Raven Smith’s Trivial Pursuits

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright © Raven Smith 2020

Cover design by Julian Humphries

Cover photograph © Shutterstock

Raven Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008339951

Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780008339975

Version: 2020-02-17

Dedication

Rather than a dedication, it’s more fitting to start with two apologies.

Firstly, to my mum on account of how much I talk about my cock.

And secondly, to my husband on account of how much I talk about his.

Contents

1  Title Page

2  Copyright

3  Dedication

4  Contents

5  A Trivial Pursuit

6 The Fear

7 Emails

8 Hotel, Motel, Holiday Thin

9  Marathon Love

10  Croissant

11  The Fridge

12  People Taking Pictures of People Taking Pictures of the Mona Lisa

13  The Ghost of Christmas Past

14  Being Tall

15  Two Drinks-Drunk

16  Treasures Untold

17  Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover

18  Penis Poirot

19  Gays for Theresa

20  Napkins and Serviettes

21  If the Prime Minister Smelled of Freshly Baked Bread

22  Never Let Me Go

23  Kevin Costner Drinks His Own Piss

24  The Affair

25  Flesh Tetris

26  The Fagin of my Friends

27  What if Jennifer Aniston Isn’t Sad? (And Everything Else that Goes Through my Head in a Yoga Class)

28  Notes from the Brink

29  Will I Be a Good Dad?

30  Aperitivo

31  Acknowledgements

32  About the Author

33  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

List of Pagesiiiivv123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960616263646566676869707172737475767778798081828384858687888990919293949596979899100101102103104105106107108109110111112113114115116117118119120121122123124125126127128129130131132133134135136137138139140141142143144145146147148149150151152153154155156157158159160161162163164165166167168169170171172173174175176177178179180181182183184185186187188189190191192193194195196197198199200201202203204205206207208209210211212213214215216217218219220221222223224225226227228229230231232233234235236237238239240241242243244245246247248249250251252253254255256257258259260261263264

A Trivial Pursuit

Forrest Gump was wrong: life is nothing like a box of chocolates, it’s more like drunk-biting into a kebab on the night bus. You’re trying to Jay Rayner the different flavour profiles but they’re mashed between pitta and the top deck’s swirling while you grip your door key between your knuckles, refusing to black out before your stop. Is that a curl of doner meat or a piece of napkin you’ve hungry-caterpillared? Like a kebab, our lives have countless ingredients; the dominant flavours and hidden additives are interlocking, co-dependant parts, like a thirtieth-birthday Omega. Disparate life-stuff vies for our attention like listening to three podcasts and a voicenote as the sound of dial-up internet reverberates backwards on a Sonos. There’s a consensus that life and death and kids really do matter. But we’ve also Googled beach sandals and healing crystals and carbs in a mango. These things matter too, but in a different way to voter fraud or organised religion or melting ice caps. Those little pots of chunked parmesan at Whole Foods feel a touch frivolous when compared to famine. The Pizza Express dough balls don’t cancel out genocide. Having to queue for too long at a bar boils my piss, but gin and tonic is a welcome distraction from our current political hell. These small things are inconsequential, but we chase them. Our trivial pursuits.

It’s helpful to think of life as a Monet – a canvas layered with splodgy strokes. A masterpiece and a big old mess. There’s just a lot of stuff to consider: your height, your weight, your jeans, your genes. Your education, your privilege, your subscription to the New Yorker. Can you still eat avocados? Can you still eat salmon? Can you still drink tap water? Or Aperol? Or probiotic yoghurt? Ottolenghi, easyJet, immigration. Joni Mitchell, the McCanns, Kim Kardashian. #MeToo and the 5:2. Microbeads in the sea. A starving polar bear on a splinter of iceberg. Can you be a good person if you don’t devote your life to Greenpeace? Can you be a good person without an asylum seeker in your spare bedroom? Can you be a good person and still judge the dresses at the Met Gala? Is pink back? Is pink woke? Is pink naff because it got woke and then we ruined it? How do you even pronounce Moët? Are we running out of time? Are we running out of resources? Are we running out of waitresses because of Brexit? Life’s torrential downpour of dust-bunnies under your bed piles up on the surfaces like Miss Havisham’s attic.

