A sort of retrospective blog

In memory of my parents
who had to suffer the consequences
of having a wayward son

An eclectic, eccentric, non-chronological mix…

Some work and hitch-hiking experiences written in retrospect.
Most other entries written at the time.

The strands include:
The Modern Characters
The Great Bicycle Walk
Letters Home

The Modern Characters mostly date from the late 1960s and early 70s.

The Bicycle Walk entries date from 1990, when I walked for a while through south-eastern England pushing a bicycle over-laden with camping kit and with its pedals detached… The slow progress had the intended effect in opportunities for observation and conversation.

A range of stuff to kick this off…

Incidentally, please remember that I am writing British English (the British black community would be understandably insulted if mis-called ‘African-American’). And, where occasionally necessary for verisimilitude, reproducing the language of many years ago (e.g. the use of ‘girl’ for young woman normal, while ‘gay’ for sexual orientation effectively unknown).

*  *  *

Cottam, May 1968. Nine deaths per power station, on average. Not a remarkable figure. Bert sees today's. The man's up on scaffolding, high inside the blockhouse. Slipping, he twists hard in the air, trying to catch hold. Then hits a projecting pole and gives up. Custom is, take the day off, or work it for the widow. That's among the unionised. In your little un-unionised gang – breaking into others’ bothies at night to eat your mid-shift meal – the only debate is: night off or work on.
Gang members at Cottam, Drax, Longannet. Jeff, foreman at — : young, black glasses, greasy black hair, feet that stink out his billet, son of the family who control – – docks. Phil, his brother, older than the rest of you, former owner of a night-club, just out of prison. Ray, the ex-boxer with the broken nose. Sid, his humorous sidekick. John, black guy who rarely speaks. Bert, homosexual with creased face and rough Beatles’ haircut, who wanders the site off-shift looking to find someone to chat up. Hank, the diminutive alcoholic.
“Don’t stand there picking your nose,” says Sid to Hank. “You’ll lose weight.”
Two jobs on the power stations: tubing condensers, and concrete grinding. Tubing is hard work; concrete grinding not, but a bit unhealthy. You polish little patches of concrete, till they’re utterly flat, smooth, level. For metal blocks, about eight centimetres by 40, on which heavy machinery will sit. Your tools are pneumatic grinders, sample blocks, spirit levels, engineers’ blue. You get the patch level, but there’s a wobble; you get the wobble out, and the level’s gone. You get wobble out and level right – but the blue shows your block’s only resting on a few high places. Your masks against the concrete dust are cotton wool pads in little frames over mouth and nostrils. Within minutes they’re sodden with saliva and snot. But you each get a free pint of milk a day, to help wash the dust down into stomach instead of lungs. More immediately lethal is when an air hose detaches from a grinder. The metal end thrashes viciously through the air while you all duck and scatter, till someone gets to the compressor and switches off.
Meanwhile in the sleeping huts the billet walls are thin.
“I find it difficult to make conversation.”
“Mm.”
“When I’m driving, I hardly ever talk,”
“Mm.”
“When I'm driving, I hardly ever talk. Even when there's someone with me, I hardly ever talk.”

*

(With apologies to Thoreau.)
Most men lead lives of quiet perspiration.

*

(From The Modern Characters.)

Archie exhibits that common trait among human beings: of worrying most about the good opinion of those he respects least.

For Bernadette, living on the edge of a racial ghetto – having all that poverty and misery only just down the road – really satisfies her social conscience.

Charles has an ideal vision of what he wants from a woman – and avoids any who might begin to match his dreams. After all, when he is hoping for so much, there's always a danger they might be hoping for something too.

*

Sweden, June ’64. Hitch-hiking from Göteborg to Norway and back over a long weekend, you stick out your thumb at an approaching car. A little upmarket, but one has to try. As it gets nearer, you finally see – the decorations – the uniformed chauffeur – and the newly married bride and groom in the back.

(Posted 30 May, 2018.)

*  *  *

Tenerife, Jan. to June '86. Los Cristianos boat yard: sample people. Danny the English football fan, who's trying to get a lift to the Caribbean in time for the World Cup. Tove the Californian girl, who lives by theft and drug running and dress design. Old John, who was in Las Palmas two years back, now with a fishing boat in place of his little sailboat and trying to keep going doing a cheap illegal ferry service for the German backpackers heading to the next island. The nameless German hippy who wanders round playing a flute wearing only glasses and a fur jockstrap. Lars, the businessman who had to leave Sweden in a hurry and has since sailed twice round the world without passport or boom. Heidi, the Aryan blonde, whose boat, when it's lifted out, is clustered thickly round with men with offers of help. Greg, the American, who used to tend missile silo computers and now mends autopilots. Tony, the retired N. Ireland businessman with half a million pounds worth of new yacht, who having just cruised down from the Channel Islands has already got bored and decided to go into property investment instead, and in one week has bought 31 apartments, a parrot, and a mountain top. Dee, his wife, whose baby bursts into tears every time it sees you. Roger, the ex-expensive-private-school alcoholic with the ex-Francis Chichester boat. John, who used to be an art lecturer in England and emigrated to Tasmania to be a fisherman. Paul, who claims he's already crossed the Atlantic once in a barrel kitted out with sail and keel, and is now planning to do it again, only this time just drifting, and meanwhile is keeping alive going round the shops with an old paint tin with a slot cut in the top and a label saying “Research for survival at sea”. And Bo, the Swedish girl, who's been staying with her baby on Tony and Dee's boat ever since her husband decided to try to set out (again) (in Old John's ex boat) for the Caribbean, and she was found still huddled on the quayside in the morning muttering “I just couldn't take any more of the sailing…….”

*

(From The Modern Characters.)

Donal's marriage immediately fills him with disappointment. Edith will always claim that it was love at first sight. Donal had assumed that loving someone would include being kind to them.

Frank is sufficiently self-aware to notice that signs of sadness in a woman’s face provoke in him flickers of desire. But he’s uncertain if this is because he has a longing to alleviate unhappiness – or because he’s reassured that the damage he’s going to do has already been done.

George has energy when Helen is low, is low when she has energy. As if there was only so much to go between them. Though that, of course, is not the reason.

*

Upper Dharamsala/McLeod Ganj, May 1987; Tibetan and travellers' India. Fourteen days of rain. Not the monsoon, just freak spring weather. You hide in the cafés and eye the drizzles and downpours outside. At dusk, lightning jolts along the ridges, filling the rooms with blue light. Fellow travellers talk of Tibet, Buddhism, meditation, travel. Rest stomachs from curries and psyches from India. Sit over chow meins and pancakes, Tibetan mo-mos and milk shakes, spinach quiches and German sourdough bread. Outside is Tibet in exile: monastery, library, hospital, temple. “Medical and Astro Institute”. Dalai Lama's “Security and Passport Office”. Children's Village with 1,400 charges. Jerry-built houses, earthquake cracks, adjacent runs of bare bent water pipe and open sewer. Hundred-mile views southwards into India. Kids in tiny gumboots playing marbles in the mud.

(Posted 23 June, 2018.)

*  *  *

Summer '85. Glenmalure, County Wicklow. The smallest youth hostel in Ireland. Only open summers. No piped water, no electricity, no telephone, no showers, no sewers, quite often no hostellers, and not much sunshine. Twenty-five mile round trip to the nearest carton of milk; eight mile round trip to the nearest Guinness. Three previous wardens have: i) resigned after two weeks; ii) come down for a summer's painting and been found at the end of it with an odd gleam in the eye and canvases covered entirely in dark brooding conifers; iii) disappeared, and been found back at the family home hiding under the bedclothes. You, today, have got up, fetched water from the river, burnt a sack of rubbish, emptied the contents of the chemical toilets into a hole in the ground, had a sponge and bucket bath in the woodshed, had breakfast, put the finishing touches to the month's accounts, and put your laundry to soak. Also checked for one hosteller if there'll be shooting today on the army range in the next glen, and for another whether she's recovered yet from going out to the women's toilets last night in the dark and bumping into an Irish corporal in battledress and blackened face sitting on the loo having a quiet smoke. Then you've locked all the metal shutters against the kids' gangs from Dublin (who so far this summer have smashed up one hostel, pinched bikes from a second, and camped to waylay and rob outside a third), and headed off down the track on the 25-mile round trip to town, to pay in and buy a toothbrush; past the overgrown remnants of the house where Synge set the plot of a play, across the picnic carpark where 405 years ago Fiach MacHugh's men killed 900 English in half an hour, past the rubbish bin where you sometimes find empty cartons with vouchers for that free film processing offer, down the glen to the sounds of chainsaws and sheep, past its three farms where before the Famine 150 families lived, past the waterfall foaming like wool, past the stone for Michael O'Dwyer who finally surrendered in 1800 and ended up in Australia as a policeman, to, after an hour, the crossroads, and the pub, and the red warning army sign, and the old ruined British barracks, and maybe the chance, if you've timed it right, of bumming a lift from the local postman.

