The Delicious Taste of Zero Concern

Letting go, having fun ... plus some swearing!

Jan 23, 2026

Friend! Trust that this piece, briefly touching the dark, will come out into light. From trauma-through-recovery-to-uplift is always my journey in these essays, and I swear I’ll never leave you in the mire. And oh, how I swear! But that, too, is temporary.

Not giving a toss. Or a fig, or a frig, or a damn. Not giving a shit or two squirts of piss. Not giving a hoot. Or any kind of fuck, whether straight, or flying, or holy. Not giving a monkey’s, or a rat’s arse.

Not giving a toss when making art is a glorious gift. To do what you feel like doing, regardless of trends/friends/the market. To risk falling flat on your face/apart/in love. To chance offence when you strip your sins bare, or plaster the entrance into your mind with swear words.

To put your work out in the world, regardless of how it lands. To put yourself out into the world, with similar balls. Neither of these things come easily, to most of us. But practice anything at all, and you’ll improve. And that includes not giving a toss.

Being ‘out of fucks’ is a meme of our times, especially among mid-life women. When you slide over fifty and female, not giving a fuck what people think becomes a vital tool for thriving in a sexist, ageist world. I have given fucks forever. I was beginning to think I’d missed my window.

But this last weekend, at the T.S.Eliot Prize Events, something shifted. Finally, I felt how it feels to not give a shit. To glide through a room of creative peers, some much more successful than you, stripped of all envy. Just happy to be there and talk to human beings, without any need to prove myself, or impress.

I used to attend the readings every year. Would sit there, mentally carping, red-penning in my head those lines I deemed cliched or pretentious. I’d wipe out whole beings (“Of *course* he’s up there, he’s the judge’s best friend”) and shut my ears. With the ones I found “good” I’d eviscerate myself with envy. Especially in the years my collections were published. Why not me, why not me, why not me? Then my friends and I would bitch in the interval. But this time? I had fun.

The Poetry World and I divorced after it ignored The Marlowe Papers. My instigation: “Poetry” didn’t care. I was miffed that a novel in verse winning major awards didn’t even merit a mention in Poetry News. I decided poetry and I were through. Still taught it, but stopped writing it. Stopped going to readings and parties.

For a long time those poetry nights had been eating me up. Attending them felt like self-harm. Backbiting thrives where pots of gold are few: the gossip, the cliques, the cronyism. Plus I longed for ‘A’ grade recognition, and was only ever an ‘also ran.’ The truth was this: I’d made The Poetry World my mum. Was playing this old piece of software, this script, which could only ever have the same outcome. Hungry for “Mummy’s” attention, naturally I got ‘Not now dear’ energy back. So I quit.

The shortlist readings on Sunday and the award party on Monday were the first times I’d visited “Mum” for 15 years. My friend was one of the judges, so I had a special ‘in’, a backstage pass. And I had fun. Some of it was great, some of it was funny, some of it was boring. No one was my enemy. In the interval, and after, and on Monday at the party, I saw people I absolutely loved. The real life Suzi Feay, who I wrote about so recently. No need to find your Inner Suzi when Outer Suzi is telling you “if you say lit fic again I will throw up in my mouth!” (love her). Then the biggest surprise, my former editor at Sceptre, Carole Welch, she who changed my life by buying The Marlowe Papers. These women felt like gorgeous, unexpected, personalised gifts.

And then there was some gentle comedy.

Long ago, when everything mattered so much, when I was starving for attention and hungry for fame, I met myself in a mirror. Same ambition, same age, and a poet. I won’t name her (but have Googled, and she’s also on Substack). Those days, it was Blogger, and I thought she was my friend. Online friend. Writer compadres. Two poets, ambitious, always in each other’s comments. The both of us publishing almost every day. Chiming agreement. Cheering each other on.

Then I posted something vulnerable. I’d spent three months on the first ten pages of The Marlowe Papers, revising again and again to get it right. But my PhD supervisor (a well known poet) at my very first feedback session, demonstrated, with surgical precision, how and why it failed. What hurt was not so much the feedback but the fact I’d been blind to the faults I could now, so clearly see. I posted my doubts, seeking reassurance.

I might as well have waded into shark-infested waters with a cut on my leg. My “Writer Compadre” went in for the kill. Yes, perhaps you don’t have the level of skill it requires, she said. A slip of the mask, and you realise, this is no mirror image. She is, in fact, your Mortal Enemy.

And it didn’t get better. Five years later, The Marlowe Papers was published. The novel world was jumping up and down with excitement, and the poetry world said pffft and my former compadre posted what she claimed was a ‘review’. She admitted she had only read the first 40 pages (ten per cent). The ‘review’ red-penned words and phrases she didn’t think effective, like I’d brought it to her poetry workshop, not had it published to critical acclaim in a six-figure-dollar deal. The gloves were off.

With the prosopagnosia, and the passage of time, I wouldn’t know her these days if she were staring me in the face. This is the joy of not giving a toss. You can make room for whole new people. Like the person I spoke to, late in the evening, her wine glass brimming, my fake-mojito drained. We’d applauded a woman our age winning £25K, and without any bitching, discussed the words and the work. She seemed a little war-worn, her face flickering with some unprocessed trauma, which piqued my interest. I asked her name.

And it was her.

My Mortal Enemy.

Except not, because things have changed, and I don’t give a toss. I laughed and said “Ah, I remember you from Blogger!” — could see she was stuck for a response — and turned to find another conversation.

My writing career has been bumpy. Lurch and stall, lurch and stall, like trying to drive a car with the handbrake on. No one to blame but myself; except blame is pointless. It yanks the brake a little tighter. So instead, I’ll aim to savour the flavour of it: the delicious taste of zero concern.

Not giving a toss is so freeing. It has been such a challenge for me. And I’ve never achieved it before in a literary room. But having tasted its joys, I hope I might do it again.

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