In 2008, the banks began to fail. My marriage had started to do so much earlier. I don’t hold Lehman Brothers to account for the latter, but both systems shared a common problem.
The financial system had found increasingly elaborate ways to spend tomorrow’s money today. Rising household debt, loose lending and financial engineering helped sustain the pre-crash economy until confidence went and the promises underneath it were suddenly repriced.
My arrangements were smaller, but the mechanism was familiar.
I too was borrowing from the future.
When we move.
When I earn more.
When the children come.
When the children get older.
When the next job arrives.
When we finally become the people the present is apparently preparing us to be.
Longing is a form of credit, allowing you to consume a future before it exists. You live now against the promise that something later will cover the deficit.
There is also shorting, the position taken by somebody who suspects the asset is overpriced and will eventually fall.
I did both.
I went long on the fantasy and somewhere underneath I was shorting the life I actually had.
That is a volatile portfolio.
I
So, leverage.
It had bankers who could turn debt into wealth, politicians who could turn rising house prices into prosperity, economists who could explain why the old rules no longer applied, and journalists who could interview all three.
Everybody looked very clever.
Then the numbers stopped agreeing and people in suits walked out of offices carrying cardboard boxes.
The wise men who had explained why everything was fundamentally sound were immediately rehired to explain why it wasn’t.
At roughly the same time, my marriage was undergoing several restructuring programmes of its own.
It did not collapse suddenly.
There were talks.
Capital injections.
Emergency measures.
There was probably quantitative easing.
Then I took my own cardboard box and left the building.
London, where my cousin took me in.
This is an extraordinarily generous thing to do to somebody unless you are forty years old, living in a spare room in Limehouse beside a rowing machine, several copies of The Economist and a framed photograph of Ron Saunders.
So I did what journalists do when life becomes unbearable.
I turned it into copy.
Gazeta Wyborcza began publishing me.
Every week there I was: photograph, byline, Englishman in Poland who had fled Poland for England and was now explaining England to Poland.
Sorrow.
Exile.
Politics.
Irony.
Several whiskies.
One old friend discovered that my marriage was ending by opening the newspaper.
“You could have phoned,” he said.
“I was going to.”
Years later I called this becoming the official correspondent of my own unhappiness. The phrase still makes me laugh.
It was also journalism of sorts.
In 2009, I was writing warnings to Polish readers about England.
The financial crisis was biting. Westminster had been hit by the expenses scandal. The farright BNP had won representation in the European Parliament. Something unpleasant seemed available. Jimmy Savile was soon to be exposed.
A recession does not mechanically manufacture fascists. Poverty does not produce a brown shirt in the wash.
But things that looked absurd become discussable and people become available for recruitment elsewhere.
The kingdom loses symbolic credit before it runs out of money.
And in 2009 I was warning Poland about England.
This now seems funny.
Poland had got through the global financial crisis remarkably well compared with much of Europe. Britain was the supposedly mature country whose machinery had broken.
History likes this sort of joke.
II
After London came St Albans.
And a wench. She was kind. There was somewhere to sleep. Sympathy. Prosecco. A bed. A hand on the forehead perhaps.
It is a very attractive financial instrument.
Take the losses from the old relationship. Package them and move them off the balance sheet. Then issue a new security called Love. Give it an AAA rating.
It also crashed.
Antidotes rarely work when the poison is still being manufactured internally.
I returned to Poland.
Gdynia and Unfinished Business.
Then Warsaw and two days later another woman.
A bar.
A smile.
Intelligence.
Sadness.
The feeling of being seen.
I knew almost immediately that I was going to fall in love with her.
This sounds romantic.
It was worse.
Seven weeks followed.
Always my room.
Never hers.
She arrived.
She left.
I wanted more.
And wanting more became evidence that what existed must be profound.
This is one of longing’s more ingenious accounting practices. Absence becomes an asset. The less you have, the more valuable it becomes.
Then, one January morning, she disappeared from the arrangement.