Letters Home

*

(From The Modern Characters.)

Ivor was always critical of Julie for being 'bourgeois' and 'conservative'. Recently, of her own accord, Julie has become a socialist and a dropout. Ivor is, of course, even less happy with this.

Ken claims that the reason he doesn't attract more women is that most of them are masochists. He just doesn't look like he'll treat them badly enough. In fact most women, meeting him, see rather deeper – and decide that perhaps they're not feeling quite so masochistic as that.

Luke is restless, always moving on. Though he understands very well that, if we don’t love ourselves, we are never where we want to be.

*

On weekend security shift in London, in the Kuwait Oil offices, walking among the tables of the basement canteen, and reaching up and flicking with finger and thumb each lampshade as it goes by, leaving behind a succession of clear notes, each one different.

(Notebooks, August 1970)

* *

(Posted 27 August, 2018.)

*  *  *

Retrospective, 1963. The North Sea from 9,000ft: black with white fumes of waves looking like miniature clouds. 
Your second trip abroad. Your first is at 16, to improve your French, 30 or so schoolkids from around the UK. The accommodation looks like a chateau from outside, a prison inside. It gets worse as you go up floor to floor. No hot water, and you can't criticise the food because you don't know what you're eating. Was that dog they gave us for dinner last night? And this – is it a sauce? a pudding? ah, no, it's potato. But you go to a rugby international, and Chartres, and Montmartre, and fancy the most fanciable girl among you, and send postcards home, and don't meet any young French women, but do accidentally say “tu” to a cinema usherette.
And now, in the plane, the others eye you uncertainly. You don't look like a deck officer or an engineering officer – which is what they are. Relief officers for a 50,000 ton cargo ship, on its European turnround. But you, 6'8″ tall, thin, with wiry curls of ginger hair and thick National Health glasses? Looking – as an affable American comments a few years later, seeing your old passport photo – like a 15-year-old chess-playing nuclear physicist who's just defected to the Russians? No, they decide – you discover later – you must be the guy who sits peering into the Decca Navigator.
In fact you're just a passenger. You'd wanted to work your passage somewhere, in the time between school and university. Inheriting a dream from your father. But it's all unionised now, it can't be done any more. Still, thanks to his contacts, you're on board for this two-week trip. A Palm Lines boat on turnround from its Africa run; off-loading and on-loading; Rotterdam, Bremen, Hamburg, Antwerp, Rotterdam. Flown over to join it; paying 10 shillings [50p] a day for food. Driving you down to the airfield, your father blurts out, at the last minute, “Wear a condom”. It's the only piece of advice about life he's ever given you. It hadn't actually occurred to you you could pay some lady to terminate your virginity. You'd be far too shy to buy the condom anyway.
Earlier that summer, like everyone else, you've been reading Catch-22. But at school, you took French, not English. You haven't read Chaucer, Marlowe, Blake, Jane Austen, James Joyce. You have, Corneille, Molière, Racine; Lamartine, Vigny, de Musset; La Rochefoucauld's Maximes and La Bruyère's Les Caractères. Oh yes, you know what literature should look like. In the sixth-form library, you come across a quotation from a medieval Christian scholastic, and its translation: “Omnis ardentior amator propriae uxoris adulter est. – All passionate love, even for a man's own wife, is also adultery” (Peter Lombard, De excusiatone coitus.) Utter ignorance of life, love, interpersonal sex, and religious feeling, and only a junior observer's knowledge of marriage, do not, unfortunately, prevent you from attempting a first aphorism in reply: “The only true adultery”, you write, “is that which derives its pleasure from its illicit nature.”

*

(Obiter dicta, Notebooks 2010s)

Life is God’s experimental mode of time travel.

* *

(Posted 9 October, 2018.)

*  *  * 

December 1968, Turkey. Sitting in a lorry cab, crossing the ancient rolling slopes of the Anatolian plateau. To the left, a line of telegraph poles, then low green hills. To the right, the great expanse of Tuz Gölü: its mudflat edges alongside the road, then the motionless salt lake itself. Beyond it, the opposite shore dark purple, with the dying sun making the sky orange and the clouds deep blue above. Not a living thing to be seen, not even a bird. A road and a line of telegraph poles, cutting through bare nature.
Then the first sign of life: a large flock of sheep, clustered below the hills on the left and scattered up their slopes, and with them a dark-coated shepherd. Then a low stone hut. Then a dwelling cottage, brown render on stone, roof of branches and dried mud.
Two days later you’re riding into Mardin, standing on the mud- and manure-covered floor of an open truck, a pullover tied round your head in a makeshift headdress, your back to the wind and the rain. Two Turkish peasants in the cab, in the truck bed with you an old mule, on its way to become mule stew.

*

Summer 1972. Coming back to England with L. from Morocco, you find X. – a good friend, the same age as your parents – starting to break under the strains of his life. He has an appointment with the NHS for psychiatric assessment, asks you to go along. He’s presented with a questionnaire. Five hundred and sixty-six questions… and a masterpiece of stupidity. Because many assume that the respondent is at ease with the double negative – and in a condition to cope with it. “I don’t usually [whatever]” – tick yes or no. When he disagrees, X. wants to tick yes. Thinking, despite the breadth of his intelligence, that this will mean “Oh yes I do”. One wonders how many treatments, policies, papers, will be based on the resulting false data. Dostoevsky in The Devils has Shatov say to the effect: ‘The life force is beyond the analysis of science and reason, and negates their attempts to describe and control life.’ (An issue that academics try to ringfence, with a nod to self-denying hypotheses.) But sometimes, in our ‘social sciences’, the problem is a bit less fundamental than that…

*

On a train going out of London, the line runs for a moment alongside a small reservoir. At the next table, a young boy leaps in his seat, presses against the window. “Oh mum, there it is – Water!… Water…”

(Notebooks, 1970s)

* *

(Posted 31 December, 2018.)

*  *  *

March, 1973. You’re back in Morocco, alone this time, escaping a labouring job in the English winter. The bus from the frontier takes you to Tetuan, but that’s not a town to stay in, and your body is desperate for exercise. Putting your pack on your back you start walking, west then south, through the shallows under the Rif mountains. It’s already late afternoon, and as dusk falls the dogs start barking, sensing a stranger. When it’s dark they start coming down at you, but only one at a time. Each time you shine your torch to show a hand picking up a stone, and they stop at a distance. There’ll be rabies around, but these are sane enough, just dogs defending their territory. After a time an Arab falls into step alongside you, coming suddenly out of the dark, a tall figure in a hooded djellaba. You don’t react, and in a while he disappears.
You walk for a few miles, then it’s time to find somewhere to sleep. There’s a junction, with a small road going off to the left, and a single-storey house where the roads meet. Over the yard wall you can see a light. There’s a gate like a door set in the wall, and you knock on it, and after a moment the light moves towards the gate. The light lifts, a lantern appears, and a face looks at you over the top of the wall, above the tangle of thorns. Then the lantern lowers, and the gate opens to let you in. You sit on the floor of the house, drinking the mint tea they’ve passed to you. The man, his wife, a daughter, a young boy. They’re not the poorest, to have a light burning; but there’s something wrong with the boy. You have no language; your French is ok, but here in the north it’s Spanish that’s the third language, and they’ll be speaking Berber or Arabic. You should be carrying postcards of home, or photos of family. Instead you can only show your passport and your maps. You point to where they are on the Morocco map, and your route down across France and Spain; but you don’t know if it means much. You’re offered bread, which you accept, and after a bit they fetch out some butter. You take a little, not to offend, but you know this is something for special days. As soon as possible, you refuse any more. The man presses you, gesturing that it’s good, but you smile and gesture that you’re full. Then it’s time to sleep. The man takes you back out into the yard and into an outbuilding. With the raised lantern he shows you straw to bed on, and you thank him. In the morning maybe you’ll offer money, but you’re afraid of offending, hospitality’s sacrosanct, and you won’t know how hard to press. He leaves you, and you fetch your sleeping bag out of your pack, unroll it on the straw, and clamber in. There’s the sound of another animal in there with you in the dark, but you fall asleep soon enough.

