Life's A Beach
A French idyll, one of mid-life's panics, speaking English, Binface
I think this heat has driven me a little mad.
I’m writing in an idyll somewhere near the bottom of a verdant France. Things here are still green, despite a heatwave that’s been longer and stronger than our British version. It’s perfection here (massive thanks Louise and Richard). As I type, there’s a pair of bees the size of small bats – giant things, all black – going about their daily business. Buzz buzz buzz. Keep sucking down the nectar for all it’s worth. Buzz buzz buzz.
Idyll aside, I’ve had this nag in the head – a double-barrelled feeling, really – that keeps swirling through, prodding the brain with mixed impressions about everything. That feeling is a blur of both bleached-out ecstasy – the love of it all – and an unhealthy amount of self-disgust, a strange contrast I wish I could ditch. Everything is glorious. Oh no, I look like a malformed lump in an ill-fitting T-shirt in these holiday photographs. My children are having the time of their young lives. Why, oh why, can’t I hear anything they’re saying? Praise it all, scorn yourself, repeat until fade.
All of these feelings carry on and smudge into one slightly psychotic whole (ecstatic depression? Must consult GP on this), just as summer reaches a whole new level of heat-induced fever pitch. You know what they say. Life’s a beach. But which version of me is going to find it though?
The paranoid slump comes from looking at holiday photos, crystal-clear iPhone reminders of where I’ve gone wrong. Hair is a mess, waistline way too thick, facial expression like an acting dog that’s over the hill and being turned down for a Dulux ad. Every one – a portrait of Summer 2026 – makes me want to change everything in a way that radiotherapy and chemotherapy never managed (that sounds like an insult to NHS treatment – it’s not – those two things are total miracles in their own ways). If I could wipe the slate clean at 55, maybe a new me could achieve a little more in life than endless low-level pub conversations that go roughly nowhere.
Part of the reason the photos turn out that way is because keeping my fitness levels up hasn’t been easy since chemotherapy. Energy is down – way down – and tasks that used to burn off excess calories now seem like carefully designed tortures. Couch to 5K? You’re bloody dreaming, mate. An exercise bike at the back of the kitchen, set to punishment level, can only do so much before you crawl off, whimpering and beaten by it all like Morrissey after taking a Welsh battery from a bunch of crazed fans at Newport Centre on The Queen Is Dead tour (going way back there, but it remains one of the gig highlights of my life, so it’s still valid).
Deafness is something I’ve learnt to live with, even though it remains a bloody drag. Silence and tinnitus tones used to make me feel sick, perhaps even contributed to the vertigo attacks I suffered. Now it’s just a low, tedious hum that I’ve had to grow used to. Records sound flatter. If the stereo panning is brilliantly primitive (listen to “Regular John”, the opening track on the first Queens of the Stone Age album, as an example), it now plays in its own disconcerting nothingness: an echo and a void. I can cope with it, but it’s bloody depressing having rock’n’roll taken away from you bit by bit.
Even the idyll – French perfection from sunrise to stargaze – can’t help here. That’s what’s blasting out of the bad side of summer’s double barrel. How does one manage to fit ecstasy into the schedule amongst such massive shots? How is the average 21st-century schizoid man meant to stay afloat?
I realise my climate-change blinkers need removing here, but… it feels like we’re in a summer that just won’t end, and I have to hang on to that as a good thing. Does anyone really want to move forward into a bleak, drizzly autumn? Britain is totally bleached out in a good way. Pubs are lazy and brilliant, and the default setting on people’s faces seems to be a kind of blissful happiness, like the happy drugs have finally kicked in.
While the funny section at the end of the news might still be missing (to be fair, the news remains unwatchable from the start), a bin fighting a by-election against a toad-faced, poncified school bully remains hilarious. It’s not something I expected to happen when I chaperoned Binface around Glastonbury in 2017 before he introduced Sleaford Mods on the Park Stage. But really, this is politics that people understand. Fuck him at the ballot box.
Add to that a new Prime Minister who seems able to speak human, a guy who genuinely loves the bands he talks about – something that should be an immediate point of affinity for anyone who grew up reading magazines like NME, Select and Q. To be part of your era, to understand culture... that’s something precious we shouldn’t scoff at isn’t it? I mean, who do you think Farage listens to when he’s stopped talking horrible bollocks for five minutes in one of his many, many homes? What films does he put on? What’s blaring out of Boris Johnson’s headphones when he’s out jogging for the cameras? Could Liz Truss even manage to process modern music? Would melody and rhythm compute?
Elsewhere, there’s The Odyssey building its Trojan Horse and a Spider-Man film that people are clambering over themselves to see – proof that cinema isn’t dead, it’s merely been napping for a while – and there’s a new Queens of the Stone Age record mixed in simple, beautiful stereo to show off the richness of a voice and a guitar solo that sounds as though it’s been lifted directly from Eno’s Another Green World.
What makes these stories – these micro-events – play out so well? How has this flip-side world crawled, albeit temporarily, out of the last two years of utter bloody cataclysm? Is this us – or just me? – choosing to ignore the worst and savour the summer, even as it scorches our skin, calcifies our plants and carries on, and on, and on?
I don’t know the answers. I just know that when I get back home I need to get myself into those new running shoes, and I need to plug in my hearing aids and learn to accommodate their strange variations of sound. And I need to take the time to breathe all this stuff in and sit with it for a minute. Good news feels like it comes around too rarely. We should celebrate it, in whatever way we can, whenever it does happen.
And I should probably delete the worst of those photos.
Nothing good comes from them. Let’s properly look forward to next year’s instead. That would be less heat-mad.