I love you, I'm glad I exist

A year of Wendy Cope, the internet's favourite poet.

The other week my tattoos were a year old, which is an objectively embarrassing thing to say. It is not cool or interesting to have tattoos. Basically everyone has them whether they're cool or interesting or not. It is just normal, more normalised than its ever been before, I think. Practically everyone I know is covered in some kind of single line work above their knees or behind their elbows or on the back of their necks or whatever. Tattoos have become essentially a kind of accessory in themselves now, so it's objectively embarrassing to think that you have to make them meaningful and it's objectively embarrassing to note when it's their birthday.

The case for the defence: I found out by chance -- from a very angry cardiologist -- a few months after getting my first and only tattoos that I definitely shouldn't have any, and I definitely shouldn't get any more of them. Nor should I have my ears pierced, but he was more annoyed by my hands than the big gold hoops. So, retrospectively, they have become my only ones (the tattoos, not the earrings) and so I have to like them a bit more. A further case for the defence: Whilst I obviously agree meaningful tattoos are embarrassing, I got these ones as a post-cancer present to myself. I could have made this way worse, further to my defence. I could be walking around with a pink ribbon tramp stamp. I wanted to wait five full years after finishing treatment to get them, because this is supposedly when your status changes from NED (no evidence of disease) to bell ringing, fun-run doing, smug forever cancer free, but I'm an impatient and impulsive person so I was like fuck it and did it a year early. On my left palm it reads: I love you, and on the right: I'm glad I exist.

These are the last lines of my favourite poem, The Orange, by Wendy Cope. The full text goes as follows:

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.

The Orange is incredibly sweet without, I think anyway, being saccharine. It’s a good encapsulation of all the things I want to care about and want to have in my life, the things we all want to care about and have in our lives; happiness, contentment, peace, connection, the ability to take each day as it comes and look forward with optimism for the future without forgetting to appreciate what's happening in the present. I’ve loved The Orange for a long time. I thought about it a lot when I was sick, and I thought more about it after I got better. And as often happens with these kinds of things -- things you start to notice everywhere once they become more important in your own day to day life -- as soon as I committed to pressing it into my epidermis for the rest of my life, it was suddenly everywhere.

On TikTok a deep, melodious, Hozier-esque Irish voice recited the poem and created a stitchable sound of his doing so. People recreated it in their own videos of them enjoying the small happiness of their own lives (this is TikTok, home of romanticising your life, home of being the main character). For a while there every time I opened the app I could hear The Orange, superimposed over clips of teenagers having sunset picnics, couples driving across a highway in their VW vans, friends dancing in the kitchen at the end of a night out. At first I didn't like it. Not because of some overgrown hipster impulse within me to be angry about my references suddenly being everyone's references, not because I wanted to be cool and different and to have found something that nobody knew about. It was the opposite actually. I was worried people would see my hands in real life and suddenly think: Oh my god, this adult woman got a tattoo she discovered on TikTok.

Luckily this has never happened. With the exception of my cardiologist people are generally only vaguely interested in becoming a palm reader. There is nothing less interesting than other people’s tattoos, unless they’re so bad that even the tattoo-haver can laugh about it. When I get negative reactions it's either that people think they're a bit intense, and they say so, verbatim ("bit intense"), and I have to concede that it is a bit intense but that's fine because I am, in fairness, a bit intense too. I've luckily never been accused of spending too much time on the FYP. Once someone referred to them as being "Indiana Jones tattoos", which I can only assume is a reference to this scene..? But usually when people do get the reference they're very sweet about it. On two separate occasions (in a pub and a charity shop) two strangers (one drunk, one sober) have stopped me to tell me it's their favourite poem too. When I’m drunk I can hold them up in photographs in front of my face or press them against other people and be like “I love you!” and maybe other people find that annoying, but I personally think it is cute and fun. Mainly it leads to connection and that can ultimately only be a good thing. It’s also, after all, the spirit of the poem itself.

