I did not intend to become addicted to Tetris at the age of 40. The desire was to be offline: in spring, I moved into a new studio space in Lewisham and wondered if I could use it as an incognito, internet-free zone. I should admit this idea came about because I was too lazy to ask for the wifi password. But I had spent the past months recovering from trauma, while watching Al Jazeera late into the night, concerned about loved ones. A place where I could slip off-grid was appealing.

To accomplish this, I recharged my burner phone and bought a second-hand, noughties-era mp3 player on eBay. I walked to the studio listening to Air’s Moon Safari and then sat at my desk with zero access to apps or world news. I was ready to focus. I was ready to get things done. Until I discovered the mp3 player included Tetris. An hour later I was still playing Tetris. At home that night, I stayed up until 2am playing Tetris. The next morning, I did not need to snooze my alarm because I was already awake and playing Tetris.

If you haven’t played Tetris for a while, you may have forgotten its beauty, its specific ability to intoxicate you into a dream space of falling shapes and temporary order. The steady affection that you grow for each of the seven shapes – the ‘tetrominoes’ – as you turn and arrange them. The T-tetromino is undeniably the cutest, with its three-block base and one-block button nose. The appearance of the magnificent, straight four-block I-tetromino at the right moment can usher a small state of ecstasy as you slot it into the slender gap you had patiently designed for it and watch four rows disappear simultaneously.

During the first weeks of my Tetris addiction, I was unaware that the game is used in trauma therapy. The combination of spatial tracking, pattern matching and mentally rotating geometric shapes engages the same visuospatial channel in the brain where intrusive visual memories and flashbacks are processed. While playing, I felt soothed and occupied. I enjoyed fitting shapes into rigid structures and watching them be erased. I rationalised my behaviour as a way to spend an evening in a heatwave, or some kind of pathetic resistance to big tech, while being vaguely aware that Tetris had become a form of disengagement from the world around me. What we justify to ourselves as a therapeutic escape can be edged with violence. I longed to experience the ‘Tetris Effect’, where colourful shapes appear in your visual field and dreams after long periods of gameplay.

When I read that Winston Churchill took up painting at the age of 40 as a remedy for his depressive moods and a distraction from WWI, I did not enjoy seeing the connection. In his essay ‘Painting as a Pastime’, he describes the benefits of painting for a worn-down mind in a similar way to how I might describe Tetris: ‘Inexpensive independence, a mobile and perennial pleasure apparatus, new mental food and exercise, the old harmonies and symmetries in an entirely different language, an added interest to every common scene, an occupation for every idle hour, an unceasing voyage of entrancing discovery—these are high prizes.’ (1)

I thought going to see an exhibition of Churchill’s paintings, which I was bound to be disturbed by, might jolt my brain from its Tetris- and heatwave-induced stupor. This turned out to be true, as I descended the stairs to the air-conditioned basement of the Wallace Collection and entered the cult of Churchill, the pervasive right-wing mythology in which Churchill’s image as a stoic and impeccable ‘great Briton’ is insulated from his racism and imperial subjugation, most aggressively by the same people who repeat his attitudes to, for example, justify a genocide. This fiction of the British establishment is the foundation of the show. The opening wall text praises Churchill’s leadership, resilience and determination, and these qualities are linked to how he took up painting to cope with his ‘anguish’ following the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns, which seems mostly to do with professional failure after he lost his position as First Lord of the Admiralty. There are cigars and cufflinks in the gift shop.

The paintings themselves are mostly Impressionist-style scenery and still lives: views of his garden at Chartwell, scenes from holidays in France, a collection of wine and brandy bottles, an upturned oyster shell. He preferred oils to watercolours, describing it as a medium of ‘real power’, and copied his compositions from photographs. Like most amateurs, he is obsessed with capturing the reflection of a building or tree on the surface of water. Maybe that’s because his attempts to paint anything under the water are a striking failure; goldfish are orange marks that sit atop a pond. What does it say about a man that he cannot capture anything below water level? Who paints reflections rather than depth? There are obvious signs of repression throughout the paintings but also a desire for control, even within their composition. For his 1930s painting Château Saint-Georges-Motel, Churchill had two gardeners and a friend row across a moat to create ripples.

Paintings by wartime leaders are often presented as part of a delirious, redemptive arc, offering proof of a more sensitive inner life that we enjoy rejecting, such as George W. Bush’s Hockney-aspiring self-portraits in the shower or bath. For Churchill, we are supposed to see his appreciation for travel and nature, but his landscapes are structured by ideology. There’s a family beach scene in Walmer, Kent with a laughably phallic Napoleonic cannon superimposed on the sand; the sunset over Jerusalem painted after the 1921 Cairo Conference, where, as British Colonial Secretary he oversaw the redrawing of the map of the Middle East; a whole room dedicated to his extremely gross paintings of Morocco, including Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque, painted after a trip with Franklin D. Roosevelt to watch the sunset over the Atlas Mountains following the 1943 Casablanca Conference, and then presented to him as a memento.

What makes Tetris so addictive is the disappearing rows, the reward system for a completed task. But I have begun to feel there is something more violent underneath this, the act of putting things in a compositional order when actually all we want to do is erase them. I see this in Churchill’s paintings, a medium which he took up to disengage, but served to reassert his control. When I leave the Wallace Collection, I sit on a bench in the worryingly hot sun, take out my mp3 player and start a game. I turn and arrange the tetrominoes one by one, lining them up so they will disappear. I see the shapes falling down from the Mayfair trees onto the black cabs, then falling over the Wallace Collection, crashing through the roof until the building is crushed, then the same over Parliament, over the Ritz and the Cabinet War Rooms and Downing Street, until, in a moment of temporary order, it is all obliterated.