Stiff Upper Quip Season Four

Welcome and welcome back

Sep 19, 2024

Welcome all to Season Four of ‘Stiff Upper Quip’; this email is going out to a record 1745 people. A good start, and the result of three years of writing graft. Indeed, the audience is now just about where I thought it’d be when I first announced the newsletter in summer 2021.

Over the summer, there were a surprising number of sign-ups, indicating that, given I wasn’t publishing, people are finding their way to this newsletter organically. In many ways that must be the ideal for a writer: Watching their audience (and indeed) revenues growing without actually having to write anything. Actually publishing texts, attempting to use words to say things, just runs the risks of alienating people. Surely the ideal writing career is to write something immensely successful when young and live off the proceeds while continually insinuating that a sequel is imminent.

New subscribers also bring about the need for reintroduction. Perhaps those who’ve been here longest might be best served to introduce this newsletter – I am intrigued by the idea that other people might know what we are doing better than we do, like the French girl at Oxford who, seeing me coming out of a play I’d written, told me, ‘I will tell you what you are up to.’

For me, ‘Stiff Upper Quip’ is an extended exercise in life writing. It is nothing more or less than a snapshot of a man’s life in the earlyish 21^st century, a weekly Polaroid placed by the bedside table. There are posts about Belgium, or turning 40, or learning foreign languages, or, to great and even lucrative success, being horny. Failure is a consistent theme; the biggest post in the history of the blog remains this from 2022 on my experiences of the topic, which was followed up here. Having enjoyed a recent period of feeling a success, I’m feeling more of a failure again recently, so perhaps a fourth part is due.

There are of course recurring themes. One of them would certainly be men and men’s lives, and these pieces (here or here, for example) inevitably number amongst the newsletter’s most successful. In these pieces, I try and carve out a space to write about men which is neither Guardianista or manosphere; neither indulging incel talking points or performatively lambasting ‘toxic masculinity’. Just an attempt to write about common aspects of male experience without judgement. There needs to be this space, I think, which faced with JD Vance and Caitilin Moran treats those two impostors just the same (freely acknowledging the former is both more powerful and pernicious, with both essentially wrong about men).

Inevitably, these pieces are amongst the newsletters’ most controversial, not least because people are oddly unused to read these days to reading male voices not affiliated to those deceiving poles of either trad-dom or social justice. For sure, there’s plenty of male writers around, but in liberal spaces they have to pay the piper by decrying ‘toxic masculinity’ and serve up bromides like ‘feminism liberates men too’; whatever they really think of things, they have to express it in a certain language judged as, one might say, ‘palatably masculine’. My rebellion against this requirement to be a ‘good guy’ is not in favour of advocating social conservatism, but just in men and women having the maximum freedom to explore and articulate their own experiences of life.

Memory is another big part of this newsletter. I’ve led an interesting and mildly peripatetic life and I am currently resident in the third different country of my adulthood; I’ve lived in London and Berlin for long periods before I came to Belgium in 2023. I’ve written about all these eras, my time studying in Freiburg, my struggles in London, my adjustments to Brussels; last year I even finally got round to writing my piece on my time at Oxford University (Spoiler: It did not go well).

I write about culture, about the music I like and making mixtapes, about Lana del Rey and writing itself. I’d like to do more of these kinds of pieces but there’s an inherent issue with any good cultural writing – and I can’t get enough of it personally – in that the reader has to know the work of art in question in order to connect with it. So you are pre-limiting your audience. Nonetheless, I’d like to write more about culture this season, particularly given how much of my life I devote to reading, watching and listening to things.

The least successful strand of this newsletter is formed by what might be called ‘creative writing’ (famously, the rest of writing requires no creativity). This covers the short stories, novel excerpts and humorous pieces which I sporadically post on here.

Predictably, for me personally this is by far the most valuable seam of my writing. I get it tho – you don’t necessarily sign up to a politics newsletter to read strange stories about European space espionage. For those who do enjoy this strand writing, please buy my novel ‘Midlands’ here. Doing so is also a great way to support this newsletter. I’m happy to say too that my second novel is in manuscript and that, as I seek a publisher, I’ll almost certainly be posting some extracts from it on this newsletter.

I don’t write as much as some, nor do I feel the requirement to. My schedule is a weekly piece, three of which are free a month, and one midweek and one Sunday post, often a long read, part pay-walled for paying subscribers (who are to be clear the best of subscribers). I try and compensate with less is more, taking time over my sentences to render them elegant, and consider that 1000 words a week which really count are better than a plethora of baggy posts. I freely admit that alongside this commitment to high style that I miss plenty of typos.

Of course, there’s always room for customer feedback, and I’m quite aware that some of you have been here longer and, indeed, reading me every week since SUQ's inception. Perhaps you’d do me the honour of offering a bit of customer feedback at this form here; it also helps me to imagine what people want me to write about more on the newsletter this year.

At the age of 42, I have arrived at the curious position for the first time that my writing is one of the parts of my life I’m most satisfied with. I write something; I rewrite it; I put it up here or elsewhere and people comment; there’s a dialogue there. And that’s all a writer really needs, to feel encouraged – to feel they’re not putting their words into a pure void. Once they’ve got that echo, even at a quite modest level, their confidence can enter a virtuous circle of growing feedback loops. And over 1700 people is a lot! I was at concert recently, looking down on the rows of audience in a giant stadium hangar, and began counting people to get an idea of my newsletter audience’s size. Suffice to say it was more rows than you’d think.

Enough navel-gazing. Time to get on with Season Four of ‘Stiff Upper Quip’. I promise you I’ll give you my all, and for your part, tell your friends to join us. If people keep coming like this we can build this writing project beyond even my most optimistic predictions; why, if we keep it up at this pace, we’ll have to open a merch stall. ‘SUQ’ tea towels, anyone?