I. A tale of two Omars

This is not a World Cup post, but it’s also not not a World Cup post. For substackers allergic to sport, be reassured, the story of Omar Artan will be one of only three brief references to football here.

For those unaware, on 8 June 2026, the reigning African Football Referee of the Year, Mr. Artan, flew to Miami International Airport, where he was scheduled to join the FIFA training camp for World Cup tournament officials gathering from around the world. He had with him the diplomatic passport and visa which had been issued to him specifically for the occasion. He was just days away from becoming the first Somali ever to participate in a men’s football World Cup.

But this could not be allowed to happen.

Instead, Omar Artan was detained and interrogated by US immigration officials for 11 hours before being banished on a flight to Istanbul. Two days later, the US administration claimed that Artan was denied entry because of his "association with suspected members of terror organisations", something which they apparently overlooked when issuing him his US visa.

We all know the real reason for his refused entry: President Trump is a racist.

It goes without saying that Trump could not point to Somalia on a map. I think there’s only a 50/50 chance he could spell “Somalia” if it cropped up on one of his regular dementia tests. But he does remember that he viscerally hates the Mogadishu-born Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and that this petty act against an unconnected football official was a small and big way of punishing her and her community.

II. Filet Minions

Some time in the 2010s, I was stuck in Chicago Union station waiting for a long-delayed train to Detroit. As happens, after enough time a very, very bored group of people reluctantly started talking to each other. Turns out I was surrounded by some super-smart academics from the University of Michigan who were all returning home from a conference.

One of them, picking up on my British accent, bombarded me with questions about cultural life in the UK: what books and TV shows were popular, what films were being shown in cinemas, what songs were being played on the radio. He was shocked, dumbfounded, flabberasted to hear that 80% of those things were actually the same American books, TV shows, films, and pop songs which were also currently popular in Illinois and Michigan.

This ubiquity, this cultural dominance of the US - certainly in the English-speaking world, although also far beyond too in many cases - something which is so obvious as to be unremarkable for those of us on the outside, was somehow a shock to this otherwise very smart man stuck on the inside of it.

But, he said sincerely, I thought British theatres would be full of British movies. How we laughed.

III. Macrosoft

The concept of soft power was first defined and popularised by Harvard academic Joseph S. Nye Jr. in the early-1990s, but soft power itself has surely existed for as long as humans have created any form of culture1.

By way of example here, from this rainy little island I live on, we terrorised and looted half the world for pretty much the entirety of the 16th to 20th centuries, and yet some of you fools still feel residual fondness for us regardless because of William Shakespeare and The Beatles and Vivienne Westwood and Kate Bush and Idris Elba in The Wire and David Attenborough nature documentaries and Dua Lipa’s book club and the uncontested brilliance of British plug sockets2.

The CIA believed in soft power so much that they spent decades funding MoMA, and Abstract Expressionism, and countless films from Animal Farm to Zero Dark Thirty, and more than twenty literary and arty magazines3.

The concept was simple, almost touchingly naive: if only that angry kid in Paris or Budapest or Santiago or Lagos could just see with their own eyes the riotous freedom of Jackson Pollock’s primary colour oils flung at a long canvas, then suddenly communism would no longer seem so alluring. Cute.

And yet… I’m not sure how much credit the CIA can take, but the second half of the 20th century was undoubtedly American-flavoured for all of us, and that wasn’t entirely due to US military and economic dominance. Because it was also Disney films and Scorsese films. Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan. Bob Dylan and Elvis and Windows 95 and blue jeans and Pop Tarts and Eddie Murphy and Cindy Crawford and Tupac and the silhouette of the Empire State Building and Friends and The X-Files and Big Macs and Whitney Houston and New York Yankees caps and Twin Peaks and George Foreman Grills.

The quality may have been variable, but the global reach was undeniable.

IV. The prodigal referee returns

On 10 June, 2026, Omar Artan arrived back in Somalia and was given a hero’s welcome by thousands of his countrymen. He also gave a far more diginified statement than I would have managed under the circumstances: “What happened has happened and it was unfortunate… Somalia is ours, whether things are good or bad. I want to tell our youth not to lose hope in our country. I am now in my country, and there is no other place I want to be. I promise you, God willing, that I will attend the next [World Cup].”

The World Cup is far from perfect. Its own governing body is every bit as venal and corrupt as the worst governments on the planet. And yet…

World Cups (and Olympic games) are, I would argue, the closest things we have to truly global expressions of collective humanity. At their very best, they have a humanising and democratising impact which the United Nations can only dream of having. What else could bring forth the improbable romance between a small town in Kansas and the Algerian football team? What about the hedonistic love-in between Mexicans and Koreans? Or the unexpected Bangladeshi adoration of Argentina? Sport, just like art, simply connects people in ways that politics cannot.

In recent years, accusations of “sportswashing” have become common - Russia, Qatar, and the US (as well as Canada and Mexico of course) have hosted World Cups, Beijing had the Olympics, Saudi Arabia hosts and funds everything from chess to boxing to golf to another men’s football World Cup coming up in 2034 - but a recent article in Defector4 argued (persuasively I think) that sportswashing is not the right term.

Because if it was all about improving a country’s reputation, well then hosting a World Cup which draws millions of eyes to your state-backed labour rights abuses, or your butchering of journalists, or your racist immigration and incarceration policies, improves no one’s impression of you. The laundry is only grubbier and more visible after the wash.

The much better analogy given by Patrick Redford in Defector is that these are hostage situations. A regime hosts a globally-popular event, one which millions or billions of people care about, then continues to behave badly, flaunts its own impunity in doing so, and therefore forces the rest of the world to acquiesce to it.

V. The global star power of President Obama

US Soft Power was officially declared dead on January 20, 2017, the last day of Barack Obama’s second term in office.

We must remember, President Obama was a pioneer. It took the USA 220 years to have its first non-white President. Then, with Trump, they elected a second just 8 years later.

Even by the high standards of his predecessors, President Obama was an extraordinarily bloodthirsty warmonger. He deployed US Special Operations forces in 138 countries globally, a remarkable 70% of the world’s nations (an increase of 130% over that much-hated, terrapin-faced fucker George W. Bush)5. In his final presidential year alone, Obama dropped at least 26,171 bombs on the planet6, most notably in wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. Coincidentally all majority Muslim countries.

Obama pioneered extrajudicial killings through drone strikes, bombing hospitals and weddings with impunity - a playbook since enthusiastically copied by Netanyahu and Putin, among others.

Obama broke his campaign promise to close Guantanamo Bay, the US’s industrial site for state kidnapping. He wasted his overwhelming public mandate by ducking the substantive education and healthcare reforms the US needed. And of course he missed a once-in-a-generation window to sort the future of the US Supreme Court which has led directly to the rolling back of women’s reproductive rights in the US to the sorry state of the early-1970s.

And yet… we forgave Obama all of this because he was charismatic and erudite and he and his family were photogenic and he occasionally played basketball semi-competently in front of TV cameras and he gave speeches that made us think that we were intelligent.

A two-term Soft Power President.

VI. No, it’s fine, I just... I just didn’t think it would be Chinese is all

A few years ago now, I spent eight hours driving from one side of a small West African country to another. The country in question is classically “underdeveloped” - no industry, not much to speak of in terms of organised agriculture, with the majority of the country’s land dedicated to subsistence farming. Total annual exports for this country are estimated to be around $200m (USD), which is roughly the same as the annual turnover of 20-30 large British supermarkets. I asked a friend and colleague there how this economy (and, more importantly, its people) survived and he told me about 80% of the country’s income came from remittances back home from those who had left to get higher-paid jobs abroad7.

Travelling across the country by road, we saw lots of goats, and regular police/military checkpoints used to extort money, and ten-foot-tall termite mounds, and one roaming gang of baboons. I paid particular attention to the many large roadside signs which heralded local projects with their sponsors’ flags on them: France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the UK, the EU, Japan. These represented investments in local healthcare, or in new methods or farming, or in building schools. Maybe I missed them, but I didn’t see any USAID projects (and this was before recent Trump cuts). In the capital, the country’s main/only conference centre had been paid for by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. The country’s only motorway and many essential river crossings had been paid for by the Chinese government.

Investments of this kind cannot reasonably be called soft power - and I’m certainly not going to attempt to unpick here the many flaws of so-called “international development” spending.

But there was an interesting parallel in the clothes we saw all across the country too, on kids and adults. I saw the following football shirts multiple times, some of them into the dozens: Real Madrid, Barcelona, Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, AC Milan, Inter Milan, Juventus, Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich, Borrusia Dortmund. I saw Argentina shirts with Messi on the back, Portugal shirts with Ronaldo (yuck), England shirts with Bellingham.

For the US? In an entire week in the country, I noted two Michael Jackson t-shirts and one Chicago Bulls vest which likely dated to the 80s or 90s. Oh, and one delightfully-incompetent piece of counterfeit Apple merch.

All of which made me think, who even are the most iconic US cultural exports of the 2020s? Mr. Beast? Taylor Swift? Joe Rogan? They are no longer exactly sending us their best.

VII. The Mousetrap

In October 2023, a 42-year-old American woman named Dr Kanokporn “Amy” Tangsuan collapsed while on holiday at the Walt Disney World resort in Orlando, Florida.

Tangsuan had severe food allergies, which apparently went ignored multiple times by members of staff in the plastic Irish pub she ate her dinner at on site. She died in hospital later that day.

When her husband sued the company for negligance, Disney responded by saying they could not be held liable as he had waived away his rights to do so in their T&Cs when first signing up to a one-month free trial of Disney+ in 20198.

It seems to me that generating/continuing to generate soft power requires at least some commitment to the value of that culture (even when, yes, culture is simultaneously also treated as a commodity). It requires a sincere belief that films can change the way we understand other people, say, or that food is both nourishing and can build bridges across communities. There must be at least some theoretical sense of craft before grift.

So yes, Britain was undoubtedly varying shades of evil during the time of Shakespeare/Jane Austen/The Rolling Stones, but it is clear that those historic Britains did also believe that theatre/literature/music was something important and worth celebrating.

Soft power, I propose, evaporates quickly when culture is treated merely as another tool for extracting value.

During my lifetime, the Western world has moved seamlessly from the neoliberal economics of Reagan and Thatcher - a comprehensive looting of the public sector which worked brilliantly (some people got very rich) right up until they ran out of public assets to sell - and into our exciting new, asset-stripping era of capitalism.

