Alec Lindsay

The pattern of life

2012-02-27T10:05:00.000Z

Do you really remember what people meant to you? I've started to think I live in an eternal present. It hardly matters what people, other than the people who're with me in the moment, think of me. Even people I'm with hardly matter much. I get up each day, afraid, and not daring to think about what the day might bring. The fear is based on how I left things yesterday, but if I'm careful and calm, those things don't matter; what matters is what I find today, now that I'm awake again. So what if somebody yesterday hated me, or loved me? Do they even matter? Each day it feels as tho' I have to piece things together all over again. If things are better it's a matter of rejoicing, but I have to be careful not to rejoice too much; if they're much the same I find some comfort in that and drive off to work; if they're worse I hold myself together and wonder if I should go to work or stay. So far I've always gone. At night I talk to bro and Ellen, and wish they were here without saying so. With bro, because he's so far away, I'm reassuring; with Ellen, who's near enough, I'm reassuring because she's younger and is only just starting. I know all the same either of them would be better at this than me, but patterns are ordained, and I am where I am. William comes over in the evening sometimes when he can. I talk often to Rufus who's coming tomorrow to stay. I know I'll cry when he gets here. I cried all over Charley on Saturday. I'm surprised I don't do it more often. He held me very tight until I'd recovered. He didn't try words but was just quiet. I'm torn between being comforted by knowing he cares, and not caring what he thinks. It hardly matters. I'm feeling sorry for myself and the fact that it's still all about me disgusts me.

Strawberries turn left

2012-02-23T13:50:00.003Z

While driving along one day with a friend she suddenly said to me, 'it's a good job we're not strawberries'. I tested the statement from various angles and couldn't immediately see that it was some sort of hidden trap, so I said, cautiously, 'why's that then?' 'If we were', she said, pointing to a hand lettered sign, 'we'd have to turn left just up here'. The title of this post gives you a clue, so I'm not going to belabour it. I admit I laughed, but she almost threw herself out of her seat at the acuity of her own wit. I like playing with language humour; I enjoy the incongruities and double meanings to be found. Magda's joke was the sort of joke I'd have made but I sometimes struggle to find a laugh when other people make them. Why would that be? It's depressing to think that all those weak jokes I make people don't really find funny. That's the sort of knowledge that's very debilitating. It drives me into silence.
Do I think humour is about confidence? Do you think it is? The best stand-ups are confident. They may not be so inside, but they project it. Some funny comics trade on diffidence, but it seems obvious to me that they're not diffident inside. The best conmen, presumably, also have to project confidence. Is there a link between a stand-up comedian and a conman? Probably, in terms of making people believe in the world they're creating. I think we will a comedian to do well, but quickly turn nasty if he's the wrong sort of uneasy or scared. Then it's circus time. Audiences are hard on those who don't please them.

At school I hated that sort of turning on somebody who had overcome all sorts of nervousness to try something, even just contributing to class discussions. And I used my confidence to divert people from aggressive forms of behaviour. I don't mean I was saintly. I just hated people who tried to control others; those who were driven by some inner demons to decry others, to bully them. I hated bullies. I disliked that some people, who struggled so much to believe in themselves, could so easily be forced into positions of subservience, forever the butt of uncivilised people, stronger mostly because they were unrestrained by civilised values. I hated the attempt to impose a jungle hierarchy on us, and provide us with characteristics which fitted the purpose of creatures whose strength had led them to seeking to impose hierarchies on us in the first place. These alpha individuals could control who would be in their magic circle, and who should be among the rest outside, and consequently prey to ill will from those inside. They didn't, tho', wield defining power in the school.
I was reasonably strong, not particularly brave, but I was confident and trusted enough to organise others against bullies. I remember using ridicule, and satire sometimes, to bludgeon bullies into backing down. Looking back I realise I used sex, in a flirting way, to acquire protectors who followed me, mostly because they were amused by me, but also a little because I attracted them. Perhaps I was on my way to forming my own little fascistic state. It was all a bit like renaissance Italy, in which there were city states who maintained a constant balance by perpetually allying themselves with each other to keep larger powers in check. Like all schools there were lots of minor groupings. If it suited some groupings, as in renaissance Italy, they merged into larger coalitions for various purposes. I was known as the friend of the terminally uncool, every form of saddo, as the insiders viewed them. I didn't want power over them. I just didn't want anybody else to wield unreasonable force against them, or me.
I've said elsewhere that my school wasn't particularly intolerant. I really don't believe it was. It's quality was that no particular grouping was stronger than any other. I'm using the example of bullies, who were by quite a large margin controlled by the sort of grouping I mentioned above. That sort of consensus in favour of tolerance in other areas marked it out a civilised community. I didn't know it was unusual, but subsequently I've discovered it might have been. I had a trouble free passage through the school as a fairly out gay boy, but it did have a few nasties, both pupils and masters, and at the other end of the spectrum, a few guys who sometimes didn't cope. We really did look after each other tho'.
That political, lively person seems completely unconnected from me now. It all went in the course of a single night's bullying when I had no strength, no words, no comedy, nobody to defend me, and nobody to organise into a resistance. When I was really just one of the saddos. It's still there you see.

I miss Murtaza. He was a blogger in Pakistan and I don't know where he went. His satire on the Pakistan's politicians, religious leaders, and businesses and banks everywhere was unrelenting. I loved his social satires. He was serious but also very very funny. His blog's still there, but he isn't.

Not enough artyfacts

2012-02-20T12:29:00.004Z

A friend of mine took the BAM railway, which crosses Siberia. It's not the same as the trans-Siberian railway. It's further north. In my family 'taking the BAM railway' has come to mean falling in love with what you previously hated which relates to the rail-travelling friend's experience. In an odd coincidence a guy made a comment on an earlier post of mine saying that I was destined to take the trans-Siberian railway and fall in love with all things Russian. (While I'm here I should say I don't hate all things Russian, but I'll leave that for the moment.) The odd coincidence is in the surfacing from two different sources the idea that crossing Siberia by railway might lead to a change in opinion about something one dislikes. I'm beginning to regret starting this because it doesn't seem so odd now. And I've almost forgotten what was odd anyway.
The BAM railway was a Soviet project. It was built by slave labour, the 'slaves' being dissidents in Stalin's Russia. Thousands died building the railway, and while some of them may have been criminals (and you may feel even criminals didn't deserve to die in such conditions), most of them held views, or were suspected of holding views, which were anti-communist, or anti-Stalin, or both. Perhaps it's too easy to lump all these people together as opponents of Stalin's communism, when the reality seems to be that they were very disparate people. It didn't take much for one to be condemned to exile in Stalinist Russia. The attitude seems to have been if it looks like dissent then it should be punished and removed.
My friend liked Irkutsk on Lake Baikal in southern Siberia. It's been a place of internal exile in Russia since the eighteenth century, and home therefore to a succession of intellectuals. Apparently it has museums, grand houses, and a pretty opera house. Chekhov called it the Paris of Siberia, which probably speaks more to Chekhov's hyperbole than to reality, but friend says it has squares and boulevards and cafe society. It all seems far away from the images conjured by the name, Siberia, and far away, come to that, from the reality of thousands dying building the BAM railway.
Russian rulers have long seen criminals and dissidents as a source of labour. The death penalty for lots of offences was abolished in Russia in 1753. This sounds advanced but a life in labouring exile was substituted for the death penalty, and death could, after an interval of labouring in Siberia, come to seem preferable. The offences for which one could be exiled became increasingly trivial, much as transportation to the colonies up to the early nineteenth century in Britain was often for very minor offences.
I don't know why my friend took this trip. Oddly I didn't ask him this obvious question. He's described the journey to me in some detail, and it sounds extraordinary. Well, it sounds more extraordinary than taking the guided bus from St. Ives to Cambridge, but then it probably isn't. It's just displacement.

