The trans comedian breaking boundaries in socially conservative Georgia

November 4, 2022 – January 29, 2023

November 19, 2022 – January 28, 2023

In May 2020 I began an intermittent diary, a notebook of infrathin sensations. I was housebound in a heat wave in London, in a pandemic, with my wife, A., and our daughter, R. S., who was then four. I started to notice what I was noticing in this reduced era: minuscule sensations, tastes. I was becoming obsessed with everything that was nonverbal. I started to seek it out. I was getting into perfume samples, which I ordered in batches from a perfume shop in town, the perfumes all decanted into miniature atomizers and sent in clear plastic sachets; and also natural wines I bought online, old music, tarot cards, the coffee I was drinking, the chocolate I was eating. I took photos of flowers as they faded. I was worried that if I tried to write down these impressions in the journal I was keeping for the novel I was writing at the time they would get lost. So I began a separate notebook. It was a very small notebook, made by a Japanese manufacturer, that I’d bought and had never known what to use for. Writing in it always felt like defacement. But now its miniature size could be useful. Each new entry took up half a page.

The more I wrote, the more I started to think about what these impressions represented. I decided that the category of experience I was describing could be extended to anything that lingered—tiny scraps from my reading, stray physical memories. I came up with different definitions for what I was after: old-fashioned words like nuance, or timbre … I liked nuance because in Barthes’s lectures, collected in The Preparation of the Novel, he describes nuance as the practice of individuation. “Nuance = difference (diaphora),” he wrote, and then added a literary analogy: “one could define style as the written practice of the nuance …” On the level of style, he continued, nuance constituted the essence of poetry, the genre of minute particularities; on the level of content, nuance represented life.

Life! I missed life very much.

Anyway, this infrathin diary lasted about six months, maybe a little less. Then the urgency of these feelings and of recording these tiny sensations began to dissipate and was overtaken with a new obsession, or a new version of this nonverbal investigation. I started manically buying paper and ink and colored pencils and pens—to make small drawings and diagrams. And so I abandoned that notebook and began another.

From tiny off-grid treehouses to experimental eco-friendly urban architecture

Today, we turn the Ramble spotlight onto the master puppeteer himself: José Mourinho.

From the moment he sprinted into our footballing lives at Old Trafford with his coat billowing behind him, to his almighty fall from grace at the Lowry Hotel in Manchester, we relive all his charm, flaws, and that absolutely unrelenting chip on his shoulder.

We explain why Real Madrid ruined his career and we settle it once and for all: who has had the most successful managerial career, Guardiola or Mourinho?

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October 22, 2022 – January 15, 2023

In our Winter issue, we published Mieko Kanai’s “Tap Water,” a story whose remarkable first sentence spills across more than two pages and describes the interior of the narrator’s new apartment as if it were the architecture of her emotional landscape. Who among us has not resolved to stop obsessing over some small piece of our home, only to fail? Inspired by Kanai’s story, we’re launching a series called Home Improvements, in which writers consider the aspects of their homes, gardens, and interior design that have driven them to distraction.

The second time I met my boyfriend, S., he told me he was getting divorced. I thought, Great. I liked the way it sounded. We were in our late twenties and so it made him and by extension me seem original, and I like people who have made mistakes. To me the marriage sounded unserious, and therefore unthreatening: it was a visa marriage, granted one that came out of a relationship. They met at work, were married after about a year, and divorced bitterly after fewer than three. I have never met his ex-wife but initially I pictured someone stylish and ethereal, and he had said she was a bit older so she was perhaps intimidating in that sense but, ultimately, good company.

The problems started with her stuff. For a brief period before they broke up, they both lived together in the house where he, and now sometimes I, live. Meaning that, as a result of the divorce happening long-distance in a kind of pandemic limbo period, and us meeting very soon after it, for the early stretch of our relationship many of her things were still in the house just outside of Belfast.

After the second or third time I stumbled across a wicker handbag or a drawer of beauty products or, once, underwear (polyester), I became alert to her things, seeking out and cataloguing items like they were pieces of evidence from a crime scene. Brown spray bottles labeled “citrus cleaner” and “disinfectent” [sic], with labels printed using a label maker. Patent beige open-toed stilettos with brittle-looking heels. Clothes, a couple of dresses, all slightly floral; she is thinner than me. A set of very large—I consider them comically large—cocktail glasses. A crate-size box of “environmentally friendly” toilet rolls with marketing copy reading “who gives a crap,” addressed to Mrs. T (Mrs.!). Wedding photos, in desktop frames bought from Next. A cheerful book on adult crafting for mental health. I could keep going, and for months, talking to friends, I did, until I could feel them start to try to edge me toward other topics or edge themselves away from this one. 

But then there were her plates. They were a set of around ten, made by her as gifts for him, vaguely artisanal craft-fair pieces in speckled white and muted blue. There is not a way to say this without sounding like a snob, but it feels relevant that she was not a potter or ceramicist in the sense that she made money from it or did it prolifically, or that the pieces she made were fully functional for their intended use. Pottery was an aspiration, a hobby that might become something more, and the plates reflected this. Tasteful but not imaginative, each one was a clear attempt at an ideal of a plate: marginally different sizes, visibly honed edges, glazes dripping slightly over rims. 

There are barn cinders all over North London! Marcus, Jim, Vish and David react to an epic tussle between Arsenal and Manchester United.

In more exciting news, Jim meets Jack Wilshere, Kate meets Frank Lampard, and everyone wishes that Liverpool didn’t meet Chelsea. Surprisingly, David then makes the case for Dychey at Everton and we discover why Kaoru Mitoma is so bloody good. And a Ramble legend returns to the fold in the Championship. He’d bite your hand off for a draw.

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Is being calm about passivity or is it a superpower that makes us strong?