Borrowed Philosophy

Trinity

2011-11-17T18:36:00.002Z

Ten, she is, lowering herself gingerly onto the riverbank grass,

amidst goose shit and the patter of punters on the Cam.

“Milton, Newton and Winnie-the-Pooh”,

their names jangle over the water, agitated by the boatmen;

loose change for the fountain, keys over a drain,

they drop. “Shakespeare, too.”

A bend in the river, what does she think?

“I like it here,” she says. “It's peaceful.”

Ah, a romantic! As ferry punts and self-hires collide

unsilently before us she sees only the green rhythm flowing,

the wind-combed grass, the cool colonnades of the library.

My daughter imagines her own Cambridge.

“Robert Oppenheimer”, a boatload of Japanese tourists

try to place the name. No, they shrug. It's gone.

Back over the bridge, dodging cyclists and proctors, we go.

I take a picture: her back and the Great Court beyond

spread out like someone's future. “Milton, Byron, A.A. Milne...”

She abandons the future, distracted by a college cat.

Sunday

2011-03-31T00:01:00.001Z

He had called some numbers from the local paper. Three different men turned up, similarly dressed, to look at the tree stump. One was honest enough to say he didn't want the job, the other two called back with prices that John couldn't consider paying. Next he tried the plant rental place in town for a digger, but they wanted a deposit and waivers and all sorts. So instead he kicked the padlock off the lean-to, found a spade and a handsaw and oiled the rust off them. He started digging on Sunday, after church. It was almost spring and the ground was soft. He dug out in front of the house until his daughter called him in for dinner.

It was just the two of them now, a widower and a divorcee, the grandkids at college or at their father's. She was a counsellor at the school and there was a manfriend, a teacher. John didn't like him. She turned off the television while they ate. Pork fillet. She was a good cook.

It was an old beech and the trunk had split in a storm ten years ago. He watched the news while his food went down, talked to Sarah about work. He put his boots back on and went on digging until it got dark. He had promised his wife a summer house here, somewhere to sit with a book and watch the sun set. Nine years gone now, she was. She had always loved to read.

April in Faslane

2011-03-10T00:25:00.001Z

Women gathered at the dock, mothers, wives, girlfriends. One with a baby braced in the crook of an arm, slouched against a rusty railing, smoking. Look, there's your pa, all pasty. Fatter than I remember. The long black shape slunk in, with a great nose on it, but otherwise like a guilty thing, half-submerged. Four or five men on deck doing God knows what outlined against a bright horizon, morning. The mountains still with snow in the creases and the sky half-sun half-thunder cloud. A burger van wafted seaward the smell of frying onions through the gates of the base as two MPs sat in a Land Rover, one with his feet crossed high on the dash, boot toes pushed against the windscreen and the other dangling a warrant in a manila envelope.

The baby fidgeted and began to cry. Ma flicked her cigarette away, exhaled over her shoulder, away from the little girl. The butt marked a shallow parabola, still lit, out into the green sea which flicked the floating cylinder and the rest of the floating debris, smashed pallets, styrofoam burger boxes, shrunken footballs, all local stuff, back against the concrete wall of the quay.

The women drifted off inland. There were warmer places to wait. For some it had become hard to tell what was life and what was interval. The baby chewed on a dummy, looking out at the long black shape in the water. It raised a chubby arm and pointed, out to sea.

Rex Redux

2011-03-05T00:15:00.002Z

Rex couldn't go through with it. He had gone in up to his waist, the worst bit really, when the cold forces the breath out of you. Then felt the sun on his neck and thought “I've paid for breakfast.” He was ruined of course, nothing would change that. The house, the car, gone. He'd hook the kids out of school at the end of term, try and get them into the local comprehensive.

Collected his clothes as he walked up the beach, hopped gracelessly into his boxers, grit on his sea-shrunk balls. Nevermind, he'd shower and dress again before popping down to the dining room. Appear respectable. For that breakfast he'd already paid for. He shook his shirt in a whisper of April wind then pulled it over his shoulders. Coward's way out, really. Limited liability. Better to drown in debt than to just drown.

The sun was above the hotel now. It was a beautiful spot, the broad bay with a fort at either end, uninterrupted views, the Atlantic, nothing between here and Newfoundland. Shame about that road, but you have to get here somehow. Late-Victorian it was, the hotel, he guessed. Queen Anne revival. Chintz. Built on a bend.

He picked up his shoes. From the East he heard the growing noise of a helicopter. He watched it fly overhead, still moving, and his bare feet registered the change from sand to tarmac. He never saw the van which threw him, broken, back onto the beach.

Back and Back

2011-02-23T00:47:00.000Z

His mother combed his hair while it was still wet, her cheeks wet too and her eyes looking tired and sore. His hand in hers and in the other a small suitcase as they walked through town, half the buildings empty or ruined or condemned. Just a short trip, two nights then home, a great honour it was, of course. They had a compartment to themselves. He told the inspector that they were going to meet the king.

“Oh, is that so?” the inspector said. The boy knew that the inspector didn't believe him.

He shared an apple with his mother then threw the core out of the window. She told him off. She wasn't really angry though. They played Beggar My Neighbour but the cards slipped around on the seat and anyway it was better with more people.

The roof of the terminus was vast and black at midday. At the left luggage counter his mother took a small bag from inside the suitcase. The Underground was crowded and smoky. It was nine stops; he counted them on the map above the door. Outside the Abbey his mother knelt in front of him and pinned the cross on his jacket pocket. She was crying again.

The king was older than he looked on stamps and newsreels, and thinner. He leaned down and said “You must be very proud” and for the first time the boy felt the absence of his father, a dead man he didn't remember.

'Nothing Besides Remains' - Some thoughts about ruins, and the Gothic

2010-03-06T23:22:00.012Z

Percy Shelley's sonnet 'Ozymandias', written in 1817 and published the following year, interrogates the curious fascination that ruins hold for an enlightened, early nineteenth-century imagination. The particular ruin in this poem, 'two vast and trunkless legs of stone' accompanied by 'a shatter'd visage' half-buried in the sand, is a broken statue of an Egyptian king.One straightforward reading of this piece is as a kind of vanitas. The king's statue has fallen, the civilisation which he ruled over has been superceded, the boast engraved at the base of the edifice – 'Look upon my works, ye mighty and despair!' - has been rendered absurd by death and time. But Ozymandias represents more than just a simple moral lesson. Shelley's poem exhibits a number of preoccupations, and trades in a number or themes which, taken collectively, stretch beyond the Romantic and into the Gothic. The ruined totem of the dead king is equally totemic of post-Enlightenment interest in what is ancient and exotic, in the waning civilisations of the East. The fable of Ozymandias is about timeless issues of hubris and usurpation, mortality and haunting, decay and degeneration. These are Gothic concerns, and the landscape of Gothic fiction is scattered with ruins which invariably stand for more than simply the remainder of things. I thought it might be interesting to explore the role of ruins in the Gothic tradition, and also to examine the ways in which we interact with, or 'read' real historical ruins, and how these approaches differ from or correspond to our reading of ruins in fictional artefacts.

Shelley's vivid rendering of the dismembered, monumental body of Ozymandias is prefigured in one of the earliest Gothic texts, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. In this short novel a usurped, long-dead prince, Alfonso the Good, restores his descendants to 'the lordship of Otranto' by manifesting severally as a giant helmet, a giant sword and a giant, disembodied fist. When the giant helmet appears in the courtyard of the castle, crushing the sickly Conrad (false heir to Otranto, milksop) and setting the novel's plot in motion, another helmet disappears from a marble statue of Alfonso in a nearby church. The 'ominous casque' has shifted from one sense of being monumental to another. It is no longer memorial, but is instead simply massive. The transubstantiation of the helmet is emblematic of the instability of even the most stable things. The hardest, densest materials are subject to the influence of external forces, whether natural, supernatural, or political. What is built to memorialise, to last, Walpole indicates, is not guaranteed to do so, at least not in its original form. Everything is subject to ruin. Appropriately for a Gothic text, in The Castle of Otranto this ruination is complicated, perhaps even perverse. In restoring Theodore, his descendant, to the lordship of Otranto, Alfonso destroys his seat. 'The moment Theodore appeared, the walls of the castle were thrown down with a mighty force, and the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude, appeared in the centre of the ruins.'Assuming that the disappearance of the marble helmet is followed by further disintegration of the statue, is seems that Alfonso has to disassemble himself, to reduce himself to ruins in order to effect change. If we take this interpretation of The Castle of Otranto as our model we might conclude that ruins are a necessary by-product of political change. Our feelings about ruins, more recent ruins at least, are certainly coloured by politics, and our ideological position in relation to the ruined artefact. The Berlin Wall, a symbol of Cold War division for forty years, toppled in 1989, dissected, commoditized and fetishised ever since, is a political ruin par excellence. Its destruction can be read as marking the triumph of capitalism in a post-feudal world. Accordingly, fragments of the wall are displayed throughout the west, the majority of them in the U.S.A., the principal antagonist on the winning side of the Cold War. These fragments serve either as a a kind of ongoing concrete vindication of the Pax Americana, or as evidence that the unbridled materialism of America and its associate nations has turned suffering into a product of sorts. Similarly, in the latter part of the sixteenth century the ruined abbeys and monasteries of post-Reformation England signalled either the success of the protestant project and the birth of a new nation, free from the influence of Rome, or the sacrilegious destruction of holy institutions. The response of someone encountering these reminders of a defeated mode of living will depend on their political or religious sensibilities.

It is, of course, impossible to engage with ruins politically without engaging with them historically. What makes a ruin significant, in a political realm, is its history. It might also be problematic to read ruins ahistorically in fiction or poetry. Ozymandias can be understood by a reader as a specific historical figure (his name is a Greek rendering of Usermaatre, the praenomen of Ramesses II), simply as a product of Shelley's Romantic imagination, or, perhaps most fruitfully, as something of each. Whichever approach is adopted, it is impossible to engage fully with the poem without bringing even the most basic understanding of Ancient Egyptian history, or at least the cultural imprint of a kind of macro-history, in which empires and kings rise and fall, to bear. Absent this understanding the sonnet loses much of its significance. Those pieces of the Berlin Wall that have been preserved are often those which are decorated with striking graffiti art or poignant messages in permanent ink. Someone standing in front of one of these recontextualised fragments, someone who was entirely ignorant of the aftermath of World War II, would be alerted that there was something remarkable about the slab of concrete in front of them by the way it was displayed, disembodied, outside a museum or a bank, but their experience of the Wall would be materially different from someone who was familiar with what the Berlin Wall meant in the quarter century between its construction and fall.

We might choose to analyse a ruin from a political or historical perspective, but it is more challenging, perhaps, to consider how ruins act upon our imaginations. We don't simply look at a ruin, register its shape, smile at its pleasing asymmetry and then move on. We savour it, shiver at it, and in a sense (I'll come back to this) we absorb it. Ruins are disturbing and fascinating, even when they are not spectacular. This is in part because they stimulate a sensitivity to chaos and disorder which is probably infantile in origin. Almost every parent will agree that children create disorder, not just by omission, but wilfully. Unable to control their world children quickly realise that the simplest way to influence one's existence is by disorganising it. The bombed-out terraces of East London proved popular playgrounds for boys and girls in the 1940's not because they were picturesque but because they represented a consummation of the childish desire to level the adult world, and to occupy a space free from even childish responsibilities. Layered on to this early enthusiasm for the ruin, as soon as we can read and often sooner, is an appreciation of the fictional energies of the decrepit castle and the crumbling haunted house, both commonplaces in children's stories, (which are often extravagantly Gothic). A literate child understands that ruins, while apparently static objects, exert a dynamic on the story. When ruins appear, things happen. In a fictional sense we read ruins as a marker of excitement from an early age, a practice which we never altogether abandon. Catherine Morland, in Northanger Abbey, an avid consumer of Gothic romances, is carried away by the idea of vile goings-on amongst remote, ruinous stones, and is affectionately teased for it by her suitor, Henry Tilney, en route to the eponymous abbey. Disappointed by the pedestrian situation and considerable comforts of Northanger, she is obliged to fabricate her own Gothic story, in which her host, General Tilney, has done away with his wife. Appropriately for a quixotic reader, Catherine is unable to separate this exciting fiction from the prosaic truth, that the late Mrs Tilney died of natural causes. In upbraiding her for her foolish suspicions, Henry describes a society which is free from chaos, and free from mystery. Feel free to insert your own italics as you read.

"Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you – Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this? [...] Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?"

Catherine's immersion in the Gothic constitutes a new education which may not have prepared her for any atrocity but has at least taught her to look for the clues. Henry presents her fantasy as a kind of suspension of rational thought, an interlude of childishness. Perhaps he has missed the point, perhaps even, he is jealous. Catherine experiences the texts of Radcliffe and Lewis primally, eyes wide open. Henry Tilney is a jaded figure whose country and age, by his own account, offer little to divert him. The Gothic in general an escapist type of entertainment - television soap operas set in inner cities amongst the working class rarely exhibit Gothic traits - which explains in part its interest in what is remote in space and time.

Gothic markers such as ruined castles, crazed aristocrats, supernatural interventions and so on, offer familiarity because we recognise them from an early age. The Gothic is accordingly both exotic and familiar at the same time. We might also observe that generically, it repeats its improbabilities, over and over again. Freud suggests that these qualities, of entwined familiarity and unfamiliarity, and of improbable repetition can be defined as unheimlich, or 'uncanny'. What Freud says about the conjunction between heimlich and unheimlich is particularly interesting when related to a discussion of ruins and how they are situated both within Gothic fictions and within the individual imagination. Ruins fulfil his larger criteria for uncanniness because they resemble buildings but are not buildings. Parts of a ruin - window arches, thresholds, stairwells - if they are still standing, perform a parody of their former function. Sections of a ruin which stand apart from others are, in effect, disembodied from the rest of the structure, and disembodiment, as we have seen, has its own subset of Gothic associations. Freud notes that the meanings of heimlich are so various that they eventually intersect with certain meanings of unheimlich (interestingly, one might make the same observation about 'canny' and 'uncanny' which both carry a sense of possessing supernatural capacities. The sense of unheimlich that most interests Freud is that defined by the Idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling. 'According to him,' Freud paraphrases, 'everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.'The ruination of a building reveals its inner structure, often to disturbing effect. Exposed brickwork is considered chic in certain contexts, plaster is preferred in others, but there is something discomforting about brickwork which is visible behind crumbling plaster. The most thrilling part of the Roman auditorium which lays beneath the Guildhall Art Gallery is not the remainder of the walls but the timber guttering, revealed by the archaeologist's trowel, which once drained water, and on occasion, presumably blood, away from the arena. Similarly, we may find skeletons creepy and puncture wounds may make us wince, but there is a special horror to the sight of bone poking through flesh. The ruin which reveals its workings, its substructures, is particulary uncanny because it speaks to us of our physical vulnerability. When we consider the peeling screed we are also forced to reflect upon the fragility of the human structure. Schelling's definition of the Unheimlich might also be sensibly applied to the ruins of Gothic romance. In The Castle of Otranto the secrets which surround Manfred's illegitimate occupation of the castle are revealed as Alfonso reassembles himself and razes it to the ground. Emily and her aunt come to appreciate just how deplorable Montoni is and his motives for sequestrating them as they first approach his dilapidated Appenine retreat in The Mysteries of Udolpho Secrets are both contained and revealed by the crumbling walls. This idea is closely related to how we experience historical ruins.

When we walk through or stand in front of any historical structure we are in dialogue with it, in a sense. It presents itself to us, we respond to it, emotionally or aesthetically. This dialogue is intensified in the case of a ruin because it has no other function than this dialogue. It is not slept or worshipped or exercised in. At some level of consciousness, the fabric of the ruin is understood to be doubly porous. What has been absorbed into the stones, the iniquities and suffering and celebrations they have separated or enclosed, continuously permeates back out of them. Self-evidently this dialogue goes on in our heads, but it doesn't feel that way. Ruins may act upon us rather as the romances of Mrs Radcliffe act upon Catherine Morland. We might respond to them unthinkingly,immersing ourselves in their projected melancholy. Or our approach might be more analytical. We might contemplate the machinations of Cranmer as we walk around the arches of Tintern Abbey. The Reformation is contained within those walls, and not simply within a figurative sense, just as the great pageant of the Twentieth Century, and its two world wars, is somehow soaked into the concrete of the Berlin Wall. These kinds of ruins are fascinating because they represent a historical or political trajectory which has stalled. Fictional ruins are often similarly coded; the ruin is the abode of the villain traditionally, to whom no good will come. Ruins, both real and fictive remind us of the thrilling narratives of childhood, but this nostalgia is tempered, and ruins acquire a new ambiguity as we grow and our understanding of history develops. However, there remains an ineffable quality to ruins which has survived the rationalisations of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Age. To engage with ruins, therefore, is to engage with ideas that are both thought and unthought, and it is this miscibility of effect, ultimately, that characterises our interaction with ruins and sustains our interest in them.

What She Said

2010-02-08T23:39:00.003Z

We are talking about Ash Wednesday, my daughter and I, and I mention Eliot's poem, which I still liked last time I read it. Kelly explains about the burning of the palms. We start talking about Lent, fasting, quarantine, and I try to explain to my daughter that people have different views on religious writing and practice. Some reject them altogether, some regard them as a harmless puzzle, some advocate their literal truth. I struggle to define my own position which seems inconsistent, even to me. I don't believe in any of it, really, I told her, but if I did, I'd approach both text and process as metaphor. We use metaphor commonly to illuminate concepts or conditions which cannot be made comprehensible otherwise. We tell the fable of the dog in the manger to make a child aware of the drawbacks of selfishness. We tell the fable of Christ in a manger to make the Gospel story resonate with children and the poor, to make the son of God human, sympathetic and universal. Bible stories, I tell her, (these are not my exact words, but they're close) might contain a kind of internal truth which reveals something to us about how we get along now.

"Do you get what I'm saying?" I ask.
"It's the truth that never runs out," she says, calmly. I freak out briefly, because she's suggesting something radical, radical for a nine-year-old at least, an idea which she has arrived at with just the slightest push from me. Until it becomes clear that she's misheard 'eternal' for 'internal'.

But still, I love the idea, that we repeat certain narratives because they continue to offer us understanding, that there is an consequent inexhaustibility in these stories, that fiction can offer a special kind of truth, that never runs out.

Sudden Death and the English Pastoral

2009-07-26T13:32:00.007Z

It's 7.15 on Saturday morning. Kelly and I are woken by the sound of an explosion, or a collision. I run downstairs and try to see what has happened. Nothing to the west, the road is clear. My view eastwards from the front right window of the living room is obscured by the tree of heaven which is in full leaf. There's no commotion in the street, no screaming. A car passes, and a train. I consider going back to bed. And then there's a young black man, tall, oddly dressed - as if he's on his way to work at Dixons, but in three quarter length trousers - looking back towards Forest Gate. He looks like he's seen something awful, he's slack-jawed, terrified.

I pull on a pair of jeans (I'm naked) and run outside, still barefoot. By now there are three or four people standing in the street. There's an uprooted bollard, a quarter of a ton of it, still rolling back and forth in the road. I turn into Ash Road, still running, and I see the first body. She's on her front, three-quarters of the way out of the car. There's not a lot of blood but it appears as though she's been thrown through the car door. Not through the window, but through the metal door. The physics of it are impossible to comprehend.

She's fleshy, black, not wearing much. Her face is pressed hard into the tarmac and she's obviously dead. I'm three or four feet away but she's definitely dead. The first dead body I've ever seen and in the most absurdly violent circumstances. Behind the wheel of the car is a man, sat upright. He's not moving. I run back to the house to ring 999 despite being half-aware that someone is already calling them. I hear my voice shaking as I'm connected. I start babbling about "a terrible accident" and give the address, correctly, I think.

"Which emergency service do you require?" the operator asks, rather laconically.
"All of them, I think, " I say, and again I have a point, but it occurs to me that I'm paraphrasing a film, something with Alan Rickman in it, where someone shouts "SEND EVERYONE!!!" into a 'phone.
"Who do you want first, Fire Service, Police or Ambulance?"
"Ambulance, I suppose." No-one's told me to calm down, so I haven't.
"Connecting you."

The man at the LAS asks for more details and makes it clear that I have obligations as a witness. "Grab a mobile when you go back outside and if necessary we'll talk you through CPR procedures. Check for breathing and pulse and make sure no-one moves anybody."
"Yes," I say, "I've already told them that." (I'm not sure that I have).

"Where are the sirens?" Kelly asks. "It's been five minutes."

I pull on a shirt and head back outside, horrified, frankly, that I'll have to help in some way. Some context here:- Two years ago to the day, I assisted in another crash between two vehicles along the same stretch of road and acquitted myself well enough. Everyone survived, to my knowledge, and I was there right amongst the blood and the broken glass. I'm the sort that gets involved, despite myself. Most people are, given the circumstances. Morally, the options are limited. Turning a blind eye, or gawking. This is different in scale though. It's hopeless. I'm certain that they're both dead.

To my great relief, and without fanfare - or siren - an ambulance has arrived. I trot up to see if there's anything I can do and now I take in more of the scene. There's another body in the back of the car. I think it's a man but there's just a head, no face, no profile, really, just flesh.

I'm numb at this point. The last thing I register is the arrival of firemen on the scene, the first of whom flinches at the sight of the ruined BMW and immediately shouts for cutting equipment.

There are no skid marks on the road. The driver never tried to slow down. He regains consciousness later, I learn, and has escaped with a broken arm and a suspected lung puncture. The two women died instantly, initial reports suggest. A second male passenger fled the scene the police believe, the tall Dixons employee I saw first of all and put out of my mind, believing that no-one could survive.

On Friday morning I walked amongst the sand dunes in North Somerset. Rabbits scattered in front of me as I made my way down to the beach. We saw wild goats in the Cheddar Gorge later. Tragedies happen anywhere, of course, but it seems that here, where we live, tragedy is just around the corner.

Tristan Wells

2009-02-02T19:42:00.004Z

He had cartoon hair, drawn on as an afterthought, boyish yet murky at the end. I loved him stupidly because he lived an uncomplicated life. It wasn't that he wasn't thoughtful, it's just that he didn't require answers like the rest of us. I didn't know at the time, how much he meant to me, how much of a model he was. God, I loved him.

I loved his coat, coveted it. It was shapeless but expensive. After he died I loved his gipsy girlfriend because she had some stuff that was part of him, and the great deep brown areolas sinking into a bubble bath as we looked at each other tearfully. And I loved his father (the greatest betrayal) because he had that old Mercedes and a video of the Newport Jazz Festival with Thelonious Monk and those dangerous Christmas lights and a giant turkey and the bit of wood which kept the dishwasher closed which you had to hurdle or limbo under and the elderly female relative, surely dead now, with the extraordinary flatulence.

He was so fast even crippled as he was by some hereditary back thing four hundred metres in fifty seconds and easy hands swatting a six into the car park at Alleyne's and that just a top edge, so perfect so fragile as it turns out.

His name is Tristan Wells. Tristan Raymond Ernest Wells. T. R. E. Wells. You won't find his name on the internet, this was 1989, there are no memorial benches or websites in tribute. He was magnificent, I loved him, and he died twenty years ago today. My life has had its share of sorrows (and more joys than I might expect or deserve) but this was the first great 'fuck you!' that this brief vale of tears had in store for me. And even then I was more grateful than disappointed. So fuck you right back. There will be brilliance and uncommon beauty amongst the folly. There will be people to believe in, and whose example we can hope to follow.

He had terrible taste in music.

An Impractical Cat (cont.)

2008-12-03T20:58:00.003Z

Alfred is not sleek, nor slender, nor graceful. He is a grubby specimen, a pigeon, but pigeons are like coalminers in that they are often grimy for reasons that are to do with their environment rather than to do with an aversion to washing.

He is a stoical pigeon, and a clumsy one. These traits were impressed upon his character by a single incident early in his life, in which he involved himself too intimately with a high voltage power cable. This brief encounter left him poorer, to the tune of two toes on his right foot and a wingtip. His flying, therefore, was erratic and his landings more so. But, he reasoned, he could still fly, and took great consolation in this gift from his Creator; many other creatures would have been completely incapacitated or indeed extinguished by such an adventure. So he feels lucky, privileged even, but this does not extend to pride. He is aware of his shortcomings.

An Impractical Cat

2008-10-06T22:08:00.006Z

Midnight is a young, slender cat who is very happy to be alive. She is almost all black, as you might imagine, but has white spots on her heels, which you see when she is tip-toeing away from you. Her white heels are her way of saying goodbye (Her miaow is very quiet).