I'm sitting in the empty showroom. It's a bit cold so I've kept my coat on, and the crumpled but classy jacket. The bosses are away today. I've taken two phone calls already, one from somebody wanting to call in early afternoon, and the other from some inarticulate guy who'd seen a pressed glass tile on Antiques Roadshow and wanted me to say whether his is the same as the one on the television. I said how could I do that? I didn't watch the Antiques Roadshow (perhaps I'd better start) so couldn't say if it was the same. He described it in minute detail. It sounded dull, but then it might be worth money. More than half the stuff in this room looks dull. Could he send an image? No. Could he bring it in sometime? I then got harangued about how he'd been 'done' in the past by antique dealers and if he was going to sell it the last thing he'd do would be to take the tile to an antique dealer. No, mate! It would be the auction house for him! So, I said, 'you'd like my opinion (I liked 'my opinion' like it's worth it's weight in antiques!) but you'd like it for free?' I was quite pleased with that, but unfazed the caller said 'yes'. Back to square one. I don't imagine anyone can value something without seeing it. Doesn't take a genius to understand that but I wasn't dealing with genius, probably. So I said, 'sorry, you'll have to bring it in sometime when one of the owners is here.' 'Fuck you!' He said, and rang off.
I had a sudden attack of remorse after that. I got to imagining I'd pissed off the owner of something amazingly valuable and so denied Mr. and Mrs. the chance to make some money. I decided not to note this conversation, but then cursed honesty made me write an account of it for the bosses.
I'm not at all sure how I come across on the phone but probably as a bumptious, pompous twat, which I am and I'm not. What I'm asked to do in this job shouldn't be that difficult. At a basic level cleaning, lifting, answering the phone, talking to people, and showing people stuff isn't hard. If I wanted the job to mean more, given time, in somewhere busier, I'd learn about the artefacts. Not here tho'. My whinge is going to be, and at the moment I'm just rehearsing it, that I'm not seeing and talking to people. I can hardly complain about not handling antiques because I know nothing. Plus I'm launching a major moan on the back of having been here only a few days! Having said that, and I'm now striving for my version of dispassionate, anybody seriously wanting a job in the antiques trade needs lots of experience and that must come from seeing and handling lots of stuff. That doesn't seem to happen here. Probably you'd need lots of money as well. Alright so I don't want to be in this business, but the honest conscientious me says I ought to earn my money. My incipient restlessness is also down to thinking quite erroneously, but quite characteristically, that I can be brilliant at anything. I also shouldn't overlook the fact that lurking in me is a complete show-off and I'm obviously miffed that this isn't a stage on which to perform. Hey! Perhaps the old me is still there somewhere. But then I've done all that before as well. Look, I say, the confident teenage me is back, and then launched myself at the world only to trip over my own feet just as I lifted my eyes up to a future. I must learn the art of taking things slowly.
That brings me to sex. Except it doesn't. I'm not confident at this very minute, 12.27, and my mainstay has completely disappeared again. I wish he'd unglue his face from Ed's for a minute or two. But now I'm being obscure.

The IT department

2012-02-16T23:43:00.002Z

There are what might be called longeurs in this job. Mr. and Mrs. go off on some buying trip, or to a sale, or a 'call out', and I spend hours just sitting around. There's a limit to the amount of sweeping, dusting, and polishing I can do without starting to think I'm some sort of Victorian tweeny. I'm sometimes asked to shift stuff around, or help load things into their Espace at their store, but that seems to be the most activity I'm called on to do. So I get lots of time playing things on my laptop, or reading. I've now, however, been set the task of photographing all the stock.

They've done some illustrations of their stock as and when it was needed by potential customers, and got a neighbour to send the results off as attachments to emails. They are hopeless about internet selling. They have no website. I think they're listed on trade sites with a note of their specialisms, but that's it. It's not for me to say they should be trying internet selling, and I got a frosty reception when I suggested they might try putting illustrations of their stuff online. In any case, I said, having a photographic record of your stock might be useful in a case of theft - a fear which obsesses them. From their reaction you would have thought I was suggesting something slightly underhand. It's about twenty years from being a new idea, I said, but I was treated to a fairly superior display of 'we've been in this business forty odd years and we doubt you could teach us anythingery'. I'm probably now branded as some young idiot who, five minutes on the fringe of the business, thinks he knows everything there is to know. In their world, I've observed, reputation, good or bad, lives on indefinitely. The same goes for slights, which are forever remembered and stored up. Their conversation topples over into the bitchy. It might be quite entertaining if I knew any of the people they talk about, but even so I think that the entertainment would wear thin very quickly. I might in one conversation have established my character as a know-it-all for eternity. Fine. Maybe it was very early to be trying to be clever. So I stopped talking about computers and the internet.

Then yesterday morning Mr. told me they had in fact been thinking for some time about photographing their stock. He'd often discussed it with colleagues in the trade, he said, and their trade association had urged that its members do it as a way of identifying stolen pieces. He thrust a camera into my hand, a newish Lumix digital one, and said I could photograph the stock in 'spare moments'. They'd get them developed. he said, later, and label them with stock numbers. I explained the concept of digital cameras, well not really because although I know how they work, I don't know how it works, if you follow that :) But I do know enough to be able to download pics into a laptop, and arrange and tag them, or send them to other people, or even print them off if needed. I explained about keeping a file in the laptop, and tagging pics, and at the same time, I said, you could provide a full written catalogue description of each item of stock, listing things of particular interest or distinguishing marks. I explained that you don't have to have hard copies of the pictures of objects, but he'd begun to glaze over. I abandoned an attempt to suggest that he transfer his stock records and accounts into some off-the-shelf buying and selling programme, but I'd lost him. So I said I'd photograph some examples and show him those at least.

No reference was made to the earlier conversation we'd had about all this. There was perhaps the merest hint of embarrassment in his demeanour, but you'd have to have known about what had gone before to have spotted it. I kept quiet. They have got a new laptop and printer/scanner but apparently have never exploited it. To cement my position as the one eyed king in this kingdom of the blind, I very tentatively suggested they might also get an external hard drive to back up the system (this is a bit of equipment I picked up only fairly recently, and wished I'd had when my laptop crashed, and keep producing it to impress the computer illiterate!) if they thought they might put their stock or accounts or whatever onto computer. After some puzzlement he said ok, but we're to start with photographing the stock 'to see how it goes'. It's a very weird thing, after being considered the complete airhead by my friends and contemporaries about things computer and internet, suddenly to be looked on as a guru for the modern age. If only they knew! I hoped I hadn't come across as somebody trying to tell them their business. Even if I could do the administrative side of it, and that's a big 'if', I know nothing about antiques, and they're stuffed with knowledge which I've realised you'd have to have spent a lifetime in the trade to build up.

My new employers aren't really a happy pair. They do have redeeming qualities but unfortunately their default position is to treat most people as tho' they're fools, and then revising them up (and sometimes even further dowm) as acquaintance grows. Altho' historically, I've ranged between having a low opinion of myself, and thinking myself amazingly clever, it's still quite hard when people judge me using criteria which clearly corresponds with my own lowest assessment of myself. I think my bosses and I'll get on better with time (if I decide to give it time), but I think their initial attitude to people will start to grate on me. Then perhaps if I carried some of their scepticism around with me I'd be in a better state now. Who knows! Bitching is wearing tho'.

Remember Eric James Borges

2012-02-13T18:38:00.001Z

A month after recording this Eric James Borges took his own life. Among other things he was a film maker.

Disaster

2012-02-13T18:27:00.003Z

I don't quite know what to do. I think I lost Sammy. That feels catastrophic which is just ridiculous. I don't know when I loved somebody so much without knowing them, and it's all down to her work, and her personality as I read it. It feels like it could finish my blog off. Such a fierce reaction is very weird.

I didn't lose Sammy! Jeez, that was amazing. My stomach is all churned up. I haven't been one of those people who obsesses about how many followers they have, but I just noticed that my number has dropped by one. I thought it was Sammy. That's the point, I thought it was Sammy, and I went to pieces. You're all good, but it's just that she's been there through some rough times and has been very kind, and I genuinely think she's brilliantly talented and inspiring. I really felt as tho' I was on the edge. All that and I've never seen her.

Earth to Alec

2012-02-12T12:57:00.004Z

There are blogs that meander along oozing genuineness. No question that they reflect the lives of their authors; no question that they are not pretending. One day I'll write something like that; something without affectation; something that doesn't depend on arrangement and revision; something that doesn't discuss things it doesn't understand. That'll be me one day.

