This was actually going to be a long political post, but what I was mainly going to say can be summed up much better here. So I’ll leave out all the stuff I was going to say about social media and feminism and sex positivity and all the rest.

But I would like to say this. I have been counting, with an increasing level of horror, the number of cheesy homilies and ‘inspirational’ sayings being put up online nowadays, especially on Facebook, most of which are meaningless and some of which are actively toxic. My name for this stuff is ‘chain-letter bullying,’ and most of it is of no help to anyone, least of all those who are vulnerable and suffering mental illness. I well know that when you’re in crisis, sometimes a helpful saying can be a comfort. But I’ve been horrified at times when apparently well-meaning(?) people have tried to shut others down (including myself) for being ‘negative’ when they are really struggling and need some support. The message seems to be that you can choose how you feel, and that if you’re feeling down and bad things are happening to you, it’s probably your fault. There’s an innate conservatism here which I find really concerning, however good the intentions of those who post these things.

There are a large number of people who have had a rubbish Christmas, and no one to spend new year with, who see this stuff and it only confirms their sense of themselves as a bad or inadequate person because they can’t force themselves to feel whatever they are being hectored about with a rainbow in the background and a couple of meerkats. Double yuck points if the homely saying is attributed, almost undoubtedly erroneously, to the Dalai Lama or a native American sage.

I’ve been trying to sum up why I’m so particularly uncomfortable with it all, and then my friend Juliet showed me the quote below.

‘In the contemporary ideological climate it has become imperative that we perceive all the terrible things that happen to us as ultimately something positive – say as a precious experience that will bear fruit in our future life. Negativity, lack, dissatisfaction, unhappiness, are perceived more and more as moral faults – worse, as a corruption at the level of our very being or bare life. There is a spectacular rise of what we might call a bio-morality (as well as morality of feelings and emotions), which promotes the following fundamental axiom: a person who feels good (and is happy) is a good person; a person who feels bad is a bad person. It is this short circuit between the immediate feelings/sensations and the moral value that gives its specific colour to the contemporary ideological rhetoric of happiness. This is very efficient, for who dares to raise her voice and say that as a matter of fact, she is not happy, and that she can’t manage to – or, worse, doesn’t even care to – transform all the disappointments of her life into a positive experience to be invested in the future?’ – Alenka Zupancic, 2008.

Read it once, then read it again.

And this is a clue as to what I’m doing next.

I wish you a very happy new year, and see you in 2013.

But anyway. Last week I had a free afternoon, so I decided to go out. I’ve been doing a pretty good impression of a one-woman three musketeers recently, jumping from rock to rock with my trusty sword. I need a break, truth be told. So I decided to go and check out the Damien Hirst exhibition at Tate Modern.

People enjoy being rude about Hirst, partly, I have no doubt, because he’s very rich now. A bit like Tracey Emin, his career has woven itself in and out of my life, and my media attention. I sort of remember the shark and the media kerfuffle, and it all seems to come hand in hand with Blur vs Oasis, and post-ironic union jacks. In fact, now I look, the shark was created in 1991, a whole four years before Blur v Oasis. Perhaps 1991 was a very culturally unaware year for me – I was doing a job that didn’t suit me at all. (OK, it was fucking vile.) In 1992, the year the shark was first exhibited, I had left London for a somewhat toxic country sabbatical. (OK, an abusive relationship.)

A bit later in the 90s, I created a sort of living artwork in my bathroom, of empty pill bottles (originally prescribed to me) all along the edge of the bath, and weird newspaper cuttings on the wall. The pill bottles fell into the bath with some regularity, and gradually became marked by deposits from the very hard local water in London W9.

But Hirst. Even just going into this exhibition brought on some melancholy memories of my deep, elevator cage-like depressions in the 90s, alternating with writing books and performing at spoken word events, and lots of drink and drugs.

His early stuff is executed with housepaint, which was a medium also used by Gary Hume. The spot paintings, some of which have no single colour alike, put me in mind of today’s Pantone-fests. I found them quite charming, although I don’t really remember them the first time round. I still love the splat paintings on the huge round boards.

