Hi Lo! People!
Welcome back to the letter. Thanks so much for not unsubscribing yet. Lo! is not a one-hit wonder, like Wheatus. It’s going to consist of a long career of bangers like The Beatles. But not like Paul McCartney, who I think we can all agree has gone off like an enormous bag of spinach right at the very back of the vegetable drawer. Where’s all that green liquid come from? Metaphorically, from Paul. My point is, buckle in for some regular nonsense people.
This week’s effort (and it has been an effort) is a box of delights. But Ben! Will it be funny? Will it be serious? What kind of tonal buckaroo are we in for here? Well, honestly, this time it’s a real emotional pick-and-mix. Stick your trowel in and find out! And then run! The security guard is coming! You’ve not paid for those cola bottles and this is Woolworth’s goddamit!
I have a dreadful, wonderful confession to make. A few weeks ago I went to McDonalds. And under the Golden Arches, like the little Golden Troll I am, I bought a Triple Cheeseburger. And, dear reader, I ate it on a bus.
You may not remember the triple cheeseburger. It’s actually a new invention of Ronald’s. For the uninitiated, the triple cheeseburger is a regular McDonald’s cheeseburger but now, for a limited time only, it has three layers of regret. They wash over you like waves. Three layers of beef (‘beef’) stacked atop each one another. Truly a meal made by a clown.
I saw it there, looking at me, and in an attempt to butter my own stomach, I bought one.
It turns out, the triple cheeseburger is not really a meal, more of a prank you can play on your own heart. Kindly, it says TRIPLE on the wrapper so the paramedics know what genre of bypass to give you, because eating one feels like giving your arteries a Halloween costume - this year they’re going as the outside of a cigarette packet! If contempt had a logo, if heart disease had a brand ambassador, if you could squeeze a war crime between two buns, it would be this terrifying piece of cow architecture. It really is a snack that spits in the face of the Geneva convention
I say a snack - it isn’t really. It’s not a meal, or a snack. It doesn’t really work for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It’s that peculiar brand of 21st century hybrid, trophy food that floats purgatorially between meal times, between classifications, between organs of your body, as they each pass the parcel reluctantly amongst themselves, unwilling to deal with its catastrophic toxic admin. Like a centaur or the fishman from The Shape of Water, it’s an abomination, with no true home, sort of unreal, uncanny, an impressive feat but also an affront unto Christ. Do you eat it sitting or standing? It’ll give you indigestion if you eat it walking - but it also give you indigestion if you eat it anywhere. It causes indigestion. That’s its MO. Mulling over how you eat it is like scratching your head over what music to put on in the car as you drive it off a bridge.
The triple cheeseburger is food that exists not so that you can enjoy it, but in order for you to say you’ve eaten it. It’s the Las Vegas of food. It’s an arduous task that is purely experienced retrospectively, like climbing an ugly mountain, if climbing made you fat.
As a new introduction to the McDonald’s menu at a time of national crisis, and given how pointlessly and conceptually cruel it is to market what is essentially an edible cow bunk bed, it feels somehow like a desperate, obligatory invention - as if it were a eugenic scheme designed to trap and kill people who are both greedy and arrogant, or maybe the answer to a rampant cow infestation, or an attempt to provoke the bovine community into a hostile global human-cow war.
All of this aside, I ate the thing. I climbed the mountain. It was horrendously delicious. And as you can tell, I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
Since early last year, I’ve been working at an independent bookshop and it always gives me an enormous amount of pleasure noticing how people behave in it. Sadly, in the same way this year has stopped us from feeling the liveness of live music, the closeness of crowds, the amazing stupid randomness of changed plans, it’s also put paid to a lot of the delights of shopping for books: pottering, browsing, sharing, picking and choosing, admiring, coveting, pining, piling, grabbing, leafing, rifling, wandering across thresholds without stopping, checking, covering, averting, worrying. There has, of course, been much more time to read. But, thinking on it for the last nine months, it’s struck me there’s a real disjunct between the particular pleasures that bookshops provide, and the actual physical act of reading.