I've pre-ordered Patrick Gale's new book, 'A perfectly good man'. He's launching it on March 2nd, at the Ennis Book Club Festival in Ireland. You can order it yourselves by finding a link on PG's website http://galewarning.org/index/flash.html. His isn't the clearest website around, but it works ok. I've blogged quite a bit about PG in the past. His novels meant a lot to me in difficult times. That should be viewed as a massive understatement. They speak so fluently to something in me. Maybe, in view of what I said about recommending things enthusiastically in my last post, it might be best if I said you'll hate his stuff so don't bother to read anything. But I can't bring myself to be even jokily manipulative about PG. It would seem like a betrayal. I want him to succeed so hard it leaves me breathless.

I've fallen into line with Amazon. I'm a bit ashamed about that because I've always lauded physical bookshops over virtual ones. I know lots of people no longer have access to a real bookshop. I've been told off about that enough times when I've attempted to list the iniquities of Amazon and urge people to go to their local bookshop. But Amazon is so seductively easy. Along with the infantilisation of Britain comes the desocialisation. I hardly need go out. It's good I've got my new job because it will save me from the temptation to operate solely from my desk, going to the door only to take in goods.

The forces have massed against the coalition's plans to modernise the NHS ('streamline' I think is the upbeat word in use - who, after all, could possibly be against streamlining! Heath Robinson maybe?). Whenever political campaigners in this country gather to go into battle for power the one institution they battle most fiercely over is the NHS. As an institution it occupies a significant place in Britons' hearts, and a gigantic place in governments' budgets. In these times of economic want politicians would like to cut into the sums paid for the NHS, but politically they have to maintain the fiction that they are as passionate about preserving funding as the next man. We are assured by all parties that the NHS is their first priority, and the plans they have will in no way draw back from the principle that health care should be 'free at the point of delivery'.
The Health Bill currently going through Parliament is over-complicated, flawed, and opens the gates to more and more private money to come into the Service. You might think, and the Coalition is desperate that you should, that that would be a good thing. Yet all the professional bodies representing health service workers at all levels, whether they be doctors or nurses, or the unions representing support staff, all patient groups, and most local health authorities are against the Bill. The Bill is having a rough ride through both House of Parliament. I can't claim to have made a particularly detailed study of it's terms, but it begins with one startling change which I think says a lot about the eventual destination of the NHS. The Secretary of State for Health will no longer have a responsibility to provide health care. This fundamental provision has underpinned health care in this country since 1948. The Coalition, speaking through the Department, maintains that altho' the words aren't in the Bill, the responsibility of the Secretary of State, and other ministers, remain the same. When the Bill came back from the Lords, who had attempted to restore the wording about responsibility, mysteriously, or perhaps not so mysteriously, the wording of the first draft was unchanged. If government responsibility isn't actually spelled out in the legislation it doesn't take a genius to work out that at some stage, when we've all got used to the idea that in fact the primary responsibility for primary health care isn't the responsibility of government, then it will be judged that all services could be privatised. How absurd it is that none of this would be necessary, that we would have no tax shortfall, if government closed tax loopholes to prevent the mind boggling levels of tax avoidance that goes on.
It would be easy to be alarmist about what might flow from the change to the Secretary of State's responsibility. Since I've ceased to believe in the probity of politicians I'm inclined to join the alarmists. The way to reducing the health service to a private system, and thus eventually to a service which will only operate in profitable areas, has been opened. It seems to me that a new era of paying for the doctor is not that far off. And if the doctors are to become the people responsible for commissioning and allocation of resources, as the Bill envisages, one can't help but fear that medicine will go the way of dentistry, where privatisation has resulted in dentists leaving NHS work in large numbers to pursue money. We're supposed to sympathise with their behaviour. Who wouldn't, goes the argument, wish to make money? In a society where everybody else is entitled to exploit their skills to maximum financial advantage, why shouldn't dentists? Anyone who has had anything to do with dentists in recent years will be aware of the cost to patients. And there are health costs to be calculated. So far it's anecdotal, but there is a strong perception that people are not visiting dentists as often or as regularly as they should. They simply can't afford it. Is this where medicine is headed? I think it might be. Fight the Bill!

Everyone will write about Whitney Houston, and a lot of it will be interminable crowing rubbish about the years of drug fuelled decline, but she sang beautifully to me in my childhood. I felt unexpectedly sad at the news.

Behaving badly

2012-02-10T19:20:00.001Z

Somehow it's not hard going back to nine to five, altho' it's only been three days. It gives, reluctant as I am to concede it, badly needed focus to my day. I'm hoping I won't get pissed off with it, at least not for a while. So far it's good, but quite physical since I get to do the lifting! Actually it's not literally nine to five. Ten to six, but who's counting. The latter part of the day drags more than I thought but I guess it would be better if there were more people around. Yet again, all over again, I'm the new boy - yay trippin! Apart from the customers, I only have the owners to talk to, and they are the reason I have the job. Mrs was a close buddy of Mum, and Dad asked her on the offchance they might want someone. I doubt they really do. They did have an assistant but Dad asked just the day after they'd sacked him. He'd been 'helping himself from the till'. Clearly a generalised euphemism for thieving because the 'till' (i.e. an antique mahogany job with a penetrating bell, and the drawer catch disguised as one of the brass handle screws) contains next to nothing. Barely enough for me to take something out to buy the coffee and croissants in the morning. I don't think it's being kept deliberately low so as not to tempt me into crime. They see cash, in fat rolls, but they don't keep it in the 'till'.
I asked why they have a till at all since they operate out of their house, and by appointment. Mr. said they had a shop a long time ago somewhere down the World's End end of the King's Road (the 'wrong' end, apparently) and the 'till' is a relic of those days.
After a couple of days I've sort of got the impression that I may not be matching up to their image of their business. Mrs has suggested, in the nicest possible way, but no doubting the intent, that I might care to dress more smartly. She's quite direct! I thought I was looking quite smart, but she's talking jacket or suit. I've got a suit, but it's one I had at school and I've not worn it in a while, and I'm not even sure where it is come to that. Its last outing was to a restaurant in London, possibly two years ago. We've compromised on a new jacket for next week, which I have to buy! I toyed with the idea of asking if I should have a dress allowance for work clothes. Might even be claimable under some sort of labour legislation, I thought, but Mrs. isn't the sort of person you mention ideas of benefits, bonuses, or clothing allowances to unless you're feeling very combative. I've gathered that in three days. Anyway I need a jacket, and a complete refit come to that. I wonder if Gok would drop by and give me the once over.
Mr. is an old, well maybe not so old, but older than her, sweetie. Smells of cigarettes tho' which is not so tasteful. If it wasn't for his reputation as an old roué (Dad factoid) I might initially have said I'd have to watch myself in the darker corners, but it's ok. Anyway I'm probably flattering myself.
I've met one or two of their clients, and one or two of their suppliers, but naturally would be completely lost if anyone asked my opinion about anything. I'm strictly a gopher, but always hoping to learn a bit. Learning the business, however, according to both bosses, is a continuing process right down to the end, and this is strictly a short term job. They know that and I think it's very kind of them to take me in. They pretend it suits them as well.
While I'm here I'm hoping to get to know about Mum from the point of view of a friend. I know ridiculously little about what sort of person she was. I know she comes, on her father's side, from an old East Anglian family who busied themselves looking after their estates and keeping clear of anything resembling controversy. Uncle John says 'Anglo-Norman dullards, but with a strong instinct for self-preservation'. On her mother's side she was from high powered intellectual stock, with serried ranks of Professor Doktor in places like Regensburg, Heidelberg, and other Universitatb[e/u]rgs. I'm not sure I like those sorts of Germans. They strike me as too intellectually rigorous, not to say arrogant, to softer, failed characters such as mine. This might be just be my inability to match their intellectual weight, plus memories of hated holidays among them, surfacing here! (I enjoy staying with Mum's brother John in Berlin, but like Mum, of course, he's a cross between the dullards and the Intellektuellen.) My great-grandparents in Regensburg were rigorous in this manner. I didn't know them but Dad, who did, used to run away from them as soon as he decently could. It was behaviour he showed with various of Mum's cousins. I remember being taken once to stay with some of them (in Regensberg actually) and Dad leaving the next day, abandoning us to these strange starchy stilted people. That abandonment is one of the few black marks against him, and an as yet unforgiven one! (I do remember, however, that they had beer deliveries to the doorstep, as we might with milk. I was very impressed by that! As I was by the beauty of a much older cousin, but that didn't at all compensate for the misery of the condescension shown me, nor the peculiarity of the food!)
I read recently, somewhere, about the house that Wittgenstein designed for his sister. In Vienna presumably. It was minimalist to the most extreme degree - bare cement walls, naked light bulbs, bare radiators, bare metal shutters at the windows. My great-grandfather's house, which my cousins had inherited, wasn't quite so extreme, but it was definitely influenced by the same aesthetic.
I'm reading a book at the moment which was recommended by a friend who knows the author. (See the link there? Friend of Mum, friend recommending a book. Oh well! So it doesn't stand up to close scrutiny as a link!) It's a historical novel set in Siberia in the chaos of the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, when control in the countryside passed between warring factions of white and red Russians, and lawless groups of displaced foreign troops. It seems like a Russian novel. It's called 'The People's Act of Love' and it's by James Meek. He's English, but he lived in the former Soviet Union between 1991 and 1999. The book's been translated into lots of languages and is billed as an 'international bestseller'. All the brightest people liked it. I wanted to like it because he's a sort of a friend of a sort of a friend, tho' why that should matter I really don't know. I tried hard but I just couldn't concentrate on it, yet Philip Pullman said 'what a narrative! What a story!' Do you ever experience this almost irrational impulse to dislike what you are being told over and over again to like? I kept trying to read the damned book, mostly because I know I frequently have this obstinate, irrational reaction. There's no getting away from it, I do dislike being told what I must think, even when it's couched in the most mollient tones.
In the end I gave the book to a charity shop. I still don't know if it's a good novel or not. I've tried to produce a rational explanation of why I might have disliked it for a reason other than the enthusiastic recommendation it got. All explanations seem lame: more and more like wilder and wilder generalisations. Let me try a few on you. The characters in the book are 'larger than life'. I dislike people who praise themselves and Russians tend to claim to be the people who feel the most deeply, the most passionately, the most honestly; even their faults start to sound as tho' they are beyond their control and part of their destiny. I hate the malign inevitability of fate in Russian literature; the let's all moan and emote for a while, and wait for the inevitable and messy end. They start to sound like Texans of the emotions - nowhere does it bigger. I disliked that this book aped the style of a Russian work, invoking the huge frightening landscapes, the harshness of the cold winter, the passion of the people, the duplicitousness and venality of rulers, the Byzantine impenetrability of bureaucracy, the innate wisdom and stoicism of the peasants. These are the hollow conventions of Russian sentimentality, yet none of this is from a Russian, but written by an English journalist. It's bad enough in all conscience from Russians, but why would an English author assume their mantle and strike the same melodramatic poses?
There is no rational explanation for my reaction. I just got crosser and crosser. I began to think I was sharing some sort of dissociative disorder with James Meek. There are schools of literature which think that no great thought can be expressed except through some correspondingly immense setting. Russian literature is like that. It just doesn't see how small mundane thoughts are not made grand thoughts by melodramatic behaviour or awe-inspiring settings. In the end I became immensely bored; bored on a Russian scale and the wind of revolt blew through the icy tundra of my brain and I hurled the book across my room.
So there you have it. War is hell. The aftermath of war is usually hell. And people in hell usually behave badly. The end.

