Welcome to my home town: Bodmin beyond the Beast and Jail

 (Written for The Independent, originally published here.)

This storied Cornish town has long suffered from a dark reputation – but it’s finally finding its feet, says Will Marlow.

When I tell people I’m from the Cornish town of Bodmin, many ask excitedly if I’ve ever seen the so-called ‘Beast’ of Bodmin Moor. Cornwall’s version of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster is a – sometimes phantom – big cat that preys on the local livestock. It’s been the subject of many a blurry photo and unverified sighting since I was a kid, but was the least of my worries while I was growing up there.

Hunkered down in a valley, Bodmin’s ominous-looking police station looks down on the town from one side while the distinctive Sir Walter Raleigh Gilbert monument looks down from the beautiful Beacon Nature Reserve on the other. These two structures perhaps better represent my home town’s enduring reputation – as a place that struggles with drug crime, and as somewhere better known for what it used to be.

Bodmin’s dark reputation within the county was probably formed when it became the home of the County Lunatic Asylum in the early 19th century. Later the hospital was named the more palatable St Lawrence’s, and my parents worked there throughout my childhood, giving the young me some empathy for people with mental health issues.

To most locals though, the sprawling hospital was a ‘scary’ place, with its classic horror-film-asylum look and tall stories about its inhabitants. It was joined in the town by another fearsome-looking building, one with supposedly more ghostly inhabitants – the Bodmin Jail. It’s been a tourist attraction for as long as I can remember, rundown when I was young: badly dressed dummies acting as the building’s former prisoners, and bats and weeds taking over the more ruinous parts. 

The Jail gave me the first inkling that Bodmin had a more colourful history than the tired town I grew up in suggested. As someone who will take to city streets to exercise my democratic right to protest, it gives me pride that my home town launched a number of uprisings against the policies of Tudor kings. All failed, but you have to admire their spunk. The people of Bodmin do – each year the town celebrates its part in the 1549 Prayer Book Rebellion with Heritage Day in July.

I would take part in Heritage Day as a child, dressing up in 16th century garb and dancing with the other school kids up the high street to the tune of Bodmin Riding – a tune I could hum to you to this day. Sunny days were also spent with my friends walking and cycling around the Beacon Nature Reserve (“the Beacon”), and up and down the Camel Trail, a 17-mile former railway line that takes walkers, cyclists, runners, and horse riders to Wadebridge and then on to Padstow.

But these sunny memories are outnumbered by those couched in Cornwall’s infamous grey drizzle. I would often use those same Beacon lanes to avoid school bullies on the way home. And I grew up in uncomfortably close proximity to drug crime and the town’s dark underbelly. It wasn’t unusual to find myself at a friend of a friend’s place where someone was taking heroin.

Bodmin wasn’t for me, for those reasons and more. Like the smalltown boy in Bronski Beat’s famous song, I left at 18 with everything I owned in a case. As a budding young gay man, I wasn’t going to find the answers I needed there. 

It took a pandemic to bring me back. When the country shut down, many of the reasons I lived in London – the music, the history, the gay culture, the food, and, most pressingly, the work – were taken away. The city suddenly felt as oppressive as Bodmin had when I was growing up. For the first time in my life, my home town seemed to offer some solace.

I’ve returned to a changing town. While many of its issues remain, it no longer has to be the town tourists drive around to get to the rest of Cornwall. The looming buildings have been transformed – St Lawrence’s is now a leafy residential area – and I can see the beginnings of a town easing towards a more prosperous future. 

Visit Bodmin once travel restrictions ease and in the future you might be able to say you went before it was … dare I say it … fashionable.

Bodmin Jail Attraction and Hotel

Gone are the lousy mannequin prisoners of my youth. Now, Bodmin Jail is an £8.5 million immersive experience that opened in October last year. You can learn about the harsh lives of the prisoners, take the ‘Dark Walk’ to get a taste of the wider county and its long history of miners excavating the windswept countryside and smugglers navigating the rugged coastline. If you’re game, you can also follow in the footsteps of the condemned – to the fully working Victorian Hanging Pit.

The rest of the ruins have also been converted in recent years – into the long-gestating Bodmin Jail Hotel, which finally opens its doors for guests on 17th May. It was a hard building to renovate: drills weren’t strong enough to drill the limestone walls, there were no copies of the original plans, and one of the biggest bat populations in the UK lived there (they now have a new roost on the site). Five years and £40 million later, Bodmin now has a beautiful and highly unusual 4-star hotel to draw tourists in.

Up the Beacon and Down the Camel Trail

The lanes around the Beacon Nature Reserve weren’t very tourist-friendly when I was skipping school in them, you had to know your way around. Now though, they’ve been tidied up and given signage, which takes the fun out of it for me but will make navigating them easier for you. Parts of the hill are closed off to benefit local wildlife, but there’s plenty of wild and windswept greenery you can traipse through.

Since I’ve been back, I’ve relived feeling the wind in my hair cycling down the very steep hills from the Beacon to the Camel Trail. The abandoned concrete pipes at the start of the Trail that my friends and I would hang out on are long gone. Now, there’s a car park and a map that will direct you along the old railway line, following the beautiful tributaries of the Camel River.

Food and Drink, But Mostly Drink

One thing Bodmin has never been lacking in is pubs, and there’s some great ones. Ten minutes down the Camel Trail is the Borough Arms, which is well-known for its carvery. Back in town you’ll find the Mason's Arms, a proper locals’ pub, but welcoming, with low ceiling beams and a living room atmosphere. There’s also an actually-quite-nice Wetherspoons, the converted Chapel an Gansblydhen (locals naturally call it “Spoons”). Down the other end of town is the Hole in the Wall, another cosy pub with chatty locals. Ask them about the pub’s mascot, the taxidermied lion you’ll see on the way in. 

Quality eateries are harder to come by in the town, it’s mainly takeaways and pub grub. But the exception is the high-end Flory Restaurant on the town square, serving a Spanish-inspired menu with Cornish ingredients. There are also a few cafes (selling pasties, naturally) and cream tea at the Camel Trail Tea Garden.

