Trinity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.)

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

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

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

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)

(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

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?

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

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

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

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)

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.