‘Don’t try to understand me, just love me.’

I took this photo a week ago. It continues to haunt me.

The image doesn’t give a good sense of scale. The object was about half the size of a paperback book. Its size is one of a series of troubling attributes. If it were smaller, it could be used as a bookmark. As it is, its only use is ornamental.

‘All art is quite useless.’

Oscar Wilde

I took the image quickly because I didn’t want to be caught with my phone pointed at my neighbour’s front garden. I live in the suburbs and people get funny about things like that.

But I was caught. My neighbour, a young woman, had been standing behind me. She said hello. I’d not seen her because I’d been taking a picture.

I don’t enjoy talking to real people and I don’t like explaining myself. I couldn’t offer an excuse. My neighbour leant in to inspect the object I’d been photographing. It sat on the grass and dead leaves of her front garden.

‘Is it yours?’ I asked. ‘The dog?’

She straightened her back. Her face contorted.

(I’d never seen her with a dog or any animal. Or another human.)

‘I’m not that kind of person,’ she said.

The dog’s face is troubling. Its head is not in the centre of the heart frame. This creates a sense of the uncanny, a suggestion that all is not what it seems, which is in distinct opposition to the text beneath it:

‘Don’t try to understand me, just love me.’

Presumably, this is meant to represent the dog’s sentiment, but there’s something uncomfortably knowing about the statement. It describes the artefact itself: I want to understand this thing, but can’t.

Meta.

The sense of multiple realities, a palimpsest of meaning, is further emphasised by the subtle image of nature underneath the heart. At first glance, you might think it part of the surrounding foliage on which the object sat. No. The green provides continuity with the colour in the photo’s background but otherwise raises more questions than it answers.

What does the leaf design add? Does it suggest the dog’s relationship with the owner (or intended recipient of the object) is natural? Wouldn’t flowers be more appropriate? Or was it the generic background of whatever design application was used in producing the thing?

The dog, a King Charles Spaniel, stares into the camera as if it’s looking down the barrel of a gun. I’ve seen many images of many dogs, but I’ve never before seen such an ennui-ridden glare. Can dogs have existential crises?

Such is the intensity of the dog’s dead eyes, I feel violated. How far into me can they see? What secrets of mine has it mined?

It’s a dog that’s witnessed tragedy, that’s for sure. Observe the pain etched into its tiny face.

Troubling: I don’t understand why someone would want to own this thing. The strangely amateurish production — aside from the unbalanced heart, the text is of inconsistent size — suggests it was made to order.

People are strange and do have all kinds of strange relationships with all kinds of strange things; it’s not so massively bizarre that someone should decide to produce a piece of laminated card with an anthropomorphised message from their dog. I guess.

Or maybe it was a gift from one partner to another, the dog’s sentiment implicitly mirroring their own message?

Maybe it came free with the Daily Mail?

Further questions: how did it end up in the front garden of my dogless neighbour? Was it thrown there? It was too heavy to float in the air. Did the owner give up their attempts to love the dog? Or did they finally understand it, making the object’s message redundant?

Was it placed there for me?

One dog owner lives on our street. They let their dog out at night, at no routine hour but always when I’m about to fall asleep, and it yaps.

One summer night, a gruff south London cry interrupted the dog’s eventide address …

SHUT THAT FUCKING ANIMAL UP

… putting voice to the whole neighbourhood’s sleep-weighted thoughts.

Two days after taking the picture, I left my house with the intention of knocking on the dog-owner’s door to ask if she’d lost a laminated card with an image of a dog on it.

But the object no longer lay on my neighbour’s front lawn. Fear of embarrassment ate away at my resolve. I returned home. I opened my phone’s photo album and stared at the heart-framed dog some more.

The thing was dirty too, as if it had seen a lifetime of trash. If I lived on the coast, I’d imagine fantasising a narrative whereby the dog in question had caused a cruise liner to sink. In Moby-Dick, the only object to survive the Pequod’s encounter with the white whale is a coffin. It’d be like that but with the laminated dog picture instead, the dog in question drowned with many hundreds of others in the belly of a ship.

