly, I was unsuccessful with an Arts Council bid that I put my heart and soul into.
I even paid for mentoring for support. I was as honest as I could be about how much I need help right now without playing the metaphorical violin.
Arts Council funding would have boosted my self-worth, which, over the last few years, has been crumbling and affecting my behaviour in deeply regrettable ways.
But I feel confident that I’ve passed a turning point. The studio space has for the first time in a long time let me feel self worth in that which i have devoted my life to.
John B Ledger 