one way out

transition

On the last transition, I was perhaps too cryptic. This time...

Ladies and Gentleman, Spring is nearly upon us. Nearly time to bask in the scent of wildflowers and feel the sun on your panda skin.

Welcome to The Mismaze.

on the subject of mutant butoh

Someone said to me the other day: you do know what’s going on in your blog, don’t you? It’s very forty-ish.

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They say we all have a book inside us. It’s true. An autobiography, at least.

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It is interesting to note that most of the memories captured here are at least ten years old. It suggests that a certain amount of time must have elapsed before you find yourself in a position to ‘look back’ or ‘reflect’.

You will not be able to reflect on what happens tomorrow the day after tomorrow.

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This document is connected to its sister document, The Yellow Fever Pages.

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The Yellow Fever Pages were mostly fiction. Fact filtered through fiction. These stories became too dense to be continued. It was a doomed attempt to process events as they occurred through the medium of fiction. An intense, daily process which gave way to the more tranquil task of filtering history through the medium of literature.

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So often things go in threes. They were onto something with the trinity. One’s a start, two’s a continuation, three suggests a conclusion. These pages will now give way to The Mismaze. Another space, which may be more sporadic, containing elements of the previous two and something else which has yet to be discovered.

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Why should a blog last forever? If texts were infinite we’d have to live forever.

Both Yellow Fever and Mutant Butoh would be best read by being printed out, mulled over for a couple of days, which is all they’d take, digested with a mug of tea or a cup of coffee or whatever else keeps the mind company whilst the reader reads.

They could then be put away on a shelf with some companion texts to keep them company, until someone across these idle curiosities and dusts them off. Teases out the connections that lurk within their pages, paragraphs, words and thoughts.

for (ongoing) winter nights

duvet cover

The duvet in Peckham obtains a cover after three nights of waiting. The cover has a white background, with a green seventies shamrock/heart motif repeated over and over and a green border where the motif is picked out in white.

The duvet cover has little pop-buttons which clip shut, though many have gone. On the side is stitched a name tag, Claire Fletcher, which suggests my sister must have taken it to University or boarding school with her, though I'm not certain she ever went to boarding school. There is also a laundry tag on it.

This duvet cover has belonged to one member or another in the family for perhaps twenty years or more. At some point I must have taken possession and it found its way to Vauxhall, from whence it has tonight cycled to parts of South East London it perhaps never expected to visit.

(more) soho depravity

darkness wrapped in light

The singer is no more that a gracefully floppy fringe, bobbing like an apple between roof beams and the backs of heads. He’s flanked by graceful arguments for the benefits of hair product. He has my complete tip-toed attention until he comes up with a line so Bergmanesque, it makes my eyebrows rebel. I retreat to the back of the class.

album cover

The painter has come round to paint the ceiling. I tell him I have to leave in 40 minutes. After 32, he comes and asks me how long he’s got left. I tell him about ten minutes, and he says he’s already done. He must be an American to have got it done so quick. He has a strong Jamaican accent and an easy going manner and I tell him he doesn’t sound American. He replies he lived in NY most of his life. Clearing his stuff away, he says I remind him of John Lennon. He says he used to paint and decorate for him in the apartment overlooking the park. He says John had a cool way about him, he treated people as they were, he didn’t try and be like someone else. He says that’s the best way to be, and he sounds like someone who’s met a lot of people who try not to be the person they are. He leaves me his card. He looks just about old enough to have painted Lennon's walls. Only just. I look at the ceiling. It’s a dazzling and appropriate shade of white.

the strange roads

Being in the wrong is not such an unlikely place to find yourself. Most go there several times a day/week/month. Some would argue that it is the only way of discovering that land called ‘right’ (though this is perhaps mere theological trickery). Acknowledging that one has visited this place is altogether harder. Perhaps its because you have to be out of there in order to acknowledge you’ve been there.

the world spins its web

four months

The child wants to be able to move. It lies on its belly and tries to crawl. Some of the parts work. The knees bend and push. The hands grip and stretch. But its hard to do it all at the same time, to co-ordinate. Yet, the child wants to move. He lies on his belly and he tries. He strains and he furrows his little brow and the effort is intense. He fails but refuses to give up. He will be back and at it again. It cannot be as difficult as it seems. One day, he knows, he will crack it.

not good for your health

the first piece of abstract expressionism

The Roundhead troops rode into the cathedral and smashed the vast stained glass window.

Shards of glass fell to the floor. They smashed sculptures and icons and let their horses shit on the floor and generally desecrated to the best of their abilities.

When they left the citizens came and cleaned up. They collected the glass shards and took them away and hid them, a piece here, a piece there.

The glass fragments lived on in secret, year after year.

When Cromwell died, the citizens brought their pieces of glass back to the Cathedral. They couldn’t put the original pictures back together again. There were no photos to go by. All they had was a crazy stained glass jigsaw puzzle. Rather than re-make anything figurative, they replaced the shards like a mosaic in the new window.

Strangely, although it made no sense, the new window looked even more magnificent than the one the old-timers had stored in their memories.

inverted

The child leaves its parent behind as they prepare to take their mock exam. The child feels supportive yet helpless. The child walks away knowing there is only so much they can do. The child feels vague feelings of antagonism towards the examiner, based on nothing more than that they will judge.

migraine

The first week at university is supposed to be a time of rollicksome high spirits. I hid away and read books. I didn’t know anyone at the university and I didn’t know how to get to know anyone. I didn’t want to make friends with people I wouldn’t want to speak to in three weeks time. Retreat felt like the only option.

In the first seminar, the tutor talked through the books we were to study in that introductory term. The first on the list was Conrad’s Secret Agent. He wanted someone to write an essay, or ‘paper’ as they were now called, to read at the next class. No-one wanted to volunteer, so I did.

I spent the following days working hard. To the sound of young men and women running around in nothing more than sheets, balancing bottles of Newcastle Brown on their heads. My neighbour played the new Waterboys album very loud until the small hours of the morning. I started to get a headache.

The headache stayed with me. It kept me company during the day and during the night. The world was swimming around me, people making friends and deciding what sort of an individual they were planning on being for the rest of their lives, whilst I was nursed by my headache.

