On my summer of illness
It is the first of September. Which usually saddens me, or at least brings up a wistful sense of loss or waste, though mixed with the knowledge that autumn is a kind of downward slope in which everything gets forgotten and all can, finally, move on.
I arrived back from my end of summer holiday in Cornwall yesterday afternoon. It was very windy and grey at Elephant and Castle, but I was happy to be back in the city. I had a huge chicken shop dinner with Glen, washed down with a 500ml bottle of Nigerian sprite and the first Indiana Jones film.
It was on the car journey back from Cornwall in 2021 that I finally gave up on pretending I wasn’t trans. As we passed Gloucester services I remember a crushing feeling that I could no longer keep up the pretence now that Cambridge, and more importantly, summer, was over.
I always liked the way Wallace Stevens envisioned summer as a more porous time in which the soul can extend from the body to engage more fully with one’s surroundings. That always seemed true to me. The way that leaves on a tree are almost more tactile in heat of the summer, touchable, even which high up, and touched in the sense that you have already made a kind of contact with them, way up there. And the imagination is alive, in a different way. Walks home in the evenings, the strange angle of a house, fluttering wings, etc.
I believe these things to be true but, when summer ends, on a car journey home, there is also the lingering sense that the summer itself was a kind of hallucination. What was that? Was any of it real? Was that me doing that? Was it worth it? Perhaps both are true.
I wanted to reread As You Like It this year, a play which I’ve long considered to be, secretly, one of his best. But I didn’t get round to it.
Anyway, it’s been a weird summer, 2024. Brat summer. I’d had high hopes, especially after having a particularly difficult spring (see reading 14).
I’ve had some brilliant times this summer, and I want this post to be about that. I want to start posting more, too, throughout the autumn, and get back to some more essayistic writing.
So, I’m gonna run through what’s happened since my last post on the 15th of June.
Firstly, I went to Madrid with my mother, and had a wonderful time going round galleries and eating very delicious tapas. We stayed in the LGBT district, Chueca, which was like a much bigger, less gentrified Soho. I especially loved the nights where I went out in my blue and white wrap dress, which I’d had for years, but had never really worn out before.
There was one evening where the nearby bars were full so we sat on a bench in the square nearby and drank cans of Spanish lager while peddling these bizarre exercise bike things positioned at the foot of the bench.
Days later, we got the long train up to Bilbao in the north of Spain and watched out the window as the landscape changed. It went from the stark and dry plains of central Spain to the wet and rugged mountains of the Basque country. We passed one town in the mountains under an intense thunderstorm at night. Strangely, there were no streetlights in the town, which added to the apocalyptic feel as lighting flashed overhead and channels of rain flooded the roads.
We got to Bilbao late in the evening, and it felt like a weird, vaguely threatening place that late at night. After arriving at our apartment, we went straight to bed. I woke up with a sore throat.
Over the following 24-48 hrs I became one of the most ill I’ve ever been. I was feverish, my throat killed, I had no appetite and I was overwhelmed with a feeling of general exhaustion and illness. We still did things over the last few days of the holiday, but not much. And the weather SUCKED.
When I got home to London, by which time it was almost July, I thought I was going to get better very quickly. But my elation to be travelling back from London Bridge on a sunny saturday afternoon was short lived.
I remained really, really ill for almost the whole week that followed, and took several full days off work. It felt like the summer was wasted, almost already over, and it was only July.
I was on a usual video call with Molly sometime in June or July. She told me about how all day at work, she’d had a line from a song by R.A.P. Ferreira’s album Purple Moonlight Pages stuck in her head- an album which we’d both been obsessed with when it came out during covid. The line was It was gonna be a big summer, you know, a big summer, except the word ‘big’ was replaced by ‘BRAT’. At the time, the weather thus far had been generally awful: rainy, changeable, and unusually cold for the summer months. Not only that, but we hadn’t done much of anything yet that had felt summery. Even then, it felt like the promise of a BRAT summer, which we had been anticipating since Charli announced the album back in spring, was going to waste.