If you’ve ever been forced to buy a ticket for an event through Ticketmaster and been hit with another 30% of hidden “service fees” on top… If you’ve ever paid a subscription fee for a service only to also be bombarded with ads… If you’ve lately found that that thing you were interested in buying no longer has a single constant purchase price, but is instead becoming incrementally more expensive the more popular it becomes (so-called “dynamic pricing”)… Or perhaps if you are a teenage Taylor Swift fan being battered round the head with 36 different physical editions of a single album that you feel growing pressure that you absolutely have to buy… well then you already know that not only is the quality of Culture no longer the point any more, but neither really is the quality of Product.

The only thing that matters now is parting you from as much of your money as quickly as humanly possible9.

VIII. A voice coach taught me to sign, he couldn’t teach me to love (all the above)

Andy Warhol once said:

What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.

You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too.

A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.

But something I noticed the last time I visited the US, is that American Coca-Cola is no longer made with actual sugar, but instead with some frankenstein abomination called high-fructose corn syrup. You’ll never guess which one is cheaper.

US capitalism - which was always justified by the philosophy of a rising tide lifts all boats, as preached by JFK and many others - no longer bothers to make any such concessions to the lives of those who aren’t already uber-rich. Warhol’s maxim of equal purchasing power for rich and poor alike has been inverted to the extent that Americans can’t even buy a Coke that tastes as good as the ones sold just over the border in Mexico.

This is (among many other things) the evaporation of soft power. Itself the symptom of a very sick and collapsing society. It happens when your cultural output no longer has any inherent value - only profit margins which must be relentlessly maximised in order for billionaires to become trillionaires.

But for the rest of us - including, of course, the many, many millions of decent Americans who have been consistently betrayed by their political/economic elites for decades - our future depends upon us developing a collective immunity from the private equity capitalism currently gutting the world’s richest economy, and which shows all signs of becoming a global pandemic.

Without our collective resistance, without us developing and championing new modes of creation/distribution/celebration of culture, we face a shared future of vulture capitalists pissing in plastic cups and selling it back to us as lemonade at $30 a pop.

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Until now, Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series has often concerned itself with a somewhat unremarked-upon kind of difference: between us (humans) and them (inanimate objects).

For example - if we hadn’t considered it before now - the first three books of the series really drive home to us that our lifespan (and therefore also, perhaps, importance?) is really not very significant at all compared to that of a single Roman coin. Individual humans, at least from the perspective of the Roman coin which has already endured millennia, come and go much like the 24-hour life cycle of a mayfly1.

For Book Four of Volume though, we confront another kind of difference, albeit one which is a much more familiar subject of literature: the chasm between us (ourselves) and them (other people).

As readers of Books One to Three have already experienced, Tara’s once-lonely world has now expanded into a whole commune of Time Loopers located in their large, isolated house in Bremen. Where once there had been two (Tara and Henry Dale), and then four (Tara, Henry, Ralf and Olga), Book Three concluded with an imminent expansion to nine people which, within the first fifty pages of Book Four, soon becomes ten, then twenty-two, then…

The numbers become somewhat immaterial. So too (a minor bugbear of mine from the earlier books) the respective nationalities and presumably clashing languages of all of these new characters2, details that are essentially now ignored despite names indicating a cross-European cast3. Verbal communication, of which there is a lot in Book Four, seems to be deeply philosophical and entirely unhindered; but regardless, this is Tara’s account written down in her own words - maybe these are not aspects which preoccupy her.

More tellingly, Tara’s documentation of her/their numbered days - now as advanced as #1892, #1945, and so on, therefore approaching six years of repeated days - no longer seems to have the clarity of her time alone.

Tara writes in superficially affectionate terms about this adopted group she has unwittingly found herself a founder member of - “A flock. A gathering.” - but her interactions with many others seem to be full of unresolved friction, of miscommunication and misalignments, and even the meaning of this single connection which binds them all together is difficult to define in the language of the old world:

What do we think of one another? I do not know. Have we become friends? I think so. What else could we be called? Housemates? We are more than that. We are tied together by a shared history. Not a family history, nor a childhood history. We are not like pupils in the same grade; people bound together by birth year or geography. We haven’t chosen one another […] We are joined together by the unpredictability of time, or that is how we think of it - we have fallen out of the world, each of us plummeting, all of us dizzy. Our lonely wanderings in the eighteenth. And our meetings. Not being alone any more. All the things we do not need to explain.”

So, Book Four seems primed to ask, is it really true that hell is other people?

The immediate answer is, of course, yes. The irritation of all these other people - certainly more than just housemates, sure, but also never exactly “friends” despite Tara’s claim to the term - is noisy and suffocating, a rumbling cascade of overlapping voices and desires, ambitions and coping mechanisms, which couldn’t be more distinct from the tranquil pool of Tara’s earliest narrative:

• Carrying on on from Book Three, we have Ralf’s irritating obsession with “saving” everyone who meets some kind of accident or misfortune on the 18th of November, which he crowbars into every conversation, and which no one else (reader included) can be bothered to engage with because it seems entirely futile??

• People, including Tara, have opinions. Lots of opinions. They disagree about the purpose and value of cars, about the significance of interior design, the best sources of food, even about the format in which they should share all of these opinions, including how regularly and formally they each need to meet in order to decide upon how exactly they might get to share these opinions.

• Fleetingly, enjoyably, we also hear how two of the new characters - Sonia and Peter - are in a passionate romantic relationship. One which began as a post-schism one-night stand before each realising they were both Loopers, a unique shared experience which (understandably) has led them to believe they are destined to be together. The other characters (also understandably) find this couple unbearable and tune out whenever they try to talk about their relationship.

And yet… companionship of course brings its comforts - from shared chores; to fresh insights, storytelling and humour; to the welcome expertise of those with medical training. Tara, as she tells us often, is happy as well as comfortable within this communal way of living.

But is this comfort also a kind of quicksand?

Book Four represents the halfway point of this seven-book series. It contains its own middle section of extended group conversation, a sort of polyphonic screed, whereby the Time Loopers dabble in Saussurean breakdowns of language. How should they refer to all the time before time stopped? How should they even define time now that every day is the same day? Do they need a new name for the time that will come after, if anything will come after?? Is it possible to ever agree on the right signifiers when they continuously disagree on what is signified by this shared repetition of time? Can the old words they once used for things be stretched like elastic to encompass their new reality? Or do they need to come up with new vocabulary, just as Tara and Henry once coined “Centiums” to mark every hundred days of the same day?

Many feel we are missing words - that is, we have enough words, the house is overflowing with them, but they are imprecise. There are too many things for which we lack terminology, and it is difficult to come to an agreement. Apparently, before we can find the right words, we must discuss everything at great length, with everyone speaking all at once.

This extended middle is meditative and repetitive, certainly not the most thrilling passage of this series to date, but it also appears to be a pivot point, because what comes after leads us into a new realm of sorrow and reminiscence and maybe even a little hopeless yearning.

For these communal Time Loopers are no longer solo adventurers. Once upon a time, their perpetual recurrence of 18ths of November had broken them free from bonds both profound and mundane - of family and love, work and bills, bin collections and inboxes - a release which, with gradual acceptance, allowed them to travel internationally, spend at will, dance and fuck without consequence, experiment with new goals and locations and personas.

But now. this community which they have founded/found, while providing many comforts, also represents a shutting down of these freedoms and an absorption of new roles and responsibilities, some of which are more welcome than others, but all of which inevitably preclude other possible options.

Some of the Time Loopers embrace their new reality. Others reject it. One, in a moment which causes others to pause, asks whether humans on repeat, humans without linearity, are even still truly human? Most, now six or so years in, have become docile and accepting of their fate. What, Balle seems to be asking, happens to us when we stop moving forward?

While words now seem more important to Tara than objects, the significance of the latter continues to hum away in the background. The ability of our Loopers to acquire/own/manipulate items continues to be unpredictable - they accumulate broken-down cars which appear immune to repair, for example - but there remains a broad truth that if you give your attention to, apply your work to an object, transform it into something else in some way, it is more likely to remain yours. This raises the tantalising possibility that Looper World has a Marxist aversion to workers being divorced from the product of their labour.

It is certainly true that a spectre is now haunting Tara. The compounding effect of looping time, an imposition which once led to freedom, is now starting to envelop its occupants within it. Once there was a world to win; now there are chains again.

However, as we have come to expect from Balle’s series, the known peculiarities and limitations of Looper World continue to expand too. This fourth book maintains the pattern of its older siblers by throwing us a couple of unexpected twists at the death which raise yet more questions of what is possible within these constraints. There is, of course, no rulebook for the Loopers to consult.

By the end of it all, I suspect Book Four might be seen as the least compelling of the Volume series, but a necessary bridge all the same.

Just as Albrecht Dürer once included a tiny mayfly in an engraving of the Holy Family4, signifying the connection of the mortal world to a 15th-century understanding of the divine and everlasting, my suspicion is that Book Four’s repetitions and introspection are a subtle path leading us back towards a grander interrogation of the world and our place and potential within it.

===

Finally, because this isn’t a Proper Review, let’s end with something fun that they would never let you do in a Proper Review - some predictions for how I think this series could possibly evolve/conclude through Books Five to Seven:

A) Tara and the others continue to build up the new rules/hierarchies/prohibitions, etc. of their time-looped world until they have recreated a new world just as unfair and divided as the one they are detached from5.

B) We encounter an “under-class” of time-looped people who haven’t enjoyed the same freedoms as Tara and the others - single mothers tethered to babies who never mature, requring never-ending feeding and changing; older couples where one of the pair has Alzheimer’s - and for whom the time-loop has become an inescapable prison.

C) Most likely ending - we follow Tara all the way into old age, the final pages of the book depicting her returning to her married home in Clairon-sous-Bois for the first time in many decades and observing her husband Thomas (still in his late twenties, still heading off to the post office) from a distance before she dies alone in the spare room.

D) Least likely ending - although don’t bet against it for the big-budget Netflix adaptation! - we discover that a single already-known character (my money’s on Olga here for some reason) somehow manipulated time on purpose and has been consciously pulling the strings of this experiment throughout.

Any predictions of your own, fellow Volumeheads??

===

On the Calculation of Volume, Book 4, by Solvej Balle, was translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell \ Book 5 is expected to be released in English in November this year

===

[LINKS TO PARTS 1 & 2 AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POST]

The most dramatic stop on our tour of the Korean DMZ is also the least photogenic.

When we get to the Third Tunnel of Aggression, we get asked whether we have any heart defects? Any other physical vulnerabilities? Are we claustrophobic? If we answer no to all these questions, we are permitted to hand in our phones and go claim a canary-yellow hard hat from the smiling woman at the front desk.

The tunnel was the third in a series of discoveries made, this one in 1978, confirming an extraordinary plan by the North to invade the South, not through the DMZ, but by burrowing right underneath it. This is no Shawshank Redemption escape hatch though – the tunnels were designed to be high and wide enough for at least three marching soldiers to be able to walk through side-by-side.

