fulfilment

One year I discovered the meaning of fulfilment.

I discovered it in the course of Job Number 123.

I was working for a telephone fundraising company, which is still going strong, and which took over my life for a little bit longer than it should have done. I took the job because, as Morrissey said, I needed one. It paid £4/hour. In 1995. The company raised money for many of the largest charities in the UK, as well as the (new) Labour party, which at the time was still in opposition.

Off the back of the phone calls made, donors and supporters were sent a letter and a form, thanking them for their support, and requesting that the form be sent back in the enclosed prepaid envelope.

All of this - the letter, the form, the prepaid envelope - needed to be inserted in an 'outer' - a white, outgoing envelope. This was what the job entailed. I became an envelope stuffer.

It was a small department. We were expected to stuff upto 100, or was it 50 000 envelopes an hour. A supervisor counted them, checking that the address was properly aligned in the window of the envelope and that the form matched the letter. Out of every batch of a hundred envelopes, at least two were usually wrong, prompting dismay from the heirachy. They called us all kinds of incompetence, which was accurate as most of us were graduates who lacked the noose to earn a living in any better fashion.

Each completed outgoing letter was known as a piece of fulfilment. The department itself was known as 'fulfilment'. I worked in a blizzard of fulfilment. It was frequently hellish. Many was the night we would stay on until nine or ten, stuffing envelopes in a deranged fashion, fighting off an ever growing mountain of impending fulfilment.

I might have stayed in this unsatisfying position for a lifetime, had not Phillipe rescued me. One day he came upto me and asked if I wanted to be a Data Processor. I told him I knew nothing about computers. He said that didn't matter. I could pick it up. Let's face it, anything was better than being a fulfilment junkie for the rest of your working life.

spare a thought...

For the electric typewriters of this world. From the acme of desirability to absolute redundancy. Who is to say that the human race will not follow in the carriage of those beautiful writing machines within the space of another cat's lifetime?

conducting a meeting in another language

I can understand ninety per cent. It's the ten per cent I don't understand which worries me.

so this is london

The plane lands at 11.30pm, Sunday evening, on schedule. Thousands of people are trying to get out of the airport. The fruits of prosperity. Weekend breaks everywhere from Krakow to Rabat. You wait ten minutes for the board to flash up where your luggage will arrive. You wait just ten minutes more for the luggage to arrive. You leave the airport concourse at 11.57. At 11.58 you make it to the train station. You prepare to hurtle down the escalator to catch the midnight train. The escalator isn’t working. Neither are the trains. Weekend engineering.

You run to the bus station. A bus pulls out. You ask which of the twelve queues you should join. A helpful man in a yellow safety bib points you to one. Six buses leave from the other queues in the next half hour. At 00.30 your bus arrives. It goes via Stratford to Liverpool Street. People sleep. You realise this is where being an insomniac comes in handy. Easier to deal with midnight chaos. Like Bonaparte.

The bus weaves through back streets past pubs called Wheelers or Frankies with plasterboard frontage over the windows, long since shut. It slips into London via Bow, Stepney Green, Whitechapel. At the station, minicab drivers ply their wares. You know your city and walk round the corner to Moorgate.

There a blond German stock insurer waiting for the 43. Her bag is ticking, menacingly. She tells you a story about driving through the forest near Bremen the night before and hallucinating a man running out in front of the car. Then, ten minutes later, a man does run out in front of the car. This is a psychological thriller. The ticking bag is the Macguffin. She says that all you do in insurance is drink. It’s so much better than in Germany, where all they do is work. It’s also better paid.

Your bus comes. A man who is about to emigrate is sitting on the floor watching Broadcast News. He says that Time Out is covering his rearrangement of letters on the Screen on the Green neon board. The event is being filmed from fifteen angles. It’s a public street. How can he stop them?

You have a sofa each. Your legs stick out the end. You sleep intermittently. Dawn comes coldly. The long night is over.

baresi sounscape

A good night’s sleep is like a present. In a dream where I am hot-footing it out of the city towards Woody Creek (a six week walk) carrying the shopping (Oranges, grapefruit yoghurt, prickly pears etc) there are two pianos playing. Their rhythms overlap discordantly and yet precisely. I shall get there in the end, although I am currently lost in a dark field, having left the traffic headlamps behind.

Coming out of the dream, I awake to hear one piano playing. Offstage. Jazzy tunes. A family is congregating, also offstage. A child drops its toy. The toy meets the marble floor above like a stone dropped from the leaning tower of Pisa. Gravity still working. Offstage, a baby cries. Chairs are shifted. The sound effect of a train sweeps past, outside. The buzz of scooters, the rustle of traffic. The piano keeps going. It’s music is now radical. Shostakovich meets Earl Hines meets Rolf Harris.

