Raven Smith’s Trivial Pursuits

Daytimes dragged, but similes Jackson Pollocked out of me late at night over Deliverooed Ben & Jerry’s. Writing is like sex or exercise: you can overthink it, and spend too long getting down to it, but you hit a critical frenzied point and it feels amazing afterwards. Euphoric, near-orgasmic bouts of writing usually surface at 10 p.m., when I’d rather be having actual sex, when the black coffee is tepid and the ice cream is drinkable.

I found myself nit-combing my personal history, larvae and debris repurposed for chapters. Sometimes the writing is so hard I’m chiselling my own gravestone with my bare fingers. At other times an idea pours out like hot lava escaping a volcano and wiping out entire cities in its molten path. The book cannot be stopped. As easy as vomiting after you’ve eaten candyfloss and ridden the Wurlitzer: it’s a simple equation of being overfull, and then shaken like a martini. The words projectile. Other times it’s like puking on an empty stomach. All that straining and retching for half a mouthful of spit. I forced up metaphors for weeks, a form of verbal bulimia. Dehydrated and ruined, I considered calling NHS Direct. Thought-provoking copy can be extracted by careful caesarean, but you’re not just the patient. I’m one of those Victorian surgeons you read about who operated on himself while trying to keep all the other organs ticking.

I’m gagging for a vacation from myself. A vacation from thinking. And from thinking about thinking. And thinking about the quality of my thoughts. And from worrying that I’m not thinking enough at all. Six weeks in the Bahamas in a medically-induced coma would suit, although I’m sure I’d find a way to dictate a few lines. Freddie Mercury said the show must go on, but how can anyone ever have gone through this process and not fallen to pieces? How can writers roam the earth without sinking into the quicksand of their own doubt? The fear gets louder: You are not cut out for this. You’re indulging yourself. You’re only here as part of some diversity quota. You are undeserving.

The sweetest escape is booze. I long to get annihilated by drink. Kamikaze drunk. George-Best-roaring-with-laughter drunk. Scarface high, but drunk. Hold-my-hair-back-and-paint-the-pavement-with-warm-tequila drunk. Lean-in-and-kiss-my-mate drunk. Lean-in-and-slap-my-mate drunk. That feeling of only being drunk, nothing in your head except Don’t fall over, don’t throw up. Weekend at Bernie’s-walk-home-because-no-Uber-will-take-me drunk. How do you solve a problem like tequila? I want to forget the seams of the chapters, the lyrics of the lines, the shape of the prose. Drink until I’m out of credit and can’t send and receive text. I want to lose my voice and store it in a shell on the sea witch’s neck. I want to wake up on the beach and comb my hair with a fork.

I don’t get drunk. I don’t wake up in A&E with charcoal round my lips. Like any good pessimist, I sit very still and worst-case-scenario plan. The dystopian Mystic Meg of my own life.

I can see a future where people tweet me about the book with concise little takedowns like What the shit? and Who commissioned this garbage? It’s manageable at first, because I’m a big boy, and if I can handle bastard sewer rats wandering round my kitchen I can handle a few tweets. Initially I’m low-key proud, because trolls are a byproduct of fame, and this is clearly my fifteen minutes. A few aggy DMs cut to the bone because underneath the Acne bomber I’m a soft-shell crab, so despite sensible advice from people I love and trust, and specific case studies to the contrary, I engage with these haters. I fire out pithy tweets that immediately get torn to shreds by the rabble like chicken in a burrito. I feed these trolls giant nuggets of retort and morsels of badly-worded self-defence. The trolling is relentless in a way that can’t be wittily anecdoted at dinner parties. People look at me with the head tilt you do when you know someone’s recovering from the flu. Some troll sets up a bot that tweets each line from the book with ‘Cancel culture do your thing’ scribed underneath. I get massacred for using words like scribed. I’m too laboured a writer. Or I’m too brusque. I’m too noisy. I’m too cautious. My vocab is in the gutter. The book is left on the shelf like a curio. It’s a novelty shrunken head, forgettable for all but the original owner. I become synonymous with Mondays, the worst day of the week, but my book somehow makes Mondays even shoddier. Out of the blue Kate Moss says I’m worse than the easyJet pilot she called a basic bitch. The celebrities pile in. Gordon Ramsay, a man who once said he would electrocute his children if they became vegetarians, calls me a six-foot turkey. I bring out the vitriol in the kindest of stars. Oprah threatens to dangle me over the balcony like Michael Jackson’s son. Things reach fever pitch when Lena Dunham says she feels sorry for me but misspells my name and Jon Ronson tweets that I should be scalped. So you’ve been publicly shaved. The book is translated into Braille solely to exfoliate people’s callused feet. ‘Ravening’ is added to the Oxford English Dictionary, defined as ‘writing a shit book’. Tabloid hacks delve into my past and reveal I’ve been counting my age in Geri Halliwell years and I’m not even half-Jamaican. Piers Morgan calls me Ja-fake-an.

