For your stray attention

Books & essays to illuminate this dismal moment

Begin or renew an annual subscription in March, and you’ll be automatically entered into a prize draw to win a lovely box of goodies, including a copy of our our group read, a signed copy of Enchantment, some of my writing essentials (a refillable ink pen, a bottle of ink, a Rhodia notebook, Blackwing pencils), and the new, glorious Clearing stickers and bookmarks • I’m making a couple of live appearances in London in March: Sunday Papers Live in Clerkenwell this Sunday, and One Track Minds on March 10th at Wilton’s Music Hall.

---

Hello,

I began this week with a tangle of grief in my head. First of all: more war, more bloodshed, more civilians killed, more young soldiers sent to their doom and disablement. It is endlessly horrifying and yet violence seems to have some kind of gravitational pull on the human psyche. I realise that people will be lining up to say I’m naive to put it in such simple terms, but I am very happy to be naive. This is just another link in a chain of suffering that stretches back to the beginning of time, and I believe that it’s possible to break it. We just have to stop thinking that brute force is any kind of truth.

But some of my grief is more personal too. On Monday, I attended the funeral of a beloved old friend and colleague, Rachel Fairhead, aka Missy F, the greatest History teacher-stroke-Missy Elliot impersonator who ever was. In my few short years of being a classroom teacher, she was a delightful, devilish, huge-hearted guiding light, and I would give pretty much anything to spend one more afternoon in the pub with her, putting the world to rights. Damn, she deserved a third act. I can only hope she’s taking ill-advised moped rides and sternly waggling her walking stick in the afterlife.

SIGH. Let’s go looking for some illumination, shall we?