A singular death

2012-02-08T23:02:00.003Z

Somebody lent me their dvd of 'A Single Man', which I missed when it was doing the rounds. I loved its appearance, and the people in it, but if I have criticism, and would I be me if I didn't, it's that everybody in the film is so damned nice. Alright so there's desperation in the Julianne Moore character, hopelessly needing the love of her friend, Colin Firth, but it's overwhelming her, not those round her; there's acquisitiveness in the Nicholas Hoult character, one of Firth's students, but there's also concern, candour, judgement and admiration; there's overwhelming grief in Firth's character, but he's also deeply civilised, and eventually recovers his hope; Matthew Goode, playing Firth's lover in flashback, is the one who is a characteristic rather than a character. He's beautiful, humorous, and good, but then he lives only in the recollection of Firth. The central action of the film takes place in one day, and at its end the deus ex machina of a heart attack kills Firth - the attack ironically intervening just as Firth has recovered his belief in life, and decided not to commit suicide.

It's a very romantic film in a way that life often isn't, but I found I could suspend disbelief as a sort of tribute to the general niceness. Somehow it seems too rude to upset these people by being nasty. Even a Spanish hustler, who talks to Firth at one point, is relaxed and poetic. The film is self-consciously beautiful to look at, and nowhere do the images look more ad-like than in the scene where Firth and the hustler have a cigarette together. It's nearly a moving film, with good touches - a scene in a bank, where Firth has gone to clear his safety deposit box in preparation for his suicide, provided a moment of inexplicable tension in a confrontation between Firth and the small daughter of one of his neighbours; Hoult not saying directly what his interest in Firth is, even when directly asked; the byplay between the members of a family who live next door to Firth, which he observes from the lavatory seat. The film overall doesn't really move in a raw way, but perhaps that would be at odds with the urbanity. I cried only once, right at the start, when a solitary Firth dreamed that he walked through a desolate snow covered landscape to the place where the body of his lover lay, beside the upturned car in which he had been killed. Firth bent to kiss him. The full significance of this moment, right at the start of the film, is unknown, but Firth's tenderness is overwhelming. It is his performance that makes the film. He's so good at repression.

So this is all spoiler, but I'm working on the assumption that everybody's seen the film except me. As it happens I wouldn't have minded if 'ancient' Colin Firth had got the beautiful concerned Hoult before he pegged it, but a deus ex machina has to do its thing. I did just wonder how Hoult coped with the aftermath of being found to have spent the night 'with' Firth who had died on him of a heart attack. But then I'm always wanting to cross Ts.

I fantasise about lives like these. How I'd like to slot into such a perfect world, and have such complete and beautiful creatures round me. The trouble is the desperation in my world is almost certainly likely to be nowhere near so grand, and possibly more real than is noticed in Ford's film making. Altho' he may not really reflect life, he does create powerfully attractive myths. I haven't read the Isherwood novel on which the film is based, but I'm laying odds on it being less mythic and more gritty.

The film is set against the backdrop of America's hysteria over reds under beds, or at least just offshore in Cuba. It's a time when being out was not usual, and although this is hinted at in the discreetness of Firth's character and his discussion of the fear of minorities with his class, the film seems to want to go with the idea that there is a calm acceptance of gay men. I think we know this wasn't true, but this is a quibble. It's not a campaigning film, not even a film about the history of the campaign for gay rights. That isn't what it's about. It's about love, the fragile nature of happiness, and death. As Firth says at one point, 'the future is death'.