There’s no way of knowing whether the dog is dead or alive. I once read a book which provided a series of hypothetical situations that might occur upon death. One suggested that the individual doesn’t really die until they are forgotten, when nobody exists to remember them.

In this sense, then, the dog lives on.

Yet the provenance of the object continues to trouble me. It’s our history that makes us who we are. This thing, now lost, exists without context. It is an enigma. The laminated card with the dog picture and the inscription ‘don’t try to understand me, just love me’ will remain unknowable, aside from the truth that people really do buy some proper shitty tat.

Where is it now? Perhaps, like the Littlest Hobo, it’s compelled to continue moving, touching a new heart in each place it passes.

Or maybe it was picked up by the bin-men.

There’s a voice that keeps on calling me
Down the road, that’s where I’ll always be.
Every stop I make, I make a new friend,
Can’t stay for long, just turn around and I’m gone again.

Author’s note: this piece was originally written as a pitch for a true-crime podcast. Green hearts, as ever, are appreciated.

12. Wear a Union Jack tie.

13. Cause the UK to abandon the monarchy & become a republic.

14. Bring over an effective opposition party. (Although, the US might have to find one themselves before worrying about us hahaha.)

Me, I watch football. Games are slow, often ending 0–0 or 1–1. I’m English.

Right. I feel a bit sad thinking of all this now. Thanks.

Late to the Party: Viewing ‘Peppa Pig’ for the first time

Inspired by:

Men Recommend David Foster Wallace to Me

Pre-Viewing Impressions

As a neighbour to a family with at least two children AND as a frequent user of the local park, I know kids to be idiots. I once saw a toddler eat soil, which pretty much tells you all you need to know.

British kids are particularly stupid as a consequence of both an underinvestment in the school system and also the weather.

I’ve been aware of Peppa Pig since college. Like much cultural phenomena and newly discovered infectious diseases, however, it took a recent story in the Daily Mail to bring home the extent of the craze. Children, we were told, were being scarred (and scared) by pirate versions of Peppa Pig on YouTube that featured sex etc. Nasty.

(I watched one. It wasn’t that bad.)

But particularly nasty because kids love Peppa Pig. I know. Because I’ve never met a kid that’s not recommended me the show.

There exists a Peppa Pig theme park. I often wonder whether they serve pork products in the Peppa Pig café. Not that the kids would realise the problem therein. (Because they’re idiots.)

I once ate sausage at an organic farm.

I once ate sausage at an organic farm. The meat’s selling point was that it had been produced from the very animals, or at least the friends/relatives, nosing about in the mud outside.

The sausage was extremely meaty. I thought it obscene.

The sort of kids that recommend me Peppa Pig are very young, i.e. the most stupid of children, not yet old enough to have developed a critical eye. These are the very same individuals that wet themselves on public transport, the very individuals that put soil in their mouths, the very same individuals constantly pimping the show on me.

You’ll understand, then, why I’ve never watched Peppa Pig.

There’s a pub in Herne Hill, south London, that brews its own beer. Last week, I popped in a lunchtime. (I’m not an alcoholic. I’m a freelancer. There’s a subtle difference.) Feeling low after a fistful of failed magazine pitches (and non-paying, online ones, can you believe?), I treated myself to the American Pale Ale. I’d managed two sips before a child screamed.

These two actions were independent.

Like a domino, the child’s cries set off the rest of the pub. Crying children appeared like the mole from whack-a-mole. A cacky cacophony.

I didn’t ask the parents, mostly women but some round-faced beards with horror-drilled eyes there too, to shut their kids up, as was my right. If I started drinking in a creche, I’d get in trouble soon enough. I asked the original mother what the plan was to shut her kid up.

She gave me a strange look. I continued staring until she replied.

‘Watch this,’ she said, both to me and her child.

She handed the toddler her phone. His maggot fingers smeared the screen’s primary colours with organic, gluten-free, vegan mush.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Peppa Pig.’

‘Peppa Pig.’

Soon, the opening notes of the Peppa Pig soundtrack sprouted across the whole pub. Soon, all children were silenced, porcinely mesmerised.