The shutters are still shut. The big room retains its dreamspace. Outside life permeates the skin, but time is just an Ikea light which can be switched off at any moment, banishing the world.

limits

The Midwinter sun dips in the South Italian sky. Early season oranges dimple the trees. This morning’s snow has melted in what became a shirt-sleeve warmth.

+++

The violence, if it did not begin as mutual, became so. The last year we shared turned into a kind of grand guignol. Black eyes, livid bruises, suspected dislocations, worse.

I suspect there is a limit to anyone’s sang froid, or patience. She found mine. At what point, under attack in an even-handed physical contest can you afford to no longer fight back? Which are the things you will automatically try to defend? She rooted out my weak points. In particular, an unhealthy attachment to books. The stages became Pavlovian. She would stand with a favourite book in her hand. I would try to stay above the fray. She would begin to tear the book apart. I would attempt to rescue the book. We would fight. She would get hurt. I would get hurt. The book would get hurt. Long after the scars healed, there remains a collection of spineless books in the library: Derrida, Marx, Auden and more.

The point you reach when you cross that limit is shame. In which I lived. A world turned on its head. You were trying to act through kindness, now you act through force. All the evil things that were ever said about you have come to pass. The harder you struggle, the more you lose. Once you have crossed this limit, there is no escape, except through flight.

If you asked why I stayed… I thought, as I always had done, since the violence began and I could still laugh it off, I thought I could make things alright. I thought that if only I could turn the tide, which some days I believed I might have done, she would be happy. We would be happy.

The last Christmas, I did run away. We had planned to spend it together, up in York. No family. I cracked at the last minute. I fled down the M1 in the red Renault, drove to Rayner’s Lane. George booked me on a flight with him and Dorothy, to Dusseldorf. She went home too. I called her from Germany. I cannot remember how the call went. I just remember being scared to make it.

I came back to our little house. We only had six months left there. Perhaps I thought I had no option. Perhaps I thought it would have been still more cowardly not to.

Bad things happened in those final months. And yet, in the middle of the domestic hell we created, with our shame, and the instinct to separate, there were moments - maybe whole days, maybe weeks – when we still had that thing which made it all worthwhile. Enough to glue us together for the final straight.

It was not a straightforward time. I remember all kinds of unspeakable things. But, to return to the theme: I know there is nothing worse than finding yourself converted into an aggressor. Causing physical pain to the one you love. Caught up in a fight which will destroy your dignity and undermine your sense of self. A foolish fight which you can never win. A fight which reveals a you which you do not want to know could ever exist.

barely the night no more

5am Doggerel

Those who do from headache suffer
Find that there is a kind of torture
For which no accountable charge is given
Merely synaptic whim and some deep in-
Grained malfunction of the cereberum,
Laying waste the capactity to think, dream,
Sleep, desire, feel like one of the chosen
Many; know when the time's ripe to batten
Down the hatch and wait for kinder
Hours to come cradle the matter
Which makes up your mind, and knows
Too that kinder hours will come, a propos
Of nothing; just the workings of time,
The cessation of pain, the end of the line.

the best loos in italy

Just past the Roman theatre, in a park which contained a ravine which was given the name of a Greek hero’s ear, we quarrelled, again.

I walked on ahead. She remained behind. The path snaked down hill. I walked round a bend and saw her up above me. I kept on walking, blindly. A little later, I heard a thwack as something hit the ground nearby. I turned around. She was a few paces behind. Throwing rocks in my direction. They drifted through the hot Sicilian air. Most of them missed.

I cannot recall the bit in the middle. I think I became upset, again. Somehow we got away from the rocky track and arrived at a public loo. It was tucked away in a glade, made out of timber so that it blended in tastefully with the surroundings.

I’m also unsure how we reached the next stage. Wherein the loo-keeper appeared and started to get into conversation with us. He showed a lot of concern for my ripped jeans. He thought I had to be impoverished to wear them. He wanted to give me a spare pair of trousers he had there. I found it hard to explain that the jeans were supposed to be ripped.

The loo keeper was wiry and energetic and he claimed that his loos were the best loos in Italy, which is something that still seems undeniable. He plied us with home made red wine. We got drunk in the late afternoon sun, sitting on the terrace of his loos, as though we were on the veranda of a Palladian palazzo.

No one ever came to use the loos, but a friend of his turned up. This friend was mournfully comic. The loo-keeper was ebullient and could communicate in any language. The friend was taciturn, with a Buster Keaton face. The loo-keeper explained that his friend was a clown.

