The British don’t expect to be happy. On this small boot-shaped island miserableness is patriotic. The British are proudly miserable. In the depths of winter misery is a crackling fire in the pit of one’s gut. It’s the only way to survive. I thought digging out the scarves and gloves, plugging gaps under doors, double glazing windows, bleeding the radiators, test running the boiler, was preparing for winter but these remedies are cosmetic. The secret to preparing for winter in Britain is allowing the malaise to gently ebb into misery and letting it burn.

The mistake I made when I arrived in Britain was assuming the British would be slightly more used to Britain than someone who’d just arrived. It was a logical assumption to make that a person born and bred here would find the weather for instance a part of life. But no, the British are just as astonished at how vile the weather can be as someone fresh off the plane. No one gets used to it. The weather is actually moderate comparatively to other countries, never too hot, never too cold. But it’s the blinding sunshine that can come out of nowhere just as you pack away your sunglasses and step out in your thermals. The wind that can turn your brolly into a tangle of wires clinging to the rim of a bin like a massive spider resisting capture. The rain that never really gets going, just drizzle that murmurs in the background of every scene. The grey that pours into every crack. The damp that trickles into your bones and settles like a muddy puddle. Every winter the British are appalled at the dreariness of their surroundings and the degree of their ensuing misery but the thing is they don’t try and fight it.

The British embrace all forms of sickness too. They have a word that means sick but not sick. Poorly. Poorly usually lasts about 24 hours. Very rarely are you asked to elaborate on poorly. If in some strange circumstance you are asked to elaborate, poorly is a dodgy tandoori. It’s your entitlement as a citizen to feel poorly a few times a year. You just have to say the word and everyone files into line brows heavy with sympathy in silent compliance with a contract they must have agreed among themselves centuries ago. The winter is unpredictable and some days the sky feels so low you need to accept its weight and declare yourself poorly. A Londoner said to me one day with his face mushy with misery ‘poorly means blah’ trying to help me understand. I kind of got it. Blah is not an excuse for absence at work but poorly is.

Poorly often means a potential cold but so does coldy. Sore legs, aching bones might indeed be coldy but its best described as poorly, until the nose starts running. Poorly means I’m not quite right in myself. Whatever that quite means. It can mean ‘I want to be alone’ but of course this is too confrontational so poorly is a gentle retreat avoiding offence. It can be mental, physical or spiritual. It can be fatigue. Its power lies in its ability to engender sympathy without having to elaborate. Serious enough to cancel, not serious enough to go to the doctor. Bad enough to stay home, not bad enough to lie in bed all day. Could get worse probably won’t.

Poorly can mean indisposed which can mean anything at all but probably means can’t be bothered. Poorly can mean out of sorts which can mean anything and suggests you are usually in sorts whatever sorts are. Poorly can mean not up to par. Poorly can mean peaky, liverish, queasy, nauseous, off colour, under the weather, not up to snuff and crook. Poorly can mean funny, peculiar, crummy, lousy and rough. It can mean ropy and grotty, vulgar, queer and seedy. It describes every glorious colour in the rainbow of feeling like shit. It’s the perfect British adjective because it justifies a period of introspection impenetrable to outside enquiry. It’s a cave to wait out the thick internal fog of repression and usually, most of the time, nearly always an excuse to do nothing.

Oddly, very poorly is a completely different matter all-together. By placing very before poorly you’ve turned an ambiguous disposition into a life threatening situation. There is no confusion with very poorly. Call an ambulance. It means sick and probably dying.

I saw a TV show about ambulance drivers in Birmingham and when they described one of the many old ladies they found in a heap at the bottom of the stairs as very poorly I knew very poorly was a serious matter indeed. When I saw a man with oxygen strapped to his mouth described as very poorly, shortly after he rated his pain 11 out of 10 I knew the prefix of very took poorly to a red alert. Just by adding very to poorly.

Poorly meant not so good once upon a time. It’s a very old word that experienced resurgence in the late 20th century post WW2 which coincides with social change and an increase in options for British people including the right to be poorly. It coincides with film and television selling aspiration. It coincides with the science of psychiatry pathologising unhappiness and prescribing pills to treat it. The expectation to be happy is now so powerful you are prescribed drugs if you fall anywhere between miserable and happy. Americans love a pill. The British could inject a packet and still feel miserable because in Britain it’s not a condition, it’s human right.

“We want you looking your best, without the rest“

I’m creating a new app that cuts out the bullshit. It will be called LOOK. Look how good looking I am. Look at me being in all the right places at all the right times. Look how happy I am. Look how loved I am. LOOK. It will save a lot time because there will be no need for the pretense that social media is about anything else other than LOOKING. The faker the better. AI makeovers encouraged. If you’re not pretty create a pretty AI version of yourself and start showing and glowing. Sell stuff and create hope for us ugly rich consumers. No more pretense. This is LOOK.