It got worse. I had a blue cap which I pulled over my eyes to screen out interference. Finally I found myself sitting in the refectory, eating the small mountain of moussaka which student refectories specialise in, the Cure’s Close To Me playing punchily on the jukebox, tears rolling from under my cap. If they were tears of sorrow then they might have been the tears of my headache. Knowing it was almost time to release my brain and let it loose into the world. It had been amusing, in a way, to be so separate from everything else, but it couldn’t be sustained.

I went out into the world. I discovered the sheep badges signified a love of Housemartins. I pretended to be able to dance reggae with the future founder of Faithless. He professed envy to my way with women. I learned to drink neat gin and whisky. Bought second hand clothes. Found myself sitting on the floor of N’s room at three in the morning on a regular basis. People didn’t know where to place me. They thought I was interesting. I didn’t know why. I had successfully become a part of the world. My headache left me in peace.

The paper on Conrad went down well. The work hadn’t gone altogether to waste. My thesis was that the real secret agent in The Secret Agent was … A sense of humour.

economics

I used to argue with James P about economics. He’d got his job at the Bank of England, he’s probably still there now. He was investigating what held back third world economies. Among other things. He’s the only economist I’ve ever known, so I enjoyed throwing things at him, seeing if I could catch him out.

I used to argue with him about a supposed individual, living somewhere like the Caribbean. Might be reading a book about him at the moment. This individual does fuck all. He (was always a he) sits in a hammock all day. Picks fruit from the tree. Water from the well. They are content with their life. In spite of the fact it can be ascribed no economic value. They earn nothing. Perhaps they are good friends to their friends or they think remarkable thoughts, but to all intents and purposes they contribute nothing. And yet they are happy. Where is this individual’s economic good to be located? If it exists at all.

Hypothetical hammock man used to keep me going for ages. We’d wade through curries talking hypothetical hammock man. I can’t remember what the solution to his problem might have been.

hard labour

The most satisfying jobs in the world do not involve creating things (which is inherently dissatisfying if you have any sense of pride, as the thing you create is never as good as you’d like it to be.) The most satisfying jobs in the world involve destruction. When I worked at the hospital building site, I’d done all the sweeping there was to do. My reward was to be given a sledgehammer and shown a wall that needed knocking down. It went far too quickly. Sledgehammers are remarkable objects. On a job that Steve got me once, painting and decorating an old church, I got the plum job of smashing out roof timbers in the company of a stoned Geordie. We’d balance on two timbers and took out the one in the middle with a rhythmic swing of the hammer. The classic ‘man sawing the branch he’s sitting on’. It beat painting and decorating all ends up. It might be that the combination of physical labour and the fruit of that labour being so rapidly evident is what makes destructive work so satisfying. There’s also something honest about it, as opposed to the perennial hint of smugness that goes with creation (‘Look what I/ we have made’) Perhaps there’s something more profound in the satisfaction to be had from destruction: the quest for a simpler life, which may have existed before they started putting buildings up, designing pretty wheels, getting silicon to reform itself as chips.

keeping the feral at bay

inventory

One packet of Earl Grey
One packet of Coffee
Two roasts (Beef & Chicken)
Two trips to Rebatos
Two maximum three nights insomnia
One test match
Eleven visitors (For whom seven cooked)
Many baths
One shower
Too much TV
The odd football match
Two books only
One delivery
Cheese
Half a bottle of whisky
Two or three bottles of wine
One flood
No disasters

canny george

(warning: the following reveals some of the plot of Syriana)

OK. At the end, you get to drive a four by four across the desert.
Cool. What am I doing there?
You’re there because you’ve found out who the bad guys are who set you up in Beirut.
What happened in Beirut –
It’s not important. You get your nails pulled out by a limey.
OK. So I’m in the four by four. In the desert.
And you intercept the convoy of the good prince –
Not the bad one –
The good one. You pull alongside, flag them down, looks like they’re going to shoot you but they don’t –
No point in driving all that way just to get shot –
He recognises you from the time you got in the lift in Beirut –
Before I got my nails pulled out –
And he looks into your eyes.
He looks into my eyes.
Right.
We have like – a moment.
Exactly.
Then what?
Then –
I –
You both get blown up by the CIA.
We get blown up.
That’s right.
We die?
Un-hunh.
No-one gets saved?
Matt Damon gets saved.
Matt Damon gets saved?
That’s right.
OK, so let me get this – I drive across the desert. I intercept the convoy. I’m doing good. We have a moment. Then – ka Boom?
All over.
OK. Anything else?
You have to pork up and grow a beard.
What kind of beard? Like something suave?
No. Like a biology teacher.
So I look like a dork, I have no plot significance, I get killed, my nails get pulled out … I love your work but it’s a tough call. I’ll do it.
You will?
Yeah. Smells like Oscar to me.

semiotic cricket

The BBC website includes a series of seven pictures of Bush playing cricket in Pakistan. This bizarre meeting of cultures is deemed worthy of greater analysis:

Picture 1: Bush with Inzamam-ul-haq, the Pakistani captain, and Salman Butt, the young opening batsman. Inzamam is one of the broadest sporting superstars in the world. He looks suspiciously like a Pakistani version of Clooney in Syriana. (A film which also contains its cricket reference). Butt has his hands in his pockets, and looks at the President as though he’s faintly amused/ bemused. This suggests Bush is good at putting people at ease or hard to take seriously. Or perhaps both. In one hand Bush holds a cricket ball, in the other, some books. His belt has a Texan twang, looking like something you’d buy at Camden market.

Picture 2: Bush is at the crease, holding the bat in one hand, his arms raised in a faintly simian pose. Behind him, Inzamam walks away whilst schoolchildren in cricket whites look on. One child looks like he might be putting a bail up his nostril. Bush looks ridiculous, one foot just off the ground. There is the air of a high spirited circus.

Picture 3: Bush is batting in the nets. He looks away as a tennis ball is about to strike him/ has just struck him on the shoulder. His grip of the bat and posture are reasonable, not too reminiscent of baseball. He is still wearing his watch, implying that nothing too threatening is being bowled in his direction. His eye is off the ball. In fact it is nowhere near the ball.

Picture 4: Again in the nets, Bush strikes the ball. His posture is reasonable, he is hitting through the line, not across, against his baseball instincts. Bush has an expression of concentration and satisfaction on his face, as he follows the trajectory of the ball. It looks as though he’s starting to get the hang of things. The clue to the picture is in the posture of the young wicketkeeper stood behind, whose hands are excessively relaxed. There was clearly no menace in the delivery. The wicketkeeper’s trousers have retained their neat crease. His expression is benign, almost paternal, even though he looks young enough to be the batsman’s grandson.