Bodmin’s Past in The Present

There are two museums in the town: one about Bodmin itself, and the better-known Bodmin Keep, which explores Cornwall's military history. Near the latter is Bodmin & Wenford Railway, a 1950s-style train station from which you can take a pleasingly windy 2-hour steam railway journey. Plus, for a glimpse of Bodmin’s prettier past, a short drive will take you to National Trust property Lanhydrock House, whose beautiful garden I ran around in many times as a kid.

Rebuilding your resilience at work after burning out from stress

 (An unpublished blog written for Hoxby – a freelance collective with a focus on flexible working.)

Not everyone is born resilient, a lot of us build it through experience. And sometimes the 'bounce-backability' we develop is weakened by stress. Writer and digital content manager Will Marlow explains how he’s rebuilding his resilience after burning out.

In 2019 I reached breaking point. I sent an email to a colleague angrily explaining why my team hadn’t done the piece of work he kept asking about. I told him he should be aware of the difficulties we were facing at the moment. I told him he should cut us some slack. Of course, I immediately regretted it. It was over-the-top, unnecessary and woefully unprofessional. I realised I was no longer in appropriate control.

Two things about this incident told me I had a bigger problem than just my huge workload to solve. Firstly, techniques I had learnt over the years to manage anger or frustration at work were no longer working. I didn’t delay my response and take some deep breaths. I didn’t go for a walk and respond when the anger had gone. And I didn’t ask myself the key question that can immediately burst a swelling bubble of frustration – will I care about this in five years’ time? (Answer: I can’t remember what the piece of work was just two years on!)

Secondly, this was a colleague I got on with. He wasn’t a colleague whose approach to work differs so much you have to work at working together. This was a man I’d had many honest and useful conversations with, an ally in the office if you like. That I’d lost my temper with him told me that something had gone very wrong. Stress was overwhelming me.

The signs of burnout

Often, you’re unaware of a workload growing into full-blown chronic stress. It happens gradually. My busy workload became a highly stressful job through a series of unfortunate events and bad timing, most of which I had no control over (more on that later). I took on more responsibility than I could handle – some of it (with hindsight) unnecessarily. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. But there were clues it was very much not the right thing.

Unable to relax or sleep

I would have stress dreams where I would find myself working again at my first job, but completely unable to do the things I used to do with aplomb. When I was with friends, I’d find myself talking about work all the time; nothing else got a look in. I’d skip the gym as my brain was so tired; I just wanted to slump on the sofa and zone out. Work polluted everything.

Unable to organise

Without realising it was happening, I’d lost control of my working day. There’s a difference between being flexible and just being reactive. I became the latter, finding myself busy all day without ticking much off my to-do list. I lost perspective and my ability to prioritise. Attempts to organise my time no longer worked because I felt overwhelmed.

Unable to appreciate the wins

I became increasingly negative about the work both I and the organisation were doing. I was lucky enough to spend some time with a career coach last year and it was a revelation to me to have someone point out all the stuff I did achieve in the past few years. I hadn’t really noticed. 

Instead, I became focused on what hadn’t been done yet, what should’ve been done better, or what couldn’t be done. When things were completed, I just ticked them off and moved on to the next thing. I no longer had the space in my head to reflect on work that was done and done well; to understand and appreciate that I was achieving things.

That negativity inevitability spilled into work conversations. I wasn’t the only one – we all like a bit of a moan or rant about difficulties at work. Indeed, I’d say those conversations are useful to 1) keep you sane, and 2) facilitate problem-solving. But a constant stream of negativity becomes unhelpful, and reflects on you badly. I’d find that even when my pointing out a potential issue prevented that issue occurring, I was still mulling over the other things that nearly caused that issue. I’d lost the ability to acknowledge and enjoy when a problem was solved.

Unable to care about the work

For me, this came in the final stages of being overwhelmed by stress. I plummeted from caring too much to not caring at all. For someone who prides himself on being a conscientious and helpful colleague, this was devastating. But my drive had left me.

Returning to resilient working – and enjoying work!

I’ll be honest – recovering from burnout isn’t easy. Prevention is always going to be the better option. If you get even a hint of any of the above happening to you, then apply all of the following without hesitation. Resilience is key to everyone’s working life – not least in the past year and as we continue to work through the upheaval of a global pandemic.

Prioritise your physical and mental health

Where I would skip the gym in favour of trash telly for my tired brain, I’ve since learnt to separate these elements of my life. Rather than allow work to affect my exercise routine, I switch from Working Will to Exercising Will. My focus shifts to exercise rather than remaining on work after I’ve switched the computer off.

Factoring time for rest and renewal is a key part of maintaining your physical and mental health. Working long hours and weekends is a key factor in burnout. Understanding when and for how long I’m at my most productive has been so useful in managing my workload, and is why I was drawn to Hoxby’s ‘workstyle’ philosophy. I’m not a morning person, but I do power up naturally around 11am. Plus my brain is oddly creative between 11pm and 1am! Being aware of that has helped me work out the best times to rest through the week.

Other health tips you might have heard many times before – because they work! Move more, eat healthily, cut back on caffeine and alcohol, practice mindfulness or meditation, have good sleep hygiene (such as not looking at screens before sleeping). All of these have helped me rebuild my resilience.

Approach and respond to things positively

Easier said than done! But I have been learning how to question the negative attitude and responses that became ingrained when I was stressed. I now ask myself, is there another way to look at this situation? It sounds cheesy, but… is this a problem or an opportunity? I’ve found that optimism facilitates resilience, pessimism eats away at it.

I’d allowed less friendly work relationships to deteriorate when I was burning out. Some colleagues became obstructions in my mind, rather than people with shared business goals. Positive communication with all your colleagues – and being able to ask for and offer help – is essential for avoiding bad days at work.

One tactic I’ve learnt (or relearnt) is approaching situations or conversations (especially potentially difficult ones) neutrally. Rather than go in to something expecting a battle, go in with no expectations. It makes for much nicer and more useful conversations. 

Another tactic is letting go of what I think ‘should’ be happening. Whether something ‘should’ or ‘should not’ take place, the reality is sometimes different. I’m learning to accept that when it happens and take things from there. It saves a lot of time and argument.

Know what’s important to you – and what you can control

You have a huge amount of resilience when you care about the work you’re doing. But I lost focus on what my goals at work were; I became overwhelmed by the bigger picture – things I had little influence or no control over. I’m learning now how to keep my focus on what is important to me, what I can influence, and what is achievable. 

