Latest news with #MartinAmis
Irish Times
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Using ChatGPT to write an essay is a bit like using a forklift to lift weights
A couple of weeks back, I did a public event in a bookshop, for which I and two other writers were each required to pick three beloved books, and to talk about each of them for five minutes or so. Choosing the books I wanted to talk about proved an interesting challenge, because although I can easily think of any number of books I have read and loved, it is considerably less easy to think of books I have not only read and loved but can also remember well enough to talk to an audience about for five minutes. A major criterion for the books I chose, I have to admit, was that I knew them well enough to not have to re-read them for the event. I felt that I had in some sense internalised these books, in a way that could not be said for very many others I had read. In the few days afterwards, I began to wonder why it was that I remembered certain books so well, and others barely at all. It is not uncommon for me to read and greatly enjoy a book and then, within a year or two, remember next to nothing about it other than, perhaps, that I once read and greatly enjoyed it. But there are books that, many years after reading them, have remained a presence in my life. And these books – the ones that seem to belong to some small and select psychic library, whose volumes collectively account for my basic sense of myself as a literate person – are, I realised, the books that I have written about. The Information, Martin Amis 's comedy of thwarted literary ambition and writerly jealousy, features a protagonist whose career as a novelist has devolved into ceaseless book reviewing – a job in which he takes no real pride, but which he nonetheless does very well. 'When he reviewed a book,' writes Amis, 'it stayed reviewed.' It's a line that comes to mind when I think about this subject. It is, for me, the act of writing about a book that causes it to stay read. And a disproportionate number of the books that have stayed read for me are ones that I wrote about at university. I read Ulysses and wrote an essay about it; the essay, I can assure you, was not very good, but the book stayed more or less read. I read and wrote about the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, and those stories stayed read. I read and wrote about Edgar Allen Poe, and Poe has stayed read. The writing of those essays was in some sense inseparable from the depth and durability of the reading. READ MORE [ Zuckerberg saying AI will cure loneliness is like big tobacco suggesting cigarettes can treat cancer Opens in new window ] I am saying all of this now because of two facts that seem fairly self-evident: the fact that the writing of essays is a central aspect of an education in the humanities, and the fact that this centrality is increasingly threatened as a result of the widespread use of ChatGPT and other LLM (large language model) technologies. The general feeling among university administrators, if not necessarily among academics as a whole, seems to be that it would be futile to try to stop students using AI in their work. The technology exists, and in the narrow sense of producing a functional piece of writing on a given topic, it's an effective tool, and it's not going anywhere. I've spoken to a few academics in the humanities recently who seem resigned to (though by no means at peace with) the idea that assessing students through essays may no longer be a viable pedagogical approach. No one seems quite sure what will replace essay writing, but it seems likely that something – a greater emphasis on written exams, perhaps, or some form of oral assessment – will have to. I wasn't a particularly industrious student as an undergraduate. I half-assed a lot of my courses, and often didn't do nearly enough reading of supplementary material – works of academic literary criticism and other secondary sources – to give my essays a plausible veneer of academic credibility and rigour. The essays I wrote were not especially good, even by the standards of undergraduate essays. But I realise now that their being good or bad was of secondary importance to the writing of them. The writing of essays seems to me to have two main uses as an educational tool. It is useful as a means of assessing a student – how much they know, how widely and deeply they have read in a subject, and how rigorous and original their thinking on that subject is. The other is both less measurable and more significant: in writing an essay, you find out what you think about a subject; you learn, in some sense, how to think about it. [ AI is already a focus of endless delusion, magical thinking and plain old foolishness ] In a recent study conducted by MIT's Media Lab, three groups of participants, aged 18-39, were asked to write essays using, respectively, ChatGPT, Google's search engine and no technology at all. The brain activity of the participants was measured using EEG. Of the three groups, the ChatGPT users consistently had the lowest level of brain engagement, and 'consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioural levels'. As the study progressed, the group using ChatGPT got steadily lazier with each subsequent essay, often simply copying and pasting the text produced by the LLM, rather than using it as a source for their own work. One way of thinking about this, from an educational perspective, is that writing an essay is to one's intellect as lifting weights is to one's muscles. The point of going to the gym is not to get good at lifting weights; it's to train your body to become stronger. Using ChatGPT to write an essay is a bit like using a forklift to lift weights. The forklift might do a perfectly good job of moving around some heavy iron plates, but you'd be wasting your time. (You would also be causing a serious disruption, and would probably have your gym membership cancelled – and rightly so.) Just as you can't get someone, or something, to work out for you, there is nobody and nothing that can think on your behalf. As with so many of the supposed benefits of so-called artificial intelligence, it's not clear what we're actually gaining. What we stand to lose is so large, and so fundamental, as to be incalculable.
