David Cameron, Downing Street, 24 July 2016

The day after the EU referendum, at a podium in Downing Street, David Cameron described a near 50:50 vote as ‘the will of the people’ to leave the EU about which ‘there can be no doubt’. This instantly created momentum for leaving, without debate or discussion, without any chance to consider whether it was too narrow a victory to be a meaningful mandate. And then he announced his resignation and fucked off. How might it have been different? I’ve written an alternative speech for him and if one of you could hurry up and invent time travel we can get it on his desk. I wonder if this might have changed the absurd narrative in which we’ve been living for the past 2½ years?

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Good morning.

This is has been an historic day for our country. Following a debate that has been marked by passion but also by tragedy, the British people in record numbers have voted to declare to us, their elected representatives, whether or not they wish to remain in the European Union.

The result is perhaps the worst of all possible worlds. A little over half of those who voted believe we should leave. A less less than half believe we should remain. The view presented to parliament is that there are strong views on either side, but no consensus has been settled, no direction has been given. We are, on this most divisive of all issues, a divided people.

I had hoped to convince the British people that we stand to gain more by participating fully in the union of European peoples than by going it alone. My colleagues in the cabinet and elsewhere sought to argue that Britain’s future lay as an independent nation. Neither side has fully convinced the British people. Neither side has a mandate for action.

The referendum – as voted for overwhelmingly by Members of Parliament – was advisory, and what advice has Parliament been given?

I believe we have been been advised that this is a country, torn down the middle. It is obvious in areas of great wealth, the merits of EU membership seem self-evident. It is clear that in areas of greatest poverty the merits of EU membership are obscure. 

I believe we have been advised, throughout the campaign, that this is a country in which anger and fear, in too many communities, are bubbling to the surface.

I believe we have been advised that the matter of our own Union is far from settled. Let no one deny the lesson we have been taught by our friends in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

I take full responsibility for much of this. My government, over the last six years, has tried honourably to bring the country’s finances under control, but the burden of these policies have been felt too often by those who could least bear the weight. 

I think it is also clear that the European Union must make an account of itself more clearly, open some of its darker processes, actively seek the engagement of British citizens in its benefits, and listen to the message of this vote.

For that reason, I believe the first thing that must be done is for this Government to go back to Brussels and campaign for a comprehensive reform of the EU’s systems, its transparency, its lawmaking, the language in which it speaks.

But, more important than that, I believe this Government must change course. Far more important than our divisions over EU membership are our divisions from each other.

We are divided by geography and we are divided by class. We are divided by nation and by generation. We are divided by race and we are divided by how we love.

It is not enough for politicians to talk of a country uniting. We must prepare a ground on which people can walk together. We must tear down the walls, seen and unseen, that stop mother from embracing her son, neighbour shake hands with neighbour, enemy listen hard to enemy.

Make no mistake – and I want the markets to hear this – I want there to be no doubt about what I am about to say – this will entail a massive flow of money, education, culture, and resources from the South to the North, from rich to poor, from the glass and steel steeples of the City of London to the former dockyards and mining villages and steelworks of this country. 

This is not a quick fix. This is not a week’s headlines. This is a decade of hard work, knitting our country together.

Only then will our country be able meaningfully to come together.

Only then will we have a chance to talk again, quietly perhaps, timidly at first, about what country we want to be and whether we can become the best of ourselves alone or as part of a family of European nations.

One final thing: I have thought long and hard through the night about my own position. I take my share of blame for the divisions in the country. I accept that the referendum has exposed and opened wider these divisions.

It would be easy for me to announce my resignation, to walk back through that black door, with a sense of a burden lifted and a song on my lips.

But that would be a gross abdication of responsibility. I hope – if you will let me – to devote my efforts for the rest of this Government’s term of office to making Britain a country to be proud of, where those who seek to divide us with hate and fear are defeated by the promise of community and love.

If we can take any solace from this result, it is that to expose our divisions is a first step to healing them. 

This referendum has sent a message, loud and clear. This country is broken apart and we need to mend.

Thank you.

My Boy: An A-Z

Our son, Ethan Blue, is two (and a bit) and I’ve been reflecting a bit on parenthood, fatherhood, children, babies, love, death, space and time. I thought I’d share these random thoughts. In case, some of the city references are a bit perplexing, you might need to know that he was born in July 2016 while we were living in Paris and we came back to London a year ago.

Advice

New parents are surrounded by advice. Usually well-intentioned, occasionally useful, mostly not, sometimes maliciously judgmental. It comes from everyone: doctors, nurses, neighbours, colleagues, friends, family, and, if you live in Paris, people on the street who seem to think it is okay to tell you when your child is hungry or tired or too hot or too cold. (It is not okay.) Much of this advice will be entirely contradictory: never leave your child crying/always leave your child to cry; set a firm bedtime/let them sleep when they need; never let them breastfeed for more than 15 minutes/let them feed for as long as they need to. Should you let a baby go to sleep sucking a dummy? We had vehement, urgent yeses and strenuous, shocked noes. And on and on. Humans have been having babies for 3 million years, so you’d think we’d have figured out how to do it, but apparently not. And it’s not just contradictions between folk myths and medical wisdom; contradictory advice comes from different doctors; reputable books point you in entirely opposite directions; parents of innumerable babies fail to agree. And it’s some of the basics people diverge on - food, sleep, cuddling. The thing is that the unceasing responsibility for a baby is such a shock, you are vulnerably ready to fall under the sway of other people’s convictions; and then when it works, it’s hard not to generalise from your own experience. We coped by inhabiting the indifferent flow: hearing, filtering, mostly discarding, only doing things that make sense, ignoring the imperious command or the magic solution. I don’t know if that would work for you; I am not in any position to offer advice.