Many people get stressed about making mistakes at work as well. One thing I have long understood is that a mistake is always something to learn from. You’ll gain new information about your client, customers, colleagues, organisation, yourself – or all of them! I’m also learning to remember that failure isn’t permanent – there will be successes and triumphs to come.

I’m more comfortable asking questions now as well – you don’t know what you don’t know, but you can control that by asking questions. Scarily, the more knowledge I do gain the more I realise how much more there is to learn about the world. I have 25 years left of my working life; even learning every day I’ll have barely scratched the surface when I retire. And that’s okay.

Find out more about how Hoxby's experts can help your HR team develop a happy, fulfilled, and highly productive workforce. And discover how The Hoxby Foundation is popularising #workstyle – flexible working that everyone can access, no matter their challenges in life.

How can your brand have a more meaningful impact during Pride Month?

 (Written as a LinkedIn blog, originally published here.)

Wrote some words to help straight people have a better understanding of what #PrideMonth is and how a #brand they work for can contribute more meaningfully to the movement.

As 2020 continues apace, many communications and marketing teams are thinking about how their brand can support Pride Month in June. Pride Month – a period of both celebration and raising awareness for the LGBT+ community – has become a key part of many brands’ marketing calendar, with rainbow versions of brand logos and branding now a common sight throughout June.

For many LGBT+ people, the superficial sight of the now well-known Pride flag, incorporated into familiar or favourite brand logos, is indescribably pleasing – a sure sign of the huge leaps of progress we’ve seen for LGBT+ people in recent decades. But dig just a little bit into the detail of the campaigns, and they can prove to be, at best, confused and naïve, at worst, hypocritical or meaningless.

It’s not surprising. With straight people being the main driving force behind these campaigns, there’s a big knowledge gap in understanding exactly what Pride is, what it means to people, and how their brand can join and encourage the momentum of what is a now a hugely successful movement.

A straight friend of mine who works for a large PR firm recently got in touch for some help with a pitch to a client, a well-known transatlantic brand. Last year the brand had engaged with Pride, which included changing their name to a mildly amusing LGBT+ pun. But the campaign was unable to show any real benefit for LGBT+ rights. It’s engagement with Pride Month had proved superficial only. My friend wanted to propose something more meaningful, but was clever enough to acknowledge she wasn’t really aware of the issues. As a friend of hers who is a G in the LGBT+ alphabet*, did I have any ideas?

What is Pride?

For me, I’ve been immersed in an understanding of Pride from when I first came out – I went to my first Pride parade in London in 1997. It was both empowering and a huge amount of fun (themes we’ll come back to below). I’ve been to many Pride celebrations in different cities around the world since then. As such, it’s easy for me to take for granted that straight people will just get it, but a lot of the time they don’t. A prime of example of this was last year’s astonishing development of a ‘Straight Pride’ in Boston, which wholly and aggressively missed the point of Pride.  

So, for straight people managing a brand and wondering what on earth they can do this June to engage with Pride Month, first you’ll need a bit of context – some Pride 101.

Pride started off as a protest movement, much in the same way as the women’s or civil rights movements. We mark it in June as that’s when the Stonewall riots, a key turning point in LGBT+ history, happened back in 1969 (although Pride events do take place across the UK and the world from spring well into autumn). The first Pride march in London took place in 1972 – part of a growing public demand from LGBT+ people for social and legal recognition in this country. Pride marches remain just that in many other countries where it is illegal or not tolerated to be LGBT+.

Celebration vs education

Here in the UK Pride has evolved into a number of things:

1. a celebration of the change and progress that has occurred,
2. an opportunity to maintain the visibility we now have in society (where women are quite obviously women, BAME people are quite obviously BAME people, LGBT+ people can easily blend into society and be forgotten – we need these events and ongoing media coverage to remind people ‘WE EXIST’ (a common phrase used in rights campaigning)), and
3. an opportunity to make each other and straight people more aware of the ongoing issues that LGBT+ people here and around the world face today.

1 and 3 can conflict with each other and sometimes cause disagreement in the LGBT+ community about the tone and purpose of Pride. Part of this debate is around the inclusion of big-name brands in Pride parades – which dominate them with huge, colourful floats blasting out pop songs – and brands waving the rainbow flag in their marketing during Pride Month. On one side, this is great – validation and acknowledgement from the mainstream, perfect for element no 2 – and it is an incredible, validating experience for the LGBT+ employees and customers of that brand.

On the other side, brand activity and the carnival, party element of Pride can drown out element no 3. Brands embrace the celebration aspect so whole-heartedly, it’s easy to forget 1) the huge problems that have been overcome, and 2) the huge problems that still remain. At best it’s naïve, at worst it’s willfully ignorant and jumping on the bandwagon to cynically capture the attention of the many LGBT+ people with disposable cash (the ‘pink pound’, as they say).

A good example of a brand missing the point is Barclays’ work with diver and Olympian Tom Daley in 2017. He went to his first Pride sponsored by Barclays and was posting videos and photos from the day on his social media channels. Knowing the importance of your first Pride as an out gay man, I shudder at the cynicism of this, capitalism at its most invasive. But I don’t think either party was to blame per se – there was clearly a lack of knowledge about the complexity and meaning of Pride.

The comedian Joe Lycett also took umbrage with Daley's posts, feeling it wasn’t in keeping with the spirit of Pride, and started hash-tagging other banks under Daley’s social posts. Subtle and silly, but he felt he’d made his point and left it at that. But then other people started doing it as well! It became something of an issue. Lycett does a very funny skit about it in his recent stand-up show, which I won't ruin here. 

If you watch Daley’s YouTube video about the day, you can see Lycett’s point. Barclays chose a nice-looking, married, middle class white gay man and got him to film the nice, middle class Barclays staff and the mostly straight crowd having the best time evs at Pride. But Pride is so much more diverse and eye-opening and political than what you see in Daley's video, which generously features an occasional shot of a drag queen.

We don’t even get to hear what Daley’s husband says in his speech at Trafalgar Square, just him geeing up the crowd. There’s zero sense of element 3 of Pride, which is arguably still the most important element. Someone watching Daley’s video will only come away with the sense that LGBT+ rights is job done, good for them.

What are the issues that LGBT+ people face and how can brands help?

