no. 66. a visit to the Barbican

Hi! I don’t know about you but I now know far more about tariffs and bond markets that I ever thought I would… Anyway, I’m still figuring out my next life moves (aren’t we always?) and second-guessing myself and all my creative endeveours (aren’t I always?) which is why this space is such an important one. I love being here and would love to find a way to write more regualry if there is an appetite for it. Any support is always extremely welcome, from a one-off (or regular!) Ko-fi to a pledge, or even just passing this on to a friend who might like to sign-up. It all goes such a long way. I really can’t tell you.

Here’s hoping we don’t have to listen to any more podcasts about China’s economy for a little while.

On with the show

***

I love the Barbican. I love it for all its Brutalist glory, for all the arts and culture it produces, for all the summer evenings spent sitting by the fountains drinking wine. And I love it because it was the perfect backdrop to an ill-judged relationship with a man nearly a decade older than me when I was in my late 20s.

It was the cliche I’d been chasing. My 30s were looming on the horizon like storm clouds bringing on a pressure headache and I wanted to reject anything that even resembled settling down. It went exactly as you might imagine. In our ‘relationship’, there were no labels or conversations about the future. There was no planning or expectations. It was evenings in the John Snow or Bob Bob Ricard, always arranged last minute, as if the whole thing was a chance encounter in a novel. Not, in fact, an exercise in managing the undercurrents of anxiety about whether or not I would receive the text inviting me out. (I always did).

And every evening always ended at the Barbican where he owned a flat. The kitchens were famously created by a yacht designer and his apartment really did feel like a small boat, separate from the rest of life and adrift from reality. We weren’t tethered together by mutual friends or shared calendars. It was just us and the Barbican - up the lift, along the corridor, the rest of the world forgotten. He once joked I only liked him for his centrally located flat. If we were tangled in ambiguity, I was absolutely certain about his neighbourhood.

He gave me a key very early on - a strange thing to do for someone so uncommitted, and, as I would learn, all part of the intense push and pull that came to define us. It was also indicative of the role his flat played in our story, as if the vital third character that gave the romance space to unfold. When he handed it over, it felt like a key to a portal, opening up a part of London I didn’t know existed. I loved getting to know the maze of routes through doors and interconnected corridors, up and down stairs. I loved that it felt like an Island, like he did, difficult to access, isolated, that entry felt like a privilege for the lucky few. Crossing the bridge from the tube only added to the sense of entering a separate territory, leaving one world behind for another. Most of the time, no one knew where I was or how long I’d be gone. I’ve always found privacy very alluring and desperately romantic. Walking back there after work, crossing the bridge, ringing the buzzer, and slipping inside, no one any the wiser, was intoxicating as I once more set sail and drifted away for the night.

When the relationship ended, it did so with a sense of inevitability. We both knew whatever it had been wasn’t real, that the credits would roll, the lights would go on, the illusion would be over. While we dipped our toes in normality - we eventually met each other's parents, we once went to a wedding together - nothing about us was real. Like the four days we spent in LA, driving a convertible Mustang along the Pacific Coast Highway, lounging around pools under palm trees and eating late dinners in red leather booths. Sometimes, he’d turn up with a silly, fancy fast car, and we would speed around the city with the top down. Occasionally, he’d take me to events where he’d introduce me to people from my favourite TV shows. It was a thrill but ultimately an empty one. Like being in the Barbican with him.

It ended where it started - in a pub. I was brokenhearted for the idea of it all, and the Barbican became part of my heart’s history. Shortly after, my most whimsical friend, a Parisian called Caroline, subletted a Barbican studio flat with a fold-up bed and hung a glitter curtain from the doorway. I couldn’t think of anyone more suited to living there. The Barbican is a mecca for design obsessives, but it’s also about living alternatively.