Book people will of course hate the thing, pulling apart my janky prose and grammar. My one-liners fall flat like Christina Aguilera at the Grammys. The Paris Review sucker-punches the book as ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. This hurts me more than the time my mum shut my fingers in the car door in south London. The Guardian blocks me. The New Yorker ghosts me. Radio 4 holds a minute’s silence rather than platform me. Diet Prada runs a week-long campaign comparing my writing to other writers who’ve made better points about identical subjects. Private Eye has nothing to satirise. For the first time in history the Booker committee decides to award a prize for the worst book published this year. Guess who wins? Somebody somehow hacks my Google search history and the world knows how often I investigate eyebag surgery and patterned shorts and synonyms for ‘amazing’. The shame is deafening. Charlie Brooker calls my book laughable. Zadie Smith calls me a twat. David Sedaris calls me literary roadkill. Despite this, I refuse to believe the book is shit, such is the ego of a man who’s survived. I will die on this hill (the hill being unsold copies of the book).

Back in reality I type onward, telling myself you only have to write the first draft of your first book once. Perhaps I’ll look back on this time and laugh, like the time I shat myself in the park on the way to work. Slowly I take more breaks. The world outside the space between my nose and the screen bleeds back in. I loosen the screws on my timetable and word-count. I turn the internet back on. I go to Egypt and I don’t write a word and the sky doesn’t come crashing down. I watch Bring It On in the bath. I bleach the loos and feel a genuine sense of calm but I don’t bother with the sinks because it’s a faff. I feed my cat M&S smoked salmon. I stop thinking about the book all the time, and the strikethrough of my anxiety Morse codes into intermittent dots and dashes. I decide whatever the outcome I’ll always be tall. I write a chapter about being tall. It pretty much writes itself. I watch Leon for the first time. I read digestible fashion clickbait which should be forgettable but I find myself thinking, ‘I’d better be reincarnated as a French woman, so help me God.’ I rewatch the Blackfish documentary and think, ‘It could be worse, I could get murdered by a killer whale in front of a bunch of kids.’ Perhaps I’ll be revered in retrospect like Van Gogh or Robbie and Kylie doing ‘Kids’: not respected enough at the time, but post-reactively iconic. Along with my mood, my prose loosens up like it’s taken stool softeners. My coach suggests I write my own eulogy, which I roll my eyes at but it helps because it’s all big-picture, blue-sky thinking. I’ve decided it’s bad taste to have my corpse Dita von Teese-floating in a giant novelty martini glass at my funeral, so I want to be dressed in my going-out top and Gucci clogs and burned like a Viking on a pyre of my own belligerence. That would suit me just fine.

Emails

I know it’s a humblebrag to say I get a lot of emails and I don’t care. I get a lot of emails. I get so many that I now open them to check for urgency and mark them as ‘unread’, an action I’d like to adopt when I’m being cranky with my husband. Your washing’s been on the radiator for three days. Mark as ‘unsaid’.

An email is always critical for the sender. Falsely flagged as hostage-situation urgent. Only a handful of these inbox delights ever need immediate attention. Technology and productivity have collided, creating a Wild West shootout of hyper-efficiency, where every cowboy touchtypes in bullet time and shoots off a round of emails. Recent etiquette decrees that those on the receiving end must apologise for not replying instantaneously. ‘Sorry for the three-minute delay in getting back to you …’ Any reply outside of a few hours is insulting and you deserve to be hexed or to lose a finger like the woman in The Piano, clacketting away at your keyboard for eternity. If you reply to an email outside of twenty-four hours, the email doesn’t even exist, it just turns to foam on the waves like Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid when she can’t pull the prince. Rapid-retort emails are the boarding school biscuit game, everyone bashing away trying to get their response out as quickly as possible. Efficiency culture makes us demand things harder, better, faster and stronger, with no margin for error. For all correspondence, we expect the laser precision of a surgeon’s knife and the professional finish of a wedding cake.