The Advertiser
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
'If I wanted to murder someone, this is what I'd do'
Novels, so I'm told, don't arrive to their authors fully formed, with plots or stories presenting themselves, ready to be jotted down on a whiteboard. A novel arrives to a novelist as an idea, often very simple, but at the same time distinct: the idea will have a certain heft and feel to it. Nabokov described it as a throb. I didn't know any of this, until I read the late novelist Martin Amis writing about how to write fiction. I read this soon after I'd left my job as a journalist after 20 years, and Amis describing Nabokov's throb gave me an idea: I could write my own novel - because I had an idea at least. My idea was simple. A crime had been committed at a big, old boy's boarding school, and a journalist who had grown up at the school 30 years ago, the son of teachers who had lived on the grounds, was sent out to report on the police investigation. That was it. I didn't even know what the crime was. But the idea became my debut novel Black River, published in 2022 by Allen & Unwin. Following Black River, I planned to write another novel, with the same main characters. So a police procedural, based around a NSW Homicide Detective Sergeant and a newspaper journalist. No sweat. Fine. The two characters, who first met in Black River, have now known each other for two years, have formed a bond, and, well, off we go. Except, what I had given myself was running orders - write a police procedural with your cop and your journo - rather than an idea. What to do? I wasn't sure. I rang a forensic pathologist who had been very kind, and very helpful, and very generous with his time and knowledge when I was writing Black River. "I'm writing another book," I said to the pathologist. "What are we going to do?" "I dunno. You're the f---ing novelist," he said. Mmmm. This was unhelpfully true. Then, immediately, he said, and I paraphrase, "Oh, if I wanted to murder someone, and have someone like me not know that I'd done it, this is what I'd do." On the phone, I think I probably sat up a little straighter. Talk about all ears. And he told me what he'd do, to commit a murder, that would stymie a forensic pathologist examining the corpse post-mortem. And that became "my" idea, the bedrock for my second novel Broke Road. (No spoilers, but it involves binding, gagging, the way certain materials might interact with skin.) And it's strange how it worked. How having a bare-bones idea gave me the confidence to start writing the novel, and how everything fanned out from it: place, character, plot, the burgeoning relationship between the cop and the journo. MORE GREAT READS: Because the basic idea of how to kill someone didn't tell me anything else: it didn't tell me who died, or who killed them, or where, or why, or whether anyone else may have been killed in the same manner. That all came later, flowing out from the first throb. Broke Road skits around, geographically, from Canberra to Murrumbateman to Adelaide to Sydney. But its heart lies north of Cessnock, in the lower Hunter Valley, at a fictional flyspeck called Red Creek, in the wine country around Pokolbin. The Hunter had always interested me, starting with its geology: the Triassic cliffs of the ranges, the coal measures laid down, the patches of weathered, volcanic soil that attracted our nation's first vignerons. Coal and wine, both industries the result of what lies beneath - in this case - a Permian swamp. All of which led to the mining town of Cessnock, and the wine district just to its north. What interested me here, was how these two worlds remain so distinct, how Cessnock has stood aloof and refused to re-fashion itself as a centre for the wine tourists. That's where Broke Road is set, between these two communities, neighbours standing apart. With my first novel, I was in my comfort zone, geographically. I was writing about my childhood home - the big old boarding school in the book is a real place, The King's School at North Parramatta, and it's where I grew up, the son of teachers. With Broke Road and the Hunter, I was well out of my depth, and certainly stretching myself. Which is good as a writer, I think (I hope). I fell back on my journalism, and did some research. I twice travelled the Hunter with a journalist friend who knows the region well. We sampled some wares, and he introduced me around. I went back several times on my own. I spoke to locals in Cessnock, winemakers in Pokolbin (and another in Murrumbateman), a