I’m listening to that R.A.P. Ferreira song now. It is called CYCLES and opens with a brilliance typical of his writing:
CYCLES
It was gonna be a big summer, you know, a big summer
Every one since then too, ”a big summer”
“Gonna be a big summer”
Yet, somehow that’s never the case, is it?
It’s the sprawl of autumn, isn’t it?
It’s the crunch,
And that’s it, isn’t it. You always think it’s gonna be a Brat summer and for some reason it so rarely feels like it was. But I’m writing this one to show that it was, really, a time in my life- one where I’ve had a whole lot of fun, and spent time with amazing people. These are postcards.
When I’d gotten back from Spain, my flatmate Oliver had returned from his long awaited top surgery. We’d planned for me to be nursing him back to strength, making him meals and watching TV in the evenings, but I was so ill I generally kept my distance, bar the few times I had to get something down from a high shelf for him.
We did talk though, and on one sunny morning in our flat I took this picture of him, a couple weeks fresh from surgery.
I really love this photograph. It’s like one of those old fashioned portraits of an artist in his studio. I love the details: the sunglasses indoors, the washing on the line in the sunlight.
10 days after becoming ill in Bilbao, I felt better, and returned to the working week with a new lease of life. After retreating into a pit of illness induced dysphoria, sweat and self disgust, and hatred for summer, I returned ready for a sunny morning at work.
I’d put together a new work outfit: an oversized blue blazer, with a blue pencil skirt underneath, black tights and white T shirt. I emerged onto the sunny fire escape, listening to Blue Bendy’s album, So Medieval (2024).
That first Monday back was also our work summer party. So I was out of the office drinking a pint of very crisp cider by 3pm, which was a most welcome surprise.
Later that week I met with my lovely friend Carrie to go to a Yoko Ono exhibition at the Tate Modern. I had been interested in Yoko Ono’s work for a few years, especially her book of art/ poetry called Grapefruit.
In the exhibition they displayed the book as individual pages along one long wall. Each page was a series of instructions which, were they to be enacted, were the artwork itself.
My favourite is one called ‘Tunafish Sandwich Piece’, which is one of the most convincingly hopeful pieces of art I have ever seen:
Tunafish Sandwich Piece
Imagine one thousand suns in the
sky at the same time.
Let them shine for one hour.
Then, let them gradually melt into
the sky.
Make one tunafish sandwich and eat.
On the 18th of July, when working from home, I left for a long lunch and had a picnic in Burgess park with Sarah, who at that time lived in nearby Bermondsey. She’d made a delicious tofu, peanut noodle salad, which we ate on a big picnic blanket on a very hot day near the lake.
Many very hot days followed, and I started making mozzarella and fresh tomato baguettes at home for lunch. On the one Friday after work it was well over 30 degrees- and Oliver, Carrie and I met at the cafe at the South London Gallery before taking a look around the exhibition in the heat. Again, I wore my blue wrap dress, by which time I was beginning to think that I needed to expand my summer wardrobe. Later that evening I took the overground for drinks with friends in Clapham Common.
Though I didn’t like living there, it was lovely to go back. And it was hot until late in the evening.
I got back, slept with my window open, and got ill again. I lost my voice, so much so that I could barely speak at Carabiner, the queer women’s night in Hoxton with Sarah and Oliver.
To be clear, this wasn’t an illness like before. It was just a normal illness, I stayed at work. But it was ominous.
27th July was another hot one- and definitely my best trans pride yet. We had a great group, with Glen, Carrie and Oliver and his friends joining us. We drank through the afternoon, walked down Regent’s street. After the speeches, I went home to change back into my blue dress (again) and headed back out to Dalston to go to the trans pride night at Dalston Superstore with Oliver’s friends.
They played BRAT a lot. The evening was hot, and brilliant, and definitely one of my favourite club nights I’ve ever been to.
The following day, Glen and I bought a fan for the flat, which took some of the heat off the living room, which by that point in the summer had become much like a greenhouse. We bought all-green ingredients to make a thai BRAT curry. It was delicious!