Here’s my favorite faux controversy to justify posting a naked torso.

“Someone at the gym called me fat” angry faced emoji, followed by a picture of yourself looking super slim and gorgeous without an inch of fat and a frenzy of comments saying…

‘OMG you’re not fat!”

and

“If you’re fat then I’m a whale!”

and

“Hey beautiful, ignore the haters”.

Or

“I’m sure nobody cares, but I’ve been sober for 571 days” followed by a picture of a half naked you, with muscles popping out of you’re skin.

Or

“I spilt coffee on my work shirt” below a picture of a very naked oiled up you, with bright white teeth, scrunching a shirt in the camera, showing off your perfect abs. Comments and likes in abundance…

“Oh no what happened, hope you’re ok stud?”

“Looking good hot stuff”

“I’ll wash your shirt for you, Sir”.

Look, on LOOK you don’t need to whip up faux controversy or sympathy to whip up the likes. No more legitimising self obsession with an ethical dilemma. When all your really want to say is LOOK AT ME.

No more obligation likes, sympathy likes, reciprocated likes, drunk likes, boredom likes…etc. Just good old fashion likes for likes sake. Pure likes, if you like.

No more ‘take me back’ yearnings when you want to reshare your summer holiday pictures because you know how super sexy you looked on that beach, at sunset, arm in arm with all those super sexy people you call friends proving that you must be super sexy in real life because you have so many super sexy friends. Comments drooling from the post, like…

“All the feels babe, wish we were there now”

LOOK is for you! A social media platform for Like Whores who are sick to death of creating faux content to excuse their narcissism. Be self-obsessed, go on. Love yourself. No, adore yourself. Ney, worship yourself. LOOK.

No more telling a million strangers that you’ve just lost your husband to cancer just so they will like your new profile pic. On LOOK you just post your new profile pic on it’s own without your dead husband and the likes come flowing in anyway, as they should. You simply get likes for sake of likes. Pure likes, if you like. That’s LOOK. You want everyone to LOOK. And that’s ok. It’s LOOK so we want you looking your best without the rest. You deserve to be beautiful and you deserve to be told over and over and over again. If you’ve got it, flaunt it because we want it. LOOK.

Our online tutorials will make sure every picture you take looks amazing, if you’re not happy with it you won’t need to caption it with ‘might delete later’. We’ll delete it for you, automatically. And don’t worry about it if you don’t get the likes you were hoping for. We’ll thrown in 1000 likes for every LOOK without the pretense or as we like to call it, the boring bit. The bit that makes you look humble, accidently caught out or normally quite shy. Don’t get distracted by content, just look good. We are LOOK. You love yourself. And so do we.

March 2020 I was working in a hospital as Covid-19 took hold of the city. To curb the spread of the virus hospital workers were required to quarantine after work. This meant I couldn’t be within 2 meters of my daughter who was only 6 months old. In the evenings I watched my housemate mummify himself in his bed sheets declaring it was the end of world, not because of the crushing weight of a modern day plague but because the local Tesco had put a two bottle limit on wine.

In the early mornings, I walked the empty streets of Brixton and stood outside houses and took photos, desperate to know what was going on in other people’s lives. What did their nothing look like?

People began working from home, unwanted household items started spilling out on to the streets. Some of it valuable, some of it junk. People started bringing plants into their homes. Gardens were everything. Many were terrified of food shortages so began to bake bread. Communications with the outside world took the form of face montages on electronic screens.

Little did we know lockdown would last for over 12 months with some short breaks in between. Little did we know Covid would go on to kill 8 million people world-wide and lockdowns in various forms would destroy livelihoods and obliterate the mental health of millions. For me there is life before Covid and life after. I never really recovered from the ordeal. It struck at the most intimate place in my psyche – the need to feel close to others.

My theatrical friends were out of work and going stir crazy in west London. One of them used his contacts in the Russian mafia to get me a very early Covid test prototype. The instructions were translated from Mandarin to English so I WhatsApp’d west London for some tips deciphering the garble. “No idea luv, use your common sense”. This was ironic considering there was nothing common sense about a small cassette that somehow detected fragments of viral proteins using nasopharyngeal swabs. I used a blood sample instead of a nasal sample, looking back, I’m pretty sure this was incorrect.

My former landlady was now in residence at nearby Peckham. She’d moved from Brighton to London to start a new job just as lockdown descended. Still on a trial period and not covered by the any government support scheme, her new employer sacked her, cutting their losses. With time and isolation on her hands she threw herself into helping the NHS which meant preparing me food packs everyday. Shepard’s Pie, lasagna, roast chicken and mash, apple and rhubarb pie. She took social distancing very seriously and would meet me half way between mine and hers, she on one side of the road, me on the other. She would place the food parcels in the middle of the road and I would retrieve them back to my side of the road. We would bellow back and forth until hoarse and then I would bow gratefully and withdraw into the shadows with her assuring me of tomorrow’s supplies “Toad in the Hole with maple syrup gravy!” Only 3 weeks ago she was tucking me into her spare bed and giving me a hot cup of cocoa. Now more than ever I needed this kind of comfort and its absence was harrowing. My most motherly friend was cold and suspicious and on the other side of the road.