30,000 armed men, per hour, per tunnel – that was the plan.

A visit entitles you to enjoy the long descent through the “discovery tunnel”, walking in a permanent semi-crouched position, plunging ever deeper into the soil until you finally reach the place where the enemy’s plan was exposed. The sightseeing stops there, but the total length of the tunnel is 1,600 metres and down at the bottom it’s impossible to imagine ever seeing sunlight again. The packed earth – above, below, left and right – is a rich brown, like molasses, the makeshift soil walls sweaty with condensation, and now there’s you too, threaded through the middle like a corpse. When you’re back out of the tunnel again, your eyes and lungs struggle to adjust to the endless flood of light and air, even though it’s barely been thirty minutes down below.

What would it have been like as a soldier? An endless trudge, cold rifle steel in hand, rations on the back, crouching a little through the darkness on the promise that the enemy awaiting you on the other side – soldiers and civilians alike, extended family perhaps – is wholly deserving of their coming annihilation. How far would the invading force have made it down through South Korea? How many would have defected? Did they really expect to rampage all the way down to Seoul, 50km away, on foot, armed with nothing but their rifles and daggers? Or, as many believe, were the tunnels mere posturing, always intended to be discovered? Another performance perhaps, this time of martial readiness.

Deep thoughts suddenly seem out of place back on the surface, where there is little to do but wait for our bus driver to reappear. Beside the parking lot is a sculptural sign, spelling out D and M and Z in giant red, green and blue letters. A brand with nothing to sell but awkward selfies. Chance insists that I have my picture taken next to it.

Over in the toilet block sits a five-foot-tall replica of a football from the 2002 World Cup, joint-hosted by South Korea and Japan. The DMZball’s plinth and location offer no explanation, save for signs which seem to convey Do Not Touch in a richly diverse mix of symbols and languages. The hidden message of the plastic ball seems to be that this one game, football – soccer, fútbol, calcio, 축구, and so on – is a truly global endeavour. No borders, no boundaries. That there is truly no location on the planet too obscure for FIFA to grace with its trademark incompetence and corruption.

Chance’s itinerary ends with us back in Seoul at The War Memorial of Korea. I have to confess I didn’t pay much attention to this part when booking my trip, so when we get there I’m surprised to find that it’s not a “memorial” so much as an enormous museum of military history, surrounded by decommissioned artillery and vehicles of inhuman proportions.

You go in, Chance says. I will wait in the car.

In the main hall is a magnificent replica of a 16^th-century Geobukseon – an armoured, manoeuvrable “turtle ship” covered all over in plates and metal spikes and adorned with a dragon’s head designed to blow poisonous smoke out upon its foes. A reminder that, before it was the North, the imperial armies of Japan and China were the enemies to fear in this part of the world.

In the rain outside there are retired fighter jets with villainous smirks painted upon them, hulking grey tanks and boats, and troop-carrying planes of impossible size, designed to house and deliver entire villages of human aggression upon any target population.

When I head back to the car park, the last thing I see is a towering sculpture of two soldiers embracing. They are said to be brothers, an elder South Korean and a younger North Korean, reunited on the battlefield and fallen into each other’s arms. They stand on a granite dome, a symbolic tomb for all those dead in the conflict to date – over 3 million soldiers and civilians just in the 1950s alone – which has started to crack.

When I return to his car, Chance has disappeared. Then I look again and realise he’s snoring away in his flattened front seat.

When Chance was a soldier, he had told me, he spent most of his time waiting. The Americans teach you how to kill people, you learn all the very best ways to kill people, but then you just wait. For hours which become years.

You man endless patrols through unpopulated tracts of land. You operate checkpoints with no visitors. You look out across the border for signs of activity which never materialise. Volunteers teach the conscripted how to shoot their guns, and how to fight hand-to-hand, but no one ever expects to use their training in real life. There are military exercises, but mainly there is just exercise – lots of long runs, often carrying heavy packs, sometimes in the middle of the night, for no purpose but to murder time and any energy for mischief.

More than anything, Chance tells me over and over again, being a soldier is about waiting.

XXX

There was one other stop on our official DMZ tour which I forgot to mention before: Dorasan station.

It’s a slick, modern-looking station, all glass, chrome, steel and the occasional oil painting. It was built in 2002, with tracks heading south; but finished in 2007, with tracks heading north. Outside there is a sign which points both south towards Seoul (56km) and north towards Pyongyang (205km), but at the moment the only trains visiting the station come from the south, infrequently. And they simply terminate here before backing out south once more.

Inside the station are empty shops and a redundant ticket office. More than a decade ago now, during a brief thaw in relations, freight trains were permitted to travel on past Dorasan and up into the DPRK, carrying raw materials to factories up there and returning south again with finished products. But the entente cordiale was short-lived. Less than a year later the tracks to the North were mothballed once again.

High up on the wall of the station is a giant map of Europe and Asia, a visual representation of what could be once more – of how this small, largely symbolic train station could (theoretically) connect all of the Korean peninsula to all of China, then on to Russia, to Mongolia, to Kazakhstan. It stretches west, with all of the great mythic railways represented in thick blue, red, and green lines – the Trans-Siberian, the Trans-Mongolian, the Trans-Manchurian. A map which shows lines reaching out as far as Scandinavia, Ireland, Portugal, even if right now not a single train ever travels a centimetre north of the station.

It’s a fine line, I think, between hope and propaganda.

[LINK TO PART 1 AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POST]

When my alarm went off this morning I felt nervous – I never feel nervous – and I have been questioning what I am doing here ever since. The cat café would have made for a more relaxing day off.

But now Imjingak Resort has made me worry about my motivations for coming here too. I told myself I was coming as a respectful visitor – to learn more about Korea’s past, about the world, about one of the planet’s most enduring, seemingly intractable conflicts – but maybe I’m just gawking at other people’s misery.

Still, is it better to be back in hyperactive Seoul, just 50km from the DMZ, theoretically at risk of missile attack from the North at any given moment, and to be completely oblivious to all of this??

The official bus is the only way a civilian can enter the DMZ proper. On board, everything starts to feel more real as we slalom through dozens of yellow and black barriers scattered across the road before being waved through an armed checkpoint. Chance used to man these same checkpoints as a young man. He tells me the barriers aren’t designed to stop anyone from passing through, just to slow them down for long enough to be shot.

Our itinerary is out of our hands now and we visit a series of eccentric places, in that register unique to the DMZ, straddling the mundane and the epoch-defining.

There is the tall Dora Observatory, its exterior painted in green, yellow and beige camouflage dapples, as if it could ever be disguised from view, a large slogan on the roof reading End of Separation, Beginning of Unification. Inside there is a small lecture theatre which people sit down in automatically, awaiting an address that never comes. We are promised that up on the observation deck you can see over the border into North Korea, the most isolated, secretive dictatorship left anywhere on the planet.

I have been reading about Kijong-dong, a small settlement just over the border – it is known as the Peace Village in the North, and the Propaganda Village in the South. By all accounts, the architecture of this small town, built in the 1950s with its bright white walls and bright blue roofs, is the best-maintained of anywhere in the North. The buildings are said to look pristine from a distance but, when observed more closely, they are just façades. There is no glass in any of the windows.

The whole village is an elaborate performance piece designed just for those of us looking in across the border – beautiful families with perfectly-behaved children are bussed in to the town every day, solely for the purpose of being observed.

Up and out on the viewing deck of the Observatory, there are rows of silver telescopes, just like any other tourist resort, waiting for us to use them. To peek into the North with arched eyebrows. Performance facilitated by both sides.

But when Chance and I get up there the morning fog is thicker than syrup. If you stretch out an arm, your own hand disappears somewhere else entirely. We take pictures of each other posing next to the telescopes with big grins on our faces. When we look down at the photos, it’s like we’re standing next to a prop in a photographic studio, a heavy grey curtain just behind us. Today’s recital of the propaganda village will remain unobserved.

There is still the small museum explaining the history of the DMZ to visitors like me. It consists mainly of small replica landscapes (so much carefully-cut astroturf, so many angry plastic men) and enigmatic captions – The poplar stump of the Panmunjom axe murder incident – which require extra-curricular googling to be deciphered.

And of course, inevitably, there is also the fifteen-minute stop scheduled at the official DMZ souvenir shop. It sells unappealing-looking rice sweets from the North, and long bottles of Sprite, and t-shirts in primary colours with DMZ emblazoned across the front like a designer logo. It’s difficult to imagine the social occasion where they would make sense.

Chance – who has done this journey a hundred times before – stays on the bus. As our fellow travellers queue up in the shop, I wander around in the open air outside, a sweeping green landscape dotted with houses, some painted in sand and khaki camouflage patterns which make them pop against the trees.

The small number of residents of the DMZ live under strict conditions, with rigorous curfews and headcounts on a daily basis, but most residents have a higher income than the average South Korean – a function of the government incentives offered in exchange for their predicament: huge plots of land for farming, no taxes to pay, and (ironically) an exemption from compulsory military service.

Just down the dust road from the souvenir shop, stranded in the middle of so many half-ploughed fields, I find two shallow ponds, both rectangular in shape. They’re difficult to place – untended rice fields perhaps? – but any logical explanation I can come up with is exploded by the abandoned swan pedalo bobbing away in a far corner.

This tired white swan has a number 22 painted on its side – two little ducks, quack quack quack – and I wonder where in the world its 21 (or more) siblings reside. Wherever they float, surely they are more in demand than the lone swan pedalo of the DMZ?

XXX

Back on my first day in Seoul I took a bus to a meeting on the other side of town. My colleagues are always telling me not to take public transport in places I don’t know – take a taxi, claim it back on expenses – and I always ignore them.

When I board, the bus driver is horrified by my pronunciation, but he understands enough to reply – in English – that a ticket there will cost me 9,000 Won. I can’t do the sums quick enough in my head, but that sounds like a lot for a single shortish journey. Too late now. I hand over a 10,000 Won note (£6, give or take) and am greeted with that universal look of disgust which I understand all bus drivers are taught on their first day of training.

As he dispenses endless coins into the metal tray, clunk clunk clunk clunk, and the other passengers roll their eyes, I piece together what’s happened – the bus driver told me nine thousand Won in English, but he meant nine hundred Won. Me handing over this large note is as welcome as spitting in a stranger’s face, and although the minor language mistake is his, the real faux pas is all mine. The outsider’s habitual crime of not knowing enough about how things work round here and expecting the locals to make it all frictionless for your benefit.