Margin call and no lender of last resort.
One night on Nowy Świat ended in police custody after an argument.
Then a week in bed in Gdynia.
Then months of longing, fury and analysis.
I repeated the story until it acquired the dignity of myth.
Much later, I gave Joanna the best line. “You wanted to leave. You couldn’t leave,” Joanna tells the fictionalised me. The affair did not destroy the marriage. It made the marriage impossible to rearrange.
That is harsher than the great-love story and is probably more useful.
I had borrowed emotional certainty from one relationship in order to settle the accounts of another.
The loan was callable and it was called.
III
Meanwhile the kingdom had its own creditors.
The financial crisis began as a technical vocabulary.
Then it became social. Then political. Then cultural.
In Britain, the coalition government elected in 2010 made deficit reduction central to its programme and announced substantial cuts. The official language was responsibility, sustainability and ensuring that future generations did not inherit the bill.
This interested me because the morality was familiar.
Somebody had borrowed too much. Somebody must now become responsible.
The peculiar part was that these were not always the same somebody.
The banks had failed.
The public was invited to practise restraint.
There is something psychologically powerful about debt because debt converts history into morality.
Perhaps that was why austerity reached deeper than budgets. It offered a morality. Accept limits. Do not ask for too much. Stop pretending abundance is possible. Be realistic. Endure.
Years later, writing about Europe, borders and Lacan, I described austerity as more than an economic policy: scarcity could become a moral pedagogy, teaching people to identify maturity with accepting constraint.
I recognise that mechanism.
I had been practising privately for years.
IV
Then my life became respectable again.
Work.
Another marriage.
Three boys.
Chaos did not disappear, but children are excellent enemies of grand theory.
Governments fall while somebody cannot find a shoe. Currencies wobble while another child refuses broccoli. The eurozone nearly comes apart and football training still starts at nine.
The old world also continued its argument with 2008.
Debt crisis.
Migration.
Brexit.
Trump.
It would be foolish to say Lehman Brothers caused Brexit, but the political credit of the old settlement had unquestionably deteriorated.
Globalisation had been sold partly as a long position on the future.
Open markets.
Flexible labour.
Financial liberalisation.
Property.
Mobility.
Rising prosperity would cover the social deficits.
After 2008, that proposition became much harder to sell.
People chose different explanations.
Bankers.
Brussels.
Immigrants.
Capitalism.
Welfare recipients.
China.
Sometimes all of them mixed and matched according to taste.
The left never obtained exclusive rights to the revolt against neoliberalism.
The nationalist right often proved more successful at converting insecurity into belonging.
The kingdom had lost its story.
So people began buying others.
V
Then came Germany.
Germany occupies a special position in my private fairy tale.
Germany represented competence.
Meetings beginning when the calendar said they would.
Deutsche Welle.
The boys at the British school.
A house and garden.
The train into Bonn.
A salary.
A proper newsroom.
A proper life.
I had wanted professional stability for so long that when I finally acquired it, I could not simply inhabit it.
I had to deserve it.
So I worked harder.
Longer.
The promised land had arrived and I immediately began paying rent on it.
Then it ended.
I went to Brussels for six months to write about paper.
Actual paper.
The European paper industry.
Forests, pulp, packaging.
There are worse places to hide.
Then I returned to Poland at the beginning of 2020.
A month later the world closed.
On 11 March 2020 the WHO characterised Covid-19 as a pandemic.
Excellent timing again.
I had returned with a wife, three children and the idea that another phase of adulthood was about to begin.
Instead we stayed indoors.
I wrote another book.
Our Man in Warszawa was ostensibly about British journalism and Poland. Increasingly it became about what looking at Poland had done to my view of Britain. The Polish edition described the old position quite neatly: an Englishman explaining to Polish readers what Britons read about Poland over breakfast.
The mirror was already turning.
Britain had spent decades sending people eastwards to explain nationalism, populism, borders and democratic immaturity.
