United By Music

Because a more colourful life is more fun

Pull Up A Chair is a weekly newsletter containing all the things I’d like to be chatting about if we could hang out together in real life.

• 📚 Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld. This novel sets up a premise: funny men with average looks always pair up with stunning women. It then spends a few hundred pages showing us a funny female TV writer falling in love with a stunningly gorgeous pop star. One friend asked if the pop star was based on Harry Styles - I thought of Bruno Mars, and a podcaster I listened to said she had pictured Machine Gun Kelly. A delightfully fun read which I’d highly recommend for your summer holiday travels. Note however that there’s a section set during the Covid lockdowns - told in emails - which I know not everyone’s keen on. Very selfishly, I’m glad to see Sittenfeld do that, because the novel I’m working on at the moment has flashbacks to the winter of 2020-21, told in WhatsApp conversations. (Bookshop.org | Amazon - affiliate links) 

• 🏃‍♀️ Allie Bennett’s Treadmill Struts. After a solid couple of years of Peloton workouts, I wanted something a bit different, and cancelled my app subscription. In addition to starting to lift heavy things up and put them down again, the TikTok algorithm served me up Allie Bennett’s treadmill strut workout format. In short: a playlist designed to pair with a steadily increasing walking pace, before you spend two songs running, and then one cooling down. The magic is this: when you find the right walking speed for the song, your steps fall into line with the beat, and you feel like a star. Hence the ‘strut’ title. If you don’t believe me, believe Lizzo, who did the strut Allie made to go with her music, and loved it. Another thing I’ve let Allie influence me into doing: a 10-minute straighten up of the flat first thing in the morning. Some mornings.

• 🩰 Ballet lessons. The summer term of ballet classes has started and I’m back to my two-classes-a-week routine. I just love it, so much. I think what some people get from yoga is what I get from ballet. It’s a combination of sport and art, and I’m satisfyingly worn out after a class. Let this be your reminder that if you enjoyed something as a kid, there’s probably a way to do it as a hobby as an adult. 

A quick housekeeping note: I’ve switched paid subscriptions on for the newsletter. That’s partly to reflect the work that I put into it, and partly because there are some things I’d like to write about that I’m not sure I want to be as Google-able, so tucking them behind a paywall is helpful. If you’d like to subscribe but can’t afford to, do ping me an email and I’ll happily give you free access.

I’m writing this on Saturday, Coronation Day - but what I’m most excited about is that when you read this, I’ll be on my way to Liverpool for Eurovision!

A couple of pals and I have got tickets for the first Jury semi-final on Monday, so I’ll be spending my extra bank holiday revelling in music, inclusivity, and joy. I can’t think of a better way to spend it. 

I grew up in a deeply conservative small town outside of London - the kind of place where Iceland Foods turned into M&S, Blockbuster turned into Sweaty Betty, and the food bank collection point in the supermarket a few years ago was a Harrods online delivery box (I sh*t you not.). It’s idyllic, but… oppressively so. My family aren’t huge fans of Eurovision, and I can’t remember when I first became a fan. Looking through the Wikipedia pages for the 2000s shows, I have some memories of the contests from 2003 and 2004 onwards, so it’s safe to say that I was fully bought into being a fan by the time I left primary school. 

So what was it that made me a Eurofan? The festival of diversity and joy. Every year, one night of TV would be given over to riotous colour, people getting to live their dreams, and a celebration of different musical styles. I wasn’t yet a politics student - I was ten - but I knew enough to understand that there was a history in Europe of intolerance and prejudice, and that this annual contest was a refutation of it. This was the era when European integration was getting gradually broader and deeper, and there wasn’t yet a particularly credible anti-European movement in British politics. But it was on its way. 

As the Eurosceptic movement developed, and as I started studying politics as an academic subject, first at school and then at university, being a fan of Eurovision started to feel like more of a political statement. Choosing to watch it and talk about it was a reflection of my looking towards Europe - rather than across the Atlantic - for at least some of my entertainment. It was a way to express that I saw these countries across the Channel as our peers and friends. While I was sad that our entries could be so embarrassing, it felt important that we could be gracious losers in a song contest, rather than embattled armies at war. For more on the history of the contest, and the language and politics rules, I’d highly recommend the Eurovision series on Helen Zaltzman’s podcast, The Allusionist.

In 2020, of course, there wasn’t a song contest. Instead, we got a broadcast called Eurovision: Europe Shine A Light. Airing in mid-May, two months after the continent-wide spread of lockdowns and restrictions, it felt like the first chance we had had to really step back and reflect on this health emergency that didn’t reflect borders, languages, or national flags. To lighten the mood a bit, though, Netflix also released their delightful film Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga a month later. It was so joyously silly, 100% fitting into my favourite genre of films: those where it looks like everyone involved had a fantastic time making it (see also: Mamma Mia, The Devil Wears Prada, The Lost City). With starring roles for Rachel McAdams, Dan Stevens, and the city of Edinburgh (even if the geography is a bit iffy), you must watch it if you haven’t yet. 

And then 2022. 2022. The best description of it was: Europe putting up our middle finger to Putin. In a contest that aims not to be explicitly political or partisan, the public vote from across the continent propelled Kalush Orchestra into first place. The song was unveiled two days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and with its words of love for a mother easily translating into a patriotic message, it went viral across the continent. The video, which was filmed in April of 2022, and published two days after the continent, shows Ukrainian military women saving children from bombed and burning buildings and returning them to their mothers. It’s impossible to watch without crying. 

 In the Eurovision Village in Liverpool they have a Ukrainian area, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the Ukrainian spirit is centred throughout the entire week’s events.