I do feel better when a group of young Americans get on a few stops later. They’re bouncy and boisterous, peach-skinned energetic boys with neon caps and neon backpacks and neon teeth. I assume they’re all schoolkids, maybe 14 or 15, until I hear them talking about their drills. South Koreans are more enthusiastic about US foreign policy than almost anyone else worldwide (Israel being the obvious exception), and of course these bus passengers are not boys, they’re men, trained killers in fact, dispatched thousands of miles from home and armed with the deadliest weapons in human history, here (so the story goes) to help protect the people of the South from their aggressive neighbour to the North.

I’m the only other westerner on the bus so it only takes a moment or two for the inevitable to happen:

- Where you from?

- London, I lie.

- Cool. Where you headed?

I explain where my meeting is and they share where they’re going too – I’ve only been in Seoul for a few hours, but I know it’s in the opposite direction to where this bus is headed.

It takes me a few minutes to convince them. They crowd around me in the middle of the bus and we compare maps on our various devices. We watch as so many blue dots (representing us? the bus? our phones?) slide along the same route in parallel and we jab fingers at grey blocks which slide up and down the screens. Eventually they accept they’ve made a mistake and hurry in garrison to the front of the bus to jump off and try again.

- Thanks dude, a grinning boy shouts back at me. How long have you lived here?

- Oh, I just got here, I say.

- That’s cool. Us too. Six months next week.

TO BE CONTINUED

PROLOGUE: Sometimes I get to travel to interesting places for work, which is both blessing and curse. This is the story of one of those occasions, or at least the story of how I spent my one day off on that trip.

XXX

Chance picks me up from the hotel forecourt shortly after sunrise.

He shakes my right hand, presses his business card into my left, tells me his full name in Korean – then immediately instructs me to call him “Chance” instead.

Chance? I repeat back to him stupidly, unsure if I’ve heard him correctly. Erm… like The Rapper? I ask, and Chance laughs at me without answering.

I have already spent a week now in Gangnam. Our hotel is apparently busy at all hours – surrounded by convenience stores with hanging bags of dried squid and squat bottles of Coca-Cola and milk soda, low-ceilinged restaurants rich with gochujang fumes – but this morning it was just me and steel roller-doors on the streets. I waited alone in the lobby for thirty minutes before Chance’s silver SUV pulls up on the road outside. Even the hotel staff aren’t awake yet.

My colleagues and I have been working non-stop for weeks – Hong Kong, then Shanghai, then Tokyo, now Seoul. The others are using our one allocated day of rest and recuperation to visit the best cat café in Seoul and to stock up on their pots of snail cream. I have decided to visit the Demilitarized Zone instead.

The DMZ is 4km-thick and 250km-long, belting the waist of Korea. A no man’s land visible from space by its absence of light. A begrudgingly-accepted buffer between South Korea (officially known as the Republic of Korea) and North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea). Both countries are republics of a kind, but only one is passably democratic these days. It is not the DPRK.

I booked my outing with Chance online before I left home. The trip was considerably more expensive than expected, but the only way that you can visit the DMZ is to be accompanied by a licensed tour guide and the only alternatives were with coachloads of people – which would be absolutely fine except for the compulsory Soju-tasting sessions and stops at souvenir shops which come bundled into your trip, all the way there and all the way back again, until the late evening.

I know, based on the schedule that he sends me in advance, that Chance and I will spend at least three hours together in this car today, just the two of us, so it’s a relief to find that he is a good storyteller. Chance asks a few routine questions about me, but mainly he tells me about his own life – his two years spent in the army as part of South Korea’s compulsory military service, his strong opinions on various western nationalities and (unrelated) the latest plastic surgery trends, his love of hiking and mountain climbing.

Chance tells me that he would much rather be showing visitors the incredible countryside all across Korea – Seoraksan National Park, say, or Jeju Island, or Daedunsan Mountain – but there is more demand for his DMZ tour than everything else put together. I feel guilty, apologise. He laughs at me again.

We drive through still-sleeping Seoul, past the neglected neon of Gangnam’s fashion retail and surgery clinics, to the countless silver high-rises studding the banks of the Han River. Chance points out the two “Trump World” towers as we drive past them – giant Pringles tins rolled in cheap terracotta cladding – and we both mutter curses under our breath.

We cross an enormous bridge and head north, buildings shrinking rapidly until it’s clear that we’re no longer in the city at all. Then we talk and drive through the countryside for a long time, speeding north past all the same commuter towns and budget roadside diners that orbit any large city.

Seoul long behind us, Chance instructs me to look over into the distance on our left-hand side.

- You see it? The place where there are no trees anywhere?

- I see it.

- That is The North.

- Really?

- Really, he replies. They have no fuel there, so they cut down every single tree to burn.

Now, as we progress ever further north, the DMZ encroaches to our left, until eventually we are just centimetres away from barbed-wire fencing running parallel with the road. Every few hundred metres we pass abandoned guard shacks on stilts, the only buildings in sight, painted in camouflage patterns.

The roads have been empty throughout our journey here, so it’s a surprise when we pull into an enormous parking lot already half-full with hundreds of cars and coaches. It looks like a theme park.

- I need your passport, says Chance.

I knew this was coming, so I hand it over. Even so, as I watch him walk off and disappear between the parked cars, I wonder at the wisdom of handing over my passport to a man I’ve known for barely an hour, here on the border with North Korea, with no other means of getting back to Seoul. Or anywhere else for that matter.

- Go look at the train, he shouts back to me.

I wander over in the direction he points me towards. It’s impossible to miss.

The train is a steam train. Was a steam train. Now it’s rust in the shape of a steam train. The story goes that the train was stranded on the border when bombs from the nascent Korean War destroyed the tracks and it derailed. There are thousands of bullet holes in the rust, which “show the cruel situation at the time” according to the accompanying signage, but I’m told that most of these fissures occurred long after the real fighting was over. Bored young men, from both sides, once liked to use the unlucky train for target practice.

As I wander around this peripheral place, Imjingak Resort, gateway to the DMZ, it seems impossible to reconcile its various tones. There are other quiet places like the train – statues and war memorials, in so much concrete and bronze, with solemn plaques – where groups of Koreans stand with heads bowed. There are thousands of brightly-coloured ribbons of remembrance tied to the fences beneath barbed wire. There are waxwork effigies with signs hanging around their necks – they represent South Koreans who have spent many long years waiting to be reunited with their relatives trapped in the North.

But there are also steam-bellowing food stands, and souvenirs shops selling North Korean wine and North Korean bank notes. There is a symbolic bridge too, to be used when all those lost relatives can finally stride back across the border. But the bridge is guarded by two giant plastic statues of a military man and a military woman – him wearing aviator sunglasses, her a mini skirt – in bulbous, cartoony dimensions. There is a small amusement arcade for children.

It makes a little more sense when I read that this “resort” was built in the 1970s to give mourning families a place to congregate, a place to remember the family members they could no longer even contact – families just over there – but also to encourage hope of a peaceful resolution, coming someday soon.

But I can’t stop thinking that those children whom people made plans (and buildings) for then are middle-aged now, have children of their own, a further two generations detached from knowing those cut-off relatives in the north, and with Korea still no closer to reunification. And then Chance returns with my passport – of course he does – and explains we are booked onto the next bus to depart.

TO BE CONTINUED

If you’re ever in Madrid, then you obviously have to go to the Prado, and when you go to the Prado you also have to be sure to see Las Meninas and obviously Goya’s Black Paintings and Dürer’s iconic mid-twenties selfie and all the waxy El Grecos, and odd de Riberas, and van der Weyden’s Descent, and yeah you also have to pop down the road to see the Guernica too obviouly, but yep, you really, really need to see this Bosch in the flesh if you can1.

Likely created as some form of devotional altarpiece - albeit one of the strangest of all time - when its wings are open, the Garden consists of three colourful panels.

That panel on the left is the Garden of Eden, with some fantastical creatures we may not entirely recognise…

And then that panel in the middle represents… well, actually no one really knows what it represents, but the best guess so far is that maybe it’s a kind of hedonistic playground for the early descendents of Adam and Eve, no longer residing in (or constrained by) the Garden of Eden of course, but still just generally surrounded by equally fantastical creatures and wearing nothing but giant plums and strawberries for clothes while riding around on enormous salamanders and ducks and unicorn cats…

And then finally, that panel on the right is Hell, except for some reason every little bit of torture and eternal damnation is music-themed because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Wait a minute, what’s that in the bottom left corner…??

Computer, ENHANCE!!

Now we don’t exactly know why Bosch populated Hell with musical instruments approximately 486 years before Ed Sheeran was even born, but there’s no doubt our eponymous Hieronymus was a smart and perceptive man.

He also had such attention to detail that meant, sure, if he was gonna portray a demon branding someone’s buttocks with musical annotation using their five-foot-long branding-tongue(?) for torture/banter purposes, Bosch was going to do the job properly.

Which meant that one day in February 2014, a very smart music student named Amelia Hamrick2 was able to do something which apparently no one had ever considered before and transcribed those bum notes into modern musical annotation to see what they might look/sound like.

And then a month after that some dude named Jim Spalink performed those notes, adding a few reasonable embellishments of period-appropriate music to turn it into a full piece, and he uploaded it to youtube.

It’s very catchy - enjoy!

It is functionally impossible to introduce On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle to your sceptical co-workers without referencing the 1993 temporal-loop-and-suicides-romcom Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray.

Just like Murray’s weatherman Phil Connors, the heroine of this septology, an antiquarian book dealer named Tara Selter, becomes stuck fast to a single day which she cannot shake off. But Tara’s novel world is considerably less dramatic than that of the increasingly-exasperated Phil’s – and is all the better for it. Indeed, a few years from now when we have all seven of Balle’s books available to us – the fourth English-language instalment is due out this April, the fifth already published in Danish, concluding books reportedly still being written – it may be possible simply to tell our sceptical co-workers that these are the most important novels of the 2020s.

From Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania to (the fictional) Clairon-sous-Bois in rural France, it is the very different rules of these two worlds which gifts us a skeleton key for unlocking their distinctive impacts. Phil Connors appears cursed to wake up on his 2^nd of February again and again and again, but only ever in the same bed and in the exact same body that he had the morning before. These circumstances lead him towards recklessness and (mis)adventure: to punch acquaintances, to seduce women, to kidnap over-sized rodents and go on the run from the police, and also to kill himself in creative ways in search of escape. As Balle herself (who first conceived of her book series in the mid-1980s and has spoken in interviews of her relief to discover how different the romcom’s approach was to her own) has explained, in Groundhog Day we appear to be witnessing a linear continuum of Phil’s soul yet a looping renewal of his matter.

“I thought, ‘Oh, that’s nice, somebody’s helped me to do some research and gone in a direction I wasn’t going to go anyway.’”

