Delicacies of the Season

Learning to speak only when you have something to say is a rare and delectable virtue. In the more bigot corners of Scotland and Ireland, you would be praised for your saintly restraint. A quiet champion for the non-loud among us.

Well, on social media, it’s the equivalent of being dead. Oh, she didn’t weigh in on the new Pope, nor a syllable about Prada acquiring Versace, not even a single take on the latest Sam Altman interview. May she rest in peaceful obscurity.

I like to think I’ve cracked a little personal code for a happy life. First off: the MDs are right - everything the mind feels starts in the gut. Enlightenment, joy, even mild existential dread, it’s all digestive. (That said, there’s nothing the NHS could publish, shout, or skywrite that would convince me to skip the local Italian). Second: cultivating a gentle, non-toxic sense of entitlement - a soft throne of serene detachment. Floating above the daily mess like some smug little deity.

I like hard truths delivered soft. Give it to me straight, but let it exhale. I honestly can’t think of anything worse than lacking clarity, except maybe the illusion of having it. It’s like trying to break in a pair of Louboutins for the very first time while drunk on wine and disoriented.

I used to hold - with just the faintest hint of pretension - this belief that finding joy in the blatantly obvious was a sign of a lack of imagination. Reality TV, instant gratification, anything too obedient to the appetites (food, sex, spectacle) felt…less than enough. Palatable, perhaps. But hardly nourishing.

These days, I find myself quite taken with the obvious. The world, unadorned. People, their stories, the theatre of watching them go about their lives. As for the endless what ifs and what might be’s - still fascinating, of course, but increasingly exhausting. A lot of might be’s are charming in theory, impractical in execution. It’s funny, really, considering I’m constantly nudging you to think deeper myself, and also here we are, drowning in tech jargon about artificial hyper-intelligence, with the word genius being tossed around like a crumpled napkin. It’s starting to make me a little nauseous at times. Don’t you miss the days when bureaucrats were just boring and not obsessed with wild, messianic fantasies about humanity’s future? I’d like those days back.

I read years ago that when you look up to your upper left, you’re supposedly tapping into the imaginative part of your brain - conjuring something, inventing, visualising. Funny how that lodged itself somewhere, because just a few nights ago at a dinner party, I caught myself doing exactly that - eyes drifting top-left as I tried to articulate this shimmering vision I had, laying my metaphorical cards on the table.

It felt exactly like directing someone while they hang a painting: No, up a bit - no, not that way - no, still crooked - you don’t see it, it’s all off. Leave it. There’s nothing quite as maddening as trying to explain something crystal clear to you, only to watch it land askew in someone else’s mind. And when otherwise competent, perfectly capable people still don’t see what you see? It’s hard not to internalise that. You start thinking the fault’s yours, and the next thing you know, you’re slinking away like a rejected student - shoulders hunched, vision intact, faith bruised.

It’s by some divine stroke, or sheer stubborn muscle memory, that I manage to keep my promises and not let it get under my skin. You just keep moving forward, armed with this quiet arrogant stoicism, believing that someone out there is wired the way you are, that someone gets it.

It starts to feel like dragging your wares through a crowded marketplace, refusing to put them down until someone stops, looks, and says, ah, yes - I see the worth in that. Until then, you carry on. Not because it’s easy, but because dropping it would mean conceding no one ever will.