Before we go on! Please consider voting for my book Skipshock at the An Post Irish Book Awards. It only takes a couple of minutes, and it will help me out more than a paid subscription might. The publishing industry is a tricky thing, where sadly awards matter, and for some reason award shows can’t just make up their own minds and now depend on the public. Thank you!!!

The other night I did a lovely event at Manningtree Arts in Essex, and someone asked me a truly fabulous question. She said something like:

Most of the things you talk about on Sentimental Garbage are over fifteen years old. What do you foresee as being the sentimental garbage of the future?

It’s a thinker! In a world where content is created and trash-compacted too fast for anything to leave a real impression, what, if anything, will be the comfort watches and guilty pleasures of tomorrow?

Sentimental Garbage sometimes gets characterised as a “guilty pleasure” podcast, and certainly that’s the most succinct way of putting it. But I think of true sentimental garbage as things that enjoyed a degree of media fuss before the culture quickly moved on. Perhaps the thing was technically “popular”, but it was not at all cool. He’s Just Not That Into You is a perfect example of this. The band Evanescence is another. These have been some of my favourite episodes on the podcast, because even though they are ubiquitous, they have also been, to a degree, forgotten. True sentimental garbage is found in the silence between fame and credibility.

Alright, on we go.

Crazy Rich Asians (2018)

When Jon M. Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians was released in 2018, the media coverage was unavoidable. The first all-Asian cast since The Joy Luck Club! This was huge! People saw it and liked it enough. Coverage of the movie was so all-encompassing that there was a swift quasi-backlash about the film’s own racial problems, as well as predictable misogynist pushback on its breakout stars. Constance Wu was branded as an ungrateful brat. Awkwafina was accused of appropriating black culture. And everyone moved on.

But what everyone missed, amid the praise for diversity followed by the critique of it for not being diverse enough, is that Crazy Rich Asians is the best romcom of the last decade. In fact, I would argue it’s the only true romcom of the last decade.

Jon M. Chu is a dazzling director, and in twenty years when starlets are plucking his movies out of the Criterion Closet, I think Crazy Rich Asians will be talked about the same way we talk about Notting Hill and Pretty Woman. A great romcom, I think, needs three things: budget, star power, and most importantly of all, it needs to be about something. You need to weave a fantasy with money, you need to ground the fantasy with Constance Wu’s warmth and Awkwafina’s side-character-of-the-century comic timing. And you need a subject. While You Were Sleeping is a kooky coma comedy, but the reason everyone loves it is because it’s a film about profound loneliness. Sandra Bullock isn’t in love with the coma guy, really: she’s in love with the family. It’s a film about living transiently, a ghost with no outlines, and then suddenly finding yourself in the heart of something. And that, ultimately, is it why While You Were Sleeping continues to run and run.

Crazy Rich Asians will run and run because it is escapist fun while also being quite seriously about class and immigration. It’s about mums. Nothing makes me laugh like this movie (“I’m so Chinese, I’m an econ professor with lactose intolerance.”) and nothing makes me cry like it either. The wedding, when Araminta dips her foot in the water! The mahjong scene! I’m crying thinking about the mahjong scene right now! I’m crying typing this! I’m going to paste Rachel Chu’s whole monologue right here so we can all cry together!

I just love Nick so much, I don’t want him to lose his mom again. So I just wanted you to know: that one day - when he marries another lucky girl who is enough for you, and you’re playing with your grandkids while the Tan Huas are blooming, and the birds are chirping - that it was because of me: a poor, raised by a single mother, low class, immigrant nobody.

Aaaaaaaa!

Ocean’s 8 (also 2018? huh)

I kind of blew my load on Crazy Rich Asians back there. But I also really like Ocean’s 8. The problem with Ocean’s 8 is that it attempted to turn a Boy Movie franchise into a Girl Movie circus prize, and it sort of failed. The Ocean’s franchise is all about the frayed edges of cheeky-chappy masculinity. It’s about sickly Vegas light and Brad Pitt eating noodles and George Clooney raising and then lowering his eyebrows. If you take any of these things away, it stops being an Ocean’s movie.

