Straight Outta Crouch End

The Luigi Mangione thinkpieces have begun and most of them sound so lamentable and out of touch to anybody who has followed his story without immediately pursing their lips, uttering ten Hail Marys and shielding their children’s eyes, as to be practically laughable. For the Evening Standard, Mangione stands for a divided America; a thinkpiece in the Independent considers the online comments “less helpful than salacious”; France’s traditionally leftwing paper Libé published an op-ed calling for an end to the hero worship of Mangione.  On Instagram, the comments under this article immediately went hog-wild: “How legitimate is it for bourgeois newspapers to take part in this debate when they spend their time legitimising social violence?”; “Lol, Luigi rid us of a deadweight. While income gaps keep widening, you should expect us to revolt against those who benefit from the system”; “Good evening - no.” You can’t understand the phenomenon of Luigi Mangione if you aren’t online; indeed, ...

It starts as a fairytale. Tall gates rise up, melting into a strange cage where monkeys roam, before we see the grounds of Xanadu, shrouded in mist, and the great house looming overhead with its sinister gothic windows; a mysteriously ominous music plays. These are the opening scenes of Citizen Kane before we see the protagonist, a dying man, utter his last word: "Rosebud." And with this, the tyrant mogul Charles Foster Kane sends us scurrying back into his hinterland, in a story told almost entirely in flashbacks, to work out how he ever became the "Citizen" Kane of the film's title. The movie's last reel gives us - and only us, in an act of blackest irony - something of an answer, but not before we have been warned by a character, giving up on ever finding the meaning of 'Rosebud', that no one thing could ever explain how somebody became as they are.  Citizen Kane (1941) may offer up a template for the origin story with which we now find ourselv...

Last week I was lying around on my bed with my kids, nattering about this and that, occasionally boffing one another with a pillow, and grabbing them for a kiss or a stroke of their hair. These are the times in which you see each other intently; when it isn't rude to stare at someone and drink them in. (I suppose those moments also happen post-coitum, when the intimacy of somebody else's presence makes you see them in another light, and you can revel in the curl of their eyelashes, the purr of their breathing and heat of their limbs.) The children seem to appreciate these sort of listless playfights we have, and of course I also cherish these times: the miraculous softness of their skin; their hair, bed-curled and gleaming; and the rot they come out with, a rag-bag of references, overheard opinions, absurd hypotheses and nonsensical babble. The intensity of their gaze can be ferocious, and they often poke at me, feel my moustache, jiggle my earring, and observe something unbidd...

 A couple of weeks ago I received news, in short order, that I had finally obtained two things I had been waiting for for three years or so: an allotment of land I can tend; and official confirmation that I have ADHD. To get an allotment and an ADHD diagnosis, you have to put yourself on a waiting list and then bide your time, while various people ahead of you die. It's not really a joke! When I spoke to the doctor in charge of assessing me I said that I felt I had been waiting an eternity, and she told me that in some wards in the UK, the wait can take up to seven years. I said: "Oh man - we must be losing some of those people, along the way." She looked up: "Are you asking if they're killing themselves?" "Yes." "Yes."  Getting both things in such a short space of time felt strangely serendipitous: here, after months of waiting - when waiting is officially one of the things I am least good at! - was a diagnosis that my mind was justified...