June reviews and views
Marseille, a revealing interview with the 'Gen Z Bridget Jones', and all the books I read on holiday
Like the first few days of a foreign holiday, I am all bunged up and dying for release. June was a strange month. At the moment, the tectonic plates of my life are shifting but whatever new land mass they form has yet to become discernible. If I were a novelist writing in the 1950s, I would describe my current state of mind as queer but that now means something very different. I keep getting urges to chop off all my hair though and pierce something, so perhaps there is a through-line.
As part of this shift, I’m slowly trying (again) to wean myself off various bits of social media. TikTok and my Twitter burner have been deleted for a few weeks now and so far I haven’t missed them. My Substack timeline is set to ‘Following only’ so I don’t get sucked back into Twitter lite by people writing short, sometimes funny things to avoid writing long, sometimes funny things (I know the game!).
Instagram is harder because of work, which is unfortunate as it is basically a portal straight to a bespoke hell. The answer to this is creating a career that isn’t dependent on social media as a distribution platform, so that’s what I’m in the process of trying to build. Long-term infrastructure.
In the meantime, I’ve been using the app Minimalist Phone, which has massively helped; in the last seven days I spent a total of 1h3m on Instagram, thanks to a little buffer that asks me ‘do you really want to open this?’ when I mindlessly click on the icon, then makes me wait for two minutes after that before I can access it. The majority of the time, the answer is ‘no’.
It’s taken me 10 years to get to this point, where I’m so sick and tired of living life mediated through feeds and notification pings, I have undergone the same defeated surrender as any other addict. I’ve attempted to kick my problem before and I will do it again until it sticks. I am sick for my phone. If I want to exist differently, it necessitates acceptance I will have to drastically change the structure of my life and work. More on that soon.
I suppose that’s my opening salvo in today’s bumper June reviews and views. I’ve got lots of them this month, perhaps an indicator that signs of life are returning to the polluted swamp of my mind as the clean-up operation commences. More likely, not posting every waking thought causes congestion, but in a good way. Anyway, let’s start with the opinions. First up: France.
Marseille
Marseille, or ‘Berlin with black people’ as I’ve come to think of it, has been the buzzy coastal destination for the young and trendy for a good while now. In previous years, I avoided it, as everyone I knew seemed to either be decamping there for summer, or on their way back. But that first wave of visitors has receded. So as everyone in south London trundled off to Paris for Fête de la Musique, I decided to make Marseille the second Big Stop on my week-long French holiday at the end of June (you can read about my sojourn in Nice here).
Marseille’s food scene is probably unparalleled in that corner of France, although as I was adhering to Backpacker Mentality™️, I didn’t eat out much. Everything was enormously tempting, especially in the city centre area I was staying, which was dominated by North African and Middle Eastern migrant cuisine. I caved on my final day, broken by a lunchtime half baguette from Pain à l’Ail, dripping with thick gravy from the Provençal daube (beef stew) filling and followed by vanille noire ice-cream (vanilla, but briny and black in colour, in case your French is non-existent), at the eponymous dessert parlour.
My first evening in Marseille (deliberately) coincided with Fête de la Musique and I finally experienced the festival as God — or Jack Lang, the minister for culture who founded the celebration — intended: on streets wide enough to actually move around and dance in. Tiny central Paris, with its cramped and narrow alleys, is hell to navigate in standard tourist season, let alone during a street musical festival. Marseille’s expansive avenues however, are a dream. I spent five or so hours pinging around Cours Julien, the bit of Marseille that has street art, cheap Latin American food and is described as ‘vibrant’ and ‘bohemian’ in online travel guides. Within the first square alone, I danced to baile, Afrobeats, rock and gabber. Also, Paris is so posey. Marseille doesn’t have the same miasma of clout, not yet anyway.
Maybe it was the relief of being able to move, maybe it was the two extremely potent Cuba Libres I consumed but for the first time in months, I felt the stress of trying to engineer a Good Experience leave me and was just able to melt into the moment, chatting away in Franglish to the various lovely people I encountered and darting from square to square. Drenched in sweat, I sent multiple, increasingly enthused messages to friends back home, like I was being paid by the minute by Marseille’s tourist board. ‘YOU HAVE TO COME NEXT YEAR!!!!! THIS DICKS ON PARIS!!!!’. An uncomplicatedly brilliant time.
Other Marseille snippets: I spent several of my remaining days trying to escape the city proper, which was not the fault of Marseille but says a lot about where my mind currently is, although the heatwave that gripped France might well have had an impact. Although I had intended to hike one of the calanques (a series of dramatic limestone cliffs and coves, designated as a national park), soaring temperatures made me jettison that plan. The day after Fête de la Musique, I headed instead for a town called La Ciotat, picked at random because it was one stop on from beautiful Cassis which is apparently where most tourists end up. I was longing for as much quiet as possible without being able to drive myself into the middle of nowhere, so pitched up at La Ciotat’s train station. It’s a 20 minute bus ride from there to the actual town and in a stroke of luck, it turned out the last stop on the bus route was a short walk from Calanque de Mugel.
So I got my cove after all, along with a bonus botanical garden, which I strolled in the early evening glow, after packing up from my afternoon sunbathing and swimming. There were signs pointing visitors up paths to something called ‘Belvedere’ — with 40 minutes until the bus back to the station, I decided to follow them and discovered Belvedere is a panoramic viewpoint, flanked by towering ruddy cliffs that resemble giant anthills. Allowing myself the space to stumble upon things is a real revelation.
Holiday reading
I binged 10 books while away, after months of not having the time or ability to sit down and focus. They ranged from A list titles, like Trust, the Hernan Diaz book Dua Lipa and her husband claim brought them together (a good yarn! Far more soapy than I imagined from a Pulitzer winner), to ones recommended by friends and ones pulled totally at random from my Kindle’s ‘read this’ homepage. I’m suggestible!
Rather than review the likes of Say Nothing1, which everyone and their mother has read or watched at this point, I’m going to focus on releases with slightly less profile, bar one I adored so much I can’t help but talk about it.