Around that time, I met one of my journalist heroes. She told me she’d wished she spent more of her younger years taking drugs and having sex. My ambitious younger self didn’t get it, but I’m starting to. Right now, my relationship and my life are very real. My relationship with E is solid; deep roots in the earth, dependable, strong and permanent. In the evenings, when A is sleeping upstairs and we’re downstairs on the sofa watching TV, I feel encased in contentment and calm and love. But maybe part of that feeling comes from knowing the chaos, the unpredictability, a love affair that was a chess game, that prioritised pleasure and late nights, permanently in the present, tomorrow always irrelevant.

As my mind - and words - continue to romanticise what was also a rocky and sometimes painful affair, as I skip over the red flags and the fights, I can see the twentysomething me attracted to something she shouldn’t be, a sparkling glint of light from a door with a No Entry sign. And I watch her following that feeling wherever it led her, come what may, the inappropriateness a temptation all of its own. That feeling led her to the Barbican.

There’s an inherent romance to the space. After all, it’s a project that was a commitment to an idea, a belief in eutopia and equality, and somehow that lofty ethos only intensified my own sense of longing. When I go back now, I see my younger self dashing through those starlit corridors, determinedly walking towards something reckless because it felt too good not to. And there are no regrets.

***

I saw the Noah Davis exhibition at the Babircan centre and it was excellent. His paintings are beautiful and vibrant and moving. As was the story of his life. I implore you to see it if you can.

Once I stopped thinking about ghosts and flames long extinguished and started focusing on the exhibition, interacting with the art echoed a process that has been playing out in my head recently.

At the start of the exhibition, you learn about Davis’ deliberate design to paint and witness the Black experience and to transform it into something joyful, sometimes mythical.

Next, you are presented with a painting he made for his father who was dying of cancer called Painting for my Dad (2011). It is a large piece, taking up nearly an entire wall. In its centre, a hunched elderly man with a lantern stands with his back to the viewer. He is standing on the precipice of a rocky opening, looking out over space or a night sky; endless black and stars. His frail frame is contemplating what is waiting for him on the other side, the journey into the unknown. I was moved to tears.

As I went between the paintings, I saw two intentions. One was to use art to say something. To make a point about politics and history and indenity and race. Art was a messenger. But when I saw the painting of his father, I saw an artwork that made a viewer feel something. And I felt it. Deeply, instantly.

I used to be someone who wanted to use words to say something, to convey a message, to spell out a problem, to bang a drum. The best art, I believed, intersects with the very real, the politics and society of the moment it was made. I wanted to write to make people engage more with the world, not less. But since motherhood has arrived, I want to write to make people feel. And this is a very different project.

I don’t think I’ve lost the anger that drove the need for writing to be purposeful but I do think my response to that anger has changed. I no longer feel the need to point out the societal problems that preoccupy me - even if they preoccupy me more than ever. Perhaps because, after all these years, it feels like shouting into a void, but mostly because but I want to try and articulate how living in this world makes me feel. Not examine the policy response or what needs to be taught in schools - however desperately important that is - but now I want to understand what this world feels like on our skin, in our blood stream.

The exhibition was a helpful clarification reflecting the internal shift I was yet to explicitly articulate. Everyone told me I’d be even angrier as a mother, and I am in some ways, somewhere deep in my bones. But I don’t want a megaphone; I want to turn this skin and bones inside out and show the world what it’s made of: vulnerability, rage, fear, and mostly, love. Because maybe, as a mother, I’ve finally understood just how personal the political is. ‘Feelings’ associated with women have long been dismissed. But like Davis showed us, that’s all we really have.

Some great things

Like everyone else, I loved Lauren Bravo pointing out the style of Shirely Hughes’ mums.

Jean’s wonderful memoir, Breasts: A Relatively Brief Relationship is now out and I couldn’t recommend it more. She looked incredible here.

Stylist magazine invited women to talk to the health minister, Wes Streeting about the desperate need for improving care for those who have experienced miscarriage and baby loss, after producing one of the country’s largest ever reports on the issue. Women’s magazines are slowly starting to look like a thing of the past for all sorts of reasons, and they were always problematic, but this reminded me of the good in them - how they champion causes everyone else is ignoring, how they give voice to women who feel voiceless and they make women’s lives centre stage. Impressive stuff.

Thanks for reading,

Until next time

Mx