Beautiful World, Where Are You(87)

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Hello – I have attached a draft of the essay with notes below. It’s reading really nicely the way it is, but I wonder what you think about the idea of switching the two middle sections? So the biographical part would come later on. Have a look and see how you feel. Did JP ever get back to you with his notes? I suspect he would be much more useful than I am!

I have so completely lost any sense of linear time that I was lying in bed last night thinking: it must be nearly a year now since the first time Eileen and Simon were here.

And only very gradually – as I became conscious that I was lying under our big warm duvet rather than the light summer blanket – did I remember that it is now almost December, eighteen months since that first visit last summer. Eighteen months!! Is this how it’s going to be for the rest of our lives? Time dissolving into thick dark fog, things that happened last week seeming years ago, and things that happened last year feeling like yesterday. I hope this is a side effect of lockdown and not simply a consequence of growing older. Speaking of which: happy belated. I did put a gift in the post on time, but have no idea when or whether it will arrive . . .

No news on our end. Felix is as well as can be expected. He continues to experience periodic episodes of despair about the pandemic, and to hint darkly that if the situation continues much longer he won’t be responsible for his actions. But he usually cheers up again afterwards. In the meantime he has been doing the grocery shopping for several elderly people in the village, which gives him lots of opportunities to complain about elderly people, and he also spends quite a bit of time down at the community garden, making compost, complaining about making compost, and so on. For my part, the

difference between lockdown and normal life is (depressingly?) minimal. Eighty to ninety per cent of my days are the same as they would be anyway – working from home, reading, avoiding social gatherings. But then it turns out that even a tiny amount of socialising is very different from none – I mean, one dinner party every two weeks is categorically different from no parties at all. And of course I continue to miss you passionately, and your boyfriend too. Seeing him on the news the other night was the thrill of our lives, by the way. Felix is convinced the dog recognised him, because she barked at the screen, but between you and me she barks at the television all the time.

I don’t know if you’ve been following any of this, but about a month ago I was doing an interview over email and the journalist asked me what my partner thought of my books.

Unthinkingly, I wrote back that he had never read them. So of course this became the headline of the interview – ‘Alice Kelleher: my boyfriend has never read my books’ –

and afterwards Felix saw a popular tweet saying something like, ‘this is tragic . . . she deserves better’. He showed me the tweet on the screen of his phone one evening without saying anything, and when I asked him what he thought about it, he just shrugged. At first I thought: a perfect example of our shallow self-congratulatory ‘book culture’, in which non-readers are shunned as morally and intellectually inferior, and the more books you read, the smarter and better you are than everyone else. But then I thought: no, what we really have here is an example of a presumably normal and sane person whose thinking has been deranged by the concept of celebrity. An example of someone who genuinely believes that because she has seen my photograph and read my novels, she knows me personally – and in fact knows better than I do what is best for my life. And it’s normal! It’s normal for her not only to think these bizarre thoughts privately, but to express them in public, and receive positive feedback and attention as a

result. She has no idea that she is, in this small limited respect, quite literally insane, because everyone around her is also insane in exactly the same way. They really cannot tell the difference between someone they have heard of, and someone they personally know. And they believe that the feelings they have about this person they imagine me to be – intimacy, resentment, hatred, pity – are as real as the feelings they have about their own friends. It makes me wonder whether celebrity culture has sort of metastasised to fill the emptiness left by religion. A sort of malignant growth where the sacred used to be.

In other news that isn’t news, the saga of my poor health continues as before. With one thing and another I am in pain almost every day now. In my better moods, I tell myself this is just a consequence of all the accumulated stress and exhaustion of the last few years, and it will resolve itself with time and patience. And in my worse moods I think: this is it, this is my life. I have been reading a lot about ‘stress’ in the medical literature.

Everyone seems to agree it is about as bad for your health as smoking, and beyond a certain point practically guarantees a major adverse health outcome. And yet the only recommended treatment for stress is not to experience it in the first place. It’s not like anxiety or depression, where you can go to your doctor and get treated and hopefully experience some degree of symptomatic improvement. It’s like taking illegal drugs –

you’re just not supposed to do it, and if you do, you should try to do it less. There is no available medication to treat the problem, and no therapeutic regime backed by any real evidence. Just don’t get stressed! It’s very important, or you could make yourself really sick!! Anyway, from an aetiological standpoint I feel like I’ve been locked in a smoke-filled room with thousands of people shouting at me incomprehensibly day and night for the last several years. And I don’t know when it will end, or how long it will take