– Solvej Balle on her reaction to the 1993 release of Groundhog Day

Conversely, Tara Selter of the Volume series will wake up on her 18^th of November again and again and again, but she does not appear to be constrained by geography – in Book Two she travels upwards to Germany and Scandinavia, then down to the south coast of the UK and on to the Mediterranean, all in search of seasons, or at least some approximation of them; in Book Three we learn that even intercontinental plane travel is possible within a single day – but just as importantly Tara’s body does not reset itself. Wounds heal as slowly as ever, hair and nails continue to grow and require cutting, her face visibly ages. All of which, as days become weeks become years, casts a long shadow over Tara’s future (just as the groundhog’s shadow, by convention, predicts a long winter ahead) and any possibility of a return to a normal, non-loopy life.

Meanwhile it is Tara’s unaware loved ones who wake refreshed each dawn and never age. In this, the narrative of the Volume series presents readers with a compelling inversion of that age-old vampire conundrum: what might it mean to love if we remain ever-youthful while others decay? Balle challenges us to consider instead what it might mean to love if we alone age yet everyone we have ever known or loved remains preserved within 24 hours of amber. Tara is clearly a well-loved woman – in separate instances, she is able to convince her husband, and then also her parents and sister, of her new reality, albeit never beyond the bars of her one repeating day – but it is telling that her ability to connect with and persuade others diminishes the further adrift from her original 18^th (and, more devastatingly, the possibility of ever again seeing the 19^th) she becomes. Soon, Tara’s recounted days stack up in her notes like losing raffle tickets – #121, #226, #361 – and as her body ages, perhaps her soul is threatening to disconnect entirely from the journey. These, it seems, are the stakes.

Writing good fiction is a kind of alchemy. Because any one of us can write a flashy sentence or a lyrical fragment (note the endless number of visual artists who hawk strings of pretty words lit up in pink neon cursive). But to write a simple sentence, then another, then another, then another, and for that sequence to miraculously transform into gold, with us barely even noticing, that is a rare gift.

In Book One of the Volume series, we do not travel far – Tara is first held captive by the 18^th on a work trip to Paris, encountering again and again the same hotel buffet breakfast, then returns home to Clairon, and cultivates first a parallel life with her husband (inhabiting only those rooms she already knows he will not enter on the 18^th, listening to him from behind walls and under floorboards, and observing him out of the window as he runs errands), then accumulating a growing number of unoccupied safe houses which she can return to as and when needed. In Book Two, the genius of being bound by the limits of a single day but not by geography are fully explored as Tara travels around Europe, including memorable encounters with a truck driver, a thief, and a joyous horde of football fans.

By Book Three, Tara is leaning into a growing obsession with the Roman Empire and how it has been passed down to us through (she asserts) a continuity of objects rather than people – “I was talking about charred grains and a drop of oil at the bottom of a jug in a city which no longer had a name. About unfired clay tablets and the basket used to carry them. About the remnants of a kiln in which they might have been baked. A doorstep. A hairpin from long before the Romans lived. That’s what had happened. I had landed in the vast container of history. It was overflowing with things.” – and then… well, then something happens which changes all of our expectations of her world (and these books) once more.

Plot summaries never do justice to great books, but especially not to these. Balle’s series of novels cannot be adequately described by their daily happenings, which are largely humdrum (certainly by Bill Murray’s standards); nor even by the character and voice of Tara, as well developed as she is, but who inevitably remains an island throughout large chunks of these events. Instead, these are books preoccupied with repetition, with small rituals, and in particular with objects – their permanence and impermanence – and consumption.

Tara’s interactions with the inanimate throw yet another dark shadow over her world. Food that she takes from supermarket shelves disappears permanently, restaurant meals eaten too often are scrubbed from menus the following (repeated) day, and other categories of items (clothes, notebooks, phones, laptops) seem to have their own peculiar habits of existing or not existing, working or not working, remaining or returning, through rules which are not quite within our ken. Very quickly Tara conceives of herself – with, one senses, only a little irony – as a monster devouring the world around her, and becomes afraid of what exactly might be left behind.

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Whereas the time-looped ecosystem of Groundhog Day (and, perhaps, the 1990s?) leads us inevitably to a cartoonish adventure playground, albeit one where driving a car off a cliff while broadcast on live TV suddenly seems desirable, the world of Volume is small and slow and human-sized. Her stuckness gives Tara the clarity to witness her own wake trailing out behind her, an unending stream of destruction which haunts her and alters her behaviour. This is a world in which an individual is forced to consume but has no viable way to produce anything meaningful. Extrapolated to the infinite, this can be nothing other than cataclysmic. But this is no fantasy world; it is our own world, frozen and therefore accelerated.

Despite the inevitable comparisons with Groundhog Day, to this reader the work of art which the Volume series most resembles is actually a very different kind of film. Chantal Akerman’s 1975 opus Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles begins with a Belgian housewife cooking in her small, square kitchen. It continues with many more scenes of a Belgian housewife cooking in her small, square kitchen, as well as bathing, eating silent meals with her teenage son, running errands around town, checking for mail which rarely arrives, and occasionally accepting cash for mute, missionary sex in her bedroom with a series of interchangeable brown-coated men.

Jeanne Dielman is a long film in which little happens and what little does happen happens slowly. But Jeanne Dielman (the character), played with extraordinary restraint and nuance by the Lebanese-French actress Delphine Seyrig, is as close to a real live human being as has ever been portrayed on screen. When (spoiler alert) at the exact halfway mark of the film we watch her taking three full minutes to peel two medium-sized potatoes in her small, square kitchen, we can sense that something is shifting slowly within her. When, around the three-quarters mark, Jeanne buttons up her dressing robe – a routine which we have already seen performed countless times – and she misses a button, half the cinema I was watching it in gasped. We know that this means something, and also that this vision of a real, rounded life slowly unravelling is far more dramatic than any explosion.

Jeanne Dielman the film radically recalibrates our understanding of film-as-entertainment, but it also re-attunes us to our own everyday rhythms. This was an effect which Akerman, as writer and director, was not just conscious of, but positively revelled in:

“When most people go to the movies, the ultimate compliment – for them – is to say ‘We didn’t notice the time pass!’ With me, you see the time pass. And feel it pass. You also sense that this is the time that leads towards death. And that’s why there’s so much resistance. I took two hours of someone’s life.”

– Chantal Akerman

Jeanne Dielman concludes with an abrupt shot of something very different, an act which is at once both shocking and entirely consistent with everything we have seen before. This congruity – that the film’s final impact has been accumulated authentically through increment rather than blunt force – is its power.

It remains to be seen if the seven-book Volume series will have a similarly shocking\fitting conclusion, but towards the end of Book Three we already find that Tara’s assumptions are being challenged by interactions with new characters and new perspectives. In particular, there is a quiet reckoning with the concept that Do No Harm is ever actually sufficient – a powerful challenge for any reader as to whether personal moderation can truly be enough to address all of the environmental devastation, systemic injustices, unpunished cruelty, and so on, of our era.

It is no coincidence that the focus of both these revelatory works of art are women. It would be easy to talk of these stories as domestic dramas, but Tara herself rails against such crude distinctions in her own unpicking of the accepted historical narrative whereby Great Men do things and the Little Women of history can be captured only through their domestic labour and service or understood via household objects alone: “And when did something become women’s history, anyway? Was it only after the ship with its raw materials and metals docked at the harbour, once those metals had been transported and processed and finally fashioned into a hairpin that it became my history? Did the raw materials belong to men’s history? […] Don’t tell me that women didn’t take part in wars or that men never scrubbed floors.” Tara Selter, just like Jeanne Dielman, is such an effective conduit for the story not in spite of, but precisely because we have been conditioned to assume that women are only ever to be seen in the margins of an epic tale.

Are there weaknesses in the first three Volume books? Yes, but they are few. For one, our patient and philosophical narrator never entirely rings true to the purported ages of her and her husband – supposedly both in their late 20s – to the extent that the occasional reference to this reads as awkwardly anachronistic. The strong and effective narrative voice, even at the very start of its journey, simply feels much older. And there is undoubted convenience in the wide number of multilingual characters whom Tara happens to encounter at key moments all over Europe, all of whom seem to speak just the right combination of languages for the required moment in time, meaning they will often share complicated concepts or theories without any loss of clarity even in their second or third or fourth tongues. But then perhaps that’s just the small-mindedness of the Anglophone reader speaking.

It is much more important, and fun, to speak of the unique strengths of these novels. At the macro level, Balle makes so many choices in how to develop her premise that confound our expectations. Many of these choices seem almost anti-dramatic at first, but only if we buy into that stale old cliché about drama requiring conflict. Like Jeanne Dielman before her, Tara sets about her days with apparent stoicism, but the impossibility (surely?) of her ongoing resolve in the face of these most inexplicable events creates its own dramatic tension. When, in Book Three, Tara reveals to us that she is losing her long-standing fealty to the sounds which have sustained her, this feels like a crisis: “I miss Thomas, even though he’s just on the other side of this wall. I miss his body, which sets things and their sounds in motion. I miss the things that bring out the sounds. I miss teacups and cupboards. I miss the paper bag from which he scoops the tea, the spoons in the drawer, the chairs, the refrigerator door that bumps against the worktop’s edge. I miss the pen that drops to the floor.”

At a sentence level, Balle conjures up a full and expressive world from this persistent focus on small objects, on sounds and memories, but also through small talk which is doomed to never grow big, and the constant reflections upon all of these things by an intelligent narrator, lonely and getting lonelier. This makes the novels’ subtle commentary on a wide range of subjects – from our collective environmental impact, to how we interpret history, to gender roles, to what it means to age and to travel far from home and family – all the more compelling and thought-provoking.

Ultimately, just as there are days in which we take hundreds of pictures, and there are hundreds of days in which we take none, the Volume series lurches ever forward – sometimes jumping ahead months’ worth of repeated days at a time. Throughout, the bones of the tale are sketched out for us by our calm and reflective narrator in a form of diary-sharing which is intimate and compelling. The day does not change, but Tara does, even as those around her renew and reset. We therefore feel the incremental progress of time, the inescapable decay and wearying of time, which has perhaps never been captured on the page quite like this before.

Three books in so far, On The Calculation of Volume is proving to be an extraordinary, addictive series of novels; works which somehow remind us that suspension and suspense share the same etymology.

On the Calculation of Volume, Books 1 and 2, were translated by Barbara J. Haveland \ Book 3 was translated by Jennifer Russell \ Book 4 is released in the UK on 9 April 2026 and is also translated by Jennifer Russell

In the meantime though, I have forced myself to write short stories and (of course, because everyone says that it will) it made me a much better writer. Although the mechanics of a short story are fundamentally different to longer-form fiction…

The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout

- Julio Cortázar

… there’s inevitably a huge amount to be learned from the greater discipline and economy required in your word choice, voice, plot development, character, number of characters, resolutions, and so on.

