99: March 2025
Hello lovely, welcome to Border Crossing issue #99, I hope you’re well.
We made it through winter!
Hibernation over. What a gorgeous sun-kissed few days it’s been, at least here on the south coast.
Shall I do something special for issue #100? Or stick to the usual format? I can’t think of anything that’d be extra enough to mess with the flow.
Next week I’m back at Sea Fog Studio (owned by Tim Rice-Oxley off of Keane) working on new Tom Williams recordings. They’re sounding thrilling so far, natural and warm and the songs are magic. Also, I thought Tom had it all written but last month he’s finished a bunch of new songs, all of which are easily album-worthy. Decisions.
My six month Creativity Counselling programs are now sold out until July 2025, though you can still book individual 90 minute sessions.
This week we start band rehearsals for Jim Bob’s big (all but sold out, you’ll have to sit in the gods) Shepherds Bush Empire show and a couple of festivals, including the 10th anniversary Shiiine On at the end of March. We get a weekend in glorious Skegness. #dope
I’ll also hopefully start work on two sexy new podcasting projects, having not done any pods since last summer. So that’ll be fun. Rich Freeman of Always Possible is crowdfunding for his How England Works project, on which I’ll be editor and sound designer.
Right, enough. The Sainsburys van is outside and this Border Crossing is already a day late, so I’ll stop fiddling with it and hit ‘publish’.
On we go. xx
gems
1
One of my favourite people, Julia Raeside’s brilliant debut comic novel Don’t Make Me Laugh has just come out having won a pile of praise and media for its pin-sharp dissection of predatory men in the British comedy industry. Raeside comes from journalism and her book is deeply rooted in researched fact and experience, sitting where a non-fiction wasn’t possible (for obvious reasons). But that doesn’t take away from its deft, hilarious prose and nuanced, unflinching storytelling. First time out, she’s already a fine novelist.
2
A beautifully written, unusually personal reminiscence by James Walsh on his newsletter, excavates his relationship with alcohol, much of which may feel harshly familiar to many of us.
3
We enjoyed Leigh Bowery! at Tate Modern, a retrospective on the great 1980s performance artist, promoter and fashion iconoclast. It’s all memorabilia and debauched tales: other people’s art and documentation focused on Bowery — more than his own designs even — so it does feel akin to a V&A show, rather than a Tate show, though that’s not necessarily a problem. But old clips off of The Clothes Show on telly screens is very V&A. The small gathering of Lucien Freud’s portraits of Bowery sticks out as the truly authentic corner of the show, where you get a proper grasp of a real Leigh, naked in all senses.
4
Boff Whalley (of Commoners Choir and Chumbawamba) has a glorious new book out, But: Life Isn’t Like That, Is It? via PM Press (that link is UK mailorder, here’s USA mailorder) which is about disrupters and, at the same time, internally disrupts its own narratives, in part via eye-catching unconventional typesetting by Christian Brett. I think this is Boff’s fourth book and he’s on a lengthy UK / USA book tour through March and April.
5
Another sign of Spring: it’s been a rare few days of proper films popping up on the streamers. The Outrun from last year showed up on Netflix, with a sublime, mesmerising performance by Saoirse Ronan, while Nickel Boys is on Prime (we couldn’t finish that one, it’s just too bleak and brutal). I also got well into Grand Theft Hamlet on Mubi — entirely shot inside Grand Theft Auto, two British actors try to put on a production of Hamlet inside the game. The audition section is hilarious.
6
7
Alex Morris and John McEvoy’s important investigation for Declassified on how John Burgess, BBC News Director of News Content and Katherine Viner, The Guardian’s editor-in-chief, both held private meetings with apartheid Israel’s former top military officer, General Aviv Kohavi, in November 2023, one month into the Gaza assault. By this point, more than 10,000 Palestinians were already slain and senior Israeli political and military officials had already made numerous public statements of genocidal intent in the Israel press and in the Knesset (abandoning Israeli prisoners of Hamas in the process).
Fifteen months later, today as I type this, Israel is blocking all humanitarian aid into Gaza, in order to pressure Hamas into agreeing to a US-led change to the ceasefire agreement. By definition, that is collective punishment of a population as a negotiation tool. Yet the framing in western liberal media is entirely without emphasis on what is unequivocally a war crime. BBC News is mis-defining it as an ‘extension’ to the deal, rather than making clear it is an arbitrary change, added after the fact by the Trump team.
Language matters.
8
I’ve mentioned John Grindrod’s lovely Monstrosities Mon Amour podcast before, but for this week’s episode he came down to Brighton and joined comedian Angela Barnes for a wander around the Marina (the link is Apple podcasts). After listening, I fell down a bit of an Angela Barnes rabbit hole: I’ve not watched her standup before, but she’s long lived high in my esteem as the greatest ever player of Richard Osman’s House Of Games, one of only two ever five-day winners (Jay Rayner recently became the second) and when she returned for a ‘champions week’ she won another four days, a peerless nine wins in two goes. Numbers don’t lie, nobody’s got near. Anyway, turns out Angela’s stand-up special ‘Hot Mess’ from a couple of years ago is on ITVx (free to watch in the UK) and it’s excellent. Also, it was taped in a room I love, the low ceilinged basement theatre at Brighton Komedia.
project basic potato
It’s Project Basic Potato time. Later this month, with help from Charlie Peverett of Birdsong Academy, I’m going to undertake one of the easiest, most entry level tasks of kitchen gardening, which anyone ought to be able to do: growing potatoes. I don’t have a garden, so I’ll be using a tall cylindrical grow bag (kind of looks like a big tall bucket) in our back yard. Charlie will also grow some in his own garden and we’ll document the process.
So… fancy growing potatoes along with us?
Especially if you haven’t grown food before? The idea is, you share your experience, I’ll include it here as we go along. We need to plant seed potatoes in the second half of this month for the earliest crop, then on into April for later crops. So if you’re up for it, now is the time to go purchase some seed potatoes, which you’ll find in garden centres everywhere. If it goes well, if we (and you?) succeed in growing, cooking and eating our own potatoes (in my case for the first time) I’ll do a zine about it.
potato gems
• Update: Tamworth Spud Man won his battle to keep his pitch, with the council back-peddling like mad in the face of overwhelming public opposition.
• There’s a new South Korean rom com series just launched on Netflix called The Potato Lab, set in a potato research centre (yes, really) where a potato-obsessed researcher falls for her suave new manager.
• Last week I had a brief but brutal bout of food poisoning, which may have been from some late night chips from a Belgian-style chippie in the centre of town. It probably wasn’t though, Rifa ate lots more than me and she was fine. However it may also have been from a diffident, oddly not-very-nice second cocktail at Soho House (I switched from old fashioned to martini, already a daft move) or possibly an in-the-moment delicious, but in memory somehow nauseatingly slimy, posh butternut squash tempura focaccia with ricotta cheese, from an upmarket spot in St Leonard’s On Sea. Given I consumed all these items in one day, clearly I was asking for it. I threw up the whole night, I counted eleven times, spent the next day struggling to move, til eventually we left (many hours late) for a family gathering in Bognor.
•
get in touch
email: chris@christt.com
Instagram: @cjthorpetracey
always there
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Thanks again. Look after yourself and your people.
All my love,
Chris
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