…and I keep dreaming about my dead relatives

The season’s turning. It’s dark in the mornings. The grids outside mine are clogged with the rich sludge of rotting leaves, so the constant rain has formed a black silty lake that floods the road and washes over the pavements whenever cars growl past. Early evening feels like the middle of the night. My cat Cosmo has become so fluffy with his thicker winter coat that he looks like a malevolent, sentient balled-up black fuzzy jumper, which has been constantly shitting me up because I own several fuzzy black jumpers, but Cosmo is the only one (so far) that is prone to suddenly coming alive and lasering me with a demonic green glare when his slumber is disturbed.

Samhain is almost here, a time of year when the veil between our world and others is considered to be thin. Connected or not, I’ve been dreaming about my ancestors. My grandma — my kind, funny, stubborn queen of improvised skint Northern baking (where you somehow conjure something delicious from whatever odds and sods have been abandoned in the back of the cupboard) and car boot sales (where you somehow conjure treasures like vintage Chanel purses and other valuable collectables from the depths of seemingly mundane stalls and then haggle your way into possessing them for ideally twenty pee but otherwise a begrudging top bid of a quid), who was generous and savvy enough to rescue me from many a strange location in response to an incoherent small-hours phonecall, tracking me down to all corners of the UK within an hour or two by some mysterious homing instinct I could never understand — she’s been showing up several times a week. So too has my grandad, an all-round top lad: lover of Only Fools and Horses, gaudy but motheaten jumpers, and dissing my grandma’s baking in favour of rinsing the Rusholme market for Indian sweets like gulab jamun or kulfi. He was an immigrant, competitive runner regularly featured in the paper for his race wins, teacher of SEN children, and blagger of bargain last-minute Teletext beach holidays on which he would consistently wear nothing but nightmarishly garish holey Union Jack swim shorts and a knotted hanky on his head.

My Dad has been in the mix too, though my dreams about him are more complicated: fragmented images of places he lived, the smell of whiskey or beer on a beard-scratch goodnight kiss, his leather motorbike jacket I’d get in trouble for plaiting the fringe of whenever it was left unattended with me in the pub. Strange stories; Monopoly games that went on for hours because everyone round the table was somehow scamming the bank; cryptic wisdom; Terry Pratchett and Iain M. Banks paperbacks with curly-cornered pages from being read in the bath; the night a few weeks before his death where we sat huddled in blankets opposite a crackling fire and he told me he’d decided he’d like to be reincarnated as a tree.

I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about memory lately, penning more non-fiction than fiction for what’s probably the first time ever. And in the midst of all my creative existential crises and attempts to embrace queer failure, I’ve been thinking about heritage: ancestral, creative, cultural. That’s part of what I’ve been exploring, I realise, in my recent writing about cult cultural phenomena like Velvet Goldmine and the Mighty Boosh; in a moment where a lot of things feel uncertain, it’s been bringing me comfort, strength, self-trust and conviction to be able to unpick these threads of my creative DNA and retrace that influence and lineage.

So the idea of paying tribute to ancestors – be they blood ancestors or part of our claimed creative, cultural or queer lineage – has a strong pull at this time of year. I loved this piece about queer ancestors by author Storm Faerywolf, and it made me think about the people like Cookie Mueller, Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, Pete Burns and Leigh Bowery – all artists whose work I’ve been reconnecting with recently who’ve led me to such a sense of gratitude that they had the guts, heart, grit, imagination and bravery that they did, and for the way their legacies have trickled down and inevitably shaped me and so many others in our own creative work. As the days become darker, I’m keeping all my ancestors close — grieving their absence, celebrating who they were — and doing my best to honour the glorious patchwork parts of myself sewn together from all these eclectic threads.

Originally shared in my newsletter in October 2023