Omg, wtf, imao

2012-02-05T23:56:00.010Z

I was talking to a friend this morning who had listened to Lisa Jardine talking on a Point of View on BBCR4 about the decline of letter writing, and the consequences of using emails and texts, and the other forms of instant messaging, that have almost supplanted it. My friend said it was interesting so I found it and listened. If you want to hear the talk you'll find it here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qng8
I've discussed aspects of this with friends before in the past, and I expect you've considered the subject, but it was interesting to hear the argument laid out. It boils down to saying that when one gets a letter one considers it, even lays it aside for a day or two (or sixteen in my case), before answering it. Professor Jardine, who knows a thing or two about letters, gave some examples of how letter writers have sometimes tempered their initial response to correspondence they get in favour of something more measured. Correspondence has, as a result, been stopped from spiralling off into acrimony and sometimes, eventually, enmity. This, she says, is changing since the advent of electronic messaging. The ability to instantly press a 'send' button for our reply, has meant that our initial response, often not the most considered, is the answer our correspondents now get.
I know there's pretty much no going back to letter writing, except perhaps as a conscious archaicism. I know that email, texts, Twitter, Facebook, and so on are with us now until the next new thing, whatever that might be. Whatever it is I don't see it as anything other than some other form of instantaneous messaging. Perhaps our messages will just be imagined, and then taken straight out of our brains! Commentators have noticed that rage has become a common feature of exchanges on social networking sites, particularly Twitter, and that the responses are instant as well as angry. I used to belong to Twitter, and saw the anger directed against people, often of a personal kind, and written in terms from which there could hardly be any recovery. We seemed to drop very readily into rage. I understand that these sites also provide a forum for airing problems, for supporting causes, disseminating information rapidly, and sometimes for making and maintaining friendships, but there are a lot of users who could do with what Professor Jardine was talking about, the sobering effect of reflection.
You mustn't get me wrong. After laboriously struggling through the above, I realised it might sound as tho' I didn't think honesty in dealings between people is a good thing. That the spontaneous response might be the truthful response. That may be true, but it's just that some set great store by speaking their mind, claiming that they are plain outspoken people and that what you see is what you get. They say they always 'tell it straight,' some in an irritating self-congratulatory sort of way. I can see that it could be argued that the directness of those using the social networking sites is a version of this attitude. The prevailing ethos of Twitter and Facebook is outspokenness, not pulling punches, saying exactly what's on one's mind. The little I've seen has left me ambivalent. If you weed out those who have to tell everybody they fancy an ice cream, or fancy their neighbour, or Michael Gove, you are left with a lot of interesting comment, good and witty people, and a certain amount of righteousness. But there's also the ignorance, rage, and hysteria. It's no accident that insults, expressions of rage, or disbelief are reduced to acronyms. They're so commonplace. It's occurred to me before that people who 'speak their mind' are often using that as a cover for being rude. Their style of conversation makes allowance for little else but monologue or confrontation. I do think honesty in dealings between people is important, but does that mean that the ordinary rules of engagement, empathy, sympathy, even politeness have to be sacrificed?
When we've written a response to a communication in haste, perhaps in a flush of anger, the action of pressing the 'send' button is almost an act of triumph. It's heady stuff this unbridled righteous anger. Without the breathing space offered by the ritual of answering a letter, it's almost inevitable that we'll let them have our angry, intemperate words. After all you've got to get your blow in or you're lost! Then may come the regret.
I've read back through this and I find I sound unutterably sanctimonious, but as I'm sure I used to say on Twitter, wtf! I'm leaving it!

Moan no.CXIX and don't forget Brannan

2012-02-04T12:47:00.001Z

I'm either a serious person or a frivolous one. Frivolous is where I'm stuck at the moment. Frivolity has been in place for some time now. I get criticised a lot, mostly in kindly terms, but sometimes in annoyance. Lately it's been as tho' I have a fear of committing to the serious. If you're serious you have to be more responsible, your arguments are meant to stand up to serious scrutiny, and anyway you're lumped in with the anoraks. (Rejoined the frivolous at the end there. Did you notice?) I try to argue serious points from time to time. I often do it on one particular philosophy blog and get bogged down. I fall to thinking I can't cope with this, and anyway is what I'm writing capable of being treated seriously by a serious thinker? It's unnerving thinking you're a complete dunderhead (Grandfather word!). So I climb back into the gaudy frivolous shell. In there I can consort with friendly people who even like my jokes, and some even find my occasional seriousness, which I throw into the mix in the manner of one used to intellectual pursuits and could if he wished play with the academic folk, profound. As in so much else in life I'm a victim. In this instance it's as a victim of the dominant view, in my background at least, that intellectualism is the worthiest goal. Academicism is a tradition in my mother's family that goes back all the way to the time when the world was forest covered and it was thought entirely reasonable that smoke from the fire should be kept in the house. I have kin in my mother's German ancestry who thought nothing of churning out sixteen volumes at a time devoted to transubstantiation, Wagnerian Leitmotifs, or Schiffsbau. My father's family weren't dullards either, bandying words with Hutcheson, Hume, Hutton, and other Hs, all through the Scottish Enlightenment. The weight of ideas is upon me :(

I meant to put this in a post at Christmas but forgot.

Jay Brannan's got a new album coming out soon. It can be pre-ordered. You should. You can find out how at http://jaybrannan.blogspot.com/ (basically iTunes, Amazon) Or from
http://hellomerch.com/shop/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&page=shop.browse&category_id=12&Itemid=57

His lyrics are poetry and I don't mind saying all over again that I'm in love and almost a stalker. Ignored of course. He's here in April and I've got a ticket for London. I'm schooling myself not to swoon. I imagine he'd probably frown at that. He does frowning rather well :(

Bookshops

2012-02-01T20:24:00.004Z

I'm fond of bookshops. I probably love them, but I'm losing touch with what that word means. I'm certain of 'fond'. I'm also starting to learn about book terminology relating not just to the physicality of books, but to collecting them. Collecting books, in the sense of buying books for something other than what's printed in them, is suspect. Or so I used to think, but the book as object is starting to seduce me. I'm learning, almost by osmosis, about 'points', 'editions', 'issues', 'impressions', binding terms, format, type, point sizes. This is learning by experience, but much of the subject is highly technical, and there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about it, even among those who you might think are 'professionals'. I've asked three different booksellers to explain the difference between 'issue' and 'impression', which I think I've mastered, and got three different answers (actually two different answers, and one 'don't know') none of which were right, at least to my understanding (answer below). So as the subject is technical, and I want to know about book production, printing, and collecting I'm going to have to find a good book (or books) about it all before I get hopelessly muddled. Anybody know one?

Here are some bookshops from all over:

http://flavorwire.com/254434/the-20-most-beautiful-bookstores-in-the-world?all=1

There are some beautiful bookshops in this selection. Difficult to pick my favourite, but Shakespeare and Company in Paris, which I have been to once, might be it. I've put that illustration in the post ->
In the Englishman's, and probably a Scotsman's, imagination this is what an old bookshop should look like, whereas in reality there don't seem to be many, if any, like it. It seems to be a great myth that old bookshops are full of leather bound books. Bookshops like that are rare. I assume that at one time, when leather bindings were the norm, bookshops were full of them. Illustrations and literary descriptions have fixed that image of bookshops in our memories. They have achieved mythic status, almost a race memory. When television or film people reconstruct bookshops they work to this image. It isn't the reality. Johnny Depp in The Ninth Gate, one of the silliest films ever made, is a bookseller who while tracking down two demon books, visits bookshops and booksellers. It's clear Polanski has the same mental image of what a bookshop should look like. Do other cultures have the same mental picture.

Have I done with bookshops? I'd just say that like galleries they're good pick up places. Lots of opportunity in my case but still a deep fear of translating the chances into a date. One day, maybe.
I was going to give you the 'issue point', 'impression' difference. I'll give it a go:
A book has a publication date, and before that date copies of the book are printed so that they can be distributed to be ready for the publication day. Sometimes during the course of printing the books, an editor or printer will notice an error, or decide to change the colour of something, or point size, or whatever. If it's a minor error the print run is stopped and the change is made, and then the printing restarts. When the book's publication date arrives the previously printed books (called a print run) are put on sale. Some copies, however, will be in the earlier, unaltered, state. These are known as the 'first edition, first issue'. The remaining copies in this first batch, those in the corrected form, are called the 'first edition, second issue'.
If, after the publication date, more copies of the book are needed, then more are printed. If they are printed without alteration these are called the 'second impression'. If further copies are needed another lot is printed, the 'third impression' and so on. Sometimes a publisher will decide that the book should be reset, perhaps new information added, or more illustrations, so when it appears in the shops it is a significantly different looking book. This is often called by the publisher, a new edition, but even if the publisher doesn't these significant changes will be recognised by the trade as making it a new, or second, edition.

On the subject of what is a first edition, two separate booksellers, both of indeterminate age, got quite irate that some of their colleagues now refer to the second impression (not edition) as the 'first edition, second impression'. They were adamant that only the first impression (and that includes both 'issues' in my example above) is properly called 'the first edition'. If it's a later impression it's not the first edition. And this is so in spite of what some unscrupulous publishers have done to skew the simplicity of this position. The dastards will actually print 'first edition, second (third, fourth, fifth and on) impression'. If it's not the first impression it's not the first edition. I told you this would happen. I'm going to get so ridiculous if I'm not prevented from collecting books.
And then there's 'states'. I might just spare you those :)

All this anality(?) is beginning to grip me. To book collectors issues, impressions, states, becomes of paramount importance. I shall have to keep a very close eye on myself in case I start slipping into a similarly lunatic frame of mind. Books, historically, do arouse great passion. Apparently there was a bookseller in Amsterdam in the sixteenth century who came to love his books so much that he bitterly regretted selling them. He pursued the purchaser of one of his books and murdered him in order to get it back. Next time you go into a bookshop keep a very close eye on the bookseller.

