Dear Patreon #14

Hello everybody, 

Goodness me but it’s been a while since I last published a newsletter. The last few weeks… months? Have been uncharacteristically hectic but frankly it’s about time I got back to telling you about a few things I’ve been enjoying lately before answering a few FAQs. 

Hello to all of you who follow my Patreon on the free tier, by the way - you won’t have received one of these before but I figured I might as well if you were kind enough to follow me. Who knows, it might tempt one or two people to bung me a few quid.

It’s half one in the morning as I write this, on account of it being too stuffy in my flat for me to sleep before about 3am. Summer in London continues to test me. Anyway, to business! 

Things I have been enjoying lately: 

Dracula Daily is a substack thought up by a man named Matt Kirkland, in which you receive Bram Stoker’s classic novel Dracula emailed to you in realtime. ‘Hang on a moment’ I hear you cry, possibly from Klausenburgh where you may or may not be enjoying a chicken done up some way with red pepper, ‘what do you mean by realtime?’ 

That’s a great question - pass the paprika and I’ll explain. Dracula is told in a series of diary entries, letters and the occasional ship’s log - all of which are precisely dated. Dracula Daily sends you each segment of the book on the date mentioned in the text so, between May and November, you read an absolutely stonking novel in a series of, ahem, bite sized chunks. 

I decided to join in this year as Dracula is one of my all-time favourite novels and it turns out that reading it in real time is absolutely fantastic. It turns the whole thing into a fabulous slow burn and really emphasises the tension during certain segments. Did you know Jonathan Harker is in that castle for absolutely ages? I did, but solely in an abstract way - only now I’m feeling it. I keep texting my friend Alice (who is also doing Dracula Daily this year) to tell her I honestly can’t believe it. He’s in there for ages. Anyway, at this stage you might be better off waiting for things to kick off again next year, but I honestly can’t recommend it highly enough - it’s the most fun you’ll ever have with a total stranger emailing you a book that’s in the public domain. 

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Amigo the Devil has long been one of my most favourite musicians, and the new album he put out this year honestly might be a career best. His songs are by turns darkly comedic, begrudgingly hopeful and quite often emotionally devastating. Yours Until the War is Over is an absolutely phenomenal album but, if there’s one song in particular that absolutely refuses to leave my skull at the moment, it’s Stray Dog. It’s a tender look at a relationship, acknowledging that these things can often be profoundly flawed but wonderful in spite of, or possibly because of it. There’s also a bit where he keeps going AWOOO and it’s very hard to resist the temptation to sing along. Fun fact - there’s a line in this song that was initially teased in his very first album all the way back in 2018. That feels like a long time to be noodling with a song idea, but honestly it was worth the wait. 

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I’ll be honest, it is extremely tempting to make this third recommendation all about baseball because I was watching a game earlier and one of the commentators casually said ‘definition of a horse, Jordan Webb’ which is 1) very funny and 2) provably untrue because Jordan Webb is a man, he’s standing on a mound and throwing the ball over and over. We can see him and everything. Then later on somebody got hit in the knee by a pitch and the commentators gave us the exit velocity of the ball after it hit the knee (31mph, if you were wondering). Nonetheless I must be strong because some of you are quite powerfully allergic to any mention of sport and I can’t be bothered reading through a bunch of comments along the lines of ‘it’s good when local team does a kickscore’. Instead I’m going to talk about quavers. 

I had a bag of quavers today for the first time in ages and you know what, they’re magic. An absolute paragon of ‘crisps that have a surprising amount in common with packing materials until you eat one and realise they’re delicious’. They’ve got a really satisfying blend of crunch, good flavour and a striking lack of actual substance. They’re a snatch of song through an open window; a fleeting zephyr on a hot summer’s day; just a really good snack. The fact that some of you may have lived your entire lives without trying quavers or learning of their existence until now has not escaped me, but fear not! Two years ago I made a video with lovely man Joe Skrebels in which we spend fifty four minutes eating different crisps and talking about them. Quavers feature, although frankly the specific flavour we tried was rank. You get a good look at them, though, so that’s nice. Anyway, there you go - I had some quavers today and they were nice. 

The usual questions

How’s Watson? 
Watson remains an absolute delight despite the fact she went bwaaaaa at a pair of dachshunds on Sunday (from a distance) and startled the shit out of them both. She takes after me in that she doesn’t deal brilliantly well with the summer heat but, after several years of practice, we’ve got a pretty good routine down now. Our top tips are bring lots of water with you when you go on walks, keep to the shade and also paddle in the most stagnant water you can find. Your mileage may vary on that last one. 

How’s work? 

Busy! Alongside my own channel I’ve been absolutely slammed with Oxventure stuff recently - I’m glad to say that we’re hitting the next season extremely hard and it’s meant a small mountain of work for, well, all of us. I’ve bitten off an absolutely enormous mouthful with Wyrdwood but I am determined to chew through it, bone and gristle and all. I really can’t wait for people to experience it - even if I could quite use a nap. 

How are the kittens? 

They’re everywhere. If you weren’t already aware, my partner and I are fostering a (formerly) stray cat and her four kittens - all of whom are now old enough to escape their little enclosure whenever they like and cause absolute mayhem. It helps that they are cute but putting them back in their lovingly maintained pen is getting a mite tiresome at this point. It’s like that bit in The Simpsons where Moe tosses Barney Gumble out of the bar only for Barney to walk back in through the back door immediately - only in this instance there are four Barney Gumbles and he’s being put back in, not thrown out. Actually in fairness to the kittens only three of them are actual escapologists - Father John Misty is quite content to stay in the pen and hasn’t started breaking containment just yet. This is one of several reasons he is my absolute favourite and can do no wrong in my eyes, including when he sat on his sister’s head and went to sleep yesterday. While we’re talking about the kittens, thank you again to everybody who bought stuff from the wishlist we hastily threw together when they all arrived, it was so unbelievably generous and has made the whole experience considerably less scary. 

Right! I’m about ready to wrap this up now but, if you’ll forgive me for ending on a serious note, I just want to say that things in the UK are Not Good at the moment. The fascist riots are not only shameful, they’re fuckin scary - and they’re planning further pogroms on Wednesday. I hope everyone can stay safe and, if you’re able and feel safe enough to do so, please consider helping your local antifascists out. You can help out without taking to the streets if your personal safety is a concern - whatever you can manage is greatly appreciated. Love to and solidarity with you all. 

Cheers! 

Johnny