Going to a bookshop produces the thrill of abundance, the same feeling I get at a bazaar or a supermarket or an art gallery or sat in front of a heaving plate of Christmas dinner - being presented with an insurmountable pile of sheer variety. The beauty of hundreds of contrasting covers that, like the surfaces of lakes, imply endless hidden fathoms within. There’s also maybe the slight panic you get at a fork in the road, faced with an endless series of possible paths into the future - it’s quite an overwhelming experience, literally walking inside an Aladdin’s cave of pure potential. I could have this! Or read this! Or be this person! Who understands this! You’re looking at the constituent parts of a possible new whole self.
But the actual pleasure of reading is very different, I think. Buying or having books is exciting - but while the books remain unread, it feels like something quite shallow, surface-level, allegedly an indicator of a curious mind, but more just a peacock’s tail of disposable income. Yet the moment at which you read a book and enjoy it - it becomes a deeply, deeply personal thing. It is an interaction between you, your memories and emotions, the symbols on the page and the imagined world they specifically imply to you, floating above the page like a ghost. The author isn’t even included in that little social circle. What you get out of a book is often not anything to do with what the writer intended or themselves imagined when they carved out the story. An odd bit of description, a familiar location or character, a particular conjured emotion, the relatable sheen of a word of dialogue - all these circumstantial elements of a narrative can spin a reader’s mind off towards their own private revelations. Nor does it continue to matter how much the book cost, where it came from, whether the cover is 100-year old leather, or Ribena-stained and tattered from rolling around in the bottom of a rucksack. It could be written on the back of a napkin, for all you care. The ricocheting thoughts engendered by reading often cause an unlocking, an entangling, a coupling, a polishing of memories, secrets, inner hidden emotions and theories, all deep within a person. These moments are often so amorphous and emotional that they can only exist within you, and are nigh-on impossible to articulate, at least in an interesting or relatable way, to others, like describing a particularly intense but uneventful dream.
Perhaps the private, selfish weight and workings of books is what makes the more commercial, superficial bookshop-browsing experience so exciting, beyond, for instance, food or clothes shopping. Both food and clothes have an immediate cachet that you can liquidate - buy a cool top, put it on and you’re a cool person in a cool top, buy a delicious sandwich and eat it and your teeth-gnashing hunger for Pret’s Christmas sandwich is, for a few hours at least, stilled. The social, performative worth of food and clothes is actually so short-term that we can actively seek out ways in which to lengthen its impact, fossilising a beautiful, delicious meal, or said cool top, as a photo that we share with the widest possible audience on the internet. I bought this t-shirt with the words ‘Connell’s Chain’ printed on it! And I need the fizz of serotonin I got when I paid for it to last forever!
Meanwhile, books do have a short-term cachet (Oo! Look! That guy is visibly reading two Russian novels simultaneously on the Tube! Crime & Punishment in one hand! War & Peace in the other! He must be a cool and clever guy! Who loves abstract nouns!), but their real worth is long-term, slow-release, lying dormant until it is picked up and cracked open. A landmine, a jack-in-the-box, an oyster with its clandestine pearled innards waiting on a shelf under the sea. Even then, once you open the cover, the contents don’t burst upon you and spend themselves like a party popper - instead, they require a slow and careful private discipline, the diligent practice of reading, to unspool their treasures. Apply yourself to the hieroglyphs and they unguard a quiet cloud of offerings.
Which is to say: Christmas is coming, and books are the perfect gift! Why not visit your local independent bookshop?
If you can’t get out and about, try this new online indie shop:
More of Will’s cartoons?
Bungee jump into Will’s website here!
More of Ben’s nonsense?
Truffle through Ben’s website here!
Feeling generous?
If you’ve got spare honk, why not consider giving to one of these amazing charities?
Black Minds Matter - these guys aim to provide free mental health care in the form of professional Black therapists to the Black community across the UK, a really brilliant cause. The BLM movement hitting the news feels like a long time ago now, but it’s so important to keep up support and ally-ship now that things are quieter on that front, if we really want things to change. I’m going to donate to these guys this Christmas - join me!
Parkinson’s UK - Parkies provides care and support across the UK for people with Parkinson’s, and fund research into a cure. They do incredible work! People with Parkinson’s tend to be 50+ and depend on regular contact with others, so have been hit really hard this year. Please consider donating!
If you have a charity close to your heart, however big or small, and want to include it here - just send us an email lomail@substack.com or Tweet at us @LoAnEmail