So Ocean’s 8 represents a kind of Catch-22, in that it would have been better for everyone if it was just a fun female heist film, and not part of the franchise. But at the same time, there is simply no way of funding a fun female heist film unless it sits under the Ocean name. Riddle me that!

Putting all that aside: Ocean’s 8 is just really good fun? Cate Blanchett and Sandra Bullock’s chemistry is electric, and gay enough that it’s frustrating for actual bisexuals but sort of awakening for women who think they might be. Cate Blanchett’s kebab van! Mindy Kaling’s little scene where she dismantles a necklace in a handicapped toilet! Rihanna as a “hacker”! What could be more camp than Rihanna as a “hacker”?! Also, sorry to the haters, but James Corden is brilliant in this as the insurance guy. When he said “I’ve seen a thoroughbred racehorse thrown into a tree shredder”?! I laughed so much I thought I was going to be sick.

No Hard Feelings (2023)

When No Hard Feelings came out the general response was that we had somehow all fallen into a time machine together. Jennifer Lawrence in an American Pie style sex comedy? What? What? Doesn’t she… doesn’t she have an Oscar?

No Hard Feelings is what I call a five star three star movie. It’s not trying to say anything big, and it’s not trying to say it in a big way. But what it does, it does well. It was made to be watched on a plane, or be a midweek movie on TV, or to like, be a random DVD that came with the newspaper in a cardboard sleeve. It’s the cultural equivalent of a stocking filler, but so is a Terry’s Chocolate Orange, and I love those.

I think No Hard Feelings will end up getting its flowers sooner rather than later, partly because this scene of Jennifer Lawrence lying about her age is already going viral on TikTok. But it also has a great scene of Jennifer Lawrence dump tackling someone while nude, and when I saw her dump tackling that person while nude, I felt a sense of existential release akin to when we saw those swans in the Venice canals during covid. I thought: nature is healing. A woman using her nude body for comedy? Not for trauma? Not even for sex? Wonderful.

“Easy on Me” by Adele (2021)

We all love Adele as a person but I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Adele, artistically speaking, is on the missing person’s list right now. In fact, Adele has been missing for some time. I know this because when her last album came out in 2021 I could not get a soul to come on Sentimental Garbage to talk about her. And I knocked on several doors! I reached out to people who had written pieces about Adele. All of them said the same thing: I don’t know if I could talk about her music, I’m more of a casual fan.

Adele’s audience right now is made up of casual fans. People would rather see her saying something funny on Love of Huns than singing her own music. I think that is very sad. We had a big chat about this in Manningtree on Thursday night about why this might be. The reasons, we think, are this:

• Adele was once the queen of break-up anthems but she suffered from the quite human decision to only write them when she’s genuinely heartbroken. Taylor Swift can write seven in a day, rain or shine, happy or sad. Taylor is the Walmart that has put Adele’s mom-and-pop shop out of business. (Not actually, of course. She has 56 million monthly plays on Spotify. But you know what I mean.)

• The death of singing competition shows like The X Factor has erased the functional need for Adele songs to audition with.

• The cultural fascination with irony, apathy and detachment have made Big Voice Power Ballads uncooler than ever. We currently have a generation of women who are currently talk-singing their way through heartbreak. There are exceptions – Olivia Dean! Rosalía! – but mostly, we’re talking Lily Allen mumbling “thought it was a dojo….” in order to communicate her heartbreak.

This is all throat-clearing to introduce my great thesis, which is that Go Easy On Me is one of the best break-up songs of the decade.

Remember! When this single came out, we hadn’t heard from Adele in years. She had moved to LA. She had lost weight. She had got divorced. She was a lonnnnng old way from the Tottenham queen (COYS) we all felt like we went to school with. And the first line, the first breath, we heard was–

There is no gold

In this river

That I’ve been washing my hands in, since forever

How good is that? How deeply fucking sad???? The image of Adele, our Adele, panning for gold in the river of her marriage, her hands coming up empty again and again and again. Coming up empty so many times that she’s forgotten completely about the treasure she was supposedly looking for: she’s now just washing her hands in it. Ugh! It KILLS ME!

The song is so heartbreaking, and so honest, and so fucking grown-up in its acceptance of failure, and of course it’s all delivered through one of the best voices on planet earth, and if you spend a minute with it you WILL! BE! SHAKEN!

