June 11th 2020, 4am. Notes App.
Or, Progress is Inevitable, and Other Things That Aren't True
Hello you, it’s so great to bump into you here. <3
Slow Burn
Progress is Inevitable, and Other Things That Aren't True
Today is June 11th, 2025. On June 11th, 2020 I wrote a piece, at 4am, in the notes app of my phone, lying in bed with the brightness turned right down so I didn’t disturb my partner who was sleeping next to me.
A few days prior I had received an email, forwarded to me by my then lit agent, from an indy feminist publishing house asking if I’d be willing to contribute a few words for an anthology of feminist writers they were compiling, on the topic of covid. I was a new writer who hadn’t published anything yet - which meant I was excited to be asked, and said yes right away, but at the same time I was also deeply overwhelmed. I had two deals with Harper Collins for books I was in the process of writing, one with a 9 day turnaround from commission to delivery, and one that I’d been working on for the past several years, in one way or another, that I’d had to put on temporary pause to meet that 9 day timeframe. (Most books work on something much closer to a 2 year schedule - though none of mine have - so to say 9 days was tight would be a real understatement.)
It was also days after George Floyd had been killed on May 25th.
Though the police’s brutality, and even murder of marginalised groups in the US and UK - particularly Black people - wasn’t new news to anyone, something about that particular incident sparked a global response, becoming the catalyst for what we promised ourselves at the time would be a long term movement, not just a moment.
As a part of that conversation, as you know if you’ve been around for a while, I had put out some posts on Instagram that I had hoped would be useful for the few hundred followers I had been able to drum up on an account that had been intended as a marketing channel for one of the books I was working on. But it didn’t quite pan out that way. Instead, something that I still can’t fully understand happened, and suddenly instead of the few hundred followers there were tens, and then hundreds of thousands of people liking, sharing, following, and listening to what I was saying. People, largely not Black, many of whom were engaging with this topic for the very first time, and were suddenly looking to me to offer guidance, direction, and - although I didn’t see it that way in the moment - I suspect a glimmer of hope that whilst things right now might be bad right now, there was a real chance that between us we could make something better. It was an exhausting time, but it was also thrilling. I got almost no sleep for weeks on end as I scrabbled to make more posts, respond to messages and comments from people around the world and in every timezone, explaining things in different ways, trying to keep the interest of this new group of people, and spread the message of caring about other people as much as you care about yourself, of resistance and strength in community as far as I could take it.
It was those posts that made the publisher reach out to me in May 2020, not the existing book deals. And it was that hope of momentum, of having the opportunity to be part of making real and lasting change which led to me saying yes - and I’m really glad I did. I think it’s my favourite thing I’ve ever written, and looking back at it reminds me of what that period of time was really like, at least for me, when it’s so tempting to recall it instead in vignettes of Tiger King and Normal People.
When I try to think about that time now, I really feel that a lot about covid has been forgotten or rewritten incredibly quickly as people on the whole have been keen to return to their pre-pandemic lives. Businesses have demanded a return to in-office working, we’ve largely stopped masking, and we wasted no time in switching our discussions about covid to the past tense - re-framing an ongoing situation as something that we’ve now moved beyond, as many people have simply had no choice other than to get back on with the day-to-day business of living - which is a lot easier if we don’t think about the year or so we spent indoors, or how the virus is still impacting us in ways we’d rather not grapple with.
That was then, we seem to have collectively decided. It was bad, but it’s over now, so let’s not dwell, shall we?
One of the things that we struggle to really bring to the front of our collective memories when we look back at that period is just how hand in hand the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement and our shared experience of covid were, in the moment. For the first time, we were all collectively shut inside, (even writing that I realise that it’s not true. I and people like me were ‘shut inside’, working from home, making banana bread, doing DIY haircuts, and keeping ourselves safe, which we were able to do because other people carried on working, bringing things to our doors, keeping supply lines flowing, and risking their lives whilst being called ‘unskilled’ - something I still don’t think we properly acknowledge.) Our phones were, for many of us, our main connection to the world outside of our homes, and what our phones were showing us, time and time again, was shocking to many people.
Another thing we almost immediately forgot is how, at the time, we talked about learning. We spoke endlessly about coming back not only stronger, but better. About not going back. About community building, and about making a new normal, one that protected and uplifted everyone - and in particular those who had been abused, marginalised, and disenfranchised up to that point.
I really don’t think we lived up to our own ambitions.
I’m not even sure if people meant it at the time.