Picture 5: In some ways the most beautiful of them all. Bush has three teenagers beside him. He looks as though he is preparing to bowl. The teenager in the middle looks at the President as though she is not sure what to make of him. Is he mad? Is he a clown? If he is (and his facial expression supports this perspective) what does that mean? Her bemusement carries a hint of concern.

Picture 6: The President bowls. As the caption suggest this looks more like a baseball action than a cricket one. Nevertheless, it is executed with gusto. The President is game. His lips are pursed. One young man with a hint of a moustache and a teenager look on. The former has dirty shoes which are not as neat as his clean, new whites. In the background is a sign saying ISLAMABAD and CRICKET. These remind us both that cricket is the most popular and lucrative sport in the Indian sub-continent, and of the fact that Bush, famously, did not know the name of the President of Pakistan before his first election. This whole photoshoot has been designed to increase his visibility and popularity in the region. Pakistan has become a key player in Washington strategy. Bush wants to be seen playing their game. As a reminder of security issues, the shaven head of a white man can be seen in the background. He has no interest in the cricket and his burly form implies he could be plain clothes US security.

Picture 7: The money shot. Bush holds his bat out towards the camera and winks. The wink says that he’s a good sport. It is confidently executed. Two wealthy looking elder statesman stand beside him. He’s in more comfortable surroundings. The bat is no longer something he has to use: it has become a prop. Most of all, we see Bush’s grasp of the art of photogenics. He knows exactly where the camera is and plays to it. Like a model, or an actor. He looks more self-assured than in any other photo. He’s been bold, he’s executed his mission (to play cricket/ to make himself more popular with another demographic), he can afford a certain macho smugness.

playing god

soho moves

Move 1: Oxford Circus to Poland Street. Go to club #1, a louche recreation of nineteenth century colonial bar in Singapore, dark wood, leather sofas, log fire, quiet. Meet Director #1, talk sound mix obstacles, strategy. Actress #1 pops in to pick up make-up in appropriate bag before heading for casting.

Move 2: Oxford Circus to Dean Street: Go to club #2, hints of Regency, more open fires, rules, smell of some Winchester music don’s living room, loud laughing laughers interrupting the quiet with late afternoon drunken laughter, shrill in the context. Meet Writer #1, talk staging plays, dearth of venues, feasibility of venture.

Move 3: Dean Street to Shaftesbury Avenue. Go to Curzon Soho, with Writer #1 who is going to meet Actress #2 who is in premiere of absent Danish director (#2), and will participate in post show discussion. Say hello to Actress #2, all glamour, see the bustle, the hum of art-success, slip away.

Move 4: Shaftesbury Avenue to Charing Cross Road. Go to Foyles. Browse. Flick through biography of a woman who as a ten year old walked from Belguim to Russia and back, was succoured by wolves, killed a soldier. Contemplate Musslich and Moseley, forego both. Flick through introduction of contemporary dramatist, friends of friends…

Move 5: Charing Cross Road to Frith Street via other streets. Time to kill. On Old Compton Street a woman says: We’re all so fucked. That’s why we need this meal so much. Quo Vadis is near empty. Think of Marx scrivening upstairs. Australia humbled by South Africa, seen through the window of The Crown and Two Chairmen. Head for theatre. No-one there. Make a call to Director #3, who’s in a Frith Street Japanese diner eating beef curry noodle. Head there. Talk about Julius Caesar, murder of Cinna, Writer #1. Cut it fine.

Move 6: Frith Street to Dean Street. Go to Soho Theatre and Writers Centre. Meet Director #4, editing her radio play with virtual help of writer (#2), who sends emails from Bora Bora. Run into writer #3, estranged friend of writer #1. Hurry to get in, run into writer #4 who is not coming to watch the play about RSI, but the reading of African play upstairs, and is emerging from theatre as everyone else tries to get in. Take seats but told the kitchen will be invisible from there. Director (#5) of show gives up his seats for us. Watch play with half body on edge of bench, half body suspended in mid-air.

Move 7: Dean Street to Dean Street. Go to Nellie Dean, forsaking overpriced theatre bar, with directors #3+5. Talk constraints of naturalism. Problems of Soho. Which theatres to take over. Actor #1 arrives fresh from stage. Talk constraints of naturalism. Actors infinite. Directors infinite. Writers infinite. The meaning of the six pint show. The lobster that walked from Newfoundland to Dublin.

Move 8: Dean Street to street whose name is too small to remember. Go to Star Bar to visit Actress #3, serving cocktails to lesbians. Talk Oldham Rep, Monday night, Carnival.
Decline to rediscover Writer #1 who is still with Actress #1, headed for Club #2.

Move 9: Back to Oxford Circus. Street cleaners leaning in green/gold uniforms, breathing in a cold which does not belong to them. Woman with dog on long lead attracting masculine attention. Crowds thinning out. Train strangely empty. Another day done.

the yellow shirt

I’d invited Elisa round to Blackheath for some supper. She lived in Greenwich and she walked up over the heath. She was wearing a yellow shirt.

Elisa was from Lancashire. When I joined the shop she was assistant manager. She was a no-nonsense woman, who had lived in Turkey for a while with her boyfriend and who was saving up money to go back there.

I’d been living in Blackheath for a while. It wasn’t comfortable as H also lived in the same block. All bad timing. Later, Sedley moved in round the corner. It was another one room bedsit, with a futon bed, a baby belling, and a meter you put 50p pieces in to keep warm. Unlike H’s bedsit, it didn’t have a view of the heath. I was only there for six months.

Elisa ended up staying over. She crashed on the floor, I crashed on the futon. Or maybe it was the other way round.

The next day I went into the shop in King’s Road, where I was manager. (Elisa worked in the Neal Street branch.) Rebecca was there. George had recently given me a yellow cord shirt which he didn’t want. It was almost identical to Elisa’s shirt.

Rebecca, who was from Tamworth, and who got me the job at the Royal Albert Hall, said – nice shirt. I knew she was thinking something else. Then she asked me if I’d seen Elisa. I told her I had. In fact, Elisa had come for supper last night. Rebecca raised her eyebrows.

