#4 Taking a Mental Picture 📸

that's that's me confetto

Taking a Mental Picture is the hastily-named segment where I immortalise moments I wish I’d captured on my film camera, and here with instalment #4 after nearly a year (!!). #1 lives here; #2 lives here. #3 here.

A rare occurrence in London: a “you free this weekend?” text actually being received in the affirmative, plans made in the short-term without having to cross reference calendars and enquiring about after-work availability in 6 months’ time. I was in Hackney Wick with an old school friend who I randomly seem to see about once a year. We’d picked a perfect day for it, with the sun cracking the flags but an ever-so-slight breeze — and, without any conferring, we’d both gone for the same outfit vibe, so neither of us felt overdressed, which is always a worry whenever I wear anything other than a tshirt and denim shorts (love it when other people dress up, feel like a melon when I do it. I’m working on it!).

With a mocha to go—and having demolished a pastry, I have a reputation to uphold— we started towards the canal and got chatting about Fangirls (which, sidenote, you should absolutely 100% go and see. I had SO MUCH FUN, and think you would too). My friend mentioned another musical she’d gone to see where, upon the release of a confetti cannon, she started clutching at the bits of confetti with great fervour, in some kind of primal joy-gathering instinct.

When I explained the origins of the word confetti (sweets - the same root as confectionery - thrown during carnivals in Italy, and that therefore a singular piece was technically a confetto, my friend SHRIEKED with joy and clapped her hands together. “Oh I LOVE that!” she said. “That’s so BRILLIANT!” She was genuinely thrilled by this random nugget of information I’d remembered, and I knew she was thinking the same thing: that words are wonderful, that language is brilliant, that our situation as humans in this patch of London from this patch of Hull in 2024 the year of our Lord Glen Powell* is something we can always find joy in, and that moments like this are rather lovely.

*Speaking of Glen Powell, I loved this piece by Anne Helen Petersen on Culture Study recently, in particular the section about who likes women and who doesn’t: it’s startlingly accurate, and yet, what is it that we can sense? I need further investigation, pls.

A Unified Theory of Glen Powell