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PODCAST

Life Litter Pod

Weekly pieces from a Substack Featured Writer 2023, read out loud by the author. Life Litter is about the things we leave behind — and how they connect. www.lifelitter.org

society & culture

All Episodes

25:40

The Village Stocks (and shares)

Life Litter Pod ·

2023/10/24

We are down in Dorset this week with Joel’s parents for half-term so I’m recording this early — it’s Saturday night, hi! — and scheduling it for Tuesday morning. Feeling altogether on top of my shit, how are you?I promised an update on the pub and an awkward encounter this week. The two are not unrelated and I intend to deliver. I’m also throwing in a review of the RSC production of Macbeth, which I went to see a couple weeks ago — and which is also not unrelated.Let’s see if I manage to pull all

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13:56

Getting paid to waste the days

Life Litter Pod ·

2023/10/17

“My heart in hiding …” — The Windhover, Manley HopkinsI went for a walk today.It’s been a long Covid-y week and it felt great to pull on my boots and head up the hill in front of my house.I’ve got a few thoughts rolling in my head and I’m wondering if the walk will make any of them any clearer. Reader, I leave that to you to judge.One of the things I kept thinking about was an interview I read in last month’s The Atlantic with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. One bit really stuck for me:So, OpenAI is

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19:19

008 — Ski season

Life Litter Pod ·

2023/10/14

I grew up on skis. Let me explain.In upstate New York, the temperature falls below freezing in November and usually doesn’t re-emerge until March. We had a thermometer outside the kitchen window. Winter mornings, I would check it. Minus 10 or 20 was pretty normal. I remember it being minus 40 sometimes. On those days, you had to make sure your neck warmer was tucked up under goggles and gloves under jackets at the wrists, so not an inch of skin was exposed. A frost ring would form at your mouth and

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17:05

Relics

Life Litter Pod ·

2023/09/27

I wrote this week about a weird old hobby of mine:When I lived by the river in London, I used to go mudlarking – a bit obsessively – along the Thames foreshore.Mudlarking is kind of amateur archaeology, basically looking for cool things in the mud and pebbles along the riverbank. The detritus of 2,000 years since Roman ‘Londinium’ is plastered in the mud; things that people dropped centuries ago, off boats, off jetties, intentionally or accidentally, getting into boats fleeing the Great Fire of

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10:48

Quality Street 🍫

Life Litter Pod ·

2023/09/21

This week’s piece is going to be a bit different, I’ve decided.Not because I’m listening to advice from certain gurus to write less — and smile more — but because I am neck-deep in a fairly involved application form for government match-funding for our community pub purchase (I shit you not: I’ve written postgraduate theses that were less complex) and I don’t have time to finish editing a long essay I’m working on about the things we leave behind and the dangers of rationalism-induced paralysis

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17:30

EAT DA RICH

Life Litter Pod ·

2023/09/12

On the railway sidings as you slide out of Paddington towards Wembley, this graffiti hits you in the eyeballs. The words are about ten feet high.These are the words of Rousseau, attributed to him by Chaumette, the leader of the Paris Commune during a Reign of Terror speech in 1793. Back then, it was a message for the guillotine-bound aristocrats.“Quand le peuple n'aura plus rien à manger, il mangera le riche.” (When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.)Here, it’s a

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16:39

Enshittification

Life Litter Pod ·

2023/09/05

There’s a pub for sale at the top of my lane.It’s an eighteenth century building, of worn limestone with pert eaves and low ceilings. Small, but for a village like this, just the right size. There’s a curved wooden bar, an open fireplace and window nooks with cozy tables. It’s the last traditional pub in our village.It’s the last traditional pub in any village near us.The pub has a garden, with a vantage over a lightly wooded valley. Every year, around this month, two mature apple trees in the pub

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27:50

Summer blend 🌪️

Life Litter Pod ·

2023/08/30

It’s funny because in between the stars you can see millions more.That’s something Joel’s sister said last week, when we were camping in Wales.Joel has three kids from his previous marriage. I have one. Together, we have none. Sometimes, I grieve for those children we’ll never have. Mostly, I think we’ve probably got our hands full enough already.Still. I grieve for the life I’ll never have; the love I’ll never have; the family I’ll never have. Sometimes the grief feels violent enough to eviscerate

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9:24

Omakase 🍣

Life Litter Pod ·

2023/07/18

I had to go into London for work on Friday.My weekly excursion to London means one thing: a nice lunch. I live in the countryside now, so I think about this city lunch for days and plan it well in advance. Caribbean jerk chicken and Ethiopian curries used to be quotidian; now they are the stuff of dreams.This week, I fancied sushi so went to the conveyor belt place near my office in Liverpool Street and had fun getting inspired by whatever passed before me. Scallop? Yes. Little pearly pink shrimp

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15:29

Paris

Life Litter Pod ·

2023/07/11

Once, years ago, I was sitting in the middle of the backseat of a taxi in a hot southeast Asian city. The taxi had no air-conditioning. Both windows were open but there was no cross-breeze.SPLAT.A perfect dollop of white bird shit landed on my thigh.The taxi driver turned around with a beatific smile and waggled his brows in an impressed kind of way. “That’s very good luck, you know.”He did not have any wet wipes or napkins, it transpired, and neither did I.I turned and looked out the window. A