Her eyebrows are especially long and her bright yellow eyes, which would otherwise be terribly fierce, point inwards slightly, towards her nose, giving her a gentle, curious look.

She appears at the back window of Daisy's house in the afternoon. Not every afternoon, but when she feels short of fun or attention. Midnight and Daisy are always delighted to see each other. Daisy has treats and toys for Midnight to nibble at or play with. Sometimes Daisy wants to squeeze Midnight so tight that she'll hurt her, almost. It is a confusing feeling, but Daisy is a sensible girl, and holds Midnight gently against her, feeling the simple resonant joy of her purr.

Midnight gets confused too, though not very often (a tendency towards introspection is but an occasional failing). She wonders whether she wants to stay with Daisy, sometimes. But the idea of home is a powerful one, even for a creature as dilettante as a cat. So she returns to her family two doors along, to the house that smells like her. She is a beautiful creature, sleek and dark, with nothing at all to worry her.

Except Alfred.

I'm Your Man

2008-08-04T20:33:00.004Z

A while ago I was very much in love with a girl called Elisabeth. We weren't well-suited, then at least. She was serious, I was glib. She had a career, I had a job. We didn't get along with each other's parents. She was a snob, I think, but not a bad one. We were both youngest children with much expected of us. We lived together for a while in a flat in Kensal Rise. She grew out of me or tired of me. Anyway she didn't want me anymore. I don't think of her that often.

She's with a soldier now. And I hope she's perfectly happy. Perhaps she has kids.

She came into my shop today, not her exactly, but a woman who looked like her, laughed like her. Same height and shape. Same age. With a little girl of a year or so who immediately became my best friend. I didn't speak to her mother really, it would have awkward, but as she left I asked her daughter's name. "Freya", she said. She looked straight at me without that distance you expect between strangers. "Say goodbye, Freya." Freya refused to comply. And then, curiously, so did her mother. She loitered, asking supplementary questions, trying to work me out. Eventually she left. Freya still refused to wave.

"She reminded me of someone," I told my colleague, Scott.
"Funny that," he replied. "She said the same thing while you were downstairs."
"What did you say?"
"I said you look like Orson Welles."

Fighting in the Captain's Tower

2008-05-26T18:14:00.004Z

What is a Renaissance Man? He is a soldier in the morning, a statesman in the afternoon, and a poet in the evening. What private time he has is given over to astronomy, and mastering the lute. He wears hose, of course, rather than trousers, and has a gift for constructing perfect, crystalline demonstrations of his considerable wit in everyday speech. His discourse, on just about any subject, sparkles with effortless erudition (though philosophy is his pet topic).

What does a Renaissance Man do? He reads, he invents, he woos, he intervenes in secret crises and in doing so secures the future prosperity of the nation. He tours his estates and wins the admiration and loyalty of his tenants. He plays tennis deftly with either hand (his second serve is an unplayable chimera of spin and bounce). He imports the finest oils and unguents from the Far East to maintain his appearance. He suspects that his hairline has begun a recession which no Oriental potion will halt. He encourages his older servants to cheek him, in a pretense of humility.

He is not real, and that perhaps, is his hamartia, that sense that everything, yea, even his very self is an illusion. His memories seem unreliable, his foundations unstable. Sometimes he wakes before the birds have begun to chatter in the eaves of his well-appointed seat and finds that the down of his pillow has been matted down by sweat, or tears, or both.

Philosophy, art, accomplishment, none of these things can save him, of course. These things instead broaden his understanding of the futility of human endeavour. He is hollowed out by that which ought to make him, anyone, whole. Even if he is not a myth he cannot exist.

"How handsome he was!" they will say. "He had so much to live for." That's how it seemed.

Inside The Park (3)

2008-03-24T15:55:00.007Z

(Picture courtesy of the most excellent Kelly O' Connor at http://www.sittingstill.net)

Henry Chadwick, a stoutly bearded Devonian sportswriter, is the man credited with devising the box score, a summary of events on the field of play during a baseball game. His prose was as stiff as his collar, as straight as his spine, and now seems hopelessly outmoded. The box score has survived as a tool of reportage however, because of its simplicity - it is easy to compile and easy to interpret, it transcends language. If a non-Anglophone, somewhere south of Florida picks up a discarded English language newspaper and turns to the back page he will not be able to gauge the performance of his favourite player, a compatriot perhaps, from the paragraph of jagged-looking print describing the game. For that he'll check the box score. One thinks of Hemingway's Santiago, checking on Joe DiMaggio's injury-plagued 1949 season.

A full box score can tell you about extrinsic factors too; weather conditions, attendance, time of game, but it obviously, necessarily, omits more than it includes. A box score can't record a loud foul ball which bends the wrong side of the pole but rattles the pitcher nevertheless. It won't tell you about the fastball thrown under the chin of a batter which induces the weak pop-up to short right two pitches later. It offers nothing on the sensation of peanut shells beneath the shoes of the roaring masses in the bleachers or the sweet, suddenly renewed intimacy that twilight brings to a ballpark. Evening becomes Fenway.

And a box score does not discriminate. Its mathematics are blind to a player's colour or his relationship with the media. Scoring may occasionally be political, but the box score is a disinterested judge, observing the obvious double turned into a single by stodgy baserunning, and the misplayed slow roller to third leg hit, and treating those two impostors just the same. Similarly, the box score does not distinguish between two other related, but different outcomes. In the fifth inning, Manny Ramirez crushes a line drive home run to left, just destroys it. The ball leaves the park in less than two seconds. It happens too quickly for a distant spectator to appreciate it. It's a spectacular feat of strength and timing, but it's strangely unexciting. In the seventh Kevin Youkilis lofts a ball high into the night sky. Then something odd happens. Grady Sizemore, troubled by proleptic waves from the future presumably, fails to commit to the ball. It bangs off the bullpen wall and scoots out towards centre field. A cartoon pursuit ensues out by the shutters. Meanwhile Youkilis is belting around the bases. I'm queuing for beer, watching him, on the balls of my feet, like an impatient child. He rounds third and Trot has just hit the cut-off. The screens down beneath the bleachers are small, and though I've got a better view than almost anyone in Fenway Park, it doesn't seem real. He crosses home plate, standing. I return to my seat.

"Cyn, that was an inside-the-park home run, wasn't it?"

The box score records these two events drily thus: -

M Ramirez (8, 5th inning off C Lee 0 on, 2 Out), K Youkilis (7, 7th inning off R Hernandez 0 on, 1 Out)

And they are equal; solo home runs, but one feels like the product of effortless genius and the other like the product of quotidian toil. Presence has shifted my perspective, somehow. What once seemed invaluable now seems overpriced, the true value of what seemed cheap is now evident. This is where this experience hinges, for this Englishman. The deciding run belongs to Youkilis, even according to my ancient countryman, Chadwick, thanks to an aberrational flirtation with failure by the mighty Papelbon. I can't make sense of all this, of course. I've been drinking for ten hours. Schilling struck out ten. His son caught a foul ball in the player's box. Pedroia announced himself. The Red Sox came within a whisker of a triple play. Trot returned.
The Captain fell over catching a pop-up and issued a rare smile of embarrassment. There is singing, lots of it. The flow of fellow-feeling pulls me out of Fenway. I roll back to the hotel, back to England ultimately, drunk and happy.

Straight From The Source

2008-01-17T19:38:00.000Z

I'm typing this in a pub, called, with admirable economy, “The Tavern” in the village of Kemble, Gloucestershire. There is manure on the road outside, and the people have accents. It's the countryside. I'm here for a site visit to the local manor house, which sounds exciting, professionally speaking, but in fact the contract is unlikely to be as lucrative as my boss was presumably anticipating when he agreed the £90 train fare for me to get here. It's a beautiful old house, the like of which one might imagine one of Jane Austen's moderately well-to-do families living in (it would have been a new-build, then, of course). I decided to walk from the train to Ewen, the adjacent village. That's what people do in the countryside, isn't it? Walk from one bit of countryside to another? They're not so big on pavements in this part of the world, so I was forced on more than one occasion to dive onto the verge to avoid oncoming traffic.

£3.05 for a pint of Lowenbrau? That'll be the “strangers” rate, at a guess. If I wanted to pay London prices I wouldn't have got on the train this morning.

Anyway, as I'm wandering towards the site I cross a small, picturesque stream. Nothing remarkable about that really, until I notice a wayside sign, a stake in the ground with painted arrows on it and the words “Thames Path” in relief. The stream is Old Father Thames, in infancy. Interesting but not an earth-shattering discovery, you might think. But the Thames has loomed large in my consciousness recently. I wrote this recently:-

The Thames rises in the Cotswolds, as a small spring which soaks through long grass down to some level lower ground where it begins to look like a brook, then a stream, but little more for most of its length. What begins as a bucket poured down a hillside flows out just two hundred miles later , coloured now by silt and sewage, bejewelled with every kind of floating rubbish, into the unremarkable North Sea. Yet this modest river was the most important in the world for a great chunk of the last millennium. The Thames brought life to London, the greatest of cities, and London brought fame to its river. This was the river on which Chaucer and Conrad worked... and besides which Spenser and Shakespeare wrote.

I mentioned my discovery to the architect I was meeting on site who said “You do realise you're about a quarter of a mile from the Thames Head?” And he took me there, after a couple of hours of ironmongery stuff. There's standing water everywhere here; persistent, heavy rain is making people's lives miserable. But every cloud, etc. We drove slowly past the place where a spring forces the river above ground and where the raised water table has created a marsh (the ground slopes more shallowly than I thought) from which the river snakes away and he told me “You're lucky – usually there's nothing to see, really.”

I've been to the Sagrada Familia, Stonehenge and Fenway Park in the last year, but this glimpse of the nascent river was up there in terms of exhilaration. That makes me odd, right?

Ou sont les Dambudzos d'antan?

2008-01-08T22:27:00.000Z

Rates of attrition at Birkbeck have become alarmingly high. Specifically in my seminar groups. It could be me. I try to be polite and understanding, and to nod where appropriate but I can't see my face when someone else says something which is neither intelligent, germane nor funny. (I, of course, have carte blanche to be unintelligent, off-topic and unamusing, because I don't have to look at me.) This wastage seems to be principally female in make-up, but there were more female students to start with, so this impression is unreliable. I could offer a generalisation about the sterling commitment of the men on the course, we happy few, but I suspect there are one or two dilettantes. And I know for certain that there are some rabid types amongst the lasses. It's a shame, that's what it is. Money wasted, time wasted, breath ill spent, in retrospect, at least. It's all my fault.

To Kathryn Light - In Lieu of A Dedication

2007-12-04T23:26:00.000Z

Kathryn Light was a lawyer, I didn't know her very well. She was surprisingly tall, by which I mean she wouldn't remain in your mind as tall, but her height would surprise you on each new meeting, as if it was a trick of good posture. She had the faintly laconic air of a woman getting by in a man's world. She didn't seem the type to tolerate foolishness or fuzzy thinking. She was smart and strong, at least I thought so, though I didn't always agree with her or understand her position on things. She had grown-up children, boys, I think. She'd decided to shake her life up a bit and to move in a different direction. She started an English degree at Birkbeck, at the same time as me. We shared a personal tutor and were in the same weekly seminar group. Today she was due to collect a marked essay on Blake and Charles Lamb but on Friday she was killed in a car accident. I don't know if anyone thought to look in her pigeonhole, or if the essay was intercepted. I wonder how she did. I hope she did well. It's oddly important to me. Our acquaintanceship was brief, less than a term, but we were engaged in the same endeavour, climbing the same hill.

I got the news the old-fashioned way, it was whispered to me after a lecture. Because I wasn't close to her, but knew her, knew the way her mind worked at least, I was properly shocked, doubly shocked, really; shocked at the news and shocked again by the strength of my reaction to it. People I truly love have died and in the moment of learning the news I seem to remember feeling nothing, but there was no Camusian blankness this evening, just shock, then sadness. We carried on with the seminar. She wasn't there. I remember this, from the first seminar, she said that she couldn't detect the idea of the supernatural in Modernist literature. "Think of The Waste Land!" I shouted. "Crowds of zombies pouring across London Bridge! Dead! All of them!" Now she's dead, of course, and I feel shitty for being over-emphatic, although I doubt it bothered her much. I was toying with the idea of writing my next essay on Prufrock because Kathryn got me thinking how much more I loved it than The Waste Land (as did she), some chance remark that I meant to talk to her about but didn't, a way to engage her in conversation, to prove I wasn't just a shouting boor. Now I must write on Prufrock. A dedication would seem cheesy, over-reaching, academically inappropriate and probably insincere, but the idea won't go away. This will have to do instead.

A Beautiful Horizon

2007-11-03T21:07:00.000Z

We disappeared to Barcelona for a few days. It stays as it was left, although the lime grove of Santa Creu is a little shabbier, and the beach is a little wider. Our flight was delayed for about an hour.

There are still pigeons to chase in Placa Catalunya.

We bumped into The Pet Shop Boys here:-

We tried to behave like tourists,

but something about the city feels like home. In the bakers they told me I spoke Spanish like a Catalan. This meant "badly", I suspect. There was a good swell most mornings, and we'd wander down to the beach to watch the surfers and play Beach Tag.

On Saturday the wind died and the beach was overtaken by anglers.

I walked out on Sunday before we went to the airport. There was a brilliant low sun, and "a blue true dream of sky".

Some things, they chase you all your life

2007-09-27T11:29:00.000Z

He has been many things, this giant man we see walking along a London street. A boxer, a bouncer, an insurance salesman (briefly), a sailor. For a while, recently, he was part of a ragged troupe of acrobats. He was the foundation of the human pyramid, the trunk of the tree, the great hurdle over which the smaller men leapt and backflipped. They worked the squares of the grand Spanish cities, Madrid, Seville, Barcelona, traveling in the backs of trucks, amongst cattle and poultry. They were all running away from their pasts, as men do, without women to anchor them. One by one they were arrested or deported. He, Dmitri, went to sea again.

"What can you do?" the crewing agent had asked him.
"I can cook and I can lift." The agent was confident he could find him some work, if he had a passport.

He doesn't hear the traffic noise or the whispers of the people he passes - Look at the size of him! - in his pocket is a battered walkman playing a Teach Yourself English tape. As he walks he repeats phrases aloud.

"I have a reservation."
"There are no pillows."

Run aground, Dmitri is still working as a cook, in a café which has escaped gentrification and the prurient interest of property developers, being just off the main drag. It is a functionally furnished place, catering mostly to labourers and thrifty tourists. There are photographs of food in the window of the café, somewhat faded now, representing Platonic ideals of breakfast, indexed by number for the convenience of its foreign clientèle.

He works from six until three. The pay is not great, but the waitresses share their tips with him so he has more than enough to live on.

Pina is a waitress there, and Dmitri is in love with her. This is obvious to everyone but Pina. She has to look a long way up to notice the sudden anxiety in his eyes as she approaches. Everyone is a little bit in love with Pina; she moves among the tables with the swift certitude of a gymnast. And they tip her well, and leave believing that they have done the right thing. Perhaps she's supporting a child by herself, they speculate, or working her way through college. The money comes to her because she is pretty and seems untroubled by, or even pleased with the nature of her employment.

In his cramped kitchen Dmitri is pleased too. He sees her every day, and whilst he knows he cannot have her - she is too young, too beautiful, too small - he feels the pleasure in his situation more acutely than the pain.

Pina, if you asked her, would have struggled to tell you anything interesting about Dmitri. "He's very tall," she might say. "He has a kind voice, but his English is not great. He calls me Tiny." Dmitri, if he had the language, could tell you a thousand things about Pina that are remarkable. The way she often walks on her toes as if she were dancing. The way she pushes her hair behind her ear with just the very tip of her little finger. The way her bottom lip protrudes slightly when she's taking an order. Her extremities are all he has access to, and then he can only look.

The boss is George, he operates the till, and answers the 'phone occasionally. On Friday he doles out the wages. He's an even-handed sort of fellow, in his late fifties, who dreams of retiring to Cyprus. He has family over there. One afternoon, after the café is closed he takes Dmitri by the arm.

"You should stop mooning over her," says George. Dmitri pretends not to understand. "That girl. She doesn't want an old man like you."
"I know," says Dmitri. "I do nothing to her. "
"Of course not, I'm not saying that. I'm saying it's no good for your soul." Dmitri doesn't know the word.
"Your heart," says George, pointing to the big man's chest. Dmitri laughs.
"She broke my heart already, boss. It's okay."

George means well. There is no romance in his life, hasn't been for years, but there is love, of the stolid, indefatigable kind. He has a wife he still cares for, and two grown-up daughters. The youngest, his favourite, has returned home from college and he’s glad to have her back. He realises that Dmitri’s life will never be like his and this gentle intervention is meant, one might suppose, to divert Dmitri away from a path that will only end in anguish. You might expect Dmitri to be touched to learn that someone cares enough about him to say these things. He is for a while, and for a while things really are okay. But Dmitri spends a lot of time alone in the kitchen, bent over a sink or a hotplate, time to revise his position on everything, time to wonder about why things happen. The thing he comes to wonder about most is why George chose to speak to him then. What had happened that caused George to put his hand on Dmitri's arm and speak to him about Pina? How had things shifted in order that he felt it was necessary to intervene? Had she complained about him? Impossible. He barely spoke to her, he couldn't look at her, not when she might be looking back. It is something about her that has changed, he decides. He wants to know what it is. He should simply ask, but knows that he can't. He will find out.

The actions of a good man informed by the purest of motives may result in consequences which diverge sharply from those he imagined or intended. Dmitri has been content to enjoy the intermittent sunshine of Pina's company, but George's remarks have altered the case somehow.

On a Friday afternoon late in the summer Dmitri, rather than heading east towards home, with the sun over his shoulder, turns left and left again. Twenty yards ahead is Pina, moving nimbly amongst lost tourists and mothers with pushchairs. Men stare at her frankly, he notices, turning to catch a glimpse of her backside as they go past. Men in suits, men in hard hats and reflective waistcoats. "What beasts we are," he thinks. "Beasts without shame." She skips past the entrance to the Tube and crosses the road into the square. There is a fountain here, circled by benches. There is no sculpture, no reservoir, just jets of water, arranged in a further circle and propelled straight up from below ground, draining gently back to its centre. There's something soothingly unspectacular about it. It's democratic, accessible. Dmitri, a conspicuous figure, attempts to make himself less so, shifting into the shadow of a wych elm. He watches Pina as she approaches the fountain, stepping out of her flip-flops. She balances easily on one small brown foot, rinsing the other in the falling water, then swapping. She puts her head back slightly as she does so, her face bright with uncomplicated pleasure. Dmitri recognises that she is laughing, privately. She closes her eyes. Pina steps on to the grass, dragging her feet to dry them. The she pushes her feet back into the flip-flops and regains the path, heading westwards, out of the square.

He follows of course, he is through the looking glass now. He follows her without really looking at her, right down to the tube platform. She doesn't speak to anyone. The city is overflowing with people not talking to each other, he thinks. Pina doesn't see him. She takes a book from her bag as she steps into the carriage. The platform is emptied of passengers, then air. Dmitri stands, savouring her absence for a moment, before taking a train the other way.

Each day becomes focused on these few minutes of pursuit. There is no longer any joy in being around her, he can think only of the end of the working day, when the doors close and their curious dance begins. The seconds before, and the actions performed therein - mopping up, stowing of pans, the removal of aprons - are loaded with expectation. He gives her thirty seconds before he goes after her. She walks the same way most days, stopping at the fountain. Her book changes twice a week. If she has time to consume all those words, he reasons, there cannot also be a man to whom she is devoted. Every day he watches her train disappear into the darkness before catching his own. The days shorten for everyone except him. He's awake, alive, only when he's following her.

Another Friday. Pina doesn't go into the square. She walks more slowly than usual. Dmitri stumbles, trying to keep his distance, experiencing a brief flash of panic.

"What am I doing? What am I doing?"

He keeps following. North now, through the university precinct. Students squint as the wind scrapes dust into the air. Dmitri doesn't look like them, he can't pass for one of them. He backs further away. Ahead of them is a church, a sandstone oddity trapped amongst other buildings, out of scale and out of place. Pina crosses towards it and sits on a bench shaded by a large fig tree. She's looking straight towards him but he's a long way back now, far enough back to disappear altogether. All he wants is to be closer to her, to engage with her somehow. Following her like this is exciting, he realises, but it isn't what he wants. It is distancing him from what he wants. Even those elements of her that are available to everyone, her walk, her smile, her laugh, he can no longer cherish. This new understanding bends him in half. He spits, emphatically, and turns to go, but doesn't; something half-sensed, half-seen, draws his attention back to Pina.

***

Tramps, vagrants, mad drunks, smackheads, crackheads, a group of men somehow synthesised from ancient archetypes (village idiot, court jester, seer) sometimes achieve a degree of local celebrity. They are on the streets, for whatever reason, and consequently always in the public eye. Dmitri has lived among these men, and has shared their desperation. He has learned their song. One of them approaches Pina. He has a great knot of unwashed hair, and a waxed jacket, full of holes. He is young and tall. Dmitri watches him, already walking towards the church. He knows him and has seen him bullying tourists in the street. He sees the tramp's gestures widen as he speaks to her, leaning over her, staggering, propping himself on the arm of the bench. Dmitri is running, he is too big, too out of shape to sprint. The tramp has Pina by the wrist, pulling her up off the bench. Dmitri tries to run harder. “What am I doing?” He thinks. Another young man, very dark, in a short-sleeved white shirt and dull tie runs up towards Pina and the tramp. The tramp pushes him away with one arm. He stands screaming at the tramp to release the girl. Dmitri hops past a cyclist and a Honda Civic. He is there, thrust back into the world as if waking suddenly from a dream. He grabs the tramp's collar. The tramp turns, adjusting his eyeline comically upwards. Dmitri drives the heel of his hand into his jaw. The tramp deflates to the ground, he's out for a few seconds, just dead out on the pavement like an improvised death. When he comes to all he can find to say is “Jesus sits there.” The young man has Pina in his arms. She is shaking. “Sweetness,” he says, “I'm here. Calm yourself.”

Dmitri is gone. He never wanted to be a cook.

Inside The Park (2)

2007-09-10T10:06:00.000Z

Christopher Trotman Nixon debuted for the Red Sox in 1996; he appeared in two games. In his rookie season, three years later, the twenty-four year old lefthander hit .270, with fifteen Home Runs and fifty-two Runs Batted In. Trot would occupy Right Field for the Sox for the next seven years. He never hit thirty home runs, he never drove in a hundred, and he hit over .300 just once (ignoring his injury-restricted contribution to the glorious summer of 2004). He wasn't quick, he wasn't graceful, his swing was energetic but inconsistent (particularly when facing left-handed pitching), he had protuberant ears and a complexion like boiled meat.

The fans loved him.

Early in 2006 he overswung at a pitch low and inside, sundering muscle from ribcage, and sending himself, once more, to the Disabled List. He would recover, and finish the season, but it was around this time that Red Sox management decided to look elsewhere for an everyday right fielder for next year, the fateful finger falling, eventually, on J D Drew. Drew was also left-handed, and prone to injury. The similarities extended little further, however. Where Nixon was a hot-headed terrier, hustling and bustling on every play, his replacement carried himself around Right Field with an air of efficient ease. In the batter's box Trot uncoiled himself with a kind of unbalanced savagery. Drew's swing was beautiful, arcing over the plate without apparent leverage, and, all too often, without contacting the ball.

The fans were unimpressed.

Trot ended up in Cleveland. This is his first game at Fenway in the uniform of another team. He jogs out towards us for the bottom of the first, home once more in the confusing polygon of green and brown that he has patrolled for three outs, for nine innings, for seventy nights or so each summer for the last seven years. His last game here was a soggy five inning affair, back on October 1st. It's as if the crowd has been holding its breath all winter, waiting to welcome him back. The applause builds, the fans become more vocal, Trot lifts his cap, looking almost embarrassed by the attention. He is a totem of the 2004 victory, but with the demeanour of an everyman caught up in historical events; he is us, mirroring our short-tempered, blue-collared, hard-working, make-the-most-of-what-you've-got selves, but he is also an agent of our catharsis. This cartharsis is ongoing, it seems. Some of the men around me are squinting hard. Women are blotting their eye makeup with tissues. Slowly, reluctantly, the noise subsides. The game begins again.

Apologies For Absence

2007-09-07T08:14:00.000Z

Summer holidays and a move at work have meant that I've neglected this small corner of the garden. The grass has receded, and what remains is rather flat and wan. Perhaps I'll put in a rockery. Less maintenance, less expectation.