On the last day of July I watched I Saw The TV glow at the BFI with Glen, which was probably my favourite film of the summer. The next day Molly arrived to stay in London with me in my flat, which doubles as her Peckham holiday home. I’d booked the week off.
One of the things I’ve been thinking, and saying, a lot these past few months, is that I am no longer a summer person. A lot of this, I think, stems from, as I discussed in Reading 15, I feel like I pass less well in the summer. Or at least, I felt like I didn’t have any clothes to wear and often ended going out in t-shirt and shorts, which I hate.
But I think I’ve solved that now, mostly. I started wearing a few of my summery dresses out, which I really like and feel good in. And I bought a few new ones- a floral red and white wrap dress, similar to my short, older pale blue and white one- and a longer navy dress from TK maxx that I really love.
I got the latter in the New Cross Gate TK Maxx, which I went to with Molly on the first day she arrived in early August. It was a hot day and in the evening we cooked a pasta and had an Aperol spritz each.
I had such a lovely time with Molly visiting, as I always do. Some of the highlights included our Friday trip to Whitstable. It was raining in London as we left on the train, but by the time we arrived to the Kent coast the sky was a beautiful blue and the air was 25 degrees.
We got in the sea, shoulders under, twice, and ate chips. Later, we drank pints of Spitfire lager at the Old Neptune pub, which sits right on the beach.
A few days later, we went out for drinks on the rooftop of a bar in central Peckham. It was great to see my area from a new angle. The weather was glorious, and I was wearing my new longer navy dress. We had an Aperol each, followed by a cocktail. Afterwards we walked to Camberwell and had some Kurdish food which I hated, though I perked up with a pint in Stormbird afterwards quite considerably.
By this point in the summer I had been gripped by a passion for imported soft drinks. It’d started back in July with me buying a bottle of Nigerian coca-cola in Presco, an off licence near my flat, having heard that Nigerian coke is one the best in the world. And, while the glass bottle certainly does a lot of the work in making it a great drinking experience, the taste was excellent. It was like a tap coke from a pub.
With Molly, I ventured into Khan’s Bargain’s on Rye Lane in Peckham, which is quite possibly my favourite shop in London. It’s a cathedral, in the figurative sense.
They have an exceptional selection of imported soft drinks, which only increased my thirst for them and their sugar content. Thus far, Arabian orange Fanta remains the GOAT.
On the evening of the 6th of August, Molly and I cooked dinner for Glen after he came back from work. Afterwards, we went to the BFI to watch Koyaanisqatsi, which was made in collaboration with Philip Glass. I was mesmerised.
Then, we caught the train to Battersea to have a drink with Ed at the Asparagus, which had turned from a Spoons into a Portobello brewery pub. Still cheap though. We got the long bus home.
Molly left, I went back to work for a few days. On the friday evening I just knew I was going to get ill again. And I did.
The following week was lost to illness. I felt possibly the most ill I ever had, and sat at home alone, laying on the sofa, breathing shallow breaths and sweating. Darling Glen was a great help, though.
A few times I felt like I was going to get better. But somehow it just kept getting worse. I spent days and days listening to podcasts, half awake. After a while I lost all ability to listen to anything, and spent long times just breathing.
A doctor put me on lots of medications, including steroids and antibiotics. By this point I believed there was something wrong with my immune system as I had by now spent half of the summer incredibly ill.
Usually, when I get ill, it peaks for a couple of days, during which time I’ll probably work from home, and be a bit slow. But these were a different level of illness. I was utterly incapacitated for around a week each time.
During these weeks, made worse by heat. I couldn’t think of anything outside of the illness. There was no BRAT summer. Only my ill, sweating body. I felt awful, and couldn’t look ahead. Lost (like Bloc).
Each time I got better, I’d throw myself back into life, and quickly forget how ill I’d been just a week prior.
Like this, the summer came to take on a kind of checkerboard pattern in which I was either rushed off my feet having fun, or catatonic and trapped in my flat feeling terrible and wanting to shake off this mortal coil.
