Hey, folks! This is the 200th episode of the ACF podcast—just in time for Christmas, here’s my conversation with my friend Ben Sixsmith about his first volume of short stories, Noughties: Eleven Echoes of a Dismal Decade. It’s a funny look at British decadence in the 21st c.—you can read it on a weekend afternoon, you'll laugh, you'll—well, you won't cry, but now & then there are surprising things…—it's a collection of stories about people recollecting the false dawn of the noughts, when they had for one moment come close to everything then thought desirable, from political transformations to celebrity, from personal heroism to televised scandal, & other things besides. Ben has an unusual ability to show that what was once the preserve of the aged, wistful regrets, a tendency to look backward to the point of neglecting life, is now firmly the possession of the middle-aged. So he uses variations of this device, characters dwelling on the past, to show that it was the noughts that set the stage for the terrible situation in England now—the cultural wasteland—after all, people are so given to dwelling on the past because they've run out of future… Ben is a discrete writer—listen to our podcast & you'll see how reluctant he is to make big claims—but the magic in his short volume comes from his sure knowledge that people have moved on from the fantasies of the early 21st c. to memories of those fantasies; they're not really in touch with reality, they're not really free of delusions, not yet. So listen to our podcast & buy his book (Amazon, paperback or kindle)!
As Ben explains, the cover is meant to remind people of Tony Blair’s leer, the vision of vacuous ambition leading his party to ruin, his nation to crisis.