* *

(Posted 27 January, 2020.)

*  *  *

Winter 1991, east London. You’re back to being a security guard again, after 20 years. You’re thinking of trying to get a mortgage; but for that, you need to show a steady job. Meantime you’re back too to primitive bedsit digs, to match your paypacket. Just down the stairs is a young Irishman, not long over, and he’s always got full-blast soundtrack spilling from his room. After you complain a second time, he says – Well, which is it, the music or the TV? He’s got both on together, turned up full, in opposite corners of the room.
Another time, when you’re chatting, you mention you know someone who’s a film double. A body double?, he says, with interest. You laugh. No, just an ordinary double. He looks puzzled. He doesn’t know what that means. And yet he’s the one who realises what the German guy on the ground floor is up to. He brings women into the house, and, yes, men come and visit them. But visiting the women seems to be free. You barely notice: you go out, do your 10 hours plus travel, come back, eat, sleep. It wouldn’t be the first time you’d accidentally ended up living in a brothel. There was that cheap hotel in the back streets of Las Palmas, while you taught English and worked on your sailboat. But here it’s the young Irish guy who works out the economics – not you with your PPE degree. It’s drugs where the German makes his money. The girls say something like – You know, this would be even nicer with a bit of a hit. So the client passes over the cash to get some in. The girls get free fixes, and probably commission, and maybe a gift. The client’s been drawn in, reckons he’s had free sex, just paid for shared sociability. It’s a creative solution to the mores of the market. The young landlord couple hear something about the drugs, but shrug it off. It’s only a bit of hash, they say. No it’s not.
Meanwhile, at work, you’re guarding a different end of the economy – an empty multi-million office block in Canary Wharf. There’s nothing to do; your partner guard, Vic, sits reading the tabloid Sun. Today there’s a front-page pic of a young woman at a ball, a titled baroness, caught wearing no knickers. Scratching her rump, and inadvertently showing, as the Victorian poet put it, a bright backside. Look at that, Vic says: the dirty tramp. He’s genuinely shocked. He belongs to an era when one’s betters were supposed to behave better. Ah, you wouldn't worry, Vic, you say; you'd give her a quick cha-cha. He does an instant switch to po-faced wit. Well, I wouldn't mind, he says; only I’ve got a headache coming on.

*

There are two temptations: to think the moral life is a seamless web; and to think that it is not. The first appeals to our slackness of intellect; the second to our slackness of virtue.

(Notebooks, 1980s)

*

The Great Bicycle Walk, 1990: East Anglian signs. Outside pub: “Mad wife sells homemade food.” Signpost to villages: “The Deals” – comprising, no doubt, Big Deal, Little Deal, and Raw Deal. Streetname in Alburgh: “Pagan Terrace”. Official notice: “Warning, sludge lagoons” (bureaucracy happily enlisting words in ways that confound our emotional expectations). “Dead Lane” – appropriately home to a farm owned by a well-known pharmaceutical company. And elsewhere, the possibly unappealing: “Lonely Farm, camping and caravan site.”
Meanwhile the sun shines off the first shoots of wheat as sharp as off wet pebbles.

* *

(Posted 2 February, 2020.)

*  *  *

1984, Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. You’re working on your newly purchased old Hungarian wooden sailboat in the “sports harbour” of the city, living alongside the expatriate yacht dwellers, Scandinavian tourists, South American businessmen, Indian duty-free shop owners, Korean and Arab and Japanese fishermen, Russian and Romanian and Cuban seamen, and assorted local waiters, bartenders, beachboys, 8-year-old pickpockets, strippers, transvestites, bar girls, language students, and old men playing chess. Plus Lola, the vast and intermittently amiable landlady at your hotel in the back streets, Oystein and Torstein, the permanently drunk Norwegians on the adjacent boat who are supposed to be renovating it for their money-earning co-owners back home, assorted busy single-minded and technically adept French yachtsmen, your friend Graham the schizophrenic Buddhist who lives in a cave along the coast, Romido who lives on the old white catamaran and is according to choice either a rich bum or a gun runner or a police spy or some combination of these, Fernando, the only one of your students to have a sister who was Miss Spain, and your Korean Consul conversation student, with his love of Gibbon and Disraeli, his vast impractical English vocabulary, and his tendency to start the lesson articulate and sober and end it mute and boozed. Spending your time cleaning your bilges, picking discarded batteries that might still be sort-of ok out of the harbour dumpster, smoking cheap cigars, and pretending to teach English. Plus ransacking the battered haphazard contents of the local library's 'foreign books' section, and, among the old American 1950s college textbooks and copies of James Bond in Dutch, coming up with an unbalanced diet of Nietzsche and Margery Allingham thrillers – though your favourite find is an old English University Library edition of “Teach Yourself English for Swahili Speakers”.

Letters Home

*

(From The Modern Characters.)

Michael is temperamentally suited to making plans, and temperamentally unsuited to keeping them. But then what is resolution, but a sign that something is not going to be done?

*

What was revolutionary about Lawrence was that he was the first English novelist of the human spirit. He writes about people transported beyond themselves. Thackeray, Trollope, Dickens, Wells, Bennett, saw only people locked within themselves. In this sense, he is an American novelist – as Henry James was not. It's also why he had trouble writing novels. Trouble, at least, once he'd left his roots – and perhaps why, of necessity, he had to leave them. English novels are about social worlds; not about lone psychological growth. American novels are about the journey.

(Notebooks, 1970s)

*

For our own failings, we have endless compassion.

(Notebooks, undated)

* *

(Posted 6 February, 2020.)

*  *  *

London, summer 1987. Nelson's Column has been scaffolded and screened for cleaning. The repetitive neat oblongs of canvas make it look like a miniature high-rise or a squared-off Post Office Tower; a diminutive model for some future eyesore. Nelson's hat peeks ludicrously out the top; the lions peek solemnly and warily over the four corners of the hoarding below, as if making a last-ditch stand against all comers. It could be a stage set for an unsubtle satire on loss of empire. No-one takes much notice, not even the pigeons – who know they're better off down on the pavement, and are by far the most animate life-form around. They swirl, scatter, flutter, group and re-group; full of energy, being busy with life. The rest of us stand, sit, sometimes amble listlessly – are generally nonplussed – having nothing to do but enjoy ourselves. Only their cameras give the humans a bit of a high – and much more in the taking than the being taken. As if the kick isn't the communion, or the future photo (though that'll no doubt make it all seem ‘real’), but simply something to do, something done.
Down in the Embankment gardens it's the pigeons that are somnolent. Here the humans are vociferous, energetic, jokey – not being on holidays but only snatched lunch-hours – so quite safe from getting oppressed by any lack of necessity.

*

(From The Modern Characters.)

Nigel dislikes people because he's afraid of them. If he sees them put at a disadvantage, then he unexpectedly finds himself quite fond of them.

For all her independence, Olive is the most determinedly submissive of women – desperately repulsing all attempts
to treat her as an equal.

One sign of Paul's neuroses is that when the natural impulse should be to give, he finds it hard to do so. Only when nothing is expected is he able to act as he would wish.