The pickled animals and fish seem a bit forlorn now, although they seemed to have a significance then. There was also an ongoing ashtray theme, which again took me back to the bittersweet days when I took up smoking in, unbelievably, 1994. (I would be a rubbish art critic, always bringing my own stuff in, but there is a madeleine element to it all for me.)

The whole victorian hunter/collector taxonomy trope turned sour for me with all the dead butterflies. A zillion of them went into various pieces here, both old and more recent. In the recent room, there are huge collages of wings like stained glass windows. A beautiful effect, but I just hope these hapless creatures died natural deaths. As if to compensate, there was a room with live ones in, huge floaty iridescent things, with a girl employed solely to pick them gently off peoples’ clothing before they left the room.

Some of Hirst’s later work belongs in Dubai airport or similar, all Swarovski stylee and bling. The huge roundel of dried flies has impact at first, but I ended up just thinking about licking it to gross myself out.

My favourite bits by far were the drug cupboards. Wall after wall of glass fronted cabinets of pill boxes of various vintages. I will now confess that I am a medication box nerd. Quite a few of these went back to 1990, and I spent ages going down memory lane seeing the old packaging of substances that I might well have bought or been prescribed back then. Oddly enough, I only visited The Pharmacy about once, despite that I was going through a West London phase during its early years.

I don’t normally manage to sit through videos in exhibitions. I don’t like the dark rooms and changing configurations of people and waiting for the point of things. The one Hirst video I did watch was one where he demonstrates the most failsafe way to commit suicide with a gun. And that’s when I realised what the problem was.

It all felt like life before the internet.

It seemed charming, nostalgic. Remember when we got all excited about this thing and that thing? Now, similar things come and go by the hour. And we can’t go back. And this is why it’s not fair to judge Hirst’s work by today’s standards, simply because everyone, with very little application, can be a conceptual artist nowadays. Whether it’s lolcats, b3ta.com, knitted zombies, or the Chthulu kigu, humans are tossing out cute concepts all day, every day without let-up, and sometimes they’re brilliant.

I may even have brushed body parts with Hirst during times out in Soho ‘back in the day’. I was also running around all night being a bit of a twat, although I wasn’t rich or famous. It might be because I’m swimming in a different pond now, the second half of my life, but as I walked out of the exhibition, I felt as if I’d been looking down the wrong end of a telescope.

And then, last night, it was my turn. I feel a bit embarrassed adding my name to the above list of luminaries, but 100 people came, and they can’t all just have been there for the burger and chips. The full title of the recent series of talks is ‘Thinking critically about…’ and my aim was to cover a reasonable amount of ground.

Before I started, we were privileged to have Michael Peacock and his lawyer, Myles Jackman, stand up and say something, fresh from the obscenity trial. I actually met Michael several years ago through the Erotic Awards. He’s a lovely guy, and the whole thing was an important legal milestone. I was also privileged to have Juliet introduce me and chair the discussion.

Addiction is a huge topic, covering medicine, society, relationships, policy and morality. And everything else. It’s never out of the papers, and the language of addiction is all over the place, with detox teas and the Priory becoming a household name. However, as most people probably know, I’m not a psychologist or a scientist, I’m a writer and therapist-in-training, so I’ve not going to give you a slew of graphs and stats. As far as I’m concerned, every statistic has an equal and opposite statistic, and it takes an expert to juggle them effectively. So I present the human face of addiction, as far as I can.

Cleaning Up came out four years ago now. A lot has happened since then, but I’d put money on having lost work because of having it published. Writing about alcohol and drugs, particularly drugs, under your real name, is always a risk. I’ve now effectively labelled myself for life, and although it’s been wonderful to get emails from people who say the book has helped them, I wonder if it has actually helped me. A potential employer might see it on my site and think, ‘Hmm, mental, potentially flaky, and liable to fall off the wagon at any time.’ Who knows. Anyway, too late!

