Glasgow. Drums. Dry ice. Bright lights: red, blue, red. I’m up near the back with Gillian, who says she loves him more than I do (as if). And there he is: hair high, shirt askew, knuckles white, clinging to the microphone like he can’t live without it, which he can’t. He repeats a refrain, painful, beautiful, on a loop, so we understand. “Life is a pigsty,” he sings, to himself and to us. “Life is pigsty. And if you don't know this, Then what do you know?”

That moment, down in the crowd of the 02 in Glasgow nearly 20 years ago, is still in my head now, as intense as it ever was, because that’s what Morrissey does. He walks right up to the microphone and names all the things that he loves and all the things that he loathes and he sings my life. I have tried other places for what I need: other music, books, I’ve googled, but in the end I return to Morrissey, always. I hear his appeals for the lamb and the lion and the lonely man, I hear the suppressed and secret devotion, I hear him say that life is a pigsty and I feel better because I know it’s not just me then.

And he’s right: life is a pigsty, and then there’s the internet. A fact I learned today is that Morrissey does not own a smartphone and has never visited Facebook or X or Instagram and I love him a bit more for that. I wish that I had never visited Facebook or X or Instagram because we were told it would be a worldwide community spreading love and friendship and information but it turned out to be the opposite of those things because of the........

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