To be clear though, TikTok - and Twitter, and Instagram - hasn't just embraced this one single poem. It’s not The Orange, it’s poetry in general. Or at least, it feels as though poetry is simply becoming more popular, in a social media sense, than ever before. Wendy Cope and Warsan Shire and Sylvia Plath and EE Cummings and Raymond Carver are all immortalised in grid posts and Tweets and 'yearnposting' TikTok slideshows, which is the term I’ve seen attributed recently to those incredibly, just so so sad lists of quotes about childhood and breakups and friendship or whatever. Accounts like Poetry Is Not A Luxury have hundreds of thousands of followers. It feels like a total 180 to the perception of poetry that existed on the internet even a few years ago, when Rupi Kaur was a meme and Tumblr was out of fashion.

It bleeds offline too, where poetry is suddenly chic again as a means of communicating how we feel to one another (which is lucky, because I think we're worse at communicating how we feel with one another than ever before). Last season fashion shows from Dior to Roksanda and Di Petsa incorporated poetry into their presentations. SS Daley had Ian McKellen reading Tennyson! There are poems on the tube in London and poems on the subway in New York. Last year I bought a friend a book of Frank O'Hara poems for their birthday. I sobbed my way through two other friends' weddings because the poetry reading sections (Rainer Maria Rilke, Lemony Snicket's "I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I see you every Tuesday") sent me properly over the edge. If The Orange ever came up I would presumably have to be sedated (I love crying at weddings!).

But on the internet a lot of the poetry that becomes the most retweeted, the most liked or whatever, it's generally pretty sad. It’s yearnposting for teenage girls and teenage girls in their twenties and thirties. It's generally about loss and grief and disappointment and betrayal and the end of love rather than the beginning. It's not that Wendy Cope doesn't have this kind of stuff in her back catalogue either, by the way. I think her poem "Two Cures For Love" is as devastating as it is brief:

1. Don’t see him. Don’t phone or write a letter.

2. The easy way: get to know him better.

But The Orange is not a sad poem, and that's why I like it. I don't think art needs to be sad or filled with trauma to be good. One of the best poems that was on the tube for ages was Sheena Pugh's Sometimes, which was presumably popular because it explores similar themes to the Cope poem I have staring up at me every time a minor inconvenience of life -- burned the toast, missed the train, sent the bad text, missed the call, forgot my earphones, stressful work email, dropped the phone face down on the street -- sends me whisper screaming into my palms. Even in this flop summer of competitive gloom, I believe people want to look at optimism more than at pessimism or realism or nihilism, especially when they're on the Central Line. It's good to be reminded things can sometimes go well, because it goes against our human nature and cultural instincts and sometimes the real evidence that convinces us to believe otherwise.

Objectively, I got these tattoos for a sad reason. For kind of the opposite reason to the Sheena Pugh poem (sometimes it is bad news, whatever, it happens!). But now it’s their birthday and we’re still in the Year of the Orange and I don’t think that’s sad or embarrassing anymore. It's good, imo, to be reminded of love and the fact it's good to exist, too. That sounds saccharine. Because it is pretty saccharine! It's also true though. I am a catastrophist and I can often spiral into feeling sorry for myself over everything and nothing, and I've now spent the past year being chastised for that by my own hands. Which is, sadly, very funny. And if I look at it through the Orange-tinted lenses of optimism, I should be pleased that Wendy Cope is one of the darlings of the internet's poetry era. Having a meaningful tattoo inspired by or written by a real person is a dangerous game, particularly for ageing millennials. It could be much worse. I'm glad I exist; I’m also glad I do so without a Deathly Hallows tattoo.

Here is another of my favourite poems to finish off this newsletter. I like this because it’s Frank O’Hara and because happy and romantic, but also because every time this poem gets posted on the Frank O’Hara poetry bot Twitter account, the fans complain because they think it’s posted too much and pandering to normies. The kind of incredibly niche internet drama that I find personally absolutely hilarious. Anyway!

Having A Coke With You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
                                                                                                              I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
                               it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

This week I read:

• Amelia Tait reveals the untold story of the other actress in Shallow Hal. I loved, this, so fascinating.

• Megan Nolan on Catholicism, love, devotion.

• If I was King I would ban dynamic pricing in pubs. City’s gone.

• I’m also still reading Middlemarch. Takes fucking ages ???

This week I wrote: A review of Netflix’s Painkiller for the Irish Independent, and a call for politicians to be banned from TikTok, for The i. I also sent off edits on my book this week, so that is fun !