We stayed there for ages. The loo-keeper kept trying to offer me his spare pair of trousers. We took a whole series of photos. There are very few photos from those days, but there is ample documentary evidence of the Syracusan loos. Photos of N posing, the loo-keeper posing, the clown looking doleful, and me looking olive skinned, short haired, quizzical, one eyebrow raised.

This was the way the world was. Being stoned by your girlfriend one minute; being plied with red wine by the keeper of the world’s most magical loos the next.

whispers

James was the closest thing to a young Paul Newman I’d ever known. He possessed a sublimely masculine beauty. I got to know him in Spain, before university.

One weekend, N and I drove down from York to visit him in a corner of North London. We arrived just after lunchtime.

He had a new girlfriend who I’d never met before. When we turned up they were there with a group of her friends. It all felt a bit uncomfortable, with no one making much of an effort to talk to us. The room was an awkward kind of post-adolescent, pre-adult limbo.

I’d told N about James. I wanted her to like him. I didn’t know him all that well but he had a charm, which perhaps went with his looks, and the two of us shared an unspecific arrogance. We both suspected that in some way we were destined to inherit the earth. So it was disappointing to arrive after our long drive and find him monopolised. His girlfriend was far from welcoming.

N and I were people conscious. Both of us immediately spotted an unlikely partnership. James’ girlfriend seemed uneasy. She was far less beautiful than him. I leaned over to N and whispered under my breath: Beauty and the Beast. N nodded.

James’ girlfriend sensed we were whispering about her. She left the room. The atmosphere changed from awkwardness to animosity.

Later, James, N and myself went for a walk. The girlfriend stayed behind. James said she had a headache. As I remember it, he seemed pleased to see us. He said next to nothing about his new girlfriend. I may have been worried that we had caused her to be upset, but he didn’t think so. Unless they are saints or highwaymen, outsiders are rarely the cause of drama. Something else was going on. We were merely catalysts.

+++

We left the next day. I never saw the girlfriend again. I only have one other memory of that weekend. In the evening there was a party at James’ house, which might have been the reason we went down there. Being full of people we didn’t know, it was tiring. At one point I leant against the banisters. I suddenly felt a hand seize me by the hair. The hand pulled me round the banister and up a couple of stairs. It was N. She perched behind me, whispering in my ear, accusing me of flirting with someone. She held me there for an age. I had to smile as people made their way past us on the stairs, as though everything was fine and dandy.

resignation

He wrote yet another resignation letter. It was the fourteenth or the fortieth, he’d lost count. It sat on his computer for a week. He’d tried so many times to resign that he begun to believe it wasn’t possible. Year after year he’d written letters. Some got sent, some didn’t. It had become a kind of joke. There was always a reason why his boss or his circumstances twisted him around and the deadline passed and there he still was, at his desk, twiddling on the internet, wondering what he was doing there. This time he’d kept the letter short and simple. He pressed send, and the email whizzed all the way across the room to the desk where his ‘boss’, who’d begun by being his partner, sat. The recipient was away. The battle wasn’t over yet. It hadn’t even begun. He stared out of a Shoreditch window and wondered if this time, just this once, he might just pull it off.

snippet

From the Library of Babel

Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species – the unique species – is about to be extinguished but the library will endure: Illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.

the andalucian

The Andalucian is studying linguistics. Synchronics and Diachronics and periphrasis. The history of verbs. She says she’s giving up drinking tomorrow. She smokes two packets a day. She’s cried for four days. When she cries, she doesn’t just cry, she wails and screams. She’s pleased to see us. She’s having an existential crisis. Someone at work told her she was as pretty as a Christmas Tree. She knows what they were trying to say and it doesn’t make her happy. She’ll be OK. She just needs to give up drinking. Get over the crisis. Rediscover linguistics.

floors

Each room in the flat has a different design of tile. Two of the rooms have the original, geometrical patterns. Four have an abstract, sixties design. These look like amoeba, trying to reproduce and colonise. In their individual colour variations. There are modern blue tiles in the bathroom. The marble is cool underfoot. It is clean, assertive, attractive, strong.

split screen

At first the party’s slow. Full of the birthday girl’s family who want to practice their English or talk politics. The party’s held outdoors. There’s an early autumn warmth. People mill around outdoors as the dusk closes in. Someone switches on the TV inside. On CNN, Bush takes up one side of the screen and Bin Laden takes up another. The bombing has begun in Afghanistan.