A little later, Rebecca said:
Doesn’t Elisa have a shirt like that.
I said she did.
A little later, Rebecca said:
That’s Elisa’s shirt, isn’t it?
I told her it wasn’t.
Rebecca asked me if Elisa had stayed the night.
I said she had. But not like that.
Rebecca couldn’t hold maintain her composure any longer. She came right out with it.
I can’t believe you slept with Elisa, she said.
I tried to persuade her I hadn’t.
But you’re wearing her shirt!

beginning of the end (job number 45)

The owner summoned me for a meeting at the head office, near Olympia. I didn’t know what to expect. I knew that the figures had been good. I also knew that the owner, a sturdy North American with a brazen ‘tash and an awkward manner, didn’t particularly like me.

The meeting was in the morning. The owner’s ‘advisor’ was there, an angular woman who would be kind one minute and vicious the next. She would descend on the shops, children in tow, and have staff rearranging them at a moment’s notice. Her visits were dreaded slightly more than the owner’s for their unpredictability, her pleasantness as unwelcome as her criticism.

The two svengalis of the shoe world sat me down on an uncomfortable bench. They offered neither tea nor coffee. They asked me how I thought it was going. I gave an upbeat assessment of my first few months in charge. Takings up. Shop looking tidier. Staff approachable and reliable.

They let me talk for a while, and then interrupted. I don’t know what it's like to be wounded and bloody out on the plains of the Serengeti, watching the hyenas circle before they approach and gleefully tear strips off your flesh. I suspect this experience is about as close as I’ll ever get.

Every detail of my stewardship of their shop was raked over. Every discount I’d ever given. Every time they’d driven past the shop, unseen, and spotted a member of staff yawning. Every layer of dust their spot checks had revealed, even down in the stockroom. Every faulty pair of shoes I’d replaced for a disaffected customer. The music I allowed the staff to play. The list of my crimes was endless.

However, more than this list, was the manner of its telling. I had been tried, judged, and lined up for execution. This was my final reprieve. Their intention was more than to merely tear up my pride, they wanted to break my psyche and assert their absolute dominance.

I sat there, shell-shocked. I had been working hard. Doing a good job. Takings were up. They were wealthier as a result of my labours. On several occasions I had been exposed to the risk of Sloane violence, defending their near-indefensible returns policy. Expecting some kind of appreciation I had been given the opposite.

It was a fine enough day. I did not hurry back to the shop in the King’s Road. I dawdled, unable to quite believe the chasm that could be constructed between individuals sharing (apparently) the same goals. In this case nothing more complex than to sell as many earth-friendly shoes as possible.

I never worked as hard for them again.

apposite

The sky is a beautiful crisp shade of blue. The sunlight hints at the Spring which is to come. Perfect conditions for a man to spend his final day in the dungeon.

between and betwixt

ash wednesday

Due to the vagueries of the international cricket schedule, I catch the morning service, on this first day of Lent. How soothing to know that it is all part of the divine agency; that we must learn to acknowledge our imperfections with the assistance of our fellow sinners; strive to correct our imperfections; put our gladrags and party clothes away for forty days and forty nights; forego pleasure; atone for sins; await the day we are reborn more perfect than before.

grizzly man

‘I had been in the jungle’ says Werner Herzog at one point and you get the feeling there might be more to that statement than meets the eye.

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The way the mother unconsciously moves her dead son’s teddy bear’s paws as she speaks, as though she has the same instinct to connect with these creatures as he had.

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Timothy had a boogie board with a union jack on it – does this reveal anything? If so what?

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The sight of two bears fighting one another, a vision of the immense ferocity that is innate to the natural world, one of the most terrifying things you could ever see.

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The laconic, grizzled narrator counterpointing the films’s ebullient, unhinged protagonist. Both of them filmmakers, both capable of being seduced by the call of the wild. One a moptop fatalist, the other a steely survivor. Begging the question which is the real grizzly man of the title?

"it was all their fault"

carneval

The chicken in Vasco de Gama takes an age to arrive. The four of us sit there, chomping at the bit, looking at placemats of Madeira to identify our other selves. We slip in and out of work mode. The telly, as ever, plays too loud. At one point Doctors is on, and smoke comes out of the Tise's ears. Then the channel's switched to something Portuguese. Images flicker. Broad thighed dusky maidens arrayed in feathers and white boots, dancing with sustained vigour. The picture pulls back to show a stadium with a road running through it. The road is lit up with fire and colour and movement. The chicken arrives. It was worth the wait.

grieving

I got the news that George had died just as I was opening up the shop on the King’s Road. I had seen him the night before. He had been peaceful. I knew that he knew that the end was nigh and that it was something he had not only accepted, he was pleased of.

The days that followed his death, the funeral, all that, remains a blur. Throughout that time, the emotion never caught up with me. The fact of his absence did not connect with a sense of grief.

One day (already chronicled below), not long after the funeral, I went back to Rayner’s Lane for some reason, before their flat was handed over to the landlords. Looked around for a bit at a space devoid of the life that had made it what it was.

Heading back to the tube, I imagine, I stopped to call my mother from an old fashioned phone box. With no warning at all, the emotion caught up with me, and I was in floods of tears.

Emotion is a tricky partner. They say ‘the English’ are unemotional. That ‘we’ hide our feelings, don’t let them out. In my experience, ‘the English’ are no less emotional than anyone else. Even if it might appear so when emotion is not displayed at times it might conventionally be anticipated.

I have a distrust of the notion that emotion should be released at the time you theoretically would expect that release. Emotion works off its own clock. It will choose its own time and place of expression. It could be that the more emotion is managed according to expectation, the more it might be being repressed. Emotion that catches you unawares, that drops from the sky like a falcon, has its place. Its intensity should not be underestimated.

hide and seek

ground floor eavesdrop

...My neighbours, chief, they're what they're going to say, Chief? Seriously? I've like never, chief, never talked like this like a slap in the face, like it's, chief, a pleasure and a priviledge, chief, I mean, really, I've never said anything, chief, what're they going to say, they're going to think, no chief, I'm running out of, chief, I'm running out of time and I'm running out of credit, chief, really chief, I've got to, chief, I've got to go, chief? ...

leak

A periodic reminder of the frailty of mortar, the bathroom cieling has a tendency to act the waterfall every three months. It was somewhat reassuring to find it has not lost the habit in my absence.

dubious practices

Of an evening the following terms were defined over nothing more dangerous than a vanilla malt milk shake:

dwarfing: the art of appearing smaller than one really is within the context of intersecting escalators.

chaffinching: the art of disconcerting one's neighbour on a tube train by rescuing oneself from sleep with the utterance chaffinch on arrival in a station.

something from the garden

ideology

There were, essentially two different approaches to the grade. One was that an overall look was imposed on every frame. A bleach bypass or an intensifier. The other was that each shot was assessed on its merits and tweaked according to the needs of the shot rather than an overall plan (but still within the context of the film’s narrative). I preferred the second approach.

hannah

Hannah was going to Oxford. I met her when we both worked at the Royal Albert Hall. She was tall, thin, willowy and black. No one she ever knew had been to Oxford before. I knew dozens of people who’d been to Oxford. I disliked Oxford. It was a toytown. She was excited about going there. We’d talk about it. Not wanting to be negative I came round to her point of view, agreeing that it might be a more positive experience for an inner city pioneer than someone with a privileged background. The unfamiliar spires and towers would have a different effect on the retina.