Still, there’s only so much any of us can learn, right?

Essentially, every short story I write lands somewhere in the 5,000 to 6,000 word range. Which is a somewhat odd place to finish so consistently and therefore something I don’t question too much as I can’t explain it in any way.

Offered to you below is almost my only exception to that rule - a very silly story under 1,000 words which was shortlisted for the 2024 Berlin Review Flash Fiction Contest.

Please permit me to introduce it like an American recipe-writer…

A friend and I have been attending the London Film Festival for more years than I care to disclose. Depending on diaries/bank balances/whatever existential crisis the BFI ticketing system is having in that particular week, then in some years it’s one film we attend, another year it’s seven. Sometimes we’ll see something that’ll soon become well-known, sometimes a film so bad it will never be shown anywhere ever again. The one constant is that at some point during a post-film Q&A with the Director someone will be offered a microphone for their Q and instead offer a lengthy M (for monologue) instead.

The most memorable of these for me remains the (2009??) screening of Dogtooth which finished with a gentleman in the crowd sharing a lengthy M about how clever it was for this Greek-set film to feature a battered old BMW in it, as clearly the car symbolised the austerity regime so unfairly imposed upon the Greek people by the German government, therefore unlocking for the audience an international and economic analogue for the scenes of domestic isolation and abuse present in the rest of the film, by which logic clearly we could (and indeed should) also read the father and mother of the household to be a familial representation of the authority of the EU (and therefore previously also the EEC) as supranational entities enforcing yadda yadda yadda…

By definition, unlike a Q, an M doesn’t need an A, but at the end of this one a slightly-bemused Yorgos Lanthimos replied “Er, no, I think it was just the only car we could afford?”.

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If you attend any cultural event of this kind - film festival, literary reading, exhibition opening - there will often be a moment like this for questions at the end.

We’ve probably all felt the siren call at least once to share some banal personal observation which (carried away in that beautiful, fleeting moment of artistic inspiration) feels clever even if, in the cold light of day, not so much. Most of us resist that temptation.

But here’s my tribute to those men (it’s always men) who do not resist…

***

I guess this is more of a comment than a question but

I did just want to preface this by saying how much I admire your entire body of work to date.

Like, genuinely.

Especially some of your earlier work which I guess a lot of other people in this room won’t have seen? Or perhaps aren’t even aware of?

And sure, the critics might have said that your early work was immature or flawed in some way. But I understood it.

I always just got the trajectory that you were on, right from the start, how everything you undertook then, every little decision you made – right or wrong! – how all of that is what led us to this moment now, which many in this room, certainly me, rightly consider to be your crowning glory.

And while the so-called critics would say that your early work was sometimes clumsy, or was somehow too violent, or that there were too many deaths – well I say, to hell with the critics!!

Because, excuse me, but what is craft without just a little bloodletting? What is art without the occasional casualty?

If there was just one word I could pick to describe your early work, I would pick incisive. And bold. And unpredictable.

So I say – and I’m not afraid to say it loudly for the benefit of the cynics right here with us in this very room! – that you are truly a craftsman. At a time when so many of your peers are not.

Or should that be all of your peers??

Oh yes, sure, sure, you over there, laugh away. But I said it!

I have witnessed the work of your peers at close quarters. It is formulaic. Predictable. Rote. It is never anything but by the book.

Safe! I’m not interested in safe! I want beauty and ambition and spontaneity! I want work that takes risks. Work that doesn’t always work out. I want an experience which yes, might well end up with us in the gutter, but is always spurting for the stars.

So – speaking entirely personally – I just wanted to let you know that I myself understand and believe in your work. Truly. Deeply. Fully. At a visceral level.

And, right now, as my anaesthetic starts to take effect.

I just want to say.

No matter what the haters might think – despite all of your so-called “past mistakes” – I truly believe in your ability to remove my appendix successfully here today.

So it’s not really a question, it’s more of a comment I guess…

Not that hoary old one in Rome you might have heard about.

No, I visited the new one. That is, the Sistine Chapel ceiling as painted by English signpainter Gary Bevans from the late-1980s-to-early-90s. You know the one - it’s on the ceiling of the English Martyrs Catholic Church in the mighty Goring-by-Sea…

The county of West Sussex has a somewhat curious relationship with religion. A story for another time, but in 1884 it was a hotbed for the Skeleton Army Riots (insert devil horns emoji) in which an unruly gang of thousands of locals - some wielding homemade banners featuring not only their eponymous skeletons, but also rats and coffins - took to the streets in fierce opposition to the Salvation Army.

The latter, broadly seen as sanctimonious and hectoring and (far more concerningly) anti-alcohol, were ultimately chased through the streets in running battles and had their large local “barracks” attacked. Despite the furious pleas of landlords, the police found themselves unable to bury the skeletons and the Sussex riots only concluded (after three days!) when the British army was called in.

As I say, an interesting relationship with religion. Either way, certainly not the most obvious place to find a replica of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. And dare I say it, the impetus behind this ceiling is much more interesting than that of Michelangelo’s. But first, why not take a look for yourself…

Why yes, that is a complete, hand-painted replica of the entire Sistine Chapel ceiling from the Vatican, at almost exactly two-thirds the size of the original (and including false windows), painted from 1987 to 1993, by just one man with no formal artistic training outside of the craft of signwriting, completed entirely in the twilight hours over and above his day job and family commitments, around and above the ordinary workings of this ordinary church, and entirely without compensation.

It is magnificent.

Let’s start with the flaws. Gary Bevans is not a master painter. (Sorry Gary.)

You can perhaps see this most clearly in the two portraits below, which are also on display in the church, a little closer to eye level.

To the best of my knowledge, the portrait on the left is a zoomed-in copy of Hans Holbein’s famous Sir Thomas More portrait, from 1527, which resides in the Frick in New York.

The portrait on the right is also (I believe) a Holbein tribute, albeit to a painting which no longer exists (or perhaps never did?) of John Fisher (1469-1535), one-time Bishop of Rochester. As far as I can tell, we only have traces of any Holbein painting of Fisher left - such as this drawing in the British Museum collection, or this “face pattern” in the National Portrait Gallery collection. So filling in the blanks to create your own version of what a finished portrait might have looked like is a very fun activity which I can only endorse.

In their Bevans versions, the skins of these two English martyrs are waxy rather than fleshy. The textures of cloth and fur - details which, in an original Holbein, somehow appear even more alive than his sitters - are flattened into simple blocks of shape and colour. The features of the two men are also simplified, the bare geometry of cheekbones, nose and chin played up, at the expense of nuanced human expression, which is therefore dialled down. These are grand European-style portraits as they might appear in a lushly-illustrated children’s book.

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Now being unfavourably compared to Holbein - for my money, the greatest portrait painter of all time - is no hardship. My broader point is that technical mastery is far from the only or even most important element of art. If it was, then prog rock would always be better than three-chord punk, and yet prog rock is generally unlistenable nonsense1. Instead we have endless ways of assessing art, critiquing art, finding affinity with art, or being disgusted or dismayed by art, and technique is just one factor out of many.

So here are two important questions to consider:

1. How did Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni come to paint Sistine Chapel ceiling #1 in Vatican City?

2. How did Gary Bevans come to paint Sistine Chapel ceiling #2 in Goring-by-Sea, West Sussex?

The answer to question one is well-documented. Michelangelo was pressured to paint his ceiling by the most powerful men of his time, forces representing the apex of contemporary religious and civic power, offered large sums of money, but still repeatedly turned down the work, indeed actively tried to pass the commission on to his younger rival Raphael. Michelangelo ultimately said a reluctant yes only after two years of persuasion. He then argued about his working conditions - frustrated with the original plans for scaffolding which would hang from the ceiling and leave big holes (literally) in his work - and he also explored then dimissed the possibility of using assistants to help him, finding no one who was up to his standards.

Michelangelo did - of course - finish the ceiling, gilding an artistic reputation which has echoed down the centuries. But it also took him four long years. There is no doubt that he was reluctant to take on a commission which was as high-risk as it was high-profile (he was primarily known as a sculptor at the time and had limited experience with frescoes) and which took him away from other work which he felt was more artstically exciting. Michelangelo also clearly foresaw that this job was going to be agonising and backbreaking work - which, fair’s fair, it certainly was.

In terms of question two, we also have clear evidence of how Gary Bevans came to paint his ceiling, most recently from an interview given to the Guardian in 20202. His answers are both humdrum - he always liked the sensory aspects of church attendance, the “smells and bells”, then he visited Rome and got even more inspired - and deeply entwined with his personal faith: “It increased and deepened my faith because I knew I couldn’t do it on my own. Every night I would kneel and pray. Every bit is done for the glory of God.” Gary Bevans painted through the night for six years, entirely on his own each evening, worried about whether he could still pay the bills though his sign-writing job, worried that he was letting down his family.

Or, to put things more bluntly, Michelangelo took on a challenging but lucrative3 Papal commission which made him (even more) famous and successful. Gary Bevans undertook an extraordinary passion project at great personal cost which would likely be ignored by the rest of the world.

“About 20 of us went from here to Rome on a pilgrimage. I came back and looked at this white ceiling and thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have Renaissance art here.’”

- Gary Bevans

Of course, Michelangelo’s ceiling is the greater of the two. Of course. The fact that it inspired another man hundreds of miles and a good few centuries away to give six years of his life to replicate it is testimony to that in and of itself. But there is something about art as personal, irrational, potentially ruinous mission which I find incredibly inspiring.

Art as pure personal passion is not always the best art, but it is the art which moves me most. While I have no reason to doubt the accounts of his faith which Gary Bevans has given, I am certain that painting the entire Sistine Chapel was motivated not just by devotion, but also a huge, huge, huge dose of stubbornness. Why not climb Everest? I might die, sure, but it’s right there and I want to see if I can get to the top4.

So, for me (if no one else), Sistine Chapel Ceiling #2 is more powerful than Sistine Chapel Ceiling #1.

It reminds me of the work of Henry Darger - the eccentric, reclusive caretaker who hand-wrote a 15,145-page novel5 and created some of the most extraordinary paintings of the 20th century alone in his Chicago bedroom, all of which went undiscovered until after his death at the age of 81.

It reminds me of the work of Vivian Maier - who took more than 150,000 photos of Chicago and the rest of the world, creating some of the most compelling street photography of her era, almost all of which remained unseen6 until her archive was discovered in an unpaid storage unit around the time she died in the late 2000s.

Sometimes art just pours out of us, it can’t be contained, and should not be. It doesn’t really matter if it has an audience, or even that much if it’s any good.