…..but no one cares???????? This song has two billion streams on Spotify yet somehow I’ve never been able to trap anyone into having a conversation with me about it. Explain that to me?

What do you think will be the Sentimental Garbage of tomorrow? Please share!

I’m coming to the US soon to do a bunch of events, including this one in Washington DC, this sold out one at The Strand NYC, and now – breaking news – THIS one at Union Hall, on September 8th! I’m sending this email out before I put it on Instagram in the hopes that some of the Sentimental Garbage fans who missed out on the last wave of tickets at The Strand will grab these ones.

So for the love of God, please grab them!

ONCE AGAIN, THE TICKET LINK IS HERE!!!!!

Controversial opinion: I really like America, and I always have a good time there. I know Too Much has done a lot to annunciate the feelings of American girls when they’re confronted with England, but I’m not sure there’s enough out there about the reverse relationship. The collective effervescence European girls feel while visiting the United States. There’s a hyper-real feeling that comes from exploring a country that you have previously only seen in movies or read about in books, and that happens wherever you go. But because America has been so rigorously over-photographed, that specific feeling of one-ness, of I’m exactly where I need to be-ness, becomes its own form of ecstasy. It makes you want to rent a stretch limousine. It makes you feel like you’re about to get discovered, just like Lana Turner, sipping a milkshake at Schwab’s Pharmacy. And because Americans are generally pretty friendly, and because they live in a tip economy, they sort of play along, play along in the way no one in Europe plays along, because they sort of know they’re living in the dream-machine, even if the machine is out-of-service right now.

Things I am looking forward to:

getting a Jersey Mike’s punchcard and filling up the entire thing in a week

free coffee refills

talking about my book, arguably my favourite book that I’ve ever written (!!?) with the person I wrote it for, arguably one of my favourite people on the planet

a million different kinds of cream cheese

meeting Sentimental Garbage listeners and instantly feeling like a celebrity guest on Sesame Street, because of how cosy and small it makes the world feel

being called ‘ma’am’

the sheer variety of coffee ‘creamers’

the lack of awkwardness in American daily life, like yes i know awkwardness exists everywhere, but sometimes as an Irish person living in the UK i truly become so physically nauseated at the amount of people who are front-footing their ‘awkwardnesss’ like it makes them clever, like it makes them Jesse Armstrong. Give me some good old fashioned “lovely weather we’re having!”; give me some “have a nice day, now!”

the New York Public Library, again

the MoMa, again

reading the benches in Central Park

the fact that I’m staying in the same hotel that I stayed at last time and therefore I have a ‘neighbourhood’

opening the Dice app and realising some random artist I listen to all the time is playing the Bowery ballroom tonight

almost dying on a citi bike

pancakes and waffles served basically everywhere at any time of day, seriously guys you don’t know how good you have it and how rare a treat these things are in the UK???

taking an Amtrak train

eating dinner with a friend and then walking back to the hotel with no jacket on

nodding to doormen in the morning

coffee dates with people i will probably never see again

having a ‘coupla dollars’ on my person at all time

calling Gavin because I’m nervous and then hear him say ‘you’re just excited’

mexican food!!!!!

accidentally eating too strong an edible but not so strong that I prang out in Washington Square Park, like last time

crying about Ellis Island

crying about Ireland; being Irish; own role in the history of immigration

embarrassing voice note detailing the above (maybe because of the edible?)

very young things being treated as though they are very old. The idea of a ‘pre-war’ apartment being exciting. I love how young America is. England is very old and very covetous and it documents things so carefully. Ireland is very old and lots of our history is lost (to covetous England). America is a child by comparison. I’ve seen every bronze age jug in the British Museum twice over and none of it made me cry like the electrical sockets in Graceland. Ghosts and empty sockets, Paul Simon said, I’m looking at ghosts and empties. I get it Paul! Something as old as death; something as new as power. It gets you.

calling salmon ‘lox’

salt & straw ice cream

seeing dogs that look like Sylv and then doing my Sylv-voice at them, which unfortunately is a kind of high-pitched ‘girl Borat’ voice

proper fried chicken

things I’m not looking forward to:

worrying about being stopped at the airport and detained for some law that has changed while I was on the plane

any conversation about star signs, because, I’m sorry guys, Americans have gone absolutely crazy with this one lately! I understand that you’re living under precarious times but you’ve gotta give it a rest with the ‘i’m a Gemini’ stuff

do I tip this person? anxiety

needing a poo at a weird time and there being nowhere to do it. This is a general travel anxiety and nothing to do with America

fascism, etc.