I did this talk in Manchester last summer, and it was an intimate environment, which created an intimate talk, and after the break, several people shared very personal stuff. This gig I knew would be tougher. Still, when I mentioned Seroxat and asked who in the room had had experienced of withdrawals, about eight people put their hands up, and someone actually mentioned the famous ‘brain zaps‘ before I did. I read out the 12 steps, despite objections from one man. People are still hung up on the ‘God’ element of the 12 steps, even though the higher power could be anything you like. My concerns about it all are nothing to do with the God stuff, but the habit forming nature of it.

After the break, we went to Q&A. My nose was a little put out of joint by one of the first questioners, who said that someone had tweeted something mildly critical about my talk. Thanks, mate! The trouble with these sorts of talks is that people often don’t ask questions, they make statements. Which is totally fine, and adds to the pool of information, but I ended up standing there slightly dreading the look of expectancy that always comes after someone has given their opinion. The only logical response in a lot of cases is ‘Thanks, yes, I agree.’ Ditto the ones that want your view on something you know nothing about. Someone asked me about the orchid hypothesis and looked positively bemused when I could do nothing but tell him it sounded interesting. But we bounced plenty of good stuff around.

My essential message doesn’t involve stats and theories, but that people really need to stop judging people for all this. Addiction isn’t a binary. We’re all on a sliding scale of addiction, depending on what we like and what we like more than is beneficial for us, or those closest to us.

Anyway, I had a great time, and thanks to David for inviting me. And thanks to everyone who came down. Too many to name, but check out Zen Buffy and Your Brain On Drugs.

Oh yes, and the neuroscience paper I mentioned is The Neurocircuitry of Addiction: An Overview.

Just to be clear, I have never been attacked in one. I’ve had a few run-ins, mostly abroad, but these tended to be rows over the fare rather than my dignity or safety. So I don’t have a traumatic memory of them. But I won’t go in one unless it’s a) very, very late at night, and b) I’m in the back of beyond, c) I’m very tired, and d) there’s no remotely convenient night bus.

Yes, I said night bus. Two little words that send a chill up many spines. The very idea of the night bus gives many people the vapours. (Ditto charity shops.) Not me, though. I’ve been an avid night bus user for years. I’ve waited for them in all states of inebriation and at all times of night, even in areas where I should probably not have been sitting around on my own, and where the stop itself was barely more than a stick in the ground. But I got home for a quid, or 1.50, or whatever it was back then. I’m less of a night owl than I was, but I still take them whenever possible. I know, there can be puke about, and unwelcome diatribes, and bad behaviour, but that has not stopped me unless the situation looked positively dangerous.

And I can’t stand being sat in a car with a guy making inane conversation. ‘Are you married?’ etc, or listening to strange rants. Lots of cab drivers don’t do this, of course, but I find it actively unenjoyable. Introvert, I guess.

And it costs a fortune. I think of all the fun I could have for the 20 or 30 quid it’ll cost me to get home, and the bus wins nearly every time. And then there’s making sure you don’t get ripped off, or driven half way round the houses with the meter on.

I paid the ‘young woman tax’ quite a few times. I remember, years ago, I was going home to Earl’s Court from the West End, when the driver claimed there was a massive traffic jam round Hyde Park corner, (which there wasn’t), enforcing a vast detour, which was followed by a lecture on places in London I might like to visit, starting with the ‘lake at Ongar’. Baffled, I asked him why he was telling me these things, explaining that I had been living in London for several years by then. ‘Oh, I thought you was on holiday here,’ he replied, embarrassed. No idea whether to be flattered or insulted by that, though I’m often told I sound American or Australian, so perhaps that was it.

Another time, stuck in a traffic jam, I had to listen to an increasingly lurid description of the ritualistic torture of a donkey in Spain, enacted by getting more and more people to sit on it until it collapsed and died. Stuck in traffic and with a work appointment to get to, I could not escape.

Then there was the time that a couple of us went from Bayswater to Holloway and had to direct the guy all the way there, road by road, turning by turning, in detail from a large A-Z. When we got there, however, he demanded a tip. ‘You’ve had your tip!’ We shouted, ‘We’ve shown you how to get from Bayswater to Holloway!’ Those were drunken days. More recently, coming back from hospital a few years ago, the guy had a GPS and I still had to direct him, turning by turning, while heavily under the influence of a general anaesthetic and wondering whether I was going to throw up.