A couple of Englishmen turn up. They say the score was two two. So we qualified. By the skin of our teeth. The Greeks put up a fight. The skipper scored in the last minute. Typical. We nearly blew it. More people arrive. They talk about the news. A Frenchman tells me that they’ll turn their enemy into another Che Guevara.

The party gathers pace. English drinking habits are matched by the continentals. I talk in Spanish, French, English. It’s getting to the end of the night. Sedley’s dragged away. There’s been a crisis. The Spanish man thinks the Englishman is coming on to his wife. Sedley calms things down. For five minutes he’s upset with the Englishman. Then it all blows over.

We drive home through the Baresi night. The air’s still warm. The Englishman doesn’t know what he’s done wrong. It will be forgotten soon. He says that he didn’t think the bombing would start so soon. In New York kids had been wearing T-shirts saying ‘Not In Our Name’. This changed everything. Dropping bombs was not the solution. The night was clear and the stars shone bright and the city sang with the scent of pine trees.

pizzaman

His canvas is a marble slab. From a drawer beneath it he extracts the dough, rolled into individual balls. He takes four or five ball and stretches each one into a circle, kneading them with the palm of his hand. When they are spherical, he teases them out a little, shaping them. Using a large spoon, he pours olive oil on each one. With the back of the spoon he distributes the oil evenly across the pizzas. With the tomato based pizzas, he then takes half a ladleful of crushed tomatoes, and spreads it on top. Lastly he adds mozzarella or tuna or olives or herbs or whatever else needs to be cooked. Using a large wooden spatula, with a handle longer than his arm, he places each pizza one by one in the oven. For the pizzas furthest away he dusts the marble with a little flour before whisking them across to the wooden spatula. They cook for no more than five minutes. He might have to add another large log to the fire, being careful not to disturb the pizzas as he places the log, leaning into the mouth of the oven. The pizzas are extracted one by one, and thrown in a seemingly haphazard fashion onto laid out plates. But none of the pizzas ever slide off or miss the plates, so it cannot be that haphazard. The plates are taken away and the pizzaman starts on his next round.

driving

We’re in his the Astra. His baby. It’s early morning somewhere in Kilburn. We’re lost. I’m map reading. I suggest we turn left. Sedley asks me why. I tell him it’s a hunch. He glares at me. He takes the map and looks at it. We turn right.

+++

We’re in the Red Renault. It’s mid afternoon. We’ve had a couple of drinks. It’s a beautiful day. On a whim, I suggest we go to Stevenage. We don’t know how to get there. We do a handbrake turn in Hyde Park. Later, at a roundabout in Hertfordshire, I pull out then get lost in my thoughts, trying to work out which way to go. A sensible family saloon car veers past, horn blaring, missing us by inches. Stevenage is a potage of roundabouts. N is still working at the checkout counter. We hang around for an age in the pedestrianised arcade. The film showing at the next door cinema is The Money Trap. There had been no hurry.

+++

We’re in a taxi in Ciudad Vieja. There’s a fierce, unspeakable tension. It’s the tension of lives on the cusp of change. I can’t stand it anymore. I get out and slam the door, leaving him behind to pay.

+++

We’re in the Astra. Crossing the border between England and Scotland. It’s mid morning. We overnighted in York with my sister. There’s a large bag of a dozen or so sample shirts in the boot. We plan to lug it round the country. We don’t know how to sell and we don’t have any appointments and we don’t really know what we’re doing, but we’ve got a kind of plan. There are plain shirts and fancy shirts. They all have large collars, cuffs and buttons. Before we settled on the name Dorian Grey, we flirted with the idea of calling the company Jay Gatz. In the car there’s a selection of about a dozen tapes. They will be played inside out. But this is still just the start of our journey. We’re listening to The Smiths. Marr’s guitar whirls round the room which is this car. Outside, snowflakes fall. They rally to the music. Soon, the flakes have soared into a blizzard. The snow falls, there is nothing but white, The Smiths sing songs of childhood, and we are headed for Glasgow with nothing but hope and our big bag of shirts.

+++

We are in their new car. We criss cross Puglia in the late Summer sun. Small towns, each with their own identity. Some are menacing, others welcoming. Some medieval, others neo-classical. As we ping pong round the province, Sedley and I chat. About the things we have seen and the people we have known.

pink noise

The office is a vast space off the Euston Road. The artist, the administrator and two funders are discussing tinnitus in the atrium. There is a buzz to the building. People come and go. The window cleaner presses his pass to the revolving door to spin it round and clean the glass. Men walk past in suits or football gear. Women’s shoes click the floor with efficiency. The artist explains how tinnitus can have the effect of making an individual feel isolated from the world. As though their best friend is the insect that buzzes inside their head. The bee in the bonnet or the flea in the ear. The funders start to talk about their building. When it was redeveloped, the offices were made open plan. The designers worried the workers would feel isolated and depressed by the vast tranches of silence that surrounded them. They found someone in California who sold pink noise. Noise emitted at a certain frequency to mimic the hum of a busy shopping arcade or even a busy office. A noise which lends a sense of industry to the building and all who work in it. We listened to the building. It did indeed hum with a contrived effervescence. One of the funders said that at six you could hear the whole building tone down.