I'm in the curious position of being between jobs, whilst still being theoretically employed. The Spitalfields shop, magnet to the slightly famous, has closed. The landlords doubled the rent and priced us out of there. So I have nowhere to go to work. Paul, my colleague, has leased some space in a serviced warehouse, for the time being, in Lingfield, in the wilds of Surrey. It takes about two hours to get there by train and while it's nice to walk across London Bridge twice a day, against the traffic, with the sun on your neck and a river breeze in your hair, it's a longer commute than you'd want to do every day. Anyway, having shifted, itemised and numbered our stock, and replaced it on the shelves in its new home, there's really no need for me to go back there. So, I'm in limbo again. Paul 'phones me occasionally, querying an invoice, or seeking moral support. I'll be shopping, or doing a crossword somewhere (anything but blogging). The conversation will generally end up up with me saying something like "Unfortunately there's not a lot I can do from here." He'll say "I'll speak to you about it later." Nothing is ever resolved.

I'd feel guilty about it, if only they'd paid me. My guess is that eventually they'll have to make me redundant. I'm nothing more than a burden on their resources at present, without a shop to weave my special brand of surly retail magic in. Or I would be, if they'd paid me. Redundancy means a small, statutory payout and I have another job to go to, subject to the hammering out of some contractual issues.

So I got that goin' for me. Which is nice. Today's the first day (or part thereof) which I've had to myself. My wife works part-time too, and I've spent the last two days getting under her feet, surprising her during housework, and distracting her from efficient shopping: -

"Wow, this 52-inch plasma is a steal!"
"We came in here for eggs."

"Look, skateboards!"
"..."

I'll take a shower, I think, then I'll head out and pick up some compost. Maybe some grass seed too.

Vikings in the New World

2007-08-11T13:51:00.000Z

Olav Olavssen arrived in Chicago early in 1941. He had a feeling for how things went together and had decided that he may as well work in construction until something else came along; they were still building things in Chicago. He found work quickly, and a place to live. He had the competent, cleanly air of his late mother. He was an ideal colleague and tenant.
After the accident he considered doing something else with his life. One February Tuesday his left ankle was guillotined by a joist mishandled by frozen fingers twenty storeys up in the Illinois sky. Discharged from the Holy Cross some days later, spring’s imminence evident on every corner as he hobbled towards home Olav began to weep, for the first time in many years, for the loss of his once useful leg, which grieved him more with every other homeward step. He wiped his eyes on each shoulder, as if his hands were dirty, tried to persuade himself that the tears were somehow windborne. Eventually he found a bar, and a half-drunk priest within. Informed perhaps by an echo of his quiet, observant ancestry, Olav sat beside the priest and offered him another drink.

“What ails you son?” the priest asks. “No-one courts a cleric in a bar unless their world is a little out of shape.”
“I’ve ruined my leg, Father, and I’m not sure I’ve the nerve to go back to work.”
“What’s your job?”
“Construction,” says Olav.
“Enjoy it much? Does it inspire you?”
“Sometimes, I suppose. When the sun first appears on the lake like a straight line–“
“Well, there you are,” concludes the priest. “Believe in Him and God will give you strength.”

Fortified by these words, and by a little bourbon, Olav continued home to his uninspiring three-room apartment in Lakeview, close to great vacant dish of Wrigley Field.
He returned to work. He adapted. There were fewer tasks that he could perform; he was disabled, in effect. He was more cautious, inevitably, around the site and amongst the scaffolding, and though the men ribbed him about his useless leg they did so gently enough and at a distance. Olav was still a big man, who could throw a four-pound club hammer like a tomahawk.

That summer America slept, as the war consumed lives in Europe, aware of the distant conflict as a suburban guard dog might be aware of a burglary on the other side of the street. Olav, watching the bathers down at the end of 55th Street, met Susan who was doing the same thing, late one August afternoon. Susan had a dog, some kind of terrier, she thought, but anyway of dubious pedigree, and this dog, which she had named Muffin, took a liking to Olav. Susan had learned, by way of a number of deeply felt disappointments, that Muffin was a better detective of the innumerable flaws of men than she was. Olav chose to disregard her scepticism and Susan was not troubled by his impediment. He could lift her from the ground like the ninety pound teenager she occasionally saw, reflected as a palimpsest in the wardrobe mirror. The city was prospering and Susan had thickened with it. Olav didn’t know her younger self, took her, in fact, to be the same age as him, from which misconception, Susan felt, it was not immediately necessary that he be disabused. Their courtship proceeded at a stately pace. From time to time Olav would mention a girl he had been fond of back in Portland. Susan didn’t talk about the past.

Autumn came. Unsure that the romance could survive the chill of a Mid-Western winter without some sense of direction Olav proposed and was accepted, without any of the vacillation customary to such moments. Her feelings for him were unequivocal still, though she was obliged to Muffin for bolstering her resolve in the days and weeks that followed. They planned to marry the following June, when they had saved a few dollars.

The United States entered the war in December. Olav attempted at once to enlist. They didn’t want him of course. What would they do with a hobbling giant on the deck of a frigate, or in the turret of a tank? He couldn’t even drive an ambulance. Olav, who had contrived a way to continue to make a living in one of the more hostile civilian occupations in spite of his disability, was utterly chagrined. His fiancée offered few words of comfort. She was glad he had been rejected, knew that he sensed this, and did not wish to seem insincere.

Olav sulked through Christmas; his frustration seemed inescapable. On an icy Friday evening towards the end of winter he travelled downtown to the bar on the Southwest Side where he had encountered the priest the previous spring. Also visiting the bar that evening was Augustus Knuth, millwright, bourlingueur, and a friend of the owner.

Knuth achieved a degree of specific celebrity following his involvement with a project in which he would soon seek the assistance of Olav. His name appears in only a few accounts of the progress of this endeavour, Olav’s in none. Historically, one might suppose therefore, that these two men were not at all central to its success - were bystanders, perhaps, attendant labourers making up the numbers – in truth they knew how to do things that no-one else knew and were thus invaluable. The bar owner, whose name is not recorded, even here, introduced the two men.

“Here’s Gus, an old friend, and a fellow artisan! This is Olav, he’s a cripple but you daren’t tell him so unless you want to swallow some teeth. Used to come in here all the time before he got some unsuspecting out-of-town girl in trouble.”
“How do you do,” says Olav, offering a hand. “My girl’s not pregnant, by the way.”
“Pleased to meet you,” says Knuth as they greet each other, their handshake making a sound like glass paper on sawn timber. He nods towards the bar owner. “He’s been spouting the same shit since Wilson was president. Artisan, my ass.” He gestures obscenely to the bar owner while at the same time making it understood that he requires another drink.

Knuth would presumably have been surprised to learn that this was how Olav thought of himself, as an artisan. He had come across the word in a book that Susan had been reading, written in the twenties by a fellow named Carey Lewis. The book was called “Work”, just that, and from what Olav could tell from a brief skim of its contents it was some kind of Red propaganda about the nobility of labour and the coming revolution and the earthly paradise which would surely ensue. He didn’t think much of that but he liked the word, he liked its overtones of deftness, and artistry. He was also impressed with one conceit he came across: -

…Are we to assume then that when God considered the mighty Cathedrals of Europe, built to his glory, he decided that only those who had paid for the construction should enter the Kingdom of Heaven? Or is it the more likely judgment, as Jesus Christ His Risen Son suggests, that the truehearted, God-fearing laborers who shifted the heavy stones and raised the scaffold should be recipients of His grace…?

Olav suspected that Carey Lewis didn’t believe in God at all and was just pretending to in order to make his point. Nevertheless, he thought, it was a good point to be making. The two artisans got to talking. Knuth listened to Olav’s grievances regarding his rejection by the armed forces. Then he offered him a job.

“Come up to Stagg Field on Monday. There’s someone you should meet. That’s all I can tell you.”

Knuth put one finger to his lips and the two men parted with another rough handshake. The following Monday, as instructed, Olav took the ‘L’ and walked to 57th Street, close to where he and Susan had met. Their relationship had cooled. She had taken to attending meetings, wearing a beret and reading Ibsen in public places. He was untroubled by these developments; now they were in each other’s orbits, he felt, neither of them could escape.

“This is your new boss, be gentle with him.” Walter Zinn, almost as tall as Olav, and with a scholarly bearing subverted somewhat by his blackened face and hands, and his prizefighter nose, introduced himself as a physicist and put Olav to work straight away. What they were doing, Zinn explained, was assembling a pile of material in order to test its suitability for use in a subsequent, much larger experiment. Sensibly he didn’t over-complicate things, detailing his requirements and setting Olav free. They made a series of cubes from graphite bricks, some of which were machined to accept pockets of uranium, from this they could calculate the purity of the graphite. It was filthy work, and not obviously rewarding, but Olav drove himself, and the small team of draft dodgers and petty criminals that Zinn had put at his disposal, with a zealot’s commitment. The results brought Olav to the attention of Enrico Fermi, the latter deciding that he might well require the new man’s services elsewhere. Olav was promptly poached, leaving Zinn to the mercies of his vagabond crew.

Enrico Fermi, it will be agreed, was one of the Great Men of the last century. Olav had never heard of him, but he knew what a Nobel Prize was and was suitably awed when it was revealed to him that his new boss had one all to himself. Zinn and Fermi were about as different as two men in the same profession are likely to be - where Zinn was erect, austere and earnest Fermi was stout, enthusiastic and a little wild - but both seemed to share a love of hard work. The diminutive Italian welcomed Olav into his consciousness, requiring his attendance at lectures and soirées and consulting him regarding the construction of the super-pile he was planning. Olav was entranced by Fermi, within hours, and though he had been denied his part in the war Olav felt that he had at last found a General, someone to follow, someone for whom he might risk everything. Olav’s huge frame and quiet demeanour reminded Fermi of Niels Bohr, who he greatly admired.

Olav takes Fermi to see the Cubs play at Wrigley, one afternoon in early July. Fermi knows a little about baseball and becomes agitated when the famed slugger Jimmie Foxx is announced as Chicago’s starting first baseman.
“I thought Foxx played for Boston,” says Fermi.
“He got traded.”
“Why would you trade a star player?”
“He’s not the player he was,” Olav explains. “He took a ball in the face a while back and he’s been shy ever since. They say he’s a rummy.”
Fermi looks at Olav and sees him angry for the first time. He changes the subject. In the fourth inning Foxx lashes a double into the ivy. Olav’s face, the physicist observes, glows with the fervour of a man vindicated.

By the time Gus Knuth was called upon again, as Chicago froze in November, he was surprised to discover that Olav was now a confidant of a number of the physicists and was greeted generally as warmly as he was. It occurred to Knuth that he might have made a mistake, introducing this open-faced hulk to his rarefied circle of influence. He need not have worried. Olav was instantly deferential to Knuth, his referee, which elevated the perceived status of the millwright in the eyes of the scientists.

These men were going to change the world. The construction of the first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile One, was an extraordinary undertaking: recreating the power of the sun in a squash court. The sun was a clue, the most efficient shape for such a pile was a sphere, and to build this sphere, and the timber structure to support it would require expertise beyond a collection of scientific minds. Fifty years of thought and experiment, three years of immediate application, thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars had been swallowed by the project. Only Knuth and Olavssen could build the pile.

Fermi concocted a rough blueprint for them to work to, based on the experiments that Olav’s lost boys had already laboured towards. The two carpenters, ignorant of the vast budget granted to the entire Manhattan Project grumbled privately that planed timber had been provided where less costly rough-cut would have served.

The pile rose in layers, like an onion being unsliced. Past the equator the structure became self-supporting and Knuth returned to other, less critical jobs. Olav remained, in thrall of Fermi and in the employ of the Government. He supervised the rest of the construction, directing future Nobel laureates, football stars and menaces to society in the art of bricklaying. The graphite bricks were texturally confusing; slippery but neither greasy nor moist. The workers finished their shifts in blackface, and the reform school boys complained that they were treated no better than filthy slaves. Olav would cuff them for this, call them foul and ungrateful, but then stand them a drink after work.

The pile was never completed, not at least as originally conceived, and Olav struggled to conceal his dissatisfaction. Fermi’s slide rule revealed that an abbreviated bun shape, a few layers shy of a sphere, would support a chain reaction and construction was halted. This victory of the pragmatic over the aesthetic disappointed the Artisan, but he kept quiet about it.
Advent arrived, and along with it gasoline rationing. Olav walked to work while fights broke out on the public transportation system. On the 2nd of December, the hundred ton pile having squatted overnight, kept sub-critical by tines of cadmium-wrapped timber, the experiment concluded. Olav gauged the importance of the occasion by the fact that Fermi was wearing a suit jacket beneath his lab coat. He found a place to stand a few feet behind the physicists on the gallery of the squash court. Inch by inch the cadmium toothpicks were removed from the sphere like cloves pulled incrementally from an orange. Nothing happened other than a corresponding increase in the clicking of the measuring equipment which then subsided. Lunch was taken. The other scientists deferred to Fermi and asked questions to which he knew all the answers. For Olav it felt good to see other people regard his General with the same mixture of wonder and affection that he felt.

In the afternoon the clicking increased and did not subside. The reaction became self-sustaining, energy was being produced from the most fundamental of fuels. Then he shut it down. Olav understood enough to imagine the triumph which Fermi was managing to disguise. Like Jimmie Foxx hitting one over the wall. Or Columbus sighting land. Unnoticed, unknown to all but a few, the world had changed irrevocably.

The following year Olav took Susan to Los Alamos, where they were eventually married, amongst barbed wire and military police, brilliant minds and the thin air above the desert. The train south was full of government men, checking papers and making people feel uneasy.
After the war they meant to make their way back to the Pacific Northwest, but made it no further than Santa Fe. They bought a house with cash and started all over again, filling their home with music and a couple of kids.

If you quizzed Olav about it, years later, a grandchild concealed beneath the footrest of his recliner, Susan preparing pastry in the kitchen, he would tell you that his involvement in the project had been rightly ignored. It was not that history had chosen to forget him, he believed, it was that he had chosen to forget history. He had sufficient reasons to be happy. He was a technician at best, he would assure you. Fermi was the real engineer. Then he would tell you this: -

“He was an extraordinary man, Fermi. He was a little, balding guy with protuberant ears and a smile never distant. If you didn’t know who he was you would have assumed that he was some kind of overlooked clerk, arriving late for work in ill-matched clothes. He had this charisma, which made this amazing thing happen, but I remember him most emerging from the lake at the 55th Street promontory, shivering, his eyes full of laughter. He was human, you see, very alive. But he was driven by a different engine than the rest of us. Some people are born to do great things, I guess.”

The Olavssens still live in New Mexico, they are elderly. No-one knows who they are.

A Poor Sort of Memory

2007-07-25T09:43:00.000Z

So I want a brief on meaningful coincidence for reasons that will become clear. I wiki it, and I read an odd little entry on Jung's theory of Synchronicity, which includes a reference to Magical Thinking, I click and idly skim the article, the "Magical thinking exists in most people" section captures my flitting interest and includes a link to the Birthday Paradox. I know what this is, but, I realise, I have no real understanding of it. Having been informed by the current article that folks like me "rarely have a deep understanding of statistics" I dive in, in the futile hope of getting the maths straight in my head. The maths is impenetrable, the probability equations are thickly wooded with brackets and overgrown with unknown powers. Fortunately there's a paragraph just for me, "Understanding the paradox", which has almost no maths in it at all. Seriously, it's about 2% maths. So now I have a grasp of the problem, albeit a trivial grasp. But I want more so I explore an external link at the bottom of the page which bills itself as "A humorous article explaining the paradox". How can I resist? It's pretty funny, particularly the part about the calculator threatening the author. Lurking at the bottom of this page is a list of related articles, one entitled "The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon", I click again, which discusses a feeling that must be familiar to everyone: -

"one happens upon some obscure piece of information - often an unfamiliar word or name - and soon afterwards encounters the same subject again, often repeatedly..."

The author explains it away with that old chestnut, cognitive bias. But here's the thing. Scrolling down I notice a list of suggested further reading. The second item on the list? The original wikipedia article on Synchronicity!

Spooky. Or a meaningless coincidence, depending on your perspective.

I'm at Hammersmith bus station when my wife calls, on my way to a softball game in darkest Barnes.

"There are two envelopes here," she says. "One from Birkbeck and one from the solicitors. Shall I open them?"

I nod, then realise she can't see me.

"Go on."

The Birkbeck letter is a formal unconditional offer of a place on the 2007 BA English degree course. The solicitor's letter is the Administration Accounts for my mother's estate, including a cheque, the final residuary distribution, they call it. The cheque is for a sum closely approximate to my total college fees. It's a kick in the head, obviously, but a good one, I think. A shakabuku, even, at a stretch.

Inside The Park (1)

2007-07-16T08:31:00.000Z

It's Memorial Day, a public holiday here in the United States. The morning humidity has been burned away by a fierce sun and in deference to the spirit of the day, and to the heat, folks are moving unhurriedly into the park. We are searched in a somewhat desultory fashion at the entrance behind home plate, and then we're in. Rob points out a beer stand, the only one, he remarks, where you'll get a decent beer during the game. It seems hopelessly far from our seats. Beneath the grandstand, cleverly, everything's painted in neutral off-white and grey shades, to exaggerate the great splash of green within. We walk along the first base side a little and then head up a ramp into the park.

Hundreds of people better qualified than myself have struggled to pinpoint the strange charm of Fenway. Some are overwhelmed by the greenness, or the intimacy. For me the most remarkable thing is that it seems, at first sight, to be both big and small. You marvel at the proximity of the Pesky Pole to home plate, then marvel again at the soccer-pitch-sized expanse of fair territory beyond it in right. The great inscrutable flatness of The Green Monster confuses the eye. A groundskeeper seems to physically shrink as he runs along it out towards centre. I experience the special thrill of being there; when you've seen the drama unfold on television and then come to see it in the flesh it's akin to walking onto the set of your favourite movie, while they're filming the sequel, but better still it's real. Everything that I will see happen tonight is real, and cannot be rewritten. It's an exhilarating realisation, and at about this point some dust makes its inexplicable way beneath my spectacles, causing my eyes to water a little.

Manny Ramirez, the great righthander, and David Ortiz, his colossal counterpart, are taking batting practice. Ortiz is being rested today, so this will likely be my only chance to see him hit.
He sprays half a dozen balls into the bleachers in right without apparent effort. Then Manny takes over and, interestingly, hits each of his pitches out the same way. I'm transfixed, of course, and I fail to notice that Rob has disappeared until he emerges from the bowels of Fenway bearing gifts; a program, a gameday newsletter and a Red Sox pencil. He presses them upon me. "Gotta get a program on your first visit," he explains. We disperse again towards our respective seats. Cyn and I are in the last two seats of Row 15, Section 43, righthandmost of the Right Field bleachers, where there is no shade from the merciless, lowering sun. I steel myself with a couple of tasteless yet fantastically expensive beers.

Aw, but they're cool people (3)

2007-07-02T08:14:00.000Z

Dover, NH, is a small city of around 25,000 souls, an hour and a half's drive north northeast of Boston. It's been there for almost four hundred years, under one name or another. It was a major textile town in the nineteenth century, powered by the foaming waters of the Cochecho. The mills closed or moved south between the wars. I've not been there myself, you understand - my loss probably - but it sounds like a subdued sort of place, where folk live out their days quietly.

Last to arrive at the Cask is Dover, who hails from this minor metropolis, and takes her pseudonym from it. She's not yet twenty-one, and as such she is an affront to barroom bureaucracy. There's some wrangling with the bouncers, the rest of the party takes a blood oath not to slip her any strong liquor, and eventually she, and her sister (Sister of Dover, 28) are admitted. Dover is about as small as an adult can be without being odd-looking. There's a classic strongman pose, where the beefcake stands legs akimbo, arms raised, with a starlet nestling on either bicep. She'd be ideal for this. I reckon I could support her, on my strong side. So she's ever so slim and ever so tiny, and as is sometimes the case with slim, tiny people she is monumentally loud. Rather than being boorish, this loudness proves infectious however, and it's as if she communicates some of herself, this small bundle of fizzing blonde energy, and pretty soon everyone is shouting or laughing. Sister of Dover is altogether quieter, she doesn't have a clue who any of us are, I suppose. I do my best to be friendly towards her, but I'm distracted by an unusual tattoo on her upper arm. A triumphant Tigger stands on the belly of a recumbent Pooh. Tigger droppings appear to be falling to earth. "Is Tigger taking a shit?" I'm obliged to ask. "They're supposed to be butterflies," Sister of Dover explains. "Why are they flying around his arse?" I'm not sure if I should be amused or disgusted.

It's approaching five o' clock, when the gates will open, and the farewells begin. People get up in ones and twos and say their goodbyes to those not attending the game. It's curious to see the degree of warmth and affection we near-strangers have for one another after just one afternoon which has passed with a click of the fingers. We split up once again outside the bar, having left an astonishingly vulgar tip (Surviving Grady people are high-rollers). Another kidnapping scenario, involving both JET and the waitress flashes briefly through my mind. I take a deep breath as we head towards the park.

Aw, but they're cool people (2)

2007-06-18T09:01:00.000Z

Where to begin with Hayes? As she approaches our table - actually "approaches" doesn't really cover it. It's maybe twenty-five yards from the door to our table, and for the few seconds it takes her to walk this distance she's making an entrance. She's rocking the monochrome, but daringly, has branched out with a white chemise. She regards us with a cool eye, from beneath a natty, chestnut fringe. It's almost a relief when she sits down and once amongst us proves herself to be as droll and amicable as her comment board persona. A fellow can only handle that much charisma for so long.

We're lucky with the waitress. She's a patient, soft-featured girl, who handles us attentively and unobtrusively. Her colleagues seem like a difficult bunch, stomping around impatiently, sporting brief shorts and brief, unconvincing smiles. She deals with the afternoon's setbacks - a CO2 shortage and a smashed glass (not one of ours) - with good humour and minimal fuss.

The only individual who's not enjoying the day so far, perhaps, is the toy ferret, whom we have dubbed "Steve". He's been liberally doused with duty-free cologne, and tossed through the air in a display of astonishing legerdemain by the author. Retrieved, he sits on the table as a marker to latecomers.

We order food, and as we do Nancy arrives, with her husband Bob in tow. This is something of a conundrum for me, as Nancy and I have fallen into a pattern of bickering and mutual denigration that has its foundation, at least as far as I'm concerned, in a deep affection. I like most of the people who contribute to the Surviving Grady board, but she and I know each other as well as two people can, who have never met, nor shared more than the scantest details of their lives with each other. Which is to say not well at all, but it doesn't feel like that. The geography of the table, as well as a natural instinct for what is seemly, prevents me from monopolising her company. Anyway the scouting report on Nancy is that in person she is somewhat reserved, in spite of her garrulousness at the keyboard. Evidently, anyone is going to seem a little quiet, relatively speaking, when a noisy, shameless Englishman with a couple of lunchtime beers under his belt is showing off in the corner. But she's not the mime I feared. She's funny, and charming, and a part of me is irritated that I didn't get a chance to talk to her at any length. Bob maintains an air of bemusement. He's a solidly compact fellow, with a warm smile.

JD and Rob are here now. Later, along with Cyn, they will shepherd me around Fenway. They're the kind of couple who were put on this earth to remind the rest of us of our shortcomings. They're handsome, athletic, generous and entirely impossible to dislike. JD is a willowy blonde, with an infectiously gossipy way about her. Rob strikes me as the kind of guy who would always go out of his way to make a stranger welcome. I'm greatly indebted to them both for helping make the day special.

I enjoy a club sandwich. Kelly has chosen an unusual side dish, a kind of fondue, in a cottage loaf. The hollowed-out crust is filled with a warm Florentine sauce into which you dip your chips and crudités. I'm not sold on it, but I dip in anyway, reasoning that if I don't fuel up now I'll be asleep by the sixth inning. I'm falling in love with the waitress. She has these enormous brown eyes which seem to regard me with what I take for indulgent affection, but which could just as easily be pity. Confusingly, JET looks just like her. Seriously, they could be sisters. And just to add to the effect JET seems incredibly pleased to see me. Obviously I've come a long way to meet these people, but at the same time I must smell of beer, bacon, and cheese, and I'm pretty sure I have spinach in my teeth. By now, I'm romanticising everything about the day, the beer will do that to someone like me, and I detect (spuriously, in all likelihood, and without any real evidence) a certain melancholy in JET. I want to give her a big hug and smuggle her back to England with me. Fortunately I stop short of voicing this sentiment, and realising the depth of my folly, I slow down on the drinking. There is a general, post-prandial lull.