Sometimes art should be attempted just for the bloody sake of it. Sometimes, in the spirit of Gary Bevans, we should follow our creative impules and attempt something impossible just to remind ourselves we’re alive.

===

A link to the personal website of Gary Bevans: https://garybevans.wixsite.com/mysite/the-sistine-chapel-uk

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I.

Earlier this month, FRIEZE held the capital hostage yet again. The roundly-despised London art fair is the one week in every year which has billionaires salivating, sends a shudder down the spine of anyone who works in the arts for a living, and means absolutely nothing to anyone with a normal life.

I have spent well over a decade of my working life in some moderately well-known London visual arts institutions - let’s call them Art Gallery, Art Funder, and Art School - and attending Frieze was practically mandatory in each. If you like going to a very big tent in a park and feeling like all of the worst artists in the world are all shouting at you for attention all at once, then you will absolutely love it. For anyone else, it’s like walking around inside a migraine made of acrylics and neon.

During F-Week 2025, I saw a few references from well-intentioned people online pointing out that only 8% of artists showing at FRIEZE came from working-class backgrounds. I’m sceptical about that stat, but mainly because I don’t believe FRIEZE would ever even bother to capture such data.

Do shopping malls usually care about the backgrounds of those making the products they sell?

II.

I suspect things got a little twisted along the way and what people might actually have been referencing is a 2024 study around working-class representation in the arts - establishing that “… while 23% of the UK workforce is from a working-class background, working-class people are underrepresented in every area of arts and culture. They make up 8.4% of those working in film, TV, radio and photography, while in museums, archives and libraries, the proportion is only 5.2%.”1

As always, this is also about intersectionality. The study also found that, in the culture sector, “90% of workers are white and only 20% are disabled.” And of course London and the south east absolutely dominate culture sector jobs generally in the UK, a super-powered magnet from which it is often impossible to escape.

None of these figures is remotely acceptable. Each is a pretty good indication of where we’re at as a country.

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III.

While these days I clearly and regrettably pass as middle class, I am very much “from a working-class background”. I grew up in a tiny council flat, sharing a room with my brother until I left home at 18. People talk about being the first person in their family to go to university. I was not just that, but also I believe the first in my family to stay in school past the age of 15.

When I was a kid, I went to a school that was… let’s just say, not the most academically ambitious? The only school alumni anyone might ever have heard of are athletes and reality TV stars.

Unlike others in my family, I was very fortunate: I found most subjects at school pretty easy - including art - and at my school that meant the teachers didn’t really know what to do with me. At one point, when I was maybe 13 or 14, without any warning or explanation, there was a concerted effort to challenge me in every subject, which basically meant giving me different work to everyone else.

In art class this meant that, while everyone else was drawing their halved red peppers with brightly-coloured chalks, my very well-intentioned art teacher made me sit in the corner drawing studies of Michelangelo’s David over and over in charcoal.

Here’s a tip for any aspiring art teachers - you know what’s a really good way, in a pretty tough school, to heap a lot of negative attention onto one teenager? Force them to sit on their own drawing pictures of naked men! :D

IV.

Despite/because of such formative experiences, I love and have always loved the visual arts. I can draw or paint almost anything in a mimetic way - a good talent for impressing small children with bespoke requests - but have absolutely zero artistic inspiration or originality, which unfortunately is the important bit.

I never aspired to be an artist. But working in the arts in London - facilitating others with real talent, in one of the world’s great creative cities - well, that felt like an absolute dream2.

V.

Upon starting my new job at Art Gallery, already some years into my adult working life, it was apparent very quickly just how different I was. Jobs at Art Gallery were famously not well-paid, but…

• I had one colleague who hailed a black cab to get to Art Gallery every morning and then another black cab home again every night.

• There were various colleagues who might answer a routine “how was your weekend?” with stories about flying out to Vegas for a birthday party or the Seychelles for a hen do. You know, the sort of thing that just keeps you ticking over until you get to take your proper holidays!

• And another colleague on the same mediocre salary as me lived in a flat in Kensington (I was very much not living in Kensington). When she invited us back there for birthday drinks one night, there was a picture on the wall of her parents hanging out with Barack Obama. Every other wall or shelf displayed a different edition from a noted artist. One plastic Takashi Murakami sculpture might have looked like a disposable piece of Japanese chintz to anyone not in the know, but I’d guess it was bought for somewhere in the region of £5k to £10k.3

To be clear, these were all lovely people, with one or two exceptions a true pleasure to work with, but they swam through their privilege like a fish through water. It was baked into the system and I was the outlier here, not them. Indeed, while I entered the art world sideways from an established profession, having somewhat proven myself in other fields, the most common route to get an entry-level job at Art Gallery was to complete a six-month unpaid internship working in support of Art Gallery Director.

These highly-competitive internships represented a kind of double-helix of privilege. In the first place, of course you could only even consider taking the poxy thing - and committing yourself to six months of London living costs on no money - if you had some form of money behind you. On the other, 90% of your duties consisted of picking up Art Gallery Director’s dry cleaning, collecting Art Gallery Director’s Ottolenghi lunch and presenting it in the approved manner, and of course walking Art Gallery Director’s Dogs, and therefore also picking up the literal shit of Art Gallery Director’s Dogs every single day.

By the end of those six months you had learnt almost nothing of any real value.

But you also now had a CV that made you eminently more employable anywhere in the art world than all of those other losers who could not afford the same six months of unpaid work.4

One time when I was feeling brave, I asked Art Gallery Director what the plan was for Art Gallery to be more accessible to those from poorer backgrounds. I was told to stop being silly - every gallery in London did that sort of “outreach”, with their minibuses of schoolkids arriving from poorer boroughs. Part of what made Art Gallery so special, I was told without a hint of irony, was that it didn’t discriminate against those from wealthy backgrounds.

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VI.

When I worked at Art Funder, it was notably less like this - there was much less conspicuous wealth on display - but the class dynamics were simply less overt.

During my time there, Art Funder Director was a well-respected curator with a number of prestigious roles behind him. He also had an almost infinite list of artistic preferences that were sacred shibboleths and (to my mind at least) impossible to predict and entirely without logic.

Tracey Emin was a genius, Sarah Lucas was a hack. Grayson Perry was a radical truth-teller, Chris Ofili a walking cliche. That sort of thing.

The funniest of these was that a painting must always always always be a called a “work of art” because the term “artwork” was used by graphic designers and of course graphic designers were not serious people.

Now look, all cultural criticism has this side to it. No doubt I’ve deployed at least as much arbitrary snobbiness in defence of my music or film tastes down the years. But I did have a chuckle when Art Funder Director blagged an invite to the premiere of the latest James Bond (don’t ask) and practically wet himself with excitement.

This man - who was something of an elite cultural tastemaker in the visual arts, literally getting to define who was “great” and who was not - actually had the cultural taste of a 12-year-old boy if you spoke to him about film or theatre or literature or indeed any other art form.

VII.

At Art School, like in most education settings, class was much more difficult to ignore. In fact, I was pleased to discover lots of people there doing really good and important work in trying to make the arts accessible to everyone.

It was still noticeable though just how many academics over the age of 50, many of whom were also self-described socialists, were able to spend six weeks every summer in their second property in France. Fair play to them I guess, but quite a stark contrast to all their colleagues under the age of 35 who had no hope of ever owning a first property to live in, let alone a second.

Lockdown threw such matters into stark relief. You’d be on video calls with colleagues taking calls on their beds, or sat on the kitchen floor in front of washing machines, those juggling childcare, or begging their housemates to please be quiet just for a few moments because this call was really important. Meanwhile an architecture professor was taking a call from the east wing of his house that had literally featured on an episode of Grand Designs.

During my time there, the senior leadership of Art School liked to talk about how “diverse” they were, measured exclusively in this instance by race and ethnicity. They went very quiet if you asked them how many of them were privately educated - by my calculations, at least 80% - all from a demographic accounting for just 7% of the UK population, but which is heavily over-represented in just about every prestigious job sector5.

Indeed, the notoriously unpleasant Chair of Art School didn’t think that anyone was worthy of his time unless they had been to Oxford or Cambridge. Something that always seemed like an awkward fit with his official role presiding over graduation ceremonies dishing out Art School degrees.

VIII.

Lockdown helped me in one very important way, perhaps even saved my career.

I had been trying to get Art School to formally amend its scholarships processes from favouring “academic merit” (i.e. giving money out to the so-called “best” students) to supporting those most in financial need.

No, one of my colleagues argued, we don’t want to do that because then we’ll end up giving money to the rubbish students.

We were on a video call, so I wasn’t able to punch him in the face.

When I calmed down, I told him the stories of some of the “rubbish students” I had spoken to in recent years. The photography student who had never owned his own camera - had got all the way to his final degree show taking (excellent) photos exclusively on cameras borrowed from the equipment library one day at a time. The student with no family of her own who had been living happily with her boyfriend until he had a freak accident and suffered a traumatic brain injury - now she was juggling caring duties alongside her studies because she couldn’t make the sums work again if she deferred for a year. The student who had been made homeless in his first year and had spent the next two years sleeping in his car, finding a different street to park on every night for fear of getting caught.

These were talented, passionate young artists, who had only ever wanted to make great art, and they would suffer all sorts of indignities to do so.

When Art School decided to try out opening one of its libraries for 24 hours a day as an experiment, it did so with understandable nervousness. But the anticipated hordes of drunken students fresh out of the clubs never materialised. Instead there were students coming into study quietly at 2am or 3am, fresh from finishing their latest shift behind a bar or delivering takeaways. There were others who came to the library to sleep with their head on a desk because they could no longer afford to have the heating on at home.

These were the “rubbish students” who were often struggling to keep up with their peers. For them, a few thousand pounds from the Hardship Fund, let alone a £30k scholarship, would be literally life-changing6.

IX.

One final story.

Art Gallery has a very sophisticated scam operation going that only a few people know about. If you look carefully, just behind the entrance doors, you can find two little black boxes facing each other on opposite walls.

Between the black boxes passes an infrared beam. Every time a visitor passes through the beam, they get counted. The total figures get submitted to various places and help determine how much funding Art Gallery gets. Much of this is industry standard.

What’s unusual about Art Gallery is that, in the times when the gallery spaces are all closed (the days of install and de-install) their numbers barely go down. Why??? Because most of the visitors to Art Gallery, which is located in a London spot popular with tourists, only ever cross the threshold to use the toilets. Some call it the most lavishly-funded public toilet in the whole of the UK.

One of the fascinating things about working at Art Gallery was the very literal Upstairs, Downstairs split in job roles. Those (like me) sat in the offices - curators, educators, communicators, fundraisers - were predominantly middle- or upper-class. Those working downstairs - front of house, gallery invigilators, facilities, estates and catering staff - almost exclusively working-class.