Now the categories were travelling west. Centre and periphery had begun swapping costumes.
VI
Then the borders returned physically.
Belarus.
Forests.
Migrants.
Soldiers.
Fences.
Pushbacks.
I travelled repeatedly to Poland’s northeastern border before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
I thought I was reporting.
Sometimes I was.
Sometimes I was looking for something.
I would drive back to Warsaw disappointed by how little revelation a border actually provides. Mostly there is waiting. Cars. Lidl. Phones. Mud. Activists buying toiletries beside soldiers buying toiletries.
Then something stranger happened.
The border entered the dream.
And in a Warsaw bookshop I found Jacques Lacan.
Not at the École Freudienne.
In a bookshop in Warsaw.
For several weeks I became, as I later wrote, a devout Lacanian.
This is what middle-aged men sometimes do instead of buying motorcycles.
The attraction was obvious.
Lacan had a word for the thing that refuses to be covered by the story.
The Real.
And I had become very interested in stories which no longer covered what lay underneath.
At the border I had imagined I was investigating other people’s exclusion. Gradually I realised that I was also repeatedly visiting an edge because I had become unsure which side of my own life I occupied. I had lived in Poland for decades without entirely leaving England; the more visible the border became, the less certain the categories felt.
Then there was the lake.
A real one.
Balaton in Warsaw.
I began walking around it when the pressure inside became difficult to carry while sitting still.
Rain.
Snow.
Fog.
Thin winter light.
Ducks occupying the unfrozen patch.
Joggers.
An old man travelling anti-clockwise despite the otherwise obvious, though entirely unstated, agreement that clockwise was correct.
The lake became the place where the book assembled itself.
Not deliberately.
I walked.
I talked into the phone.
I went home and wrote.
Then walked again.
At one point the pun arrived by itself.
Lake. Lac. Lack. Lacan.
VII
Old liabilities do not vanish because one stops opening the statements.
Fifteen years after the first Warsaw affair, an old love returned.
Not as a spectre.
A person.
Older.
It would be tempting to turn that into destiny.
I did for a while.
There was affection and intensity and rooms and wine and messages and arguments and the strange experience of discovering that something one had stored as mythology had continued living a perfectly ordinary life.
Longing reopened its credit facility.
The old futures market became available again.
The debts accumulated.
Not hers.
Mine.
Work became uncertain.
My body issued several warnings.
Hospitals.
Broken ribs.
Diabetes.
Gallbladder.
Money became tight.
The house became another promised exit: sell it, move, begin again.
Then several things appeared to give way almost together.
The relationship closed.
The house sale stalled.
My journalism sat suspended.
In the book I wrote afterwards, the important discovery was that the attachment had roots running backwards through earlier losses.
Collapse is rarely sudden. The sudden bit is recognition.
Lehman did not create the bad mortgages.
It revealed them.
A referendum does not manufacture alienation on polling day.
A lover leaving does not create the absence.
The margin call merely asks what collateral was really there.
That is when the fairy tale becomes accounting.
VIII
This is where shorting and longing finally meet.
Longing says: Borrow against the future.
One more year. One more job. One more person. One more house. One more country.
The future will pay.
Shorting says: It won’t. Get out. Leave first. Distrust the institution. Distrust the marriage. Distrust the country. Distrust the promise.
Protect yourself from the fall by believing in it before it happens.
I had become rather good at both.
Long the rescue. Short the present.
No wonder the portfolio was volatile.
The post-2008 world had developed something similar.
Everybody wanted something back.
That may be the defining longing of the post-crash kingdom.
Restoration.
Put it back.
The nation.
The border.
The factory.
The family.
The marriage.
The house price.
The old certainty.
The lost lover.
The self before the damage.
But there is no return.
There is only the next arrangement, which sounds bleak until you notice that the next arrangement is what life has always been. There are no final accounts, just less leverage.
Fewer imaginary assets, a little less longing borrowed from tomorrow, and when the rain starts again, a fixed roof.
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