Aw, but they're cool people (1)

2007-06-11T11:36:00.001Z

History may well adjudge Tim Berners-Lee as the most influential Englishman ever to have lived. Children of the future will yawn at Shakespeare, struggle with Newton, and wonder what all the fuss was about with regard to Churchill. None of them will be able to ignore the World Wide Web. As he scribbled down his grand idea on the back of an envelope is it possible that he conceived how swift and total its conquest of the globe would be? Academics, terrorists, enthusiasts of every shape and colour have found each other via this extraordinary medium. And now, on a sticky morning in late May, I was about to gravely disappoint a motley bunch of Americans, unfortunate enough to have bumped into me on a website, a blog, strictly speaking, called "Surviving Grady".

It's a curious thing to meet people you already know for the first time. You assess them differently, and experience a subtly different shade of self-consciousness as they assess you. It must be something akin to what happens when two public figures first meet.

Il Papa: I thought you'd be taller.

Bono: I thought you'd be... holier.

Cyn is warm and chatty, easy company. Her online persona can tend towards the belligerent so I'm pleasantly surprised. I tone down the Englishness, too, so perhaps we're both muting our cyber-selves somewhat. We're acknowledged by a guy in a filthy pair of chinos, a shift manager perhaps. Cyn, with typical directness outlines our demands to him. We need a table big enough to accommodate a dozen or so souls, if everyone shows up. He slopes off to sort something out for us.

Next to arrive is Bridget, who I imagined, based on her rather impish sense of humour and a blog photo taken from a steep angle, to be tiny. She's tall, however (it can't be her!) and wearing a vivid green Red Sox tee-shirt. She's pretty and obviously very smart but shy in spite of this, I sense. I've forgotten that the rest of us are half a generation older than her, of course, and upon realising this I resolve to curb my behaviour in deference to her. I keep this up for about twenty minutes or so. At least into my third beer.

Kelly's next. Again she's taller than I'd thought. She's also in black, with fair, celtic skin, and impossibly curly red hair cropped short to make it manageable. She's lugging a backpack jammed with camera equipment and a toy ferret. It becomes clear, very quickly that she's one of those people whom I hold in the highest regard, because they exhibit all the qualities I lack. She's thoughtful, reasonable, funny without being a clown, self-aware without being inhibited. That slim sliver of the afternoon that I don't spend making lame jokes I spend listening to her, and agreeing with everything she says.

It's eleven thirty, so the four of us go inside, loitering sheepishly by the entrance. There are large LCD screens everywhere and a robust sound system blaring although there's only us and the waiting staff to hear it. Before we're seated Cindy turns up. She's a voluble, pneumatic blonde who is obliged to suffer the worst of my more animated misbehaviour. She sits next to me, a decision, I imagine, that she is still regretting.

As the day wears on, my recollection of events becomes a little impressionistic.

North of Columbus

2007-06-07T22:58:00.000Z

I was looking for something else when I came across this, an article ignored for publication by The Spectator. It's quite long, fictionalised in parts - who remembers drunken conversations with any degree of accuracy? - and, in fact, rather overwritten. But it's not bad enough to delete altogether, and it fits the travelogue theme (Every Day Is A Holiday At Borrowed Philosophy!) rather well. More on Boston to follow.

The apartment overlooks a small square close to the Museum. Locals call this part of the city el Xino; its squalor recalling other Chinatowns familiar to sailors, sex tourists and professional travellers back in the 1920’s. There is some evidence of post-Olympic gentrification even here. Beneath the cloistered edges of the square a café and a skate shop seem to thrive, and in the north-east corner a basic, sandy playground has been laid out. Reassuringly, the rest of the plaza is given over to dogshit and vagrancy.

The winos hold the junkies in suitably low regard, I’ve noticed, and from time to time exhibit their contempt with their fists. The drunks wear dark clothing - to disguise their incontinence, presumably, and contributing somewhat to their random, baggy menace - the drug-addled tend to be more brightly turned out, although one sometimes gets the impression that they are wearing each other’s clothes. A waiter assured me, early in my stay, that none of these undesirable souls were Catalan. “They come from elsewhere in Spain, from Africa, from Yugoslavia, just to stink up the streets.”

Yugoslavia? Of course no-one comes from there anymore. But by early afternoon, once they have drunk off the previous evening’s sleep and begun their daily carousing in earnest, you might suppose that the reeking crows gathered around the square’s benches might be singing about Tito, or Franz Ferdinand, or Philip of Macedon. Their vocal facility declines each day with the sun and their noise turns into something feral, a desperate fling at self-expression.

Today, as I shave, the voices from the afternoon window seem a shade more coherent, momentarily, passing as a faint signal on a short wave radio. I can almost grasp the melody - for a second it’s there, like the gist of a half-remembered nursery rhyme - but then it’s gone. I finish shaving and rescue some clean clothes from the suitcase already half-packed in the hall (I will be flying home for good on Wednesday). In the two months I’ve been here my skin has darkened and my mode of dress has shifted somehow, until the distracted figure looking back at me from the wardrobe mirror could be a local boulevardier, albeit one in need of a haircut and a woman substantially younger than himself with whom to window-shop on the smarter streets of the Eixample. As a result confused day-trippers from Zaragoza will ask me the way to the aquarium or the Imax, and become increasingly confused as I offer tortured instructions, or apologies “Desafortunadamente…” and sometimes tortured apologies for my instructions all rendered in unaccented schoolboy Castilian.

My route to Bar Julia is the same most days. Past the museum, where idling skateboarders try to sell me marijuana, shuffling through the lime groves of Santa Creu. Students sunbathe on the east side of the courtyards, between lectures, it is beautiful amongst the lime trees, and unexpectedly quiet. From here I emerge onto the Carrer de Hospital and head east towards the market, a hot sandwich and, occasionally a beer. But not today. I have promised a copy of “Highway 61 Revisited” to a Swedish waitress I met on Sunday evening. She works at a restaurant which offers vast salads served by waiters and waitresses who dress informally and come from all over the world. The restaurant is a little out of the way. She’s not there but I leave the CD anyway. Heading east again I realise that although I’m not lost I am on unfamiliar streets. There are areas here, west of the Ramblas, which have escaped Mayor Maragall’s reinvention entirely. Bedsheets hang drying like grubby flags from windows above boarded-up shops. I keep walking, and happen, quite suddenly, upon a obstacle course of magnificent black prostitutes. I don’t realise that they are prostitutes at first, of course. They are not any more provocatively dressed than the girls in the supermarket aisle or the cinema queue, but they are young and fleshy and African, talking amongst themselves until I’m almost amongst them. “Oi guapo!” one girl shouts to me. It’s impossible not to smile when a handsome young woman chooses not to ignore you, regardless of her agenda. This involuntarily reaction encourages the others who begin to catcall, offering themselves. There must be twenty-five or thirty women shouting at me. Beneath my suntan I can feel my face burning. The source of my shame is obscure. I have merely walked down the wrong street. It is daylight, my intentions are unambiguous, but it occurs to me that if I were at home, trying to catch a cab from Kings Cross, and these girls were skinny and white rather than hearty and black my reaction would be one of disgust, not shame. This thought puzzles me sufficiently that I walk past the half-dozen pimps - lurking at the end of their avenue of employees, engaged in some kind of small-stakes, playground gambling game - without fear. I call my wife from the Placa Reial, where a stamp fair is taking place. Leaning on a fountain, with the scent of flaking gum and the sound of aggressive haggling around me I describe my recent encounter, seeking absolution perhaps. She laughs at me instead. “See you very soon,” she says, “and no more whoring.”

* * *

“In 1937,” my companion explains, “with the greater part of the country already under the control of the Nationalists, and in spite of the subversive efforts of both Franco and Stalin the first true anarchist state in the history of mankind was created here, in Aragon-Catalonia. Industrial and agrarian concerns fell under popular control. Productivity in the collectivised factories and farms actually increased, as people began to work not for themselves but for each other. People believed, all at once in a complementary idea of selfhood. It must have been an extraordinary thing to be part of. Eventually, the loss of men to the war, and sabotage by Fascist and Communist fifth columnists took their toll, and the idyll, whose preservation had always had to be fought for, dissolved. There are men here,” he gestures towards a table of gnarled philatelists, “who remember that time, and to the whole region it is still real. For libertarians and revolutionaries everywhere else in the world the commonwealth is a vindication of anarcho-syndicalist thought.” He hasn’t touched upon the subject of my initial enquiry yet, but I have the feeling he’s just getting started. I’m happy enough to listen though, he speaks English beautifully, clearly, but with the low, slightly cynical intonation that you hear from bus drivers, barmen and museum curators throughout the city. My wife calls this ‘The Catalan Grumble’. He unfolds his sentences carefully and without hesitation. His is the kind of voice that is used to being listened to.

“The people of Catalonia are like the countrymen of Sleeping Beauty; unconscious through years of oppression, then awaking with the same revolutionary zeal but finding that there are fewer things to protest about. This, to answer your question, is the source of Catalan militancy. The lesson of the commonwealth, for most Catalans, certainly for those who remember it, is that political action can produce concrete, positive change.”

We are sitting at a small square table. The walls are covered with giant black and white images of late jazz pioneers. I recognise Charlie Mingus, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk. The music playing slightly too loudly in the bar is not Bebop however, but something less cerebral and more percussion-heavy, Township music, I think. It’s a little urgent and primal for late afternoon, though even the aged stamp fanciers are tapping their feet. My new acquaintance has the wild-eyed look of a shaman as he talks about the revolution. “Ben”, short for Buenaventura, is named for Buenaventura Durruti, hero and martyr of the anarchist movement. Smoking furiously, as if he has just rediscovered nicotine, he tells me a little about himself. He studied at Bologna, I learn, then at the LSE. Now he now teaches here at the Universitat de Barcelona. He looks like David Baddiel will, ten years from now, but has a very different kind of charisma.

“What does the commonwealth mean to you?” I ask him. He sips his Estrella ruminatively before answering.

“For me this history is just that, a story, a fairy tale like Sleeping Beauty or the Gospels. You can interpret it as outsiders do, as a justification for revolution, a blueprint for violence against the powers that be. Or it can spur you on, as it does our local activists, to further protest and vigilance against encroachment by big business and the state. Me, I’m a dreamer. I believe that the story of the commonwealth is a story about the perfectibility of humanity. About the idea that if we come together, educated but without prejudice, we can achieve an earthly paradise. I recognise that this is an unrealistic ideal, a cliché, in fact, but if we do not aspire to achieve great things we will never achieve anything at all. Experience has instructed me towards a less naïve view of life, but perhaps naivety is something worth holding on to.”

“I love my family,” I tell him. “I’m not sure that I could not put them first.”
“The idea is that you invest a little faith in the collective, that it can provide for you and yours more effectively than a plutocracy, or whatever your current government passes off as a democracy.”
“It’s just an idea, though, isn’t it. If people are comfortable with their lives then they’ll never make that leap of faith, will they? Which is why revolutions only occur when people are desperate.” It’s early in the evening, and a little late in our lives to be having this conversation, it occurs to me. Ben withdraws, sensing my self-consciousness, perhaps. He nods to me and gets up to go to the bar. As he replaces his chair he says, gently “People can be desperate for an idea, you know.”

* * *

The clientele of the bar becomes increasingly youthful and cosmopolitan as afternoon turns into evening. The stamp sellers break up their stalls and leave the square to tourists and street performers. I have nowhere particular to be, and I’ve taken an early supper of almonds and stuffed olives, so for the time being I occupy a quiet corner, with a crossword and a collection of Harold Brodkey’s stories. A group of locals, youngish people, between twenty-five and forty years old, have congregated at one end of the long L-shaped bar. They are drinking quickly, heavily, I notice. And they are scruffy, artfully so in some cases, which is unusual for this city, where men and women seem to resign themselves to a kind of smart conformity of dress much sooner in life than in London, say, or Berlin. My favourite waiter is working tonight and while he conscientiously ignores me as he has done for the past eight weeks I have an opportunity to observe the group more closely. Something is very wrong. They can barely speak to each other. As if to confirm this observation the youngest of them, a tall, slim woman with unkempt red-brown hair halfway down her back stands, suddenly tearful, and strides outside to the square, pressing a number hard into her mobile phone as if trying to push a drawing pin into a concrete wall. I feel the draught from her overcoat as she passes. Away from her friends she begins to sob harder, in between hoarse stage-whispers to whoever is on the other end of the line. More people arrive and join the group, among them Ben, to whom I had been speaking earlier. He has changed his clothes so must live close by, I conclude, with a note of self-congratulation. He acknowledges me with a wave and a brief smile, but the manic look has gone, he now just looks like a pale, middle-aged man with an ill-judged afro.

My waiter decides that I have waited long enough with an empty glass and makes his way over. He winces at my Spanish as I order, and leaves without a word. I think that I may be falling in love with him - he’s certainly playing hard to get. My drink sits warming upon his tray while he chats to an American couple at the bar. The mood amongst Ben and his friends has darkened, meanwhile. One of the men, a tall sandy-haired head boy type is addressing the rest of the group. His voice is raised but he is speaking in rapid Catalan and I can’t make out a word of what he’s saying. It must be powerful stuff though. Two more of the women begin to weep, now the shoulders of one of the men begin to heave. The head boy raises his glass, finally, and the friends drink together. It’s a wake, I realise. Pretty soon everyone is in tears. There is an honesty in the grief, it is uncomplicated, proportionate, unexaggerated. The friends hug each other or stare at nothing. An older guy is holding on in the clinch a beat too long, like a shattered heavyweight. The girls push him away, indulgently. I meet Ben again at the urinal.

“Sorry for your loss,” I tell him.
“You’re kind,” he replies. “He looked like you, actually.”

This spooks me a little, as perhaps it was meant to. I leave him behind and return downstairs to collect my book and paper. An Australian woman is complaining to my waiter that there are men and women cuddling in the Ladies. The waiter looks the other way. I can see a shrug forming, from his fingertips upwards - What can you do? The square is at its busiest now, but I feel queasy and decide to return to my apartment. London is now just under 72 hours distant. Strangely, Glasgow is closer still. From the Irish pubs on the Carrer de Ferran I can hear Celtic fans, in town for a Champions League match with FC Barcelona on Wednesday. They are singing a hymn, a favourite of my childhood, Give Me Joy In My Heart, but with the chorus revised to reflect their worship of their erstwhile striker, Henrik Larsson, who now plays for Barca.

Hehn-rik Larrsun!
Hehn-rik Larrsun!
Hehn-rik Larssun is the King of Kings!

From my bedroom window I see the drunks slumped together in the square below like an unlit bonfire, and realise that their rendition of this same hymn was the tune I half-recognised earlier today, as I washed shaving foam from my face.

I can’t sleep. I have been away too long. I tell myself, out loud, and with drunken conviction, that anyone who puts their faith in anything other than home is a fool. There is no Utopia, that’s the point of it. Anarchy can’t save you, neither can brotherhood or Bebop, Bob Dylan or Henrik Larsson. Just find a place that fits and stay there. By now of course I’m crying; for the life I miss, for the dead motorcyclist who looked like me, even for the prostitutes who made me smile. I get up and finish packing.

It’s time to go.

The pilgrimage has gained momentum

2007-06-05T09:45:00.000Z

Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox (around whom the whiff of the occult lingers like no other sporting organisation) sits in a pentagle, bordered by five thoroughfares. Van Ness Street runs along the south side of the stadium, diverging slightly from the First Base line within. Banners show the team's retired numbers, alongside Jackie Robinson's 42, in blue relief, on an otherwise featureless facade. A little way along is a bronze statue of Number 9, Ted Williams, caught in a moment of rare condescension with a young fan. Williams has a pained look about him, as if dimly aware of the craziness that awaits him post-mortem.

Any account of a visit to Fenway measures itself against John Updike's classic essay "Hub fans bid Kid Adieu". Updike is one of the great prose artists of the post-war period so you'll get no change out of him. His subject's splendour has been dulled somewhat by the shenanigans of his family and also by the Red Sox' cathartic victory in 2004. Until 2004 Williams was a totem of the team's frustration. A World Series win eluded the team armed with this great weapon; in an era of Free Agents migrating in search of glory and lucre the story of Number 9 playing out his days surrounded by lesser mortals serves as an exemplar of lost loyalty, lost innocence, even. Fittingly, the statue is larger than life.

I walk down Van Ness Street, killing time. A Brasilian kid, five years old, is swinging off his father's arm. He kicks a tennis ball towards me along the pavement. I flick it up with unwonted deftness and hand it to him. His dad, gawping up at the grandstand, lowers his gaze and smiles.

Yawkey Way runs behind home plate. The game doesn't start for another eight hours but here, already, there is a crackle of excitement. The food stands are parked in the shadow of the stadium but gameday papers, programs and every conceivable type of merchandise are being sold by a shaggy flock of vendors. Ambling fans of both teams form a haphazard tricolour of red, white and blue. The Cleveland fans are just barely outnumbered, I notice. There's no reason for the locals to get here quite this early. I manouver my way through the bustle, wearing black, feeling like an impostor.

Things are quieter on Brookline. Aside from overpriced parking and ticket offices some non-Sox related businesses operate here. It's still a little overcast, and if I hadn't seen a forecast I'd expect a thunderstorm later. Ahead and to the right, looking rather like a bus shelter or a Normandy fortification, is the rendezvous: The Cask 'n Flagon. Loitering outside, with the faintly distracted air of a tour guide, is a small, yet Rubenesque woman in dark sunglasses. Cyn. I gather myself for a moment, removing my headphones, then I stroll over and introduce myself.

Fun on Route 9

2007-06-04T12:05:00.000Z

The clock thermometer on the second floor balcony tells me it's seventy degrees out at 5.30 in the morning. The peninsula of Nahant, really two islands connected to the mainland by a causeway, fills a quarter of the horizon out to the east. Spring haze obscures the city southwards. We're all still on London time, my wife, my daughter and I, and we shuffle around the house barefoot, talking in whispers. Broad low waves exhaust themselves on the beach a few yards away, you don't really hear them after a while, and an occasional gull shrieks, waiting for the tide to recede, waiting for breakfast in the exposed sand. We're hungry too. I eat a three day old doughnut - surprisingly good - my daughter eats her imported cereal straws, my wife swigs from a bottle of water.

The top floor of the house is full of light. Tall windows extend almost the whole way around. Without moving you can see back toward semi-industrial Lynn, right around to the airport, where the taillights of landing Boeings become visible through the morning mist, as we wait for the rest of the house to wake.

The girls are off shopping today, and I'm headed to Fenway, for some conspicuous consumption of my own. There's some hassle with the surround sound, meaning that my daughter has to watch Playhouse Disney in dumbshow. Her tiny niece attacks her lovingly, biting, pulling hair, leading with her head and shoulders.

We get on the road just after ten. My brother's driving a Navigator. It's black, and, as he puts it, loaded. TV, DVD, GPS, refrigerator, jacuzzi. The interior of this great tank of a vehicle is about the same size as our hotel room. We head south, past the dog track at Wonderland, past the horse track at Suffolk Downs. He hands the toll booth guy some crumpled notes and we disappear below ground, emerging close to the hotel.

The Plaza must once have been quite grand. It occupies a triangular block of the city, close to the Common. Nowadays it's cheap enough for us to stay there, along with flight crews from various airlines, and other British middle-income types (all sporting long shorts, polo shirts and sunburn).

I kiss the girls goodbye and manage an awkward handshake-cum-hug with my brother. I dump our bags and change out of my long shorts and polo shirt.

Boston calls itself, amongst other things, "America's Walking City". Compared with, Venice, say, ("Europe's Floating City") this title seems a little, well, pedestrian. It's meant to indicate that because of the relatively compact layout of the city centre it's a great place to walk around. And so it is. But it also captures the pleasant, if unspectacular character of the place. Boston is nice. The people are nice. Even the tramps are nice. I stop in Starbucks on my way up Boylston Street. I'm walking to the park, obviously. On my way out a softly-spoken vagrant who thinks my name is Buddy asks me for change. "There you go, Buddy, " I say, emptying the foreign coins from my pocket. "Thanks Buddy," he says. He looks pretty well-groomed for a homeless guy and has no detectable street odour, despite the swelling mid-morning temperature.

I shift onto Newbury Street which runs east to west, parallel to Boylston. Pavement patios are being swept or hosed down. Dogs urinate against trees. Childless couples stroll along slowly with their heads on each other's shoulders. It's all vaguely Parisian. Until I come across a U-Haul truck double-parked further up the street, obstructing the traffic and attracting vehement insults and instructions in Massachusetts English and Arabic. An unabashed college-aged guy is waving off the barrage while struggling with a mattress.

Back on Boylston I slip into Saint Clement's, a modest but satisfyingly murky Catholic church, and light some candles. The candles are colour-coded in some way which I can't decipher. The three other patrons are all deep in prayer so it seems inappropriate to ask. I leave a tip, being in America and all.

It's very clammy now. A few yards further west and I can see Fenway Park, squatting unassumingly on the other side of the street. And here are the Fens, soft-looking ground with marsh grasses. There are public allotments here, staked for tomatoes and runner beans and sunflowers.

I'm early, so I slip on my iPod. Nirvana is playing, which seems apt.

Heading West

2007-05-22T11:07:00.000Z

We bought a car, a silver blue Peugeot 206 with just 18,000 miles on the clock. It smells faintly of dogs and doesn't seem terribly robustly made. But it will get us to Heathrow on Saturday, barring some incredible misfortune. I'm ambivalent about flying, as any sensible person should be. You hear that it's the safest form of transport, but you have to remember that if anything does go wrong fatality rates are exceptionally high.

It should be a super trip. My wife and I went to Boston back in1999. It rained. I went to a strip club with my father, played barefoot football on the beach, sang karaoke at a roadside hostelry after my brother's wedding and exaggerated my Englishness to a barely credible degree wherever and whenever the situation saw fit. Last time we stayed in a borrowed winnebago with a bed about three and a half feet square. This time we're staying at the Boston Park Plaza, which is either a Grand Hotel or a fleapit, depending on which review you read.

This time I get to see my beloved Red Sox play, weather permitting ("...sometimes it rains.") And while I'm looking forward to seeing family, and meeting unmet friends, this is the point of the trip. It's St Peter's, Lourdes and Santiago de Compostela all in one, for a fellow like me (and I love those gaudy Roman churches). Let's hope Fenway doesn't disappoint. A Sox win wouldn't hurt either.

Something to hold when I lose my grip

2007-05-17T13:09:00.000Z

The anniversaries come thick and fast. My wife and I have been married for seven years now. I think we've established our compatibility beyond reasonable argument. Either that or we're trapped in a bubble of apathy that neither of us are energetic enough to burst. I like the former idea, and I'm convinced that we're in it for the long haul. In fact the only thing that might persuade me into divorce would be the promise of another wedding day because our wedding day was a riot. We'd have to remarry each other, Burton/Taylor style, because it wouldn't be the same with anyone else. I'm not particularly prone to uxoriousness, but a conversation I had last night, with a friend who is also warmly ensconced in a loving relationship, reminded me of how fortunate I am to be where I am.

She said something along the lines of: -

"Partners should bring out the best in each other."

Which is a wonderful idea. I'm afraid that I've failed my wife in this regard; she was inexplicably gentle, tolerant and rounded to begin with.

"I think I would have turned okay eventually," I told my friend. "But my wife has certainly helped me along the road to decency."

"Two Become One" sang the Spice Girls. Reductive nonsense. If you enter into a relationship with a view to giving up half of yourself what you need is a therapist, not a lover.

The easiest way for a couple to become more than the sum of their parts is to reproduce and in this area we've done very well. Or at least our genes have combined to brilliant effect. I see in our daughter many of the good qualities that my wife possesses. And our not so little one is occasionally rather mouthy, and always very beautiful. Gets that from me. Her proud grandmother would have been 67 today, she is greatly missed, absent for the first time on her birthday. Much love.

Busy Making Other Plans

2007-04-26T10:43:00.000Z

I have nothing but admiration for people who manage to knock out 250 words on this, that or anything every single day. Of course many of them have a specific subject matter to work with, or a project to relate the progress of, or a round-the-world-adventure to irritate their less intrepid friends with the details of.

I am not haggling with a Nepalese craftsman in the foothills of the Himalayas this week. Nor am I getting married, nor converting a Vauxhall Chevette into a tank.

I don't have a muse. Maybe that's the problem. I have a lawn I'm trying to regrow, but the progress of this undertaking wouldn't make for ripping reading, I suspect.

Reseeded (again). Noticed lady blackbird consuming seed.

Reseeded (again). Scattered fine layer of compost over seeds.

Green shoots appearing! Green shoots! Walt Whitman can kiss my plump English arse - green shoots are visible!

