Raven Smith - Raven Smiths trivial pursuits

4th Estate

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright Raven Smith 2020

Cover design by Julian Humphries

Cover photograph Shutterstock

Raven Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008339951

Ebook Edition April 2020 ISBN: 9780008339975

Version: 2020-02-17

Rather than a dedication, its more fitting to start with two apologies.

Firstly, to my mum on account of how much I talk about my cock.

And secondly, to my husband on account of how much I talk about his.

Forrest Gump was wrong: life is nothing like a box of chocolates, its more like drunk-biting into a kebab on the night bus. Youre trying to Jay Rayner the different flavour profiles but theyre mashed between pitta and the top decks swirling while you grip your door key between your knuckles, refusing to black out before your stop. Is that a curl of doner meat or a piece of napkin youve hungry-caterpillared? Like a kebab, our lives have countless ingredients; the dominant flavours and hidden additives are interlocking, co-dependant parts, like a thirtieth-birthday Omega. Disparate life-stuff vies for our attention like listening to three podcasts and a voicenote as the sound of dial-up internet reverberates backwards on a Sonos. Theres a consensus that life and death and kids really do matter. But weve also Googled beach sandals and healing crystals and carbs in a mango. These things matter too, but in a different way to voter fraud or organised religion or melting ice caps. Those little pots of chunked parmesan at Whole Foods feel a touch frivolous when compared to famine. The Pizza Express dough balls dont cancel out genocide. Having to queue for too long at a bar boils my piss, but gin and tonic is a welcome distraction from our current political hell. These small things are inconsequential, but we chase them. Our trivial pursuits.

Its helpful to think of life as a Monet a canvas layered with splodgy strokes. A masterpiece and a big old mess. Theres just a lot of stuff to consider: your height, your weight, your jeans, your genes. Your education, your privilege, your subscription to the New Yorker. Can you still eat avocados? Can you still eat salmon? Can you still drink tap water? Or Aperol? Or probiotic yoghurt? Ottolenghi, easyJet, immigration. Joni Mitchell, the McCanns, Kim Kardashian. #MeToo and the 5:2. Microbeads in the sea. A starving polar bear on a splinter of iceberg. Can you be a good person if you dont devote your life to Greenpeace? Can you be a good person without an asylum seeker in your spare bedroom? Can you be a good person and still judge the dresses at the Met Gala? Is pink back? Is pink woke? Is pink naff because it got woke and then we ruined it? How do you even pronounce Mot? Are we running out of time? Are we running out of resources? Are we running out of waitresses because of Brexit? Lifes torrential downpour of dust-bunnies under your bed piles up on the surfaces like Miss Havishams attic.

And are you engaging with it all? Or just scrolling down the feed liking pics? Are you actually getting happier? Or just less anxious? Are you making a good indelible mark on this planet, or leaving a cavernous carbon footprint? Are you the change you want to see in the world, or do you just tweet about it? Are you a muggle, commuting through life with your eyes down on todays paper? Are you a messiah preaching the gospel, or an obedient disciple? And when you finally get to the pearly gates of heaven, will that one viral tweet count for or against your entry?

Modern life is rubble. Shingle from the bottom of the ocean brought in by the tide. We comb the beach ascribing value to each discovery. Whether thats eating McDonalds or living vegan, Donna Tartt or emojis, David Hockney or Zoella, being healthy or being thin. These are the trivialities we chase, our aspirations outside of having kids and not dying. We pursue these trifles that are both souffl-light and anvil-heavy. At times theyre as mundane as a Uniqlo sock, at others theyre as dizzying as a diamond earring. Were riddled with choices like a gangrenous leg, but we dont have to be binary between the profound or the irrelevant. They coexist. These things have a meaning but they are also meaningless, overshadowed by genuine disasters.

Each decision we make is a self-portrait, but like Elizabethans we commission painters who make us look better. We dont choose stuff for who we are, but more for who we want to be, perusing a life we see as successful.

In most cases trivial pursuits arent a conscious act by the participant. Theyre a complex, invisible system of influence, like the mafia. And quiet prompts steer us from the periphery of our vision. Like most fairytales, this book is based on a simple conceit: everything in your life is trivial, but also has enough meaning to pursue. The small stuff is straw, but like Rumpelstiltskin the straw is also the gold. Take shoes, for example. If you see a pair of shoes online you may ask yourself, Do I want these shoes? Its innocuous enough. But within that question youre like Cinderella, a woman who transformed her whole life with the perfect shoe and partied hard and fell in love. But the question has doubt too. Youre the undeserving ugly sister coveting the shoe. Do you deserve the shoe, or the prince? Should you buy the shoe for some future engagement at which youll feel worthy of the shoe? Will wearing the shoe convince you and the people around you that youre worthy of the shoe? And in this whole shoe-mess youre also Prince Charming. Youre searching for the woman who wears this shoe.

Does that make sense? It sounds ridiculous because it is. And were all doing it all the time, with multiple decisions we make about our time and our houses and our baby names and our dick pics. A million micro-factors encouraging us to do more and be more. Were all striving for something, whether its a great meal, or the right hand-soap, or a cute kid with tiny Birkenstocks (always the right shoe). Everything is a major or minor decision, made en route to this bigger portrait were painting of who we really are.

I heard on Womans Hour that life is a big U shape: happy childhood at the start, and happy old age, the middle a big sag where you mainly just work and eat, and worry about money and worry about food. This book, I think, is the bottom of the U, all the human existing that congregates in the reservoir tip before we hit the blissful slalom of old age. Sometimes the U is filling with water and were drowning rats clawing up the sides, other times its a hammock and were lazing on a sunny afternoon.

I lie awake thinking about a bag of crisps I opened upside down last year, but alongside that there are more frets. Is empathy in retrograde? Do we care more about ourselves than other people? Am I middle-class-signalling by shopping at Waitrose? What if I only buy own-brand goods there? Is that actually worse? How is time passing so quickly? How is time passing so slowly? Why am I tired all the time? On my deathbed will I wish Id slept more? After I die will they make a twelve-part Netflix original about me? Who will play me if Meryl is busy? Who will play me if Meryl is dead? What is my legacy? What is my lunch? Do I fail every time I eat carbs? Or do I beat the system? Could I perform the Heimlich manoeuvre in an emergency despite never having been taught it? Why am I sweating when Im sitting still? Why am I back scrolling Instagram? Why do I pretend to hate the internet, and that an analogue life is a more pious path? Is sass a superpower or an Achilles heel? Is charm real? Is charisma real? Are these traits youre born with? Or do you cultivate them like a garden? Deep down in my soul, in the bit you cant see in selfies, am I the cat bin lady, angrily and chaotically acting out at the world? Or am I the cat in the bin, manhandled without my consent? Am I the bin itself, passively filled by nearby drama? Ive lost hours searching for rugby-striped bedding, which is as much to do with my religious love of John Lewis as it is about the reminiscence of being a closet gay in a rugby scrum at school. What does getting the right bedding really mean on my personal success scale? Do I even notice most of my achievements? Or are they all passing clouds? When I die, will some zany acquaintance insist everyone wears colourful clothes to my funeral? That would be really bad.