And are you engaging with it all? Or just scrolling down the feed liking pics? Are you actually getting happier? Or just less anxious? Are you making a good indelible mark on this planet, or leaving a cavernous carbon footprint? Are you the change you want to see in the world, or do you just tweet about it? Are you a muggle, commuting through life with your eyes down on today’s paper? Are you a messiah preaching the gospel, or an obedient disciple? And when you finally get to the pearly gates of heaven, will that one viral tweet count for or against your entry?

Modern life is rubble. Shingle from the bottom of the ocean brought in by the tide. We comb the beach ascribing value to each discovery. Whether that’s eating McDonald’s or living vegan, Donna Tartt or emojis, David Hockney or Zoella, being healthy or being thin. These are the trivialities we chase, our aspirations outside of having kids and not dying. We pursue these trifles that are both soufflé-light and anvil-heavy. At times they’re as mundane as a Uniqlo sock, at others they’re as dizzying as a diamond earring. We’re riddled with choices like a gangrenous leg, but we don’t have to be binary between the profound or the irrelevant. They coexist. These things have a meaning but they are also meaningless, overshadowed by genuine disasters.

Each decision we make is a self-portrait, but like Elizabethans we commission painters who make us look better. We don’t choose stuff for who we are, but more for who we want to be, perusing a life we see as successful.

In most cases trivial pursuits aren’t a conscious act by the participant. They’re a complex, invisible system of influence, like the mafia. And quiet prompts steer us from the periphery of our vision. Like most fairytales, this book is based on a simple conceit: everything in your life is trivial, but also has enough meaning to pursue. The small stuff is straw, but like Rumpelstiltskin the straw is also the gold. Take shoes, for example. If you see a pair of shoes online you may ask yourself, ‘Do I want these shoes?’ It’s innocuous enough. But within that question you’re like Cinderella, a woman who transformed her whole life with the perfect shoe and partied hard and fell in love. But the question has doubt too. You’re the undeserving ugly sister coveting the shoe. Do you deserve the shoe, or the prince? Should you buy the shoe for some future engagement at which you’ll feel worthy of the shoe? Will wearing the shoe convince you and the people around you that you’re worthy of the shoe? And in this whole shoe-mess you’re also Prince Charming. You’re searching for the woman who wears this shoe.

Does that make sense? It sounds ridiculous because it is. And we’re all doing it all the time, with multiple decisions we make about our time and our houses and our baby names and our dick pics. A million micro-factors encouraging us to do more and be more. We’re all striving for something, whether it’s a great meal, or the right hand-soap, or a cute kid with tiny Birkenstocks (always the right shoe). Everything is a major or minor decision, made en route to this bigger portrait we’re painting of who we really are.

I heard on Woman’s Hour that life is a big U shape: happy childhood at the start, and happy old age, the middle a big sag where you mainly just work and eat, and worry about money and worry about food. This book, I think, is the bottom of the U, all the human existing that congregates in the reservoir tip before we hit the blissful slalom of old age. Sometimes the U is filling with water and we’re drowning rats clawing up the sides, other times it’s a hammock and we’re lazing on a sunny afternoon.

