In search of the holy grail

Submitting one’s work to literary agents is enough to turn a person into an emotional Janus – looking forwards to the promise of publication while at the same time looking back at the growing heap of rejection emails. It can be exhausting: one minute feeling elated because of a request for one’s full manuscript and the next utterly dejected at the thought that it, too, is bound to be rejected. Why do we do it to ourselves? It’s not as if writers are particularly thick skinned. And I personally have an eversion to gambling in all its forms and yet isn’t that exactly what I’m involved in here? The rewards can be great but the odds are painfully, negatively stacked. And, yet, I keep trying.

Hey ho. I remind myself that there is more to my life than an illusive promise and this is wonderfully affirmed by the visit of one of my oldest UK friends and her husband. Having not met up for nearly two years, we seamlessly pick up where we last left off and spend the whole visit talking and laughing – rare for me, who can be completely talked out within an hour. With old friends, it’s all so effortless. Their visit happens to coincide with my birthday and Adrian books a meal at our favourite pub. At the end of the meal, three waiters appear at our table with a birthday pudding and candle and sing to me. In harmony. It rounds off the evening perfectly. 

Kate is spending the weekend in Jutland and sends gorgeous photos of the night sky over the fjord by which she’s camping. She now has her Danish residency so we’ll soon have a request to ship her possessions across the channel. We realise, with a little shock, that she means to live there. Alex and friends are putting on a joint 40th birthday music festival in rural Hampshire and he sends photos of the setting up – lots of hay bails, marquees and beer kegs. It’s a far cry from my own 40th birthday with young children and a degree to get through. I’m glad that my children are doing things in the right order or not at all – university in their late teens and no offspring. 

It’s a lovely bright day, so I’m closing up my Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook and joining Adrian on a tramp to Birling Gap. I love the Downs, the wide openness of them with the sea beyond reaching to the horizon; the constant promise of something new and different. An antidote. There’s so much I hate about the world right now, the way in which progressive creative thought is being gradually closed down, the way that humanness is being distilled into a battle for power and money, while blind eyes are turned to injustice and suffering, corruption and sheer bloody nastiness. Yes, I know it was always thus, but the means to achieve it, to spread it world wide, to make it seem normal, is now so much greater than it ever was before. 

Recently we listened to a documentary by Jill Lepore about the Simulmatics Corporation. No, I’d never heard of them either. But their story is both fascinating and creepy. Founded in 1959, Simulmatics was at the forefront of the new computer era, crunching social data to conduct large scale behaviour analysis. By feeding in a number of human variables, they could predict future behaviour, including consumer and political behaviour, and you don’t have to be a genius to work out that once you can predict behaviour, it’s a short step to influencing it and this exactly what they did. Simulmatics claimed that they were instrumental in John F Kennedy winning the Presidency in the 1960 election. Jill Lepore claims that they were also largely responsible for prolonging the Vietnam war. This is where social influencing began. Where the genie got out of the bottle and never went back.

If you’re interested, you can hear about it on BBC Sounds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002cb38

And so to the antidote: the Downs, the sea and the blue sky (and not a little wind) and the soothing rhythm of putting one foot in front of the other. Walking the Seven Sisters can feel like being on the brink of something and I want to believe that the something is positive; the sort of something that will bring surprise and delight and relief. Take away the bad stuff and save humanity from the jaws of self-destructive populism.

The trouble is, when I look around the world right now, I can’t think where on earth it’s going to come from.