Baby

When does a baby stop being a baby? It’s undecidably a matter of biological change in him and mental change in me. There’s no single moment of change; when he started walking upright maybe (about 12 months), when he started stringing more than one word together (about 18 months), when he started counting (18 months) or reciting back to us bits of the books we read him (about 2): these are all milestones in the transition from baby to little boy. There was certainly a point when he was about 20 months when his limbs started to lengthen and he lost his puppy fat and his face started to look more expressive where he looked more like a little adult. But for me there was just a moment where I found I needed to look at him differently. He stopped being a baby when I stopped looking at him as a baby (and I stopped looking at him as a baby when he stopped being a baby).

I was massively unprepared for the arrival of our baby. On reflection, I’m not sure there’s anything I could have done to prepare. And I mean mentally unprepared – we had a cot and a buggy and did some antenatal classes. But I was unprepared for how little a baby does. For almost the first six weeks, our baby did very little; a bit of crying, some drinking of milk, a lot of sleeping, but he didn’t respond much, didn’t smile, didn’t show any clear interest in anything. And because of the little beak-like protruding nipple-sucking lips and big wild unseeing eyes, he seemed more like a bird than a human. And this, apparently, is all normal. And then came the slightly magical moment where I smiled at him and he smiled back. And that’s really the first time we felt like we had care not of a vulnerable new-born baby bird but that we had a child.

Babies and then children seem to have a version of what I think Richard Rorty calls the ever-growing circle of attention. Initially the baby can’t really see anything; the world is William James’s blooming, buzzing confusion. Then the eyes start to focus and I think in the first three months they can properly pay attention to things in their immediate periphery (probably less than a metre around them); then this widens and they get a sense of the room they are in; after six months, Ethan started to understand that there were other rooms in which things were happening even if he wasn’t there. Now, aged two, he seems to have a mental map of the streets around our flat. I guess this continues to grow until, at some point, he has a fully cosmopolitan sense that we are all one humanity, and perhaps even that we are all equal members of an ecosphere. Of course, this latter stage, as we are currently realising, is not a stage that everyone achieves.

This sense of attention spreads through his body too. Those wild unseeing eyes at the beginning begin to look purposeful within a couple of months and then the body, as it becomes more coordinated, directs itself more at the world and itself. Now he occasionally seems haphazard but mostly purposeful, even if we don’t understand the purposes to which he is directing himself.

Child-friendly

One huge difference between London and Paris is that in London I now expect every public building (galleries, museums, theatres, etc.) not just to be accessible to children but specifically to have thought about the experience of their spaces for children. In Paris, I am amazed when I find a building that isn’t actively hostile to children (but see Paris). Having Ethan has renewed my relationship to London. I’ve been to the Science Museum more often in the last six months than I have in the previous 40 years. Following Ethan through it I discovered it has Stephenson’s Rocket: here, in my own city! We discover the glorious central courtyard of the V&A with its shallow pool, water fountains and Great Exhibition tile work. We suddenly see all the green spaces and public parks and playgrounds (seven in easy walking distance). We peek into restaurants and if we see a couple of highchairs stacked obediently in a corner, we know it’s safe to go in. (If they have a lot of highchairs, though, we generally find them as unbearable as if we had no child of our own. There is, in the cosmic system of child-friendly restaurants a goldilocks zone of restaurants that are not child-unfriendly and not too child-friendly, but just child-friendly enough.)

The exception to this is Italian restaurants which are typically not just child-friendly; it’s like they are child restaurants that also welcome adults. A good Italian restaurant is the perfect place to take your child.

Death

I’ve always disliked – and still dislike – the idea that having children is the meaning of life (the idea just kicks the existential can down the road). In fact for me having a child has just sharpened the ambiguity of mortality. Within a month of EB being born two thoughts came to my mind with enormous force and clarity. The first was: ‘you can die now’. And then, almost immediately afterwards, ‘you absolutely cannot die now’.

I find myself thinking about my death all the time with a mixture of calm and horror. At one point I found myself reflecting that ‘all being well, he’ll be at my funeral’. (‘All being well’?)

Either/Or

Having a baby is an oddly non-binary experience. Looking after a six-month-old baby is simultaneously completely fascinating and extremely boring. Changing a nappy is adorable and disgusting at exactly the same time. The first year crawled by at terrific speed. Perhaps because everything is loved without end: the boredom, the nappy, the hours.

Food

He goes through phases, sometimes eating anything, something seeming affronted at the very idea of meals. Quite often he expresses deep suspicion of anything that isn’t beige carbohydrate. Our complacent mantra is ‘he won’t let himself starve’.

Gender

We didn’t know the sex of our baby (see Ultrasound) and one of the benefits of that is that you don’t pre-gender the child before it appears. We bought gender-neutral clothes and toys. We found a brilliant department store that does a great range of gender-neutral clothing that just looks great.

But enforced gendering is hard to avoid. I tell my son he is clever and brilliant and (sometimes) that he is brave and strong. I tell him these things all the time. I hope I would say exactly the same things if I had a girl but I don’t know myself enough.

And then there are some strange circular arguments. We noted that even though he has a range of different toys, he very quickly became obsessed with cars. Some people we know described this as the triumph of nature against nurture, his natural boyfulness leading him to cars. But there’s literally nothing male about cars and, even if there were, cars have existed for little over 120 years; that’s not enough time for evolution to have imprinted the car into masculine DNA. The truth surely is that, because he is a boy, they have gendered the cars.