When I was growing up in the countryside, going in a cab seemed a slightly glamorous thing to do, especially as the distances covered tended to be long, and therefore expensive, and because if you didn’t have a car already, you were buggered for transport, with the three buses a day (or less). So perhaps they just seem decadent. And there’s the slightly naff idea of the pampered princess who ‘just lives in taxis.’

And I almost never call them when I’m going out either. I’ve gone out for the evening on public transport in many forms of costume and makeup. It just never occurs to me to call one.

Maybe it’s because my childhood memories of car journeys, especially long ones, as a child, are very fraught. The smell of the seats. The whine of the windscreen wipers in the rain. The screaming rows, and the uncomfortable questionings on the motorway, again with no escape. It may just be that I don’t like going in cars at all.

Anyway, the festive season. Actually, these thoughts apply all year round, but they are heightened during the winter party months. And the summer ones. And spring and autumn.

So, as you’ve probably worked out, I don’t drink. Neither do quite a few other people, for varying reasons. Just to ram the point home, I don’t drink alcohol, like, ever. And yet I, and others like me, are sometimes, when out for the evening, still sometimes expected to chip in for the drinks part of the bill.

I’ve lost count of the number of events that ‘throw in’ a glass or two of horrible wine as a justification for bumping up the entrance fee. I don’t want this, thanks. Mind you, when an event is unusually overpriced, and there’s free ‘champagne’ offered as part of the deal, you know the evening is going to be rubbish, so it’s quite a useful indicator.

But the non-drinker’s tolerance is far more heavily tested when they go for a group meal in a restaurant. The odd beer slipping through the net is one thing. A booze bill that doubles the cost of the meal is another. A while back I went to a posh book launch and then about 15 of us went for dinner. The wine flowed. Then the bill came. £40 a head. I looked at it and said, ‘I’ll give you £20 as I haven’t drunk anything.’ The host looked bemused and disturbed. ‘But I’ll have to recalculate the bill!’ he said. ‘You’ll have to recalculate the bill,’ I replied.

One friend who invited a group of us to a restaurant last year cracked it by running two tabs, one for the alcohol and one for the food. Perfect, and I wish people would think a bit and offer to do this more, when there is clearly a number of sober people at the table. Of course, even this wise and reasonable course of action can still be thrown by the one non-drinker at the table who will loudly show up the rest of us sober types, in our killjoyish meanness and poverty, by theatrically insisting on paying a full share.

The thing I hate the most is having to ask permission not to pay for alcohol in advance of an organised event, when I know the bill for the meal is going to be large. The potential humiliation (ohh no, the host might think I’m poor!) might be enough to silence you and get you to reach into your pocket and subsidise the drinkers. But we are in a recession and I have no shame on this. If someone’s going to get stroppy about it or act like they’re doing me a special favour, it’s a friendship that might just be over.

Of course, sometimes over the years I’ve swallowed it and paid up. Context is all. But can you tell this pisses me off a bit?

Update
I’ve been reminded that the situation is the same for people who aren’t drinking because they happen to be driving, and people who only ever have one drink. Also, and I remember this from long ago boozy restaurant days, it’s often the people who have ordered the most, whether brandies/champagne, or just food (the fanciest starter and the biggest steak), who demand equality over the bill, and call ‘spoilsport’ the loudest.

The excellent Pod Delusion is celebrating its second anniversary next week.

I was totally blown away. On top of that, I realised, with a feeling of regret and almost shame, that over the years I have missed huge chunks of her work. This was echoed by some of my Twitter followers last night. It’s a really moving body of work and I only now truly realise how much she deserves recognition. On top of the conceptual stuff, she’s worked in loads of different media and is also a really skilled artist. I particularly love the embroideries. There’s one of a giant penis ejaculating flowers. And I look back and realise just how astonishingly, unbelievably sexist some of the coverage of her has been over the years.