There’s lots of ways brands can contribute in more meaningful ways to counter the potential cynicism of their involvement. When I was working at Cifas, rather than just stick a rainbow version of the logo on social, we published comments from the CEO about the work he’s doing to promote diversity and inclusion (D&I) in the organisation. We felt the acknowledgement of Pride needed to have some meaning behind it, that it needed to reflect the organisation's behaviour towards minorities. Cifas was doing meaningful work around D&I, so why not talk about it?

D&I has become a key focus for many companies. For LGBT+ people specifically, the business case for enabling talented LGBT+ people to be themselves at work is clear – they work better and are more productive. What is your brand doing in this area? Rather than D&I remaining just an internal discussion, be public about it. That way more talented LGBT+ people will be drawn to work for the company in the future. It is a key internal discussion you can leverage as well – e.g. what D&I guidance is given to customer-facing colleagues? Can a lesbian couple expect to be treated as a straight couple? Will a trans person feel welcomed and safe in the hands of your brand? If so, why not reflect that in your marketing and PR?

D&I doesn’t have to be a conversation just for Pride month either, there’s no reason not to talk about it all the time. But also with LGBT+ rights, there’s other awareness touchstones through the year – this month, February, is LGBT History Month in the UK, perfect for talking about the things that have been achieved so far. There's International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia on 17 May. Then there’s Coming Out Day on 11 October, which gets a huge amount of traction on social. Coming out is a hugely complicated and difficult process that straight people won't be able to fully comprehend – there’s nothing you go through that’s similar. Helping achieve a better understanding of that is useful for LGBT+ people in engaging the sympathy and support of straight people.

There’s also a lot of campaigning done around getting the support of straight people in progressing LGBT+ rights. We can’t do it on our own, and it’s mostly straight people that will drive changes in the law and in society. Also, it’s more powerful when a straight person calls out homophobia than when we do it – it says more clearly: this is socially unacceptable. Straight people that are motivated to stand up for LGBT+ rights, or willing to normalise LGBT+ people in society, are called ‘allies’.

I have a particular straight male friend who fits this bill. One of the many reasons I’m friends with him is his willingness, seemingly instinctual, to normalise my sexuality – not just with me, but in front of his other friends. He’s made me feel more comfortable in social situations where I might otherwise just stay quiet and not get too involved. I know he’s got my back. Normalising LGBT+ people for straight people, and then getting them to normalise us for other straight people, and calling out homophobia and discrimination when they see it, is a key piece of work in gay rights. It’s the only way things will get better.

Another big issue for LGBT+ people here in the UK is mental health. We grow up feeling unsafe and feeling shame, in constant fight or flight, which is embedded during childhood. It manifests itself in adulthood in many ways – depression, drug problems, sex addiction, etc. There’s a fantastic book I’m reading at the moment called Straight Jacket by Matthew Todd about overcoming the legacy of shame. And that’s why it’s called Pride – to counter our feelings of shame, if only for one day. So, if your brand has any kind of social responsibility programme, supporting charities that tackle LGBT+ mental health issues would be something worth talking about.

Trans rights is another key issue. Some people seem to have accepted that homophobia is no longer socially acceptable and moved their bigotry over to trans people. The debate centres around: is a trans woman a woman, is a trans man a man – what toilet do they use? Even progressive hero JK Rowling has joined in, disappointingly. As such it’s probably a more difficult issue for brands to engage with, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t – at the same time, trans people are becoming very visible and successful in the mainstream: Caitlyn Jenner, Eddie Izzard, Sam Smith, Laverne Cox, to name a few. And while not trans, but certainly playing with ideas of gender, the success of RuPaul’s Drag Race makes it clear that a mainstream audience will engage with something different if it’s presented in a way they understand – in this case a reality show. Again, donating to trans rights charities or campaign groups as part of social responsibility programme, and making trans people feel seen and welcome in your marketing, would be something worth talking about.

Internationally, it’s a mixed affair for LGBT+ rights. 27 countries have made same-sex marriage legal, and 43 countries recognise homophobic crime as a hate crime, but in 70 countries same-sex sexual activity is still a crime, and in 9 countries you can actually be put to death for it. Amnesty has a good global overview, including a bit on why LGBT+ rights are important. In the US a key issue is treatments to 'cure' gay people (two good films about that came out recently: The Miseducation of Cameron Post and Boy Erased), and the rolling back of LGBT+ rights by the Trump administration. But I’m guessing most readers of this will be focusing on UK campaigns. Hopefully the above has given you enough to chew on.

Obviously, it’s hard to give you specific ideas – only you know your brand and how it can collaborate with the Pride movement. But hopefully a better understanding of that movement triggers some ideas for you – ideas that will have a more meaningful impact on the progression of LGBT+ rights. I’m here if you have any questions, and I’d be very pleased to hear how you do this June.

* How you refer to the LGBT+ acronym in your communications is an editorial decision. It has a varied and highly political history, with some versions having 11 letters. The difficulty of including all the different ways people might identify themselves suggests to me that labelling something as complex as sexuality or gender is a non-starter. But for now we’re still in the business of labelling things to help people understand them – labels are still useful. I go for the acronym LGBT+ as most people know and understand those four letters and you’re still acknowledging that there are more identities out there in need of recognition.

Why we should #SaveTheOA

Just smashed through the rest of Part 2 of The OA, such a brilliant TV show. It had me looking up ‘transference’, which led me down a Wikipedia warren to Freud’s views on homosexuality, Havelock Ellis, eugenics, the Nazis and eugenics, the US and eugenics (man, they were well into it before the Nazis came along), JH Kellogg, and a reminder of the greatest fact of all time - that Kellogg invented cornflakes to dampen people’s urge to masturbate.

It also had me googling Pyramus and Thisbe, which taught me about Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses, previously unknown to me, and led me through how we ended up with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which I’d always thought was his story. All this from watching American fantasy drama The OA.

It also had me looking up liminal thinking, liminality, liminal beings – such as centaurs, ghosts and cyborgs – and the work of cultural anthropologist Victor Turner. Turner’s words offered me a new lens through which to view my ongoing depression, as this writer used it to view her grief: ‘Turner defined liminal individuals as “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony”. But Turner gives hope by referring to “betwixt and between” through the concept of the “realm of pure possibility.”’