But all of us used the same toilets, the exact same ones as the public did - truly, a great leveller.

On the Wednesday of my very first week at Art Gallery, I entered the toilets and encountered something that I had never seen before or since: a single, very long, very brown, human poo, stood up entirely on one end, improbably located a good ten inches from the toilet bowl.

This was a dilemma.

It seemed to me that I had two options: 1) tell someone about it and run the risk that I forever be whispered about as the phantom floor-shitter; or 2) flee the scene and, if witnessed fleeing, definitely become known by colleagues as the phantom floor-shitter.

I chose option 1 and reluctantly informed my lovely colleague on the front desk:

Right, sorry, so this is a bit weird, but I’ve just been in the toilet and…

Someone’s shat on the floor!

Er, yeah…

Happens every week! Mike thinks it might even be a performance of some kind?

right…

We’ll catch them eventually though! I’ll go clear it up as soon as Mary’s back…

ok.

I walked back upstairs feeling very lucky and more than a little guilty.

I did always feel like an outsider in that office, but at least I never had to clear up anyone else’s shit.

The World Athletics Championships took place in Tokyo recently. No one really noticed. It’s funny because, here in the UK at least, whenever the summer Olympics happens it takes over our media for three weeks straight. But when the blue ribbon (gold medal) discipline from the Olympics happens independent of all those other sports then no one really cares.

A particular shame on this occasion because there were some brilliant performances in Tokyo, but not least in the very final event of the week where the all-conquering men’s 4x400m relay runners from the USA (all-time World Champs medal tally: 469) were pipped to the gold by the talented boys from Botswana (all-time World Champs medal tally: 7).

The win was notable in its own right, but even more so because it happened in the midst of an almighty downpour that left the track looking more like the shallow end of a swimming pool.

Almost 90% of Botswana is covered by the Kalahari desert.

II.

When my school friends and I were young, we organised our own decathlon.

It’s the sort of quirky shit you can’t do these days. If you do, you instantly go viral and run the risk of Timothée Chalamet turning up.

But back then - back before social media was even a thing - there was no Chalamet Risk Factor and we had no aspirations for going viral. We were doing it solely for the love of the game.

Once we’d come up with the idea, bored witless one summer, it was surprisingly easy to hire our local athletics track for the day. And by “hire” I mean pay them £3.50(?) each for the privilege of running round the track and jumping into some sand.

At the front gate, there were protracted negotiatons about what exactly we were getting for our money… apparently, according to the grey-haired man on the gate, all of the fun stuff was out of the question. No javelins, no hammers, no high jumps, no vaulting poles, no hurdles. We managed to compromise on access to half a dozen shot puts which, for some reason, were deemed less likely to lead to death and destruction.

III.

Some years later, I completed the London Marathon three times - with varying degrees of success.

On my first attempt, I struggled with the training for various tedious reasons. London had been frozen through months of an extended winter. It snowed, in London, in April, just the week before the marathon. Then the day of the marathon was suddenly the hottest of the year. I raced my 26.2 miles, got very badly sunburnt in my vest, my every exposed bit of skin burnt the colour of a London bus, and the second half of my marathon took twice the time of the first half.

On my second attempt, I trained perfectly. I stayed close to the start of the race so I wouldn’t waste any extra energy commuting to the start line. But something I had eaten while out and about the day before disagreed with me enormously and I completed the race via every horrific toilet on the course1. By the time I eventually finished I was so pale I made Casper the Friendly Ghost look like Donald Trump.

On my third (and final) attempt, everything went perfectly. I beat my previous PB by about 45 minutes. A lot of people came to watch me running around the course and absolutely no one saw me as (unbeknownst to me) I ran the whole thing following a few seconds behind Gordon Ramsay and he was apparently very distracting.

IV.

The currency of Botswana is the pula.

Pula is a word from the Setswana language meaning “rain” - something which is understood to be so rare across the deserts of Botswana that it has the dual meaning of “blessing”.

In Botswana, rain is so precious as to be a suitable name for a currency.

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My dad lived with a terminal cancer diagnosis for 4 year and 7 months, but we weren’t allowed to talk about it.

I don’t think this was particularly complicated. My dad was afraid of dying, absolutely terrified of dying, almost as afraid of dying as he was of talking about his feelings, so we just… didn’t.

But I had not realised quite how bad the situation was until his funeral when one of his many brothers came up to me and said “I just can’t believe it, A, the news was such a surprise…” I stood there in silence – the only polite response I could muster after the best part of five years waiting for this long-anticipated death to finally punch me in the gut. “Only last week your dad was telling me about the operation he was gonna be having - you know, the one which was going to cure everything...”

Fear of dying is surely one of the most relatable forms of cowardice. But my dad was not a coward. One defining moment of my childhood was watching him walk out of the block of council flats I grew up in to confront a gang of 20 or so teenage scallywags who had been terrorising our neighbourhood on dirt bikes for many weeks prior. It never came to violence. My dad just walked out there on his own, stood right in the middle of the whole snarling gang of them swinging a heavy golf club (no ball) and they got the message pretty quick. We never saw them again.

This is the sort of thrilling masculinity which can get you into trouble. How old was I when this happened? Not old enough for the cherished fatherly advice I instantly received that a golf club was less likely to get you arrested than a baseball bat, because no British policeman would ever consider baseball a plausible hobby.

(Decades later, I created my own fuzzy photocopy of this moment, wading into the middle of dozens of Morris Dancers who had insisted on performing on the street outside my house late into the evening, waking up a dozing newborn in the process. Half a dozen of them surged at me with their sticks aloft, but it was difficult to feel too scared given the tinkling of little bells accompanying them. Once as tragedy, again as farce? I didn’t even take a golf club...)

My dad’s willingness to square up to bullies was certainly something he learned from his own mum, who once marched into school to confront a teacher who had dared to dole out some petty form of corporal punishment to another one of the many brothers. A tale told many times. My paternal nan was barely five foot tall, but by all accounts this callous (male) teacher took a few hefty slaps around the back of his head, then got dragged around the playground by his ear, and this being (I think) the late-1950s or early-1960s there were no consequences beyond everyone finding this hilarious and the teacher keeping his hands to himself from there on in.

By the time I got to know her, sadly there wasn’t much left of my dear old nan (so many brothers…), but this was the same incredible woman who once bunked off school as a young teenager in 1936 to go to Cable Street and stare down the black-shirted fascists, to make crystal clear that they were not welcome in the East End of London, to help send Mosley packing.

I love my dead dad – obviously – but his particular cowardice, his inability to communicate in the face of the inevitable, leads me to think of the vast majority of contemporary western “journalists” and “media commentators” whom I very much do not love.

They can see it, of course they can, just the same as the rest of us… This relentless cycle of “sensible” centrist politicians (Macron, Trudeau, Biden/Harris, Starmer, etc.) who offer absolutely nothing to anyone who needs it – because what is “centrism” if not defending the status quo, which coincidentally used to be the dictionary definition of “conservativism”? – followed swiftly by the populist neo-fascism which we’re all becoming extremely well acquainted with right now. It’s easy money out there at the moment, tugging the Overton Window ever (far-)rightwards by promising everything and nothing, scapegoating immigrants/the disabled/trans people, and so on, all for personal enrichment. None of it ever has to add up. The grift cannot lose when the media will never call it out and the only alternative on the electoral menu is simply a different flavour of dogshit with fewer calories.

Approximately ten years ago now, I appalled one of my then-colleagues at a celebratory work lunch by saying that fascism was on its way back. I have no memory at all of the context which prompted me to say this, but (obviously) I’d completely misjudged the mood. My statement clearly seemed kind of outlandish back in 2014 or 2015 – like I’d just informed her that I had been abducted by aliens that morning. And yet now, if you tell anyone that yep, sure, we’re doing fascism again, it’s just about the most banal statement of fact going.

I have a habit of getting timings wrong. I write fiction, lots of it, but I write it slowly and spasmodically. One novel I started writing c.2013, possibly a little earlier, is about what might happen if the CEOs of badly-behaved companies started getting bullets to the back of the head one day. That novel has never gone anywhere much beyond my own laptop, so I can’t exactly blame Luigi Mangione for plagiarising me, but it probably would have been a good idea to have at least had it finished and ready to pitch to publishers before that particular story hit the front pages.

Really though, the point of my half-finished novel was not the assassinations, so much as the way that our society treats fast violence (e.g. the murder of a single person by way of gun or knife) and slow violence (toxic pollution, say, or climate catastrophe, or the slashing of disability benefits – actions which might in time lead to many thousands, even millions, of deaths) with such wildly different consequences for the perpetrators.

So where is our Cable Street? How do we oppose this never-ending creep back towards fascism?

Honestly, I do not know. The average modern fascist is far too lazy and online to ever actually march anywhere, but even when they do come together on the streets it’s with lavish police protection and indulgent media coverage, so how do you meaningfully confront them? Where do you stand them down? How do you shame them? You can’t exactly do it on twitter or facebook anymore – as if you ever could, right? – or even the pages of the Washington Post, given the platforms themselves are owned by some of the worst of them all. Even the bullet to the back of the head is only viable when they’re not permanently using a toddler as a human shield a la Musk.

I suspect that the only real answer still lies in that ages-old secret sauce of all progressive politics – the building of communities. Of communities of people who care, people who will fight for what’s right, people who will look out for each other, but especially the most in need, people who will work on the difficult, nuanced solutions to problems that don’t simply scapegoat the most vulnerable in society. Truly progressive politics.

But I also know that I am a hypocrite and a coward, because I barely even want to talk to my next-door neighbour most of the time, let alone build up and engage with a much wider and more disparate community of real-life people, some of whom might even be just a tiny bit annoying… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

At the start of this year, a very good friend of mine donated a kidney to his brother. It’s the sort of thing that you don’t think actually happens outside of soap operas, but apparently it does. Removing a kidney – yes, the sort of everyday miracle of modernity that would have led to instant death for approximately 99.9999999999999999999% of human existence to date. But it went well – they popped that one kidney straight out of my friend (and popped it into his brother) through a metaphorical keyhole and he was back in a hospital bed texting me our usual nonsense again just a few hours later. Bonkers really.

The last time I saw my friend in person before his operation, I asked him how his parents were coping with this crazy soap opera plotline - having both their sons undertake this incredibly risky procedure at exactly the same time.

My friend said his mum was worried about it – of course she was – but yeah, she was holding up ok.

What about your dad, I asked.

Yeah, my dad hasn’t actually mentioned it to either of us yet, he said.

I didn’t need to ask my friend anymore about that.

We both laughed.

{AA}