Photo: Royal Victoria Hotel, St Leonards-on-Sea, 28 December 2024.
Earlier this year, shortly after I had moved to St Leonards-on-Sea, I received a letter from a 21-year-old stranger – a handwritten letter, in fact. They explained (and they are indeed a they/them) that as part of their love of analogue media they had recently acquired a cassette player.
This stranger had been listening to their mother’s old tape collection. One tape particularly intrigued them: a handmade music compilation – now known as a mixtape – made by a school friend of the mother’s around 1991. This was before the stranger was born, and indeed when both the tape-maker and the mother were younger than the stranger was now.
The tracks were mostly indie guitar pop from the time: the Field Mice, the Pastels, the Pooh Sticks, the Blue Aeroplanes, McCarthy, the BMX Bandits. But the stranger’s fascination was not so much the choice of music as the wider meaning of the tape as an object. A meaning that had accumulated over time.
I have been listening to the tape on repeat for the past week, imagining you, all those years ago. Holding it in your hands, picking out the songs, listening to them, thinking of my mum as you did so.
This led to the stranger looking me up on the internet, which in turn led to them, poor thing, reading my online diaries, my Svelte Lectures series on Substack, and even my thesis.
Until recently you have only existed to me as a character in the story of my mum’s childhood.
Now I had become something else. Certainly not, I hope, a real life, three-dimensional human being. I would never live that down. I can’t really see myself as a role model, either, except perhaps as a cautionary tale. I think instead that I must have moved, in their eyes, from being a dusty young character of the anecdotal past, small ‘c’, to a living but middle-aged Character of the digital present, capital ‘C’.
I love the way you write. I hope you are going to write more.
The stranger wrote to me, and I wrote back. And now, with their mother’s blessing, I’m giving them advice on their university studies, pleased to put my PhD to some use.
In fact, now that my job with the Christopher Isherwood Foundation has ended, I’m looking once again for a source of income. Mentoring students like this might be in fact be one way forward. Another is to get back into serious writing. I have various plans for books, including one based on my diaries, one based on my thesis, and a novel. But books tend to not make much money compared to teaching, or indeed compared to Substack. So watch this space.
I used to make mixtapes all the time in the late 80s and early 90s. It’s been years since I made one. But it might be argued that this time of year, late December, is a kind of mixtape season. People offer their taste to the world in the shape of lists: their Favourite Things of the Year.
Mixtapes, lists, writing, it’s all creativity and expression. All statements of love, life, living in time. No matter how ephemeral and niche these acts might seem, one cannot rule out the possibility of their having a useful and lasting effect upon others. Even upon others not yet born.
Best to just do it, and send it out there.
*
A Mixtape for 2024:
SONGS:
Chappell Roan, ‘Good Luck, Babe!’,
Jessica Pratt, ‘Life Is’
Gigi Perez, ‘The Sailor Song’
Tess Parks, ‘California’s Dreaming’
Pet Shop Boys, ‘Loneliness’
Bruno Mars and Rosé, ‘APT.’
Claire Rousay, ‘Head’
Laurie Anderson, ‘Road to Mandalay’
Emma Anderson, ‘Taste The Air (Julia Holter Mix)’
Charley Stone, ‘Free Food’
Janis, Perez & YANIS, ‘Pharmacoliberation’
Noel, ‘Dancing is Dangerous’
Abstract Crimewave ‘The Longest Night’
Fuse ODG, ‘We Know It’s Christmas’
BOOKS (fiction):
Alan Hollinghurst, Our Evenings
Nat Reeve, Earlyfate
H. Gareth Gavin, Never Was
Khaled Alesmael, Selamlik
Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn
Iain Sinclair, Pariah Genius
Justin Torres, Blackouts
Adam Macqueen Haunted Tales
Henry Van Dyke, Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes (reissue)
BOOKS (non-fiction / memoir)
Katherine Bucknell, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out
Claire Dederer, Monsters
Xiaolu Guo, My Battle of Hastings
Liam Konemann, The Appendix
Salman Rushdie, Knife
Hanif Kureishi, Shattered
Claude Cahun, Cancelled Confessions
BOOKS (poetry):
Peter Scalpello, Limbic
JP Seabright, George Parker, Jaime Lock, Not Your Orlando
Camille Ralphs, After You Were, I Am
Jen Calleja, Goblinhood (poems and essays)
FILMS / TV:
Orlando, My Political Biography
Wilding
Scala!
Poor Things
Feud: Capote Vs the Swans
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Tags: mixtapes, New Year's message, st leonard's on sea
