Branches: The Best of 2020
And what we had won't be the same thing now but you will make something new.
For my last Branches of the year, I thought I’d load you up on the best of 2020… a handful of gems to accompany you through the (finally here) Christmas/New Year break.
If I’m going to pick just one thing from this year, it’s The Bureau, a French spy drama that’s 5 seasons, and 50 hours of pure, golden age of television, joy.
The best song of the year was Frank Ocean’s ‘Dear April’.
If you could take two strangers
Lead them left and right
At a certain place and time
Like you took these strangers
And our two strange lives
And made us new
And took us through
And woke us up
I believe that no matter what it makes us do
Take us through it
And wake us up again
And what we had won't be the same thing now (Now, now)
But you will make something new
These were my 100 most played songs on Spotify in 2020.
The three mixes I got the most from were Thylacine’s lockdown set:
Gerd Janson’s Boiler Room set:
And Maribou State’s Fabric Mix:
My favourite book was Barbarian Days, William Finnegan’s stunning meditation on a life of surfing.
“The particulars of new places grabbed me and held me, the sweep of new coasts, cold, lovely, dawns. The world was incomprehensibly large, and there was still so much to see. Yes, I got sick sometimes of being an expatriate, always ignorant, on the outside of things, but I didn't feel ready for domestic life, for seeing the same people, the same places, thinking more or less the same thoughts, each day. I liked surrendering to the onrush, the uncertainty, the serendipity of the road.”
Ocean - John Butler 2012 Studio Version
The best new thing I bought was the Forerunner 735XT which meant not having to take my phone running, but still getting awesome run data, and programming track workouts into my watch and having it automagically guide me through them.
Pro runner Emma Coburn’s pre-run warmup
To Run My Best Marathon at Age 44, I Had to Outrun My Past
“I used to think of athletic ability as a mountain. You're born at the base, and you'll die there too. In between, you climb higher and higher until you begin to descend. But that analogy isn't quite right, because as you get older you acquire wisdom that can help you train. I've come to realize that a better analogy is of rolling peaks. You go up, you go down. At some point you reach your peak, but there are still vistas as you descend.”
It was nice to find a new hero this year, the Opera House architect Jorn Utzon.
Jorn Utzon: The Man and the Architect
The discovery of Utzon, my brother moving to Copenhagen, and the gripping first two seasons of the Danish series Borgen all made me pine for a trip to Denmark.
The Miracle Sudoku
I found Heaps Normal this year: simply delicious non-alcoholic beer.
This was the most useful thing I read all year on politics.
David Shor’s Unified Theory of American Politics (NY Mag, 2020)
“So there’s a big constellation of issues. The single biggest way that highly educated people who follow politics closely are different from everyone else is that we have much more ideological coherence in our views.
If you decided to create a survey scorecard, where on every single issue — choice, guns, unions, health care, etc. — you gave people one point for choosing the more liberal of two policy options, and then had 1,000 Americans fill it out, you would find that Democratic elected officials are to the left of 90 to 95 percent of people.”
A Small Needful Fact
Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.
This delicious vegetable curry was the recipe I cooked most this year.
I’m still oddly moved by the breeding process of Siamese Fighting Fish (jump to 33:58).
And I haven’t forgotten the surprised/weird/sad feeling I got watching Mouse of Silver, by The Midnight Gospel.
“Clancy: There's no way to stop the heartbreak. How do you... What do you do about that?
Deneen: You cry.
[pause]
Deneen: You cry.”
The Three Sides of Risk, by Morgan Housel
“Well, let me take this to a dark and tragic place,” I said before telling a group of 500 strangers a story I hadn’t talked about in almost 20 years.”
Instead of writing this year, I sent newsletters (34 of them!) I write Branches on Saturday mornings, and while we were in lockdown, and Julia was home on maternity leave, Saturday mornings were free and energised. Then on the day Melbourne went into its hard lockdown she went back to work, back to a hospital full of COVID patients, and my year flipped. Suddenly Saturdays mornings became my only chance in the week for respite.
If you noticed Branches shortening in the second half of the year, you simply noticed the echo of my life compressing, locked down, two young kids, a doctor wife, and my extra time and energy evaporating.
“Sometimes life seems really short, and other times it seems impossibly long. But this chart helps to emphasize that it’s most certainly finite. Those are your weeks and they’re all you’ve got.”
All the macro things that defined this year - the bushfires, COVID, the state of the US, Melbourne’s lockdowns - are equally matched for me by the micro things, and especially the amount of time I spent with my two boys. They’re one, and five now.
This Is The Highest Praise, (Daily Dad, 2020)
“There is one way to judge, in the end, whether you’ve done this thing right. It’s not based on how rich your kids get. It’s not whether they make it into Yale, or whether they turn out handsome or beautiful, smart or famous.
In the end, the ultimate test of a father’s worth is, do your kids want to spend time with you? Of course, we can make some exceptions for those rough teenage years, or whether they like being seen with you in front of their friends. What we’re talking about is simply this: does your presence make their lives better or worse? Accordingly, do they want to have you around or not?”
I spent so much time with them. Through the repetition and predictability of lockdown, we fell into sync. I will always remember this as a strange year, full of moments of darkness and uncertainty.
But equally, I’ll remember it glowing with the love of my two kids, full circles, still untouched by strain, or doubt.
“I wish there was a way to know that you're in the good old days before you've actually left them.”