One evening, as the fever passed for the third time, I lay on the floor of my room next to my bookshelf like I used to as a teenager. I listened to Faye Webster’s new album, which is just the sort of thing I used to listen to as a 17yr old.
Amongst several things, I pulled out my copy of A Wave by John Ashbery. This was always the collection of his that I connected to the most. Since my first terms in Cambridge, this book had taken on a kind of religious power over me.
I read it differently to other books of poetry. I read it more like a series of instructions for living, or conceptualising one’s life. Its wisdom seemed timeless. Each poem felt like a kind of fragment of a religious text, which, if ever pieced together and understood, would explain most of everything.
For years, especially as I wrote my undergraduate dissertation, my favourite line of poetry had been from that collection: We are somewhere near a tennis court at night.
This line captured something like what I meant when I said Wallace Steven believed that, during the summer, the soul could extend from the body. The kind of extrasensory feeling that we’re ‘somewhere near’ a tennis court, mixed with the vivid sense of the artificial lighting of the court, and the emptiness of the court itself.
There is a strangeness to this line, as well as an intense beauty- a beauty that I always found the most intense and convincing- the idea that there is more, more life, more world, always going on around us, that, while we can’t see it, we are, in a sense, always there. By this, I think I mean that there is nothing outside of experience, but that experience is also a collective thing not limited solely by what we see and hear by our own eyes and ears. There are things that we know and experience in other ways. Things that we know are always near. The nets hanging in the darkness. The hedges nearby.
So, I’d returned from this line, which had formed a core part of the argument in my dissertation, and continued to read on. Immediately after, on the following line, I was surprised to find a line that I had read many times before but seldom paid much attention to, probably owning to the importance I saw in the line prior.
We are somewhere near a tennis court at night.
We get lost in life, but life knows where we are.
I stopped in my tracks, not quite able to take in what I had just read. Suddenly, this line made sense in a way it never had before.
I had spent weeks thrown back and forth between illness and life, lost in the swing between nothing and everything. Now, here I was laying on my bedroom floor seeing this, reading it again:
We get lost in life, but life knows where we are.
In a totally intuitive, simplistic way, all of it made sense. The way in which, no matter how lost we might get, how unfocussed, how ill, how depressed, we are always within the great arc of life.
We can never be ‘outside’ because there is no outside. We are always in it, and always at the absolute centre, right where we need to be and right where we always were. Life knows where we are, all the time, because all of this has happened before.
I would love to go into detail about predetermination here, which I believe in passionately and wholeheartedly, but I will have to save that for another blog post.
Suffice it to say that rediscovering this line has had an intense impact on my general outlook on life and my sense of satisfaction with the way things are headed. It’s given me a renewed sense of comfort, at the very least.
By the weekend, I felt mostly better. I went to drag brunch in Dalston Superstore with Oliver and his friends- and Sarah, who joined for the first couple of hours. We followed up the drag brunch drinks with a few at various pubs in Dalston. Once again, the weather was perfect- this August has had the best weather I remember for the month in years.
My last week of work in August was intense, as we’ve got something big coming in September, which should be fun and exciting. I finished on the thursday with some great, positive feedback on the work I’d been doing in the throes of my illness and recovery, which was a fitting end to the school year for me.
23rd August was All Points East festival in Victoria park, which Oliver and I had awaited eagerly. We saw: NewDad, Jockstrap, Pixies, and LCD Soundsystem.
It was such a brilliant day. We snook in 500ml resealed bottles of gin, were given some free snus on the way in, and I wore my new red and white wrap dress. We had some great conversations with a Swedish girl in the crowd while we waited for Pixies to come on stage. The band were great, and played a lot of Doolittle, which is my favourite album of theirs.
