random thoughts of a friday morning

Bleak House.

Cheltenham, 1974. A strange sense of bewilderment. Not the end of the world, but not the world as I had imagined it would be. People seeming to want to take pity on me, and me in my eight year old head neither wanting their pity nor feeling it was anywhere near the mark. Being faintly surprised by the way these adults misread my little face. Perhaps understanding for the first time the way in which people cannot do anything more than map their own emotional globe onto each and every problem they find. Sitting on a wide old white-bannistered staircase whilst some kindly soul ruffled my hair and told me it would be alright, with them unable to hear me thinking that these weren't the words I wanted to hear.

Dole. Someone read these pages and said the mention of the word Thatcher had a violent reaction on them. I apologise for mentioning her again. Thatcher won her second term on my twenty first birthday. It was as though hope had been eclipsed for my twenties. I expected all that came to pass. To be poor, to be on the dole for years; to work in shoeshops and mince pie factories and on building sites and so it came to pass. I was peripatetic, unsettled, and lived within that circumference where you don't expect the breaks, and don't get them. The Anglo was the first time I ever got a job which paid me to do something I wanted. If I ever think of myself as a walking disaster area, it comes from those years, finding myself in another rented space, hostage to housing benefit, increasingly bewildered by the way security was so fickle, and the simple things were so impossible to realise. There was no simplicity available; there was nothing but never-ending London murkiness.

I have known only one thing that's as comparable to the stressfulness of life on the dole. Constantly feeling under that Thatcherite regime you were about to be caught out. Even when you'd done nothing wrong, you invented things in your head. Your whole idea of any kind of security tied to forces beyond your control. Dedicating hours of your life to being in places you don't want to be. Dashing from pillar to post to get to your sign-on. It's another institutionalised way of living, which caught up with me. It was a relief to know that would never happen again, when the housing benefit was stopped and I had little option but to leave London and write a book. But even as late as 1993, I arranged my flight times to Montevideo around my signing on in Bournemouth.

Decades. Writing this I realise what a lost decade my twenties has become. It culminated, at two poles. One was the pool table in Basingstoke, described below somewhere, one logical extension of the grit of life that gets caught under your skin. However, fortunately for me, it also culminated in climbing a statue on election night in Plaza Independencia; in a mazy walk to the port from the Mercado (also documented below) and perhaps, above all, an out of season trip to Polonio, the place where they set the beach on fire, where I learnt how to say: Yo Que Se. Somehow I had hung on in there and it was true, silver linings were out there, all that belief in the inevitability of bad luck was wrong. I got lucky.

My thirties were a very different decade to my twenties. Not without their own issues, of course, as is well known, but they seemed to make more sense, and if things seem to make sense, then it's likely you'll be able to take more pleasure in them (though that is not always so). So much so that that sense of never-ending London attrition receded, for a few years in my thirties I even had some cash to spend. But when I look at the art, it's strange how people tell me that I put so little of myself in there; for the twenties was the era of Mickey Valid; of Macbeth and the doctor; of the Jungle of Cities. (A stage in Wandsworth so small the leading man falls off it, half cut, but that's another story).

Forgive the somewhat discursive nature of this morning's entry, dear reader. I woke this morning early, full of confusion, and shall be doing so again. It helps to take the space and impose some shape, which is what words can do. I could write here now til the cows came home, for it soothes me, but I must away to Stratford East to see the teenager's plays. Don't get me started on being a teenager.