The only fly in the ointment was: no one knew for certain whether this pink noise really existed. And if it did, whether it had ever been turned on. Perhaps the hum was the building’s natural sound? Perhaps it was just the natural sound of the workplace? Perhaps people had just been lead to believe that the pink noise was out there, fuelling their endeavours.

court

In the same hour that my sister boarded a plane headed for Khartoum, a character walks on stage and shouts that he has just escaped the clutches of the Jangaweed.

+++

The play pulled together the modern Ireland, Sudan, and relationship crises, all things that I have been exposed to of late. When you are in these boxes, it is easy to judge whether the language rings true or not. You either sit on the edge of your seat watching your life pass by your nose, or you sit back and raise your eyebrows.

+++

The bar is the usual rattle. The stately director, featuring oncemore, making a statement in his scruffiness. Familiar faces wondering where they may have seen your familiar face before. (A wedding; a short film shoot; in your home when you cooked for them; never.) A splash of Hollywood lending its blessing; a clean-shaven literary manager once known as Megan; the same people who are always here; and no-one wanting to talk about the play.

+++

The seats are the most comfortable in London. A critic scribbles beside me. There has been sporadic but controlled coughing throughout the show. Mainly from me. In the dying seconds of the first half, a daughter hands her father a guitar. It is a peace offering. The father takes it. In the middle of the night he sings her a short, sweet song. The song is perhaps a minute long. Thirty seconds in, the cough seizes me. It takes possession of the depths of my throat. My throat trembles like a pregnant opera singer. The spasms cannot be controlled. The actor sings sweetly. I swig my water. It doesn’t help. The cough barks. It barks again. I try to swallow it. It laughs at me. I convulse. The thirty seconds is lasting longer than thirty weeks. The cough is totalitarian. It throws me forwards. I’m on the floor. Hacking and barking and howling. The singer sings his gentle song. The cougher writhes. The lights go down. Applause ripples round the theatre. The cougher scales his seat. Swigs water. The cough has loosened its grip. It retreats for the interval, smirking.

pint

I’m with someone in whose company it somehow doesn’t seem quite right to go into a pub with and not drink a pint so I order a pint of Pride because it seems right it seems like any other form of ordering would be wrong.

We talk about theatre and dance theatre and how to make a nuclear bomb and mutual friends and the things that matter in the world and my pint refuses to go down. We keep talking, about the impotence of protest and that February day was it only three years ago in the park in the cold which happened all over the world and we talk about more mutual friends and some things we don’t talk about because we got them out of the way before we went to see the piece of dance theatre that was more dance than theatre and still my pint will not diminish to nothingness.

So I change to shorts instead and pour nearly half a pint into my friend’s glass and we keep talking and the pub is just as conducive to talking as it rains outside in the narrow streets north of Oxford Street and west of Tottenham Court Road near where the cobblers used to be and probably still is and Pollocks toy museum and it really doesn’t seem to matter that the pint refused to be drunk.

eye lidded

When five comes and the birds begin their song
You say to yourself, which from all the crimes in
My songbook, was the one that earned me this
Precious punishment. The one committed
At the drop of a hat, in a dingy bar, at some
Drunken hour, failing to even sense the presence
Of a god, let alone the fact you’d offended
Him or her or it. There must be some overlooked
Crime, awaiting rediscovery, whose sly curse holds
The brain in inclement health in spite of heart’s
Longing for that which the night should offer:
An end to all thinking; the films of your
Silent mind; the icepick of unconscious.
When five comes and the birds begin their song
You have unpicked all the visible vices, and still
The answer hasn’t come, still the riddle of this
Perverse wakefulness taunts. All you can do is
Listen to the birds, and hope that in their
Greeting you shall find the answer before
Another day has come, leaving another night’s
Waste of sleep behind, whilst the vengeful god
Smiles at the havoc he or she or it doth wreak.

short film out-takes

The director and his leading lady sitting on the stairs before the party scene. Something about the angle of shoulders and the completeness of the bubble that surrounds them saying that this shot, the one in my mind, will count for more than any that will feature in the short film they are making.