forensic investigator and a forensic pathologist in Newcastle, a former homicide detective, a geologist in Maitland, a property developer, a local council manager, a politician, a builder, a ceramics teacher, a urologist, a pilot. The pilot character got cut, but the rest is all in there, threaded through Broke Road's plots and people and sense of place. I hope I've done it all justice, so that, most important of all, readers can enjoy. Novels, so I'm told, don't arrive to their authors fully formed, with plots or stories presenting themselves, ready to be jotted down on a whiteboard. A novel arrives to a novelist as an idea, often very simple, but at the same time distinct: the idea will have a certain heft and feel to it. Nabokov described it as a throb. I didn't know any of this, until I read the late novelist Martin Amis writing about how to write fiction. I read this soon after I'd left my job as a journalist after 20 years, and Amis describing Nabokov's throb gave me an idea: I could write my own novel - because I had an idea at least. My idea was simple. A crime had been committed at a big, old boy's boarding school, and a journalist who had grown up at the school 30 years ago, the son of teachers who had lived on the grounds, was sent out to report on the police investigation. That was it. I didn't even know what the crime was. But the idea became my debut novel Black River, published in 2022 by Allen & Unwin. Following Black River, I planned to write another novel, with the same main characters. So a police procedural, based around a NSW Homicide Detective Sergeant and a newspaper journalist. No sweat. Fine. The two characters, who first met in Black River, have now known each other for two years, have formed a bond, and, well, off we go. Except, what I had given myself was running orders - write a police procedural with your cop and your journo - rather than an idea. What to do? I wasn't sure. I rang a forensic pathologist who had been very kind, and very helpful, and very generous with his time and knowledge when I was writing Black River. "I'm writing another book," I said to the pathologist. "What are we going to do?" "I dunno. You're the f---ing novelist," he said. Mmmm. This was unhelpfully true. Then, immediately, he said, and I paraphrase, "Oh, if I wanted to murder someone, and have someone like me not know that I'd done it, this is what I'd do." On the phone, I think I probably sat up a little straighter. Talk about all ears. And he told me what he'd do, to commit a murder, that would stymie a forensic pathologist examining the corpse post-mortem. And that became "my" idea, the bedrock for my second novel Broke Road. (No spoilers, but it involves binding, gagging, the way certain materials might interact with skin.) And it's strange how it worked. How having a bare-bones idea gave me the confidence to start writing the novel, and how everything fanned out from it: place, character, plot, the burgeoning relationship between the cop and the journo. MORE GREAT READS: Because the basic idea of how to kill someone didn't tell me anything else: it didn't tell me who died, or who killed them, or where, or why, or whether anyone else may have been killed in the same manner. That all came later, flowing out from the first throb. Broke Road skits around, geographically, from Canberra to Murrumbateman to Adelaide to Sydney. But its heart lies north of Cessnock, in the lower Hunter Valley, at a fictional flyspeck called Red Creek, in the wine country around Pokolbin. The Hunter had always interested me, starting with its geology: the Triassic cliffs of the ranges, the coal measures laid down, the patches of weathered, volcanic soil that attracted our nation's first vignerons. Coal and wine, both industries the result of what lies beneath - in this case - a Permian swamp. All of which led to the mining town of Cessnock, and the wine district just to its north. What interested me here, was how these two worlds remain so distinct, how Cessnock has stood aloof and refused to re-fashion itself as a centre for the wine tourists. That's where Broke Road is set, between these two communities, neighbours standing apart. With my first novel, I was in my comfort zone, geographically. I was writing about my childhood home - the big old boarding school in the book is a real place, The King's School at North Parramatta, and it's where I grew up, the son of teachers. With Broke Road and the Hunter, I was well out of my depth, and certainly stretching myself. Which is good as a writer, I think (I hope). I fell back on my journalism, and did some research. I twice travelled the Hunter with a journalist friend who knows the region well. We sampled some wares, and he introduced me around. I went back several times on my own. I spoke to locals in Cessnock, winemakers in Pokolbin (and another in Murrumbateman), a forensic investigator and a forensic pathologist in Newcastle, a former homicide detective, a geologist in Maitland, a property developer, a local council manager, a politician, a builder, a ceramics teacher, a urologist, a pilot. The pilot character got cut, but the rest is all in there, threaded through Broke Road's plots and people and sense of place. I hope I've done it all justice, so that, most important of all, readers can enjoy. Novels, so I'm told, don't arrive to their authors fully formed, with plots or stories presenting themselves, ready to be jotted down on a whiteboard. A novel arrives to a novelist as an idea, often very simple, but at the same time distinct: the idea will have a certain heft and feel to it. Nabokov described it as a throb. I didn't know any of this, until I read the late novelist Martin Amis writing about how to write fiction. I read this soon after I'd left my job as a journalist after 20 years, and Amis describing Nabokov's throb gave me an idea: I could write my own novel - because I had an idea at least. My idea was simple. A crime had been committed at a big, old boy's boarding school, and a journalist who had grown up at the school 30 years ago, the son of teachers who had lived on the grounds, was sent out to report on the police investigation. That was it. I didn't even know what the crime was. But the idea became my debut novel Black River, published in 2022 by Allen & Unwin. Following Black River, I planned to write another novel, with the same main characters. So a police procedural, based around a NSW Homicide Detective Sergeant and a newspaper journalist. No sweat. Fine. The two characters, who first met in Black River, have now known each other for two years, have formed a bond, and, well, off we go. Except, what I had given myself was running orders - write a police procedural with your cop and your journo - rather than an idea. What to do? I wasn't sure. I rang a forensic pathologist who had been very kind, and very helpful, and very generous with his time and knowledge when I was writing Black River. "I'm writing another book," I said to the pathologist. "What are we going to do?" "I dunno. You're the f---ing novelist," he said. Mmmm. This was unhelpfully true. Then, immediately, he said, and I paraphrase, "Oh, if I wanted to murder someone, and have someone like me not know that I'd done it, this is what I'd do." On the phone, I think I probably sat up a little straighter. Talk about all ears. And he told me what he'd do, to commit a murder, that would stymie a forensic pathologist examining the corpse post-mortem. And that became "my" idea, the bedrock for my second novel Broke Road. (No spoilers, but it involves binding, gagging, the way certain materials might interact with skin.) And it's strange how it worked. How having a bare-bones idea gave me the confidence to start writing the novel, and how everything fanned out from it: place, character, plot, the burgeoning relationship between the cop and the journo. MORE GREAT READS: Because the basic idea of how to kill someone didn't tell me anything else: it didn't tell me who died, or who killed them, or where, or why, or whether anyone else may have been killed in the same manner. That all came later, flowing out from the first throb. Broke Road skits around, geographically, from Canberra to Murrumbateman to Adelaide to Sydney. But its heart lies north of Cessnock, in the lower Hunter Valley, at a fictional flyspeck called Red Creek, in the wine country around Pokolbin. The Hunter had always interested me, starting with its geology: the Triassic cliffs of the ranges, the coal measures laid down, the patches of weathered, volcanic soil that attracted our nation's first vignerons. Coal and wine, both industries the result of what lies beneath - in this case - a Permian swamp. All of which led to the mining town of Cessnock, and the wine district just to its north. What interested me here, was how these two worlds remain so distinct, how Cessnock has stood aloof and refused to re-fashion itself as a centre for the wine tourists. That's where Broke Road is set, between these two communities, neighbours standing apart. With my first novel, I was in my comfort