In 2020 my life changed, and so did yours, in lots of ways that were both temporary and permanent - although which would end up being which wasn’t necessarily obvious at the time.
As I look at the police response to the protesters in LA this week, using military force against people who are trying to keep families and communities safe and together, or indeed the far-right, anti-immigration riots in the UK last summer, I find it hard to congratulate us for how far we’ve come in our collective care and community building.
When I think of the hours of footage that we’ve seen streamed directly into our phones of injustice and genocide and death and suffering in Gaza I find it hard to believe that visibility is the key to compassion.
I find it hard to believe that the moment was, indeed, a movement when I see the pushback against DEI programming, education and funding, alongside an enormous, and terrifying slide to the political right in Europe, America and beyond.
I don’t see progress when I think about people’s reluctance to wear masks, even in shared spaces like public transport despite both the continued risk, particularly to already vulnerable groups, and the well documented impact of long covid.
So I’m taking today as an opportunity to remember and to re-think. Knowing what I know now, how can I approach things differently? What can I do better? What are the lessons I should have learned from 2020, but let go of in favour of returning to a normal, and the comfort that offers?
Am I sharing the piece I wrote 5 years ago today with you because sharing something I already know I like is a lot easier than sitting down to make something completely new? I guess a bit, if we’re honest - and I do always try to be, especially with you.
But I’m also sharing because as time moves on I find myself thinking about how much has changed since that night, and how much hasn’t. Mostly how much hasn’t. And how much I had, somehow, allowed myself to imagine, and even expect that it would - which is maybe naive, and maybe what you have to do if you want to keep on living, and making art, when it feels like you’re living at the end of the world.
The below piece was written by me, very late on a night where I hoped that writing things was a form of resistance and hope, and published in This Is How We Come Back Stronger: Feminist Writers On Turning Crisis Into Change, by The Feminist Book Society, 2021.
I end the piece by saying ‘we keep moving’ - but I’m not sure we do.
June 11th 2020, 4am. Notes App.
I wrote this piece on my phone, in one sitting (lying?) as a single stream of consciousness, one morning in June – a month when finding restful moments was proving difficult for me. I decided not to make edits later, instead preserving that morning and those feelings in amber, fossilised tree sap, as a personal record of the moment.
At first it seemed unreal.
We’ll just get a few bits. Just in case, we told ourselves.
He can pop out on his lunch break. It will be good to get out of the office for a while.
What do we need?
A little bit of oil.
Maybe some avocados.
Lots of cat food.
No toilet paper. We’re not monsters.
Walking down the aisles, shelves were empty. People were wearing masks, the first time we’d seen it. Look at them, we said, shaking our heads.
Overreacting. A trolley piled high with bottled water and loo roll. Selfish.
They’re going to feel silly in a few weeks.
Will this be a time we always remember? I ask. No, he says, I don’t think it will be that serious. It’s not like it’s Ebola.
We didn’t know.
Ah, fuck it, we said. Let’s get a Zip Car. Let’s go to Costco. We’re not panicking. No. Of course not. It will just be a laugh.
These things won’t help with the virus, the cashier laughed, ringing up our stuff. A giant cake with ‘Happy Birthday’ written on top, in the kind of icing that you only see in American films. The biggest bottle of tequila.
We’re not worried. This will be over soon, and if we’re going to stay inside for a week, we may as well have fun doing it.
That doesn’t last.
People die. Thousands of them.
How can we stay connected?
I start an online dinner party. Once a week? We can do it on Instagram Live. We’ll share a recipe in advance and we can all cook the same thing and eat together. We’ll be together, but apart.
We think we’ve caught it.
I cough and cough and cough until the pain shooting through my head goes down through my right eye, into my jaw, making me see stars.
I have a temperature. I feel like I’m burning. How hot am I? We can’t know; our only thermometer is for cooking.
I sleep sitting up. Maybe that will help me cough less. I sleep all of the time, waking every few hours with a coughing fit. Gasping for breath at the side of the bed.
What are we supposed to do now?
There’s no advice for what to do if you’re sick. Stay at home. Don’t spread it to others. Reduce the R number. You’ll never know if you really had it, not for sure.
I saw it in the news. A Black woman in London was sick. Her husband phoned 999. She’s not a priority, they say.
No ambulance is coming. No hospital will take her.
Stay at home. Protect the NHS. Save lives.
He washed her, dressed her, sat her in the living room whilst he got dressed himself. When he came back, minutes later, she had died. Alone in her living room. I think about her every day. And him.