+++

Coming out of the flat in Balham at 7 o’clock in the morning to find that the van had a flat tyre. Coming out of the flat at 7 o’clock the next morning and finding that the van had another flat tyre.

+++

About seven in the morning. The DOP wants to capture his tracking shot through the aisles before the dawn light breaks the supermarket window. There’s a stack of three thousand toilet rolls in the way. Every one of them is moved within five minutes. The lead sips beer through a straw. The light is getting closer. The tracking shot is captured. The toilet rolls are breeding. There are now seven thousand toilet rolls. Every one of them must be replaced. The set descends into a collective hallucination. A new day emerges. The world eeked out of sleepless pastel softness.

+++

About four in the morning. A man sits in front of a plate which has an extremely dead looking baked potato on it. The man is being filmed, but not for the film. Just for behind the scene footage. He’s asked if he has to eat the potato. He looks like he’d rather eat his foot.

+++


Somehow the microwave is plugged in. It balances on the edge of the empty swimming pool. At a given signal the hand towel is placed in the microwave. After three gos, it’s discovered that the optimum period of time for cooking the hand towel is 95 seconds. The hand towel emerges steaming. It is rushed through the door into the actor’s hand. The director says he likes the steam. The art director likes the steam. The actor likes the steam. The steam is filmed and stars in at least three takes. When the film is screened, the steam is invisible to anyone save the actor, art director, director and myself.

temperature

The temperature in London was 9 degrees today. In Montreal it was minus 10. In Khartoum it was a balmy 28 degrees.

+++

Where is the Sudan in your imagination? Monica flies to Khartoum on Tuesday. In the chill of Covent Garden we shopped for a torch that can be attached to your brain, powered by two AA batteries, and a guide to learning the English language. I have never known anyone about to fly to Khartoum before. I once met a Sudanese man in a restaurant in Ladbroke Grove who told me that Bush should effect regime change, sending a couple of warships down the Nile. The fact that my sister is headed there brings it to life. It is 40 degrees in January. It has 140 languages, including Arabic and English. It is Muslim, Christian and perhaps 138 other religions as well. The Nile flows through it. It borders the Sahara, lush lands to the South and the Red Sea. The British built railways, the Pharaohs built tombs, and Gordon died there. It contains Dafur. You need a pass to travel to places. They need more English teachers.

+++

My sister said: I wonder how much of the country I’ll get to know. Then she added: I wonder how much of a country it is ever possible to get to know.

things that sap your strength

flu
unfamiliar surroundings
haircuts
poverty
ambition
maladjustment
dreams
loss
insomnia
obesity
excess
comfort
cold
heat
lack of space
fortune

marathon men

It seems as though the only way to address the dentist is by his title. He is Dr Shah. There is a strange pleasure to be taken in addressing him this way.

+++

The dentist inflicts microscopic doses of pain. He appears to take no pleasure in this. Neither does it seem to bother him overmuch. It is a part of his job.

+++

When I was a child I had a dentist who used to say that cleaning your teeth was a waste of time. I liked this theory and adhered to it for many years. It tied in with my intuition that just because everyone told you something was the right thing to do didn't mean it was in fact the right thing to do. Although, subsequently, I have never come across anyone else, be they dentist or layman, who believes brushing your teeth is not good for them.

+++

Dental pain works extremely effectively in film or theatre. Everyone can identify with it. It is far more excrutiating watching someone having their teeth maltreated by the dentist (or anyone else) than it is seeing someone having a limb blown off or severed.

name dropping

I don’t know where I saw the job, and have no idea how I came to apply for it. It was still early days in London. The idea of being a personal assistant did not appeal, and I was completely unqualified, fibbing that I could touch type, and had shorthand. I even went to a couple of shorthand classes.

I got the tube from Rayners Lane to South Ken and wore a tie. The interview was in her home, where she worked. Although I never found out what her work consisted of, besides being the widow of the country's most brilliant post-war theatre critic. Her home was in Thurlow Square, which I passed through this evening on the way to doing an unlikely hour or so on Lorca with a Texan/ Uruguayan combination.

Her manner was almost as grand as her home. It didn’t phase me. I had been educated to deal with grand manners. It must have been obvious within about thirty seconds that I was the wrong young Wykehamist. She asked me how I was at dealing with famous people. She told me that Princess Margaret came round for tea quite regularly. Would I be happy to make tea for Princess Margaret? I may have hesitated, but said I didn’t see why it should have been a problem.