*

Srinagar, Kashmir, late May; Moslem – and more central Asia than India. When you ask a local which cricket team he cheers for, he grins and says “Pakistan”. On the Dal Lake, the water level's eight feet above normal, lakeside living shacks are under water, the waters lap over the boulevard and soak the shoes of Hindus up on holiday or honeymoon from the hot south. Out in the countryside, entire crops have been lost. At night on the houseboats you hear the calls to prayer from the city mosques. But not the clear human beauty of a lone muezzin’s song. Whether it's the water, or just the weird overlapping, as the calls come amplified and unsynchronized, but the effect is unearthly, unnerving, fading and rising, unutterably strange. Exactly like the soundtrack of some Hollywood horror, where a choir of the undead cries into the night.

(Notebooks, 1980s)

* *

(Posted 15 March, 2020.)

*  *  *

1970, London. You’ve got a room in a mews flat just off Notting Hill Gate. There’s a spare room, it’s the route to the loo, but it’s ok for putting people up. Mostly Australian backpackers, young women, that your flatmate has chatted up, hoping to find a solution to his virginity. But your brother visits too, and a friend from school days. Your friend’s stayed on longer at university, choosing to take the academic path; and in the process he’s become a Marxist. There weren’t many in the quiet cathedral city where you both grew up. He’s taken up a university post abroad, and asks if you can receive mail redirected from his old address, and forward it on. This arrangement not to be mentioned to his parents, should they be in touch. And if anyone should phone asking for information, you are to offer the codeword “Clarissa”. To which the correct answer is, “she has gone on holiday to Hong Kong”…
Anyway, he departs, and nothing much happens, though there now seem to be odd clickings on the phone line. And some people claiming to be communists from Finchley come calling, but fail to respond to passwords of any kind. But then one morning there’s a knock on the front door, and you go down the stairs to the cobbled mews, and there’s a uniformed policewoman standing there. You’ve only just come off night shift as a security guard, still in uniform, so don’t exactly look like a rabid revolutionary, which possibly throws her a bit. Anyway, she comes out with a stumbling story about inquiring about a stolen car. Which could be quite convincing, in this mews of ground-floor garages; only, when you ask what make of car, she can’t remember. So after that you realise you’re now in the Special Branch book for operating a subversive left-wing cell. Which is ironic, because you’ve paid your dues in American style ‘political science’ – whose ideology is to strip you of ideology by focusing on testable trivia – and so now have no noticeable political beliefs of any kind. But no further amusement comes of this, except for just one item in the post for possible forwarding, a duplicated ‘pamphlet’, published by the Marxist-Leninist Organisation of Britain. Which attacks a Mr. Robert Archbold for his own pamphlet, “The ‘Marxist-Leninist’ Organisation of Britain is a Trotskyite and Counter-Revolutionary Gang Hiding Behind Red Flags.” You can’t remember if your friend decides he wants this forwarded on.
A couple of years later, back from Morocco with your girlfriend, you’re staying in Notting Hill itself, still then a semi-ghetto of West Indians and Irish and the disgruntled young. Your trip abroad has lost you the mews flat, but you’ve got this one, through a dropout friend, a big bare white room that your girlfriend brightens with her clothes. No police-people come visiting. Yet this place, you discover after a while, is connected to a protest group who’ve been conducting small bombings. Against property, and political and cultural symbols; thankfully, as they indeed intended, almost no-one has been hurt. But there’s a big trial coming up, that will end in long prison sentences. You happen to meet one of their minor followers. And him, your German girlfriend is wry about after, with the clear human sight that you love her for. “Patrick,” she comments, “is really proud that he has to report to the police every week”…
And at the same time of course, everywhere, in every way, people do indeed suffer the inequalities of power. And some try to fight it, in their quiet ways, who don’t have to. There’s no intrinsic merit in your footloose dispassion. And perhaps Marx was wrong, when he said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. Perhaps, thanks to our humanity, it is always, simultaneously, both.

*

Summer ’87. In far northern India, in a shop, a Tibetan kid is wrapping bread for a long-haired traveller. He starts to wrap it in one sheet of newspaper, stops, peers closely at the sheet, sees it's the one with the local cinema times, thinks, changes his mind, and chooses another. The new one is the front page. “Oh yeah”, says the traveller, “that's better, the front page, eh? What's it say? – Eighteen dead in the Punjab? Fantastic – you wrap it in that.”

(Notebooks, 1980s)

*

(Obiter dicta, 2013.)

One is forced to conclude, looking at the world, that God’s sense of humour is even broader than our own.

* *

(Posted 15 September, 2020.)

*  *  *

1984. Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic. You get glimpses of expat life. J. runs a bar in Colonial Town with another American. J.’s from Colorado, ex circus clown, ex many things. Tells the story of an incident in El Rincon – a late night bar people go to when everywhere else has closed. (Two women expats comment that it’s one of the few places they’d think twice about going to alone.) J. had been drunk, and fallen asleep at the bar. A prostitute tried to pick his wallet. The barman saw her, drew a knife. She smashed a bottle to defend herself. At which point J. woke up. That was what was wonderful here, he said; how good your friends like that barman were. What a really kind thing it had been.
Meanwhile, early one Sunday morning, there’s a minor earth tremor in the city. Afterwards, you clearly remember: just waking enough, you decide you’re only a few months old and someone’s rocking your cradle, and quietly go to sleep again.
That evening you find a colony of ants, probably disturbed by some shift in the wall bricks, trying to set up home under your pillow. You relocate them unsympathetically to a nearby crevice. There are rules to observe. Ants have walls, cockroaches floors; the bed is for you and the mosquitoes.

*

Socialising: a process in which human beings flock together in the hope of finding love or of forgetting that they haven't.

In the tension between love and need – that is where the world lives.

(Notebooks, 1970s)

*

Autumn, 1972; a building site in Notting Hill. The sky is magnificent. The sky itself, and the line where the sky meets London, all around. You only have to lift your eyes, and there it is. Airliners cross it, looking huge as they drift down towards Heathrow. In the morning, going to work, when everything is silent, you can catch one from the top edge of your eye, and for a moment, before you see it properly, it seems completely motionless; as if some great chunk of metal is sitting over the city in the sky.

* *

(Posted 27 September, 2020.)

*  *  *

December 1968. You arrive in Kuwait with sixpence in your pocket. Maybe you’ll find work but it’s doubtful. Besides, everything’s closed for three days: tomorrow’s the first day of Eid, then it’s Christmas – they fall together this year. At the consulate, the guard puts a call through to the consul in his home. He’s pessimistic about work, talks of English travellers selling their bodies on the streets of Tehran. But agrees to what you say – book into a hotel, surrender your passport. He’ll ask the Foreign Office to phone your family, give them a message to telegraph money out. He speaks to the guard, gets him to take you to a suitably cheap hotel. They look at you, look at your passport, say ok. You don’t ask, just need to sleep. Later you get up, ask. No, they don’t do food. Of course they don’t, the cheap ones never do.
A bit more experience, and you’d ask them to get stuff in, add it to the bill. But the Moslem code of hospitality comes to your rescue. An Egyptian staying in the hotel brings you a kebab, a young Arab shares bread and jam. Each day your body gets weaker, but you get by without selling it. In the heat of the day you lie on the bed, reading Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. Through the window, part of the street shows, hazed by mosquito net. On the opposite roof, as evening comes on, the painted bulbs of a café appear, above the shop lights and the neon. The sounds came across, recorded music among the voices, and the sharp crack of backgammon counters, wood on wood.
In the relative cool you get up and go out. Go up the street, stepping among the people and the cars. Visitors jam the shops, faded American sedans nose between the pavements. Out on the main road, sounds flatten beneath the width of sky, and the dark shine of newer cars takes up the shoplights. Students go by, red and white headscarves above suits, hands clutching chocolate boxes. You think you can see how far people have come to buy: beards that belong in Syria or the Lebanon; styles of dress from North Africa. In the shop windows, record players and tape recorders – German, Swedish – polished wood and metal, bright knobs and dials. Endless shops of Swiss watches. Down the back streets, on the stalls, are the cheap counterparts, among the rolls of cloth and the paste jewellery. Cardboard boxes of watches. Clusters of plastic radios.
You come out of the souk and find yourself by the old harbour; go along the breakwater looking at the dhows. Then turn, and walk down the huge quiet avenue, back towards the centre, wandering slowly among the flowerbeds. Near the hotel, by the main street, the line of shoe-cleaners, crouched on the pavement, see the dirt on your shoes, and begin beating their boxes to catch your attention, each joining in turn as you go by. And you think of how life might be, back in England: getting a flat, and lining it with books, and putting people up in it.