We had a great position for the main event. LCD Soundsystem did a 2 hour set which was, probably, the best thing I’ve ever seen live. I had been a fan of their music for years, but had never been obsessed them with bar ‘All I Want’, which I mentioned in reading 14. Stood there, listening to ‘Home’, and ‘Dance Yrself Clean’, and ‘Someone Great’, I was simply elated. The crowd was perfect, everyone was dancing, and chanting at some of the more anthemic sections. We were all mesmerised by the giant disco ball- and the music couldn’t have been better for us to dance to.
But the absolute highlight was their last song, which I think many saw coming: ‘All My Friends’. The rising end of the song had Oliver, who stood just ahead of me in the crowd, thrusting his fist in the air as we all danced and sang. I was ecstatic.
We hummed ‘Dance Yrself Clean’ most of the way home from Mile End. I got back and gulped down a bottle of Arabic orange Fanta. When I woke up at 3am, incredibly hungover from the gin, I had to battle to not put the song on, as I knew that would take at least an hour off my precious sleep. The next morning I got the 5 hour train to Cornwall, listening to LCD Soundsystem the whole way.
Molly got on the train at Exeter, and we sat together for the last few hours of the journey. This was the fourth year she was joining us on our annual family trip to Cornwall, and I was so happy to see her there again.
I’ve already written a lot for this one, so I will keep the last week of August brief.
Molly and I got the ferry across from Falmouth, where we were staying, to Flushing. We had some nice lagers in a very picturesque and sunny beer garden before going to the village summer fete, which was totally bizarre but fun. We looked through the books they had on sale and drank a nice glass of Pimms each.
The following evening, we went to a vegetarian Indian restuarant in town that we loved the previous year. It was as delicious as last time, and it was great to have more good conversations with a most loved friend.
Afterwards, we walked back to Beerwolf books to meet my brother, who had just arrived in Cornwall from Leeds fest, where he had been working. He had some excellent stories to tell.
On Thursday the 29th of August, Molly and I lay in bed watching a documentary on the queer and lesbian artists of Lamorna Cove in South West Cornwall, where a collection of artists, eschewed by the more well known colonies of St Ives, had lived in relative seclusion, fucked each other, and made amazing, modernist artwork.
We decided to add Lamorna Cove to our itinerary for our trip to Penzance and Newlyn that day. My brother joined us, and it was another glorious day in the sun.
We saw art from the Newlyn School in Penzance before walking into Newlyn for a pasty, and a pint of lager. After, we got the bus, to Lamorna, which was exhilaratingly windy on the top deck as it raced up the hill and into the Cornish countryside.
At Lamorna, we went to the settlement’s only pub, the Lamorna Wink, before walking towards the scenic cove itself, speculating on the artistic history the cottages was we walked down.
We had ice creams and a can of lager each. I had mint choc chip, and we sat with our feet in the icy water looking over the bright rock of the cove, struck by how isolated the area was compared to St Ives, but immediately recognising the artistic attraction of the area.
A man was standing stones on the rocks around us, which added to the weirdly totemic, spritual feel on the cove. Molly and I mediated for a while, listening to the sounds of the waves hitting the rocks, before I started exclaiming ‘wooooo!’ in excitement, breaking her out of her mediations.
We got the train back, and had chips at my family’s new house in Falmouth. We spent the last day, on the beach in Falmouth- again, warm, sunny,- and we both got fully in the sea, though it was far cooler than Whitstable had been at the start of the month.
I got back yesterday, the 31st of August. Now it is the 1st of September. I’m finishing this up listening to LCD Soundsystem, which I played constantly in Cornwall, and which me Molly, and my brother danced to on the last night.
I am, weirdly, excited to go back to work. We have big things planned, and I have a new dress in sage green for Monday.
I’m also excited to join the downward slide into autumn. Not because I’m glad the summer is over either. It was a weird summer, it was going to be very big, and it was, though not quite in the ways I thought.
I was ill for much of it, but perhaps the chiaroscuro effect that had on my weeks as they passed by only brought the fun into greater relief. I hope to write more.
We get lost in life, but life knows where we are.
01/09/2024
Freya-Onions-report 
Leave a reply to Freya Onions Cancel reply