Hannah and I had a work friendship. The Royal Albert Hall had a shift system. We would overlap once or twice a week. I seem to remember her slightly older, more taciturn boyfriend worked there as well. As is the nature of an unrewarding job, little things make it worthwhile, and I used to look forward to seeing her. We’d exchange a few words, nothing much. Note that we had a youthful bond which set us apart from most of our red-blazered colleagues.

Hannah left to go to Oxford. The week before she finished, The Flaming Lips played the Hall. They brought a crazy crowd with them. Hannah and I were working on opposite sides of the pit, which was stripped of its chairs. Officially we were supposed to stop people smoking, keep them calm. Some of the ushers made an attempt but it wasn’t going to wash. The band generated a mighty atmosphere. I saw Hannah across the way dancing like a banshee, breaking all the rules. I couldn’t quite go there. We agreed it was the best night’s work we’d shared.

Hannah was going to study music, I think. We might have made loose plans to keep in touch, but I doubt it. However, Hannah was one of those people, (we are all probably granted a few), who I would bump into every so often. I ran into her when she was still at Oxford, and I remember her telling me she was having a great time. I think I saw her another time, later, when she told me what was happening with her career. Was she finding it hard? These are all details that evade me. When we ran into each other she would always utter a little laugh and say how remarkable it was. Repeated co-incidence being rare within the city.

The last time I met her was underground, in King’s Cross. She had a child in a buggy. There was an awkward patch of stairs between two lines, which I helped her negotiate, carrying one end of the buggy whilst she took the other. She was grateful, but by now the ties which linked us to that peak of the Flaming Lips had been stretched too far, and we greeted and parted as the virtual strangers which, in effect, we always had been.

slate grey

In the grade, the magician recreates the planet, using a set of dials and some buttons. He has learnt how to turn day into night. A clumsy trick. More than this, he can change the pattern of days. A dull overcast English afternoon becomes a sultry Vietnamese memory. Sour greens become vibrant. Harsh pinks are tuned down. What is seen could be a washed out dream of a life or it could be a vivid adrenaline shot. You pick and you choose.

The computer program he works on is called Into The Mystic. During the shoot, whenever there was an issue or a problem, the mantra was: It’ll be fixed in the grade. You walk out of the Soho haven and head home and cook and eat and annihilate some time listening to football and watching something about how to be ‘an ethical man’ as Iraq burns again. You go to sleep and you dream and forget your dreams and you wake up and you are where it says on the tin and you look out the window and it is February again and you want to call the magician. Tell him to spin his dials, hit some buttons, fix it in the grade.

the porn tariff

Back in the early days of the twenty first century, when virtual communication was still a novelty, suppliers fought tooth and nail for subscribers. One of the most effective marketing ploys was something called the porn tariff. This was an extremely cheap subscription, back in those dial-up days, with only one condition attached: the subscriber was obliged to spend at least one hour a day browsing porn sites. Whilst this seemed like an attractive option to many men and women on the planet, the reality was underwhelming. The images downloaded frame by frame, byte by byte. After searching for their most fantastic fantasies (Dwarves, Lady Di lookalikes, Reptiles, Edward Heath, the Empire State Building were among the favourite searches) the images, which the subscriber hoped would in some way correlate to the ones they possessed in their minds, took so long to appear that the thrill had passed, indeed the hour had passed. All that was achieved by some blurred indelible image was anti-climax.

+++

{The porn tariff was in fact no more than the product of a delirious imagination, but the subscribers were not to know that.}

the known unknown

Laurie leaned to one side across the table. He body was angled at about ten thirty, his head tilted back the other way. A strange S of a figure. He was drunk. He had had a few sherries in his office before supper, listening to music, whilst M and I sat with M in the kitchen, helping with the food.

We drank wine with supper. Steak, his favourite. His wife had cooked it as a special treat. My sister and I sat on the other side of the table from our grandparents. Some discussion had blown up. My sister had engaged Laurie in it, was sparring with him. Laurie enjoyed these jousts, by and large.

Tonight, one eye was rolling in his head. He had an angry smile. Tonight he wasn’t telling tales of getting Bob Hawke drunk, or the Communist marches he and his brothers used to go on after the war, before he discovered capitalism.

Tonight he had some kind of dark mischief in his head. The conversation had gone down a different path. One which lead to this question.

You know I’m not your real grandfather, don’t you? Not by blood?

We knew. It was known. He was our step grandfather. He always had been. Ever since we were born and long before that too.

I said that we knew.

Laurie stared at us.

His wife, our grandmother, threw up her arms like a sparrow in mid-flight, and said, in her still accented English, all those years on:

This is ridiculous.

Laurie kept staring. Laurie said there were things he could say. Laurie looked like someone who wanted to cause trouble. My sister and I sat quietly, dealing with this man and this couple who we barely knew. Who had been present all our lives, but at a remove. This was the first time we had spent time with these people who’d we met but a handful of times.

Laurie continued to lean. His wife, our grandmother, said that the children didn’t need to hear these stories. There was no need to bring these things up. At a certain point she got up and walked out into the hot night. Sometime later, Laurie followed her. Sometime later he sobered up and sometime later still it all blew over and the past was forgotten.

M and I went back to the units. There was no-one else for miles around. The kookaburras and the cockatoos were silent. There was little to say. Sooner or later we went to bed.