Rather than view my depression as something through which I’ll continue to wade for the rest of my life, I can view it as a threshold through which to pass, something betwixt and between what went before and what will come next.

You don’t get that from many TV dramas. But The OA is so well thought out, so thoroughly researched and structured, it offers up a real-life cultural puzzle to unpick that’s almost as compelling as the puzzle in the house that the characters are trying to solve. That Netflix have cancelled it is such a shame given that both the world it’s created and the storytellers behind it are just beginning to show their potential.

I hope there is some way we will get to see Part 3 of The OA, and hopefully much more. I hope that the obvious love on social media for the show will cause Netflix to rethink their decision. Shows like this don’t come along very often. Please don’t leave us betwixt and between.

Leaving Facebook

The Cambridge Analytica scandal should’ve been enough really, to make me want to abandon Facebook. It was clear evidence that we were sharing personal information with an organisation that had no regulations around what happened to it, and didn’t seem to care. It was clear evidence that it was our personal information that Facebook traded in, not the modicum of advertising you see dotted around the website.

But I stayed, buoyed along by the ease with which I was able to keep in touch with people close and far away. It seemed so innocent when I logged in – pictures of my nephews’ smiling faces, friends running marathons, my sister training her dog, friends sharing useful information about living a greener, more environmentally life in a world built to do the exact opposite. What could possibly be wrong with all that?

The news kept coming, however. We can now attribute the work of Cambridge Analytica to the presence of Donald Trump in the White House, a racist and a liar whose navel-gazing and inept approach to politics now has him causing a multitude of unnecessary deaths in the Middle East. But they’re not American deaths so that’s okay.

I digress. Reporting on Vote Leave, the organisation given the job of campaigning for the leave side in the UK’s 2016 EU referendum, revealed it had spent millions on targeted Facebook posts – using often inaccurate but always emotive words and memes to fire up those voters who were either unsure what to vote, or weren’t previously even intending to vote.

As such, here in Britain we now live with chaos, ineptitude and divisiveness that just wasn’t there before 2016. Or where it was, it was contained and work was being done to improve things. We now live with an open, gangrenous wound that splits families and friends at the slightest mention of the word ‘Brexit’. And we are led by another racist and liar who has only his self-interest at heart.

And aren’t the racists loving it. Two of the leaders of the free world are openly racist and get away with it, so now they can to. To see news footage of Bulgarian ‘football fans’ making Nazi salutes and monkey noises at the England players is incredibly distressing. We’re going back, not forwards. Back to darker times, not the mythical better times the Brexiteers would have you believe.

It’s not all Facebook’s fault, of course. This ongoing upheaval is a perfect storm of many factors. But Facebook is a large factor, and one I have some control over. The positive aspects of using the site fade with every login. Many of my close friends have departed it in the past year, or just stopped using it. Most of my friends and family I keep in touch with over WhatsApp and, of course, in real life. (I’m aware WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, but it has proven less insidious so far, and I will happily jump ship once something better comes along.)

But what of those people who you only keep in touch with via Facebook, you might ask. I think losing touch with people is okay – it happened all the time before Facebook came along. I don’t think it’s necessary to keep in touch with everyone you meet, whether it’s old school friends, former colleagues, or a friend of a friend you’ve had a few good nights out with. If I see you out-and-about I will say hello and find out what’s been going on in your life, that won’t change. If anything, it will make it more pleasurable. A nice surprise.

I expect I will miss those that post regular updates about their lives, especially those that live abroad, watching their kids (or pets) grow up. But these curated displays of lives lived at their best are no good for anyone’s mental health – your friends and family always seem to be having a better time than you. The truth is often far different when you speak to them privately – they are experiencing ups and downs as much as anyone, but sitting there comparing your life to what is presented on Facebook is a mistake that is all too easy and tempting to make.

I’ll miss those that are ‘good’ at Facebook as well, those that post regularly and engagingly, with good humour and pathos, inviting informative and entertaining conversation. Unfortunately, they are the exception that proves the rule – Facebook is not a place for discussing, questioning, and learning something new. It’s a place to shout your opinion, shoot people down, and get offended at the slightest hint someone might disagree.

So, it’s not Mark Zuckerberg’s quiet meetings with right-wing influencers that has finally moved me to #DeleteFacebook. I’m actually quite admiring of that. He said himself when interviewed by Congress that Big Tech companies are naturally more left-wing environments. That he is trying to engage people “across the spectrum on lots of different issues all the time”, is an ideal way to counter the divisive rhetoric of many of our current leaders. “Meeting new people and hearing from a wide range of viewpoints is part of learning,” he says. “If you haven't tried it, I suggest you do!” He’s not wrong.

And yet his website isn’t built to nurture that, quite the opposite. It enables you to create a bubble in which all of your opinions are validated for you all of the time, and if anything counters that you can silence it quickly with a tap of your finger. There’s no need to engage with anything uncomfortable any more – even if it’s factually correct.

Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s recent baiting of Facebook’s advertising ‘standards’, an attempt to force them to be more diligent in fact-checking political adverts in the run-up to the 2020 US election, showed how unwilling the company is to take any responsibility for misuse of the immensely powerful tool they’ve created. It’s their wholly unsatisfying response to Warren’s challenge that has finally broken me. If they can’t find ways to regulate this monster they’ve created, to stop it from bending reality so much that the societal system we have become so accustomed to starts to break in deeply unsettling ways, then I want out. I’m pushing the eject button.

We all should really. It’s the lack of meaningful reaction from Facebook users to the reveals of how our personal data is being used that keeps the company assured in its lack of action. If we don’t care, why should they? Only a substantial exodus would prod them into more accountability. But I understand why you don’t want to leave – it’s a very hard habit to give up.

I’ve had a good 12 years (!) on Facebook. I’ve laughed a lot, had my heart warmed, and shared some of the best moments of my life with the people I care about who couldn’t be there. And I’ve done all the awful, unhealthy things as well – cyber-stalked exes, befriended school peers to see how fat they’d got, aggressively shot down the opinions of friends of friends with whom I disagree. I won’t miss that ‘benefit’. It never got me anywhere good. But also, Facebook has maintained and renewed friendships I might otherwise have lost, and I am enormously grateful for that. Now though it’s time to find new ways to do that, ways that don’t contribute so much damage to the world around us.