Quantity of books obsesses some people. The nineteenth century prime minister Gladstone loved quantity but rarely had time to visit bookshops. I read an American writer's (forgotten his name!) account of going into a bookshop in Holborn in London hoping to have some time looking at the stock but he was turned away by the bookseller who said that he'd sold the entire stock to Mr. Gladstone. The writer congratulated the bookseller on his good fortune and was amazed to be told that it was the third time that Gladstone had bought his entire stock. What he liked to do was have the books packed up and sent to his house, Broadlane Halll (renamed Hawarden Castle), in Flintshire, so that he could go through them at his leisure. Perhaps he did this with other booksellers's stock. A library was built, St. Deiniol's, to house his 30,000 books, and researchers can stay there. I'm in danger of going off at a tangent! Here's a link for you to read about it http://www.st-deiniols.com/
I'm at the beginning of a descent into book collecting. I think I'm saveable because I still think reading them is better than obsessing over editions and condition. But who knows! I have started to appreciate beautiful books. I have started reading people's accounts of their life in book collecting or selling. I have this horrid feeling I might fall into the abyss :(
I'd better rejoin the human race soon. Please!

Some of you have sent good wishes for Dad. That's very kind, and thank you. His doctor says he's responding to treatment, but it's very exhausting. He's very worn down both in fact and appearance which is a bit hard to deal with, but he's confident that he's going to get through it. He manages his life pretty well, with help from the Polish brothers who live in one part of the house. They are just so nice. He's so lucky they are here. Mind you he's been very welcoming and generous to them. There's an expression about things going round or coming round, which I never understood, but that! I'm sure there's an account of the arrival of the Poles somewhere back in the blog. They really keep all the physical stuff going, but Dad's not giving up on management! And I may have a job, in Cambridge. I went the nepotic route again. Not proud of it. I'd be completely lost if I had to depend on my qualifications, aptitude, drive, or experience. I'd be crap at real job finding. I'll keep you posted x

Plumbing

2012-01-31T00:16:00.005Z

Not sure where this one's headed. It will be a tight post about the inside of my head: not tight as in squiffy, foxed, adrift, blotto, pissed, but tight as in close-knit, germane, pressing close, stylistically claustrophobic. I think I'm inviting parties to tour my head. Not guided as such, more accompanied. I'm quite inclined to let you wander at will but you might upset what order there is if I allow that. Why? Because I'm obsessed by secrecy, whispering, gossip, keeping people close and bound to me. Except those I push away, but I'll not go there now because that's a psychological problem and will only make me deviate from my purpose of creating worry here and now. This may be a way of loosening myself up, and the more pairs of eyes there are searching the better. Why worry? Or why worry. I've decided. I want you all inside my head and rummaging round to see what you can find. Is it dusty? Full of scrumpled up ideas or just crumpled blank paper? No ideas? Is it draughty? Does it smell. There's logic and usefulness in there but adrift from their moorings. Do you see each other or hear rustling noises. It's dark, I bet. No light, soft yellow light, or harsh white light, or even glimmers. Nothing shines there, right? Is it populated by monsters. Or kindly handsome people? Questions. Ask me a question. Go on! No? I'll ask another then. What are the walls like? Is it like the inside of the ladies lavatory at the London Library? Here is a picture of the pipework under the sinks there. Taken by a friend.

It's really good isn't it? I was so pleased when she sent it to me. How many people get to see that? Well all the lady members of the London Library obviously, but who else. Bet my brain's a bit like that. It's good to think of the august ladies whose knees have been level with these pipes. Beatrice Webb do you think? Did Nancy Astor ever go into a library? I'm certain, unless neither used the ladies, that A.S.Byatt's and Lady Antonia Fraser's knees have stood there. Or perhaps they were scared of going in. Nah! Not A.S.Byatt. She's surely afraid of nothing. She wouldn't have spent the day with her legs crossed, nor slipped out to defecate at Christie's, or the Ritz, through fear of pipework. I sometimes went to the lavatory in Christie's. Such a gorgeous pampered clientele, and amazingly up themselves. Viewing days are a wonderful free art show. Try it. In King Street, or there's a branch in the Old Brompton Road. Mind you, any auction would do. More crumpled paper. There are some thoughts of Oliver Sachs over here tinkling away, Gang! The disorder is worrying, but not a new worry. Why is Lady Antonia Fraser, Fraser and not Strong? Or perhaps she's left Strong. Or him her. But she wasn't born Fraser. Pakenham. Are you finding the things I can't find. If you persist in kicking things over, you'll find my disgusting, disgraceful thoughts. You're a disparate lot. Or are you. Your ages range quite widely. How should I write for you? Quite a lot of you come from very different cultures. Do you read these things? Is inside my head at all familiar? Are there points of reference? Lots of thoughts about fast cars. You didn't know about those, did you? And soldiery. I was obsessed by soldiers when I was little. Grandfather gave me his large collection of lead soldiers. Militaristic gay kid. In a Ferrari. I was disappointed quite early when it was explained to me that they didn't wear the rich uniforms any more. George IV liked to design uniforms for his troops. They were absurd. No way you could keep some of those dragoon helmets on at a trot. And the law of contract. When I was little I found a book on contract by somebody called Wilson, and read it. I'd forgotten that. Are all the books I've ever read in there? Hold one up and I'll see if it's familiar. It's you lot kicking around in there. Ah, well, I let you in. If it gets no worse than this it won't be a worry. Not much understanding of science. We buried a dead shark at school. Just outside the end of the biology lab. Where the hell did it come from? You'll see how that thought came up. Why we buried it is within recall - we buried it in order eventually to get the skeleton. Is that an adequate reason? Inside a schoolmaster's brain would be a scary place. That sussurating noise is you kicking through paper? Or memories of showers. Or leaves. I like leaves. Particularly the perfection of hornbeam leaves. And why spillikins. Were they invented to develop motor skills in children. Must have been. I was highly competitive at them. Or any game. Shrieked a lot if I didn't get my way. No change. Yeah, yeah! There's a girl in there with whom I fell in love when I was six. Was that a heterosexual feeling? She had eyebrows which turned up at the ends so she had an oxymoronic angelic Mephistopholean appearance. Do you read her name? I can't see it. It was the eyebrows I was in love with. I bet she's plucked them now :( I didn't then know about Mephistopheles. I first kissed a boy when I was six. I was at my most daring when I was six. Donald ***** . He was totally nonplussed. Then I thought he was just appreciative of the effort I put in. Can you see his expression? His father was badly injured in the first Gulf War. They all lived in the darkest house I've ever been in. Perhaps light affected Donald's father. It smelt very strongly and unidentifiably. Things, memories, get adapted. They don't rest in your brain unamended. Each time you get them out and look at them they change, sometimes drastically, sometimes subtly. But they are changed. Memories are an illusion. We think they're constant but in fact we modify them in the light of continuing experience. They also become mythic, and I know I tweak the myths to make them more interesting. Even simpler to relate. Each time we think about them, memories are changed. It makes the brain a noisy place. Constant activity. That memory of Donald has changed. His mother was quiet, depressed, even to my very basic child's imagination. I see now she must have been almost overwhelmed by coping with a troubled boy, and a ruined man who was himself, I guess, not much more than a boy. Not what she signed up for, and herself not much more than a girl. Old to a six year old. Five or six years before had it happened? The house had gone to seed. I still can't identify the smell, not even now, using my much larger experience of smells. I'm pretty certain Donald's in the Army now, probably been shot at as well. He'd be about the same age as me I think. Lost touch with him. I've read Clausewitz. Some people say he's the greatest writer on war, but I think people who say that are thinking about strategy and tactics. He doesn't exactly explain war. It's more that he understands politics. The political section of my head is badly underdeveloped and I struggle with economics. Is my first proper love in there? Stupid question. I know he is. Love is probably wrong. Do you get flickering images going past you or is it more hand held than that? His name was Malcolm. He was a different kettle of fish. He was in my year but tall, good at games, not very bright when I look back. Rugby first XV. He had a bullishness which I wouldn't find attractive now. Not really sure I did then. Kind of aggressive. I wouldn't mind betting he's completely and thoroughly heterosexual now :) Is it very boring in there? You really don't have to stay. I don't think there's going to be any very great revelation after all. I used to design imaginary buildings. Forever doodling architraves, sketching follies. Loved gateways, which is depressingly obvious. Thought I might do a book about gateways. Then the steam dissipated. Is there any sign of a way to kick start my motor? There's a lot of you in there. Why don't you try a few switches, or pulling on a few levers. You're very quiet. Succumbed to the dust?