I lie awake thinking about a bag of crisps I opened upside down last year, but alongside that there are more frets. Is empathy in retrograde? Do we care more about ourselves than other people? Am I middle-class-signalling by shopping at Waitrose? What if I only buy own-brand goods there? Is that actually worse? How is time passing so quickly? How is time passing so slowly? Why am I tired all the time? On my deathbed will I wish I’d slept more? After I die will they make a twelve-part Netflix original about me? Who will play me if Meryl is busy? Who will play me if Meryl is dead? What is my legacy? What is my lunch? Do I fail every time I eat carbs? Or do I beat the system? Could I perform the Heimlich manoeuvre in an emergency despite never having been taught it? Why am I sweating when I’m sitting still? Why am I back scrolling Instagram? Why do I pretend to hate the internet, and that an analogue life is a more pious path? Is sass a superpower or an Achilles heel? Is charm real? Is charisma real? Are these traits you’re born with? Or do you cultivate them like a garden? Deep down in my soul, in the bit you can’t see in selfies, am I the cat bin lady, angrily and chaotically acting out at the world? Or am I the cat in the bin, manhandled without my consent? Am I the bin itself, passively filled by nearby drama? I’ve lost hours searching for rugby-striped bedding, which is as much to do with my religious love of John Lewis as it is about the reminiscence of being a closet gay in a rugby scrum at school. What does getting the right bedding really mean on my personal success scale? Do I even notice most of my achievements? Or are they all passing clouds? When I die, will some zany acquaintance insist everyone wears colourful clothes to my funeral? That would be really bad.

I’m not concerned with how we got here, I’m interested in the status quo. I’m not going to trace back to our penny-farthinged pre-internet culture, nor am I going to Charlie Brooker your future. This book will not tell you how to feel. When to cry. When to laugh. When to panic. You don’t get a gold star for reading two lines without checking you phone in between. This book is a buffet, but unlike the lukewarm salmonella-y kind, there are plenty of piping-hot takes. I will keep serving dishes as you Bruce Bogtrotter them. I have a lot of questions. Is being tall its own social currency? Am I the contents of my fridge? Does plastic recycling matter if we all still eat fish? Does yoga matter if you’re not filthy rich? Am I the Nelson Mandela of Grindr because I managed to escape it? Is this the long walk to monogamy? Will I ever be as hot as I was on my wedding day? Will I ever be as hungry? Is a bagel four slices of bread? Are vitamin supplements secret carbs? Are three cigarettes a meal? Fucking hell, Raven, a meal is a meal.

Raven Smith’s Trivial Pursuits answers some of these questions, and reflects on the importance of the least important things. A CSI dark light that shows you the ominous stains of our frivolous attempts to accomplish or attain. Tie a napkin round your neck, chérie, and I’ll provide the rest.

The Fear

As someone who’s never done a live sex show, I can say with confidence that nothing gives you performance anxiety like sitting down to write a book. When starting this book I was riddled with apprehension, the kind that paralyses you and freezes you mid-scene like porn on a bad internet connection. I’ve had intense jobs before, all the palaver of contract negotiation and emails flying back and forth like a gravel pit. A meaningful work project takes infinite energy and infinite patience, but the end result is worth every brave conversation, every 7 a.m. conference call, every stand-up argument across the open-plan office. The time I threw a shoe. The time I ‘humiliated’ the cleaner. That little slap for the intern. A meaningful project is worth settling out of court. But every work meltdown before today was a merry Morris dance, all belled shoes and ribboned sticks, compared to the actuality of having to write this book. I will never say I’m overwhelmed again.

Like a self-professed summer person, schvitzing in the corner with a wet top lip as the humidity peaks, I declared myself a book person, thinking it was a personality I could slather on like sun cream. But when summer hit I just felt sweaty and stressed like wilted salad leaves left out of the fridge. Writing a book about modern life while living a modern life is basically declaring yourself the puppet who wants to be the puppeteer. Not just a Pinocchio participant in culture, but an observer of all the strings that hold it up – Geppetto overseeing the whole dance with strategic tugs to the beat. My bravado simmered down and the doubt crept in the way a summer anthem infects your brain. Could I even write? What defines an essay? Could I pose a juicy question? Then illuminate an answer? Could I show the judges versatility too? Beyond that, could I do daring literary gymnastics like Shakespeare on a pill? If all the world’s a stage, was I ready to tap dance? Not sonnets. I didn’t want to write sonnets because they’re a bit old-fashioned. But could I write a book for normal people who just want a little jazz?

