Dear Michael Gove, I am writing to you as you are the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government ..read more

Ask yourself: Is reaching a final and nixing the national semi-final, semi-competent voodoo, not significant enough? Beating Italy in the final will rocket England into an emotional firmament that might be in its own way unbearable. The air is thin up there. We want triumph but can we handle it ..read more

Well I wasn’t expecting that, were you? The mad and sudden flux of adrenaline, the gush, the knackering rush. Together alone men took their tops off and Love Island was fucked off for Gareth Southgate’s post match interview. Domestic life was interrupted as the TV-cum – campfire lit up our shared homes and the primal flooded in and football did indeed come home. And together we are struck. Because it’s not just a game is it? It’s not just twenty-two men, plus subs. Ninety minutes, plus injury time, plus extra time, plus penalties. Penalties, bloody penalties. Viewed rationally all that w ..read more

Writing Caroline Flack Written by Russell Brand on February 17, 2020 Caroline Flack “The line then that separates people who kill themselves and people that don’t is vague and uncertain, it is a line within each of us, not between us.” I recently performed a monologue, a ‘verbatim piece’ made up of extracts of the last written words of people who had taken their own lives. I was grateful to the surviving family members for allowing me such intimate access to such a painful and personal artefact. There is so much shame ar ..read more

Writing Remembrance Written by Russell Brand on November 12, 2019 It is Remembrance Sunday, 1030am and we stop, my family and I; two kids, two dogs no excuses, prompted by a display of parochial magnificence, poppies, flags and a sign reads “hot squash” these two words mashed together enough to make us ignore the double yellow. We pull up at a bus stop (no busses were running) leave our mad and difficult dogs in the boot outside a Tesco Express, it’s ubiquitous livery now normal even in a setting as pastoral as this, a village green in Buckinghams ..read more

Writing For Jade Written by Russell Brand on August 15, 2019 For Jade March 27th, 2009 When my Mum first got cancer I must’ve been around the age Jade’s eldest son is now. Too young, in fact, to properly comprehend what was happening, only old enough to sense the tingling presence of fear, the averted looks, the stifled, thin lipped sympathy and muddled, neighbourly compassion. My Mum, Thank God, did not die and whilst her cancer returned several times; each time more frightening for me as my innocence waned to be repla ..read more

Writing The Finch In My Brain Written by Russell Brand on July 6, 2019 The foreward I wrote for Martino Sclavi’s book: It is eerily joyful to write a foreword to Martino Sclavi’s book The Finch in My Brain, because five years ago I accepted that he was going to die. Not in a cosmic ‘You gotta go sometime’ way. No, I observed the face of the man in the white coat in the Kaiser Permanente Hospital as he held up a grim grey scan of Martino’s brain. ‘That dark area is the tumour,’ he said. It was big. I mean, Tino has a big ..read more

Writing Semi Final Blog – England V Croatia Written by Russell Brand on July 11, 2018 “It’s coming home” has become a summertime idiom, replacing “Hello” as my standard greeting, the “Under His Eye” of this heliocentric inversion of the Hand Maid’s hell in which we are all now blissfully residing. This World Cup has created, as festivals are supposed to, a temporary utopia, this rare and beautiful English summer, scored by an entirely new English football experience. Hard and even foolish to unpick the alchemy that has ..read more

Writing HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY (England: free at last from penalty curse) Written by Russell Brand on July 4, 2018 Well I wasn’t expecting that, were you? The mad and sudden flux of adrenaline, the gush, the knackering rush. Together alone men took their tops off and Love Island was fucked off for Gareth Southgate’s post match interview. Domestic life was interrupted as the TV-cum – campfire lit up our shared homes and the primal flooded in and football did indeed come home. And together we are struck. Because it’s not j ..read more

Writing World Cup 2018: When England’s fun stops, stop – but could it actually be coming home? Written by Russell Brand on July 3, 2018 We have no meaningful wars now. Economic to the last drone-spilled drop. No principle, no patriotism in slinking off to some resource-rich-ragged land and maiming their children. Perhaps there never was. England is only England in relation to the world and the world is only the world during the World Cup. When else could it be? The Eurovision Song Contest? All pastiche, irony and digital ..read more