Long time no Lo! friends!
It’s lovely to see you.
Look, with the benefit of hindsight, promising you guys one of these emails every three weeks was pretty ballsy. A radical dream born of the endless idealistic savanna of 2020, when unoccupied time was still a shiny novelty, something to be filled with random kitsch projects and pan-flash plans. 2021, as a year, has been crunchier, more pragmatic, I think. If 2020 was a car crash, 2021 was the year we tried to restart the car, failed, pulled ourselves from the wreckage and cracked open the bonnet to get a good look at the metal whirring within. January’s rolled around and it’s looking like we’ve decided to get back inside the flaming passenger’s seat.
Because, lo and behold, here I am again, getting very familiar with my bedroom walls. On Monday I tested positive for a classic case of Being Filled With Demons (specifically the world-famous pathogen superstar ‘Covid19’, truly the influencer of the age) and ever since have been living within the confines of my bedroom and its adjacent bathroom. By the time you read this I will hopefully be isolation-free, out in the world, strutting down the high street to Earth, Wind & Fire and blowing festive, antibody-rich kisses to strangers, but at the time of writing I have been in my room for five days. Allowed some time off work, and enough of a holiday from my head cold to pull the English language into coherent sentences, I’ve put on my jeans (the isolation equivalent of white tie and tails), whinily asked for a cup of tea to be delivered to my door on my flatmates’ WhatsApp group (serious thanks and kudos to my flatmates who have fed, watered and washed up for me over the last week - they are 24-carat heavenly angel flowers, and if you ever meet them in person you should be so lucky as to even think about hoping to dream about kissing their feet), so I can send you some observations from the isolation pod.
I’d also like it on the record that the first time I typed out that last sentence I misspelled the word ‘observations’ as ‘obsessions’, which is a beautiful Freudian slip, I think, revealing of the kind of hyperfocus imparted by being inside a tiny room for a week. Observations become obsessions. Thoughts become theses. Pajamas become skin. (As a side note, I love Freudian slips. They’re like spoonerisms, but they actually tell you something useful. Thank you subconscious! Love you!).
The smallest thing becomes your story for the day. I live on a fairly busy road in London’s very sexy Peckham district (pronounced: Peach-um, by nobody) and on day three (of, we hope, ten max) of my solitary confinement, a fleet of ice cream vans passed our flat at 8.30am playing, at full volume, classic ice cream music. You know, the music ice cream vendors have universally sanctioned as the kind of music that will induce good-feeling in their customers? Tunes that scream: whipped sugar! frozen quiffs of milky goodness! iced whimsy in a cup or a cone! Come children, all is innocence and light! That’s right: spooky clown music. A haunted circus. A thousand xylophones committing suicide. A whirly-organ rich with jangling infant ghosts. The scariest, most horrific, spine-clutching melodies in human history. For whatever reason it is, ice cream vans love to pump the kind of harmonies that are biologically determined to make the hominid species wither and detract like a sea anemone or a fifty-year old penis. Hearing clown music does to the ears what seeing a python eat a hamster does to the eyes. Our DNA gives it the finger.
Now, three days into a raging viral fever, imagine waking up to the music. Going on for minutes, as you heave yourself into consciousness. Roughly twenty vans (each with their own Disney characters drawn shoddily enough on the side so as to not rouse the suspicion of copyright) all jingling and jangling and rattling and clanging and chiming their little horror-bells. Obviously now I know that music was just the Messrs. Whippy plying their trade, but at the time, for a good ten seconds, I was pretty darn sure that clown music was a new Omicron symptom. I was mentally preparing to go about the rest of my life with no sense of taste, and the sound of professional jugglers in my ears. Truly terrifying. I later found out, from my flatmates who had also heard the horror (thank God), that the phalanx of ice guys had been playing their music so loud and for so long because they were driving in the convoy to the funeral of another local ice cream vendor. True story! Crazy huh! Imagine the catering at that wake! Lots of ice cream, I’d imagine! Did they cremate him or freeze him! Hahahahaha! Mr RIP-py more like! LOL! Ice cream!