Writers have always held a particular allure, because they aren’t like regular people. Writers don’t just observe the world like it’s streaming on Netflix: they masticate the world, they ingest it, and it marinates, eventually thrown up as a warm flume of hot takes. Out of them trails a festoon of delicate-but-robust prose, like a string of knotted hankies from Fagin’s pocket. It felt bold to call myself a writer. More of a hypothesis than a fact. A thrill cut through with potential humiliation, like a beery teenage kiss. I feel like an interloper, climbing aboard the literary boat like the Somali pirates on Tom Hanks’s container ship. I’m the writer now.

But I’ve scrambled my brain. Social media and the news cycle and infinite scrolling have whittled my attention span down to a nub. So while I’m triple-screening I’m also plotting, or coveting, or consuming. Every waking second brings an avalanche of ideas to sift through like the currants in a Christmas pudding while you search for the coin. Ideas dangle before my eyes like Boris Johnson on that zipline. Worries and desires and regrets stack up in my head. The sheer panic that I didn’t fully cash in when I was a twink. The sheer panic that the Cosmopolitan cocktail won’t make a comeback like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. The sheer panic that my dad was so laid-back as a parent I just absorbed complacency like a human kitchen towel. Is shopping a religious experience? Or are gyms the new churches? Why isn’t there a Mumsnet for gays? Or a Grindr for meeting the best people at a party without having to wade through the bores?

Thoughts come as easily as teenage boys but bounce off just as quickly, refusing to stick around for a second date. I wanted to step back from the trillion passing thoughts and conduct them, or at least organise them into workable groups. To somehow jettison out of my head and orbit the mess, an astronaut weightlessly jotting down his observations. I began this book on a dictation app, endlessly pacing my kitchen ad-libbing into my phone like the Lenny Henry of Camberwell but without the Red Nose Day suit or the Premier Inn deal. The notes caught thoughts like the trowel that came with our litter tray so you can sieve out the cat shit. I covertly spoke to the app everywhere I went, like a portable confessional booth. Cut to me in the street counter-arguing a podcast on my way to yoga. See me gurn-whispering into my phone in the corner of a club. I would wake just before dawn, with bin-breath, and express groggy observations right from the heart of my subconscious.

Countless things materialise when you’re talking to yourself. One is that I say essentially a lot. And basically. And talk almost exclusively in metaphors. But a phrase jumped out of my notes: Everything is a distraction from death. I can be quite melodramatic – perhaps there’s a teenage goth hiding inside me, all black boots and cobweb make-up. I still embrace this death sentiment, because everything is a distraction from death. We can either focus on the inevitable conclusion, or distract ourselves, gawping at the football streaker before the match ends. We find a way to fill that finite space between cradle and grave.

Before I typed a word I procrastinated. Procrastination is my toxic boyfriend, a confirmed bachelor keeping me from committing words to the page. The first bout of research had nothing to do with books. I was more concerned with how writers dress. I searched pictures of them at their desks and bought caricature garments. Sartorially, Truman Capote in Venice won out, all laid-back white shirts and wrinkled cords. Capote once said ‘Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go,’ and I’ve always felt like that about my own personality: appetising and moreish at first, giving way to an overwhelming sickliness.