zone, geographically. I was writing about my childhood home - the big old boarding school in the book is a real place, The King's School at North Parramatta, and it's where I grew up, the son of teachers. With Broke Road and the Hunter, I was well out of my depth, and certainly stretching myself. Which is good as a writer, I think (I hope). I fell back on my journalism, and did some research. I twice travelled the Hunter with a journalist friend who knows the region well. We sampled some wares, and he introduced me around. I went back several times on my own. I spoke to locals in Cessnock, winemakers in Pokolbin (and another in Murrumbateman), a forensic investigator and a forensic pathologist in Newcastle, a former homicide detective, a geologist in Maitland, a property developer, a local council manager, a politician, a builder, a ceramics teacher, a urologist, a pilot. The pilot character got cut, but the rest is all in there, threaded through Broke Road's plots and people and sense of place. I hope I've done it all justice, so that, most important of all, readers can enjoy. Novels, so I'm told, don't arrive to their authors fully formed, with plots or stories presenting themselves, ready to be jotted down on a whiteboard. A novel arrives to a novelist as an idea, often very simple, but at the same time distinct: the idea will have a certain heft and feel to it. Nabokov described it as a throb. I didn't know any of this, until I read the late novelist Martin Amis writing about how to write fiction. I read this soon after I'd left my job as a journalist after 20 years, and Amis describing Nabokov's throb gave me an idea: I could write my own novel - because I had an idea at least. My idea was simple. A crime had been committed at a big, old boy's boarding school, and a journalist who had grown up at the school 30 years ago, the son of teachers who had lived on the grounds, was sent out to report on the police investigation. That was it. I didn't even know what the crime was. But the idea became my debut novel Black River, published in 2022 by Allen & Unwin. Following Black River, I planned to write another novel, with the same main characters. So a police procedural, based around a NSW Homicide Detective Sergeant and a newspaper journalist. No sweat. Fine. The two characters, who first met in Black River, have now known each other for two years, have formed a bond, and, well, off we go. Except, what I had given myself was running orders - write a police procedural with your cop and your journo - rather than an idea. What to do? I wasn't sure. I rang a forensic pathologist who had been very kind, and very helpful, and very generous with his time and knowledge when I was writing Black River. "I'm writing another book," I said to the pathologist. "What are we going to do?" "I dunno. You're the f---ing novelist," he said. Mmmm. This was unhelpfully true. Then, immediately, he said, and I paraphrase, "Oh, if I wanted to murder someone, and have someone like me not know that I'd done it, this is what I'd do." On the phone, I think I probably sat up a little straighter. Talk about all ears. And he told me what he'd do, to commit a murder, that would stymie a forensic pathologist examining the corpse post-mortem. And that became "my" idea, the bedrock for my second novel Broke Road. (No spoilers, but it involves binding, gagging, the way certain materials might interact with skin.) And it's strange how it worked. How having a bare-bones idea gave me the confidence to start writing the novel, and how everything fanned out from it: place, character, plot, the burgeoning relationship between the cop and the journo. MORE GREAT READS: Because the basic idea of how to kill someone didn't tell me anything else: it didn't tell me who died, or who killed them, or where, or why, or whether anyone else may have been killed in the same manner. That all came later, flowing out from the first throb. Broke Road skits around, geographically, from Canberra to Murrumbateman to Adelaide to Sydney. But its heart lies north of Cessnock, in the lower Hunter Valley, at a fictional flyspeck called Red Creek, in the wine country around Pokolbin. The Hunter had always interested me, starting with its geology: the Triassic cliffs of the ranges, the coal measures laid down, the patches of weathered, volcanic soil that attracted our nation's first vignerons. Coal and wine, both industries the result of what lies beneath - in this case - a Permian swamp. All of which led to the mining town of Cessnock, and the wine district just