My fingers automatically type hollow platitudes that keep colleagues and suppliers lubed for the working day. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve replied ‘Amazing!’ when the work is adequate. Amazing! keeps the wheels turning. There are more amazing words for Amazing! – Stunning!, Superb!, Magnificent! – but they reek of motivational speaker. Using superior words can make you sound like a nervous Carol Vorderman on a first date with a jittery bag of consonants. Too thesaurus. Too composed. People can smell the bullshit. But Amazing! is timeless and suggests an emotional exertion that isn’t really there. Like blue jeans, Amazing! never goes out of style. Like sex, Amazing! is good as long as you’re getting it. Amazing! is the bread on a shit sandwich of getting your own way. Pop an Amazing! into an unflinchingly direct command and people think they’re helping you out rather than following an order. When your life flashes before your eyes as you die you mainly see instances of the regret and pain you have caused others, but you also see the people whose days were Wonderbra-lifted by a well-placed Amazing!

I’ve read that flowery emails with too many platitudes are less effective, and that women use this more apologetic lexicon, whereas men just say what they want. In a bid to be assertive I eradicated shriek language from my prose, taking my email tone from giddy teenager in love (‘Amazing! Raven xx’) to the intensely militant guy in Full Metal Jacket (‘I need this immediately, as per my last email’). Taking the sweetness out of the emails dropped the blood sugar, and made people feel like I was having a pop. I could almost hear them paralysed at the computer as they received the command, and then scurrying about like frightened church mice. I sort of enjoyed it at a dictator level, but even my inflated sense of self has a boundary. Colleagues felt stressed and inadequate, like me when I lost my virginity. Nobody wants the feeling of deflowerment every time they get an email. Amazing!s were reinstated like a hymen.

Most email communication is superfluous – anything truly urgent happens on the phone, or in the hay-fevered cross-pollination of a conference call, multiple voices and three-second time delays creating an apocalyptic hellfire like when the Ghostbusters crossed the energy streams. You don’t email 999. You don’t email a boiling pan of water off the stove. Britney didn’t email her hair off. Emails are never truly urgent.

Things that are urgent: towels when you get out the bath; chinese food when you’re hungover; diet Coke when you’re thirsty; Jesus’s cross at the crucifixion, or a coffin at a normal funeral; mini quiches at a wake; butter on a jacket potato the moment it comes out of the oven; extra security protocols in action films when people think they have enough security protocols; unlimited patience at Heathrow Terminal 5; Advil PM on a long-haul flight; and Toblerones from duty free. A Starbucks bathroom is urgent when you need to piss. As is masturbation before you sit at a computer all day. Sex when you’re horny is an immediate need. Though not having sex immediately is its own thing too. I can convince myself I urgently need more vitamin supplements or new pants, but I’m aware that’s just my consumerism talking. I don’t want to sound like an emotional wellness coach, but we urgently need friends when we’re sad. I’ll go all-out and say cake when you’re sad, too. And kittens when you’re at rock bottom. You need money when you’re broke. Or family heirlooms to hock. Or the balls to cat-burgle a stately home, or to Anna Nicole Smith an older man. You urgently need to watch Antiques Roadshow if you feel even the slightest bit depressed. It always helps.

What’s never urgent is an email. The vibration of a notification is an ambush, striking at any time to jolt you out of the task that had your attention. Notifications can swirl and engulf you like the bees that killed Macaulay in My Girl. Endless connectivity is the plague of our century. Ring-a-ring of roses, a pocket full of WeTansfer notifications and breaking news alerts and calendar reminders and the family WhatsApp group. Alerts build in a crescendo that floods all of your senses like a bad case of food poisoning. And we secretly get off on it. We’re being alerted to our own sense of importance and need for attention. We welcome the false adoration. It’s more than a dopamine hit. The closest thing to an orgasm is turning your phone on after a long flight and flooding the basement with notification vibrations. A reminder that people know you exist. It fortifies our sense of importance. We’ve convinced ourselves we need to be constantly connected, like those heinous couples on Oxford Street who would rather clothesline you than let go of each other’s sodding hands. This is the Braxton Hicks of intimacy. Connectivity making us feel connected, responding to notifications, not people. A false idol of togetherness.