I'll be thirty-six next week, meaning that adulthood has caught up with childhood in terms of temporal extent. And you'd have thought that in the second half of my life thus far, having got all that growing out of the way, the sloshing of hormones having calmed to a mere ripple, I'd be well-set to consider what to do next. To have a plan of action. Goals, dreams, realistic or unachievable. To regard the future with a clear eye. But always, instead, when the question pops up, unasked-for, yet fully-formed - "What next?" - I find that I still have no answer.

Good Friday

2007-04-06T21:43:00.000Z

It's my father's sixty-eighth birthday. He was a beautiful, generous man, who believed in relativity and the fundamental decency of humankind. He's been dead a while now, and I try not to think about him too often, so great is the gap that he left. I am still the luckiest boy alive to have been loved and raised by such an ordinary, warm-hearted fellow. Snot and tears prevent me writing more, but there's not much more to say. Imagine your ideal best friend and then recast him as your father. That's how privileged I was.

Summoner's Tale

2007-04-01T10:42:00.000Z

Lauren Laverne came in to the shop today, with her mum and dad. She's surprisingly tall. The last time I saw her in the flesh she was still fronting Kenickie who were supporting Ash at the Astoria and I don't remember her being particularly Amazonian. That was ten years ago, I'd guess, and she doesn't look any older. My daughter likes her because Auntie LaLa bought her a Christmas present - an electronic toy which my wife won on her radio show - and because she's a familiar voice, every morning. I mention all of this only because she is "the lady on the radio" mentioned in the previous post on this blog.

I'm starting to believe that the shop is built on a paranormal hot-spot, an intersection of lay lines perhaps, because this is not the first time this kind of thing has happened.

One morning my colleague Paul and I were reflecting on the inevitably of a son turning into his father. That afternoon a TV producer, scouting locations, came in and asked if he could film in the shop. The programme was called "Oh My God, I'm My Dad".

Then there was the Nick Bradshaw incident. I really should get in touch with him, incidentally.

I'm not by nature superstitious, but if I were I'd be blogging furiously about Scarlett Johansson.

That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore

2007-03-28T11:02:00.000Z

Dear Diary,

You will doubtless be pleased to learn that I am fully recovered from my recent affliction. Spring has arrived in London. The young lady on the radio described the weather this morning using the phrase "barley water sunshine" which I thought most poetic. The haze she describes is more pleasing than midsummer haze, as it is a result of the natural earthly cycle of condensation and evaporation, unlike the smog that engulfs us in the hotter months. As I strolled out for my mid-morning constitutional the sky had brightened further lending some legitimacy to my wearing of those rather expensive sunglasses I told you about. As I sat on a bench in the small park in the shadow of the market a blackbird hopped right up to me, and eyed me curiously before absconding with a discarded cake wrapper. All in all it seems like a good day. It occurred to me, as I sat in the sun, that for some fortunate souls every day must be like this. They must glide effortlessly through life cushioned by their own brilliance and success. But then I thought, where's the fun in that? It is through struggle that we learn and grow. Therefore I have resolved never again to feel sorry for myself, regardless of how dark things become. Things could always be worse. I could be French, for example.

Much love. Will write again soon.

Tom

Minor Illness

2007-03-23T10:31:00.000Z

Continental fellows, like Proust and Nietzche, put their ailments to good use. Restricted to daybeds in murky living rooms they scribbled away at great length. My productivity during illness more closely follows the Anglo-American model of old Tom Eliot.

On Margate Sands
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.

The idea of the body punch is to wind an opponent, causing his hands to drop, and exposing his chin. That's what it feels like, this curious thing I've picked up. Like I've been pummelled beneath the ribcage, by the heavy gloves of a prize fighter. There's been some puking, and some general disturbance of normal lower alimentary function, but it's this ache around the gut that's most difficult to abide. It's hanging around like the weird guy at a house party, you don't know where it came from, it's strange and unwelcome, and definitely not leaving of its own accord. Meanwhile my chin is exposed to the bitter blows of fate.

The Karamazov Brothers Reimagined As Circus Stereotypes - Part Four

2007-03-14T13:24:00.000Z

‘I got into music because of a girl. She dumped me and I moped around. They’re all impossible really, and they all say they want one thing when they want something completely opposite, or maybe they’re just testing you. Fuck knows. I sat around with some mates, smoking, and they gave me a hard time because I didn’t see much of them when I was going out with her, so it was “Now you’ve got time for us you prick” which was fair I suppose. But it gets you down spending your days indoors with the curtains drawn just spliffing, and money was low, so I got a job in a record shop and the pay was fucking awful, like two quid an hour but it was good to get away from my stoner mates for a few hours every day and have that music all the time. The guy who ran the shop, he didn’t own it and to be honest I think he had his fingers in the till, nothing stupid, just the odd tenner here and there, he was into all that old school shit, which I thought was embarrassing at first, but then of course you’ve got to factor in the drugs. A lot of those fat soul boys were taking a lot of speed because it was cheap, principally, and because they were fat, I dunno (laughs).
We drove up to Caister after we closed the shop on a Friday, and I’d got some E. My mate Chris, he was also fat and a junglist, but he used to get his stuff down in Plymouth and he reckoned it came straight off the boats from Russia. Or submarines, as if they’d surface in the English Channel and there’d be these mad Plymouth blokes, like frogmen, who’d do the deal on the hull, swap ‘em E’s for Levis or something. It was quite mad. My girlfriend, Chris would always say to her “You’re mine, you are. When you dump him, you’re mine” in this ridiculous yokel accent. He always had spit on his chin but he did take a shitload of drugs. He’s clean now, I heard, he works as a children’s counsellor or something ridiculous. Anyway, she did dump me, he was right about that. “Told yer Pav,” he said. “She’s mine now.” So we dropped the first lot in the car on the way up there driving up the A12. It was all over. We were fucked. Of course with the E it’s impossible to resist the big beat. When you’re near the speakers it feels like someone’s squeezing your heart, but it feels good. Anyway I’m dancing and sweating and it’s fucking packed and I look at the DJ and he’s just surveying the scene, laughing, and I think, “I could do that. How hard can it be?” I had no decks, no records, but right then I thought, “I’m gonna be a DJ. I’m gonna make these fat fuckers dance.” So I started dealing, smalltime really, just fulfilling a need, supplying a demand. And this is where I was smart I think, I didn’t consume the profits, or spend it on birds in tight jeans with long necks and bangles and all that. The temptation was there because the money was there. I was never interested in promotion. I’d get the E and sell it to the bouncers. Much less hassle. Then I’d go and do a three hour set for free. And I was good. I don’t know if it’s something you can learn, but I was good from the start. I was spending more on old records than new ones. There is so much music and everyone else was playing tiny percentages of it. I never saw it as a niche market, I wanted to include everyone, now you run the risk of turning some people off, but, you know, fuck them, basically. If their minds are so small that they can’t listen to new ideas, well, old ideas really, then fuck them. That was the attitude I brought. I wasn’t sucking up to the crowd, I was challenging them, seeking to educate them.’

‘I don’t know who my Dad was and I never really gave a thought to it. People back home remember my Mum. They all knew what she did for a living, but no-one tried to help her. It wasn’t as if the priest or the council were knocking on the door saying “Lizzie, we’re here to save your soul and get you off the game.” She wouldn’t have listened anyway. She never listened to me. She was kind though. She looked after me when she could. She’d put me to bed then go out to work, what else was she going to do? I got through school alright because of her, got my GCSEs. I was going off to college maybe, after that. There was a hitch in the road. I got dumped. Life does that to you, though, to keep you sharp and alert. Well, it does that to some people. Life just ground my Mum down. She loved me, I know that. Everything she did was for me, so I can’t blame her, I can’t think badly of her. I think that her death made me more determined to succeed and to come through, if you like. I didn’t want to be someone who people talked about for the wrong reason. It’s funny kind of example to set, I suppose, but that’s what it was. Whenever I’ve felt myself sliding into bad behaviour, I’ve stopped myself, shaken things up, followed a different path. I feel fortunate that I was able to make her comfortable at the end. It’s a horrible way to die, your body just kind of packs up. I knew she was dying but I was in Rio. It’s crazy over there. You’d could play Mantovani and they’d go mad for it. I flew back as soon as I could but she’d died the night before. It was easier than I thought. A relief, really. The funeral was pretty quiet. She had no family left, it was just me and some ageing Toms she knew, a couple of old guys I didn’t recognise. Punters maybe. There was some stuff about it in the papers, but I didn’t read it. I’d lived it, and it wasn’t a lot of fun. You try and remember the happy times, like they tell you to, but to be honest it was a stretch. We had no money, never went on holiday, ate shit food. But I know she loved me. Can I nick a fag?’

‘I never did it for the fame. Just as well, really, it’s a pretty anonymous life. It’s not like I can’t walk down the street. Ninety-eight percent of the population don’t know who I am. Of the two percent that buy the records or come to the clubs most of them couldn’t pick me out of a line-up. That’s as it should be. Most of the time I’m just playing other people’s music. It’s different when you’re in the studio, obviously. There’s a creative element to that. But it’s still a bit like a kid playing with poster paints, trying to see which colours go together best. I read a review of the last EP I put out which said I had an unusual talent for juxtaposition. It’s not a word I’d use. Because I don’t know what it means. (Laughs). Joking. But that’s a pretty slender talent. It’s not going to help me in many other areas of life is it? Unless I take up, what’s it called? With the broken tiles. Crazy paving. Those geezers are just like DJs aren’t they. Making it up as they go along. Fucking charlatans, that’s what they are. I’m not a missionary or anything, but the most satisfying thing is after a set when a punter comes up to you and asks, “What the fuck was that?” And they start singing a tune you’ve played back to you. You see it in their eyes, that they’ve understood. That’s pretty rewarding. A lot of guys try to make it into something it isn’t. They paint themselves like they’re some weird puppet-master directing the whole thing, controlling the energy of the room. That’s all bollocks. Music can be transcendent, especially if you’re fucked (laughs) but at the end of the day you’re just playing records. It’s not that taxing. You hear these wankers moaning about their schedules and all the travelling when most people are daydreaming about a life like theirs. They say they want more recognition. For what? They’re not saving lives or helping the poor are they? There’s no Nobel Prize for Hard House. (Laughs). I think that the bloke doing a mobile disco at a wedding has a tougher time than we do, trying to get the grown-ups to dance without playing Madness or something from “Grease”. That’s a fucking riot, I’d love to do that. Play for five hours and get fifty quid and a couple of chicken drumsticks. Mental, but real, y’know. No foam, no girls in cages, maybe a couple of tearaways in cheap suits doing some spliff in the pub car park but that’s it. Play some proper tunes. “Billy, Don’t Be A Hero”, all that. Mad. Maybe that’s what I’ll do. Go into semi-retirement. Get the Transit out at weekends and tour the South-East. Lights, PA, everything. There’s no way I’m playing fucking Spandau Ballet though, fuck that. Does that make me a snob? So be it.’

The Karamazov Brothers Reimagined As Circus Stereotypes - Part Three

2007-03-09T10:24:00.000Z

He was a boarder at a choir school when he ran away. He had given no indication to his fellow pupils that he was unhappy. He wasn’t subject to any bullying from the boys or staff, as far as anyone would admit. I didn’t think they were lying. The choristers seemed confused, the teachers panicky. The housemaster had gone into the dorm on the morning of March 3rd, drawn the heavy curtains, and found his bed empty. “Where’s Alex?” he had asked, prompting yawns that were also shrugs from the seven other lads. Perhaps he’d gone out for a run, they suggested. He liked to jog around the Great Pond before breakfast, sometimes, hoping to catch a glimpse of one of the great carp, eight feet long some of them, which swam there. His trainers and athletics strip were still in the locker at the end of his bed. By ten o’ clock the whole school was looking for him. In uniform, they swept in a line across the Commons and out into the woods calling his name. “Alexei!”

They were returning when I arrived. They had not found him. I eased the car up the drive past blazered boys, many of them now armed with sticks. The spire of the cathedral projected above and behind the school and seemed to get taller the closer I got. The Headmaster was waiting on the steps. “Is there just one of you?” he asked. “We’re very worried. Will you have to drag the pond?”

I told him I didn’t think that was necessary yet. “Have his parents been informed?” The Headmaster shook his head. “We can’t get hold of them,” he explained. “It appears they may be out of the country.”

I interviewed the boys from his dorm. These eleven-year-olds were still at that precious, prelapsarian age where all they cared about was food and football. They were astonished at the suggestion that young Alex might have been anything other than ecstatic to live and sleep among them.

“Can you think of any reason why Alex might have run away?”
“No. Uh, none. We have a great laugh.”

I alerted the station that we had a possible Missing Person. The school secretary found his file and scanned his photo for me. “It’s from last year,” she said. “His hair’s longer now, but he doesn’t look anymore grown-up.” I sent the photo back to the station and went to interview his masters. It was two o’ clock by then, academic lessons had been abandoned for the day, and the boys had gone off to choir practice.

His housemaster, Turner, was a hare-eyed fellow who worked in this closed-off world, I assumed, because he had failed to make it outside. He was astonishingly nervous. Had he noticed anything unusual about Alexei recently?

“No. Yes. I mean no, he was very much himself. He’s a quiet, polite boy. Rather shy. Always keen to help. Charming, really.”
“You’re close to the boys, are you? A confidante?”
“Not exactly,” Turner said. “You can’t be their friend and their master, it doesn’t work. But I think if any of them had a problem I’ve made it, um, clear enough that they can come to me.”

The rest of them were as unhelpful as they were co-operative. How strange, I thought, to live amongst these young men and to form no deeper impression of them than would serve to fill out a school report. I thought of the men and women I worked with. I could tell a story about most of them that would illustrate some personally unique pattern of behaviour. The teachers seemed to regard a classroom of boys rather as a postman might consider a sack of letters. Their job was simply to make the boys someone else’s responsibility. I left the school just after five. Some lads were out on the Commons, punting a rugby ball around. They paused their game to watch me pass. I was angry, disproportionately so. As I reached the station my phone rang.

They found him in the Lady Chapel, shivering, still in his pyjamas. He didn’t know how he had got there and remembered nothing about what had happened during the day. They rushed him back to the school, fed him, and put him to bed in the matron’s room. He ran a fever for two days and never moved. The housemaster wanted to take him to the local hospital but was persuaded by the matron and headmaster that this was unnecessary.

I visited him a week after his disappearance. He was as described; quiet, courteous, shy. But no-one had mentioned his eyes to me, which was strange, as they were remarkable. He had the darkest eyes, as if his pupils and irises were a single shade. Black almost.

The Karamazov Brothers Reimagined As Circus Stereotypes - Part Two

2007-03-08T12:36:00.000Z

“Five minutes,” says a guy in a headset. “You’re on in five.” Ivan looks out from the wings. The stage is black. The ceiling of the club is black. The whole place smells of piss and dust and beer. About a third of the seats are occupied; everyone else is at the bar. He goes over his routine in his head, pausing for laughs. This laughter, he realises, is entirely hypothetical. But he knows what it sounds like.

Try to think of the first joke you ever heard. The first joke that really made you laugh. (This is how they did it at the workshop). Let’s explore why it works. Why it’s funny.

“What’s yellow and highly dangerous?” This was Ivan’s joke. The facilitator explained that because it’s difficult to think of anything that is, in fact, yellow and highly dangerous the question creates confusion, or what he called intellectual discomfort, in the listener.

“Shark-infested custard.” This absurd answer, it was further explained, creates a strong mental image, as well as relieving the listener’s intellectual discomfort in an unexpected way. A guaranteed laugh. Conviction is the most important thing, he said. Weak material, nerves, an indifferent audience, can all be conquered by conviction. If you believe in the joke, if you believe that the audience will laugh, then generally they will.

Ivan drums his fingers against a partition. The booker really liked his stuff, his nervous energy, his rapid synaptic leaps from subject to subject. He can do it, he knows. He is well prepared. His delivery is assured, his timing honed. It’s a short set he’s doing so even if he bombs he can be off stage almost as soon as he walks on.

He listens as the MC finishes his set. The empty seats have been filled. A band of smoke stretches impressionistically across the front of the stage. There is a big laugh, and Ivan hears his name. Then the MC rushes off the stage, pausing to pat Ivan on the back and say “Don’t shit your pants”.

He’s on, squinting hard into the lights, owning the stage. As the applause dies, as he’s about the thank the audience for their kind welcome, a fat guy in the front row shouts, very loudly, “QUEER!”.

“Why do you assume I’m queer? Because I like to fuck your girlfriend in the arse, is that it?” And then he’s rolling.

The Karamazov Brothers Reimagined As Circus Stereotypes - Part One

2007-03-08T10:56:00.000Z

Dmitri, a giant, hungry bear of a man, emerges from the delicatessen with his mouth full of spit. He unsheathes a dry sausage and eats it as he walks across the square towards the beach. “The drains are bad this morning,” he thinks. Finishing the sausage he discards the paper wrapper which the wind drags like a cat’s toy, stopping, starting, before coming to rest at the foot of a slide in the small playground next to the market. He buys six beers from a kid on the boardwalk and sits at the edge of the sand watching the surfers crash amongst the waves. Every so often a girl will trot up the beach to use the showers. The sand makes everyone knock-kneed. Dmitri watches the girls wash off the sand. He keeps his jacket on – it’s denim, too hot for this weather – because he is ashamed of the hair poking down past the sleeves of his t-shirt. A dog comes and sniffs at him. He cuffs it away with his giant hand. The dog can smell the other sausage wrapped in the inside pocket of his jacket. He knows without looking that people are staring and laughing at him.

He's So Frothy

2007-03-07T14:48:00.001Z

Mr Coffee takes me to one side this morning and says: -

"Hey, I'm famous. You know youtube, the website?"

I nod.

"I'm on there. Search for Mr Coffee."

I search and find this video. I have no idea what's being said but the blurb translates roughly as

This Sicilian genius has converted a scooter-van into a mobile coffee shop!

It's not exactly Citizen Kane. But it's fun to watch him playing up to the camera. And then I notice, at the right of the screen, between 0:41 and 0:37, a great bumbling oaf in a corduroy jacket. Me. I think of myself as a wiry seventeen-year-old, of course. Most men do, in spite of glaring evidence to the contrary. Somewhere along the line I've transformed into wall of flesh. It's most discouraging. I yearn for the aerodynamism of my youth.

More About Money

2007-02-28T16:04:00.000Z

Today I took a brief sojourn amongst the mega-rich. Business took me to Kensington Palace Gardens, home of some the World's Wealthiest People. This guy lives there, as does this guy, oh, and this guy. The houses look like the picture above. The fellow I went to meet wasn't there, he's got a dodgy knee, apparently. It rained heavily, and there was a fire on the Tube. It was a waste of time, but I got to smell the money.

Fabulous wealth does not ensure happiness, self-evidently. In fact, I concluded, strolling along a pavement completely free of litter and gum, there is a kind of poverty in superfluity. The miniature daffodils growing sparsely in my front garden afford me greater pleasure, I imagine, than those sprouting in the Sultan's crescent beds do him. Alien to the plutocrat is the sensation of relief when your car starts first time and you weren't entirely sure it would. Will these people ever know the joy associated with finding a fiver in the pocket of a coat unworn since spring? No.

I hope that these precious lozenges of pleasure are never denied me, because I am richer for them.

Instead of Drowning

2007-02-27T16:26:00.000Z

I am the son and grandson of sailors; men with squinting faces, lined with salt, their eyes reflecting an endless blue-grey horizon. Like Ulysses I feel the pull of the sea. The shrieking of gulls is enough to shorten my breath and narrow my veins.

I have this money, my share of my mother's disposed estate.

I could go to Vegas and put it all on black. But what happens if I win? Twice the problem.

I could buy a boat. I've found a 60 foot gaff yawl which I could easily afford:-

But I'd have to man her, moor her, and, presumably, learn how to sail. I like that boats are girls. Maybe I'll just get a beach hut.

Fixed as Fate

2007-02-11T14:39:00.000Z

For a few yards either side of the fence a path of flattened grass is visible. People still come here it seems, for a sensation that we discovered half a lifetime ago. The fence itself is new, rising from a shallow ditch ten feet straight up, then returning outwards at forty-five degrees for a further two feet. Someone younger, fitter than us could still climb over, I’d guess, but it wouldn’t be easy. Anyway, that’s not our plan.

The first plane tears overhead while we’re still in the car, a Swiss A330, big enough to shift the suspension. We rock gently to rest, smiling at each other as the plane’s engine noise diminishes.

I get out first. It’s early and the grass is still wet although the day is warm. I catch myself crouching as I approach the fence, like a kid playing a solitary war game. I pull at the mesh where it meets an upright. The bottom wire has been cut already, and the stretcher bar unscrewed. The corner pulls up easily. I turn to summon Mary from the car but she’s already out and without looking around she hurries across the grass, ducks under my arm, under the fence and through. I twist and drop to my knees and I’m after her, pulling the fence back down behind me.

***

I’d expected the call ten years ago, when I heard about her parents, who by that time had more or less withdrawn from life, from Mary, and from each other. It’s difficult to imagine how anyone carries on after losing a child, and in this case they hadn’t. Instead they drifted blankly from day to day, a suburban marriage in dumb show. There are no photographs of their firstborn, suddenly and immutably gone, anywhere in the house, Mary tells me. They never talk about her. They rarely talk about anything else.

Mary’s elder sister, Catherine, was my first girlfriend. The family went on a skiing holiday, Catherine caught a cold which turned into something else, and she died, aged eighteen. The whole thing happened in less than two months. I got to see her once, after she fell ill. Her skin was curiously grey, but otherwise she seemed herself. I dream about her occasionally, but I stopped crying for her years ago. There didn’t seem any point. You can’t measure how loss affects you. There’s no control, no parallel life you can lead where your loved one doesn’t die, and instead your lives diverge in the normal way: - different colleges, different interests, different partners. Some part of you remains stuck back when you heard the news, however, like the cropped branch of a tree, with all of its potential outcomes and flowerings flatly aborted.

She rings me at work. I don’t recognise her voice. She no longer sounds fifteen and spoiled.

“Dickie? It’s Mary”
“Mary?”

And then we fall (oddly, considering the matter which connects us) into an old, dimly remembered pattern of teasing. She suggests I’m pompous. I wonder if she’s still not brushing her hair. It is innocent and reassuring. Then she says: -

“Listen, I want to go back to the runway. I can’t get the idea out of my head.”

I experience a sudden spell of dizziness, as if I’ve stood up too quickly. I am at once surprised that I’ve never thought to do it, and panicked by the prospect of doing it now. It’s stupid, possibly dangerous and certainly illegal. And for all of those reasons it’s exciting.

“Why don’t you go?” I ask her.
“I want to go with you,” she says. “Like we used to.”
“I’ll think about it.”

We meet a week later. We had last seen each other some time after the funeral. Her hair is darker now. I’m a little grey around the temples. She goes to kiss me on the cheek and I’m not expecting it so my lips end up brushing her nose.

“Oh my God, you’re old!” she says.
“We’re practically the same age now,” I tell her.

She is gawky, and she smokes heavily. Her knees and elbows and cigarettes project outwards at unexpected angles. Her hair seems undecided. She has a dreadful laugh. There is, thankfully, nothing about her which calls to mind her dead sister about whom, it turns out, she too is reluctant to talk. On the whole, though, she seems undamaged. And while there remains something unrefined, something adolescent about her, who’s to say she wouldn’t have turned out that way without her family marooning her on the brink of adulthood? We choose a date. It’s important to Mary, obviously, and I don’t feel that it could injure me.

“It’ll have to be a perfect day,” she says, “or we’ll postpone.”
“Okay.”

A week before the agreed date I call her to suggest a reconnaissance. She’s against it. “Back then we just used to go, if the weather was right.” I wish that there was someone I could lie to, someone that I could make excuses to, about it. Someone who would wonder where I’d gone, but there is no one. On the chosen Sunday the sky is layered with storm clouds, and hail showers are forecast. Mary calls me at six in the morning. “I don’t think we can do it today,” she says. I’m relieved. A nasty little part of me hopes that the absurd idea will fade now, that she’ll forget about it and that the feeling will go away. Later, when the hail starts I walk out into the garden and lift my face upwards. I stand there with my eyes closed, feeling the hail spring off my face. The experience is more painful than cleansing. I go back inside where the pellets of ice melt in my hair.

***

There’s a further fence between us and the end of the runway strip, which may also be new. It’s not as high as the chain link but it’s solid and topped with razor wire. We’re close enough. We crawl to where the grass is deepest. Mary is five yards ahead of me. “Is this okay?” she asks, sitting suddenly upright. “It’s fine,” I tell her. She lies down in the grass. I crawl alongside her. We hear the engines approaching, but it’s something small, a 737 perhaps. My skin starts to prickle, nonetheless, as the engine noise increases. The plane is a long way up as it passes over us.

