Cirque du Chic

There are two things you should never do: read your own work, and meet your heroes. Foolishly, I have done both for the sake of this blog post. I must be something of a daredevil. Longtime readers of this blog (that is, those to whom I send links) may recall that, in late 2020, I … Continue reading Lisbon 2: Meeting My Hero

What does it mean to “live for the hope of it all”? What is “it all”? What is “living for hope”? I’m not just being deliberately obtuse. I think “living for the hope of it all” is a genuinely weird turn of phrase, and when something is weird, it merits at least a little bit … Continue reading august 13: For The Hope Of It All

Something I neglected to think about in yesterday’s post is whether a successful escape is a good thing. Well, I did touch on it in vague terms when talking about my own daydreams of solitude, but I didn’t really put it back into the context of the song – arguably a pretty core function of … Continue reading august 12: An Addendum

august is a song which is, in part, about escape. The narrator wants to escape with James, into isolation, where they can be in love and stay in love. A running theme throughout the song is the notion that nothing else really matters to her; indeed, she says as much quite directly (“I never needed … Continue reading august 11: Escape

august and cardigan represent two competing and incompatible visions of ownership. august centers around a narrative that the narrator doesn’t have the ownership that she thought she had over James. She says this very directly: “You were never mine”. Betty, by contrast, seems to have a much more solid sense of her ownership of James: … Continue reading august 10: Possession and Ownership

Very little time tonight. A few questions to explore later: Continue reading august 9: Some Questions

A short post today, because I’ve not got much time, nor many ideas. At face value, august doesn’t seem to contain much guilt. Contextually, this seems odd: after all, if the narrator is “the other woman”, surely that carries a certain complexity of feeling, even if the guilt ultimately lies squarely with James? Betty is … Continue reading august 8: Guilt

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is the idea that people seem to be predisposed to seek out not just different aspects, but different extents of the human experience. I’m aware that this isn’t a remotely novel observation. We’ve been aware of people we could consider “thrill seekers” or “daredevils” forever, although I … Continue reading august 7: The Depths of the Human Experience