This is an updated version of a post I originally made in 2021. I’ve recently had a few messages asking for advice about starting a podcast, so I decided to blow the dust off this baby and add some new material.

I’ve seen a lot of snarky comments online about how people should not start podcasts. They all have this weird tone, as if someone creating a podcast behooves everyone else to listen to it. I don’t like this sort of thing. But then again, I never understood those jokes about people who crack out an acoustic guitar at parties. At a certain point in a party, talking is boring, and it’s nice to have a little singalong? Am I insane for thinking that? Can’t we all just try a little thing?

Anyway. Podcasts. As long as you’re not going to sit your friends down and make them listen to an mp3 of you recapping episodes of The Good Wife, you are absolutely within your right to start a podcast. Having a podcast is really great, and the skills it teaches you are valuable and transferable. You learn how to record, produce and edit audio. You meet new people. You have a new way of hanging out with the old people, the people you’ve known for years. Sometimes you get money. It’s a great hobby.

Equipment

If you listen to Sentimental Garbage, you’ll know that half the episodes are recorded in studio (thank you Soho Radio!) and half of them are recorded sitting on someone’s couch, or someone’s bed, or in the basement of an Austrian ski hotel. For the remote podcasts, I use Rode Wireless Go II. I wish I could say that these are “easy” to use, because frankly they can be a bit buggy and I’ve had to watch far too many Youtube tutorials in order to use them. But. They are the easiest. The most important thing to remember is to keep them charged, and to always have them on “split” mode so that they record each mic separately.

i can feel you glazing over,

because I mentioned a Youtube tutorial, and the possibility that you might have to watch one. It is time for some Vulnerability.

I suffer from a disease that I made up called Behind The TV Stress Disorder. The lore is this: in the old days, if you wanted to plug in the DVD player or the Playstation, you had to go Behind The TV. You had to plug out one Big Cable and scramble your hand around to find another Big Cable, and the whole time your face was hot and your chest was cramped from squeezing into so small a space, you could feel a scary sense of electricity back there, and someone would be sitting on the couch saying “Nope. Nope. Still not working.”

The long-term effects of BTTSD is that being confronted with any technology more complicated than say, an iPhone, gives me the physical sensation of being trapped behind a very large Samsung television. I tell you all of this because I think many people are unknowing sufferers of BTTSD and as a result do not pursue anything with a technology aspect.

This is me telling you: if I learned how to do it, you can learn how to do it.

Editing

This same sentiment extends to editing. Editing is not hard. It’s actually kind of enjoyable, once you get the hang of it. There are one million tutorials on this subject, but let me boil all of them down to six simple steps.

1. open Garageband

2. Drag the two tracks (your recorded track, and your guest’s) into the file so that they are stacked on top of one another.

3. Listen

4. when you hear something that sounds wrong or boring, press the space bar to pause it. Drag the cursor back to where it started to sound wrong or boring.

5. Hit cmd + t. This will make a cut. Listen to the whole wrong/boring bit. Once the wrong/boring bit ends, make another cut.

6. Erase the rogue segment using the backspace key.

And that, my friends, is editing.

Podcast Jewellery

We were repainting our front door recently and were told that we needed “new door jewellery”. Door jewellery refers to the knocker, the brass numbers, the letterbox flap, basically anything that isn’t the wood. Podcast Jewellery therefore refers to anything on the podcast that isn’t two people talking. The theme music. The graphic. The stuff.

