Dear Joe,

In the time it has taken me to reply to you, Donald Trump has been re-elected as President of the United States, I graced the Continent, you directed Dancing at Lughnasa at the ADC (terrific; I brewed the tea), 2024 ended, and I was damningly DMed this Instagram Reel by a third-party. I guess that makes me a lousy letter-writer.

The Netherlands was beautiful and very clean. There was no litter on the streets. In Leiden, the flower boxes along the canals were full and blooming, and after we took the twenty-minute train journey into Amsterdam, we were shocked to find identical flower boxes containing identical flowers – pink-purple and white. That is a level of synergy the UK cannot comprehend. Their museums were also foreign: an exhibition titled Seduction (followed by Death) at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center included a mini-game in which two space-hoppers became sperm cells racing to fertilise the egg. Parents and children idled alongside corkscrew duck vaginas with gentle, unruffled curiosity. In Belgium, children explored the crumblings walls of the Gravensteen, a Medieval castle in Ghent that has totally disregarded the concept of the guard rail, without breaking their necks. How many safety emails would this spur in England? Perhaps they complain in Ghent too, I don’t know. If they do, the Gravensteen has not listened.

"For all its genitalia, the Naturalis Biodiversity Museum moved me more than I anticipated"

For all its genitalia, the Naturalis Biodiversity Museum moved me more than I anticipated. The interconnectedness of the universe will do that to you! In the penultimate moment of the experience, you are asked to place your hand on a dark surface. A million pinpricks of light burst over your skin, flowing out from your fingertips over the wall in front of you, reconfiguring into a deer, a beetle, a mushroom, a star, and finally into the entire solar system. If you ever took the patronus quiz on Pottermore, it’s a bit like that. The particles, the stuff of being, culminate in a line of text: “WHATEVER YOU BECOME, YOU EXIST FOREVER.”

Tartt-gate sounds thrilling! I read The Secret History during A-levels — I understand it is our editor’s favourite book – and after your letter, I wish I’d listened along as well. I enjoyed it on the whole, although Henry Winter is the sort of character who should never cross my path after a couple of J2Os. I remember my animosity surprised me because I can and have put up with some literary rotters, including more than a dozen murderers. What was it about Henry that rankled? In the end, I believe he was incapable of daftness. He was also unloyal and serious without earnestness. That’s three strikes. Only Julian was worse – for being named Julian.

Or maybe I was merely bitter on behalf of the, as you write, “nasal/asthmatic character, Bunny.” Last Easter, my childhood asthma returned in a chest infection that choked me when I coughed. When the choking didn’t stop, my mother ordered me to book a doctor’s appointment, and after several rapid proddings, I was forwarded to the pharmacy to collect an inhaler in a paper bag. Technology has revolutionised since my day. Shaped like an Actimel bottle, the new Turbohaler dumps the pump for a twist-and-suck model, less tactile but better at delivering more drugs into your lungs. It worked. Moreover, my affliction gifted me a community: since learning my friend is also asthmatic, we have started referring to our lungs as naughty but loveable children. When a wheeze tears through our laughter, we exchange blushing, conspiratorial smiles. “Oh, these lungs,” I chuckle. She places a hand on her chest. “I know,” she murmurs. We understand each other.

I am struggling to think of a comparison with asthma in literature, but the music video for Fontaines D.C.’s ‘Starburster’ features an inhaler and a neon green shell suit. Gasps end-stop the lines of the chorus, inhalations without release. Talking to Rolling Stone, lead singer Grian Chatten said he wrote the song “after a panic attack in a London tube station.” Joe, no offence to your city, but I can empathise. My friend coughed up actual black goop after his first ride on the Northern line.

"Confuse two things often enough and they collapse"

How are you getting on with the John Ashberry dissertation? How goes the Ashberry-ing? I look at photographs of him and I imagine a blueberry – no, a blackberry – and Wikipedia tells me the leaves of the rowan tree are so repeatedly confused with the ash, it also became known as the ‘mountain-ash’. Confuse two things often enough and they collapse. The rowan tree’s fruit is small and red, the real Ashberry. Are you reading anything special to open the New Year? I wonder if you aimed to finish a book right on the last day of 2024, or whether you took the same read across the chronological threshold with you. The first book of 2025 is portentous. I have chosen Despised and Rejected by Rose Allatini.

Belatedly,

Eve

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