Every spring, when this very specific time of year comes around—the end of February, the beginning of March, the last drag of the gray weeks before the clocks change—I get a glimpse of what it must be like to have a Christmas no. 1 (minus royalties). It is the time when people celebrate my greatest work.
As someone who has recently published a bookon top of countless articles floating around in various parts of the public domain, and even more hundreds of thousands of words hidden in unpublished novels and diaries and scraps of stuff I never finished, I find it somewhat humiliating that my greatest work is not among them. No: as democratically determined by the attention economy, my greatest work is a tweet posted just over four years ago. At 11 a.m. on February 27, 2022, I was lying in bed, starving in a ray of sunshine feeling plain, and I pulled out my phone and posted:
“I like to think I lead a complex emotional life, but then the sun comes out and I’m happy. I’m functionally no different than a big leaf.”
I was at the time a pretty dedicated poster for what is now X, the everything app. I’ve had a few popular tweets in my time (I’ve since hacked my account, so you’ll have to trust me, or, as I just did, check out the wholesome afterlife of my “unscathed by how few kinds of bear there are” post on Facebook groups for animal enthusiasts). On Twitter, he garnered a very respectable number of likes; but the sheer scope of it, its escape from the control of that particular microblogging site, is something I only realized over the years. It has gone architecturally viral, built in the language of many online. It has its months of sweat, but of course come spring it appears again as a crocus. Friends would reach out to say they’d sent it to their family group chats, or show me videos of long-haired women reading it on their Instagram reels or TikTok videos. A screenshot re-posted on the Instagram page “ocd_and_positivity” last year currently has almost 30,000 likes. People wrote to Bluesky to tell me their kids had ‘big leaf’ poses they took in the sun. A man in Germany contacted me to ask if he could put it on his album cover.
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Sometimes I’ve drifted away from my seasonal fame, from my life as a living-laughter influencer. For one thing, as someone who generally likes to get paid for their writing, I’ve never made a red cent from it. I’m getting plagiarized on LinkedIn by people trying to look happy! Those happy kids and boisterous singer-songwriters haven’t benefited my bank balance one bit! I am the victim of theft on a grand scale!
For another thing – it’s tweeting good? Like, yes, it has a certain beauty of embroidery as a gift, but does my greatest work really have merit? Is it better than Philip Larkin’s “The Coming” as a way to usher in spring (“In longer evenings / Light, cold and yellow / Washes the stillness / The front of the houses” – hell yeah!)? Better than “Here Comes the Sun” or ritual sacrifice? Better than a big move on the Wikipedia page Newgrange?
I have my doubts (history will be the judge). But with the passage of time I have put these concerns aside. Winter is long and the end of winter, the muddy months that pile up after the new year, are longer and bitter. You wear tights. You stand at the bus stop. You review Terror and consider it related. Nothing seems worthwhile. But then one afternoon there’s a break in the sky and you see the sun and feel a bit of its warmth and the possible floods of a summer at the same time as the blockage is lifted. You feel wild. It feels like greeting the people standing on the pavement outside the pub clutching that first pint outdoors. The air smells wonderful. In short, you feel like a big leaf. It’s a great feeling. I am happy to be associated with him.
(Further reading: Alice Coltrane’s extraordinary score)
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