So what happened? Why did I miss so much? For context, it might be worth going back in time, way back, to the 80s art world. People who slag off the YBAs really don’t know their UK art history. In the mid-late 80s I briefly thought of taking art history to postgraduate level, and becoming an art critic. (Yes, I have no idea what was going on with me then either. Perhaps it was because I had not yet sampled class A drugs.) Anyway, I got myself onto the mailing lists of all the big public galleries, and quite a few small private ones as well, and went to a lot of private views.

Bloody hell. British art was, in the main – er, what? I can’t even remember. There was a lot of boring toss. The exciting stuff was coming from the US, as I recall; Schnabel, Haring, Basquiat, and many more. I seem to remember the high point of UK pricey modern art was some painter who did large sinister canvases of people in suits, whose distinguishing characteristic was that at least one person would be wearing glasses which were whited out by a reflection. Actually those images reflected the time quite well, although they were’t much fun. But it was the gallerists and the culture round them who I found really unpalatable. They seemed mired in pomposity and cliquery, and I soon realised that that world and me weren’t going to do business.

So along came the YBAS, who were lots of fun and gave you lots to think about, even if you hated them or simply didn’t get it. I remember reading about Tracey’s shop, and thinking what a laugh it sounded. Art and your own shop was a million miles from my life at the time, when I was temping and writing my first novel and pursuing intoxication very heavily. And then she stormed out (drunk? on painkillers? whatever) of that TV show in 1997 (my memory had that incident at least two years earlier) and everything fit into place. I saw the clip and was reminded about how pompous so much arts coverage used to be. What she did was a genius move. The ladettes had bedded in for long enough to make it OK for a woman to be wrecked in public, and people were also getting sick of the whole posh poloneck approach to arts discussion. That was a pivotal moment, and not just for her.

I loved the Sensation exhibition in 1997. (Remember the people who threw paint at the Myra Hindley handprint painting, but somehow forgot to object to the Chapman Brothers’ sculptures of children with genitalia stuck on their faces?) The sexist flak Tracey got for the tent and the bed was just absurd. However, the fame became a kind of monster that built her up until she looked, for a while, to me anyway, like just another big ego self-publicist, and I think I was put off and sort of lost interest, and I really, really regret that.

In fact, I feel a real affinity with some of her work. Although we’re from different backgrounds, the sense of exclusion when young, the small town slut-shaming, (though my home town was really small) the hospital trips, the caning it and the insane hangovers are really familiar to me.

Anyway, this is a Sunday breakfast ramble and I don’t care. Yes, I know she said she voted Tory.

If you haven’t been, see it before it finishes. You’ve got eight days.

As far as I’m concerned, last night’s riots were a physical expression of what has been going on in the minds of many people who would never consider smashing a window. I’ve had the ‘Why aren’t we rioting?’ conversation several times recently, always while discussing the banks. I had to laugh at Nick Cohen’s otherwise good piece in the Guardian the other day. He seems to think those in debt are okay because of low interest rates. Alas, I am one of the many who is being bent over a barrel and shafted by certain financial institutions constantly raising rates, and I have felt like rioting myself at times.

The gap between rich and poor has been getting visibly wider since I started working, over 20 years ago. And it has only got worse. Businesses and individuals are going down all over the place, while the UK is still being run by millionaires who, with the best will in the world, have literally no idea what it’s like to have nothing but the money in your hand to live on. No property, shares, ISAs, land to sell, or rich family members to borrow off. Too many of those in power are fortunate in that way, and they simply have no idea about how most of the population live. The media hasn’t helped because so many people who work in it are comparatively well off, or at least get to write about enough freebies to make it look like they are. £500 quid facial, anyone? There is still an ‘us and them’ feel, even in supposedly left of centre papers.

It’s important to say that there is no golden age when everyone was lovely to each other. But last night’s rioting is a legacy of decades of eroded values and obsession with money and possessions over all else. Also, as a result of this, I have observed, in the last few years, a sense of self-righteous entitlement about some young people that is way more alienating than simple aggression. But it’s always the bad apples that give the rest a bad name. Most teens just want to get on with their lives and grow up and learn things and experience things, but they are demonised. Now it will be much, much worse for them, because of a few.

Also, because of a few, legitimate political protesters are going to be hit much harder in the future.

