I moved house, for the 25th time. It’s over now, finally, and to my surprise I find that I am - to the naked eye, at least - still alive and in one piece. I’m hoping this one, despite once again being just a tenancy, might have a sense of permanence to it, because if it doesn’t I absolutely am going to donate every one of my possessions to starving psychedelic orphans, and this time I swear I’m not kidding. One of the byproducts of that permanence, if it happens, might be that I don’t write here about moving house any more, although since people’s attachments to living spaces and objects is one of the major themes of the novel I’m about to begin working on, I probably shouldn’t make any promises. As I sit at the well-worn kitchen table whose legs I’ve just reattached and write these words with the morning sun streaming over from the Blackdown Hills, this quiet Devonshire bungalow feels like the perfect place to be still and centred and get down to a lot of what I have been meaning to create, including some of the things I didn’t have time for before because I was always so fucking busy moving house. An anxious feeling has accumulated over the course of the move - I mean, as well as the standard ones of feeling like your whole life is in danger of falling through a rip in the fabric of the reality you’ve created for yourself and that the mere process of shifting your base of operations from one building to another is exposing you to all the worst things about 21st Century communication - and a couple of hours ago I fully realised the root of it: until today, I hadn’t done any writing for three weeks. Writing is now no less part of me than one of my own legs. Arguably more so. It’s a necessity for survival, and I don’t just mean financially.
I have been painfully missing the novel I finished a few weeks ago, my second. I loved being inside its world, which was so much less jarring than the one I’ve been inside for the last few weeks. Being in moving limbo has distanced me from it. For the time being, the whole book, still unread by almost everybody except me, seems to have floated off into the ether. “I did write it… didn’t I?” I wonder. Somehow it’s often in moments like these that I remember Amazon exists. A lot of the time I don’t even think about it, but in a lull, a period when I’m annoyed with myself for not writing, I sometimes let it bother me more than I should, especially the way it makes out it’s my boss when it isn’t. I repeatedly ask people not to buy my books from Amazon and to use their purchase to support independent bookshops instead, then I look at the Amazon sales ranking for my latest, see it’s temporarily slipped beyond the 100,000 mark, and tell myself “Ok, here is the proof that it will all be over soon: the people in the car with the blacked out windows will be here to take you back to work on the checkout at Tesco, or that factory where you had to stand in a skip while people threw stuff at you.” Momentarily, the messages I’ve received from readers will mean nothing. “Nobody cares about that! That’s not real life!" Amorphous Amazon-Led Publishing Industry Dictator Brainvoice will tell me. “Stephen Fry? William Boyd? Kate Atkinson? David Sedaris? They were just being kind, in a pitying sort of way, when they said nice stuff about your work. The only things that matter here are the numbers, and we’re watching very closely and you’re on thin ice.” But then I’ll snap out of it, remember what’s truly going on here. I’m in my own little cobwebby corner, writing for my niche crowd, writing to continue to be able to write as freely and honestly as possible, and nobody corporate who disapproves of it has yet succeeded in stopping me, and isn’t that kind of amazing? The niche will always be a niche, but it occasionally expands a little. Substack seems to be helping with that. I don’t want everybody to read my first novel, Villager. But I am proud of it and would very much like people who’ve enjoyed my writing on Substack to read it. With that in mind, I’ve decided to reduce my annual paid subscriptions to half price for the next week, and send a signed paperback of Villager to everyone (wherever they are in the world) who opts for one. Here’s a photo of the stack I’ve just purchased direct from my publisher.
(If I need to, I’ll buy more, of course: you’ll all get one.)
We brought Jim with us to the new house. That we would do so was never in any doubt, but some of you seemed worried about him and asked, so I thought I’d let you know. Jim was a Cornish farm cat living in a barn on the other side of the field behind our previous house who was brought over to meet us by his best friend, our cat Charles, in early December last year, then never left. I say “was” because he’s almost completely lost his accent now and “farm cat” is a bit of a stretch when it comes to describing the soppy strawberry blonde lump who sprawls out and takes over half of our bed every night. I have had the pleasure of living with 14 different cats in my life and can honestly say he’s the biggest, the cuddliest, the least aggressive, the kindest. I’m not wholly convinced he’s actually even a cat.