Wrinkled cords helped set the mood like a dimmer switch at a swingers’ night, but I still couldn’t sit down and type. Procrastination kept me scrolling pictures of Tripp Fontaine for hours. It helped me pick little fights with my husband by WhatsApping him pictures of his mess around the house. Procrastination was sous chef to the extravagant sandwiches I made for lunch that took forty-five minutes minimum to assemble. I produced pint after tart pint of ‘Raven’s Lemon Curd’ which I gifted to friends. I talked about writing a lot, saying ‘It’s just a numbers game,’ not knowing that that was a naïve lie. I quipped that I was an essayist, because even the word ‘writer’ became more and more loaded, a gun in my pocket about to shoot me in the foot. I decided that if I pretended to be confident I would become confident, like a birthday wish when you blow out the candles. In my most baller moments I convinced myself that I was the undiscovered voice of my generation, a phrase that leaves a metallic taste in your mouth like you’ve licked a fistful of coppers. I swallowed that acid idea down and let it settle in my stomach like Vesuvius ash. I watched my husband’s poker face as I told him I was the voice of my generation, looking for a fault, for a wince, some sign we were colluding in the narcissism. He never faltered, because he knowns when to pick his battles and he doesn’t want an arrow in the eye. Husbands can be very good at building momentum but they can also slam the brakes. This time he left me running like a car engine while he nipped in for a grab bag of Quavers to keep my blood sugar up. I sat in the passenger seat as the vehicle filled with toxic voice-of-a-generation-monoxide, breathing on the windshield and writing voiceofageneration in the mist. I said to my husband, ‘I have to believe I’m the voice of my generation to write this book, it doesn’t matter if it’s true.’ It felt empowering and deluded to say it, and thrilling to force him into secrecy. It was a pact that brought us closer, but I still didn’t write a word. Instead I wrote ‘voice of a generation?’ in an email and saved it to drafts.

Shifting from audio note-taking to actual book-writing was like the early days of a love affair: anxious, confusing, obsessive, joyful, exhausting, exhilarating. I felt like I was sixteen again: self-conscious, besotted and confused, trying to convince myself not to obsess. Each day I sat down to edit my muddled thoughts, rather than facing the expectant blinking cursor of an empty Word doc. The anxiety of a blank page was forgotten, and I couldn’t shut up about it. I could hear people getting bored with my book-fixation, but I couldn’t stop. The process was electric and fluid, a hazardous and insoluble mix. Lively and dampening. I would find myself so sodden with anxiety I wanted to climb into a bag of rice. Forever. Unlike a love affair, there is no reciprocity. You pile more of yourself into the book and nothing comes back out. You are doing stand-up into the abyss. Transmitting but not receiving. One hand clapping in an echo chamber of your own notes.

The first sentence was the hardest, like pissing out a Sylvanian Families badger. I wanted to write something both humble and heroic to send out into the universe on a golden record. Something to misquote in the history books. Whatever I wrote would be a deliberate stain, an unsightly skidmark on new underwear, asylum seekers in Chipping Norton, pineapple on a pizza. Each sentence had to be written in red Sharpie that won’t Cif off the fridge. Everything felt finite and irreversible. I was Nicole Kidman with a prosthetic nose (to make her look more Virginia Wolverine) lining her pockets with rocks and silently entering the water. Dragged to the bottom by the weight of the project. I cracked my knuckles, ready to expel magnificent observations and sparkling wit. Prose was constipated. I felt a hydraulic pressure to reveal something mundane that coincidentally-on-purpose tapped into a relatable zeitgeist below the surface of culture. A personal anecdote that would ripple out and touch countless lives. ‘Let them eat cake’ for the podcast generation, penned by Carrie Antoinette. The full-frontal exposure of my thoughts was daunting, like trying to open a tin of beans with a sharpened stick. It went beyond stagefright. The fear was a fatberg meandering the tunnels of my veins. I was the ninety-nine people in the room who didn’t believe in me. All I had was wrinkled cords.

But then I wrote a sentence. An OK sentence. An everyday, palatable sentence. It wasn’t Let them eat Huel, but it was good enough. And then I wrote another. I could nurture the seeds from the dictation app into seedlings, like a black Monty Don. I had paragraphs. And they were my bricks. I had blueprints and foundations, but I couldn’t think ahead to the house I was building, because that was something for other people to peer into and walk around and judge. I was not ready for colour schemes or wallpaper or Kirsty Allsopp. But brick by brick I cornered off a little part of the world of my own. The wind changed direction and the skeleton of a building stayed standing. No huff and no puff. No subsidence. I have a tendency for complacency so I didn’t look back, I kept my spirit level and I just kept writing.