Hospital

Fortunately, Ethan has had no very serious need for hospitals. He had some wheeziness which meant a few A&E visits, in part because our local GP system seems to have broken down. And then not long before his second birthday, he tripped over holding a toy with a sharp edge which cut his lower lip on the outside, while the impact meant that his teeth macheted into his lower lip from the inside. We took him to hospital, pretty much expecting them to give him a plaster and say go home. Instead they booked him, with our permission, to have stitches under general anaesthetic.

Lilla being at work, I have to handle the day with him. Even though I know the operation is entirely routine, I don’t sleep well the night before. In the morning, I take him to one of his favourite places, the London Transport Museum (seriously, go, it’s so much better than it sounds) and then we wander over Waterloo Bridge, along the South Bank and head to Evelina Children’s Hospital. I feel inexplicably guilty all morning, as if I’m tricking him into hospital. It reminds me of the day I proposed to Lilla in Venice; as the evening approached, when I’d planned to give her the ring, I felt bad that I knew what was going to happen and she didn’t.

In the hospital, the nurses and the doctors are completely brilliant. I confess my fears to the young anaesthetist and she says brightly that when she’s on the other end of these things she worries too and needs the anaesthetist side of her brain to remind the mother side that the procedure is completely safe.

When he goes up for the operation, I go with him into the operating theatre. He is going to get the general anaesthetic through gas and the way that works is he sits on my lap and I cuddle him as they apply the mask. Of course, Ethan struggles and gets upset and I cuddle him even tighter and it takes everything I have not to burst into tears right there because I’m turning cuddling my child into a form of restraint, holding him against his will, turning affection into torture. I didn’t burst into tears, because I knew it would upset and probably frighten him and it would embarrass the nurses, and of course me.

He goes limp in my arms, which upsets me further, and then they say I have to leave but I can give him a kiss and I do so saying I love you in a whisper because I don’t trust my voice to say it out loud. Outside I cry in a corner until I realise a porter is trying to change the bin I’m sobbing against.

When he comes round, he’s fine, a little disorientated but, after eating nothing all day, he wolfs down a cheese sandwich and watches In the Night Garden on his bed, taking everything, as ever, in his stride and better than his parents.

Hospitals are places simultaneously of terror and comfort. There’s a strange plasma smell in the corridors and this reminds me that blood, too, is a sign of life and death. His brief hospital stay was in the week of the NHS’s 70th birthday so that’s two extraordinary things we have created there.

I

It interests me that two things happen at the same time: developing a sense of self and learning to play-act. Purely from observing, in an amateurish way, one child, it seems that the moment they understand that they are a distinct self, separate from the world (Lacan’s Mirror Phase, psychoanalysis fans), is also the moment where they can imagine alternative versions of themselves. The sense of self is detected in his insistence on wanting to do things other than what we want him to do. The play-acting is detected in his ability to imagine and perform doing other things than he is actually doing. Certainly our boy started doing these things within days of each other.

For Lacan, the Mirror Phase - the moment where the child (mis)recognises itself in the mirror as a distinct and whole person - is both a moment of completion and loss, where we achieve a sense of selfhood through the profound loss of our intimate prelinguistic sensual oneness with the world. But is it possible also that the imagination continues to keep that bridge open and even pushes beyond just this world into possible and impossible worlds?

Jealousy

A common worry among men, I gather, is that the child will steal their partner’s affections. (Interesting that women, apparently, don’t much worry about this.) I don’t know that I worried about this to a point of seriously thinking it could be true but I did wonder what it would feel like to share my wife’s love.

It’s ridiculous of course. The love is different and new and anyway love isn’t like that. It’s not like sharing a bag of crisps. Love is the magic money tree, only better.

Kiddo

I expected – because this is what I was told – that I would instantly feel a flood of paternal feeling when he was born. I’ll be honest; I didn’t feel anything like that. There’s an overwhelming sense of responsibility and amazement and incredulity and quite a bit of fear. When he started smiling back (see Baby), that’s the point I started to feel more defined feelings of love. And of course now I sometimes just look at him and think my heart will burst out of my chest (see Love). When did I start feeling like a father, though? To be honest, I’m not sure I do – or rather, maybe I have been expecting a feeling that doesn’t happen. If I’m honest, particularly in public, I sometimes feel a bit like I’m pretending to be a father; when I’m out pushing him in the buggy, it occasionally feels like I’m pretending to push a buggy. Sometimes when I’m talking to him in public, I feel like I’m acting the role of a father and acting it quite badly. In the park once I hear myself saying ‘come on then, kiddo’ and blush at my clichéd performance.

Love

Love evolves as our baby grows. When he was first born, there’s a sort of love I have but I think it’s mostly made up of concern (for his safety), anxiety (that we’re not doing it right), and amazement (that he’s there at all). They are all, in various ways, heightened, sometimes rapturous states and can resemble, or may even be, love. But this changes to something more recognisable when he starts to reciprocate. As we begin to feel we are communicating with him and he is communicating with us, love changes entirely. As he develops physically, his personality shaping his face, his body becoming more agile and adept, we start to love the whole person (see Baby). When he walks and then when he starts to talk, sometimes I am choked up just looking at him. When he obediently says ‘I love you Daddy’, even though I know it’s mostly just repetition, it floors me. And when he eventually put him down to sleep at the end of the day, we find ourselves sitting on the sofa looking at pictures of him on our phones, and every day has the intensity of a new relationship because he changes all the time and with it he changes how we love him.