So yes I’ve been dining out on that little story for precisely every waking hour since Wednesday.
Socialising has not disappeared but has narrowed into a very strange, uncanny little corridor. I’m obviously not totally lonely. If anything I am fielding more calls than ever. All of my close friends and family not only know where to find me but also that I can’t possibly claim to be busy to get out of talking to them. I’m basically governmentally mandated to be a good pal for the next week. But here lies the issue - only over the phone. My phone is now my sole channel of communication with the outside world which has proved to be…an interesting development. And by ‘interesting’, I of course mean ‘mind-bendingly toxic’. iPhone and I were already in a frankly septic marriage - now my phone essentially has me in a Britney Spears-style conservatorship, locked away in a glove compartment and only releasing content under it’s creepy all-listening governance. I used to finish texting people and throw my phone across the room, purely in order to put some distance between me and its ghoulish phosphorescent clutch, its pulsating primary-coloured symbols and their direct route to the hormone sacs in my skull-onion. But now I gaze into it like a cursed puddle, hoping the faces of the people I love will surface for a moment to whisper riddles and mantras. We have a very Snow Queen/Magic Mirror vibe going on, and it's threatening to swallow me.
In order to take a break from the small screen, I will, of course, don’t worry, give myself a daily healthy break of mindfulness, wellbeing and goodly-do by staring at my computer instead. I have been mainlining episodes of Succession, a TV show that’s so riddled with tension it has taken on Schrödinger’s Cat-like properties, in that it is both too excruciating to watch, and not to watch. Obviously everyone in the postcode between Venus and Mars is watching Succession and is telling you to watch it, and I sort of hate to be told to watch television as if it’s homework for a conversation I am yet to have. I will not be revising for your friendship, I’m afraid. That said, it is a very rightfully famous and good show, and if you are one of the tiny commune of pungent bearded hermits living under a maggoty plank who haven’t yet seen it, just be prepared to be low-key terrified the whole time you’re watching it. Each episode is like having a very slow, hour-long, whiskey-flavoured heart attack. The drama often accesses such tangible levels of awkwardness, the cringe becomes so palpable, congealing in front of you, you could reach out and bite it like Roquefort. My finger hovers above the space bar so that at particularly spicy moments I can whack pause and moan the word ‘why?’ at the walls of my room, my duvet, anything in the vicinity, essentially asking inanimate objects both why the characters are doing what they’re doing, but also why I continue to watch something that reduces me to such a nuclear state of discomfort. But continue I do, primally unsure at a quantum level as to whether I should still exist watching this show, in this room, between these walls. Succession has poisoned me with uncertainty. Jesse Armstrong is Schrödinger and I am now his little, totally quite possibly dead cat.
More of Will’s cartoons?
Canoe down the rapids of Will’s website here!
More of Jack’s work?
Bellyflop into the pool of Jack’s website here!
More of Ben’s nonsense?
Fart amongst the jacuzzi bubbles of Ben’s website here!
Ben’s Gigs
Obviously the future of live things (events I mean, but, hell, maybe also more generally) is sort of a crapshoot right now! But, all being well (haha), there’s one show this year I’d love to see you at because it’s really truly something a bit different…
Follow the link for details…
13th Feb 2021 - Alex & Ben’s Valentines Eve Love Carousel @ The Bill Murray
Feeling generous?
If you’ve got spare honk, why not consider giving to one of these amazing charities?
CALAIS SOS - I was meant to be MCing a gig for these guys last Monday but was obviously struck by the ‘vids and couldn’t make it in the end. But it’s an excellent, excellent cause: providing food, shelter and care to refugees in Calais (particularly children). They’ve hit 93% of their target and are very close, so if you could sling them even a fiver, I would personally love you forever.
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 {or you wanna get in touch for whatever reason!} - just send us an email benpope86@gmail.com or Tweet at us @LoAnEmail