She said she’d call and let me know, as though there was anything to know. A week or so later I called her, and she half apologised and said the post had been filled. She had been meaning to get round to telling me.

apres le refit

Does it mean anything that the back stage bar at the National Theatre has been redesigned to look like an airport lounge bar? It used to look like something out of 1974, selling Watneys, Skol and pork scratchings, with the bearded locals propping up the bar, drinking stout pints of ale, hoping not to catch the eye of the mavericks. Now it’s morphed all the way to 1990, a bit of pine and Ikea furniture giving it that comely cigarette free vibe. The beards have gone and everyone’s drinking spritzers.

13

On Saturday someone told me that a film had come out wherein the twist was so unexpected that it might redefine the principle of cinematic narrative. This seemed like something that no film bod could or should resist. In between insomnia and drunkenness and exasperation the mutant butoh dancer dutifully went to check it out.

Tick any of these boxes if they redefine cinematic narrative as you know it:

Moody black and white footage.
An extended set piece scene.
A twist.
A beginning.
A middle.
An end.

cheltenham

The child lay awake in the dormitory. A dozen other eight year olds sleeping alongside him. The light had been turned off hours ago. Some kids had chatted for a while, but now it was deathly quiet. The child was coming up with a plan. For what to do. When the kidnapper came. He’d have to do something. He couldn’t just lie there. The child wasn’t scared. There was no point in being scared. He was just being practical. No point in the kidnapper coming and him being awake and having no plan.

in the middle of the night

Blessed is the tribe that lies together in the dust, naked, cold,
Shivering in fraternity. Fearful of the beasties; fearful of rain;
Yet strong in the sharing of fear. The flap of an arm all they need
To know they’re not alone. Your neighbour’s toenail or breast
In your face to guard against beasties or shelter from rain.
Monkey’s proud dawn cry is but a few hours from now. So:
Cuddle up close. Make the ground soft. Dull the night sounds.
Select your stars. Shut your eyes. We'll fly there. Together.

perversity

In Holloway there is a brand new temple of recycling. It’s bright, shiny, and allows for the recycling of anything from Christmas trees to barracudas to souls or silverware.

There is only one drawback to this green deity. Pedestrians are not welcome. The only way of entering is via car or lorry.

alcohol

You need to have a certain kind of credit to get drunk. If you don’t have that credit, you’ll end up dipping into your deficit.

+++

Some people drink in order to pursue oblivion. Some people drink for light hearted pleasure. Some people drink to pursue reality. There are no rules.

+++

Sometimes drinking stops you sleeping well. Makes you wake at strange hours of the morning. Sometimes it’s the only thing that will help you to sleep.

In the cathedral’s shadow

We walked around the back of the Cathedral. Along the little passageway with the long haired Bacchus fountain, past the mini graveyard, under the small passageway. We knew every inch of the walk. We’d done it for years.

+++

I remember seeing her around a year before I met her. Standing around in a group near the Buttercross. Tall, long-haired, standing on the edge of the group, with a hint of being out of place. I met her in Pitkins. She didn’t say a single word. It meant I had to say things.

+++

We sat in the car which her father had left her. Her father was never around. Years later she found out she he’d been living a double life. The car was a small silver rover. It was parked by the tall fence, just along from the Queen. I can’t remember what was said, but all of a sudden I was out of the car, scaling the fence, running across the playing field. Her voice followed me but I was gone.

+++

There wasn’t long before I went to Australia. She must have come and picked me up. We drove out of town to the place with a name and a church where she would one day marry, near the Itchen. She drove well, but got done for speeding once. It’s still a good stretch of road, tempting you to go faster than you’re allowed to. We had the same driving instructor. A nervous white-haired man called Mr Godfrey. He spent a lot of time telling me how to cook an omelette. She passed, I didn’t. Her mother gave us tea with a shot of whisky in it. Then she took us on a tour of the bits of the house that never got seen. The top floor was covered with a hundred mousetraps. Her mother said it was better to say goodbye cleanly. No point dragging these things out.

Two months or so later Miguel would appear in Madrid and I had the world on my shoulders in the Adelaide Hills. We didn’t know that then. All we knew was that there was no way of knowing what would happen. Speculation is a foolish game for eighteen year olds. We didn’t feel young. Everything was done with consideration.

+++

We stopped under the flying buttresses. She cried. She wasn’t someone who cried. She said I’d needed a couple of whiskeys to get my courage up. I tried to talk to her but she walked away. I didn’t feel bad. I felt like I’d been given no option.

+++

When I worked in the scaffolding factory I used to stand by the shotblasting machine. The shot would spray off and smack the side of your face. Like hail. It was noisy. You couldn’t talk to anyone. All you could do was think. I thought about everyone, but I thought about her especially. It was two years since I’d seen her. I wasn’t allowed to mention her name. I knew that this wasn’t real. The sting of the shot was a constant reminder of what was real. Lea could not be removed like a limb.

