PicoBlog

At a housewarming party at the weekend: a couple of my dearest friends now own part of the building I’ve obsessed over since the first time I saw it from the back seat of a car on the motorway into Glasgow. The room the perfect proportion of people I’ve loved for decades and people I’ve just met: the kind of audience that, two drinks in, I mix something from blended whisky and lemon & lime fizzy water and playact for. Turning to Big Talk and the choices that have gotten us to this point, the things we left behind and the bits we’d pick up again if only we weren’t so terrified.

In six weeks, I’ll be 42 years old, and I don’t want to do anything I’m supposed to do ever again.

And who is right there with me?

Only the poet laureate of dissatisfied, heartbroken, hard-working girls everywhere: Taylor Swift.

What surprised me most about The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology - all 31 tracks of it - was just how over it our girl sounds. Which one’s about Matty Healy, which one’s about Joe Alwyn - I don’t care, I bet her Notes app is so full of killer lines and dinner date vignettes worth building a song around she could have given us another 30. Christ, if the contents of my Evernote account ever leaked - or, worse, all those middle-of-the-night solipsitic voice notes recorded on my Apple Watch because my phone is in the other room - you’d be having me committed. The second verse of “But Daddy I Love Him” is the most Eldest Daughter Coded shit I have ever heard. The “him” is for the algorithm.

My favourite, I think, comes from the late night “anthology” dump. It captures, for me, that feeling of having done all the things you’re supposed to - the career, the relationships, the bylines, the mortgage - only to still be desperately unhappy. It’s about the hard work of figuring out what it is that you actually want, what it is that you’re here to do. I’ve seen one lyric in particular get dragged online, tone deaf shorn of the groupchat girlie context so probably deservedly so - but the bit I keep reaching for is this:

I hate it here so I will go to secret gardens in my mind
people need a key to get to, the only one is mine
I read about it in a book when I was a precocious child
no mid-sized city hopes and small-town fears
I’m there most of the year ‘cause I hate it here

And, sure, celebrities! they’re jUsT LiKE uS! is a marketer’s dream, but I’ve been making sense of myself out of other people’s lyrics for longer than I’ve needed therapy (I’d make the same point with a David Berman lyric, you know I could).

My initial response to the album - still mostly where I’m at, I think - is that the greatest con Taylor Swift ever pulled was allowing the world to anoint her its princess while simultaneously being a complete lunatic. This is not “pop music”: it’s lyrically dense, takes dedication and/or inebriation to properly connect with. It’s Radiohead’s In Rainbows. That’s not a criticism, except for the bit about Radiohead: it is, in fact, what makes it worth the time. It is music marketed to the TikTok generation arriving at the perfect time for those of us in early middle age, reeling from the collective trauma of a global pandemic none of us has properly reckoned with yet and unpicking the internalised misogyny of the killer-soundtrack-indie-romcoms of the early 00s that shaped our worldviews. It’s the accompaniment to this great Ask Polly (Heather Havrilesky) quote about desire that I copied into my journal and bookmarked with a ribbon:

Even the most absurd and embarrassing corners of your passion and longing are valuable. Even the most shameful moments of full surrender have something beautiful inside them, an ability to let the world touch you and form you into a new shape. Even when you feel weak in the wake of big passion or big love, you’re tapping into something elemental and lovely inside you: your emotional core, your wild spirit, the part of you that’s capable of caring deeply about something outside of your skin…

It is being too much, and wanting too much: all the things you’re not supposed to; great, big, sticky fistfuls of it. It is the corner of Italy I disappear to in my mind when it’s been raining for 10 days straight and I’m too anxiously nauseated to eat: Amalfi views and a big plate of pasta, an even bigger hat. In the fantasy I take my paternal grandmother’s name, and nobody will find me until and unless I want to be found.

But I don’t have the resources of a billionaire-but-oh-so-relatable pop star, or the words of my own, so I plaster a smile on my face and cosplay medicated sanity until it’s time to come home, and scream, and scream.

• It’s actually this on repeat right now though

• It’s my dad’s birthday on Saturday, and I have no idea how to mark it. Probably by writing this.

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