This is where knowing gifted people really comes in handy. My friend Harry Harris did the music for Sentimental, and Gavin did the artwork. My friend Hannah does the final mix once I’ve edited everything. I pay all these people, except Gavin, who is my husband and legally would get half my money in a divorce anyway. If you don’t have a Gavin or a Harry or a Hannah, I guess you could get some kind of Temu version of them on Fiverr. It’s important that you clearly communicate to Temu Gavin and Temu Harry what you want, though. When I briefed Harry back in 2018, I had noticed that a huge amount of culture podcasts had folksy, often ukulele-led theme tunes. This is not a diss. I understand why these podcasts sounded like that. It was meant to signal approachability and friendliness, but the trend had swelled to just feeling inane and silly. It felt like a good time to zag. I asked him for a shimmering, glossy, Fleetwood Mac-y vibe. I referenced Silver Linings by Rilo Kiley, and I think we actually ended up with something that feels a lot like that song!

Ok but what do I say on my podcast

My favourite thing about having a podcast is that you learn how to listen to people. Like actually listen, rather than just wait for gaps to say your pre-scripted bit that you were so certain would make you sound smart. You will realise just how many of your conversations outside of podcasting are merely pre-scripted little bits to make you sound smart. You will learn how to be more present and focused in your conversations, and you will notice the difference in how it makes people feel. People bloom when they know they’re being listened to.

And yet, with all this spontaneity and intimacy, you will still find yourself saying stock phrases. Memorised little lines of awkward chatter that you have picked up from listening to other podcasts. Everyone has a few awkward bits of chatter that they say anyway, and that’s no bad thing, but on a podcast it can sometimes halt the flow of conversation or act as a blocker for what can be really interesting, uncharted territory. These are the things you say because you’re not sure of what else to say, and sometimes you’re better off just letting that uncertainty breath than you are swooping in with a stock sentence. FYI, I’m guilty of almost all of these, and actively cringe when I hear myself saying them. That shows you how annoyingly powerful they are.

“Well, that’s something for a whole other podcast.”

What other podcast? We’re on this podcast, nerd! Everyone who’s ever hosted a podcast has rolled this one out, because it’s an easy way of steering your guest back on topic if a tangent has taken you elsewhere. It is always accompanied by an awkward little giggle, a sort of gut-based reverse-laugh that is never about humour and always about nerves.

If your tangent is interesting, let it flow on, and edit it out later if it doesn’t fit. If it’s not relevant at all, wait for a gap in conversation and say “this is really interesting, but I’m conscious of the time limit, and I’d really like to talk about X”. Edit this out later. Your guest will not have hurt feelings about this. This is producing, and good podcasts need to be produced. When I guest on a podcast, I get extremely nervous when a host is just hitting record and hoping for the best. Their lack of structure makes me think they’re not going to edit the audio later, and that I will end up sounding like an idiot because of it. It’s like ordering a gin and tonic and not getting any ice in it: you’re like, ok, this is fine, but if they’re getting this wrong, what must the bathrooms look like?

“Can you edit this out?” / “Don’t worry, we’ll edit that out.”

Well, you haven’t, have you. Because I’m listening to it. I should never be listening to unedited material, and I shouldn’t be hearing you talk about The Edit.

I understand why it’s tempting. Podcasting feels informal, and you want to keep a fun, loose, naturalistic atmosphere. Let’s keep stuff in that we said we’d edit, because it just flows better, y’knaw??

Keeping stuff in that you said you’d edit is disrespectful to the guest, for one thing. But even if the podcast is just between you and your best friend, it’s jarring for the listener to be constantly reminded of the medium they’re listening to. It’s the podcasting uncanny valley. When the hosts are constantly talking about hosting the podcast, editing the podcast, the experience of having to put out a podcast, you start getting the sense that they’re too excited, have no clue what they’re doing, and your trust that they’re going to entertain you starts to dwindle.

It’s Monty Burns losing his job, riding the bus, and then saying “I am riding on a bus.” Everyone knows it’s wrong. You saying it makes it wrong.

“You can’t see this, but…”

No shit we can’t see it! It’s an audio medium, fucker!

I understand that lots of people are recording video with their podcasts now. I hate this. It’s really tricky because you want to promote the thing on social media, and the easiest way to do that is to have a video of the words coming out of your mouth. But when a podcast starts assuming that it is a visual medium first, it totally loses me. It has stopped being an intimate chat between two clever people; it is now just a badly funded morning show.

“I’m so getting cancelled for this!”

