Notes from the Substack Fête
On lockdown, memory, and the poems I wrote when the walls closed in
I caught up with Nina Power at the Substack Fête last night. We talked about writing, academia, religion and poetry — which is exactly the kind of conversation I like to have before I’ve even found a drink. Nina is as allergic to small talk as I am, which made for a very good evening.
The poetry conversation reminded me that I wrote some during lockdown. I use the word loosely. You can judge for yourselves below.
Finding them again reminded me of the sheer misery of those years — and how comprehensively that misery has been revised out of the official memory. Ed West, who was also there last night, told me he remembered the lockdowns as lasting about six months. The lockdowns and other restrictions lasted two years.
Some time distortion is to be expected. Patrick Fagan and I wrote about it this peculiarity in Free Your Mind. We had Christmas sandwiches in summer 2020, the Olympics were emblazoned with the wrong year, and of course the normal rhythm of daily life was interrupted.
January 2021 was the lowest point for me. I was finishing A State of Fear, typing my little fingers to the bone in a cold garden office during the third lockdown, after a cancelled Christmas, cut off from everyone, watching every source of income disappear. Freelancers were, to use the technical term, absolutely stuffed. Paying the bills was becoming an obsessive preoccupation.
I’ve been asked several times whether I’ll produce an updated edition of A State of Fear. I won’t. Everything still stands. The facts are correct and the argument holds. It’s a record of a genuinely ghoulish strategy — the deliberate frightening of a population into compliance — and it doesn’t need updating because I got it right.
What has changed is where that book led me. I’ll write about that soon. My new book is something I am sinking into nervously, excitedly and gratefully — and it begins, in a way, where A State of Fear ends. I’ll be sharing what I am doing here with subscribers first.
For now: the poems. They are behind the paywall, for two reasons.
First, if you read The Free Mind and value it, a paid subscription is the only thing that keeps it going. I give away more for free than most writers on this platform. The paid tier is how the lights stay on.
Second — and I will be honest — I am not entirely sure whether I am proud of these poems or utterly mortified by them. There is only one way to find out, dear reader, and it involves subscribing.
Bubble was written after the introduction of “bubbles” — one of the more surreal and stupid pieces of social engineering of that period. Slavery was written when the same people who had been disinfecting their shopping bags and snitching on their neighbours took to the streets in their tens of thousands. The cognitive dissonance was, as they say, quite something.