***

In the short summer between exams we came here, Catherine and I. Someone told her about it. It wasn’t my idea. You lie in the grass, and when a big plane goes over you get a brief feeling of weightlessness. It doesn’t happen every time. Some afternoons we lay there without being lifted once, just staring upwards into nothing. It was an excuse to be together, without having to take action. We just lay there, like an emblem of our future, joined, waiting for whatever hurtled in our direction. Mary followed us one day, and after an exchange of sororal threat and counter-threat she was allowed to stay. The first Jumbo that went over low shifted her a foot off the ground. She was lighter than us, and being younger, was not so attached to the earth.

***

The four Pratt & Whitney engines on a 747 make an unearthly noise, a noise you’d expect to hear only in a nightmare. The tone shifts sharply as they approach. I look across at Mary. She is crying, but calmly. She notices me looking at her and wipes her face then takes my hand. Her skin is dry, rough almost. She says something I can’t hear over the scream of the jet engines. I wince and she shouts: - “I’m glad you’re here!” The 747 snaps into view, huge and low, its belly almost with reach, seemingly. And then I get it, the pull, moving instantaneously from my shoulders down to my toes. I stay in contact with the grass, but for half a second it feels like I’m cushioned by something else. “Yes,” I hear myself say.

We lie there watching the plane climb and bank out of view. There is only sky then, free from cloud or haze, rinsed clean by a week of heavy rain. There is nothing to focus on, no depth. I feel the dampness of the grass on the back of my neck. Otherwise there is nothing. “Did you get it?” I ask. Mary nods. She is shaking now, and swallowing hard. “Are you cold?” “No,” she says. She looks straight upwards. Tears stutter down her cheek and into her ear. I watch her, propped up one elbow, for several minutes. Another Airbus takes off. “I’m hungry,” I tell her. “Let’s go.” “Okay.” I pull her to her feet and we walk back towards the car.

Mr Congeniality

2007-02-09T10:52:00.000Z

If there was a beauty pageant for stout, easily irritated fathers-of-one, organised along traditional lines, with the judging divided into Evening Wear, Talent, Swimwear and Personality categories, and if, say, I chose to enter, here's what I'd do by way of preparation.

The three esses. Sunbed, Spa, Sit-ups. Now the sunbed can be tricky. You want to take the edge off your natural, Northern European pastiness, but you don't want to end up looking like George Hamilton. Proceed with caution. The Spa thing is probably best left until a week before the competition. Should include removal of excess body hair as well as a facial, manicure, etc. Leave chest hair. It's manly. Sit-ups should commence the day you send off the application. If you can't shift the paunch then make sure it doesn't shake.

I like to think I still cut a pretty dashing figure in a dinner suit. I'm tall enough, and broad enough through the shoulder. These are my rules. Black. No cummerbund. No wing collar. For the purposes of this pageant I'll wear patent leather shoes, though I wouldn't otherwise. Maybe some spectacles.

For the talent section I'd sing a great pop song previously recorded by someone who wasn't a great singer. "Like a Prayer" by Madonna springs immediately to mind. This approach is foolproof. I'll accompany myself either on classical guitar or heavily distorted electric. Acoustic is a complete no-no. This isn't after hours at a friend's house, this is Mr Chunky Annoyed Dad UK! Learn the song. Do not alter the lyrics. This is a wanker's trick.

Resolve not to be talked into Speedos. Shorts brief enough to reveal one's powerful thighs yet not so snug as to make a vulgar show of what only one's wife should see are de rigueur.

If I've made it this far then I'm going to wing it on the host's questions. I will consider some stock responses however.

"My daughter."

"A cure for HIV/AIDS."

"Mohandas K Gandhi."

"Machu Picchu."

"An ambassador for stocky, easily-irritated fathers-of-one throughout the world."

In Which I Turn My Back On The Literary Snobbery Of My Youth

2007-01-30T12:43:00.000Z

Ten years ago this week Penguin published It Must Be Love, a small collection of short stories. All proceeds went to the Terrence Higgins Trust, a British AIDS charity. Included amongst its pages was a story I wrote, "Queen's Park Scherzo", an amiable enough boy-meets-girl sort of tale. Getting published for the first time wasn't quite the life-changing experience I had anticipated but it was pretty exciting nonetheless. People's reactions to the story ranged from cautiously condescending to glowingly effusive. Here's the thing that bothered me; people would invariably say "It really reminded me of author X". Now, at twenty-five, when literary superstardom is just around the corner the last thing that you want to hear is that your work is even in the same firmament as another writer. And it wasn't Georges Perec or Julian Barnes that I was generally being compared to. No, it was good old Nick Hornby. I was disgusted of course, even though I loved High Fidelity and it may me cry twice before anyone died. I didn't want to be popular, I wanted to be literary. Hornby was definitively mid-brow. I wanted to mentioned in the same breath as Nabokov, Updike and Bellow.

I was only twenty-five.

By way of apology to Mister Hornby (I'll get round to "A Long Way Down" as soon as I feel ready for it) and in homage to his early masterpiece I present my Top 5 Break-Up Albums of all time.

1. Us - Peter Gabriel

Written following his split with Rosanna Arquette. Mystical, troubling, very beautiful. Managed to get both me and my friend Marv through difficult break-ups of our own (possibly with the same girl). (Not Rosanna Arquette, you understand).

2. The Colour And The Shape - Foo Fighters

Dave's first marriage goes to shit but the world gets "Everlong". Hardly seems fair.

3. Jagged Little Pill - Alanis Morrisette

"Did you forget about me, Mr Duplicity?" Brilliant. And she was about fifteen when she wrote it. Which perhaps explains her somewhat loose grasp of the concept of irony.

4. Hearts And Bones - Paul Simon

Another actress (Carrie Fisher this time) departs leaving a trail of exquisite songs in her wake. And "Cars Are Cars".

5. Tunnel of Love - Bruce Springsteen

The Boss had been touring for three years solid. Homesick, he sought solace in the arms of Patty, one of his backing singers, who, appropriately enough, looked liked one of Marge Simpson's sisters. This was an obvious downgrade, but the ways of love are indeed mysterious. Anyway, he wrote about it and produced his best album since "Nebraska".

Now that's mid-brow.

Habeas Corpus

2007-01-28T12:39:00.001Z

Foot-binding, apparently, has ceased altogether. The Kayan women of Myanmar still stretch their necks with brass coils and in the West young folk pierce themselves for an endorphin rush. Michelle, a friend of mine, explains that one can consider one's body as a blank canvas, or as an unadorned sculpture, that is ripe for decoration.

I don't understand, and I likely never will. I appreciate that there's a degree of hypocrisy in my position. I shave, after all. I wear wooden bracelets and a wedding ring. I'm circumcised, though that wasn't my idea. I have this dark, rather nasty suspicion that body modification, particulary the extreme, socially deviant type, is an expression of an inward deficiency, or a distractionary tactic. The idea being that you think of an individual not as the sum of their shortcomings but instead as the guy with the rawlbolt through his septum. Interestingly this is a view I've always held and perhaps, like any view long held it's subject to erosion. Almost everyone's pierced or tattooed nowadays, after all. Soon I'll be the outsider. The only man in London under forty without some visible scarification. People will point and stare. "Look at him, the self-satisfied fool!" they'll say. "He's nothing more than a lump of crude, unshaped soapstone!" But I'll know, whether they have modified themselves in order to fit in, or in order to stand out, that they cannot judge me, because I have remained pure of heart, and just as the God I don't believe in intended. I will refuse to judge them, out loud at least. But I'll know. I'll know.

Abstract Impressionism is Easy

2007-01-24T12:30:00.000Z

We bought a "Paint Your Own Dali" kit from a discount bookshop (we'd gone in there to buy a road atlas, which they didn't have, curiously). It was the cheapest way to buy a canvas and some acrylic paints; the idea never being to attempt to incompetently reproduce Premonition of Civil War but instead to allow my daughter and myself to daub away.

I was thinking Rothko. My daughter had other ideas. "I want a heart," she said, "and a flower." Specifically the flower represented by her name. She indicated where she wanted them on the canvas. I began to paint.

Of course I can't paint. Not representative painting anyway. I went through a phase of spatter-painting at seventeen inspired by Jackson Pollock via John Squire. It's pretty easy to achieve some striking effects. But my inability to draw and my lack of skill with a brush have hampered my otherwise inevitable development into the next Géricault.

The finished effort was rubbish. Totally without merit. An embarrassment to the canvas. There was never any question of it being hung anywhere, but I couldn't quite bring myself
to throw it away. So it's been kicked around the house for a fortnight or so, sneaking into the corner of my vision occasionally, to remind me of my limitations.

On Monday, housebound, waiting for a courier who didn't ever arrive, I decided to take action against the offending objet. I found a small pot of metallic pink paint under the sink and began overpainting the canvas. As I did so the acrylic underneath began to lift and mix with the pink paint, creating a richly coloured paste. I grabbed a palette knife and began smearing the canvas with the paste, as if buttering toast, a technique, I dimly remembered, called impasto. It was exciting, I felt a little like Nick Nolte in "Life Lessons". I touched the picture up with streaks of acrylic, vermilion and burnt siena mixed. The smell of burnt siena, like the smell of roasted peanuts, is delicious and repulsive all at once.

I have no talent for the plastic arts, evidently, but it's very satisfying to have fluked something half-decent. And for a few moments I thought about packing in the day job and making a living selling my work over the internet, entering the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, perhaps getting some galleries interested...

Invasive Metal Injury Redux

2007-01-14T10:49:00.000Z

The marital bed, which doubles as a crash mat for my daughter when she's in gymnastic mood (I stretch out on the bed and she vaults over my legs), collapsed beneath me as she was about to pounce. Any other day it wouldn't have been a huge problem, the frame was drilled for different height mattresses, meaning that I had simply to lower the angle sections on each side, along with the central strut, refix them and drop the wooden slats back into place. But I'd given blood earlier in the day and my left arm was rather stiff, and she was already overtired and we'd hoped to get her to bed early. My drill/driver doesn't seem to hold a charge any longer so I was obliged to do the whole thing by hand, while feeling rather run down. Leaning in to achieve the most secure tightening of the angle section to the frame I put all my weight on my left knee and then felt, and perhaps heard a faint popping akin to a skewer puncturing a bag of mince. A wave of nausea followed as I rocked backwards to discover that I had forcibly introduced a nailless sawtooth picture hanger (illustrated above) into the soft tissue of said knee. The most unpleasant aspect of the situation was that it was still attached; the two slightly barbed tines that are normally driven into the reverse of a box canvas were instead going about their business - not falling out, essentially - in my lower leg. I pulled it out, and a sucking sensation, broadly antonymous to the entry pain but significantly more acute caused me to make a noise like a very elderly man might under torture. Twice. And I still had to finish rebuilding the bed. I soldiered on, leaving perfectly circular bloodmarks, about the size of an old penny and with the colour and definition that one would expect from a recently refurbished franking machine, all over the newly laid laminate floor. This was Friday evening. It's still pretty sore.

A Little Learning

2007-01-03T00:45:00.000Z

I hated school, in spite of it being an environment in which I thrived, for the most part. I asked my daughter yesterday if she was looking forward to returning to school. "It gives me a headache," she said. She's six, so there's a possibility that if I'd asked her the same question five minutes later she'd have nodded excitedly and started telling me about the games she plays with Pearl and Ebony and Kamar. But I asked her at the wrong time and was obliged to struggle with the guilt which accompanies the idea that you are sending your child into an environment where they are unhappy for six hours a day, every day.

My resentment of all things scholastic began in the infant classes, when on beautiful spring mornings I'd sit and wait for the other children in my class to complete exercises I'd knocked off in seconds, staring out past a climbing-frame free of clamberers to a football pitch where no goals were being scored. What was the point of these empty minutes? Why was I so confined?
Worse still, being an advanced reader, and intermittently deaf I was constantly subjected to the prodding and beeping of educationalists and audiologists, held separate and distinct from the other children by both my gifts and shortcomings. I spent entire afternoons in the small lounge at the centre of the school, reading passages from technical journals and dissertations to astonished young women in polyester trousers. A large window faced south off the lounge and along the sill were a number of potted geraniums whose baked odour made me nauseous on hot days. Xenophobia caught me out, I remember. I pronounced the first syllable zyen- which might be how they say it in Spain. I wouldn't have guessed this then, of course, back when foreign holidays were only for rich folk and criminals.

We were concerned that my daughter had inherited my hearing problems. After a series of familiar tests - you hear a beep at a range of frequencies and place a wooden peg into a hole on a board - it has been determined that there is nothing wrong with her. She's simply ignoring everyone.

She's back with her friends, at least. All presumably ambivalent about their education, applying smuggled lipgloss in a quiet corner of the playground. I hope she's happy.

Deep/Crisp/Even

2006-12-20T12:53:00.000Z

Strolling up Brushfield Street this morning I encountered a figure synonymous with the festive season. Somewhat overweight, ruddy of complexion, dressed in a brightly-coloured, hooded ensemble and replete with a bulging sack, he was a sign, along with the advent of colder weather and the promise of snow, that Christmas was upon us. Darren, temporary postal worker, and patron saint of misdelivered cheques, was here! As I approached he was folding Christmas cards and complimentary calendars in order to stuff them unceremoniously through the wrong letterbox.

"Anything there for Handles with Care?" I asked him. After sifting through his hefty bundle he handed me a wad of envelopes none of which were addressed to me. My heart thus warmed like a Yule log I waited until he was out of sight - not wanting to imply that he was in any way incompetent - before redistributing the letters correctly.

* * *

Work on "The Recognitions" continues. The section I've just completed had more than a whiff of Grace Metalious melodrama about it, with nary a diversion from the thrust of the story. I am pleased that Recktall Brown, whose name is presumably a disgusting pun, has reappeared. He's a corpulent, Truman Capote-style Mephistopheles, and as compellingly black-hearted a villain as I've encountered in fiction. There's still a long way to go.

Enjoy The Silence

2006-12-14T14:10:00.000Z

It's 1989, late summer. Ben and I are driving too fast along the B158 . It's one in the morning. I'm a little intoxicated and we're listening to "Violator". Childhood is receding. College, and all of its complications lie ahead, just around the next sharp bend. In the small red vehicle, hurtling across country, we are young and invincible.

Then it's spring in Prague, a couple of years later. Unexpectedly homeless I pretend to sleep in the waiting room of the Old Town railway station, sunglasses on, guitar held close like a tearful girlfriend, twitching at every shriek from every passing lunatic, vagrant and drunk. The cleaning staff ignore me. Perched on their carts are transistor radios, ancient clunky looking things which only seem to play the early hits of Depeche Mode.

Sorry Nancy, that's all I've got.

Lessons From Antiquity

2006-12-14T13:06:00.000Z

"Happiness writes white." So said Henri de Montherlant . De Montherlant was a pederast with Nazi sympathies who killed himself in his seventies, so presumably the words flowed pretty freely. People tend only to remember him for this nifty little maxim, however, which will outlast the rest of his oeuvre and also perhaps the millions of words committed to paper by his more respectable contemporaries.

I'm in a good mood. Because it isn't yesterday; a day which was punctuated by disappointments, setbacks, reversals, third-party moaning and stress headaches. No-one wants to hear about that of course. Nothing's guaranteed to make you switch off quicker than someone else's tale of woe. Except perhaps someone giving you directions. Unless you can infuse your story with a heap of comic irony.

So yesterday a heavily pregnant woman 'phoned me every ten minutes for several hours to find out when her delivery would arrive. The delivery turned up while she was on the 'phone. She was not appeased.

"I've had to call twenty-five or thirty times to sort this out."

In truth that first 'phone call, the one where she found out that the goods were going to be with her on time and as promised would probably have satisfied most people.

No comic irony there, then.

I booked a courier at quarter-to-four to collect by five o' clock. I had decorating to finish at home so I was keen to get out on time. At quarter-past six, having been on hold for twenty minutes I'm told that my collection isn't going to happen because of an account query that has mysteriously arisen in the last two-and-a-half hours.

See? Not funny.

And in between I drifted from disaster to disaster like Candide, but without a friendly mentor to remind me that it was all for the best.

Today everything's copacetic¹, and even if it weren't I'd scarcely notice, because it's not yesterday.

I intend to spend this afternoon antiquing. It's soothing and makes me feels like a proper artisan. For the uninitiated the process consists of taking this:-

staining it with a tourmaline solution until it looks like this:-

Before relieving the surface back using a household cleaner (I prefer the lemon-scented variety) until you get this:-

Don't listen to dead French dudes. Happiness is an artfully antiqued doorknob.

¹In addition to the acquisition of Daisuke Matsuzaka by the Boston Red Sox reasons to be cheerful include the arrival of my T.M.... sorry, my daughter's T.M.X. Tickle Me Elmo in the post, Monty Panesar's Ashes debut and an invitation to free drinks at the Spitalfields Christmas do next Thursday. Hoorah for me.

Why I Don't Write About Sports

2006-12-05T16:27:00.000Z

At about a quarter to five, one Saturday afternoon in May, things started to go wrong. Lionel Scaloni didn't kick the ball into row Z, Steven Gerrard scored a thoroughly predictable wondergoal; extra time, penalties, and the end of West Ham's FA Cup dream.

Up until that point things were looking good. There was the World Cup to look forward to, and an England team never better placed to win it all again. Our incumbent champions at fifteen-a-side were rebuilding, Jonny Wilkinson was uninjured. The Ashes rested safe in NW8.

It's all turned to shit now, of course. West Ham are sure to be relegated, John Terry's boys will fail to qualify for Euro 2008, we won't make the semis in France next year, and the Ashes are as good as lost.

Sport is depressing, and writing about it doesn't help. If it's a kind of proxy war then it's one where you're always, eventually, on the losing side. Unless you're Brazilian, or Australian. We're tribal creatures, I suppose, and we attach part of ourselves, the part that's intricately interwoven with our self-esteem, to these players and these teams. And most of the time they lose.

It struck me as curious that although sport is a big part of my life, as a spectator, and only occasionally a participant nowadays, I never feel driven to express what I feel about it. And now I know why. It's depressing, and it's incredibly difficult not to talk in clichés, because that's how we tend to process sporting information. And I read a lot of websites that are written about sport, and most of them do it better than I could.

My name is Tom Miles. I am not a sportswriter.

Great Big Book of Everything

2006-11-27T12:25:00.000Z

I've embarked upon The Recognitions by William Gaddis. It weighs two pounds in paperback and runs to almost a thousand pages. Recently I've been struggling to get through anything, bookwise, to the point where I might have abandoned Bonjour Tristesse mid-sentence, halfway through, for fear that there was something else I should rather have been doing. Anyway, I'm confronting this sudden incapacity with a blunt object; a vast, sprawling, apparently difficult book stuffed with erudition on Early Northern and Flemish Art and Calvinism. Three characters have already died (one of them a monkey) and I'm only fifty pages in. It's terribly overwritten, in a sense, no noun escapes an (obscure) adjective and no action an adverb. The overall effect is surprisingly convincing, however, and one suspects that perhaps the author is either pulling your leg, or aiming to tune the reader in to a kind of mediaeval metaconsciousness , with the gothic layering of modifiers.

I've had to buy a new sofa on which to read it, which makes it a pretty expensive undertaking. I'm optimistic that I'll succeed. Finishing a big book is one of those things that I need to do to reassure myself that things will be normal again soon.

In Which I Meet Another Slightly More Famous Actress and Am Alarmed By the Conversion of an Old Friend

2006-11-14T22:57:00.001Z

Samantha Morton came into the shop today. She has a daughter a little older than my own. We talked about light switches, though, rather than parenting small girls, neither child being present. She was dressed down. I had WD-40 on my favourite cotton jumper - it's off-white so you could see the stain forming - which made everyone feel relaxed. Her husband-to-be might buy some castors from me. After she went I read about her.

Human chemistry is a curious thing. Morton has an edgy on-screen presence, her performances don't always seek the sympathy of the audience. The journalists who write about her seem to start off on the back foot, accordingly. Which perhaps makes her uncomfortable. Anyway she seemed jolly simpatico to me and not extraordinary in the least, which in itself is remarkable, because she is an extraordinary actress, I think.

The night that Tyson fought Bruno I was at Jake's house, not sleeping with a girl called Helen, whose face might have launched a small flotilla. I was at that cynical stage of late adolescence where I was prepared to overlook some serious character flaws in order to get some love during the holidays. Helen was slender, absurdly pretty, and deadly dull. No, not deadly dull, but not interesting to me other than in the way that any girl is interesting to a teenage boy. She had boring parents, so it probably wasn't her fault. If I'd turned out that way, or if my good friend Martin had, we'd have no alibi. While I'm busy not sleeping with Helen Jake has worked out that her sexy and interesting friend Jo who wanted to sleep with me but couldn't surmount my misguided crush on her prettier but decidedly less charismatic chum would probably make herself available to him just to spite me. (I found this out later). While we were talking about "Emma" and waiting for the fight to start Jake and Jo were upstairs fucking. Well, this is what we assumed. They rejoined us half-an-hour later. Jo was barefoot, and a pair of tangled knickers fell out of her turned-up jeans and rested on the tiled floor like an accusation.

I thought about that evening earlier today, so I googled Jake. He's a monk now, in the Army of Jesus, he's been celibate for years, and wouldn't you know it, he has a blog. Life, truly, is rich and strange.

It's Not My Home, It's Their Home...

2006-11-07T20:53:00.000Z

The house is up for sale. That'll be the house where I was born. Where my sister was born. Where I grew up. Where I slept with my first two girlfriends (and some subsequent girlfriends - the ordinal details are a little hazy). Where we all got terribly sick last Christmas. Where we held wakes for two departed parents. Just when you think everything is final some new finality comes up and smacks you in the face. My sister has cleared the place of much of its clutter and doubtless some of its charm. It looks different in the photos, apart from the shed, bastion of banished males - my father and I, essentially - on Sunday afternoons. We'd go down there and burn things. It was beautiful.

Twilight approaches

2006-11-02T16:26:00.000Z

It got cold in a hurry. The skin on my hands and lips is drying and rupturing in protest. My bladder is confused. I am obliged to wear either a rollneck, which makes me look old and chunky, or a scarf, which makes me look affected and possibly homosexual. Not that I think there's anything wrong with that, necessarily, as long as you are. Gay, that is. Apparently my brain is feeling the chill too. There are some obvious consolations, of course. You can retrieve your winter coats from the dry cleaners, there are fireworks, which last a month, it seems, nowadays, and the dipping sun in a clear sky casting fabulous shadows on the buildings around where I work. Sometimes, as the afternoon turns into evening, I get five minutes to watch the light creep up the church and disappear.

Barceloneta

2006-10-31T16:36:00.000Z

For the past few mornings I've woken up and walked perhaps a hundred yards to paddle in the Mediterranean before breakfast and rinse my feet under a boardwalk shower as the sun climbed over low cloud. I've climbed the narrowing, steepening stairway to our apartment with groceries that taste sweeter having been bought in a foreign currency. There's an old joke about a guy hitting himself over the head with a hammer; when asked why he's doing it he says "It's great when it stops." I don't think I was ready to come home. It isn't great now it's stopped.

Dirty Protest

2006-10-19T15:42:00.000Z

Our premises, despite their location on one of London's more picturesque streets, are decidedly low-rent. There's no heating and the water supply is limited to a pipe projecting crudely from a wall downstairs. I'm obliged, therefore, to cross the market to the public toilets when nature calls. I went in there earlier, and in one of the cubicles someone had stuck yards and yards of paper to the walls using their own excrement as paste. A can of Tennent's Super stood empty, presumably, by the bowl. The whole thing was a tableau of hopelessness.

Which is not to say that my own attempts at self-expression here are of any greater value. But I am at least trying to communicate my sense of anomie without getting shit under my fingernails.

Arson, considered as a method to expedite probate

2006-10-13T22:41:00.000Z

I'd love to burn it all. Carpets, linen, white goods, furniture, everything. Leave just the bare stones or better still knock that down and shift the land only, and see what that fetches. I hate the whole business and once again wish it could happen without me. It's irresponsible. It's not the way things are done. But I'm pretty sure, given the circumstances, that I'd get away with a few hours of community service. The back lawn never took; an intense fire, fit for Guy Fawkes, wouldn't matter at all.

The Suppositious Angler

2006-10-12T10:24:00.000Z

Izaak Walton, Freeman, Ironmonger, my Stuart counterpart (if you'll permit the conceit), looms large in my consciousness today, as if the imaginary catgut that somehow connects us down through the centuries has been tweaked by an unseen hand. This weekend I shall venture out into the Hertfordshire countryside and perhaps breathe the air on Amwell Hill. Then I'll contemplate a stream, and look for a flash of pike or grayling. The stream is life, flowing endlessly. I will strive for a gentler, more pious life. I will live long and well. I will accommodate changes of rule without compromising the core of myself. I shall not be a scoffer, witty or otherwise.