Cancel culture has become this strange boogie man for creators that spend a lot of time online. It is everywhere and nowhere; it happens to friends of friends, but never friends. We are increasingly unsure of what it actually means, and scales anywhere from “attracting mild criticism” to “losing work for appearing to have an unpopular opinion”. We think that by talking about theoretical “cancellation” a lot, by showing we are with it enough to understand what cancel culture is, we will avoid any serious critiques of what we have to say. We want to head criticism off at the pass by telling our audience that any criticism they might have would fall under cancel culture, which would be very uncool of them.

I completely understand and empathise with the urge to do this, but it’s is a weirdly castrating thing to do to your audience, as well as jarringly egotistic. “My takes are so hot that people are dying to cancel me!” Girl, sit down, you’re hosting a Good Wife podcast.

“Uh, so, I don’t want to generalise…. and, y’know, obviously, I don’t know that much about this subject, and I’m not the person to comment, but, I think that, maybe…”

Ah, the conversational cladding that takes an interesting point and wraps it in so much bubble wrap that no one can tell what it is, and it takes seven extra minutes to unwrap.

This comes from the same place of insecurity as the above point about cancel culture. I.e., you’re so afraid that people are going to take umbrage with what you have to say that you couch it in a word salad of phrases taken from Twitter. You constantly “check your privilege” long after it’s relevant or interesting. You talk vaguely about “optics”. You refer to yourself as living in a bubble, you qualify that your evidence is “only anecdotal”. Unsurprisingly, you get a lot of female podcasters doing this. They constantly second-guess themselves, using their uncertainty as a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card for any criticism that might come later. It’s like they’re already mounting their own defence: “As you can hear on the podcast, I clearly said this was not my area of expertise, and that I was only offering my opinion as an idiot.”

Lemme tell you what I’ve learned in eight years of hosting podcasts: people have a level of forgiveness and empathy for podcast conversations that they don’t have with written material. Whereas someone might screengrab a bit of your article and share it around as evidence of you being an arsehole, nobody is transcribing your Good Wife podcast. Podcasts are like a walled garden of online conversation, and it’s where people go to hear people sort out weird and thorny issues. Let go a little bit. Take down some of that cladding and see what’s underneath.

I am not a very good texter and as a consequence I frequently hurt people’s feelings. It’s terrible. “I used to think you hated me,” is something I’ve heard more than once. Sometimes the subtext is but now I realise you just don’t like texting, and sometimes the subtext is occasionally, I think you hate me still.

I don’t need to explain why I’m bad at texting. Every Bad Texter’s reasons are the same. It’s not so much about not having enough time, but about being so overwhelmed by the volume of communication radiating from your phone that it becomes the Mr Burns disease door from The Simpsons. So many things are trying to push through at once that nothing at all gets addressed.

I don’t think my brain is advanced enough to form a hierarchy between an email from my agent, a text from my mum, a DM from a stranger and seven thousand requests to leave a five star review for every product or service I have ever enjoyed. I also don’t think I have ADHD or anything. I just think expectations have become unreasonable. “I am normal!” I just yelled at Ella, normally. “THIS is the thing that is not normal!”

You agree with me. I know you agree with me! You feel it, too! You hate it, as well! And yet, in three months, we will be sitting opposite one another in Polpo and you will say: I thought you were mad at me, there. Then, a month later, someone will say to you, in a different Polpo: I thought you hated me, for a while. At some point in the next 12 months I will also wonder if I am despised by someone, then bring it up with them at dinner. Everyone will be horrified. We will all put our hands to our chests, genuinely devastated to have caused psychic stress for our friend. We will each resolve to do better.

The thing is, I don’t really want to do better. I’m bad at texting and I don’t want to be good at it. I hate my phone, and so do you. I feel vulgar and sick when I spend too much time on it, and inevitably, texting takes time. But equally, I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, particularly the feelings of people I genuinely care about.

This shouldn’t be a problem, and yet it is.

Because while everyone I know is trying to cut down on their screen time – buying lockboxes, downloading specialty apps, leaving their phone in other rooms while they sleep or read a book – nobody wants to be left on read. And when we’re left on read, it feels very close to being thrown out of the nest. We fail to text others back and we see it as morally neutral behaviour; but when others do the same to us, it creates sincere panic.