+++

She had a boyfriend in Oxford who was intense, passionate. Once I went to see her and they had a fierce row. She wasn’t made for rows. I could see it was upsetting her, but there was nothing I could do.

+++

On her wedding night I hardly got a chance to speak to her. At one point we sat on the steps of Winchester town hall and maybe we mentioned the people who weren’t there and maybe we talked about something else.

+++

I came up to see her in London a couple of times. She was working for Barclays. I don’t know where she was staying. I don’t remember anything we did together in London. We never talked all that much. She wore gloves. I have a strong memory of saying goodbye at a tube station once, but I don’t know which one. We went to Trafalgar Square. We kissed there. It was a cold night. Lea laughed at me. She asked why men always kissed with their eyes closed.

extracts from a lecture

Artists used the ideal of female beauty as a substitute for an ideal of cultural beauty. (Whatever beauty means) The female body was a symbol (In art). Which meant that the female body had no representation. No matter how many times it was depicted.

+++

A throwaway reference to Heidegger: We catch ourselves caught up in history.

charing cross library

Drunks fall off green chairs. Next to them sit lost adults, seeking a place to read. Every seat is taken. Chinese newspapers lie open with pictures of Chinese beauties wearing angel wings or spangly bras. Rows of Chinese books, DVDs. Then a mouse runs across the carpet, hoping to grab a spare chair.

the bubble

Imagine another skin. Which shines. Which gives the world a charmed edge. This is the bubble. The bubble drifts through life, tasting its wonder and adding to the wonder of that taste. However, nothing is as simple as it looks. In order to move, the force within the bubble has to pedal like crazy. From the outside the bubble appears to glides like a swan. It is not quite like that on the inside. Futhermore, the bubble, like all bubbles, is fragile. It knows it is. It's a part of its beauty, but it is also means that life is lived on a perpetual edge. For all that, the bubble is unique. It is a blessed bubble, striding the blast.

equation

Perhaps it must be that the greater the positivist, the greater must also be the negativistist latent within.

the motion cries

Think of great rivers you might have seen.
The Indus or The Nile. The Mississippi.
The Ganges or Amazon, Plate or Rhine.
Think of another one. Think of the shape
Their water takes as it flows from one point
To another. Think how a mighty river can
Surge and bellyache like a sea on a flood
Tide, or lie like a cat in the doldrums. Think
On how that river can seem like the busiest
Street in the world. Or a wasteland, barren,
Tragic. No matter what shape your river takes
It will always be wet. And it will never cease its
Flow.

new numbers

The tube stations I want to get to are shut. I walk backwards and forwards several times between announcement board, barrier and ticket machines. It makes no difference. Walking out of the tube station I brush past a man heading down the steps in as much of a hurry as I am not in.

A few minutes later, the man walks up to me. He looks Chinese. He’s middle aged. He wears a navy anorak. He needs to get to Tooting Broadway. He’s in a hurry. He speaks no English. He points at things. I find the bus and the bus stop he needs. It’s a 44. I point at the numbers. It crosses my mind he might not recognise Roman numerals. He doesn’t seem very grateful. I leave him to catch a bus to Camden. I look over my shoulder at him but he’s already forgotten me.

+++

On top of the hill in Brockwell park, there are 360 degrees of fireworks. It’s like being in a beautiful war. I tell Matthew he might as well go to bed now. New York cannot compete with this. He might as well give up and go to bed and wait for another new year to come along to celebrate. On the way down the hill, a man from Mount Barker plays a Dylan song I don’t know. In the rain.

+++

The 88 bus doesn’t take all that long. I change at Camden. I’m falling asleep. I’d set myself to make it through to the dawn but the sky’s grey and lifeless and bleak, as though it’s asking why I bothered.

+++

Max makes about 50 bruschetta. It takes half an hour. I tell him he’s wasting his time, they’ll never get eaten. They all get eaten.

+++

It’s about five thirty. The host says he wants to go to sleep so he can get up and watch Gone With the Wind. He’s never seen the whole thing. His girlfriend wants to make a bed up. I could fall asleep in a second. My brain’s gone through enough cartwheels. But I’ve decided to leave and so leave I shall. It’s still night outside. In the sky there’s a faint pink light next to a faint blue light. The twin lights hover over the city. I assume at first that this is the first glimpse of dawn, but these lights never seem to change or evolve into daylight. The dawn of 2006 comes from somewhere else. It floods in sideways.