Australia is a beautiful country but sometimes all that unknown space can bear down heavily on your shoulders.

the fiend

They were playing table football in Piriapolis. The room was vast, a games hall. Full of kids playing pool or table football or slot machines or just hanging out. The games hall was on the promenade looking out over the sea. Above the small town was a vast, confetti-cake of a hotel, and some stubby hills. Below the promenade was the beach. The place had that seaside air. Not too much to do. Kids hanging out in the pool hall. Early evening. He half expected his friends, who were by now his friends, to suggest they stop off for some fish and chips.

The four of them had broken their journey back from Punta to Montevideo. It was the end of his initiation week, which had involved a thousand and one English teachers, several late night ice cream parlours and more meat than he’d ever set eyes on.

He was focussed on the suitably competitive table football game. Suddenly he felt something hit the back of his head. Like a piece of paper scrunched up into a ball. Instinctively he turned to see where it had come from. People were staring at him. Someone was even pointing at him. He felt instantly uncomfortable. A stranger in a strange land.

Danny had stopped playing. He shouted something, pointed at his head. His hair was long, down to his shoulders. He felt something move. He brushed his hand through his hair. Danny was laughing by now. He looked around. People were still staring. It moved again. The piece of scrunched up paper. He ran his hand through his hair a second time.

A cockroach the size of a ping pong ball dropped towards the floor. It regained its balance and lurched out into three dimensions of pool hall. People ducked as it approached. The beast was done with mind games. It sallied out into the night.

Strangers were smiling at him now. He smiled back. He’d never seen a creature as big as that. His friends were doubled up in laughter.

They finished the game. Twilight had snuck up on them. They sat on the promenade and had a beer whilst waiting for the bus. James’ Sit Down was on the jukebox. They played it a couple of times. The air was warm and sweet. The sea tranquil.

In four days time he was back in Bournemouth, signing on.

snippets

I don't believe it's our job to recontruct the country. The Iraqi people will have to reconstruct that country over a period of time...Tourism is going to be something important in that country as soon as the security situation is resolved...

Rumsfeld

Nevertheless, when the decisions are about war and peace one would expect the governments of the most powerful and best equipped states to have mechanisms and procedures in place to ensure some quality control over the materials that experts prepare for them. One would expect that these governments themselves, at the very least, would examine the material with critical minds and common sense.

Blix

It was only a little later in the process that it occurred to me that the Iraqis would be in greater difficulty if, as they had been saying, there truly were no weapons of which they could “yield possession.”

Blix

foucault

It was always cold in York. Ducks were always mating. The season was usually either dank Spring or damp Autumn. A peculiar kind of soggy, weeping willow beauty.

One day in one Summer it was hot. I sat in the fields behind the University and told N something I’d never told anyone. In the background was a red-brick place called The Retreat, which features in either Discipline and Punish or Madness and Civilisation, I don’t remember which.

+++

I’d decided to do philosophy as the secondary part of my degree for two reasons. I didn’t want to have to learn a language and I’d started reading Nietzsche and wanted an excuse to read more of him. However, on the whole, philosophy was either intimidating or tedious. The reading was hard going, and the seminars were dominated by individuals who weren’t scared of saying whatever came into their heads. Circular conversations that never seemed to go anywhere. Democracy and philosophy not necessarily the finest bedfellows.

I signed up for a course called Sartre and Foucault. Largely because of the lure of discovering what existentialism might mean. That was the Sartre aspect. They let us loose on Being and Nothingness and we swam around in it like brainless cod in the Atlantic. That ‘we’ includes the tutors.

Foucault was something else. I’d never heard of him before. Didn’t realise he was not long dead. One of the first to fall in the great Aids war. Aids was big in the eightees. When Foucault’s fate emerged, it only emblazoned the sense of charisma his books engendered.

Foucault wrote better prose than most philosophers. Some philosophers, including his arch rival Derrida, read like people who suffer language as a necessary tool of their trade. If they could find a way of mainlining their thoughts into the psyche, they’d much rather do that. Foucault seemed to take pleasure out of writing. There was an elegance and a wit to his prose.

That helped. Then you began to grapple with the ideas. Ideas you could grapple with. Although he writes about the death of man, his work is rooted in the analysis of those things that man does. The institutions and the ideas that those institutions embody. Madness, sex, literature, crime. Somehow Foucault took these mainstream, potboiling subjects, and used his alchemy to turn them into philosophy.

A lot of people mistrust Foucault. They claim the facts he used in Madness and Civilisation are inaccurate. They claim he invalidated the notion of truth. That he reduced all things to a fluxus where qualitive judgements were eradicated, where morality was something you manufactured, a world without absolutes or foundations.

I wasn’t looking for these things from philosophy. I wanted it to do one thing and one thing only. To explain to me why the world was as it was. Full of beauty and terror. Where the most beautiful things could become the most terrible. Why it seemed never to be as simple as it should be. How I should cope with this.

Foucault helped. Not a great deal, but he did. He explained, piece by piece, how we’d built up the structures we inhabited. Why I was at University. Why sex was not straightforward. Why literature could help you. Why there were edges to the world that we could cross. At our peril, if we so chose to do. He did it with a kind of rhetorical panache, with a playfulness, which suggested that he didn’t always know if he was right in every detail, but he knew he was onto something. The same rhetoric that probably gets him into trouble with the purists.

I find him hard to read now. You need the time and space of studenthood to wrap your brain around big ideas. A time when you can establish your aspirations before you project them into the world. Everyday culture doesn’t want its citizens thinking too much; it warps their effectiveness as citizens. When the time of struggle is over, and my dotage is approaching, I might have the time and space again. Assuming the cells are still working.

extreme screen

A man dressed in a mac stands bare foot on a wobbly rock. The same man crouches in imitation of tobacco pickers of Salento. A jackhammer blasts Tabacco dock.

Four human figures crawl across an abstract space past a mysterious vaginal centre. They crawl into and out of each other, like multiplying cells.

A man dances naked to Ricky Martin. A needle is injected in his stomach. His blood simmers like wet marble. His radar eye stares out, seeking material.

culture clash

The kid had a bullet shaven head. He was not big. He had a sort of runty meanness to him. He wore a black bomber jacket and Doc Martins.

The kid used to hang out by the Buttercross, looking for trouble. He’d done time for beating someone up. One day one of the posh kids caught his eye and he glared at him. The face stuck.

A while later he spotted the posh kid walking through the cathedral close. The shaven haired kid fell in behind him, stalking his prey.

Then the prey did an unusual thing. Rather than fleeing, rather than just hoping he went away, the posh kid turned and faced him.