I opened the Notes app on my iPhone.

‘Peppa Pig,’ I wrote.

I turned to the mother.

‘I know Peppa Pig.’ She asked if I’d ever seen it. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Never.’

Post-Viewing Impressions

This is what I thought as I summoned episode upon episode of Peppa Pig to my MacBook:

If I wanted to watch a show about a family, there are like a thousand others I could have chosen. Arrested Development, for instance. Or Star Wars.

The episode that stuck with me, being the only episode I watched, was ‘The Powercut’. It tells the story of a powercut. I had images of the famous New York powercut of the late 70s, a time of renewed neighbourhood friendships and rioting. Peppa Pig and family live in a detached house on a hill (therefore not London, unless Daddy Pig works for Deutsche Bank), so stayed inside.

However, I was strangely taken by Peppa’s mispronunciation of ‘electricity’ and also the honk sound effect made when Daddy Pig smashed about in the basement looking for a torch.

Peppa’s first thought on dealing with the powercut was to watch TV. This reminded me of the time I broke up with a girlfriend and, crying, went to ring her as she was the only person I felt I could ever express my emotions to and I wanted to talk to someone about breaking up with my girlfriend and still do.

In the end of the Peppa Pig episode, the power is restored, which is a telling metaphor for something. It speaks to me of how we form narratives in our own lives. We use the building blocks of prose writing to form our own experiences. In this case, the power being restored works as a proxy for a full-stop.

They pigs in a house that is recognisably human but would cause you or me to suspect, if we were being taken around by an estate agent, say, that we’d accidentally taken hallucinogenic drugs, not to mention the talking pigs.

Although there is no kitchen featured, I couldn’t help but wonder what these animals ate for breakfast.

Daddy Pig appeared a Full English fella.

If I had to summarise Peppa Pig, I’d do so in this way:

‘It’s a children’s show about a pig.’

‘It’s a children’s show about a pig.’

Next in this series: Lena Dunham’s Girls. As always, green hearts are appreciated.

Kids Recommend Peppa Pig to Me was originally published in Thank You Anyway on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My arty friends go to arty places and post their arty photos on Instagram and Facebook. So I did too.

The word ‘harbour’ was painted on a wall. I thought the colours were nice. I had to take it quickly because a man was shouting at me.

I like the different textures here. Also — I accidentally took this image when trying to open Tinder.

Is this the Middle East? Or is it Kent? I think such questions get to the very heart of the human condition. (The construction vehicles were making a right racket.)

It is Kent.

Look at all the vertical lines. Forever upwards. I almost tripped over a tiny dog while taking this.

Repetition, repetition, repetition. Sometimes an accidental zoom can really pay dividends.

‘It’s always ourselves we find in the sea.’

(There were also some plastic bottles.)

This is out of focus because a construction worker asked me what I was doing.

‘Taking a photo, mate,’ I said.

He wasn’t impressed.

Ominous, isn’t it? Like something out of 2001. It was just a pile of granite, though. The seagulls loved it.

I don’t know.

I can’t remember taking this.

There was an interesting phrase written on the lighthouse. I can’t remember what it was. Something about the weather.

Where do the stairs go?

What is art? Is this art?

There was a plaque that said it was art.

I see these two images as partners. One I drank literally, the other metaphorically. Both gave me sustenance.

Behind my finger is the sea. I took this in a rush because there was a group of teenagers mocking me. It was actually a really nice view. The sea was proper turquoise.

Arty pictures = piece of cake. Next time, I’m going to write poetry.

I decided to take some arty photos like my arty friends always do. And it was so easy. was originally published in Slackjaw on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

5/7/5, 2017

Kim Jong-un looks at

the mirror, stares at his hair,

mouths ‘I’m a big boy.’

Wrote an awesome tweet.

Wasn’t retweeted.

Maybe Twitter’s down?

My kid cannot sleep.

Worrying about Russia

maybe. Or monsters.

Not all voting Leave

were racists but all racists

sure voted to leave.