We have all learned, for whatever reason, that communication equals intimacy. Even though some of my closest friendships operate on a one-text-chat-a-month basis (and usually, to figure out when we’re next hanging out) we still believe that messages are the greatest proof of our love. The greater the volume of communication, the more intimate two people must be. Which is true, to an extent. Even as a self-described Bad Texter, I still have three or four people who hear from me most days. I’d wager the same is true for you, even if you are also a Bad Texter.

So communication = intimacy, or at least it’s a sign of it. So therefore no communication = no intimacy? That seems to be the conclusion we’re all drawing, alone with our phones. No intimacy = you hate me/we’re in a fight?

Your Bad Texter friend leaves you on read. You look online and your Bad Texter friend doesn’t look sick or busy. They’re at a restaurant with some other friend. They’re posting their White Lotus takes. They’re posting, using their phone, the very same phone you used to ask them what they were doing for lunch on May 10th, and they’re choosing not to reply. The only answer the data can show us is that they hate you, and you’re in a fight.

I’m sticking up for the Bad Texters here, even though I know our behaviour is in many ways inexcusable. Just tell me if you’re free on May 10th you dumb slut!

The only thing I can say in our defence is that (assuming my psychology is the same as most other Bad Texters) to me, posting online is like squeezing a spot, or throwing up a flare from a desert island. I don’t really want to have a conversation. It’s the tension release that comes from reconfirming your own physical existence, which is weird, because you’re doing it in a digital way. It’s a strange combination of I exist! but also no one fucking talk to me, ok!, and I don’t really understand it except it’s how I’ve been behaving for 20 years and therefore must be authentic to something.

I can’t fully explain the paradoxes of a Bad Texter but what I can tell you is that we are not in a fight. Unless you’re mad at me, about the texting thing, which sucks because I predict there will be little change on that front. But let’s not think about those right now. I’m more interested in this idea of expectation.

There was an idea, in the 1950s, that the boom in home electronics like vacuum cleaners would result in more free time for women. That didn’t happen. What happened instead was that the standard of cleanliness kept rising. Previously, floors were supposed to be swept of crumbs and dirt; now they were supposed to shine. I’d argue that something similar is happening with text communication and our intimate lives. In a previous era, letters and phone calls were what sustained a relationship, with the understanding that both these things were expensive and time consuming. On some level, we simply had to believe that our friend kept on loving us even if we didn’t hear from them.

I spoke to my friend Ella about this just now, who is researching this exact topic for her forthcoming book In Love With Love. She was trying to figure out why so many romance novels are epistolary: why the early ones are filled with letters, the later ones filled with texts and emails between characters. Her conclusion, more or less, was that texts are important within love stories because love is so intangible, and so hard to find proof of after morning has broken and kisses have faded. You want to point to something, after the person has gone away: See, right there. They love me. I can see it because they wrote it down.

But the boom in chatting technology has also created a boom in social expectation. We have to keep on writing it down, forever. And with that expectation, we may have lost a measure of good faith toward one another. We have lost the promise that our friendships flower in some seasons and sleep in others. Instead, there’s this feeling that our relationships are like financial stock, constantly spiking and dropping, and that one person will cash out on if they don’t see a proper return.

What’s interesting to me is that this anxiety runs parallel to the anxiety that we’re on our phones too much. It seems impossible to me that we could succeed at both. Or that we could succeed at both and still be actually good friends to our friends.

I’m not running for Friend of the Year or whatever, but what I will say about myself is that when I’m on a hang, I’m 100% focused on the hang. I am a good listener! I will remember everything we talked about it and I will follow up with you about it later. I am not checking my phone during the movie. I am not taking annoying videos during the gig, because we both know what the gig is for, which is to hold hands and cry. And these things are only possible when/if my focus is healthy and my anxiety is low. These things are only possible when you are not fucking addicted to your phone. Our phone usage cannot be dictated by our most phone-addicted friend, in the same way our nights out can’t be dictated by our most substance-addicted friend.

