LS Lowry - Going to the Match 1953.
My sister loves the Beatles. She loves them with a kind of encyclopediac love, a love that you prove - by being able to reference the engraving on Ringo Starr’s toe ring, or dropping into conversation that so-and-so shares a nickname with Paul McCartney’s twice-removed-second-cousin’s-nephew.
It is a Fact Love, a Love shown in the time taken to know things. Like if Romeo had wooed Juliet by reeling of the finer points of Tudor era darning, or John F Kennedy had courted Marilyn by explaining why the placement of that beauty spot there is of utmost importance for facial geometry. This is a love built on flashcards, and reading, and learning. ‘Look – I have seen the things that are important in your head and put them in my own! I have copied your brain! My very consciousness has altered – all so I can pass the GCSE of you!’.
I envied her Fact Love, her experience of a single minded devotion. I missed the One Direction era, was benignly and disinterestedly #TeamJacob, and felt - at best - mildly intrigued by Dylan O’Brien. I’ve never loved anything to the point of buying merch - never had the goggles that enable you to spend £40 on a T-shirt. So I’d never really thought of myself as a fan, as having the kind of heart-in-mouth awe that leaves your palms clammy, and you unable to string a sentence together.
That was until I met Caitlin Moran. I’d written her a letter. In it I explain how she showed me how kindness and humour can be compatible, how she found words for things that I did not quite know existed, that she taught me about feminism and class and joy. That, of all the people I had never actually met, she had had the greatest influence on my life. That I had read her column for close to a decade, and I think she had made me a kinder, calmer person for it. The letter was about 7 pages long, handwritten on note paper I had taken from my parents.
I went to see her at a Tortoise event, wearing a black and red coat that I have found from a charity shop, which started life in a Paris boutique - because Moran makes fashion writing an art form, on a par with the best food critics. In typical Moran-fashion (she speaks just like how she writes), ‘Hello’ blended almost immediately into ‘I love your coat, isn’t it fantastic’.
The hope had been to respond with something wry, amusing, Brilliant. Something to prompt a coffee, and then a mentorship, and then - many years from now - an amusing two part column reflecting on this experience, our first encounter, and the importance of meeting your heroes.
What came out my mouth was far from Brilliant. Instead a sort of garbled hodge podge of admiration, awe and panic. I felt like a cross between a thirteen year old boy speaking to an attractive waitress, an adoptee meeting their biological parents for the first time, and a student meeting the subject of their thesis. She was there! Talking to me! Making jokes!
It was a good thing I had the letter because I was utterly unable to speak.
Maybe I am more of a fan than I thought.
Clearing through my room the other day, I came across the A4 project book devoted to working out the answer to a big question. What do I want to do? How do I see my life going after the Line of school and university? What makes a good life?
In this book are various exercises as I tried to work out an answer. I listed my closest friends - what is it I admire most about them? I listed activities - what do I like doing? I thought about the relationship between a good day and a good life - which comes first? Do you define one in terms of the other? I listed my heroes, my role models, and my lives-to-avoid.
I think it speaks to my swotty naivety that I thought that I could solve the meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything in a Red and Black book from WHS Smith.
Funnily enough - even after pages and pages of writing, and a whole 3/4 of a gap year - I still don’t have an answer. But I have a much better idea of the enormity of the question, and a few hunches that will allow me to muddle along for the time being.
One of the things I realised is that I admire those who think and share what they think about. So, this time last year, I started a column. First I wrote privately, for a few close friends, and as the months went by I picked up more along the way. Now I’m ready to start sharing my writing a little more publicly. I’m incredibly indebted to those first few readers and friends who reassured me that I wouldn’t be pelted with tomatoes and mocked remorselessly if I put my opinions up online.
Particular thanks to Jack Golden, Emma Mathews and Olivia Gurney-Randall. Also to my lovely parents. You have reacted to the adult equivalent of a glitter-spattered macaroni necklace with the same levels of enthusiasm and support that you have always done, and for that I am profoundly grateful.
An altogether different kind of fan is explored in Bill Buford’s ‘Among the Thugs’ (available here). Buford explores the darker side of football fans and the hooliganism of the 1990s - by joining them. Barmy Bernie, Daft Donald and Steamin’ Sammy become his compatriots as he becomes ever more enmeshed into a world of tribalism, violence and Bacchanalian crowds.
It’s grotesquely compelling - both the characters and the scenes in front of you (gems include a ‘spectacular belch, long and terrible, a brutal slow bursting of innumerable noxious gastric bubbles’), but also the process of observing your own desensitisation to the events that take place.
By page 241, the fact that one hooligan has bitten the eyeball out of the eye of a policeman fails to even register. And so this is so much more than an ethnography. It looks at the limitations of the writer (Buford is beaten up, the witness to violence, and at points so drunk he is unable to know what takes place), and the release of the crowd, on the moment where thought collapses, and all our layers of consciousness compress down into one. Would thoroughly recommend.
Plato calls telestic madness? Bakcheia? Dionysiac frenzy?'
Wunder-kammer - wonder cabinet
Wendell Berry - I keep an inventory of wonders and uncommercial goods
Cornell - Pharmacy - with lapis laxulis and gold leaf from a painting in a tonic bottle - beauty for the soul/ a tonic