I am so tired of money culture being thrust in all our faces, all of the time. Not everyone makes money. Not everyone can. But over the last 15 years or so there has been a corporatisation of the individual. Some of it comes from trying to import US values (get up and go, a certain kind of professionalism), which isn’t all bad either. But there are certain things that you must be doing, or you are second class and/or stupid, and one is make money and therefore own things. Our ‘proper citizen’ homeowner culture is part of this, and I am really tired of it. (What has been done to housing in the last 10-15 years makes me utterly furious – but that is another blog post.)

Plus, this culture has made us really soft – ‘Hey, there’s a Pret in the high street and I can just about afford another Jo Malone candle, so I’ll just keep quiet,’ – and to get publicly or visibly angry would be an instant giveaway that you might be having problems. If you aren’t one of the haves that the media has waved in our faces so much for the last decade, it’s best to hide away in shame.

Perhaps this will change now? Last night’s riots affected us all. So perhaps it’s time for us all to come out about the realities in our lives and start talking to each other.

But I am reading endless judgement both from those that have no idea about addiction, and those who claim to ‘know’. Actually, addicts get an even worse write-up than the merely mentally ill. People with depression get enough abuse from people who call it ‘self indulgent’ without the layer of intoxication on top causing an extra layer of us-and-them superiority from those who think they are a million miles from the average junkie.

Someone at work said earlier, ‘Hopefully Amy’s death will send a message to young people about drugs,’ but this kind of death never does. Even among the filthy fingernails and missed toilet bowls, if you’re open to it, there is glamour. When you’ve got a drug head on you, there is nothing more marvellous and wonderful than taking possession of a small packet of whatever chemicals, and opening it among the scattered mess of the previous session.

Coffee tables, mottled with sticky rings from hours of wineglasses, overflowing ashtrays full of dog ends, some broken open and resmoked, smeared mirrors, rolled notes, tinfoil. All against a backdrop of music and shouting, cackling, doorbells going and doors slamming. It’s a constantly self-replenishing last supper whose landscape only changes with the light, going from night to morning and back again, the earth’s slow sleeping breath behind the spinning heads. There are days when oblivion can’t come fast enough. Getting comatose is common and welcome. When you find a drug you like, it’s like a miracle.

These are well-documented states of mind. But still no one knows what to do with addiction. It isn’t just a disease. It’s more complex than that. It begins with a behaviour. And if it is an illness, is it physical or mental? No one’s quite there yet, although neuroscience is on its way.

Many of us have made poor choices in life. When I first got intoxicated I was reaching out for something. Could a living human being have walked into that role? Perhaps, but sometimes the people we need the most just don’t manifest for us. You can’t expect another person to save you. And when we’re on a downward spiral, we tend to repel the good people who are all around us if we could only see them. For years I was certainly a magnet for people who mirrored my worst traits. Drugs are more reliable than people.

The death of anyone at 27 is tragic. But look again. If it was diabetes, Crohn’s or say, a heart condition that was making her behave that way, for example, at the almost unwatchable gig in Belgrade in June, Amy would have been rushed to hospital. And similarly, if she had previously been diagnosed ‘merely’ bipolar or schizophrenic, and carried on like that on stage, she might even have been sectioned and it might even have saved her. For a while anyway.

I say again. No one knows what to do with addiction. There is a strong puritanical streak running through our society. Lots of people think they are different to, and better than, junkies, that they lie on the opposite end of a spectrum of indulgence. And yet these same people might drink, smoke, be unable to go without coffee for more than an hour, (and talk about it all the time), or constantly fall in love with people who abuse or neglect them, and this is seen as acceptable.

Twitter has been on fire with ranting about the selfishness of addicts. In fact, the word ‘selfish’ means something different to everyone, to the point where it becomes meaningless. And ‘tortured artist’, said sarcastically or not, is a cliché; lots of people are tortured who don’t have a creative outlet. Close up, addiction is an ugly thing, but it’s really, really time to stop referring to ‘abuse’ of drugs.

Could anyone have helped Amy? I don’t know. Perhaps an infinitely patient and self-sacrificing partner who gave her unconditional love. But perhaps even that wouldn’t have been enough.