It was a violently cold afternoon.

The posh kid said: Come on then. He didn’t say it with menace. He said: If you want to hit me, you might as well do it. Come on. Let’s get it over with.

The kid didn’t quite know what to say. He asked the posh kid what he was on about. The posh kid said that was the only reason he could be following him like that. He acknowledged he wouldn’t stand a chance in a fight. So he said they might as well get on with it.

The kid in the bomber jacket was wrong footed. He said: I wasn’t going to.

As soon as he’d said it he lost the will to hurt the posh kid.

The posh kid looked like he didn’t believe him.

There wasn’t anything more to do or say. The posh kid looked scared, but he wasn’t acting scared. The kid had had enough. He told the posh kid to fuck off. Then he walked away across the close.

The next time he got picked up, he knew in his mind who’d done it. Who’d spoken to the police. It was the posh kid. The one he hadn’t touched. Next time he saw him, he’d do it right. Only he never did.

a piece of complexity

The piece moved backwards in time, then sideways in time. Sometimes it appeared to move forwards in time but was in fact standing still. The piece confused the actors, the director, perhaps even the writer.

There was only one way to tackle it. Assume nothing. Argue every line. Make mistakes.

After three hours the two actors seated on the white sofa had made it as far as the interval.

3 homes

A blue door and a small courtyard and roses that grew all year round and two single beds in separate rooms and armchairs we never sat in.

+++

A blue gate which opened onto a side door where the payphone which was stolen used to live. A front room dedicated to a drawing board. A bedroom down two steps. A kitchen big enough to cook in.

+++

A spiral staircase leading to a high ceilinged coachhouse leading to a stepladder leading to a bed laid out like a flying carpet, sailing above it all. A wok and a microwave and the art of cooking without a cooker.

home

Home feels like a museum I have been invited to spend time in. Full of artefacts from my own life.

Home feels like a laboratory experiment. Remove the rat from its normal environment. Obliterate any notion of normal. Return it to its former environment. Observe for a month.

Home feels like it is watching me. The objects are assessing my progress or lack of. The floor is gauging my weight. The walls have graphs concealed within their cracks, charting progress. Or lack of.

Home is the camellia waiting to bloom. Green daffodils shoots breaking through to tease on a daily basis.

Home is a waystation. A lightning rod. A diving chamber. A clock.

Home is subterranean.

Home is the sound of the wind and the shimmer of drizzle beyond a bedroom window.

Home is lying in bed. A bed. This bed.

actors

Actors move up and down a food chain of fame. The fact that you might be recognised brings a sense of self-consciousness you sometimes don’t need. I heard a story once about an actor who arrived in the Netherlands and was stunned to realise his face was famous through a commercial he’d done that had taken off. But a light spreading of fame does not pay the bills and can even work against getting jobs. It can typecast you and shackle you to a past you’ve moved on from. It creates a strain between the perception of success which recognition conveys, and the reality of the ongoing struggle all but the very few are constantly engaged in.

rules of engagement

Do not get too comfortable.
Do not become too emotionally attached.
Enjoy but do not covet.
Use time effectively.
Write.
Think.
Sleep.

priors barton front door

If I can only get the key in the lock. If I can only get the key in the lock. If I can only get my hand to the keyhole and place the key in the lock. If I can do this thing...I might get away with it. I might rediscover time. The night might end.

I get the key in the lock. The lock won't turn. The lock isn't turning. I'm turning the key but the lock's stuck. The lock's stuck! I'm stuck. I'm fucked. We're all fucked. There's no way back in. We're trapped out here. I'm trapped with them. The door won't open. I've been here five minutes. Ten minutes. An hour. Two hours. All night. All the nights there's ever been. Trying to get back in. Trying to open the door.

The door isn't open. I'm going to be trapped out here. With the clouds racing across the sky. With the night air eating my face. With one sock on and one sock off. With no way of knowing if I will ever see the light again. The door's shut. They're watching me, laughing, waiting.

The lock opens. The door opens. I step inside. I am safe. For now.

laughing gas

The balloon is filled with some kind of compressed air pump. Only the air is nitrous oxide. The air from the balloon is released into the lungs. Then blown back into the balloon. Then back into the lungs. Some laugh, others feel a brief rush. It's cheaper than wine; it is a throwback to a time when balloons made a party; you walk away with the evidence.

+++

Soup recipe. Cook chicken thigh and two and a half red peppers in oven with fresh thyme and bay leaves. Cook stock. Cook onions gently with one red chile and pimento. Put all the ingredients together and blend. Add stock to determine consistency. Season; add yoghurt and olive oil. Chill before reheating.

+++

Brixton market on a Saturday. A young woman with a fag in her mouth sells fruit to an elderly haggling West Indian. The smoker deals with the haggling, saying Summer's plentiful but Winter's always hard. A young black kid is preaching his version of the gospel. An old white drunk runs out of a shop and tells him to shut up.

winchester 6

The adolescent walked into the bookshop. He had an account there. He could buy whatever books he liked, within reason. The bookshop was old-fashioned, slightly stuffy. Quiet and studious. There were a dozen people in the bookshop. He knew all of them. Some of them by sight, some of them he knew to say hello to, some of them he knew reasonably well. All of these people were involved in their own quiet perusal of books.

He looked at the revolving wheel of Picadors. Flicked through Calvino, Brautigan, Pynchon, Hesse. Names he either knew or which would catch up with him. He wasn’t buying. Just killing time.

As in a vision, he saw this space recreated. So that each of the dozen people who were there did not exist in a bubble of their own, but in a communal bubble. Where to participate in each others thoughts, dreams, desires, hopes and fears was as natural as it might be to participate in your own.

He looked at the faces around him. Some glanced back at him. He saw how distant the world he had just imagined was. How removed from the world they actually shared. He left the bookshop with the dream inside it.

saltar

There’s a very large hirsute fat man standing on the terraces. The large fat man is suffering. His beard is dripping sweat. His team, Nacional, are two nil down on the night to the team from Brazil. The Centenario, home of the first world cup, is far from full. It’s a weeknight in the Libertadores. It looks like Nacional are going out. He turns and shouts at the others in the home end. Shouts at them to sing louder and shout louder. One fellow in particular catches his eye. He’s got long hair and he looks like he doesn’t belong. He’s not shouting, he’s not singing, he’s not even jumping.