Pitched the New Yorker

a comic piece about walls.

Still waiting to hear.

Not all voting Trump

hate women but all women

haters voted Trump.

My Medium posts

never get recommended.

I blame the Chinese.

7 Haiku about the Modern World was originally published in Slackjaw on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

2017: the year that nuance finally died.

On the morning of April 14th, Good Friday, I checked the news. America had dropped a huge bomb, North Korea was readying a nuclear test, and Manchester United had conceded a last-minute equaliser in their Europa League tie, proving all was not bad.

On Twitter, I noticed a tweet from The New Yorker about the TV series Girls. I retweeted the message, adding my own comment.

A follower replied:

Without mentioning me, the follower wrote in their own TL:

(What really hurt was that the second tweet received far more ‘likes’ than my original.)

I’ve never watched Girls. Sure, it’s been on in my house. I’ve seen it. But I’ve never watched it, despite all the Guardian and NYT articles telling me how absolutely incredible the series is.

Life is whizzing by too quickly for TV. I’ve got tweets to write.

Hating on Girls wasn’t my intention. (I sound like a teenager again.) It may be objectively the best TV series made since Quantum Leap and my initial point would stand:

The level of hyperbole employed by The New Yorker is criminal. No TV show can be so well directed/written that your ability to distinguish its fiction from your own reality is impaired*. Unless you’re psychotic. And I don’t think that was the reviewer’s angle.

I have no problem with Girls. (I sound as if I’m in primary school.) But I did feel a bit hated on. I drank some coffee and thought a bit. I remembered a tweet that I’d seen in the last week.

Kitty Empire’s last three albums of the week were all three-star reviews.

Reviewing in 2017: the best of times, the worst of times (and no room for Mr Inbetween). Everything’s great. And if it’s not great, it’s shit. And if it’s shit, there’ll be someone on Twitter accusing you of hating on it.

Of course, social media and clickbait headlines encourage such absolute judgment. In 2017, we can understand culture only in superlative terms. Even my dog knows this and he’s the stupidest dog that’s ever existed. Who’s going to read a film review if the headline emphasises its mediocrity?

‘New Superhero Flick is OK’ won’t get attention.

But these will:

It’s not Twitter’s fault. It’s not even Buzzfeed’s. Whose is it? And then it hit me:

The Gipper’s.

In Rick Perlstein’s Invisible Bridge, he describes the profound effect Ronald Reagan had on the language of politics. In framing the Cold War as a struggle between America, the shining city upon a hill, and the USSR’s ‘evil empire’, Reagan reduced not only this struggle to a good/evil binary, but also started the corrosive process that destroyed any form of nuance in politics. Ideologies became stringently left/right, them/us.

2017 is the apotheosis of this process. Other than reactions to The Great British Bake Off’s move to Channel 4, there’s no better example than Brexit. The hugely complicated question of Britain’s relationship to the EU, a relationship with costs as well as benefits, was reduced to the single sentence:

“Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?”

The majority of voters, being idiots, decided to leave. In our binary world, UK government policy, despite being a parliamentary democracy, was to treat this decision as sacrosanct. It was the will of the British people, we were told, an assertion that ignores the many millions of voters that either wanted to remain or didn’t bother casting a vote either way.

Reducing the world to binaries leads inexorably to conflict. For your policy position to be correct, it must be contrasted against one that is incorrect. For your army to be the heroes, they must have defeated the enemy. Concillation and negotiation is weak because it acknowledges that the opposing party may have merit. F Scott Fitzgerald once noted that a mark of intelligence was to be able to consider two opposing points of view. But Fitzgerald is dead.

In the same way that my tweet was interpreted as an attack on a beloved TV show, myopic world leaders will interpret actions of foreign governments as acts of war. Therefore, in many ways, the Girls defender is a Donald Trump in miniature.

And should world conflict explode over the coming year, you’ll know who to blame: Ronald Reagan, yes, but also The New Yorker.

And, indirectly, Lena Dunham.

(For the reference, I would give this post a 7/10. I was disappointed it wasn’t funnier.)

*Apart from Westworld.