The Bluestocking: vol 276

You say yes, and you never do it

Happy Friday!

Recently, my very talented colleague Elaine Godfrey asked for advice on turning 30, which a) suggests that she is in her 20s, horrifying; b) gave me a chance to offer my agèd perspective:

My advice from the other end of the decade: Start saying “no” to more things. Re-read the books you loved as a teenager. Visit Japan. Tell your parents what they mean to you. Throw out any clothes which require specialist underwear. Stop drinking. Look after your knees.

I’m obsessed with saying No. Or rather, my inability to do so. About a decade ago, when I first started getting asked to do punditry and panels and all that jazz, I found it absolutely excruciating to turn opportunities down, because I worried that they wouldn’t come around again. What I needed was someone to beat me around the head with the concept of an opportunity cost—every single thing you do means you don’t do something else.

Probably the biggest lesson of my 30s has been to (partly) internalise that. Recently, I was talking to someone off the telly. I asked him what he planned to do over the summer. “Nothing,” he said. “I think that one measure of success is not working.”

I know that journalism is a very weird occupation in many ways, but I think it does share with other jobs the fact that it’s easy to be consumed with doing stuff for the sake of doing stuff. (If I don’t tweet, how will people know I’m still alive?) But being in broadcast mode all the time means you have to rely on what you already know; there’s no space to think, or read, or reflect, or change your mind.

So that’s my biggest recommendation to anyone, whatever their age: consider saying “no” more.

Helen

---

Gareth Southgate

Can The Left Make Peace With A National Flag? (The Atlantic)

For an audience in London, Dear England doesn’t need to show what came next. Almost the whole country knows, including those who aren’t sports fans or hadn’t even been born at the time. England’s goalkeeper, David Seaman, wearing one of the worst shirts ever designed—he looks like a children’s-party entertainer—can’t get a glove to the German team’s next penalty kick. That makes it 6–5 Germany, which goes on to the final and ultimately wins the trophy. Gareth Southgate, meanwhile, goes home with the weight of an entire country’s disappointment upon him. That winter, he makes a pizza ad where the joke is that he has to wear a paper bag on his head in public.

[…]

Southgate understands that the power of sport is the power of story—the redemption arc, the last-minute comeback, the underdog triumph, the grudge paid back. He understands that soccer gives people values around which everyone can coalesce, regardless of their political beliefs: hard work, sacrifice, humility, courage. James Graham, the playwright behind Dear England, understands that too. Much of his work for the past decade has been focused on the country’s shifting identity, whether among former mining communities in the BBC drama Sherwood or within the emerging Thatcherite working class depicted in the hit play Ink. Graham is now the closest thing England has to a national playwright. You can probably imagine the demographics of an audience at a subsidized theater performance in London—whiter, richer, and more liberal than the country overall. Yet by the end of Dear England, the crowd was on its feet, shouting along to the unofficial anthem of the Southgate era, Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline.” (Well, except for the former BBC journalist sitting next to me, who fled after the first half, perhaps finding it all a little too populist.)

I watched Dear England, currently on at the National Theatre in London, and had some thoughts about patriotism—which I then discussed with Ayesha Hazarika and Sam Freedman on their podcast The Power Test, alongside Sunder Katwala and Catherine Mayer.

PS. I enjoyed doing The Power Test, and I think the episode was good, but I kind of wish I had said No to it—there was some internal resistance to booking me, because of my Extremely Normie views on gender. Thankfully, the production team stuck to their guns. My policy going forward on this topic is not to put myself through any hassle like this because I have enough outlets on which to air my views without volunteering for extra grief. (Podcast appearances are one of the things to which I will be saying “no” more in future . . .)

---

Quick Links

1. “‘One thing that it might be helpful for your client to know in all of this … obviously, we’re working very closely with the Americans on all of this, and the three-letter-agencies [shorthand for the FBI/CIA/NSA etc.], and we’ve got a lot of information at our disposal,’ he recalled the officer saying. ‘And given all of that, we thought your client should know that we know ‘James Ball’ doesn’t exist’.” Hmm. I’ve known James for more than a decade, so it was a surprise to discover that the Feds don’t believe he is real. They’re now pressuring him and other journalists to give evidence against Julian Assange (Rolling Stone).

2. Important Barry Gardiner update.

3. This Ben Taub longread makes me surprised that nothing went wrong with the Titan submersible before. What a mad operation (New Yorker).

4. Mel Brooks’s advice on dealing with studio execs is equally relevant to other professions: “You say yes, and you never do it” (twitter).

5. On a related note, this conversation between Brooks and Judd Apatow is delightful, covering Brooks’s WWII service, Lenny Bruce’s jokes and why he loves Gogol (The Atlantic).

6. Completely insane photo of Carla Bruni and her parents. Those frisky continentals, eh? (Helmut Newton archive).

7. How have I never seen this clip of Trump being told about the death of Queen Elizabeth II before? It’s the Tiny Dancer playing in the background that makes it, along with “whether you agree with her or not” (twitter).

8. If you’re worried you might be asked to have an opinion on America overturning affirmative action, here is a good pro piece (Freddie deBoer, Substack) and a good anti one (Ibram X Kendi, Atlantic)

9. ‘Really early on, I would deliver a script to a producer, and they’d go, “This is a bit —” and I’d go: “I know! I hate it! This is what I really want to write!” And I’d have another script: the naughty-hand script. I’d be like, “I meant to do that.” And they’d be like, “This one’s really good!” It was like I had to get the one that I thought people wanted out of my system and then be like: “Suckers! Here’s a much better one!”’ Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s writing advice (New York Times).

10. BTW, I totally see what Waller-Bridge means. I once told Caroline Criado Perez my ultimate writing secret: the VOMIT DRAFT. Sometimes you have to write the bad version of something to exorcise it before you can write the good one.

See you next time!