Music

I am overwhelmed with admiration for people who make music for kids. John Lithgow made a glorious album of children’s songs, Singin’ in the Bathtub. We discovered the fantastic songs of Tee & Moe. Sam West put us on to Radio Doudou, a French online radio station that pumps out non-stop radio for babies. Best of all, on Twitter Mark Hunter (@Hark_Munter) recommended Caspar Babypants; he’s the former lead singer of the Presidents of the United States who now just makes albums for kids. And what albums. The songs are power-pop, country-tinged, Beatlesy bursts of sunshine. He’s got about ten albums of the stuff. The songs are funny, charming, full of melody and wit. The chorus of ‘Bad Blue Jay’ is something that Teenage Fanclub would be proud of. ‘Baby of Mine’ made me cry. ‘Baby and the Animals’ is joyful. He’s got two albums of Beatles covers and the ‘Hey Jude’ is one of the best Beatles covers I’ve heard. There are very few winks at the parent audience but ‘Too Dirty to Love (Muddy Baby)’ pulls the trick off perfectly. There’s a whole channel of songs for kids on YouTube (KidsTV123), most of which I find unbearable (and the Solar System song is one of the most chillingly lonely-sounding songs ever), but I have to hand it to A. J. Jenkins who signs his work; for the first year EB is transfixed.

Memory

He’s two and I read something that says none of us can remember anything before we’re about three and those memories that we do seem to have are imagined or implanted by other people’s vivid descriptions. I sort of knew this already but it disappoints me to think that none of the experiences we have given Ethan in his first two years will stay with him, until I reflect that they are embedded in who he is, his boldness, his familiarity, his boredom, his joy, his endless laughter.

Other people’s babies

I used to be very bored by other people’s babies. Now I love them. I like holding babies. I like their smell. I find their antics amusing, even when they are screaming their heads off. This is not that anything has been unlocked for me; it’s just empathy for the parents and gaining experience of why babies are interesting.

Paris

By having a baby in Paris, I learned a great deal about the distinctive nature of French public space that in turn illuminated much of its political history. One is that public space is truly public and open, a place of debate and contestation. You see this in the graffiti, most of it political, or the French appetite for political posters (incredible). But you also see it in the way that strangers will come up and tell you your child is too cold or needs food. If someone said that to me in London, I would assume they were dangerously insane; but that’s because in London the public space is not really public at all; we carry with us a portable sphere of private space that should not be invaded. In Paris, if you’re on the street, you’re in the debate. This explains (or is explained by) 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871, 1968. And Paris public space is extremely non-hierarchical. That public debate is fundamentally democratic. Although French society is in many ways very deferential and hierarchical, this is not true on the streets. Anyone can speak to anyone. In practical terms, when you are walking down a pavement with a buggy, Parisian people don’t assume they should get out of your way. In London, generally, people step aside to let a buggy go through. In Italy, people seeing a buggy coming twenty metres away would step off the pavement in readiness. In Paris, every encounter is a debate.

Quiet

Sometimes, when he’s awake, I long for a bit of peace. When he’s asleep, we find ourselves going in to look at him to check he’s alright. When he’s noisy, we want quiet; when he’s quiet, we want noise.

Reading

We read to him a lot. In fact, in a burst of excitement before he was born, I ordered all of the Mr Men books and read them to him one by one over the first couple of months (boy, do those get weird); even though he understood nothing of what I was saying, the bold colours and schematic images seemed to attract his attention. Now we read him a couple of books a night and he can finish our sentences if we stop. One thing we realised very quickly is that children’s books are probably the most popular form of serious visual art; some of the books are jaw-droppingly beautiful, clever and often emotionally shattering. Sure, some books are dreadful, so when he selects, for example, The Little Train That Could, my heart sinks. But when he reaches out for Oliver Jeffers’s Lost and Found, or Marion Deuchars’s Bob’s Blue Period, or Once Upon a Time by Raul Guridi you know you and he are about to have genuinely enriching visual and emotional and narrative experience with your child. And then there are some classics – from Winnie the Pooh to Paddington, from The Paper Bag Princess to The Gruffalo – that are so full of joy that it makes the adult novel seems desiccated and mean-spirited by comparison.

Smiling

We tried to impose as little on the baby before it was born as possible. This is why we didn’t want to know the sex of the baby, so the clothes we bought were gender-neutral. But it was hard not to think ‘I hope they’ll be clever’, ‘I hope they’ll be passionate about something’, ‘I hope they’ll be nice looking’. But when the baby was born that melted away. Now we just want him to be happy, that’s all.

Television

We don’t generally let him watch TV until 5pm. A friend gave him a Woody doll (from Toy Story) which freaked him out for a few months until he embraced it again and played with it so much we thought we’d try him on the movies. And now he requests them, which is no hardship, the three Toy Story films being about as perfect a trilogy as can be imagined.

His mental development can be detected in the way he assigns some words to things and some to classes of things. So ‘Woody Time’ is ‘all television watching’ (replacing ‘Hey Duggee’ which was ‘all television programmes’), just as he seems currently to use ‘two’ to mean ‘all numbers above one’, and - briefly and a little hurtfully - ‘mummy’ seemed to stand in for ‘all parents’.

Ultrasound

We had most of our ultrasounds in Paris where having a baby is very medicalised. An upshot of this is that they appear baffled when we say that we don’t want to know the sex of our baby. The French attitude seems to be that human knowledge has progressed to the point where we can know this, so why would you deliberately wreathe yourself into the shadows of ignorance? You might as well refuse anaesthetic for having a tooth removed. And indeed most doctors found the idea of a natural birth comically absurd. When we went for an utrasound, we would have to tell them quickly about our wilful desire for unknowing before they announced it. French being a gendered language, this seemed to be quite difficult to do and we came away from one appointment debating whether she meant ‘il est bon’ in a gendered or neutral way. One doctor was very good about this and would caution us to look away from the screen when the ultrasound was about to reveal something. I couldn’t help but sneak a look and frankly could see nothing in the mock turtle soup on the screen. Another doctor asked ‘do you want to know the sex of your baby?’. No thank you, we replied. She pursed her lips a little and returned to her task, murmuring with undisguised triumph, ‘But I know’.

