Happy New Year! I’m Polly Clark, novelist and TS Eliot Prize–shortlisted poet. Monday Night Reads brings thoughtful writing direct to your inbox every Monday at 7pm. Recent highlights include my interview with Graham Linehan and my essay dissecting Pan Macmillan’s corporate apology Anatomy of an Apology.

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Dear Reader,

This year I have travelled a lot. Because my novel, Ocean, was published, some of that travel has been exciting: Italy, the Edinburgh Book Festival, bookshops and radio stations. But mostly I take trains from London to Scotland, where my family is. My daughter, now at university, has relatives scattered across the country all clamouring to see her; the only reliable way to catch a glimpse is to go to her.

And so I am now more familiar than most with the West Coast line. The journey from Euston to Helensburgh has, in recent years, become an odyssey. If it comes in under eight hours, I feel oddly triumphant. Delays are so frequent that Delay Repay has become almost fully automated, although I still maintain a long-running chat with Avanti on X, as customer service appears to exist only there. Ticket prices continue to climb: it now costs the equivalent of a European city break to cross my own country. Over my last few journeys, refunds have averaged about fifty per cent, suggesting the system itself has quietly accepted defeat.

As I girded my loins to undertake what would be my last long train journey of 2025, back to London and requiring a detour because of engineering works, I found myself thinking about a travel nightmare from a few weeks earlier. At the time it was so engulfing I could not write about it at all. Only later did its meaning become clear. It was not simply a bad journey, but a lesson in how systems now fail: thoroughly, politely, and without correction.

As soon as payment went through for my ticket in October, my phone began to ping with weather warnings, all helpfully clustered around my day of travel. I alerted those expecting me to the strong possibility of non-arrival. I told myself I would cancel if it looked too awful. Replacement bus services were mentioned, as they always are, with a cheerfulness entirely unrelated to reality. There comes a point when arriving shattered is simply not worth arriving at all.

And yet, miraculously, the weather held. So did the line, despite an electrical failure in Glasgow that morning. Encouraged, I trundled my case to Euston, only to be met, upon stepping onto the concourse, by another announcement: an electrical failure at Preston meant that all West Coast trains were now cancelled. The litany of apologies and supposed alternatives echoed across the despondent masses

This was the only weekend I could make the journey. I was packed, committed, already mentally there. Travelling the next day would simply invite a new set of failures, and I could not extend my stay at the other end. Train operators, however, continue to treat travellers’ time as infinitely flexible. A refund or alternative date is offered as if these were adequate substitutes rather than poor compensation for lost hours. So I obeyed the tannoy and headed for King’s Cross, to take the LNER to Edinburgh and on from there. It would take longer, but I was in it now: a tiny particle obediently re-routed, my own plans dissolved into the wider logic of the system.

This was the tipping point into a parallel world of train travel logic. I got a seat on the LNER service and off we went. All was relatively smooth until Doncaster, where we ground to a halt and the driver announced that there had been a fatality on the line. Coolly, I wondered what could have possessed someone to choose this particular way of ending everything that day; perhaps a last, theatrical demand for attention from an indifferent world. The silence in the carriage suggested we were all pondering much the same thing.

We would be staying put for the foreseeable future. It was now 7pm, and the uncertainty, already at full intensity for days, was beginning to take its toll.

“You can get off and have something to eat,” the driver said. “I don’t know when we’ll be going.”

As I nibbled a station-bought sandwich and drank a beer, ChatGPT informed me that fatalities on the line can take hours to clear, though often around ninety minutes. I tried to summon sorrow for the dead person, but found myself oddly blank, estranged from any recognisable human feeling. It was this, in retrospect, that disturbed me most. Immersion in chaos leads to indifference; a dulling of proper outrage. Extreme weather, power failure, and a suicide all in one day: none of it felt remarkable anymore. When the driver mentioned Delay Repay, the phrase drifted through the carriage without landing. A refund was so grotesquely beside the point that no one even looked up.

The staff were friendly and helpful, but entirely without alarm. There was no acknowledgement of a systemic failure that, with minor variations, has now become commonplace. Our infrastructure simply does not work. The unacceptable is administered calmly and embraced without a murmur — as if movement itself, independence itself, were now a kind of unreasonable demand.

Eventually, the person who had succumbed to despair was removed from the tracks and we resumed our chunter north. Soon after came another announcement: the train would terminate at Newcastle, and we would need to find alternative services to Edinburgh. It was late, too late. At Newcastle, hundreds of us crowded the platforms, staring gloomily at departure boards. Unable to face traversing Scotland that night, I booked a hotel in Edinburgh at considerable expense.

What I still love about travel is hotels. Anonymous, private, comfortable, they give me the same peace of mind that the metre of water around my boat does. Should any of the mythical “money from the far right” said to fund sex-realist women ever trickle down to me, I plan to live out my final days in the Ritz like Margaret Thatcher, or take a perpetual cruise. Both are cheaper than a care home, likely better staffed, and why should I not have an eternally replenished minibar in my dotage? I have earned it.