The people came in hazmat suits, took her away. In and out as quickly as possible. They stood outside, posted a report through the letterbox. No one told him what was happening.
Oh fuck. I think I could be in real trouble.
The Queen looks wrong. Like she’s done her own makeup. Like she’s had to mix a few foundations together on the back of her hand to get her shade. Like every Black teenager in Boots in the days before Fenty. But, unlike Black teens, she’s not used to it; she doesn’t have the knack. She looks weird.
We’ll meet again, she says. Everyone is talking like we’re at war.
How are people getting things? Supermarket shelves are empty and deliveries are gold dust. Maybe we’ll just figure out how to do this ourselves.
Have I become a wartime housewife? I scrape the seeds out of a tomato, carefully, with my fingers, onto a piece of kitchen paper and place it on the windowsill, in the sun.
Is this how it works? How long does it take for a tomato plant to grow anyway? Ages it turns out.
I'm not a wartime housewife, I reassure myself, as I cut the bases off spring onions, celery and leeks, fill a glass with water and stand the root ends in them. I’m finding a way to be self-sufficient. I’m getting stuff done.
Slowly the roots will fill the glass, then you can plant them and they’ll regrow.
Don’t forget to change the water.
I order more soil.
People clap for the NHS. Every Thursday at 7pm. At first it’s gentle, but as time goes on it becomes cheering, whooping, banging pots and pans, whistles and tambourines.
The NHS are heroes. Thanks for them are splashed across newspaper front pages. There are photos of smiling doctors and nurses in their uniforms.
They’re saving lives.
Something is wrong. What is it? Everyone’s white, someone points out. 44 per cent of NHS medical workers are BAME. 70 per cent of frontline workers who die of it are BAME. But almost every hero's face we see is white. What happened to the Windrush nurses?
Heroes so white.
I have it, a man claims. Then he spits in Belly Mujinga’s face whilst she’s at work for Transport For London. She dies. The case is closed. No one is prosecuted.
Ahmaud Arbery is out jogging. Two white men lynch him in broad daylight.
Lynching was only made illegal in 2018. It doesn’t seem to have sunk in yet.
Breonna Taylor is sleeping. Police break down her door and shoot her eight times. They’re looking for drugs, but there are none. They’ve made a mistake.
It’s the wrong address.
We say her name. We celebrate her birthday. Twenty-seven today, except, not.
A police officer kneels on George Floyd’s neck. Three other officers watch.
George is forty-six years old. He calls for his mom. He begs them to stop. Herealises they’re going to kill him. Eight minutes and forty-six seconds is such a long time.
Count it.
We feel these things as though it’s our own skin. I cry for days. I bury my face in a cushion and weep in the toilet. The house is open plan, and he has conference calls to make.
He knocks softly on the bathroom door. Are you ok? he asks. What’s wrong?
I can’t breathe.
The world is watching.
No justice. No peace.
We take to the streets.
Black Lives Matter.
We’re meant to be in lockdown, no gatherings of more than six people. Black people are the group most likely to die of it. We know. But how can we not gather? We can’t go on this way.
We ask our allies to support us. We ask our friends to pull up. We didn’t make this mess, we tell them; we can’t fix it on our own. The young turn out. But the Boomers who have turned out to march against Brexit and every other injustice are conspicuously absent. They do not send their apologies.
We make posters and banners. We shout into megaphones. We deserve to be here, we say. We’re people too. We didn’t ask for this, for any of it. Enough is enough.
We take a knee. The meaning has shifted. Eight minutes forty-six seconds is a lifetime.
People want to hear from us. People follow us. They’re looking for teachers, they want us to guide the way. They forget we are tired. Maybe they never knew. We have had skin in this game for as long as we have had skin. Our very bones are tired. We need them to join the fight this time.
My followers explode. Nearly two hundred thousand people want me to tell them what to do. How am I supposed to know?
I am in a daze.
I don’t sleep for a week. I feel like if I stop, if I let the feelings back in, I’ll be sick, right onto this pink velvet sofa that has become part nest, part mission control of an empire I didn’t mean to build.
The eyes of the world are suddenly on Black women. Is it the first time ever?
They buy our books. They are thirsty for our words. We wanted them to listen, but not like this. Are we helping, or are we profiting from other people’s pain?
Everything feels wrong.
Will we keep the momentum or will it fizzle out?
People want to get back to normal, to the good old days. We want to scream that normal wasn’t working. That normal was killing us.
We keep moving.