*

Always postponed – the moment when we think we start to live.

*

(From The Modern Characters.)

All Quentin’s acts are meant to save his freedom: freedom from need, freedom from duty, freedom from devotion. And so, of course, all his dreams are of ways to lose that freedom. Determined and alone, he cowers in a corner of empty space, staring out at the dense blocked maze of his mind.

*

November, 1991. Heading across London in the tube: “Now I know what a baked bean feels like,” says an old lady, as even more passengers crowd on at Bond Street. One kid starts shouting across the carriage in the crush, calling out the names of hated foods, trying to get his friends to be sick in the crowd. “Kidneys.” “Rhubarb.” “Liver.” “Cabbage.” Each offering is greeted with cries of nauseous delight. At Oxford Circus they get off, but more people push on. A child wails resentfully, the parent mutters something reassuring. Only to get another wail back: “But I don't want to go home!”

*

The eye of the social scientist; the eye of the politician; the eye of the painter; the eye of the poet; the eye of the novelist; the eye of the child.

* *

(Posted 16 October, 2020.)

*  *  *

The Great Bicycle Walk, 1990. Rural Suffolk in summer. Sun shining, birds singing, wheat growing. Plenty of trees, no cars. Bits of land left to unproductive uses. Dandelions and daisies and brambles by the roadside. Nineteenth-century farm buildings, with those old wrought-iron ‘S’ shapes on the walls where the tie-bars end. Ivy-covered remains of an abandoned house.
Must put a bit more padding on the handlebars.
Moving from delight to effort to delight. That being the only way to be fully human.
You and your two-wheeled donkey.
Come to a crossroads, go to pub for directions. No-one behind bar, but three people sitting in front of it: woman, man, younger woman. Wait for one of the bar staff to appear, meanwhile the woman’s nattering on about you – “he’s tall isn’t he, he’d get you to shut up”. You play dumb, so she turns her attention back to the man. “I don’t believe you,” she says. “Well,” he says, “two of them said so, and they’ve both got medical training.” “I’ll shout it round the pub, shall I,” she says. “Alan’s got..”; and stops. “Alan’s got..”; and stops. “I don’t believe it,” she says; “you bath every week, same as everyone else.” “Every day,” says Alan, a little hurt.

*

We’re all bits of god, trying to get back.

(Notebooks, 1990s)

*

Notting Hill, 1970. Children in Talbot Road, playing game with empty bottle – standing in circle, and throwing it from one to another. One drops it, but it doesn't break. Someone suggests they change it for a milk bottle, but someone else doesn't like that. Then, as you walk away, there is the sound of the bottle smashing on the road, with a little explosion, and you turn to see them preoccupied with gathering up their belongings and wandering away.

* *

(Posted 23 August, 2021.)

*  *  *

Allahabad, March 1987. A pilgrim town on the Ganges – but, unlike Benares/Varanasi, not a tourist destination. Instead the other visitors are mostly lawyers, come to argue cases at the state high court. You, you’re here for a bit of acupuncture from the ‘President of the International Acupuncture Association’ – who turns out to be a self-styled ‘professor’ with a shabby office down a side street, and whose usual clients are wealthy Saudi Arabians searching cures for infertility or impotence. Still, he introduces you to a local poet/journalist, who introduces you to the organiser of the about-to-happen Allahabad All-India Conference on Reincarnation. So – since you are not unsympathetic to the subject – you get a large garish rosette proclaiming you a Delegate, and get to listen to presentations that reinforce your doubts about the spoken word as a medium for intellectual inquiry.
Your poet/journalist friend writes for The Pioneer, the paper where Kipling worked, and for which Churchill was war correspondent. During your stay, he unearths dubious goings-on in the personal finances of the – already harassed – Minister of Defence. Thanks to stories of this kind, the local police are supposed to give him 24-hours-a-day protection. But in his left-wing youth, other writing incurred a different police interest. He’d sent one of his English-language poems to the North Vietnamese – who liked it so much they dropped it in thousands over the war zone. Fortunately for him, this was a little before Indira Gandhi declared the 1975-77 “Emergency”. So when the police came round, he was able to show them a letter from the same Mrs Gandhi, expressing her thanks and appreciation for the copy he'd sent…
It’s not long since Holi, the festival when coloured dyes get thrown around. Unfortunately, he tells you, not the only thing that gets thrown, round here. Since moving to his present house, he's witnessed at least two murders a year, on the busy junction outside. And not the knifings or even shootings you might expect, for the purely personal, non-political affairs that they were, but bombings that left unlucky passers-by dead or maimed; using readily available home-made devices selling for 1 rupee 25 (say 6p) each. That’s pretty cheap. At one rupee, a newspaper is somewhat cheaper than a bomb. On the other hand, a ballpoint pen costs around 2 or 3 bombs; so the relative economics of pen and sword are unclear.

*

(Obiter dicta.)

Life’s not a bed of roses, you say. But of course it is. Only – the thorns are still attached.

*

We are all longing to give meaning to our lives; and try to do so in just two ways. One is by limiting ourselves: by disciplining acts or thoughts till they satisfy some concept of the valuable. The other is by being lifted out of ourselves – and all our hopes and dreams, studies and creations, journeys and procreations, come down to this. The first is a path of discipline – but it appeals to the ego because it enlists the ego. The second is a path of growth – but the self-forgetfulness it depends on is so easy to forget. For all its domains can equally be territories for the ego, of course; but then they’re not paths for growth.

(Notebooks, 1980s)

*

* *

(Posted 28 August, 2021.)

*  *  *

The Moonduster voyage: Punta Delgada, Azores, April 1983. Photo, by Mike or Barry: a small party. Brendan, bent over the galley, grins into the camera, his face bleached by the flash. Your chin and nose and someone's disembodied arm and a cola can all peek in stage right. A Frenchman sits on a pipe cot, legs sprawled and a beer bottle stuck halfway into his mouth, its neck bulging out one cheek. Another disembodied hand reaches down from the hatch above, and has either just let go of a small yellow globe – an orange presumably – or possibly is just reaching to pluck it from where it balances behind Brendan's left ear.
As he drinks more, Brendan starts swinging from the handrails, stomping round the cabin. And then at one o'clock in the morning, decides it's time to cook crêpes. So you're all sitting round and there's empty glasses and full glasses and empty bottles and half-full bottles, and in the middle of it all Brendan is mixing up the batter dough, and getting the cooker going, and pouring the mix in the pan, and getting it cooking, and then trying to flip these half-cooked crêpes. And each crêpe that's ready he pours brandy over it and flicks his lighter, and there's this great whoosh of flame and all this soot appears on the cabin roof. And then he serves that crêpe and starts on the next. So in the end all the dough's been cooked and all the crêpes eaten and all the drinks drunk and all the guests have gone, and you crawl into bed and say goodbye to the world for a few hours. And in the morning you wake up and – naturally – Oh my God: What day is it? What year is it? Where am I? Who am I? Where's all this crêpe dough come from??!! Every bloody where. All over the galley. All over the ceiling. All over the floor. In your bunk… What have I been sleeping with? Oh God – a pancake.

*

Maybe it would be good to have the eye and ear of an Indian hunter, dropped suddenly into civilised life. Innocent acuteness. Chronic innocence.

(Notebooks, 1970s)

*

London, 1980s. A businessman on the tube is working away on his Psion Organiser. The woman he is with turns to him: “Do you want another sweetie?”

* *

(Posted 30 August, 2021.)