Suspended time

2012-01-27T00:44:00.001Z

My blog is very random. If you want several random things about me you'd just have to read. At the moment I'm in a bit down because technology has separated me from a complex blog of somebody I've never met but whom I love. I've been moaning on about this for some time now. I thought I'd got the hang of her beautiful new place but it turns out I haven't. I'm very sorry and please forgive the overwrought thing. It's a combination of so much. Rufus hasn't rung for a couple of days and I need to talk. He's not answering and not replying to my texts. Dad's not good and it'll be a week or two before bro gets here. The visit to Oxford in the event was a bit of a downer. I said I hadn't any regrets about the university thing, but I think I must have. I've been into Cambridge and talked to Diana at the place I used to work and it doesn't seem likely they can fix me up with any temporary work. When I left they abolished my job and shared it out among a number of other people. I had a drink with Richard and got a bit emotional on his suit, which was a bit shaming. Bramble, our long retired fat pony, had to be put down. He was everybody's childhood pony, and Dad just retired him a few years ago so he's been living a happy retirement. But there you are. I can't read because I can't concentrate. I don't cook because it would just be for me and I haven't the heart. I just snack, buy stuff, go to the pub. Somebody said to me that Darren Hayes' latest album's not up to much. I'd already bought it, and had played it a couple of times and been mildly disappointed. I've now listened again and he's right; it is not crap exactly, but not good. That's a big disappointment. Been swimming in Lynn a couple of times. Just thrashed up and down endlessly. It was kind of cathartic. Ruy rang from Spain to say that his father wanted to clear my paintings from their house. I said junk them, but Ruy said his father wanted to buy one. I didn't know what to charge so I said he should just have it and junk the rest. They were bad. I'm no good at that either. I might have gone out and shot myself but for the fact I've forgotten the combination of the gun cupboard. Joke! Another friend whom I've written about before, the most beautiful man in the world, William, has been over once or twice. He, and his Sophie, are usually upbeat, but even they seem gloomy. Perhaps I'm infectious. I've said before that William, Rufus, and I were at school together, but the occasional new person turns up so I'm just filling you in. Went to see The Artist again, alone. Fun, not deep, just fun. Beautiful performances. Everyone's going on about Dujardin, and alright he's good, but I loved Bérénice Bejo. Interesting that it has so many Oscar nominations. I think it's a strange uncertain time in America. It seems to me their confidence in all sorts of areas of life is shot. The Oscar nominations overall are nostalgic and sentimental. I think the strangest thing was the omission of Mallick's 'Tree of Life'. I haven't seen it, but having won the Palme d'Or in Cannes, and directed by Mallick with Penn and Pitt, not to get a mention looks odd. Mind you opinion has been divided about it so I shouldn't pontificate in the absence of knowledge. Was that really me? Still. Anyway The Artist distracted me for a while. Taken Dad for his treatment this week. He seems weak, but that's the effect of the drugs, I'm told. I have nothing intelligent to write - don't really know why I'm writing this. Yes, I do. All in all it's not a happy place. Piffle.

Tagged and struggling

2012-01-25T23:48:00.000Z

I was 'tagged' by an internet friend. I only have the haziest idea what that means but I think it's the public face of a social networking thing. It grows exponentially because you get sent eleven questions to answer and you are meant to to answer them and then pose eleven more questions for eleven people you know. The guy who sent them to me is the sweetest person, and I like him a lot, but I have a real horror of social networking sites, and chain things for that matter. I'm inexplicably alarmed by this, yet I have no qualms about putting stuff out there in my blog, or in comments on other people's blogs. I expect it's wrong in me, but I'm also bit reluctant to ask people to join in when I'm not sure about it myself. I'm going for a sort of compromise. I'll give you some questions if you want to do it. I'm not formally tagging you as per the rules, but answer them if you want. My questions follow, then the rules, then I've listed my friend's questions to the people he tagged in case you want to answer them instead:

1. What do you think about so-called mercy killing, or euthanasia?
2. What is your second most commonly recurring dream?
3. Do you imagine you will have a partner for life?
4. What do your friends think about the way you dress?
5. Do you an enemy who you think might do you physical harm and what do you think about that?
6. What sort of event, organism, concept, or construct do you think the universe is?
7. What makes you happy?
8. Do you have a recipe that you never tire of (and I need the recipe)?
9. Would you go away with somebody you love and admire even if he/she offered no commitment?
10 Would you find it easy to go to war for your country?
11. Why do you think people keep pets?

You answer these questions, then you pose eleven questions of your own, and then list the blogs of the eleven people you are tagging. Finally you go to their blog and tell them they've been tagged and that they're to go to your blog to get the questions. And so the thing rolls on. I think :)

The rules as they came to me:

Post these rules.
1. You must post 11 random things about yourself.
2. Answer the questions the tagger set for you in their post.
3. Create 11 new questions for the people you tag to answer.
4. Go to their blog and tell them that you've tagged them.
5. No stuff in the tagging section about "you are tagged if you are reading this." Legitimately tag 11 people!!

These are the questions I was sent and have answered. I'm not 'tagging' you. It has to be your decision whether you ignore this thing, answer my questions (above), or have a go at these.

1. What is or was your favourite cartoon character?

Judge Dredd

2. Coffee or tea?

Tea, but reluctant to separate them.

3. The best thing you've ever done in your life?

Ridden in a point-to-point

4. The worst thing you'll ever admit to doing in your life?

I'm trying wriggle out of this one, but don't see an easy escape route. I could admit to something bad and it would be the worst thing I'd admit to, but that doesn't mean there aren't worse things that I won't admit to. I think I'll pass.

5. How many people will actually answer the question above honestly?

Six.

6. Is there a god?

That's being silly! No.

7. Do you like Brussels Sprouts?

Yes, and it's possible they are God.

8. Would you lend me £150?

No. I'm saving.

9. Would you lend a politician £150?

Without question, yes.

10. Peanut butter or jam(jelly for my American friends)

Jam.

11. What has been the most memorable place you've ever visited?

Naples.

I apologise for avoiding this game. I hope this will do as a compromise, Jase! xx

Idealism

2012-01-23T00:53:00.004Z

This is the first time I've been back to Oxford since the debacle of my trying to be a student here. A debacle related elsewhere (altho' possibly an elsewhere that has long been axed) which was precipitated by a man (who was totally innocent of all blame). Actually, I'm a bit hazy about this, but I think there's a possibility that I may still a member of the University, even to the end of time, but just one who never graduated (not even within a whisker). If I had stuck it out, and came back now, I'd find myself still here heading towards the horror of finals in the Summer. Or am I telescoping time? I've done a lot of that lately.

I'm not really sorry about not being 'up' (and don't ask me why English(?) students go 'up' to their university, and 'down' when they leave). It doesn't weigh on my mind (the bit about not being 'up' - not the 'up' and 'down' thing. I don't know about you but I'm getting confused). I see Ellen and she's happy, and she's bright, and she's made for the place. She'll be a success. And I'm not saying that she's the less for that, or even the more for it. People are made for different things. This is where I'm going with this. I don't believe people are necessarily made for exclusively one thing which they find, if they're lucky. I mean most people are made for many things. I think it's wrong to assume that there's a particular place for everyone; a niche, if you like. For some people yes, and if they find it they'll be happy, but most of us, I think, fit in all sorts of different places, and regrettably some of us in none. Perhaps feeling that we should search for our own fulfillment is a state of mind. It's assumed the fulfillment is a state of mind, but perhaps the search itself is also a state of mind.