to its north. What interested me here, was how these two worlds remain so distinct, how Cessnock has stood aloof and refused to re-fashion itself as a centre for the wine tourists. That's where Broke Road is set, between these two communities, neighbours standing apart. With my first novel, I was in my comfort zone, geographically. I was writing about my childhood home - the big old boarding school in the book is a real place, The King's School at North Parramatta, and it's where I grew up, the son of teachers. With Broke Road and the Hunter, I was well out of my depth, and certainly stretching myself. Which is good as a writer, I think (I hope). I fell back on my journalism, and did some research. I twice travelled the Hunter with a journalist friend who knows the region well. We sampled some wares, and he introduced me around. I went back several times on my own. I spoke to locals in Cessnock, winemakers in Pokolbin (and another in Murrumbateman), a forensic investigator and a forensic pathologist in Newcastle, a former homicide detective, a geologist in Maitland, a property developer, a local council manager, a politician, a builder, a ceramics teacher, a urologist, a pilot. The pilot character got cut, but the rest is all in there, threaded through Broke Road's plots and people and sense of place. I hope I've done it all justice, so that, most important of all, readers can enjoy.
Irish Times
22-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
In 28 Years Later, Brexit Britain runs screaming towards its Apocalypse Now. What took it so long?
'Donald Trump is going to make punk rock great again,' the mouthy musician Amanda Palmer said after that individual was elected president of the United States for the first time. You think? In the same year, 2016, the United Kingdom elected to leave the European Union. Nobody suggested that punk would feast on incoming catastrophe, but there was great wailing from the literati. 'I think it's a self-inflicted wound,' Martin Amis said. 'I don't like the nostalgic utopia.' Ian McEwan described Brexit as 'the most pointless, masochistic ambition ever dreamed of in the history of these islands'. One imagined poets and choreographers collapsing in despair up and down the aisles of north London's classier off-licences. READ MORE Brexit would now reap the artistic whirlwind. Right? The Europhobic voters of Stoke-on-Trent will feel silly when they hear about that ballet concerning lengthened queues for non-EU passport holders at Florence airport. Worthwhile anti-Trump culture proved thin on the ground in that president's opening term. There was even less Brexit-bashing art in the aftermath of 'Britain's fateful decision' (to use the approved cliche). We did get a great many popular – and good – nonfiction books on the mechanics of the referendum, its potential aftermath and its moral implications. Fintan O'Toole, of this jurisdiction, had a big hit with Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain . Tim Shipman's All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain's Political Class did what the title claimed in exhaustive fashion. There was a lot more where those came from. But few were writing operas or novels on the topic. We are still awaiting the first great anti-Brexit protest song. These thoughts are prompted by the arrival this week of the second sequel to Danny Boyle 's classic zombie flick 28 Days Later. It hardly needs to be said that Alex Garland's script for 28 Years Later does not halt the violence to ponder article 50 of the Treaty on European Union. [ 28 Years Later review: Danny Boyle's rattling zombie epic never lets up in pace or invention Opens in new window ] We are dealing in allegory here – an unmistakable and blackly hilarious allegory. The mindless zombies have been driven back to Britain from the Continent. (I didn't catch if, like the Romans, the rage virus left Ireland uncolonised.) One proud island off the northeast coast has, however, kept the hordes at bay and, in the process, retreated into a class of mid-20th-century patriotic nostalgia. Boyle intercuts a reading of Rudyard Kipling's poem Boots with clips from Laurence Oliver's Henry V. 'Gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here!' And so on. The film-maker confirmed his intentions to El País newspaper. 'We haven't made a political film,' he said . 