The man who do what you don't dare do

A darkened tunnel inadequately lights up. An alarming riff rings in the beginning of the madness. In a siding off the tunnel stand two men: one is stock-still, waiting, watching; the other, his body is swaying as he stares unflinchingly at the camera, his boldly patterned top – a deconstructed and reshaped American flag – at odds with the double Mohican hairstyle and eyes blackened with make-up.

There are men in the tunnel, what are they doing? As we get closer, we’re not sure we want to know. Each alarming riff is followed by a warning crash of bass and drums. It’s coming, it’s coming, what is coming? The still man in the siding is sat down, the other man twitches at the crash of drums. We are getting too close to the men in the tunnel, they stare at us. The still man is standing again. The other man is jumping unnervingly. He’s ready now. The men in the tunnel start to run. The chaos begins.

I'm the trouble starter, punkin' instigator
I'm the fear addicted, danger illustrated

Having been iconic and omni-present for some 23 years now, it’s hard to express the impact that The Prodigy’s Firestarter had on me, my peers, and popular culture at the time. It was, to put it with no exaggeration, a revelation. It was a much needed release during a period in which me and my peers were still coming to terms with both the raging hormones that were ravaging changes to our bodies, and the growing and seemingly inexplicable anger inside us, that, only with hindsight decades later, we can put down to the growing, unconscious realisation that the adults around us and in power weren’t the clever, knowing and authoritative individuals they’d have us believe. They were fucking everything up.

I'm the bitch you hated, filth infatuated, yeah!
I'm the pain you tasted, fell intoxicated

Culturally it was a revelation as well. With rave becoming commercialised, grunge becoming radio fodder, and Britpop starting to eat itself, Firestarter’s aggressive blend of rave and rock (it sampled relatively obscure alt-rock, synth-pop and house tracks) was a breath of fresh air. With its melding of genres, it was the beginning of the breakdown of the tribal barriers that had separated music fans for so long, a band that any of us could get behind.

“I keep coming back to @stuwhiffen DJing at the Bullseye when I was 17. It was an odd night, Indie/Metal/HipHop/whatever but there’d be a moment each Friday night that everyone would dance together, that moment would always be for The Prodigy.”
Music producer Dan le Sac on Twitter

The song’s lyrics, written by Keith Flint, the maniacal vocalist in the video, are shockingly violent, and the pummelling backing track, orchestrated by the sampling magicianship of still man Liam Howlett, is, to this day, an abrasive, triggering pleasure. In The Prodigy, producer Liam was the fuel, and growling vocalist Keith was the fire we were all drawn to. Firestarter shocked the establishment, with both song and video only allowed to be played after the watershed. But the people loved it and lapped it up, making it the band’s first UK No 1 – where it stayed for three weeks – and their first big international hit.

I'm the self inflicted, mind detonator, yeah
I'm the one infected, twisted animator

You can see the roots of what The Prodigy were creating with the Firestarter video, mashing together the aesthetics of the two biggest youth movements of their lifetimes: punk and rave. Keith Flint was mesmerising not least because of his performance, more on which in a bit, but also because of how he looked: punk haircut, goth make-up, chunky BDSM necklace and pierced tongue, contrasted with that boldly patterned (political?) top, and short trousers that added an unexpected and uncomfortable sense of the little boy lost. This on-the-nose mash-up of alternative cultures might not have worked either, were it not blended together by being filmed, disconcertingly, in black-and-white.

But the video was much more than just a show and tell of Things The Prodigy Love. Keith took his obvious admiration for Johnny Rotten and ran with it, taking it to a darker and, conversely, more fun place. It’s a classic punk frontman performance with deeply disturbing flourishes.

He’s troubled, trapped – literally at some points, in a web unable to move legs or arms, his body waving around uselessly. He twitches at every crash of bass drum, banging his head on the empty space in front of him. There’s something inside his head he’s trying to shake out, scratch out, but nothing works, the fire keeps burning inside. There is no respite. Sometimes he loses himself in the music and there’s a pleasing campness to his performance, a Freddie Mercury strut, juxtaposed with terrifying aggression as he punches the air between you and him and stares, challenging you to look away. 

His bandmates move around him like moths to a flame, not getting close enough to be burnt, but unable to draw themselves away – his madness is inexplicably intoxicating, appealing. Dressed normally, wearing the baggy tops and trousers most of us boys and girls were wearing in the mid-90s, the rest of The Prodigy represent us – the young and the jilted, just before Tony Blair and New Labour came along in their blindingly shining armour to give us some hope. They represent us, drawn to an idea, no matter how terrifying, of the freedom of madness and the chaos and uncertainty of rebellion, waiting in the dark, waiting for the opportunity to spill out on to the streets above.

I'm a firestarter, twisted firestarter
You're a firestarter, twisted firestarter

It’s this aggressive and unflinching passion for life, and making it something worth living, and living it on your own terms, that makes it so hard to reconcile with Keith Flint’s suicide. As I write we have no idea of the circumstances that led to it. He has talked in the past of his battles with depression and the resulting, gargantuan intake of drugs and alcohol that led to the collapse of The Prodigy in the mid-2000s. But the band had regrouped, continued to have No 1 albums (last year’s No Tourists being just the latest) and sell-out tours (one of which they were in the middle of when he died) – Flint’s performances leading to much overuse of the word ‘incendiary’.

Personally, he was married – to DJ Mayumi Kai – and lived in a nice house in Essex. He seemed to be embracing a sober and fit life, describing his live performances as his “drug. You've got to go out there firing. There's nothing sadder than watching a heavyweight boxer and he's out of shape and getting bashed around.”

That all seemed well is substantiated by his own bandmates’ reaction to his death. Announcing it on the band’s Instagram page Liam Howlett said: “The news is true , I can’t believe I’m saying this but our brother Keith took his own life over the weekend , I’m shell shocked , fuckin angry , confused and heart broken ..... r.i.p brother Liam”.

In recent years there’s been a number of well-known men who have taken their own lives, and some of them – Robin Williams, the double sucker punch to alternative music of Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington – I’ve been quite stunned and moved by. None of them moved me quite like Keith Flint’s death has though.

