As we head into Festival Season, so many amazing contributors will be joining the magazine to help us cover what will no doubt be a stacked year of independent cinema. As I move into a more Editorial Role at the magazine, and move away from culture commentary on TikTok, pieces like this will become more common. I hope you enjoy - read at your own risk.
My summers are often the same – I have some kind of dead-end job, I'm stuck somewhere I don't want to be, or I'm starting something new. Somewhere around June, I meet someone I like. I then proceed to ignore them and spend all summer waiting to feel nothing again. All my best songs are written, the entire summer is cast over in blue. The world spins, and I watch it. Then September hits, and I become myself again. As I approached 30, and watched in horror as Trump finally started the war the USA has been threatening my entire lifetime, I knew that if I didn't change anything, nothing would change, and maybe soon, it would be too late.
The UK is now in a drought of our own making, as we find it harder and harder to connect online over the din of algorithmic noise. If there was anything to do about it, it would be hard to do because it would be hard to organise. The more people realise this, the more communities are built, and the surge of the Greens in the last year has been proof of this.
Despite all this hopelessness, hopefulness and action, I have not been immune to apocalyptic thinking this year – I came out of a really bad sickness in March – in my recovery, I swore to myself I wouldn't overwork, only to find myself directing a short film by June. My only light at the end of the tunnel was this concept of Summer 2026 - I was going to leave the house more, do less, break the cycle, and let the universe catch me.
In a lot of ways, it did – I am lucky enough to have the best friends anyone in this entire city could ask for, and have been out of the house far more than I ever had been. I've recalibrated my risk tolerance – in some ways it's higher, and in some, lower – and the world has opened up to me. I've had fun.
But I've known, the entire time, that the reason I was doing this was because we were likely to end up somewhere much darker than before – COVID was (as a financial event) and is (as an ongoing pandemic) bad enough, but what is about to happen with the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz is something we in the modern world have never had to endure. Tie that with climate change, and we're not heading anywhere better in the short-term.
This is the pessimism I spent so much of my online career trying to combat. I don't want it to feel like the end of the world, because then we'll do nothing to stop it.
However, reader, living like it's the end times has its benefits, for real. You flirt more, you wear less, you say yes to everything, you let yourself imagine the concept of falling in love (even if you're not quite ready to be the kind of person that is), you go on adventures you wouldn't have allowed yourself to take, and the world worth living for, the world worth saving, presents itself to you. Suddenly, you see yourself in the world instead of watching it.
I've said I'll keep this going when the summer ends, but I know myself, and I know when the sun goes, I tend to go with it, and I will become myself again - the one I was in June, before kickoff. The world is just as fucked as before, but now, I feel like I have enough petrol in the tank to last the winter fight. At least this summer, I changed something, even if nothing changed.
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