2016
the year of bed bugs, stomach fetishists, voodoo dolls and prolific scams.
I was wondering why everyone was sharing photos of themselves in 2016 when I hadn’t really noticed people doing that en masse for other ten-year-anniversaries, but then I thought about it and realised 2016 was kind of monumental. I can’t really believe it’s been ten years. I just found myself googling “what was going on astrologically in 2016” and while the results were inconclusive, apparently much of the planetary shifts pointed to “a transformative, and sometimes chaotic year of change and redefining foundations.” I do feel like something shifted in 2016, maybe it was just because it was the year I turned 21, but it felt like a year in which something changed atmospherically. As has been widely discussed elsewhere1 I think one of the biggest/ weirdest things was the replacement of the chronological timeline on twitter / facebook etc with the algorithmic timeline, which quite literally altered reality. Obviously it was the year of Brexit, and Trump getting elected for the first time, both of which felt completely bewildering and shocking to me at the time, but now just feel like grim inevitabilities. At the time I was a twenty year old socialist living in a Labour safe seat area of London, in that brief optimistic period that Corbyn was still the party leader — I still had a lot of hope!
In my own life, the events of 2016 were somewhat comically deranged. My earliest memory of the year was David Bowie dying. I got up for work in the coffee shop where my shift started at 6.30am and didn’t look online. A few hours later my friend came in and told me the news, we played Bowie songs all day long (I worked twelve hour shifts at £8 an hour, seems illegal) and then I got the tube to Angel where my friend ran an open mic in a bar that sold bottles of house wine for £10 (also seems illegal.) Frosty, the open mic guy, asked me and my songwriter friend (let’s call her Vanessa) if we could play any Bowie songs for the customers. I remember playing The Prettiest Star on his little shitty stratocaster and getting paid in glasses of shit wine until I was drunk and running to get the last tube home.
In February I went to Berlin for the first time, to stay with a girl who’d reached out to me on facebook because we’d gone out with the same boy when we were teenagers. In retrospect, it was a weird thing to do. She’d sent me a lot of unsettling messages and because I had not yet honed an intuitive radar for crazy people, when she invited me to come and stay with her in Berlin, I thought, why not? I boarded a Ryanair flight and got fined for not buying a ticket on the train into the city, by a security guard who marched me off the train to an ATM when I told him I had no cash.
Immediately as I arrived the vibe was off — I didn’t know she lived with a boyfriend (let’s call him Hans) and her place for me to sleep was a couch in their bedroom. They kept wanting to talk about the teenage boyfriend I’d had five years ago, who I had barely given a moment’s thought in the interim. The main thing I remember about that boy is that he loved The Rocky Horror Picture Show. When we went for dinner the girl took me aside and said ‘I don’t want to make you uncomfortable but Hans has a stomach fetish so I would prefer if you didn’t eat in front of him because it makes me jealous when he looks at you eating.’ Naturally I was quite astonished by this revelation, and began to wonder if something terrible was about to happen to me. As I spent the night on their weird couch and listened to them talk in drunken baby voices to each other, it occurred to me that these people might be angling for a threesome, and so the next morning I pretended something urgent had come up in Prague, and went to the train station to randomly take a train to Prague where I stayed in a hostel that looked like a castle, where I seemed to be the only guest, and it snowed, so beautifully, and I went to various 1920s cafes and thought dreamily about cockroaches and Kafka. In one cafe, the waiter offered me a cigarette on a tiny silver tray when he brought me my coffee, a gesture I found incredibly chic and Jean Rhys-coded.