The conclusion here is not that I become a better texter, but that we all become worse texters, together. I can actually handle an exponentially raising beauty standard, because I am a big girl and I know when to block a botox clinic on Instagram. But what I cannot handle is the communication standard, and the constant low level concern that I am hurting peoples feelings. Maybe I shouldn’t care so much about this; maybe that’s what 2014’s ‘ban bossy’ campaign was all about.

And while I’m here: are we in a fight?

Note: Gavin and I have only just started watching this season so please keep the comments free of spoilers if you can

If I were on The Traitors I would die almost instantly as a Claudia-ordained Traitor but I would make it remarkably far as a Faithful-turned-Traitor. I would be so dead wrong about some poor lad from the beginning and I would write his stupid name down every single evening.

Night 1: “Look. I’ve said it to you in person, and it’s nothing personal, I just have nothing else to go on, and I need to trust my gut. Michael.”

Michael <3 x

Night 2: “Listen – I wasn’t convinced last night. I still just feel… I’m sorry. Michael, I’ve written your name down again.”

Michael x

Night 3: “On the challenge today you said to me and Lisa that, if you won the prize money, you’d use it to buy a camper van and tour the vineyards of France. And I just thought. That was a bit sus. You know? Like, why a camper van? Why do you need to be on the road? What are you running from? Anyway. I’ve written Michael.”

Michael

Night 4: “No surprises from me tonight. Michael.”

Michael >:-(

Night 5: “I have a strategy, and I’m sticking to it.”

(An exhausted sigh from the whole room)

Michael!

Michael is, of course, a Faithful, and the reason I am kept around so long by the Traitors is because I am so relentless in my witch hunt that there is really no reason to get rid of me. I’m surprised that more contestants don’t employ this strategy. Pick someone who is obviously a Faithful! Keep the Traitors off your back!

We’ve seen this kind of thing before. I remember some blonde girl on season one who was an absolute Javert for her Michael. Her downfall, from what I can recall, is that she correctly deduced that her Michael was a Traitor, and so she was eventually murdered.

By night six, a Traitor has been banished and I have been rewarded for my dogged pursuit of Michael by being summoned to the Traitors to join them. During my first Traitors meeting, I am very clear in my aims.

Me: “I think we should murder Michael.”

Traitor: “Right. But don’t you understand, if we murder Michael now, it will be quite clear that you’re the new Traitor, because you’ve been so clear about your feelings about Michael from the beginning.”

Me: “Fair enough. Perhaps we could murder a friend of Michael’s. Weaken his defences. Who is close with Michael?”

Traitor 2 (Linda): “Michael is my son.”

Me: “Wow.”

I am silent for the rest of the Traitors meeting.

At the next banishment I am still banging my drum about Michael (for consistency) and when people get fed up with me I reveal that Linda is Michael’s mother. She told me this! In strictest confidence! But I am sharing it now, because I don’t think real Faithfuls keep secrets of that magnitude. This only succeeds in getting Linda banished. This improves my standing in the group (I correctly outed Linda) but diminishes my quest against Michael (because they wouldn’t make mother and son both Traitors, would they?)

Several times Michael comes to me in an attempt to ‘clear the air’, but I’m not having it. Eventually Claudia is forced to take me aside.

Claudia: “Can I ask. Do you know Michael, or something? Is there a reason you have a… specific problem with him?”

Me: “I don’t have a problem with Michael.”

Next banishment meeting: Michael.

Eventually it is just me and Michael and some other poor fuck. Michael makes a tearful speech about how he is a Faithful, 100%, 110% even, and how he has felt attacked and intimidated by me from the beginning, and he doesn’t like how I play the game, and he’s sure I’m a lovely person in my real life, but as far as he’s concerned I seem to be a complete and total bitch.

He succeeds in turning the other poor fuck against me. I stand at the top of the room and I tell them both that I love them, and I consider them both my best friends, and incredible people besides. But that I am a Traitor. Michael and the other one rejoice and split the money. My footsteps echo through the now-empty castle.

“I did what I came here to do,” I tell Claudia, who fears me.

“Yes, and what was that, exactly?”

Our Traitors Whatsapp group, in the months and years after our season takes place, is a busy, joyful, vibrant place, where I am always sure to wish Michael a happy birthday.