Ignorance

2006-10-08T11:50:00.000Z

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure
Of what is true or right or real,
But forced to qualify or so I feel,
Or Well, it does seem so:
Someone must know.

I once attended a lecture given by Noam Chomsky, but he wasn't discussing the iniquities of U.S. foreign policy, he was talking instead about his main sphere of expertise, linguistics. He used words I was familiar with and discussed concepts I thought I understood (I had some grasp of the structure and development of language, or so I believed.) However it was impossible to follow what he was saying. My friend, Ian, attended the same lecture. Emerging from the auditorium into a bright Oxford afternoon that seemed to mock our own lack of brilliance we realised that we had shared an experience. We were unused to not getting it. It was too hard. Ian said "Every time I thought he was saying something I recognised and agreed with he would dismiss it as an example of inexact or idle thinking." It felt like we'd been reprimanded, but neither of us were sure what for. Ian completed his degree and is a partner in a firm of patent attorneys. I never fully recovered.

I click on Big Bang on the Wikipedia home page. I should explain - I used to take an interest in physics, in the wondrous massiveness of it. Astrophysics, cosmogony, the whole thing. My interest shifted to particle physics, practical physics, if you like, as I progressed through my twenties. There were enough external factors making me feel insignificant, I didn't need further reading to reinforce the idea that I was no more than a blip on a blip and that all my endeavours would disappear into the baseless fabric of this vision like footprints in wet sand. What's new, I wonder, in the world of extraordinarily clever men trying to figure out why and how the universe became, what gives?

It's a depressing exercise. I get halfway through a series of sentences but keep having to click on further links to ensure that I've understood the concept of the sentence from which I've linked. But the new article often contains ideas that are beyond me. It's like looking up an unusual word in a dictionary where the definitions employ still more obscure words. I descend, spiralling into an inescapable pit of unknowing. Philip Larkin, whose great facility was to communicate the panic and despair of the 20th century with a degree of calmness and well-concealed optimism comes to mind.

Strange to be ignorant of the way things work:
Their skill at finding what they need,
Their sense of shape, and punctual spread of seed,
And willingness to change;
Yes, it is strange,

Even to wear such knowledge - for our flesh
Surrounds us with its own decisions -
And yet spend all our life on imprecisions,
That when we start to die
Have no idea why.

Last Goodbye

2006-09-27T15:25:00.000Z

We went down to the river. Sons, daughter, mother, sister, grandchildren. We threw the ashes in. It was early afternoon, but as autumn gathers the sun never gets very high. As we tossed handfuls of the burnt remains into the water the dust caught the light from the low sun. The stuff itself isn't very dusty, it's surprisingly coarse, and somewhat crystalline in texture, but I suppose that the crematorium consumes things at very high temperatures, producing this strange matter. Only her sister was too squeamish or perhaps too sensible to join in. The grandchildren all grabbed a handful, threw it as far as they could and threw a flower in afterwards. My grandmother, old but still not frail exactly, made her way out over the edge of the riverbank. "Goodbye Sal," she said, quietly, unhysterically, and threw away the last grasp of her daughter she'd have.

There was enough of it for another dozen mourners, but we were in a public spot, and unsure of the legality of what we were doing. The last third or so of the container I upended over the water, enjoying the dust surrounding me. That would wash off. Self-evidently you can't wash away memories. The river ran clear there, and you could see the ashes colouring the river bed.

The whole scene had a kind of awkward suburban beauty to it. My wife took a picture. Then we went to Ikea. Life will go on, so you may as well go with it.

Hurt

2006-09-20T12:44:00.001Z

I stabbed myself in the chest with a chisel. This was not some Gothic exercise in self-harming as therapy, you understand. I was carrying out some basic joinery work at home, and the blade of the chisel, which I was too idle to sharpen, failed to bite into the wood and bit into me instead, just north-east of my breastbone. If you've ever wondered what it feels like to stab yourself with a chisel-type object, perhaps even considered trying it, I'd say:- don't bother. It's an unpleasant sensation. It leaves you feeling winded, and a little panicky. There wasn't a great deal of blood - it's not a fleshy part of the body - just a gentle rusty seepage. I wondered about getting a tetanus booster, but then couldn't be bothered. I have had enough of all things medical recently to last me into the next decade.

The loft is almost finished. This is a good thing because we'll get our house back, but I'll miss the excitement of coming up the stairs to see what sudden reshapings of space have occurred while I've been at work. What I love most about what's been done so far is that it hasn't really altered the character of the place. It's still somewhat shabby, somewhat chic, and it's still home. Once the builders depart, of course, the real work begins; dealing with my daughter's prolonged and irrational grief at their departure, decorating, flooring, moving furniture and all the associated DIY injuries I'll inevitably sustain.

Kid Fears

2006-09-12T13:36:00.000Z

When I was a child I was convinced that a nuclear war was imminent, that the entire Northern Hemisphere would be destroyed, and that the only sensible course of action was to move immediately to New Zealand. You couldn't drag me there now, of course. Unless I could go there in stages. London-Boston-Seattle-Hawaii-Auckland or something along those lines. There's no way I'm spending 26 hours on an aeroplane. Looking back Carter and Brezhnev were a pretty stable pair to command their absurd respective arsenals but it didn't feel that way to my eight-year-old self. I was not sophisticated enough to appreciate the niceties of Mutually Assured Destruction, but I knew that hiding under a table would not protect me from a nuclear winter. I read a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction - The Chrysalids, I remember, made a particular impression - and worried away in bed.

So, how do I protect my daughter from the night terrors? She is too young to recall the events of 9/11, but was affected by the London bombings in an oblique, childlike way. Kids don't forget anything of course, but I hope that once she becomes aware that the "Bombs" don't set themselves, and aren't an abstract evil, she won't grow suspicious of the Muslim classmates she now plays with without prejudice. I hope that she'll communicate her fears so that we can reassure her that they have no foundation. (This is a kind of hypocrisy, of course. When her godmother is away in Iraq or Afghanistan we fret about her, although she is probably more likely to sustain serious injury crossing the road in Sunbury.)

I'll tell her that it's Martians she needs to worry about. That'll do the trick.

What If We Give It Away?

2006-09-07T14:03:00.000Z

I have a new profile photo. I'm still looking irritated, because the passing years have not been kind to me. A couple of weeks ago I went to give blood at the Bishopsgate Institute. This is not an exercise I enjoy, it hurts, and the rewards are somewhat abstract, unless you count the biscuits and weak squash available after your donation.

The phlebotomist asks me my name and date of birth.

"Tom Miles, third of May, nineteen seventy-one," I tell her. She's young and attractive and slightly offhand. She has short dreadlocks which she swishes for emphasis.
"Three days before mine," she says. I laugh a small uncomfortable laugh. She looks young enough to be, well, my significantly younger sister. If I were black. I can't help but ask:-
"Nineteen seventy-one?" She nods. Having already, actually stabbed me in the arm she has now poked a metaphorical needle into my heart. I murmur something feeble along the lines of "You look very well on it," and she smiles in a way that makes it perfectly clear that she's thinking "And you really don't." She doesn't say it aloud, at least. She swishes off instead to attend to another donor, in that young, attractive, offhand way of hers.

I pout at her when she comes to remove the needle, but then thank her (for hurting me and siphoning away my lifeforce!) and hobble off towards the refreshment table, silent and aggrieved.

God Save The Green

2006-08-29T15:26:00.000Z

There's a magazine called Golf Punk, I saw it on a newsstand, as I hovered between trains. It's marketed, presumably, at that sliver of society which enjoys an archly alternative lifestyle and, well, golf. Alice Cooper and Jesper Parnevik, essentially. Seems unlikely they'd actually purchase the magazine as they must appear in it every month, or so you might think. It turns out that Golf Punk distinguishes itself from other, more earnest, golfing publications not through a distinct anti-establishment editorial policy, but by including a section on "Bunker Babes" (scantily clad) interviews with female golfing celebrities, or "Swinging Sirens" (scantily clad) and a regular clinic with the "Golf Nurse" (not wearing much). Golf Punk then, is not simply a golf magazine with a new angle, it is instead a dreadful chimera; part hobbies periodical and part Lads' Mag. I've never understood this sort of thing. It's not that I'm prudish, it's just that for me golf and pornography make for an uneasy mix. It's the same with fast cars and motorbikes. Do you want to fuck the girl or the Kawasaki? Cindy, 22, from Eastbourne, or Colin Montgomerie?

I could get precious about the subversion of the meaning of "Punk", but as "Punk" at least in part was about this kind of subversion I'd be arguing against myself. Doesn't mean I have to like it.

Printed media will dwindle, I hope, to a sensible level. Golf Punk will disappear. I read a novel recently, for the first time in weeks, and enjoyed the experience, but generally any piece of prose I read, under 3000 words long, and over 50, I will read on a PC. The more abstruse ends of printed publication are losing their legitimacy in the face of the internet, I think. I hope. Golf Punk will disappear.

It's not easy being a nice guy

2006-08-23T15:43:00.000Z

If enough people shout "Killing people is wrong!" at you, often enough, and for long enough, I don't care if you're Gandhi, you're going to want to kill someone.

Autopilot

2006-08-17T13:37:00.000Z

I need a fucking good cry. Some snotty hysterical sobbing, complete with inadvertent dog noises. Because the numbness is starting to trouble me. I have forgotten how to be in a mood. I'm neither upbeat nor downbeat. I'm just beat. And it can't continue. I need somehow to access the little pocket of pain that I've squirreled away just beneath my consciousness. Because, I suspect, you can't get over something without getting it in the first place.

I am Martin Blank. It's not me.

Gin hasn't worked. Imagining how robbed my grandmother must feel is now an intellectual exercise. I should be in pieces; in fact I feel pretty together, but at the same time take no pleasure in this sensation. Perhaps, at thirty-five, I'm turning into a hard-boiled little orphan. I hope not. I'm too old to start smoking other people's dog ends and throwing stones at empty buildings - I don't think I could carry it off. Anyway, let the tears rain, because it's not me.

Home Improvement

2006-08-12T16:42:00.000Z

It's raining in my living room. Like in the Outkast Miss Jackson video. I thought that perhaps the tarpaulin protecting the exposed roof had shifted so accordingly I confronted my vertigo and climbed the scaffold ladder. I get vertigo on a horse, so climbing forty feet up in a storm was no small endeavour. It was a futile one, however. The tarp hadn't moved. The tarp has holes in it, rendering it useless. A tarpaulin with holes in it should be called something else. A perfaulin, perhaps. Or a roofaulin.

The builder is not returning my calls.

The Eulogy

2006-08-06T10:26:00.000Z

"If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly."

I've decided to keep it brief (thus minimising the possibility of me breaking down while delivering it), not too mundane, not too poetic, we'll see.

Our mother loved us hard. She couldn’t help but do so. Not that we were easy to love, with unwashed faces, and the chartered disobedience of children who are free.

And her love was steadfast, in the face of various small disasters and disappointments; bloodied knees, torn clothing, unsatisfactory school reports.

Her love was with us everywhere, mindless of removals, upheavals, or the breadth of oceans.

And her love was timely, buffering us from the reversals of romance and sporting endeavour, reminding us that the job we didn’t get was the job we didn’t want.

Her love was proud, proud of our quick-wits, our strong teeth, and our sense of right and wrong.

Her love was grateful, for the grandchildren we had who ran around her feet and whom she could love as fiercely as she loved us.

Her love is never-ending, so while she can’t put her arms around us anymore we should all remember that she still loves us hard, because she can’t help but do so.

All Things Must Pass

2006-07-28T13:42:00.000Z

Sarah Helen Miles (née Chalkley) died today at around 12.30 in the afternoon. I got the chance to see her for the last time yesterday. Her hair is still brown, uniquely, amongst the women in the hospice, which suggests that perhaps she died too soon, but if you'd seen her, unconscious and struggling for breath you'd know that the end couldn't have come soon enough.

Cancer has a bad reputation. But while it has taken both of my parents from me I have been spared much of the heartache that this disease can cause. My father was pretty much himself the day before he died, and I am lucky that I can remember him like that. The secondary tumour on my mother's brainstem meant that she was significantly incapacitated the last couple of times we were together. But again I can count myself fortunate that less than three weeks have passed between diagnosis and death. Enough time to prepare oneself, and to say goodbye. "Oh well," she said to me, after we got the bad news but while she was still compos mentis, "a short life, but a graceful one."

Whether or not she led a graceful life might be open to debate, but I truly hope that she believed that she had. She was a good mother, and she loved us all.

What You Will

2006-07-26T14:50:00.000Z

Jacques, Shakespeare's great pessimist, details man's seven ages in theatrical terms. The final age is bleakly detailed thus:-

...Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

They took my mother to the hospice yesterday. While she sleeps, or rests fitfully, I can believe that she's just drowsy because of the pain relief. When she's half-awake, half-alert, the whole inescapable nastiness of it is hard to bear. She sat up to take a drink of lukewarm pineapple juice, just as we were leaving. The juice comes in one of those little cartons, meant to fit in a lunch box. She is a large, flamboyant woman, but she looked tiny and helpless on the bed. It was about the saddest thing I've ever seen. How terrible, to be a child again, without any of the attendant joy and innocence. We took my grandmother home. It is impossible to imagine how she must feel, and impossible to comprehend the resilience of spirit that keeps her from breaking down. I am so proud of her that even to think of it brings me to tears.

Nobody loses all the time

2006-07-20T00:10:00.000Z

I try to avoid the familiar territory of a journal - Woke, brushed teeth, travelled to work, worked, took lunch, worked more, returned home, watched The Usual Suspects very carefully hoping to discover plot holes - that kind of thing, but I have to say that today was a winner, so I'm ignoring previous practise. I spoke to my mother this morning while she was in the garden, managing a little breakfast, with grandchildren somersaulting around her. She sounded pretty weak, and I was at work, swallowing hard at times. But it was a good call, to the benefit of both parties. I need her to know that I am thinking of her all the time and I know that she appreciates that my capacity for dealing with the nitty-gritty of serious illness is startlingly limited. So we small-talked, and told each other things we already knew. There will be no new good news, not now. Whatever your theological position I suppose that what we all seek at the end is peace. We found a little bit this morning.

My last day at work, for a while at least, passed without incident. Paul is a little tentative around me, understandably perhaps. We speak about our kids, mostly. Neutral stuff. I invoiced all the people who have yet to pay us, which felt good, as the completion of an uninteresting but necessary task often does.

I waited 45 minutes for a bus. No matter, still a good day.

The London Tecumsehs, well, they were extraordinary. We may lack consistency at the plate, but we're a team, a family, a happy breed. Unstoppable. Today we won, and I caught a good game.

The hire car is nice, although my daughter is already fretting about having to return it next week. It didn't get us home for the end of the Red Sox game. No matter, they won. The Yankees lost. This is an absolute good. Life continues to supply these nuggets of joy, to prevent you from withdrawing altogether. Life says:- look, there are acorns and hazelnuts here, as well as large swooping raptors who want to feed you to their offspring.

Thank you, Sunny, for your sage, yet still flippant advice. You're almost as good as a ZOOM.

Thank you too JD, Josh and Mishi. I've read your kind words and I still think you're all full of shit. Kidding. I'm bewildered by your kindness. How strange to have friends you've never met! Brave new world.

i thank You God for most this amazing

2006-07-14T20:50:00.000Z

The primary site of the cancer is in the lungs but there are secondary tumours in the liver and brain. We saw her, my wife and I, yesterday morning. It didn't feel, as I expected it to, that there was someone else in the room, whom we had to ignore, as he sweated beneath his black hood, sickle glinting. Partly because there was a real person there most of the time. My sister, the District Nurse, the dogwalker, the Doctor.

She is home, our home, where two of her children were born, where she spent her last night with my father, reunited with the spaces and objects she loves.

My sister has borrowed a wheelchair from the Red Cross. I observed, in passing, that it was easy to fold away and assemble. "Of course it is, Darling," said my mother, "those things are generally propelled by stupid people." Her faculties may not have faded yet, but they will very soon. The consultant seems to think that two months is a reasonable expectancy. I didn't know they did that kind of thing anymore; it seems like a General Hospital cliché. I keep thinking of Lady Bracknell:

To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

But I don't think I'm careless. Disorganised perhaps. It's a hard-knock life.

The Moon's a Balloon

2006-07-10T21:34:00.000Z

My mother is ill, perhaps very seriously ill. I don't deal with these things well. My brother called me early this afternoon. I am mean to him because he let me down when I was eleven. De profundis, I believe, I understand him better than anyone. Anyway, I love him very much but I never, ever tell him so, because of what happened a quarter of a century ago. He and my sister have decided to be present when the consultant explains the results of my mother's MRI, tomorrow morning. I can't be there. I have builders coming and it's my daughter's school sports day. Moreover, I don't want to be there. I hate hospitals, doctors; I can't take them seriously. My mother told me (I have, at least been to see her) she'd been referred to the oncologist and might have to be moved to the cancer ward. This prompted a lame joke about Solzhenitsyn. I've never even read Solzhenitsyn; that's how shallow I am. Fuck it all. I am relieved that my father doesn't have to put up with any of this, having long since succumbed to his own batch of aggressive cancer cells.

Here's some other news. I'm a shit father, impatient and inattentive, but my precious little girl just got her school report, which really couldn't be any better. The headmistress has written "I am proud to have you in my school" at the bottom. Who knows, perhaps she writes that on every report. It had the intended effect, even if so. Which is to make slapdash parents like me grab their occasional offspring and say "Well done on not letting me ruin your life thus far." She is an absolute fucking marvel and I wish I had a Jiminy Cricket around to punch me in my fat head when I forget this. I will try harder. And I believe in fairies.

Of The Abyss

2006-07-05T13:40:00.000Z

Jack London thought Spitalfields the worst of places, "a welter of rags and filth". That was a century ago, and the properties he describes with disgust have been cleared of sweat-workers and are now occupied by wealthy Bohemians, west of Brick Lane, or have been razed by the Luftwaffe and the LCC to the east, where post-war housing projects stretch out towards Stepney, populated in the main by Bangladeshi families. There are still homeless people on the streets, however. They are a filthy, curiously ageless group, mad, or alcoholic, or both. Some faces come and go, some have been here for ever, it seems. Other shopkeepers know them by name.

"Do you know Susie?" asks the woman from the picture framers. "She used to sit by the cashpoint opposite you."
"No," I tell her, "I've never noticed her."
"She's dead. Died in the street."
I feel nothing but a mild annoyance that I've had to hear this bad news. And almost immediately I wonder "What's wrong with me?"

I walk on by. I avoid eye contact. There's a big black guy, "The Maddest of the Mad" we call him, but in fact he's not as intimidating as some of his peers. I think of him as a kind of Socrates, because he doesn't ask for money, he just tries to share his confusion. "Why have you got cash?" he'll ask passing city workers. "Why am I so thirsty?" he'll wonder aloud. This morning I find him sitting on the step next to the shop when I go out for rice crackers. "I'm hungry," he moans. For once I stop and look at him. "I can't help you," I tell him, and it feels true. His eyes are wild with something other than hunger. I can't rescue him. He has fallen too far.

Penniless and Sunburnt

2006-06-27T14:01:00.000Z

It was completely unprovoked.

We were talking about something else, something neutral, something innocent, when my wife pointed out to me, à propos of nothing in particular, that I hadn't sold many books recently.
"I just can't find the time to buy new stock," I explained to her.
"Well, why isn't the old stock selling? What's wrong with it?"
"Nothing, other than that no-one wants to buy it."
She laughed at me in a way that undermined me somewhat. This happens fairly frequently and you get used to it. You adapt to the lowered regard and expectations of your loved ones.

Anyway, I have resolved to make her proud of me once more by exhibiting some entrepreneurial spirit ("The trouble with the French is...") and selling some Borrowed Philosophy merchandise.

So, hypocrite lecteurs, mes semblables, mes frères, if you really love me you'll buy a t-shirt, so that I can regain some sense of worth, and so that my daughter can hold her head high in class again.

I'll make time to trawl the charity shops of South Woodford for unconsidered literary gems which will sell immediately for many times their cost price, we'll be able to afford the car hire for our forthcoming sojourn to the South Coast (there's a wedding to attend on the way and our aged VW looks more like a stock car), and harmony will be restored to the Miles household. Isn't that a price worth paying?

The Debt to Pleasure

2006-06-18T12:45:00.000Z

Is there anything nicer than a ZOOM lolly? I'm not saying that they're better than sex. But I've had sex that was less pleasant than eating a ZOOM. And I've never had a ZOOM that was anything less than exceptional. Even one that's been in the freezer too long and has permafrost around the base. Still wonderful.

(In a future world, where men and women are truly free, you will be able to combine the two activities, mating copiously with an icy confection in one hand and a knot of your lover's hair in the other.)

They are available on demand and cost around 50p. The packaging is fully bio-degradable, they're low calorie too, unlike a Magnum, say, and accordingly can be consumed without guilt. And who's ever had sex without a little stab of conscience, before, during or after? Perhaps the most exciting thing about a ZOOM is its Proustian capacity to transport you back to a simpler time, when your thoughts and actions were driven by your taste buds, rather than your reproductive organs. Frustrated people everywhere should treat themselves to one of these marvellous moments of frozen delight. It may heal what ails ye.

Next week: the fab...

Rainbow Day

2006-06-15T10:31:00.000Z

According to the Isihara test (above, if you can see the 6 you're normal) I suffer from garden variety red/green colourblindness. This means, amongst other things, that I am unable to fly fighters for the Royal Air Force, or to distinguish between certain shades of green and yellow. Colourblindness is a misnomer, evidently. It's not that I don't see colours it's just that I see them differently, anomalously, to use the opthamological term. I came across this quote when reading about the subject:-

From a practical standpoint... many protanomalous and deuteranomalous people breeze through life with very little difficulty doing tasks that require normal colour vision. Some may not even be aware that their colour perception is in any way different from normal. The only problem they have is passing a colour vision test.

I am deuteranomalous people. One in every twenty white European males. You'll see us in Top Shop juxtaposing hopelessly ill-matching shorts and shirts and thinking we're Fonzie. We're a happy-go-lucky bunch, because the only problem we have is passing a colour vision test.

I mention this excuse for a genetic defect because tomorrow, at my daughter's school, they are celebrating "Rainbow Day". I assumed that this was some kind of multicultural festival. The school is a model of multicultural interface, with the colours of the world all getting along in prelapsarian innocence. My daughter then explained to me that she was "Fry", and would have to wear purple. And that some other members of her class were "Lister". She didn't know what colour they had to wear. So it seems that Rainbow Day is a colour-coded celebration of Eminent Victorian Quakers. This was confusing enough a concept without me having to deal with the purple business.

Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
Indigo
Violet

See? No purple. Or is purple a blanket term covering all those high-frequency colours? I asked my wife. Her response was unhelpful. "Purple is purple," she said. "And our daughter doesn't have any purple clothes."

Brighter Later

2006-06-13T15:19:00.000Z

London, having sweltered for almost a week in the high twenties and low thirties, is now darkened by monsoon conditions. Right now it's raining so hard that vehicle alarms are being set off, storm drains are overflowing, and it's twilight at four in the afternoon. Everyone is much relieved, although the temperature has only dropped marginally, the storms have at least brought a breeze to ease the inescapable stickiness of a city heatwave. It's that same kind of unique big city heat that Nick Carraway describes in The Great Gatsby. As I stroll to work in shorts, flip-flops and a crumpled gingham seersucker shirt I am almost moved to pity the suits sweating into their white collars, loosening their ties, admiring my pedicure (I'm considering a sarong for tomorrow). The suits can keep their six figure salaries, here at Handles With Care, where we work for the love of it, Wednesday is "Bring an Item of Your Wife's Clothing to Work Day".

Imagine

2006-06-05T08:29:00.000Z

My daughter's godmother has made it safely out of Iraq. She now faces a twelve hour stopover on a runway in Kuwait. It's 45° C there, and it was hotter in Basra. There are a thousand keyboards clicking around the world, as people register or rationalise their thoughts on the Iraq war, and I'm convinced that there is nothing fresh I can say about it. I'll make this observation, however, in the light of widespread whispering that Tony Blair is about to convert to Roman Catholicism. There is no God. God is a voice in your head. We shouldn't pretend that our brave boys (that's what they are, whichever way you look at it) are on some sort of Crusade out there. They've toppled a dictator, but, as happened in Yugoslavia, the nation has fragmented without the binding energy of that dictatorship. Oppressed people are thirsty for very specific freedoms.