*  *  *

Norwich, 1966. For the summer gap before a university course you find a job with one of the Norwich builders, and on the first day get sent to join the work on the outside of the Cathedral. The pay is about 5/6d or 5/9d an hour – 28 to 29p. Though people working right at the top of the 315ft spire get an extra 1p an hour danger money. Your job, working alone, involves drilling into the stonework further down, on the outside of the tower, so only about 120ft off the ground. The last section of access is by external scaffolding ladders, holding onto ladder with one hand and electric drill with the other. The latter being a sturdy item about 15 inches long, with a drill bit extending a further 8 or 9 inches, the whole weighing several pounds.
Having reached the relevant platform one plugs in, takes up a suitable kneeling position to apply pressure, and commences drilling. Inevitably, though, the drill bit often seizes in the stone. Causing the drill itself to revolve instead. Rapidly winding electric cable round drill head as a result…
Now this should be no problem, one just has to release the trigger. Unfortunately, there’s a little design defect. As the drill head starts to wrench viciously out of your grasp, the heel of your trigger hand can’t help hitting the trigger lock button, pushing it on. So the next step is to lurch for the side of the platform, unplug the drill with one hand, and stop oneself leaving the platform with the other… At the end of the day the foreman – an astute observer of human nature – decides that your wan countenance may indicate that you don’t have the perfect psychological profile for the job. Next morning you find yourself transferred to the building of a squash court, somewhere out in Norfolk, which is a mere two storeys high.

*

(From The Modern Characters.)

Ronald is fatal to women. They marry the next man they go out with.

All Stanley’s ventures in love and business have failed. And so of course he hesitates to give financial advice. But feels exceptionally qualified to give emotional.

Tristram suspects that, if he’d made a success of his life, he’d have been deeply unpleasant. Only his failures have saved him.

*

There was a girl you’d begun to know; and then you couldn’t see her for a few weeks. When you’d been with her, only one thing had frightened you – the hard line of her jaw, where the tough American matron showed through. In the weeks when you couldn’t see her, that jaw obliterated everything else. Her real face faded, till she was all that jaw in your head.

(Notebooks, 1970s)

* *

(Posted 31 August, 2021.)

*  *  *

Fes, Morocco, 1972. The ‘mother’ asks where L’s wedding ring is. Oh, you say, we left it behind. Too expensive to travel with.
You don’t know if the lie convinces her. But it’s enough for the proprieties.
When the bus down from Tetouan stops for mid-journey break, you and L share a single kebab stick. Which impresses the conductor so much, he invites you to stay.
Two rooms, plus corridor, kitchen, washroom. The larger, the day room, and where the women sleep at night. The smaller, where men sit and sleep, and you and L too. A little white room, about 7 feet by 7, ceiling high, paint thin and patchy. Into it, very comfortably, two covered mattresses, with pillows for sitting and a sheepskin rug, another small mattress. Plus your two rucksacks, and rolled sleeping bags.
And just now, on the black and white tiled floor, a thin shiny metal tray, covered with beaten patterns, with glasses of mint tea.
The women: Aailayal, Fatayma, Kinza, Aakaya. One who runs the household, you label her the ‘mother’. One much older. One young child, name unknown. Two late teens.
Mohammed, the conductor, twenty-one. No sign of a father, deceased you assume, so M’s family head. Other men, mostly young, come to talk, sleep. But hard to tell if they’re relatives or just friends.
The men go out, work, come back. Are in good or bad temper. Talk, as far as you can tell, of mopeds, football, radios. The older women have quiet dignity, make gentle gestures. When the ‘mother’ sends someone shopping, she takes their hand, and places the coin in it with her other, as she gives her instructions. The kindness of the gesture; how it humanises the transfer of money.
There’s shock when you do some laundry, hang it on the roof. So when L does some darning, you stand over her, pretend to give brusque instructions. L manages not to laugh.
And, in complicity, she’s wearing a dress, not jeans.
The older woman gestures, tries to tell you something; the older teenager translates to French. Says your translator is 'la femme de Sharif’, the lorry driver friend of Mohammed. 'Femme' perhaps just ‘betrothed’, since a 'femme' can still be ‘demoiselle’. Not sure why you need telling. Probably being the only man here in the day, and not family, makes you improper, dangerous. But now you can ask the girl for more. She’s the sister of Mohammed? – yes. And the old woman – the “grandmother” – is, you’re told, their mother… So not, then, the woman who runs the household – who did seem maybe too young. And the man in glasses is Mohammed's uncle? – yes. The brother of the father, or of the mother of Mohammed? Of the father and the mother….?? So things getting complicated again. Our poor mutual French? – or, like ‘femme’, the way meanings overlap? And apparently Sharif is also some kind of ‘son’ of the older woman – as well as being betrothed to the sister of Mohammed, who is also her ‘son’… So for now you retreat to your notebook, to ponder on all this. Who is this woman who runs the household? An older sister, unmarried or widowed? Or maybe the wife of the man in glasses – the electrician? Perhaps. Or is she still in fact the mother? – if, for the other, older woman, ‘mother’ may include grandmother, and ‘son’ grandson.
Outside, the walled city, the labyrinth of ancient alleys, the birds swarming and settling. The companionship of the Muslim world, within the sexes, not between: women in privacy together outside their homes, men holding hands in casual friendship as they walk, talk. The stalls, shops, in their locales: all spices here, all butchers there. A coal-seller, utterly blackened in body and clothing. In a cemetery, a grave done out in bathroom tiles. You walk back with L: “I can’t see, here,” you say. You never try speaking German with her, her English is too good. “You mean you don't get the meaning out of it?”, she says. Yes, exactly. A London scene has a thousand details that hold meaning for you, here not. The scene becomes flat and loses itself, only the bizarre – to you – remains.
Next day, the women make a big lunch. Radishes, beans in oil, tomatoes, fish. Flatbread, of course, as carbohydrate and as cutlery. One teenager divides a fish for you, the other offers it. At the end, one calls ‘garçon!’ – as if there’s a waiter somewhere, and male. Laughter. L gets the little girl to eat some more, helps clear away. The two teenagers brush their hair, one jokes with L about its length, smiles at you, hers is longer. Later she’s watching you in the mirror, to see if you’re looking at her.
You wonder if you and L should go to your room, perhaps they lie down after lunch. But then one of the teenagers gets told to pattern henna on L’s hands. She mixes it with her fingers, the mix green but leaving its orange-red stain. She’s usually surly, this girl, doesn’t like L; starts sloppily, letting the drips trail to make lines. She’s spoken to sharply, gets out a needle, uses it to touch along the edges, make them neater. And soon she’s working carefully and quickly, just her fingers again, but covering the whole palm in a complex, interesting design. Then along the backs of the fingers, a different pattern on each. Then L’s other hand, larger patterns this time. When she makes a mistake she removes the blob with a clean finger and swallows it, licking the finger. You ask her if the different patterns have meaning? – yes, she says. You ask what they are, and she reaches for the hand she did first; but only touches up a line or two, then goes back to the other without answering. Probably too complex, too instinctive to explain. But now she’s much happier, because we've become her friends, not just Mohammed's.
Your final night. Coming home, Mohammed has his tired hands and feet pressed against the floor by the woman stepping on them. Then takes you by the hand to the kitchen, to see the couscous being prepared. Later that night, as everyone’s turning in, you go to the toilet in the darkened flat. Suddenly, utterly unexpectedly, your body emits a stunning explosive fart. Like nothing you’ve ever heard. There’s a second’s silence, then bursts of laughter from the girls. Back in your room, in her sleeping bag, L’s laughing too, near hysterics. M chuckling a bit. Next morning, by the roadside, hitch-hiking, you’re both still grinning. “After all, the noise, it was incredible. It was beautiful,” L says.

(Notebooks, 1970s)

* *

(Posted 6 September, 2021.)