Our egos are bolstered by notice-me-fications, and reinforced by being busy. The culture of being busy isn’t a new idea, but I-could-be-doing-more-to-enrich-this-moment is a new pressure. Like a parent at the Tate shoehorning culture into their kid, who just wants to draw. We’re trying to find a deeper, multifaceted meaning in every moment. When I was a kid we’d make stained-glass-window biscuits: a shortbread frame with a boiled sweet that would melt in the oven and flood the frame right up to the edges. And that’s our new endeavour: trying to fill every day right up to the edges. Like trying to pack a fortnight’s clothing into your carry-on. We’re adding depth, adding texture. Texture is the right word because it’s not about doing more stuff, it’s about each life experience having a deeper colour and a coarser consistency, and meaning more because of these things. Like a gin and tonic, but the gin is made by artisanal West Country virgins and the tonic is the expensive stuff from Waitrose. The lemon is Sicilian and cut with that knife we got in Japan, darling, do you remember? Think of life as spaff of MasterChef velouté, and we’re all Marco-Pierre White wannabes examining the subtler flavours of the sauce rather than drinking it down like piglets. We’re actively seasoning every second we’re awake. In any moment’s respite from our densely-packed milliseconds we consult our to-do list, the modern prophet for structuring our time.

To-do lists are basically notes we write to ourselves that remind us we exist and have purpose. A list of obstacles that cleverly distracts us from the realisation that regular meditation won’t scientifically let us leapfrog death. The humble to-do list keeps existential worries at bay. A to-do list is a breezy nursery rhyme of irrelevant tiny tasks, the lightest of gestures, that keep things ticking forward: Pick up dry cleaning. Put down my phone. Hydrate. Trivialities maketh the to-do, as grandiose statements are left for rom-coms when people refuse to forever hold their peace at a wedding. These are things to-do, and when they’re to-done we add more. An infinite scroll of distraction, like when you need to leave for work but you can’t resist the constant refresh of your news feed. To-do lists represent an evolving, inescapable validation of how we spend our time. The fetish of being so busy we can’t stop to think about mortality, every instant of the day chronically stuffed to the brim like a foie gras goose. We’re choosing to be forever occupied, like a toilet at a house party.

Hotel, Motel, Holiday Thin

There are so many songs about summer the other seasons get jealous. Luckily climate change is a great leveller, and when it’s finished we’ll have a forever nuclear winter and no seasons at all. In the meantime we can listen to ‘Summer Holiday’ and get excited for a vacation, no more climate-change worries for a week or two. Saying you love to holiday in Britain is a lie and you deserve to get mad-cow disease. Going on holiday never, ever involves driving down the M25 with all your stuff packed tight in the boot like Stan’s girlfriend in ‘Stan’, your only respite eating the sad, ulcerous motorway food that’s been reheated at the back of a garage followed by the empty calories of a Toffee Crisp. Somebody’s always crushed into the back seat with their knees by their ears pretending to be jovial. Inevitably a Fathers for Justice guy dressed as Batman blocks the dual carriageway to protest a court order. Hours pass. You piss in a layby. This is not a holiday.

Board the plane without thinking of the carbon footprint, and join the annual tradition of Brits abroad. Shakespeare would have loved the ease of an easyJet out of Stansted, penning sonnets and a tragedy or two. Maybe even a Luton haiku. Holidays are important because they heal wounds and knit bone. The bumps and scrapes of daily life are cured, like Jesus and the lepers. Room service is couples therapy. Breakfasting on beer is CBT. Reading a beach thriller is deep psychoanalysis. When everybody is spending in euros your family becomes like the von Trapps, all matching outfits and sing-alongs. Bridge over troubled daughter. Your pent-up aunt is a breeze. Citronella is an aphrodisiac, and it’s clinically proven you have better orgasms by the sea. Feta is a superfood. So is ouzo. There are no drawbacks to being away.