Voice

I always thought I’d try to speak ‘normally’ to our boy rather than that up-and-down sing-song voice that parents use. That was stupid of me, because children like the up-and-down, sing-song style just in the same way that they like big bold colours and strong shapes.

When reading to Ethan, I sometimes put on different accents for the different characters. You will be interested to know that the Gruffalo speaks in a Glasgow accent; the Highway Rat speaks like Phil Daniels; Madam Dragon is from Morningside; the bear who wants his hat back talks like Bernard Bresslaw; the Fox who searches for the Golden Wonderflower appears to be from Swansea. Sometimes, when I’m doing a new accent, Ethan stares at my mouth in wonderment as if I’ve stopped speaking and started doing something entirely different.

Work

I’ve always had a slightly chaotic work process, often working through the night on writing projects, focusing intensely on a research project for months at a time. These things are no longer possible and it’s taking a while to understand how to rebuild my work process to accommodate having a child. I find – sometimes – that I can be very focused; when he goes down for a nap, I have already been planning the work task I am going to do and I get to it immediately. I haven’t quite experienced the ruinous impact of the pram in the hall. I find that Ethan and work ground each other.

X

I find it very hard not to kiss him all the time. On the top of his head on his beautiful cheeks. I finally understand what my own parents are like. Lilla and I have agreed that, even though he’s two, we respect his personal space and when he pulls away from a kiss (or says ‘no’ when I’m tickling him) we stop. He has also started to offer hugs and kisses to us, which completely floors me.

Yours

After EB was born, it didn’t sink in that I have a baby, that I’m a father. And you know what? Two years on and it still hasn’t. Perhaps it won’t and maybe you just get on with it anyway. It’s like how you cope with work; most people I know feel on some level like they’re a bit of a charlatan whose inadequacies and incompetence will one day be exposed to the world. But then it doesn’t and you carry on anyway, realising that perhaps this is what being up to the job feels like. The most I feel like a father is when I pick him up from nursery and he sees me and runs gleefully towards me shouting ‘Daddy’ (which is my favourite moment of the whole week, no question). But at that moment I feel like ‘his Dad’ more than he feels like ‘my son’. But also it reminds me of the oddity of the possessive pronoun. He’s not ‘my’ boy in the way that that is ‘my’ book or ‘my’ dinner. I’m just looking after him for the world and for him.

Zzzzz

Before I had a baby, my standard question to new parents was ‘are you getting much sleep’? I now discover that this is everyone’s standard question. We have been lucky. Ethan sleeps well and also we were not working 9-5 hours for the first year so we didn’t feel the horror of sleepless nights so much (we could always make it up in the day). Also, we devised a pretty clever plan where I would handle any wake-ups between 10pm and 3am; Lils handled 3am to 8am. That way, each of us was guaranteed at least five hours. (Sometimes, I will admit, I would hear him stir at 2.57am and would have my fingers crossed that he wouldn’t cry out until 3am). He had a reversion at 3 months, where he started waking up in the night, and we figured that out, through a mixture of Ferberizing and then anti-Ferberizing and then some Heath Robinson version of our own invention. And since he was six months old, he’s basically slept for 12 hours a night.

So if I do have advice for you it’s this: live in Paris; have a summer baby; be on sabbatical; be lucky.

The Writer

Ella Hickson's new play is a beautiful savage mess of a thing. It is a ferocious attempt to rip apart the form of the play, for the writer to try creatively to think beyond her own abilities and her learned skill as a maker of plays. It is a piece of despairing utopianism; the play hates where we are and tries to imagine somewhere else and is really not at all sure it has succeeded or that it can succeed. In that sense, it feels to me like it captures a pretty important structure of feeling for what it's like being a progressive in England now.

SPOILERY DESCRIPTION: The play begins after a play. A young woman has come back into the theatre to retrieve her bag and encounters the director and she lets him know what she thought of the play in no uncertain terms. We then discover that scene is a work in progress of an unfinished play by the writer. Then follows a domestic scene between the writer and her boyfriend, in which they have sex and row about her reluctance to turn her play into a lucrative movie. The writer then describes a poetic journey into a wilderness where she discovers sex with a woman for the first time. The potential director of the play the writer is writing doesn't like this scene, considering it undramatic and he urges her to write an ending. The final scene is set in an expensive apartment, where the writer and her lesbian partner live. They have sex and then have sex again with a dildo, which seems to disturb her girlfriend. The play ends with an image juxtaposing creativity and brutality.

I think what I most liked about this play is the feeling it embodies. Its mixture of rage and frustration, it yearns for a better world but keeps bumping its head on this one. It proceeds by a kind of via negativa, continually undermining itself. The first scene turns out to be a try-out piece of theatre where the writing has been shaped to suit the dramaturgical preferences of its director. But the scene at home, though plausibly meant to be real, also feels rather sculptured, rather too neat, a little sitcommy - and the director prowls around the action, watching it from all sides, seemingly bending it to his will. The most liberated part takes the action into this magic realist entrance into an imagined or recollected pure femininity (see below). We slip from Goodge Street to the jungle, from work to love, from hurry to timelessness. And then that, too, seems to be a draft of something about which the Director is pretty scornful - and, daringly, she gives the director a good hearing as he attacks the very play we're watching. And so finally, we get the last scene that the Director has been asking for and its status is also ambiguous: its effectively an expensive, lesbian rewrite of the previous scene with the boyfriend. It flirts with inauthenticity, of the failed gesture, sketching out a scene in the absence of what might be represented beyond it; within the scene, it seems to ask if in our society sex of whatever kind risks tending towards mimicking heterosexual power dynamics, and drama risks tending towards  conventional play dynamics. Its another scene under its own erasure.