I’ve had my own issues with suicide ideation, which I won’t go into here as I’ve written about it before. But these events are certainly triggering and I’ve had to become adept at managing my own mental health and bouts of depression. I’ve found the best way of dealing with my sensitive reaction to the unexpected deaths of people I’m a fan of is to write about it (hence this blog) and to talk to friends about it. There was a flurry of messages I swapped with them in reaction to the news of Keith Flint’s death. This was a man and a band that had soundtracked our teenage and adult lives. As one friend said: “this makes our youth seem a long time ago.”

But, while The Prodigy’s 1994 album Music for the Jilted Generation was a seminal album for me (here’s the self-indulgent paragraphs) – one that showed me pop music didn’t have to be limited by genre, its cinematic scope and profound energy firing my imagination like few other albums have – The Prodigy’s impact didn’t stop for me and my peers in our teenage years.

I’ll never forget one couple I’m friends with picking Firestarter as the first dance at their wedding, much to the shock of their older guests and the amusement of the younger ones. The first time I saw Keith Flint in a live situation was not with The Prodigy, but with his short-lived punk band Flint at the Scala in London. The music might not have been fire-starting, but there was no escaping his mesmerising energy. Even in the quieter (for The Prodigy) ‘00s I remember the grinding funk of Girls kick-(fire)starting a party I was attending. They never lost their power even when their career seemed to be winding down.

Then, during their comeback in 2009, I finally saw them live (they’d been a long and conspicuous gap on my gig-attending CV) at the Big Day Out festival in Melbourne. Pogoing and head-banging in a tent in the Australian heat, it was one of the sweatiest and most breathless (from yelling “breathe with me”) live shows I’ve ever attended. Their show at Alexandra Palace in 2015 was similarly visceral – a beer-soaked blur of noise and adrenalin, mostly remembered amongst my friends now for one particularly amusing photo of me straddled on a friend’s shoulders, my arms thrust into the air, lost in the pure energy of the music.

Their music has continued to soundtrack our lives – last year’s No Tourists album providing a thought-provoking and incensing musical backdrop to the continued polarisation of politics we’re seeing, and unsure how to respond to. (Unintentionally, it seems – Liam Howlett has said the album is more about “escapism and the want and need to be derailed and not to be a tourist and follow that easy set path” and back in 2004 he told The Guardian: “Politics? It’s never political for us. We just write music for people to go ‘yeah!’ to. To be honest with you, I’ve never been angry about anything in my fucking life.”) As one friend said to me: “[No Tourists is] so good! They are so relevant and I hope it puts some energy into other [bands] to make something to wake people up.”

What we’re all struggling with though, more than the loss of Flint as a presence in our musical worlds, is the inexplicable nature of his death. It was the same with the deaths by suicide of Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington in 2017. And the same with any high-profile suicide – Anthony Bourdain, Avicii, Verne Troyer, Robin Williams, Alexander McQueen, and way back to that most talked about of rock suicides, Kurt Cobain’s – whether you’re a fan of these people or not, that question of ‘why?’ sits uncomfortably and stubbornly unanswered.

If even Keith Flint’s bandmate Liam Howlett, who he’s just spent weeks on tour with, can be “shell-shocked” and “confused”, what hope do we have of understanding the sudden death of a man who has been a familiar and invigorating presence for nearly 30 years? As one friend of mine put it: “It’s just awful. Makes you realise that anyone you know could end up taking this path.”

“The word that you hear is ‘selfish’. That used to get bandied around quite a lot: ‘Why would they be so selfish, look at the people they’re leaving behind.’ But they literally think that everybody else around them will be far better off without them there.”
Tony Robertson in ‘Horizon: Stopping Male Suicide’

That question of ‘why?’ is what recent BBC documentary Horizon: Stopping Male Suicide, aired in August last year, tries to explore at its start. In interviewing survivors of suicide attempts, and the friends and family of those who succeeded, they establish a number of key factors that can, and do, lead to men attempting or committing suicide. But before I describe them, here’s some stats for you:

• In the UK ¾ of people who commit suicide are male.
• Suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50 in the UK, causing more deaths in this group than car accidents and cancer.
• In the UK, someone takes their own life every 90 minutes, and it’s estimated that for every person that succeeds, there are 20 more attempts.
• There are higher rates of suicide in the north-east of England, where people are 35% more likely to take their own lives.
• It’s estimated that each suicide death costs the economy £1.5million.
• It’s UK Government policy to reduce suicide deaths by 10% by 2020.
• Funding for research into suicide prevention is much lower than many other areas of health: there is 22 times more funding for each cancer patient than for each person affected by mental health issues – suicide prevention funding is even smaller.

The Horizon documentary explores a number of factors that can contribute to suicidal thoughts or even lead to suicide. Not least of them is mental health issues, but the difficulty of using those as a predictor of suicide is that the majority of people with a mental illness never attempt to take their own life. The factors are more complex, and people with suicidal thoughts are often not in touch with mental health services. As one doctor puts it, “it’s like looking at a car and asking how it broke down – you need to know so much more about the car before you can work that out.”

Shirley Smith of suicide prevention charity If U Care Share, while talking about the larger numbers of suicides in the north-east of England, says there’s three factors that are common: bereavement, finances and failed relationships. The high unemployment rate in that area is also undoubtedly connected. If you lose your job, she says, that will have a knock-on effect on where you live, your relationship: “it’s a domino effect.”

That domino effect continues after someone has committed suicide as well – people are statistically more likely to attempt suicide if they know someone who has taken their own life. This is all within the context of diminishing friendship groups: the big gang you spend time with at school or university and into your 20s grows smaller, with many men relying only on their partner as they get older. If that relationship breaks down they are left isolated – many men not having the emotional support network that women nurture.

In 2017 Men’s Health magazine conducted a study “to better understand how mental ill health affects ordinary men in ordinary ways.” An astonishing 15,000 men contributed, with startling results. More than half (56%) said they have had suicidal thoughts, while 70% of them said that their mental health 'wasn't good'.

As Men’s Health editor Toby Wiseman describes it, what was revealed by the survey was a “conflict between notions of masculinity.” All the respondents subscribed to the idea of the ‘new man’, but found that hard to reconcile with the hard-wired, older idea of masculinity – defining yourself by your career, being the bread-winner, etc, which results in panic. “They know where to go for help but back themselves into a corner where they don’t feel able to, fighting some internal dialogue between the man they feel they should be and the man they can’t help but be.”