The fat man’s attention is caught by the game again. What he doesn’t realise is that the long-haired man is an Englishman, who doesn’t speak a word of Spanish. That this is his first ever sultry night in this country, on this continent. It’s also the first time he’s ever been to a football match.

Things are no better in the second half. The fat man turns and sees the long-haired kid, who’s still neither shouting nor jumping. The fat man decides that he’s probably Brazilian. This thought pisses the fat man off. He walks over to the long-haired kid. He asks him what the matter is. He tells him to jump. Saltar, he shouts. Saltar! The kid looks at him, baffled. His friends are laughing. (Friends he has met for the first time ever that very night) The fat man wraps his arm around the Brazilian and shouts in his ear.

The friends laugh. They tell him the kid’s not from here. He’s English. It doesn’t bother the fat man. His team’s losing, the long-haired Brazilian’s not moving: it’s all wrong. Someone says something to the Englishman. They tell him the fat man wants him to jump.

Suddenly everyone’s jumping. The fat man still has his arm round the long-haired kid’s shoulders. The kid starts to jump. The fat man thinks that that’s more like it. He gets the kid to sing. The kid goes la-la-la, but at least he’s making an effort. His friends can’t stop laughing.

It works. Nacional score. Now they’re going to have sing and jump and shout even more to get back on level terms. The fat man moves away to gee up the rest of the crowd. Every now and again he turns to check on the Brazilian kid. The Brazilian kid’s still jumping.

Nacional score again. All they need to do is hang on and they’ll qualify. The final whistle goes. Nacional are through. The Brazilians are out. The crowd celebrate by throwing stones at the riot police. The riot police cower. The fat man melts into the night.

The Englishman has been blooded. This is South America. Prepare for the unexpected.

small town big city

What does it mean when twice in a weekend the city which people treasure for its anonymity shrinks to the size of a pueblo?

vitriol

There’s safety in numbers. You can say what you like. Mild mannered people and aggressive people alike scream: ‘You Wanker!’; ‘You’re Shit; You’re Shit!’ and more and more. Part of the challenge of watching a football match is to find new things to say or old things to say for ninety minutes. The man beside me gives a running commentary. He’s on first name terms with Frank and ‘Ernan and Maka.

Aggression released is a kind of buzz. Exiting in the throng, someone says – You’ve got to give it out. They give it out so you’ve got to give it back. He breaks off to scream at another unspecified Scouse section of the crowd.

The blur of bodies is dizzying. For a while my head goes walkabouts, lost on a biologically induced E trip. Within five minutes I’ve come down. Head pegged back to feet pegged back to ground. I’m ready for anything now. Whatever vitriol should come my way.

6 x mr p

Last night on my way to the pizzeria, surprisingly called Enzo e Scifo, the following images from the dim distant past sprang to mind.

+++

Sedley, seated upstairs in the Taj Majal. H is on one side of him, Bjorn on the other. Patricia might be there, and others. I am leaving early. He will disfructar the Uruguayan night, never knowing quite when it will end.

+++

Walking through the square in Bari Vecchia. As we move through the late-Summer throng, all kinds of freaks, beautiful women, and other sundry Italians come up to him and greet the professor. Somehow he glides through the square and we escape to the other side.

+++

A night in Bournemouth. Sitting on the probably freezing floor in the as yet unconverted upstairs flat. Drinking whisky. Listening to Sticky Fingers. Talking til the cows came home.

+++

In the Plaza Independencia, sitting on top of Artigas’ mausoleum. The sun’s setting. He’s trying to tell me something that’s very difficult to say. About Frieda. And other things besides.

+++

In York. This one is unspecific. He seemed to spend more time in York than he did in Nottingham. Sometimes he’d stay for months. Come to our lectures and write our essays. Have his whole social life mapped out, completely independently. I guess the first year he must have used my room whilst I stayed with N. We never quite understood why he visited with such enthusiasm. (It was only this week he sort of told me.) But we didn’t mind. He enjoyed our company and we enjoyed his. Which was all that mattered, back then.

+++

In the flat in Wells Street. Richard, of course he does, offers us a gin and tonic and a smoked salmon sandwich. Richard rabbits on about copper and China. He has great schemes. Sedley chomps with impatience. He’s too big for the flat. Richard says ‘you see’ yet again. He says ‘Yeeessss.’ Richard says: ‘Absolutely.’ There’s a pause. He offers to fix us another G&T and goes into the kitchen. We grin at one another.

+++

Written during an exaggerated wait at the very fine Bari airport…

define your location

Last night I was watching and they had these screens up showing pictures and I was thinking that if they had screens tonight the pictures for this song would be somewhere in between Conan the Babarian and the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

professor paradox

Horacio’s English is even more rudimentary than my Spanish. He’s gesticulating like the director he is. The Nobel prize winner, who’s work he’s directed, is listening to him explain in his piecemeal English his plans for a rock and roll Peer Gynt.

+++

It’s sometime in the middle of the morning. The morning morning. About three. It’s not so late for them. I have just about adjusted. They use all of the day and all of the night. Why waste the sleeping hours if there are things to be done or said? Sleep can always wait.

We sit in Ana’s little flat. The conversation is stop start. Sometimes he and I understand each other, sometimes we don’t. He’s a theatre director who works in advertising. Who fills the tiny room. Who shrugs his shoulders and throws his hands in the air, and laughs.

He puts on a video. It’s a series of Party Political broadcasts. From the first election after the dictatorship. He’s there on screen. Looking a little younger. Wild eyed, full of a demonic energy, running around the little screen like no-one you’ve ever seen in a party political broadcast.

He is Professor Paradoja, telling the truths that the politicians could not get away with.

+++

We get in the car and drive to Stratford. Horacio loves it. They want to see some theatre, but we can’t get tickets. We see everything there is to see in Stratford. Somewhere outside Anne Hathaway’s home, they quarrel, like couples do, but it blows over. In the evening we stop off in Oxford and see Lindsay Kemp at the Oxford Playhouse. Horacio moves around in a blur of energy. England has to try and keep up with him.

+++

In the last days before I go away, they take me out for supper. We go to a restaurant on The Rambla. It’s a sultry turn-of-the-year night. We eat on the terrace, looking out over La Plata.

Out there, somewhere between river and sea, a storm breaks. Sitting in shirtsleeves, we watch the lightning; listen to the thunder. Tronzos y relampagos. None of it touches us. We are the storm’s spectators. VIP guests of its distant fury.

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.