So while it's utterly unacceptable for politicians to say "We are fighting for our way of life" when they are, in effect, colonising a country whose extant government posed no real threat at all to their way of life, you could argue that this idea is at least grounded in the real. There is such a thing as "a way of life", and if running a V8 on inexpensive gasoline falls under The Pursuit Of Happiness then you could even make a case that Bush Jr is constitutionally obliged to protect American oil interests in the Middle East.

Take God out of the equation and it's even more difficult to know what the rebel Iraqis are fighting for. Settle the sectarian issue, stop blowing people up, and Bush will have an exit strategy. He'll be able to withdraw, claiming to have established a democracy, and you can tell yourself that you've seen off the infidel.

Take God out of the equation and you have half a dozen middle-aged men standing around, pointing at each other and saying "I'm right and you're wrong". It's not as naive an idea as it might at first appear. Coalition forces went into Afghanistan with the express goals of destroying Al Qaeda bases, removing the Religious Maniacal government (taking God out of the equation, effectively) and capturing Osama Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders. Resistance remains, but the operation, which was not blurred by political doublespeak, was a success, even if Bin Laden is still at large.

No-one mourns the passing of the Taliban, indeed the liberation of Afghanistan may prove to be the one positive to come out of the events of 9/11. But I hope not. Peace reigns in the Balkans, after all. It's a given that people everywhere should enjoy religious freedom right up the point where it impinges on someone else's civil rights. Tolerant, secular democracy is an ideal for Westerners, an ideal born out of The Enlightenment. The enlightened view is this:- you can believe in God all you want, Mr Blair, Mr Bush, Mr Al-Zarqawi, you can pretend that he informs your decisions, but God does not exist. God is a voice in your head.

But I've Been Seen With Farrah

2006-05-24T20:52:00.000Z

Today I missed an appointment with the dead, and embarked on a relationship with a movie star. Nothing much else to report.

A little blue, after drinking too much - for shame! - and half a night of contorted sofa sleep I resolved on the train to drop in on Miles, C R (dec'd). What this involves, as I have discussed elsewhere, is visiting the small Catholic church hidden behind Liverpool Street and lighting a candle for him. The church and the candle are props, really, Prospero's baseless fabric, or what you will, which allow me to access that part of my subconscious occupied still by the rather more Falstaffian figure of my father. Whilst I am aware that nothing real happens, when I stare hard into the flame I can kid myself that some kind of communion is taking place, if only in my mind.

Reader, I failed him. Various factors, among them the time difference between Uttar Pradesh and London, kept me from the altar. I am fortunate that my father is an affable angel in the Henry Travers style, because, let's face it, you don't want to mess with one of those Old Testament dudes. I'll go tomorrow and I'll light two candles.

Her name is Meredith MacNeill and she's the best thing to come out of Canada since, um, maple syrup Leonard Cohen Larry Nelson Larry Walker Margaret Trudeau and The Tragically Hip.

We're taking things slowly. Like Lee Majors, I'm not the type to kiss and tell, but I think that she digs me. Or acknowledges me. Or could pick me out of a line-up from behind a two-way mirror.

I'm being falsely modest, of course. We are on smiling terms, as of today. She gave me a little, shy, Mrs Gaskell sort of smile which wrongfooted me somewhat. When I saw her later I gave her the old Hungover Lost Boy Wince. If you're female and you know me you might recognise this as a variant of the Drunken Lost Boy Simper.

I have since analysed these two incidents with Derridan vigour. She smiles at me because she walks past my shop two or three times a day (the shop is between her home and the tube station) and I'm invariably standing around acting nonchalant. I smile at her because she's beautiful - here I don't discriminate, I smile at all the beautiful women - and because I believe that she is within spitting distance of superstardom.

So, another resolution for tomorrow. I'm gonna talk to her and tell her I'm her number one fan.

Keep your fingers crossed for me.

If A Thing's Worth Doing

2006-05-22T19:30:00.000Z

I've been working on various side projects...

It's so difficult to find time...

The dog ate my homework...

I'm considering abandoning Borrowed Philosophy. Last week a teammate described it as "a kind of public mid-life crisis". And just now I feel more committed to the softball and fiction blogs. This is why I could never have an affair. It's not that I lack imagination, it's just that my imagination lacks duplicity. And I'm a terrible liar. My poker face is positively elastic, in the Rowan Atkinson mould. Note: Rowan Atkinson - much bigger than you'd think, widthwise, and painfully shy.

Anyway, glory be to God for dappled things.

Buffalo Bill's defunct

2006-04-30T10:12:00.000Z

Has it been so long? Were I sufficiently deluded to believe in an audience I would by now presume that they had left their seats and demanded a refund. Or unBookmarked me. Anyway they'd be gone, so I'd talk about them behind them behind their backs.

x was impatient.

y was disloyal.

Don't get me started on n.

I feel okay. I sat down last night with a bottle of Havana Club thinking I'd empty it. I had about a quarter of it. Which is good news. The bad news is that CCTV footage reveals me looking like this:-

this morning. I am three days shy of my thirty-fifth birthday. I quit smoking years ago. I haven't ingested anything illegal since my daughter was born. I can't drink anymore. And still time marches on, and I look more like Marie Curie everyday.

Jane Seymour, the newsstands tell me, is Still Fabulous At Fifty-Five. Tom Miles, I can tell you, is Already Fucked At Thirty-Five. There's a fine line between looking distinguished and looking wizened, a line which I'm not close to straddling. But I feel okay. I keep a portrait of myself in the attic and do you know what? It doesn't look a day older than when it was painted, some surface dust notwithstanding. My joints are pretty good at the minute. I've lost some weight. I feel okay. I just look like a dying man.

Regarding the Efficacy of Veiled Threats

2006-04-20T13:27:00.000Z

Dear Sir/Madam,

Thank you for your e-mail.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

We confirm that we have cancelled the membership.

We trust that this now clarifies the matter for you.

Regards,

Customer Services

Books For Children

2006-04-19T14:56:00.000Z

I'm having difficulties with my membership of a book club that I've never joined. They're threatening to sue me. For £7.98. I tried ringing them to sort it out, as instructed. It's a completely automated service. But I managed to find an e-mail address so I wrote to them.

I have received a letter from yourselves threatening me with legal action because a "Miss Tom Miles", an entirely imaginary person, has not paid for some goods which he or she never asked for and indeed, never received. It is impossible to speak to a human being on the number given on this letter, giving rise to the suspicion that your organisation is also imaginary.

How's this for a scenario:- the imaginary "Miss Tom Miles" drives down the M4 and torches the imaginary building which houses the imaginary employees of the imaginary organisation pursuing payment for the imaginary delivery.

Please instruct your recoveries department to credit the membership number above for any outstanding balance and then delete the account or face the imaginary consequences. I await a prompt response.

The idea was to elicit a reaction. They came back to me in a matter of minutes.

THIS IS AN AUTOMATIC ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. PLEASE DO NOT RESPOND TO THIS E-MAIL.

Thank you for your e-mail enquiry, our team will respond as quickly as possible.

Thank you.

The Dislocated Thumb of Ian Kinsler

2006-04-17T21:02:00.000Z

I'm glad that I didn't delineate any rules when embarking on this blog; rules about regular posting or subject matter. It's a long weekend, the baseball season is under way, we're redecorating. I offer this as an apology to an entirely imaginary public. Must stop using "entirely imaginary". And hello to Claire, sad-eyed lady of the lowlands, if she sees this. I hope that thirty-five is treating you well. I have new spectacles, and paint on my knuckles. And so to bed.

Mending Wall

2006-04-09T13:41:00.000Z

It's beautiful title, isn't it? I've appropriated it from old Robert Frost, who specialised in finding the significant buried within the mundane, something I'm obliged to do too, given the relative lack of incident in a typical week. It's a cheat, though. I've mended a fence. And while doing so I wasn't moved to reflect wryly on the way that the boundaries we erect to keep others out often imprison us. Instead I thought about the cold beer in the fridge that awaited me upon completion of the repair, more Ferlinghetti than Frost, that. Or perhaps it's William Carlos Williams I'm thinking of. Meanwhile, around the world other people were falling in or out of love, planning for their futures, or their immediate ends, shopping, fucking, being born or dying. The fence is finished, it shivers in the wind, looking impermanent and not a little sad.

I confess that I am jealous of the journals I read of globetrotting Twentysomethings and their fabulous, unexpected lives. It isn't a question of the grass being greener. If that were so then these kids would write about their yearning for the stability of a suburban family life. And I would not could not swap what I have for what they have. I am jealous because I never risked anything. I never lived abroad, I never immersed myself in another culture. I never took a chance on my own adaptability.

Still, I have my family, my four walls, my tiny garden and the fence that surrounds it. I should remember that that is enough.

Departures

2006-04-02T13:10:00.000Z

Mindaugas Ramonas, the bandy-legged Lithuanian bricklayer who lives downstairs, is moving out. He's waiting for FO passports for himself and his wife Olga and has asked me to keep them somewhere safe until he can retrieve them if they arrive after he's gone. I asked him where he was moving to. He pointed eastwards and said "Odessa", with a noncommittal air. I was a little confused, but remembered that there is an Odessa Road down towards Forest Gate, and surmised that it was to there, rather than to the port on the Black Sea that he was intending to relocate.

Odessa has always interested me because of its historical status as a Free Port. One imagines the streets peopled with misplaced citizens from everywhere on Earth; exiled poets, war-sundered lovers, deserters, agitators, people running away from their old lives and towards an uncertain future. But it is not these streets that await Mr and Mrs Ramonas, not for now at least. The flat roof above their bedroom is leaking rainwater and they are having trouble with the letting agents. It's time for them to move on. To E7.

Shimata!

2006-04-01T20:48:00.000Z

Mr Thomas came out of the loo. He was wearing a grey blanket to which flakes of pastry adhered. He gave a sobbing cry. 'My house,' he said. 'Where's my house?'

I worked something out earlier today, on my knees, replacing the lids on felt tip pens scattered by my daughter. Youth is an exploration of the possibilities of chaos; age is a quest for order. As children we resent any control, any delimitation of what we can do. Adults require a robust police service funded by reasonable taxation.

Let's say I'm playing a computer game, my daughter is watching and the character representing me within in the game falls to their death or is otherwise thwarted by a glitch or developmental quirk. As the on-screen me spirals towards oblivion I'll attempt to wrench the joypad into pieces cursing the game for its non-linear reasoning and general shittiness. My daughter will pull her knees up to her chest and giggle irresistibly. For her, the fun starts when things go wrong.

I can't train myself out of the problem-solving habit, nor should I, not now. It's part of what a father does. But it wouldn't hurt to swim with less caution in the choppy waters of the unexpected, I live comfortably in a affluent democracy, after all.

This is an oversimplification, of course. Most children depend on routine and are wary of the unknown. And grown-ups dream of a job where they do something different and exciting everyday. The difference lies in how we respond to a setback, perhaps. If she writes a number the wrong way round my daughter won't mull over her error, she'll raise her eyebrows and write it again correctly. She says "Oh, sorry," sotto voce, to herself. She is still at that age where failure can be spun as an opportunity to do something again and to do it better. As I approach middle age I am struggling to hold on to my belief in the perfectibility of human nature. But I want to believe. That we can get it right. Meanwhile small children everywhere are hoping for the worst, for bombsites to play amongst, for rubble to sculpt.

The Lesbian Novel and Me

2006-03-30T21:47:00.001Z

Just up the road is Jeanette Winterson. She has a flat above a shop, but does not, presumably, count herself among the common people as she owns the shop, the flat, the entire crooked building and paid for it all in cash, by (and from) her own account. She doesn't seem to get out much. I wonder about her, if she spends the daylight hours hunched over a William and Mary bureau scribbling in tiny copperplate, if she's shy, or nocturnalised, if after years of front and forthrightness she's rethought herself as an inner city recluse. It's a strange, though gorgeous spot to choose for the pursuit of a quiet life. When I have seen her, climbing the stairs with a glass vase of lilies, or looking out of her crooked house windows at a commotion in the street, I've been jolted somewhat. Writers are people that we encounter through their work, and it is unnerving to see them engaged in private pursuits, interrupted, distracted. And Winterson belongs to, or rather comes from an entirely other England than me. Northern, God-fearing, gay. I am glad that she has been around, being Jeanette Winterson, for the last fifteen years, even though I struggle with her fiction. There is an iconic quality about her, that goes beyond her hair, or her nose. I remember that the tendons on her forearms would stick out when she squeezed some emphasis into a fist on late night discussion programs. She always seemed convinced, and as a result was often convincing, in her arguments. Now she has a shop, albeit a very special one. She is Roger of the Raj.

Better Living Through Chemistry

2006-03-17T21:22:00.000Z

There is an Indian folk tale about the tiger and the tiger's child. It's a parable about domestication. The tiger is distracted by the tiger's child and lets his fire burn out. He sends his child to the man village to bring back fire so that he can cook their food; he cannot go himself as the people in the man village are afraid of him. The tiger's child reaches the man village where he is admired and spoiled by the people. He falls asleep in front of a fire and turns into a cat, forgetting why he came to the village. Since that time the tiger has always eaten his food raw. And the cat has always lived among people.

I mention this only because my wife and I were in the kitchen earlier and while she danced around in her nightwear, a bottle of wine to the good, I admired the effect that the descaler I was using was having on the grimly geological deposits around the base of the mixer tap.

I was once a tiger. Now I am Bagpuss. Emily loves me. If I could just find out where she lives I'd be set.

Wonderboy and Waxgirl

2006-03-13T13:48:00.000Z

It has been seven days since my last confession. I have, of course, sinned in thought, word and deed without interruption since then. But not in such a way as to make the world a worse place, so I'm giving myself a mulligan. The swearing and the lusting are par for the course (end of metaphor) but I have been surprised by the gluttony. If it is gluttony. I am really hungry all the time, like Roy Hobbs in "The Natural".

What am I so hungry for? Will this hunger ever be satisfied? Will I have to sell my soul at any point?

The ENT consultant discharged my daughter this morning. Her hearing is normal, although he did remove an impressive clod of wax from her left ear before she took her test. It's a relief to know that she has simply been ignoring us, on and off, for the last five years. When I was young and deaf among the apple boughs audiologists were crabby, disapproving women of a certain age. Nowadays, based on recent visits to the soundproof booth, they are young, exotic, friendly and hot. I am considering feigning some flutter and wow in order to get tested.

The consultant was "a funny man" according to my daughter. Which is funny ha-ha. He was fantastic with her and reminded me of a chap from school, Mike, who I always liked, but never got to know. His father was a bit like mine, but with money. Mike had a lovely girlfriend who wouldn't let him sleep with her but he claimed never to masturbate. I, for some reason, chose to believe this; I think I was the only one who did.

Death To Police Pigs

2006-03-06T09:55:00.000Z

You arrive in the grey, tatty bus station, on a cold afternoon. You are seventeen years old, you have just spent twenty-four hours on a coach as old as you are and you are lost in Central Europe. Your sister, Miranda, has failed to meet you. She has gone to Dresden for the weekend although you do not know this yet. You wait around for half an hour, your body temperature steadily declining, hoping that she'll turn up. When she doesn't you walk up the most civilised-looking street and change some money at a casino. You 'phone home. Your father, as distracted as you expect he'll be, answers.

"What? Hello."
"Daddy, it's Dickie," you say. That's your name.
"Hello sunshine, how's Prague?"
"It's terribly cold," you tell him. "And Miranda's not here."
"Ah yes," you can sense his attention wandering, "I think we know about that. I'll get your mother."

You hear a series of noises apparently unrelated to the retrieval of your mother, punctuated by the familiar barking sound that your father makes when he's not getting his own way.

"Dickie, it's Mum. Miranda's gone to Germany with her boyfriend, I'm afraid."
" --- " You still don't swear in front of your mother.
"She says you’re to go the English faculty at the University and ask for Josef."

You thank your mother, consult your guide book, and head off as instructed. On route you buy from a roadside vendor a beer and a wurst both of which are remarkably good and inexpensive. This cheers you somewhat. The English faculty is closed when you get there, however, and you resign yourself to a premature death, slumped in a Czech doorway. This the only fate that awaits you. You have another beer, and another.

Hours later you find yourself huddled for warmth between two amply proportioned Australian girls on the concourse of the main station. They are trying to persuade you to follow them to Munich. They leave on a 5.30 train, before it gets light. You wander slowly back towards the University. You are ineffably tired. There is a warm waiting room outside the faculty office and a sour-faced security guard defies your expectations by letting you wait there. You fall asleep. No-one disturbs you.

"Dickie? Are you Dickie?" A frog-faced man with excitable hair is shaking you awake. A large camera swings from his neck. "I am Josef, I expected you yesterday."
He takes your rucksack and leads you outside. "We'll get coffee," he says. "And then we'll find you somewhere to stay."
"Okay." The idea of finding a bed is extraordinarily appealing, and you are content to follow this man, this stranger, anywhere, if he can secure you somewhere comfortable to sleep. You emerge into a Prague morning that smells of spring. The overcast skies have been replaced by blue brilliance and a fierce, low sun.
You have some indifferent coffee in an underground restaurant and Josef argues about the bill. Eventually the proprietor waves him away and you leave without paying.
"Now, accommodation!" Josef pulls you onto a tram and within minutes you are back where you started, at the bus station.
In a backstreet office the two of you sit down opposite a long-legged woman with a severe haircut. She sounds, you remark to yourself, like the villain's plaything in a James Bond film. There's something transfixing about her. Josef stares at her with accustomed blatancy.
"I have a place in the Jewish Quarter, but it's expensive."
"How much?"
"Sixty deutschmarks."
"I can't afford that, I'm sorry." The long-legged woman looks a little perturbed and Josef kicks you in the back of the ankle.
"That price is for the week?" he asks. She nods and you feel foolish, and a little cheap.

Your new home has twelve foot ceilings, a grand piano, pictures of Masaryk, creaking bookcases, chandeliers of the finest Bohemian crystal, views outward over the Vltava and inwards over a broad atrium strung with washing lines like streamers. You experience a strange sensation, when Josef leaves you alone here for the first time, that the owners have only just left and will shortly return. You, Goldilocks, find the largest bed you can and fall asleep on it.
For the second time today you are woken by your diminutive guide. He is knocking on the door of the apartment and shouting, in different voices:-

"Dickie, Dickie, DICKIE!"

You struggle into an upright position and realise that you have been wearing the same clothes for more than two days. You let Josef in.
"Come, come," he says. "There's to be a demonstration."
"About what? I thought everything was okay now. I thought you had your revolution."
"They're protesting against the Police."
"Why?" you ask.
"The cops are like a secret society. Lots of them who had senior jobs under the Communists are still working there."

You make your way towards the New Town. Protestors are gathering at the bottom of a broad thoroughfare. "Wenceslas Square," Josef tells you. The crowd swells quickly, but everything still seems relatively good-humoured. A brace of jittery policemen, who seem to be about your age, study the crowd palely. They are armed, you notice. The crowd, five or six thousand, at best guess, begin to move. A banner is unfurled up front, it reads something like - DEATH TO POLICE PIGS - according to Josef. It occurs to you that such a message isn't really in the spirit of the Velvet Revolution. You turn towards Josef to make this observation but he is off, snapping away. The crowd has begun to chant and punch the air. He returns a few moments later, still taking photographs. You mention the banner and he laughs.

"Of course a lot of these people aren't Czech," he explains. They're international anarchists here to start trouble." As if to illustrate this assertion one protestor, his face half-covered by a black neckerchief, tries to snatch Josef's camera. "Polizei?" he demands. You step between them, walking backwards, as Josef spins the camera around to his back. He waves his press credentials over your shoulder into the German's face. "Photographer," he shouts. "Czech photographer."

The march moves forward. Depressingly, you realise that once again you are heading back towards the bus station. But the crowd are getting angrier now, and the whole thing, you admit to yourself, is exciting. People join the crowd from side streets. Josef is struggling to contain himself. "This is going to be good," he says.

The police station is in one of the older buildings in this part of town. When the protestors get there they balloon outwards around the main steps and raise the volume of their chanting. You and Josef climb the wall beside the steps so that you're looking down slightly at the crowd.
A coin is thrown by someone, you can't see who. The crowd exhales. Then more coins, you can't see them hitting the windows but you can hear them clacking against the glass before they fall to the pavement. People are looking for stones to throw but there are none. The coin throwing stops and Josef and you go down into the crowd. A man in a peaked cap with epaulettes on his uniform has appeared in a second floor window. He is appealing for calm but sounds angry himself. The crowd, quietened initially begin to shout again.
"Golf balls," says Josef. He points at the entrance to the department store on the other side of the small plaza, he stuffs some notes into your pocket, deutschmarks. "Get as many as you can." His amphibian face is infused with an irresistible glee. You nudge your way through the mob. Inside the store everything continues in serene disregard to the events taking place across the square. Muzak plays. Scents are sampled. You walk briskly towards the sporting goods department, laughing. You buy around two hundred golf balls, emptying out the deutschmarks. The assistant thanks you, in English. You run back downstairs and onto the street. Josef finds you before you even see him. "Great," he says. "Now give them to the Germans." You don't move. "Trust me," he says, and you decide to do so. The same German you saw before seems to be in charge and he thanks you, again in English, for the ammunition.
The balls go up, harder, flatter. Again they're aiming at the windows, and this time the windows are smashing. Many of the balls miss their target, however, and ping back at unpredictable angles from the aged masonry onto a cowering crowd. By now you’re back on the steps, watching this happen. Josef is cackling like a madwoman and it is now that you appreciate the genius of his idea. From where you are it looks as though the police are attacking the crowd. Golf balls are retrieved and hurled again. The crowd grow still angrier. Soon the police really are throwing the balls back at the mob. Eventually someone fires a shot in the air. The crowd flinches, retreats a step, and then roars again. Josef has run out of film and he grabs your shoulder and begins to direct you away from the steps. "In case things turn nasty," he explains.

Later the two of you are drinking in a small bar in the old town. You are falling in love with the waitress who is only a little older than you, and who keeps ruffling your hair when she goes past.
"You can teach me good English" she says, bringing you gin and tonics. You laugh and she looks offended, just momentarily.
"What did you do today, little boy?"
"Another drink and I will tell you, I promise." Josef laughs. But he is shaking his head.

The Sea, The Sea

2006-03-05T14:15:00.000Z

We found time to get to Southend yesterday, and the winter sunshine was enough to temper the essentially desolate feeling that you get in a seaside town, out of season. My daughter had fun, and my wife and I realised that we could never, ever, live somewhere like that, somewhere so very white and otherwise socially homogenous, somewhere opposite, in fact, to where we live now. The reasons behind this conviction are probably different for the two of us. I was brought up in a medium-sized town that was almost exclusively white and middle-class, and if the experience hasn't scarred me exactly, it must have hampered the development of my sense of community and of personal and social responsibility. My wife was raised in the Babel of the East End, however, and has never left it, and would miss it terribly if she did. We had an expected house-guest the other evening, a friend of my wife's who had missed her train. When quizzed by a third party about her stay in Stratford she was broadly disparaging and pointed out that, after all, she was from the country. To us, the country is somewhere you might want to visit, but not somewhere you might conceivably want to live. Southend, by no means uniquely, has neither the obscure charm of the country, nor the diverse delights of the city. It has the sea, though, which is what took us there, and not against our wishes.

Maryland

2006-02-24T16:10:00.000Z

There's a guy who I see at the station most mornings, he's slight and pale, his hair's a little long. I believe he's Irish, but I don't know if this is because I overheard him speaking once, or if it's because of his appearance. He has that wistful, Irish look. His wife is short, round, black and looks annoyed whenever I've seen her. They have two daughters who are, through a happy coincidence of apparently unremarkable genes, very beautiful. They are always very well turned out, in blazers and boaters and are usually carrying musical instruments. The family as a whole is a kind of advert for reproductive diversification. I'm not jealous of the father. Although I'd like another child I have one surprisingly wonderful daughter. Our relationship is very different from that which the Irish guy seems to have with his daughters, which seems friendly, if a little formal. I've never seen him hug them or wrestle with them and that seems a little alien to me; my daughter spends most of her time trying to injure me in one way or another. It's her way of telling me she loves me, or hates me, or that at least she concedes the unfortunate fact of my existence.

It occured to me the other day, Wednesday in fact, as we stood on the platform waiting for a city-bound train, he was with his elder daughter, that it may just be that in so proper a household the kind of rough and tumble that most fathers have with their kids just doesn't go on. And then I thought, noticing once more the small tonsure of recession that his wistful Irish hair might possibly conceal from the rest of his family all of whom were a head and a half shorter than him, it could be that they don't know he's bald. Maybe they don't know.