*  *  *

The Great Bicycle Walk, 1990. A pub somewhere in middle England, where your route crosses a main road. Some of the clientele’s local, more passing through; food is available; ‘hostelry’ would be the right word. The sign on the front door says “Beware of the cat.” Inside, the landlord is one of those who keep up a patter, function on a flow of extroversion and condescension. Someone comes in: “Yes, young man.” Now there’s a give-away, that ‘young man’, always a sign of a desperate need to put down. “A pint of AK.” That mollifies him: “A man of taste.” The mat on your table advertises “McMullen Original AK, Cask Conditioned Ale”.
The talk round the bar has been of golf expertise. “It really is a left-handed game.” “Oh yes, yes.” “Your right hand shouldn't have anything to do with it.” “Just guide it.” Now it turns to the salmonella scare. “You know where Mad Cow Disease came from, don't you?” puts in the landlord. “Here?” “No, Downing Street.” General laughter. Even so – you’d still assume he voted for her.

Unsurprisingly, his persona shows ragged at the edges. He serves the pint, then emerges from the bar and goes over to a table, perhaps with the menu – you don’t see. Then, as he comes back past, you hear him muttering to himself: “Don't be so stupid.” Whether self-criticism or comment on others is unclear, but it sounds like the former. He apologises to another table for the delay in their food: “Having trouble hatching the eggs.” “Perhaps the cat's killed the chicken?” they suggest, to join in the fun. “Oh no – he only kills people who don't pay their bills.”
He brings your meal: “Don't touch the plate. It's hot. Jesus Christ, I think my wife used to work in a crematorium.” The shepherd’s pie is good. “Must be made with real shepherd,” you think. No jokes like childhood's.
Another day, a different world: a truckers' stop on another main road. Meals, bed & breakfast, tv, pool table. Egg and bacon, £1.65. The most expensive meal, gammon, egg and chips, £3.00. A poster on the wall for the “Ultimate Truckers Show” – but Easter weekend, so already over, no good being tempted. A young woman comes round, collecting dirty cups and plates from the tables by carrying round a plastic washing-up bowl, which she dumps in front of you while she fills it up. Sensible. Reminds you of the old story about the difference between Spanish and Portuguese peasants harvesting almonds. The Spanish had made a technological breakthrough: they spread a cloth on the ground under the tree before shaking it… Meanwhile two truckers come in with their travelling companions, one in a bra-style top. There are fashions that aim to intrigue you, and those that hit you with the actuality of the wearer's body. Probably the sexiest are the rarest – those that float around the body while making you desperately aware of it.

*

London, 1971. Shaun's story – selling bibles in Ireland. An old, bent woman answers the door. He shows her the expensive Bible he is selling. She holds it reverently, doesn’t open it – he’s not sure she can even read – just touches her fingers to the big cross on the beautiful binding. Then turns away to try to find the money to pay for it.

* *

(Posted 10 September, 2021.)

*  *  *

Signs, stickers, and graffiti, 1970-1987. Shop in Notting Hill: “T. Spencer and Mum”. Amersham, old sign left behind above brand-new self-service chemist: “Your old furniture taken in part exchange.” Wiltshire, painted in great white letters on side of a barn: “NOTICE. Any unauthorised person found on these premises will have steps taken against them which will utterly astonish them.” Norwich, ‘74 power crisis, on a public library door: “Closed at dusk” – technology’s failure reinstates poetry. Limerick, Ireland: health food shop – “Eats of Eden”; and church signboard, “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”, and a few doors down – “Powers' Small Profit Stores”. Bahamas, two adjacent maxims in shop window: “Christ Is The Answer”, and “Support your local police”. Sign on a take-away diner in New Orleans: “Buster Holmes – handmade fried chicken”. Official Texas road sign: “Drive friendly”. Official Indian road sign: “Careless driver Kills and die Leaves behind All to cry.” Painted on bread van in Seattle: “Drive carefully. The loaf you save may be your own.” On a car sticker in Seattle: “One hydrogen bomb can ruin your entire day.” Sign on shop in New York City: “The Music House: new and used music.” Harlem signboards: “Please curb your dog”, “Basement partially sprinkled”, “New Testament Church of Christ Inc.”, “Radio Church of God”, “Harlem Fried Chicken”, “Epidemic Cleaners”, “Church of the Meek”. University of East Anglia graffito: “Jesus saves, but Kenny Dalgleish always gets it on the rebound.” Slogan on sticker on London furcoat advertisement: “The real owner of this coat was murdered in it.” Graffito on Victoria Station toilet door: “Jesus Christ, I love you and would surely kiss you on the lips; give my regards to your Father, Brian.” And inscribed in a Piccadilly Circus toilet: “Repent! The day of the Lord is near, very near, and coming fast, it will be a day of fury, a day of trouble and distress, a day of ruin and destruction, a day of darkness and gloom, a day when the Lord shows his fury!”; and, written underneath: “That was yesterday.”

*

London, 1980s. Walking along Harrow Road, among the shoppers, when a black woman going by with child and pram looks up suddenly into your face. Your stomach turns right over, and you walk on shaking. She was not beautiful, or unusually attractive – just pleasant, and physically neat. But the feeling was quite different from the sudden impact of great beauty – or of seeing someone who fits a preconceived emotional appeal. It was purely physical, yet not sexual – unique and devastating – as if a great surge of libido or of communication had come out of her.

* *

(Posted 18 September, 2021.)

*  *  *

February-April, 1982. You travel through Egypt slowly scribbling a playscript. Travel 3rd class on trains, eat in workers’ cafés, stay in hostels. Ignore all ancient monuments and antiquities; but in Aswan go to the local fleapit, with just a tent for roof, to see Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. At night the theme music drifts across, keeps making you think someone’s keeping cockerels. Your café diet is rice and macaroni mixed with hot sauce for 5p; to clean the tables the 12-year-old waiters spray water out of their mouths. Back in Cairo, you lose a contact lens, have to stop to wait for another. A Viennese astrologer tells you, for free, that you’re in for 12 lousy years – but will spend six of them superficially successful as a universally popular entertainer. You can’t decide if this means comedian or politician. You haunt the American University enclave to use their library, and sit out at wicker tables in the sun, peering one-eyed at Egypt's most sophisticated young ladies. Go to see Verdi sung by Egyptian opera singers and Tennessee Williams acted by drama students, and a week of films in Flemish with Arabic subtitles. Head back in the evenings to your shared room in your travellers' hotel, to find, say, that the bright young New Zealand couple and ageing English homosexual have checked out, and been replaced by a pale-faced US Muslim convert in a djellaba, who gets up in the night to pray, and a nubile young Swede who lies around rubbing suntan oil into her legs. And then, eventually, with full eyesight and just one scene and a bit left to write, head back to Greece. Back from CocaCola written كوكا كولا to CocaCola written Κόκα-κόλα. Back to hot pastry filled with goats cheese for 20p. Back from 3am calls to the faithful to pornography on sale in Syntagma Square.

*

Whether in a house or in a culture – when no style reigns, every object becomes kitsch.
And ‘style’ then becomes, not code, but panache; a matter of energy, not beauty; of presenter (“he’s got style”), not presentation.
And the artist for that world is Picasso, a pirate – in the sense of buccaneer; a man to milk each movement for its zest – not himself for his truth of vision.
So if a Mondrian reflects the physical structure of an age (its neat grids of ink, of glass and concrete, of tarmac), a Picasso reflects its de-structured consciousness.

(Notebooks, 1980s)

* *

(Posted 19 September, 2021.)

