The Karamazov Brothers Reimagined As Circus Stereotypes - Part Four

‘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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

"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.

Suggested Reading

All Things Must Pass

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.