Matt Haig

Finding ways to support other bookshops and work with homeless charities. Anyway I just want to put what is in my head into the world.

Serious question. I mean, specifically, British people. Like, I can honestly remember hearing Prince Andrew being our ‘Trade Envoy’ going around the world making deals on our behalf and thinking okay then. I can remember the news telling us it made sense because the royal family ARE SO LOVED AROUND THE WORLD. Just as the news had once told us that Andrew was a war hero because he had been in a helicopter and took some photos of some wildlife on the Falklands. In the 80s, that was Andrew’s thing. Wildlife. That is what we were told. Every Royal was given a cause. Like some charity avengers. So, like, in It’s a Royal Knockout in 1987 Andrew’s team were raising money for the World Wildlife Fund. So we couldn’t hate him. Because he liked pandas. And so decades later while he gives a man he knows is a pedophile inside trading info within minutes of getting it no one is really batting an eye that good old Randy Andy War Hero is doing important things he isn’t qualified to do and putting our country’s business interests at risk because he may be being blackmailed in a subtle or not subtle way by a monstrous pedophile who has some kind of pedo sonar that has detected all the other powerful pedophiles in the world and blackmailed them like the creepiest Batman villain ever. And now we are going to be gaslit again as more royals are put in front of us to talk through their cuddly causes and we are just expected to carry on like we aren’t just all enabling pedophiles and confirming to ourselves that there is a natural order and we will revere even the most mediocre people in the world if they are posh enough and we are told they are above us. There goes the OBE. Good.

Seen a lot of posts recently about it being a superpower or a kind of joke but I find it predominantly hard. As someone diagnosed with autism and adhd I have to say it is the adhd side that screws up my day most. It is the side that pushed me to chase thrills like shoplifting and alcohol and cocaine. It is the side that for ever does things because they are interesting rather than important. It is even the side of me that had to stop taking medication for actual adhd because I got too addicted to the tablets. It is the side that can’t answer important emails about film rights but can have a long Instagram chat about an old movie. Yes it is the side of me that gets me fit and chases runner’s highs and who can hyperfocus on novels. It is the side of me that gives me infinite anger at people who have benefitted from society’s nonsensical neurotypical unequal rules who then plan trips to an island to party with fellow pedophiles - I think because of a heightened justice sensitivity (or maybe that is the autism) and yet strange empathy for people like Shia Labeouf when he gets arrested for partying too hard in New Orleans. But I would love a mind that could just sit or settle or be bored for five seconds without a discomfort so strong and unavoidable my whole body begins to move restlessly or stands up to make a double espresso or grabs the phone to make this post.

Ahhh. Fair. Fair fair point. Been getting this a bit since I dared to criticise billionaires pretending to be racist in order to get idiots to vote for Reform. And since I expressed edgy views like declaring pedophiles should probably be in prison and not ruling the world. But I get it. I hate being another one of those dicks who says let’s save the world in one post and buy my book in the next post. Almost as bad as a literal multibillionaire who moved to Monaco to avoid tax moaning that immigrants are the drain on society. So what can I say? I will certainly be paying my full rate of tax to give back to society, unlike the UK’s second richest man Jim Ratcliffe. The one who made his money not by writing stories but by buying up toxic chemical plants. And royalties from my last book went to all sorts of places. Money from all preorders and the big first week sales as always went to mental health and suicide charities. And they will again. It’s a tradition now. Oh and then there was helping raise money for Spellow library in Liverpool which was destroyed by rioters in 2024 campaigning against - ahh - the housing of asylum seekers. And I am currently trying to get a bookshop and cafe going that will support the homeless in Brighton. Anyway, one day they might invent something called Google where you could look at official data from the Office of National Statistics which clearly lays out that immigration brings more money to this country than it takes. Now after you have told me what to do with my house why not ask the tax dodgers you support how they improve the country.