Recommendations
I’ve Been Listening To
I am a huge podcast fan, and despite having been deeply into books on tape as a child, my podcast listening has never really extended into fiction - until Sherlock & Co. The first thing that strikes you as a listener is the amazing, and immersive, sound design - it’s unlike any podcast I’ve heard before, and I absolutely love and recommend it. The show is a modern, and fun, take on the detective, his little gang, and the scrapes they constantly get into in the name of sleuthing. Does he still live on Baker Street? Yep. Does he still rely on Mrs Hudson to keep things ticking over? Kind of, but this time she’s not his old stuffy landlady, she’s pretty cool, she’s from Andalusia, and she’s brilliant with a spreadsheet. John Watson, as well as being Sherlock’s companion and housemate is a podcast host, balancing doing shoutouts and keeping Sherlock out of his own way.
Unruly: a History of England’s Kings and Queens - David Mitchell. I listen to a lot of very silly podcasts, which I love (shout out to Pappy’s and Slime Country), but I suddenly felt a bit guilty about all of the nonsense, and wondered if I should maybe use some of my listening time to try to learn something. And so, this seemed like as good a place to start as any. I’m not far in yet, chapter 6 of 39 (I honestly didn’t expect it to be that long, I just checked to get a number for you and was shocked that there are 25 chapters left - but it hasn’t put me off, which must be a good sign), and so far I’d say it’s quite fun. I think it might actually be better as a read than a listen, but Mitchell does narrate himself, and when I finish writing this I’m going to go for a stroll and listen to some more, so I think that must mean I’m enjoying it so far. One of the things I’ve learned in those first 6 chapters is that there was a period when, after the Romans left, people in England simply forgot how to do plumbing and stone masonry, and so they just…didn’t, for several hundreds of years. Which does make me think that the idea that progress is inevitable and linear needs more of a re-think.
I would add though that if you’re looking for a fun history book, I actually might prefer The Greatest Nobodies of History by Adrian Bliss that came out last year, which is really a lot of fun if you’ve ever wanted to have a chat with a dodo, or the virus that caused the black death. There are of course some human characters, but that’s less fun. (I read rather than listened to that one).
After a really long hiatus, I’ve been rediscovering This American Life. God it’s good. I’ve popped two that I’ve enjoyed recently here for you - and it’s not even the treats section yet.
I’ve Been Reading
No such thing as a ghoti - the English language is wild, and this book review was a fun way to remember that.
Careless People; A Story of Where I Used To Work is written by an ex Facebook/Meta employee, and whilst I was totally absorbed by reading it, I can not tell you quite how frustrating it is - especially if you’ve spent any time working in FAANG or Big Tech. It’s really interesting to see the plans the business had, how they were executed, the intended, and unexpected outcomes of their choices, and what the internal culture was like - especially during the Lean In years. I do have a major issue with this book though, in that whilst the author is happy to point out the carelessness, and even casual cruelty of her colleagues, the business, and the products they were building and implementing around the world, she doesn’t seem to feel that she herself had any culpability, or could have done anything differently, despite the seniority of her role. As someone who, when I worked in FAANG, led a staff protest and strike against the business I was working for at the time, I found myself constantly somewhere between annoyed and baffled at her lack of personal action, and seemingly regret.
I’ve Been Watching
The Ballad of Wallis Island. I need you to watch this film. Honestly, it’s brilliant and funny and I’ve never laughed more in the cinema. I need people to talk to about it.
Mike Birbiglia has a new Netflix special out - The Good Life. I will admit that I liked it slightly less than his previous specials, but it reminded me to re-watch the back catalogue, which is always perfection.
Remember a few newsletters ago when I said the nostalgia was a toxic impulse? Well forget that, because I’m watching LOST. I’m watching with my partner who has never seen it before, we’ve just finished season 1 and he already thinks it’s wild. He doesn’t even know about all of the [REDACTED] yet.
Your Treat
My fun time offering for you today is this playlist of Habibi Funk. It starts with a cover of Brick in the Wall. I don’t massively like Pink Floyd, but I like this, and I think you will too.
I’ve heard of Iron Chef, and I thought it was a Masterchef type vibe, but American. What I hadn’t understood is that it’s actually a Japanese show, and, friends, it is absolutely unhinged and brilliant. It’s all on YouTube. You’re welcome.
And finally, remember that song Big Booty B*tches? Have you ever seen the guys behind it? Now you have. Look what a nice time they’re having - I can’t decide which one of them I’d rather be.
As always, I’ll leave you with Alex the parrot’s last words
‘You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you’
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SW. <3