When I finally did get to hug my daughter I was so excited I leapt over a merry-go-round in the playground and landed on my side, fracturing my ankle. Not being able to get into A&E I dressed it myself and reinforced it with packing tape. This was the spirit of the time. Just get on with it because there are people much worse off.

Christmas 2020 I checked into a Premier Inn in Brixton and quarantined for 7 days, after my housemates tested positive for Covid, one of them in ICU. My Clapham mates Michael and Jarrod met me at Windrush Square in Brixton to convince me to side-step lockdown regulations and join them for Christmas dinner. I was desperate for turkey and a cuddle but I hobbled away mumbling about owing it to the dead.

It wasn’t until June 2022 I tested positive myself after 5 days of a blistering sore throat and thunderous fever. This coincided with my daughter’s 3rd birthday and I couldn’t attend her weekend celebrations. Already feeling cheated by the virus, I lay in bed overwhelmed by the injustice of my situation. Until now I’d calmed myself by placing my pandemic-related “bad luck” in the context of loved ones not being able to say goodbye to their dying parents in hospital due to Covid restrictions (as was the case across the country and world) but during the peak of Covid fever the bigger picture was hard to see. With sweat pouring out of me, I texted a work colleague “I hope everyone in the world gets this thing and dies a horrible death”. The fever talking. Sorry 8 million people.

The slow opening of society was difficult to embrace because everything was a bit shit. All the places you once loved were not quite right, like butter left open in a fridge over night.

Within a year, a cost of living crisis would be upon us, pouring salt into our wounds and digging it out with a rusty spoon. The perfect excuse for Capitalism to do less and charge more. Even though starving to death would be good for my figure, I wished it was 2019 again.

The knock-on effect of a global pandemic no matter how painful, pales in comparison to saying goodbye over the phone to your mother as she lies dying in a hospital bed. Quite frankly unless this was your experience of Covid-19, you haven’t got my sympathy, not for long anyway.

Morrissey was and still is a self-obsessed jerk but I’d still give him my big toe if he ran out of vegetables.

It’s a brave man who has The Smiths in his top ten albums of all time. People get precious about the authenticity of one’s Smith’s love. “Sniveling pomposity” is my usual response to any accusation of class tourism. You don’t have to be born in a shithole like Hulme to love the Smiths. David Browne reviewed “Strangeways, Here We Come” in Rolling Stone magazine in 1987 and he says the album “stands as one of their (The Smiths) best and most varied records….despite the problematic artsiness of its lead singer” Artsiness is a new word for me in 2020 and there it was in 1987 describing Morrissey’s self-obsession and explaining why Johnny Marr had left the band soon after the album was made. Problematic artsiness, no less. Browne then says “If you’ve ever considered Morrissey a self-obsessed jerk, Strangeways, Here We Come isn’t likely to change your mind”. Morrissey was and still is a self-obsessed jerk but I’d still give him my big toe if he ran out of vegetables.

The Smiths gave hope to kids who grew up in buttfuck nowhere and had a choice between writing poetry and certain death and certain death for writing poetry and writing poetry about certain death.

In his review, David Browne fails to mention “Death of a Disco Dancer” the soaring gem of the album. This is dextrous song-smithing. Johnny Marr commented to Q Magazine that one of the best things about the song “is that keyboard drone. It’s like Goldfinger on bad acid. Which is kind of The Smiths in a nutshell.”

“Girlfriend in a Coma” is a tidy pop song and remains the entry level tune for new Smith fans. The Smiths gave us a sensibility not just a sound. Manchester is full of it. Kids of poor parents get an education and create art with a wink, to maintain ironic detachment so they don’t betray their working class roots.

David Browne is clearly fed up with Morrissey in his review and is out to champion Marr the overlooked genius because straight men don’t have enough of a voice in indie music.

The Smiths helped us laugh at the moronic human condition and gave us all permission to fail. We must always wear their iconic album covers on our t-shirts and pretend we like them at music festivals.

Strangeways has less of an intersection between Morrissey and Marr found on “Meat Is Murder” or “Hatful of Hollow”, still slightly at odds but creating a bitter sweet purity. In Strangeways they are definitely car pooling. More production helps.

Most days I’m in the mood for The Smiths but some days they make my ears bleed. Like when you’re stroking a cat because you love it so much and you notice you’re actually slapping it. I’m the cat in this scenario by the way. Top Ten!