'But we've used the current world as a reference, how we behave in it, what cultural legacy we're going to leave behind. Brexit has constrained us, locked us in, and that's what 28 Years Later is about.' A stubborn Mancunian of Irish descent, Boyle will care not a whit if the thumping allegory upsets leavers, not least because it in no way impedes the hurtling progress of the core narrative. He can feel proud of showing how the subject can be addressed without dragging your film into po-faced agitprop. Why have so few artists attempted anything similar over the past decade? Have a look at Anish Kapoor's A Brexit, A Broxit, We All Fall Down from 2019. Created for the Guardian newspaper, it works an enormous cleft along the spine of Britain. The meaning is clear – a little too clear for an artist of Kapoor's subtlety. In 2017 the unavoidable, pseudonymous Banksy delivered a mural showing a sculptor chipping away one star from the EU flag. Not his most affecting piece. British novelists proved reluctant to engage so directly with the subject. It remains an oddity that Ali Smith's Autumn , frequently labelled the first post-Brexit novel, was published just four months after the vote. Alex Preston, writing in the Financial Times, marvelled 'that writing this good could have come so fast'. No deluge of Brexit fiction flowed into the succeeding abyss of negotiation. Plenty of films seemed to offer comment on the Brexit mindset. You could see Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk making the case for either side. The triumphant Paddington 2 played as an argument for diversity and inclusivity. But 28 Years Later really does feel like the closest thing to mainstream cinematic engagement with Brexit since the country voted on June 23rd, 2016. Maybe the argument against feels too much an obsession of elite London dinner parties. Maybe the wider subject is too complex to address as allegory or side narrative. Most likely audiences (and creators) just got sick of it long before the documents were finally signed. It's not Vietnam. Nobody was going to make an Apocalypse Now about Brexit. Though Boyle has come closer than seemed possible.
Times
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Young motherhood reimagined by an exciting new literary voice
Everyone loves a young writer. They punch their way into the literary world, demanding respect for the chutzpah of penning 90,000 words in their twenties. We loved Martin Amis for writing The Rachel Papers at 23. We had hysterics when Zadie Smith published White Teeth at 21. And much of Sally Rooney's stardom can probably be put down to the fact that she was a sprightly 27 when Conversations with Friends appeared on our shelves. Now we have Saba Sams. She was just 26 when she won the BBC national short story award and the Edge Hill short story prize for Send Nudes, the titular story in her published collection. The next year Sams made it on to Granta's list of the best young
Telegraph
06-04-2025
- Climate
- Telegraph
I'm tired of all this sunshine. I want to bathe in some lovely rain again
I am a winter swimmer. Most people think I am mad, going off under leaden wintry skies to lower myself into 3C water with nothing but a bit of nylon for protection. But not only is the freezing dip a welcome shock, but the greyer and rainier the weather is, the better. For there is no urban landscape on earth that looks better, more alive or more atmospheric under cloud, rain, storm or fog than London. The flipside of this is that sun is not always enjoyable in our ancient city. In fact, it can be abrasive, and indeed long periods of London sun make me feel trapped, worn down, intruded upon. Controversially, I am very ready for the present endless-feeling sunny spell to end. For nothing, surely, is worse than a low winter or early spring sun boring into one's eyes – aggressive, glaring, but chilly. I always think of Martin Amis's novel London Fields in which he talks about the 'carcinogenic' sun waiting at the end of the road. It makes the stone and brick look dirty and tired, whereas drizzle brings out the sinuous romance of London's – and Britain's – architectural environment. I always scan the weather forecast not for sunny days to look forward to but for days of rain. The latter is especially welcome in the spring and summer, when the sun rises early and the day feels like it is scorching itself on your retina long before you're ready to face it. By contrast, there is nothing more pleasant than waking to the soft patter of rain or going to sleep with it, the water illuminated in the street lights. I like a sunbathe on holiday as much as the next person, but in London, I'd take a rain-bathe, or indeed an icy-bathe, any day instead.
