‘Oh, I don’t know. A week or two later, I went to Hackney Wick to see my friend Richard Porter’s play, PLANES, at the Yard theatre. It’s a monologue with two musicians – really just Rich talking on stage, telling the story of his sister’s suicide, which coincided with the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. It’s a play, I think now, about these two ways of reading the world, about the pull towards paranoia, to building narratives of blame and punishment, and about what happens if you don’t.

Over and over, he sorted through the facts – a missing plane, a blood-soaked scarf, a car parked on a country lane – assembling them into patterns, finding a way to live alongside them. It was like the news cycle had been upended: the disasters done, the bad surprises weathered, leaving an enor­mous space, in which anything, nothing, something could happen next.’

From Funny Weather, Art in an Emergency, Olivia Laing (2020)