This could easily feel very in-jokey and the theatre contemplating its own navel. And, sure, there is an element of that. But what lifts it beyond that is the vivid articulation of the writer's fears and hopes for her writing and her demands for her own wildly free expression as a direct response to the state of her own selfhood and to the state of the world. It's a feminist play, of course, but its tone and thought shifts from the #MeToo fury of the first scene to the middle section's pure femininity, in the sense that the French feminists of the 1970s called écriture feminine: not the masculine ascription of foursquare meanings to words, organised in logical, unambiguous forms, but a feminine, pre-Oedipal maternal sensuality about bodies and words and endless shimmering meanings. The final scene returns us to an anxious working through of power and its intimacy. These multiply erased scenes, these provisional scenes, these ironic scenes, they're all tearing things down to see what lies beyond. It's a close cousin of Alice Birch's similarly provisional and self-destructive and apocalyptic Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again, a totemic play of this decade.

So is this a good play? The Writer makes that question wonderfully hard to answer. The Director says that the first scene is the best - and he says that because it engages in crisp debate and dialectic, with pretty clear psychological through-lines, and a big plot reveal two-thirds of the way through. And so, 'technically', it sort of is the best scene. But the Q&A scene that follows is much subtler and funnier in its observation of how men and women (sometimes) talk to each other. The scene in the wilderness is rich and haunting. The final scene is bleak and unsettling and questioning. And these other scenes are all interesting in very different ways from the clear debate structure of the first scene.

I wrote a blog last year about Max Stafford-Clark and the revelations of his sexually predatory behaviour, noting that his method of 'actioning' (divining the subtextual actions brought about by each line of dialogue) meant that he, more than most, would know exactly what he was doing with his mischievously malicious sexual remarks. After it appeared, the director Paul Miller (of the Orange Tree) got in touch privately to say he thought I should have gone further. For him, Stafford-Clark's 'actioning' seems predicated on the idea that we are all predators: that whatever we say is always doing something to someone else. We are seducing or fooling or crushing or persuading one another. It says we can never be honest or truthful because there's always something nastier going on. Of course there are milder and more loving kinds of 'action' but actioning tends to be most powerful in the rehearsal room when it 'reveals' a darker purpose beneath an innocent line and all too often that type of directing makes the characters prowl territorially around the stage emotionally fucking each other up. Paul Miller is right; it's a cynical and aggressive view of the world - and Hickson asks us if it's also a male view of the world.

It's a good question and one we should take seriously. Not that women can't do that too (and of course, not all men, yada yada), but it's a bantery, aggressive behaviour that treats the other person as a kind of object to be plundered. And the way our world works, most people who get to do that are men. And it's challenging for me, because I teach playwriting, and I'm always asking my student what their characters are doing in their acts of dialogue. 

Hickson is a very talented writer - and so, of course, she is good at writing those scenes. The first scene is gripping and funny; which is why she gets that over with, undercuts it, and moves on. This hasn't stopped some critics simply affirming that it's the best scene. But that's to stubbornly refuse to go on this play's journey - and I can see why you might not; the continual iteration of scenes and their undercutting make this a dramaturgically harrowing experience, the bottom continually falling out of the play. But if you do follow her across that river, you find that somehow, Hickson holds it together by, it seems, sheer force of will, and verbal power, and the heat of passion and hope and disappointment and despair.

Blanche McIntyre's production is perfectly judged. This is not, I think, an easy play to direct. It could have fallen massively on its face, because the play almost wants itself to fail, its wants the failure of our dreams to be written across its structure. It's a play that flirts with nihilism: political, cultural, sexual, dramaturgical. But by stripping things back to their dramatic  basics, by working the theatrical magic and undermining it and revelling in it again, she makes it a beautiful intricate puzzle box, the solution of which is the end of this world. The actors commit to this bright experiment of a play with absolute commitment. Romola Garai finds steel in amongst all the anguish as she longs for something sacred and perfect, just a bit of awe, in the theatre. Lara Rossi is fierce in the first scene, moodily powerful in the last, the moral heart of the play throughout. The guys - Michael Gould and Sam West - precisely identify and embody the hideous behaviour of Nice Men In Positions Of Power (I don't exclude myself from this accusation by the way).

There are moments throughout where I cringed at my own attitudes and behaviour. There were moments I felt self-righteous and moments I felt desperately moved and moments I wanted to cheer and moments I wanted to hide. The total gesture of the play is inspiring and magnificent and the feeling, the feeling, the feeling just felt like 2018 distilled. I love this play.

Cockpit

This stunning production is not just a revival; it's a rediscovery of a genuinely forgotten jewel of mid-century British political theatre. It's a breathtaking piece of work: bold and subtle, thrilling and ambiguous, pleasurable and daring. It has just ended its run at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh. Who will give it a further life?

Cockpit is set just after the Second World War in a theatre in an unnamed German town; the theatre has been requisitioned by British troops to temporarily warehouse all the people displaced by the depredations of war before being returned to their homelands. But this means French collaborators are here alongside Resistance fighters, Russians with Poles, Chetniks with Partisans and more. There is a constant threat of revolt, only briefly quelled by what seems to be an outbreak of Bubonic Plague. As the play ends, the faultlines open up again and this time the guns are turned on the British.