We were deeply shocked and saddened, upon arriving here, to find that the previous tenant had abandoned her own cat, leaving him locked out of the house to fend for himself in the nearby hedgerows and fields in the days before we picked up the keys. Here he is, looking depressed, having re-entered the house to find that it is full of other, less conventionally attractive cats and weird Mid 20th Century furniture.
I’m lying. He’s called Phillip, very much loved, and we are fostering him for a short time while Caroline, his owner, finds a new home for herself and him in Ireland. He’s extremely posh and agile, with the shoulders of a small wolf. Despite his size and muscularity, he is absolutely terrified of our small rotund female cat, Roscoe. But let’s face it: who isn’t?
I am now on the downslope over the brow of House Move Hill: the bit where you realise it will all actually stop, the other less fraught form of life - or one not dissimilar to it - will slowly resume, and you feel a deep sense of gratitude for it all, that it’s somehow still here, what you’ve piled around you to cushion you from the crap. You are with the person you love, with a roof over your head. Zero cats were mistakenly left at a petrol station on the A30. Although a recount may be required, it would appear that a total of no more than four objects have been damaged in transit. All the records and books are here and intact, apart from that 1956 Milt Jackson LP one of the movers dropped on the lawn. But before that came The Fear. Maybe it’s because of how nomadic I’ve been over the past decade and that I was using the very last reserves of house move energy I had in me, but I’ve never quite known it this extreme before. Yeah, you’ve got some keys, and a contract, but you feel briefly like you are tumbling through a void, and below you are the cold snapping teeth of the infrastructure of our increasingly cynical and suspicious technofeudalist world. The credit check teeth and the letting agent teeth and the deposit teeth and the potential car crash teeth and the proving your identity again and again teeth and the call waiting queue teeth and the this really wasn’t a good time for one of us to have a doctor’s appointment teeth and the doctor’s surgery accidentally lost your blood teeth and the final meter reading teeth and the broken central heating teeth and the cleaning teeth and the cleaning the other house teeth and the trying to get hold of a person you hope will fix the broken central heating teeth. The snapping is amplified and it briefly feels like you’re seeing into the frightening robot mouth of society and in fact you are but thankfully it’s not the whole story and at other times it’s not normally this intense, just like Amazon isn’t the whole story, but can feel like it is, if you’re looking solely at it. You sense, at worst, that the teeth wish you weren’t a human being at all. You know that they don’t want you to do anything, or be anything, outside of a conventional algorithmical idea of what a human being is supposed to be. They definitely don’t give a shit about your books, or want you to write them, and because in those moments the teeth feel like everything, which makes you even more grateful than some people do give a shit. And then, just when you think you’ll be tumbling through that void above the cold snapping teeth forever, it’s over, and you turn away, not fully away, because in 2023 the teeth will never let you since they are there inside everything, not least the small rectangle in your pocket, but far enough away to see and receive the antidote: art, books, music, the love of pets, a nice pen, a fresh notebook, and the unbeatable undying excitement of not quite knowing, and not having anyone dictate to you, what’s going to come next.
You can reserve a signed first edition of my new novel, 1983, for next year here (and contribute to its funding in the process).
This is brilliant. I'm semi-nomadic as well, and the snapping teeth metaphor is exactly what it feels like. Every time I move to a new state it's the snapping teeth of bureaucracy; new driver's license, new car registration, new doctors, new health insurance, new home insurance, new car insurance, trying to get the post office to actually deliver your mail to your new address, etc, etc. Thank you for once again putting into words the things I feel but cannot explain. You do have a wonderful way with words. No matter what Amazon says.
It is sheer hell and amazing how unable organisations are to cope with a change of address. Cos no council tax payer ever moved before the end of the financial year. My partner has been told he isn't eligible to vote but I am on basis of electoral register update I provided and I didn't mention any of his eccentricities on the form. I have finally achieved refunds from all the various policies that decided to auto renew on an old address when I had specifically set them up not to. I gave up on the British Gas refund because while I know we didn't use £500 of gas and electricity in a month when everything was switched off and we weren't living in the property in the end I decided it was a small price to pay for my sanity, such as it is. If there is a next time I will just invest in extended post redirection and pick them off one by one. Being organised doesn't pay off. Your cats are lovely