“If I knew 10% of what I know now, my son would still be alive.”
Steve Mallen of Zero Suicide Alliance

While showing that that factors that can lead suicide aren’t effective means to predict and therefore prevent it, Stopping Male Suicide does offer some advice to help us achieve what its title suggests, things we can do immediately and don’t need to be medically qualified for.

It all comes down to talking. Talking and listening; communicating better with your friends and family, and not skirting around the issue of suicide when someone you know seems down or troubled. Don’t be afraid to ask someone directly if they are feeling suicidal. There is evidence to show that this will help protect a suicidal individual – they will feel noticed and listened to. For guidance on how to do this, check out Zero Suicide Alliance’s free 20-minute suicide prevention training course.

Horizon also interviews Kevin Briggs, a highway patrol officer who has spent many years patrolling the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. He says he’s spoken to hundreds of people threatening to jump off the bridge – only two did. “Most people come back because of the glimmer of hope that folks need,” he says. “Many times folks are just looking for someone to listen to them: not to give advice, not to give them a prescription, not to say ‘you know what you shoulda done’, not to argue or blame, just to listen. Just to listen to what’s going on.”

I’ve no idea what all this says about the suicide of Keith Flint, or even if it can help me and my peers try and understand what he did. The factors that caused him to finally end his life will be as complex and inscrutable as any other – possibly even for those close to him. But I hope his death at least makes us all a bit more aware of what the people around us might be going through, more curious about their thoughts, and braver about asking exactly what is going on in their heads.

Gorgeous George

George Michael was the cause of my first encounter with musical snobbery. It was 1996 and I was at college. I was getting the bus from town back to the college with some friends, clutching in my hand a freshly purchased CD of George Michael’s just released Fastlove single. I’d been awaiting its release impatiently, back in those days when a song would have weeks of radio airplay before you were finally able to own your own copy of it. Now I could take it home and play it on repeat ‘til my heart was content (or I’d grown sick of it, more likely).

But my excitement was tempered somewhat by the reaction to my purchase of one of my friends: “Oh, are you one of those people that likes bad music?”

I knew immediately what she meant. This was 1996 – peak Britpop-era. Indie and rock music (so-called ‘real’ music) had conquered the charts. Oasis and The Prodigy scored No 1 singles. The likes of George Michael were sneered at by my peers. Those peak Wham! days were long forgotten and now irrelevant. 90s pop star Jarvis Cocker waved his bum at 80s pop star Michael Jackson at the BRITs and was proclaimed a hero.

But I liked all of it. To me, Fastlove was a really good tune; the way Don’t Look Back in Anger and Firestarter were really good tunes. That was the most important thing to me, although of course you’re influenced by what comes with it as well: I enjoyed Oasis’s almost parodic self-confidence; I loved the unhinged aggression of The Prodigy. There was something about George Michael that appealed to me as well, his cheesy 80s past aside. But at 18, I might have had difficulty articulating what.

I was never a full-blown fan. Only the occasional song from his catalogue would worm its way into my soundtrack, but when it did it was always a favourite. Also, he was too classically beautiful for me to develop a crush on. But I found a lot to admire in him. He was, like Madonna and Prince, very much his own kind of pop star. Although we now know he was holding a large part of himself back, his songs and image and interviews were all very much expressions of his own uncompromising personality. There was no shady Colonel Tom Parker or Simon Fuller type figure manipulating the wants and desires of his fans. 

And his vocal range was astonishing – with the ability to raise goosebumps with an even average song. But most importantly, he knew his way around a melody – no matter whether you like songs like Last Christmas or Wake Me UpBefore You Go Go or not, there’s no denying their craft.

Looking back now, if you listen to the tone of his songs, they tread that fine line gay men tread between the melancholy of our existence (A Different Corner, Heal the Pain, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me, John and Elvis are Dead) and the euphoric release of allowing ourselves to be who we are (Faith, Freedom ’90, Too Funky, Outside). There were clues in his appreciation of women as well. In his videos it leaned more to the aesthetic than objectification – the Freedom '90 video is a classy appreciation of some of the most beautiful women in the world, rather than the exercise in titillation it could have been.

Two years to the month after I bought Fastlove, George Michael was arrested in an LA toilet for cottaging. His reaction to his abrupt outing was both hilarious and galvanising. He took ownership of his behaviour. There was no excuses, no playing down, no blame apportioned anywhere but with himself. He did what he did and he was what he was, so what. The funny and euphoric single Outside, and its accompanying video, were the perfect response to the world’s shock and distaste. It combined what the world loved about George Michael – his infectious pop songs, his sexy videos, his sense of humour – with this new element of his persona. He was saying: “I’m still me, this is just another side to me.” And it worked.

For gay men, his response was a revelation. For so long – literally a century or so, beginning with Oscar Wilde’s trial – the idea of being publicly homosexual had been steeped in shame. Occasionally, a gay male pop star punched his way through to the A-list, but Boy George was too weird, alien-like and androgynous to be too threatening to the mainstream, or relatable for gay men. Meanwhile, Freddie Mercury went from closeted everyman rock star to fulfilling the Tragic Gay archetype, dying as he did of complications from AIDS at the age of 45.

George Michael was different. The Outside video is the response of a naughty child who is quite pleased he’s been caught so he can show off about what he’s done. You can see it in the singer’s sly smirk over his shoulder as he purrs “I think I’m done with the sofa…” You can hear it in the sarcastic lyrics: “And yes I've been bad, Doctor won't you do with me what you can,” mocking the idea that homosexuality can be cured. He was showing us a new way to say “I am what I am”, now with added middle finger.

He took (and continued to take) ownership of both the ‘homo’, and the ‘sexual’. As he would say in a later interview: “Gay people in the media are doing what makes straight people comfortable, and automatically my response to that is to say I’m a dirty filthy fucker and if you can’t deal with it, you can’t deal with it.” Finally, a gay public figure we could relate to.

As such his loss is a great one. He was a frequent reminder to the mainstream of a gay life well lived, at least eventually, and the struggles mentally and socially we go through to settle into that life. His legacy is incredible, one that reaches beyond those perfect pop songs. I hope he continues to inspire and galvanise young people in death as he did me in life.