The choice of Wils Wilson to direct this is a touch of genius. Wilson's more usually associated with site-specific or site-responsive work, placing shows in boats or pubs or nightclubs. But this is a site-specific play for a theatre as a theatre. As we enter, there are banners through the auditorium; ladders have been fixed between the stalls and circle, between the boxes and the stage. And this extends into front of house where there are banners announcing that the theatre has been requisitioned and through the foyer and up the stairs piles of suitcases and shoes, that horribly moving evocation of refugees. The Lyceum is a sumptuous C J Phipps-designed theatre from the 1880s, all warm, enclosing curves with a tall, imposing proscenium, the gilding currently picked out against a powder blue motif. It's a terrific building but it's also a very conventional-seeming theatre so this kind of reinvention is all the more potent. and all the more thrillling

The architecture's semiotic of grandeur and conservativism works beautifully for this production, helping to underscore the play's many ambiguities. The British soldiers running the building are, notionally, our heroes, at least at first. They are in charge; they have oversight of everything else that happens and they seem to be trying to do the best for these refugees. But it becomes increasingly clear that they just don't 'get' Europe. The recent and immemorial rivalries, tensions, enmities cannot be stamped out by a stern word or at the other end of a pistol. Slowly it becomes clear that the soldiers' approach to Europe is desperately inadequate. There is the small comic part of the stage manager, immensely proud of his theatre, who equips the soldiers with stage properties and, at one moment, makes possible a moment of blissful near-transcendence as one refugee, revealed as a singer, performs Violetta's aria from La Traviata. But his ushering in of stage settings only makes more absurd the British claim to authority; it just makes them look like fakes. It's a fiercely clever play.

I should own up that I have some skin in this game. I think I discovered the play when I wrote about it in 1956 and All That. Since then, a lot of theatres have been in touch with me to get a copy of the play, including a couple of our national companies, but it was David Greig at the Lyceum who had the commitment and clarity to actually programme it. I can't tell you how moving it was, 25 years after I sat in the British Library, not quite believing what I was reading, finding that yes indeed, this is a terrific play that completely holds the stage and feels as fresh now as it did in 1948.

Yeah, 1948. Part of what is so extraordinary is how ahead of its time this play is. It's the kind of immersive environmental theatre experience that we associate with the 1960s and with our own century. Its political subtlety and its expert link with theatrical form is staggering. Bridget Boland was a London-born Irish writer who started writing screenplays but, during the war where she served in the Women's Auxiliaries, she became involved in the ABCA play unit, a group of soldiers putting on plays to dramatise current affairs for the troops, confined the barracks between Dunkirk and D-Day. The techniques used were those of the leftist theatre of the 1930s: mass declamation, agit-prop, living newspaper, a bit of Brecht. It's one of the lesser known stories of British theatre that this kind of leftist work had a much wider influence on our stages through the unlikely conduit of the British army. And this is one of the most high-profile examples, a  successful , critically-acclaimed West End run of a play using jubilant theatricality to ask hard questions about Britain's post-war role.

And this production is just sumptuous. The cast double invisibly to give you a full sense of a theatre thronging with people. Some of the audience sit on the stage, which amplifies the world further. The lighting by Kai Fischer is, dear God, ravishingly beautiful. Aly Macrae has woven music in and around the action, haunting folk songs from right across Europe that serve as a memory and a rebuke to the simplistic and slapdash worldmaking of the victors.

It is a huge, fantastic image of Britain's problematic relationship with Europe since the Second World War. It's funny; it's tense; it's ravishingly uplifting one minute; grimly despairing the next. It's got a brilliant multilingual cast and it should be seen again. London should see it. London would love it. There must be an unoccupied West End theatre that could take it. It's perfect for a dark theatre - it's a pop-up theatre show and it feels completely perfect for now. Come on, London theatre managers; Cockpit is waiting for you.

Max Stafford-Clark

Max Stafford-Clark was made to step down as artistic director of Out of Joint, the company he founded over twenty years ago and which has been a major producer of new plays and modern revivals ever since. Before that Max was the longest-running artistic director of the Royal Court from the late seventies to the early nineties. And before that he was co-founder of Joint Stock, a hugely innovative new play company from the 1970s. And before that he was associate director at the Traverse in Edinburgh. He has been a champion of playwrights and playwriting all of his life and, indeed, he is particularly associated with championing plays by women, most notably Caryl Churchill with whom he had an important working partnership for over a decade.

His directing methods have been hugely influential, particularly in his method of 'actioning'. This requires actors to identify the 'action' that is being enacted by each line: when you have the line 'Where are the scissors?', what are you actually doing to the other character by asking that question? You could be 'interrogating' them, 'involving' them, 'challenging' or 'accusing' them. By identifying this action, you lay bare the scene beneath the scene, the underlying transaction of the play. It's a valuable way of putting force and shape behind each line of dialogue but while a more Stanislavskian tradition can tend to solely concentrate on your own individual psychology, 'actioning' means everyone in the rehearsal room is aware and able to contribute to the understanding of what is going on. His directing is all about staging the dynamics of social transactions.

But now he has been forced out of his position at Out of Joint because of sexually inappropriate behaviour with young women. The Guardian reports that he told Out of Joint's Education Officer Gina Abolins: 'Back in the day, I’d have been up you like a rat up a drainpipe but now I’m a reformed character'. He apparently on a previous occasion suggested she try on a bikini in front of him and that she should have casual sex and tell him the details. Several other women, including the playwright Rachel De-lahey, have said that he would ask them personal sexual questions about, for example, how they lost their virginity. With his assistant Steffi Holtz, he made several personal comments about her appearance, touched her bum, and on one occasion said to her: 'If you were sat on the desk there in front of me I would eat you out'.