Summer is all about deliberate emptiness. Vacations are Dalí landscapes with all the clocks melted, but there’s an open bar so you can drink rum and spend a day warm on the sand. In a lifetime of hyper-erranding, a scheduled period for us to go fallow is a must. Beached interludes see us unchained from the shackles of to-do. Just one day out of life. Time with nothing in it, like Oliver Twist’s pockets, lolling on a sunlounger in the hourless vacuum in a flask between the tea and your hand. Rest and sleep deep, like the blackout void you had at the staff party sponsored by a tequila brand. Commit for a week, maybe two, just until my skin turns brown then I’m coming back to you.

Mini-breaks are not holidays. They’re the crippled boy from ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ who isn’t allowed into the cave of real travellers. Mini-breaks are person number three in the human centipede of travel. If travel is a trifle, mini-breaks are in the basement, below the sponge fingers at street level – gelatine from a cow’s hoof, maybe. Mini-breaks take you in and out of a city in two minutes, like teenage intercourse. The pace is stressful, more stressful than all the tabs currently open on my computer. Mini-breaks are just the tip, like when straight men sleep with other men. I bite my thumb at mini-breaks. Looking into my crystal ball I can see your mini-break’s future: dashing about like Supermarket Sweep. Smelling stressed because you are. A cultural hit list, Sophie’s Choice-ing between the modern art museum and the Sistine Chapel. A rip-off gondola. A rip-off rickshaw. One bite of gelato. A star turn at the Acropolis. A single finger in the Bocca della Verità. Thirty-six hours later you’re mini-broken on the tarmac back at Gatwick. Shakespeare’s sonnet still a first draft. Mini-break people are the kind of people who think a guy who caught their eye once on the tube is in love with them and then put an ad in the paper trying to find him again. They pen little poems about that fleeting moment for the rest of their lives. The kind of people who believe in short-term, showy romance and buy their girlfriend roses while she waits for them to propose. People who say they get their ‘smellies from Boots’. Basic couples dragging their basic luggage across the globe adhering to the artificial signifiers of love.

I hate mini-breaks but I’m also addicted to mini-breaks. They’re shit, but my God they’re convenient. They’re like countershock from a defibrillator when your pulse stutters. A daytripper global citizen. Venice is literally sinking under the weight of us, but we engage in a personal fallacy: I’m not part of the problem, I’m not like these other tourists, when I’m here I’m having a unique time, I’m having my own personal cultural experience. I’m not a mini-breaker, I’m a big breaker in a condensed timeframe. We all want to see the world, but none of us want to leave our creature comforts behind. I’m happy to go halfway round the globe, but I won’t give up my San Pellegrino. A cavalier romp on the high seas full of mystery and adventure please, but with a vegan option at dinner. Scott of the Antarctic but comfortable hotel slippers. Indiana Jones and a hot shower. I want the pretence of quill-writing extended witticisms by candlelight, but in reality I immediately go into meltdown if Google Maps can’t find me in three seconds.

It’s hard to beat a city by the sea. Cities by the sea are like theme parks where you’re tall enough for all the rides, freer than their landlocked counterparts, which sprawl ever outwards like a self-levelling screed. You get the metropolis and the marine in one mouthful. Barcelona hits the sea. Manhattan hits the rivers. Rules help control the fun, but there’s always something naughty about the nautical.

Getting away from it all has a familiar formula. Booking a holiday is a rain dance for more work. A festival of burnout before you’re out of office. The moment you book your vacation your workload quadruples, constipating in a bottleneck. Usual hassles will need more hustle. You’ll have missed an initial on a contract and be embroiled in the Puccinian saga of re-signing and rescanning. You’ll spend hours on the phone because you did something really bad to a Virgin Media representative in a previous life. Every meeting you take will be commandeered by a Bob Geldof character on a forty-five-minute tangent about Africa, and you cannot morally interrupt an Africa tangent. Your side-lover becomes irrationally demanding, begging to take you to Madam Butterfly and boiling your kid’s bunny. You start to receive threatening handwritten letters from the guy you thought you killed on the road after drinking heavily at your graduation party last summer. He has a hook for a hand. All of this you will juggle alongside booking hotel reservations, airport transfers, internal flights, the yellow-fever jab, the ever-so-romantic love in the time of cholera jab, the cult classic rabies jab, passports, travel visas, insurance, additional phone data, insect repellent, miniature shampoo, maps in English, maps in Arabic. Trust me on the sunscreen. Don’t forget your toothbrush. Don’t forget your plug adapter. Don’t forget your plug adapter. Don’t forget your plug adapter.