*  *  *

The Moonduster voyage: Punta Delgada, Azores, April 1983. You arrive dismasted, it’s on local TV, a moment’s celebrity. The captain of the little naval boat alongside invites you all to use their hot showers. You get the welcome warm water over you, pick up the soap, place it on your stomach ready for that first downward thrust to the groin. Feel something cold and metallic on the underside, turn it over. There’s an old rusted razor blade got itself stuck to the other side.
Portuguese ladies come to visit, mostly expats from the mainland. Brendan links up with one, starts to disappear in the evenings. The rest of you settle into a round of repairs and waiting for the new mast from the States, interspersed with restaurant meals and drinks on other boats. After a time there’s a newly arrived sloop being craned out onto the hard, just 24ft, French flag, unpainted aluminium. “That's typical French,” says John. “The Dutch go in for all this steel, with the French it’s aluminium, unpainted. Put a French boat and a Dutch boat alongside each other, salt water, and poof – electrolysis – no more hulls.”
Next evening he comes aboard. Gérard's his name; nice guy; been living on his boat for five years. Lifted out now to get it ready for selling, he has to go home. Has stories of the Caribbean and Central America and Brazil. Tells about all the abandoned yachts in Baja California, Costa Rica: these Americans – spend all their lives dreaming of cruising – retire, buy, set off – get sick or bored – within five hundred miles they know it's not for them.
That night he changes your lives, shows you all the matchstick game. Claims it kept him in drinks for two years in Brazil, playing it in bars. You put matchsticks in three piles; it doesn't matter how many in each. Pick up as many matches as you like on your turn, but only from one pile. The loser's whoever has to take the last match from the last pile. “You go first or I go first, it doesn't matter,” he says. He's right; it doesn't. Gérard always wins.
Next day you bump into him on the quay, get shown round his boat. You try to pick his brains on abandoned yachts, matchstick games. On the former he's forthcoming, on the latter not. There's no trick, no rule, he claims, you just have to practise; that's his story, though you're not convinced. Back on Moonduster, you find Mike and Barry huddled over little heaps of matches. “No, look,” Barry says, “if I pick up three of them…”
A few weeks later, the mast’s ready. Being flown to the US NATO air base on the next island, courtesy of a US Admiral friend of the US millionaire buyer. You get sent over to make arrangements. The civil airport’s right next to the military one. You get in a taxi, down the exit road, up the entry one. Big signs maintain the pretence it's Portuguese, hence the Portuguese security guards. They peer in, see you're not Portuguese, you must be American, wave you through. Five minutes later you're wandering into the base operations room. Locations of all US nuclear submarines and battle fleets pinned on a map that covers an entire wall… Excuse me, you say, it’s about this mast.

*

Tangier, 1989; ‘dans la figuration’. The Sheltering Sky. It will all be cut, be different, in the final edit. But for now, once again, here in the actual street, the music begins. Once again you and the others, in your ’30s clothes or your djellabas, begin to walk and talk on the pavement. Once again the tram, as if on those fake tramlines, begins to pull away. Once again, Debra Winger appears, from behind it, and moves towards the café, slowly, as if still hypnotised by the desert. And once again she passes through the doorway. To where, in the interior, Paul Bowles will be watching from his table, as she looks for she knows not what inside.

(Notebooks, 1980s)

* *

(Posted 28 January, 2022.)

*  *  *

Notting Hill, London, autumn 1972; a building site. Up on the scaffold Mannan, the Irish labourer, unzips the front of his trousers, puts in his hand. He gropes around, pulls something out, peers down at it. “Twenty minutes to lunch”, he says. He puts the watch back, and zips up his trousers again.
Wheeling barrows of cement. Easy, except your height makes the angle wrong. But paid as hod-carriers: £56 a week. That’s riches. Four years back, before inflation, it was 14 quid a week you’d get as a farm labourer or plumber’s mate. Now that’s what you pay in tax.
Sky goes black, rain starts bucketing down. Two brickies struggle to get their work covered before they run. “Come on,” says the one. “You know I don’t know how to swim.”
You drop down a level, into a room that’s got a roof. Bare brick and concrete. Water dripping making puddles. Ground outside becoming a sea of mud.
One of the brickies sings:
Every time it rains, it rains
Pennies from Heaven…
“We'll all end up like seagulls,” someone says. “Fucking wet feet and fucking cold fucking noses.”
Mannan’s just been elected union rep. One day he tells you he’s going to the opera that night. Next day you ask how it was. He’s big, tough, utterly secure in his masculinity. “Oh, it was lovely”, he says. “It always is.”
Couple of weeks more, winter’s coming on.
“Cold today, ennit?” says one of the brickies. “Cold today.”
You didn't think so yet, but you don't have to stand in one place all day.
“Cold, ennit?”, he says. “A bastard day. A bastard cold day today.”
Pause.
“A bastard day. A bastard day, today.”
A long pause.
“Cold today, ennit?”, he says.

*

The will to live is set off by difficulty. Then worn down by it.

*

Rather than progressing from one thought to another, most of us drift from one emotion to another. The result is an endless wanting – for whatever the generality of its cause or content, most emotion ends in the particularity of its bearer. (Wanting not to want is no exception, of course!) For thought, the solitary activity, leads to a forgetting of self; but emotion, which longs to be shared, can discover at any moment its own aloneness. Hence the mistake of the emotionalist schools of psychotherapy: by teaching people to concentrate on their emotions, they leave them more solitary than they began – having only traded in their sincere desperation for a desperate insincerity.

(Notebooks, 1980s)

* *

(Posted 2 February, 2022.)

*  *  *

The Great Bicycle Walk, 1990. Not far into your first day, you stop for water at a lone cottage. The woman talking about life there. “Oh, it’s beautiful. Mind you, it gets a bit tasty in winter, with the wind across the fields.” How you can just see Norwich at night, as a yellow haze on the horizon. But if she goes in, it’s too much – “all that pushing, babychairs banging your shins”. Comes back exhausted and covered in bruises. And how, when they moved there, they saw this ‘Ruined Abb.’ marked on the map. Ah, a ruined abbey – maybe they’d dig up religious relics. All they found were cow bones – it was a ruined abbatoir.
Not wanting the hassle of your tent, you beg spaces in sheds, garages. One night you sleep at a friend’s bungalow; the next, on the floor of a chicken hatchery. Hatch 25,000 a day, four days a week; for the table, not layers. Not far away there’s a growery: take 100,000 a time, slaughter in one go when big enough, clean out, start again.
Just down the road as you go, the other extreme of rural enterprise. A rough sign: “Firewood sticks, 50p a bag”.
Meanwhile, with the predictability of human association, you find yourself longing for an egg breakfast.
Poultry’s appropriate, you’re near the route of the old goose drives. Norfolk to London, a hundred miles. A thousand, sometimes two thousand, in a drove. First marched through warm tar, then sand, to give them shoes for the journey. Moving at about a mile an hour, grazing on post-harvest stubble. From August to October, till the ways got too muddy. Turkeys too, up to 200,000 or more a year – in (yes, really) tiny leather boots. Gradually ended when the railways came.

*

(From The Modern Characters.)

Ursula makes you feel like a doormat. She comes in with a muddy soul, and wipes it all over you.

Vincent keeps lists of the kind of jobs he could do, lives he could lead. He writes them in notebooks, pins them to the wall. This is, as it turns out, rather sensible of him. Since the reminder of so much possibility allows him to go on in the same old way.

Walter’s eccentricity is driven entirely by his insecurity. Others imagine he cares only for the flow of life, when in fact he’s always longing to freeze it into certainty. His poverty makes his solutions unconventional. But they loom larger over his thoughts than the conventionalities of ordinary men.

*

On a two-man security assignment, talking to R.: Came from a military family, ran away at the age of 12, joined a circus, got brought back by the police. His father disowned him, ordered him out of the house. (A serious man; when he’d been in the Military Police he’d shopped his own brother.) R went back to see him after his own first marriage, then again after his second. That time his father ordered him out again, because the new wife was German. When he heard his father had been knocked down by a car, he went to see him; his father ordered him out of the hospital. Sat up in bed, said “I don’t want him at my funeral,” lay down, and died. R paid for the funeral. Now his brothers won’t talk to him.

(Notebooks, 1970s)

* *

(Posted 3 February, 2022.)

 *

An appeal for intelligent reviewers…!

Just a reminder that my collection of microfictions, Tales for my Dog, is available worldwide on Kindle for 99p or less. And readers’ reviews of it, posted on Amazon or Goodreads, always very much appreciated. Many more needed.

If you already have a print copy from elsewhere – direct from York Publishing, or a free gift or review copy – then adding the Amazon Kindle version still allows one to give an Amazon ‘Verified Purchase’ review.

Currently, new print copies of Tales for my Dog are only available through Amazon Print-on-Demand. Please see the links at the foot of the page here.

Thanks! David.

*  *  *