Stafford-Clark had a stroke a decade ago and his spokesperson has suggested this may have contributed to his 'disinhibition', but, of course, these stories go much further back than that. I remember reading Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia and assuming that the lecherous theatre director in that was based on Stafford-Clark. Since this story broke last night, a number of women in theatre have responded with variations of 'at last'. This was an open secret.

I hope that more women (and men) come forward to add witness to this story. Max is probably not the worst offender in the theatre industry but for thirty years he was one of the most important and powerful figures in the progressive, leftist, edgy, experimental new writing theatre world. It is impossible to guess how many actors', writers', designers', directors' and administrators' careers will have been shaped and damaged by his behaviour. The people who would not work at the Court because of him; the people who had to make horrible compromises with themselves to work there; the people neglected because of his lack of sexual interest in them; the people hurt and crushed by these actions; and more, the shrapnel of these actions will have scattered very far and very wide.

But let me just say a couple of things, because I already see a little narrative emerging that concerns me:

1. 'It's a witch hunt'. No it isn't a witch hunt. Like Harvey Weinstein, Max Stafford-Clark was king of his castle for two generations. It is only now, with him in decline, that it has been possible for women to come forward without too much fear of the consequences. (I say 'too much' fear, because there is still fear. I note with shock that both Gina Abolins and Steffi Holtz have deleted their Twitter accounts.) The door opened just a little with Lucy Prebble's superb piece in the London Review of Books, which refers to 'a much older legend of new writing in the theatre' who was known to be a 'lech' (and who I guess is MSC). And now women are naming him, coming forward in a measured way with independent, specific cases, all of which seem to corroborate each other. They are brave and brilliant for doing so and should be listened to. 
2. 'No one is safe'. This is true or should be. If you've sexually assaulted women in the past, you are not safe. Nor should you be. The excuse that Weinstein used that he came into the industry in the 70s and that's how things were then is bullshit. Maybe men thought they could get away with it but where's the evidence that women were less horrified and crushed by sexual humiliation in 1977 than in 2017? There isn't any. If you behaved like that, it's because you knew it was wrong but you did it anyway. Of course some men's fear is that a false accusation will be believed and their career ruined without any due process. That would be an injustice, of course. But first, the history of this is that overwhelmingly women are not believed and that's why women don't come forward. Second, the history is that overwhelmingly when women do come forward it is because it is true. False accusations are the infinitesimally rare outliers; they should not drive who are are and what we want to be as a society, as a culture, as a theatre. We have a window now when women feel emboldened to come forward and I don't even want to say that's a good thing. It should just be normal.
3. 'But he championed women playwrights'. Yes, he did. Andrea Dunbar, Caryl Churchill, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Sarah Daniels, Charlotte Keatley are just some of the women writers who were championed during his artistic directorship of the Royal Court. There's another list one could make of women writers who were championed by him at Out of Joint. But to think that this is some kind of balancing act is to fall for the very power dynamics that allowed him to abuse women. Max Stafford-Clark did not 'make' these writers; they are not dependent on him. They would surely have been major figures in our theatre if Max Stafford-Clark had not been born. They are each singularly talented, creative and extraordinary women and it would be every bit as true to say that they made him.
4. 'But let's not forget his greatness as a director'. I agree; Max Stafford-Clark was a hugely important figure in establishing a style for new writing - plain, unadorned, clear, urgent. In fact, I think the theatre has moved away from his style, which can now seem rather leaden and unimaginative, but his historical importance should not be ignored. But here's the thing: his significance as a director does not counter-balance these accusations; it is part of what makes them so inexcusable. Because the man who invented actioning knows exactly what he is doing, when he says, 'Back in the day, I’d have been up you like a rat up a drainpipe but now I’m a reformed character'. The words themselves appear to suggest a kind of contrition, an affirmation of new-found saintliness, that the sexual threat is in the past. But if we 'action' it, we know what's going on: he is 'intimidating' Gina Abolins; or he is ' abusing' her; or he is 'humiliating' her; or he is 'assaulting' her. When he tells his assistant, 'If you were sat on the desk there in front of me I would eat you out', Max Stafford-Clark, the great director of new writing, with all his sensitivity to the interpersonal power dynamics when people meet and talk and boast and clash and compete and battle for territory and try to fuck with each other's heads, knows exactly what he is doing. He is, supremely and appallingly, a master in the dynamics of social encounters. His directing does not excuse his offences; it helps explain them.

Let me say one last thing. I know Max Stafford-Clark a little bit. I was a script reader at the Royal Court in the very early 90s and met him a few times through that. The Royal Court were, collectively, a visiting professor at Royal Holloway in the mid-1990s and we met a bit more then. He has visited my university a few times and I've bumped into him on various occasions. The last time I met him was in March when we were on a panel together, talking about Caryl Churchill's The Skriker. He was, as he always is, witty and full of insight and experience with just that little tang of outrageousness to guarantee the audience felt privileged and included and a little shocked. I guess that last characteristic is something he deploys at other times in other ways. I didn't know about his reputation really; I think I'd heard occasional things, but very distantly and very vaguely. Or is that true? Did I choose to hold those rumours 'distantly and vaguely' because I liked him? These moments are a chance for us all to think about our actions, to ask ourselves difficult questions and I do wonder now if I allowed myself a tiny bit of complicity.

So I like him, or I liked him. I am saddened by these revelations. I'm not sad for him really; I'm sad for the people around him who may or may not have known about his proclivities. But mostly I am sad for all the people who will have suffered over many years. I'm sad for our theatre which has this shit to deal with all the time. But no matter how sad, it's better that this is known. Often speaking out is a stark responsibility, a sad and stark responsibility.