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13:49

005 — One night in Oxford

Life Litter Pod ·

2023/06/20

Welcome back to The Notebooks. If you missed the last, this is where we were.If you’re coming in fresh, The Notebooks is a piece of long form writing, based on a true story, served in weekly instalments. You can read it yourself or listen to me read it in the VoiceOver.Pieces in The Notebooks may have a song-matching, like wine and cheese. Song-match this piece with: L.E.S Artistes, Santigold.Not your quick-release serotonin fix, The Notebooks are in it for the long haul.Now re-opening The Notebooks

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23:53

004 — Red carnation

Life Litter Pod ·

2023/06/12

Welcome back to The Notebooks. If you missed the last, this is where we were.If you’re coming in fresh, The Notebooks is a piece of long form writing, based on a true story, served in weekly instalments. You can read it yourself or listen to me read it (audio linked above).Pieces in The Notebooks may have a song-matching, like wine and cheese. Song-match this piece with: Mumford and Sons, Little Lion Man. You can listen to the extra audio note in the audio recording if you want to know why.Not your

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23:56

003 — Wordsmoke

Life Litter Pod ·

2023/06/05

Welcome back to The Notebooks. If you missed the last, this is where we were.If you’re coming in fresh, The Notebooks is a piece of long form writing, based on a true story, served in weekly instalments. You can read it yourself or listen to me read it (audio linked above).Pieces in The Notebooks may have a song-matching, like wine and cheese. Song-match this piece with: The Coral, Dreaming of You.Not your quick-release serotonin fix, The Notebooks are in it for the long haul.Now re-opening The

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9:29

002 — Town and country

Life Litter Pod ·

2023/05/15

Welcome back to The Notebooks. If you missed the last, this is where we were. If you’re coming in fresh, The Notebooks is a piece of long form writing, based on a true story, served in weekly instalments.Pieces in The Notebooks may have a song-matching, like wine and cheese. Song-match this piece with: Avett Brothers, Famous Flower of Manhattan.Not your quick-release serotonin fix, The Notebooks are in it for the long haul.Now re-opening The Notebooks to July 2006….-Did you grow up in the country?I

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9:37

001 — On a train in upstate NY

Life Litter Pod ·

2023/05/08

On a hot afternoon in late July 2006 on an Amtrak train between Albany and Penn Station, I was sitting behind a woman watching a movie on a laptop. She had a blanket over her despite the heat.After a little while, I became aware that she was masturbating under it. I know. Right there on the train. It was really weird. I had seen men masturbate in public — most notably, the man with a hood over his face who wanked at me and a friend in our school uniforms through the train station railings when we

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16:07

Reading all the books

Life Litter Pod ·

2023/05/01

This week I wanted to write about Joel — my Joel, this Joel —’s new job and going to see Hamnet, the play. As you may have picked up from previous posts, he’s a software engineer of very respectable pedigree and his new job has something to do with SEO. I wasn’t initially clear how those two things were connected but it turns out what connects them is a little-known phrase in Aldous Huxley’s 1954 book The Doors of Perception.The phrase is this: The consciousness of having read all the books.I jotted

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7:47

Tits at Oxford and Harvard

Life Litter Pod ·

2023/04/24

There’s a targeted ad that keeps popping up on my Google. I bet you’ve seen it too. It is the most ridiculous of all the ridiculous targeted ads I see. It says “the company that’s harder to get into than Harvard” and features a beautiful young woman, with a winning smile, her gaze fixed slightly upwards off-camera.Here it is:It also comes in another, sultrier variety:There is so much wrong with this ad. Let me break it down.First of all, I don’t even know what it wants from me. Is it a job offer? Is

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4:14

Think of the most awkward encounter you can

Life Litter Pod ·

2023/03/27

Well, it happened again.Another person asked if Joel is my son.Joel is my boyfriend, to be clear. Not my son.I say “again” because this was not the first time it’s happened.The first time was last summer, back in the heady days when I was 36 and Joel 28. We were still pretty new to the village and no one knew us. To remedy this, a kind neighbour asked us to a garden party — the same one who you may recall also invited us to a fancy dinner party.I know, the Cotswolds eh? It’s all garden parties and

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6:46

000 - Smart phones stole my brain

Life Litter Pod ·

2023/03/13

I often hear people ask what would you tell your younger self? What wisdom would you impart?I’m not at all sure this is the right way round.Growing older strikes me as an act of forgetting, so why should I have more answers now, the older I am? I don’t even know where my keys are.I actually think it’s my younger self that has all the answers. She was a master of juking the system. I find myself outwitted by the system, effortlessly outmanoeuvred and so deeply enmeshed I wonder if it’s not too late

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8:28

Four times I was awkward this week

Life Litter Pod ·

2023/03/06

The eagle-eyed among you may have spotted that this is a new sub-section of Life Litter called Awkward Encounters.I’ve been racking my brains trying to work out what theme(s) unite my posts here because everybody likes a theme, a structure, a story.What I have landed on is that most of my posts seem to be about me being awkward, in various interactions with other people.So many of them. It’s quite humbling, really.Why are my encounters so awkward? I’m not really sure.I’ve been told my resting bitch

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