Matt Haig

I keep hearing that Gen Z are becoming toxic far right lost boys and wannabe antiwoke tradwife influencers yet 30 percent of young people plan on voting Green and less than one in ten of them are thinking of voting for the fascist stockbroker. So maybe we shouldn’t pretend the whole world is X?

The secret is apparently out. The Midnight Train is coming and it can be preordered from today. My first proper love story. Out next May.

For anyone feeling January right now

I don’t know who did this but I like it.

I don’t relate to this mythical white English past where people felt safe. The most dangerous person in my town growing up was a white man called Michael Sams. Our town didn’t have a bookshop but it had a serial killer who kidnapped women and put their bodies in wheelie bins and who had traps on his property. He would later be called the Most Dangerous Man in Britain. Yeah. Every day we passed a workshop with a mutilated corpse inside and never realised. Yet at the time I had a mate whose mum told us to be careful of ‘darkies’. Nah. Be careful of the middle class white man with the woodwork studio more like. My Nan was racist too. Until she wasn’t. My Nan was racist because she was born in 1905 in rural Devon and never saw a ‘coloured’ (her word) face until she was an adult. Then my mum became best friends with a British Caribbean person and my Nan loved her and baked her cakes till the end of time. Then she got a friend from Leicester and used to take me as a young boy to Leicester and it was always the most exciting time. To leave my bland town of mediocre chain bakeries and drive through streets alive with Indian shops and Bangladeshi restaurants and everyone seemed so friendly to me and my Nan. She was also lovely to my best mate at the time whose dad was Chinese and I think by that point in her life she genuinely was as blind to superficial features of ‘race’ (an artificial construct anyway) as it was possible to be for someone of her background. Anyway, yeah. I hate the way racists are now using their childhoods as these mythical places of white harmony. My friend group - the people I always felt safe around - were always a mix of backgrounds. It was the people who wouldn’t mix, the hardcore racist lads, who were more likely to hurt you, whatever your skin colour. The people who mocked any difference. Because their racism was always a defect. An unarticulated inferiority complex which needed to punch down. I don’t know. It’s under a lot of threat this idea that ‘diversity is strength’ but I think it is. Darwin found it so. And I think it strengthens the soul. Anyway. Miss you Nan.

These words have helped me so many times. They are so simple and I have known them ever since I read Letters to a Young Poet years ago and I repeat them so often I feel like the whole world knows them. But they don’t. So here you go.