My hotel that night was a humble Ibis. But it was clean, anonymous, and blessed with a large bed and crisp white quilt. I sank down upon it with a large glass of wine and opened my laptop just in time to catch Helen Joyce speaking live with Helen Webberley, the former GP and founder of GenderGP, on Times Radio.

It felt fitting to be watching this encounter in the spare, floating space of a hotel I never intended to be in: shaken loose from confidence in the physical world, suspended between destinations. This, I realised, is the sensation of 2025: a kind of systemic purgatory, where fantasies are given mainstream airtime even as reality is confirmed in law.

What struck me was not simply that the trains had failed, but that expecting them to work was being increasingly framed as unreasonable; just as Helen Joyce’s insistence on the radio programme that words like sex, evidence, and law still carry binding force in society was met with a shrug, and at times a sneer, from Webberley.

Joyce, a respected journalist and co-founder of Sex Matters, spoke from the position of law and material reality. Following the Cass Review and the Supreme Court ruling confirming that sex in the Equality Act means biological sex, the UK has finally begun to dismantle the practices of the Tavistock clinic, where children were given puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones without evidence of benefit or meaningful follow-up.

Webberley is attempting to establish her online hormone-dispensing service in the United States, having found the UK increasingly hostile to such practices post-Cass. In contrast to Joyce, she spoke softly, maternally, in the language of ‘souls’ and ‘acceptance’. Children, she argued, even very young ones, should be affirmed when they declare themselves to be the opposite sex. Blocking puberty, with its known risks to physical development, fertility, and long-term health, was framed not as an extreme intervention but as a moral imperative.

Joyce’s position was unyielding and simple: sex cannot be changed; children cannot consent to life-altering medical interventions; and the majority of children who experience gender distress will resolve it without medicalisation. It was reality versus fantasy, or so one would think.

What was chilling was not merely Webberley’s adherence to discredited talking points, but the tone in which they were delivered. Self-identification was treated as a kind of holy magic, a declaration sufficient to alter reality itself. No guidance. No watchful waiting. No adult boundary. Just affirmation, warm and unresisting, disguising a total abdication of responsibility.

It sounded like a debate, largely because these conversations have been absent from much of the BBC, Radio 4, and the left-leaning press. But the real significance lay elsewhere. Here was gender ideology exposed in full daylight: science-flouting, law-botching, and financially motivated. Helen Joyce demolished every one of Webberley’s girlishly whispered arguments.

In my hotel purgatory, wine glass in hand, I watched in disbelief. It seemed extraordinary that a set of assertions could be so thoroughly discredited, and yet Webberley could remain fervently attached to them all. Like her, supporters of gender ideology are completely unmoved by evidence. It was like, I imagine, watching David Icke debating someone like Jeremy Paxman about the existence of lizard people, and Icke remaining unaffected by proof of his lunacy. Or worse, imagining Icke cheerfully advocating medical intervention for children who believed themselves to be reptiles.

Joyce later confessed that she was shaken by the encounter with Webberley. I was not surprised. Webberley is not an aberration but an embodiment of gender ideology: impervious to evidence, unrepentant about its consequences, and incapable of stopping without intervention.

Just as getting home has become a relentless negotiation between order and chaos, so too has living as an independently thinking person. A hotel room offers only temporary refuge. The temptation is to be like the train staff: kind, weary, offering a beer, rolling one’s eyes, hoping for a better day tomorrow.

Gender ideology flouts the law. It ignores the Cass Review. And it continues to shape policy. Wes Streeting has, controversially, authorised a trial of puberty blockers, meaning hundreds more children will receive life-altering drugs they cannot consent to, rather than analysing outcomes from the thousands already subjected to this experiment at the Tavistock. It is another assault on reason, another exhausting parry by fantasy against reality.

2025 was the year this pattern became impossible to ignore. Not just the fantasy itself, but the manner of its persistence: institutional, procedural, calmly administered in defiance of evidence. Like a transport system that no longer promises arrival yet continues to sell tickets, it conditions us to lower our expectations, to accept chaos as normal, and to carry on without protest. The danger is not only that reality is under attack, but that we are being quietly trained to live without it.

Thank you for reading,

Polly x

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Forthcoming in 2026

I’m delighted that my retrospective Afterlife: New and Selected Poems is published February 26th 2026. It features selections across 25 years and four prizewinning collections, and opens with a collection of brand new poems. You can find out more, and preorder (which means a great deal to me and my publisher) by clicking the button below.

Preorder Afterlife

In May, the paperback of Ocean is published. I’m so excited to see this edition out in the world; you can preorder from Waterstones here:

Preorder paperback