Daphne Bennett

I wasn’t aware of who Jeanette Winterson was when I booked the bookshop event at Toppings & Company Booksellers in Edinburgh in Nov2025. I was staying in Edinburgh for a couple of nights. I was invited to a dinner and a tour around the Scottish Parliament and to attend the First Minister Question time.

It was a very very wet day, pouring down all day. I saw on Facebook there were floods. I was soaking wet after the tour, went back to the hotel and got changed, put my feet with dry socks into the wet boots and went across the road for a pint in an Irish pub before heading to Toppings, only to find out the book launch took place in the church at York Place.

It had been I month since I come back from Hong Kong for my grandma’s funeral. The summer warmth was gone for good. I wasn’t happy in my job and the only thing that made me happy was my manager going on annual leave. I was on my own 2-3 nights a week with the kids, it was getting darker and colder. And when C was there, we both talked about how much we hated our management in our own work places and how empty and miserable we are every night, while appreciating this is very much a first world problem. I had a very bad cold for weeks since getting off the flight from Hong Kong to Paris then changing to Newcastle. I had been inconsolable since I came back, for many reasons. Devastated. Everybody has a family, and that’s where all the troubles come from. On top of that, everywhere I looked was about AI is going to take all our jobs and the economy is fucked. It can take my bloody job, whatever. This trip to Edinburgh was something, in days like those, I looked forward to.

Sometimes what you think is the most important turns out it is not the destination.

That is what Jeanette Winterson’s new book One Aladdin Two Lamps is about. Encounter, serendipity and chances. Every good story starts with an urgent problem needed to be solved. A hero at an apparent dead end we can’t see a way out but s/he would not conform to reality. The question s/he ask is not ‘what is’ but ‘what if?’

It’s all very well saying it is a fact that everything looks thoroughly f***ed top to bottom from the outside. In story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights, knowing you are married for a night and to be killed when the day breaks because of the king’s revengeful fetish must be one of the stickiest situations one can get into. But our hero says, no I don’t want to die tomorrow, what can I do? Her inventiveness and curiosity helped her get through one night, then the other.

Winterson talked about how we don’t just live in the physical reality. Our minds travel, we can escape into a book or a movie to look for dimensions, a moment in the past, we can jump into any stories, have a feel of others’ life, at the beginning, the middle or the end. What we care, what we think and how we live, is never fixed, even if the situation is. And we live in the story we tell ourselves, that’s why having your own voice and your own story is important, however hesitant, however broken, however small. You have no choice but to be your own hero of your story, however much you wish to cruise along in life, be someone’s wife, someone’s mother, someone’s daughter. We are condemned to be free, and the responsibility of being will come back to haunt you.

That November, I was bored and sick of the AI & tech news, of identifying transferrable skills and upskilling and jiggling the responsibility as a parent and processing the grief and other useless feelings alone.

I just want normal things that everyone wants, I think. A job that I don’t hate, nice clothes, eating out every now and then. I don’t know what I want. What I don’t want is my attitude problem that follows me everywhere since nursery age. I am always asking ‘but why?’ even at this age. And worse, ‘I can do it better and faster!’ This urge gets me into so much shit. I just want myself to shut up and follow the queue and do as I am told.

I was really grateful I booked the ticket that night and went for it. She stresses, ENCOUNTER WITH OTHERS MATTERS. Although I didn’t get to know her fully, I become more open to people. The change is gradual, and I have good days and bad days, but I still make some extra effort to get out of my house when I can, like my evening in York.

Since then, as if like magic in Aladdin, tech and politics bothered me a bit less. I started reading again and going to the movies lately. I have read a few of her other books later. Thankfully, things also took its course and I have moved on from that depressing role. What needed to happen happened. I have come to terms better with my cynicism and the world around it.

Inspired by Winterson’s book, I decided I had the power to change my focus, who is allowed to occupy my mind and take the centre stage in my story. Likewise, I can the endings. I can declare I learn no morals in this story and move on. I learn to stop apologising for who I am because apologies are never accepted wholeheartedly I may as well give them a finger. For things I can’t do yet, I have the power to learn and change that as well. I have no choice but to be the hero in my story, who can’t stop being annoying and clumsily stepping on people’s toes however hard I try, can’t help asking what if, but why, why can’t we? I know my limitations but I never cope very well with boundaries. The world just has to put up with me, as I just have to deal with the consequence of my impulse and recklessness.