Do I think it matters that people search for fulfillment in most areas of their lives? I'm not sure. I do think that imagining one can only be happy doing one thing, or being in one place, or with one person, is a common mind set. I have it, and when I was in therapy everybody I met had it and they were mostly discontented. People spend a lot of time and emotion on searching for that thing or place, when they could be fulfilled in looking at where they are. Curiously I heard Vikram Seth say today something along this line. He said he didn't much care to travel but liked going to a place and if it pleased him then staying there, maybe for six weeks, maybe for six years. But then that also sounds like some sort of search.

You're supposed to strive, aren't you? In our society you are meant to strive for perfection, strive to better yourself, strive to be a better person, strive to save the world, buy a BMW, or that foreign villa. These are targets set for us by others. The level of imagination is depressing, but it's not just our fault that we are so limited, that when the lottery win happens all we can think to say is that we'd like a bigger house and a better car, then run out of ideas. Nowhere are we encouraged to think except in terms of the ultimately safe and meretricious area of material goods. If we said we had no interest in owning a bigger house or a better car, society would regard us as odd, even possibly alarming. I can well imagine that there would be considerable cynicism and anger if a lottery winner decided to use all the money to bring water to African villages, or spend it on City farms, or found a political party, or an order of rationalist sisters of mercy. In other words things other than the material things we are supposed to crave, and which are ultimately dangerous things to crave. The lottery winner would be better understood if it was the house, the BMW, girls, boys, wild parties, all manner of excess. And it doesn't matter if you spend your money in this way, rashly and quickly, because society loves the feeling of superority we will be able to display if the money is 'wasted'.

It's very hard to shake off the conditioning which demands that you drive yourself on towards these limited society-approved goals, that drives you to 'better' yourself within these parameters. Our institutions, private and public, political and social have created a driven culture. Conditioning that above all has made work increasingly demanding and intrusive, insisting that individuals lives be more and more subjugated to their employers, reversing a historical trend towards a fairer relationship between capital and labour. I think we're reaching the point where the inflated fetish for achievement at work is proving to be bad for workers. The message is that enjoying life is deeply suspect. 'Lotos-eating', as I've noticed before, has had a bad press.

Work's the thing, and more than that, work which drives you to the edge of sanity is almost demanded. In the limited amount of employment I've had I've seen that 'targets' loom large in people's minds. The lawyers I worked for lived and died by 'billing'. If they didn't bill their clients in a quarter for the amount they had declared to be their target then meetings were held, assessments made, accounting done, and possibly the loaded gun left on the desk of unfortunate individual who'd failed to meet the target. It's cut-throat. They are mostly unhappy. Is that perfection, is that ideal? Is that the place where people want to be?

There will now be a short intermission:

I'm now confessing to being mildly technophobic. For some time now I've been going to read a blog by a blogger whom I adore. Unfortunately it has recently become even denser, richer, and more desirable than ever, but I cannot work it. I just don't get how to navigate it. I'm distraught. We used to have something of a dialogue going (although it was mostly me being star-struck), and I loved it. Now I just can't get through to the places in the blog I want to be in. There you are. Just admitting to being incompetent; don't get me wrong, I'm still admiring and in love, but very frustrated. What I need is a version of this blog set out in order. I'm not saying whose blog it is (you'll have to work it out) because any failing is mine. Just send me a manual, Sammy, or take me by the hand and show me the way to enlightenment. Imagination is all but dead in me and I need yours. Love, Alec xx

P.s. Discount all that stuff about the difficulty of using the blog. I went back and found it worked quite easily. I still have minor problems with it, but all is down to my stupidity. :/

P.p.s. I heard Paul Johnson talking recently. I've read a few of his books. Mildly irritating but nothing compared with how irritating he is in the flesh. He's 80+ and knows lots, yet has learnt nothing. What a tit (as Dad is fond of saying, altho' not always about Paul Johnson)! Sorry. I was bursting to say that. My temper is stratospheric.

Running out of steam

2012-01-19T13:35:00.005Z

Not sure what this post will emerge as, simply because I'm not in the way of making a coherent piece about anything at the moment. I just can't concentrate and I don't know why. Frustration boils in me, but its origin is obscure.

I'll start by saying you should read, you must read, I insist that you do, possibly the best blog in the world for creativity and sheer exuberance. It's http://sewshootme.blogspot.com/ In another life, in which I am heterosexual, I would pursue Sammy (whose blog it is) and insist that she live with me so that I can be vitalised by her energy. I might well in that alternate life be a bit creepy. I think she's had men who were (are?) shits, or been weak, or stupid, or all three. She can be excoriating on the subject of men, but she's a wonder is what she is.
I'm a loyal person so she can't take on the role of my sympathetic female friend (I'm avoiding the horrible jargon words), even supposing she remotely wanted the post, because I've got a sympathetic female friend. That's not to say one can't have more than one, but it is a bit greedy. It is nevertheless a tribute to my fidelity that I'm not camped outside Sammy's place demanding, well just demanding. (Hmm! A 'Carry On' thought occurred! Aropos of nothing [I love that apropos thing!] but just so you know I'm not plagiarising these brackets. They're employed on the (unconsciously implied) advice of another blogger for use in foggy situations :)

I'm unlikely to be going back to Spain for a while. There's a bit of a problem in the family, and what with Max being away in the US, and Ellen up at Oxford, I've decided I should stick around. Not sure if I can do crises. I'm absolutely no good in the ones in which I am the star, but I can hope I won't disgrace myself. I'll not be at home tho', but in Cambridge. Work at home is well covered by Charley and Michal so I'll job hunt in Cambridge and see how things turn out. I'll be home at weekends a fair bit. This was my idea. I'm not under any sort of pressure. It's just the best thing. Probably for me mostly.

Someone said they'd been reading my archive. Actually he said 'rummaging in'. It's what you do in attics, or at jumble sales. It seems appropriate. The idea alarmed me, perhaps embarrassed me is better. I can't think why, unless it's that I might not like the earlier me you'll find if you start rummaging. That's axiomatic actually. Anyway I thought I'd check it out to see just how embarrassing my archive is. Very is the answer. There are a number of points about it which struck me apart from the shame. The 'poems' are unforgivable! I work desultorily (that word's very hard to say aloud) on a big 'poem' which I might now, through rummaging, have killed. And how frequently I write them! On the plus side I was struck by how easily I wrote about a range of different things. Unfortunately that seems to have gone. I seem so young at the beginning with lots of life and enthusiasm, yet the blog was born out of a cataclysm. Obviously cataclysm suited me because in comparison I sure seem grey now. Have I accepted a life lacking in colour? The posts seem concerned with a much wider range of things; yes, they're all about me, and yes that's what blogs are, but now there's no gesture towards anything other than navel gazing. I'm only inward looking. It's my listlessness that concerns me most. I probably shouldn't have looked.

I did an online memory test thing. It was mentioned in the Saturday Guardian supplement on memory. It's tied in with some Cambridge project. You get the result at the end and I scored quite highly. I've been going round boring people about it. Any success, no matter how trivial, has to be seized on and flaunted in my world, although it wasn't all pleasure. A lingering memory of the frisson of fear that accompanied exams troubled me briefly. It's an anonymous test - you just have to give your sex, age, telephone number (no you don't!) - and you can end it at any time. I'm not sure why this took my fancy, but generally I'll do any test. I'm quite competitive, and find excuses, no matter how elaborate, for failure. I once conjured the distracting effect of a non-existent rabbit, not the batting kind, to explain getting bowled by a rank long hop in a house match. Ludicrously some people thought the match important and were loud in their derision of the rabbit excuse.
Anyway, this is the link.

memorytest.docopeople.com/test/

Try it and if you score better than 82% I'll find an elaborate excuse to explain why you might have been 'better' than me (honesty compels me to admit there was a second element to the test in which I was respectably average, but respectably doesn't really appeal so I'm not mentioning it too much!)

Been getting off on Chopin lately, which in life I doubt he would have appreciated. Sergio Tiempo helped!

There's an interview with Sergio on YouTube somewhere in which he come across a bit like Swiss Tony which is disappointing, and funny. Disappointing because he looks dreamy and plays amazingly and people like that have no right being boringly stereotypical. But then Swiss Tony is an inspired character (although perhaps should only have had one or two runouts).

I've always liked the wonder of clever things done at home, particularly music. This is the allegro from Chopin's Etude op.10, no. 1 in C major played by Kristian Cvetkovic (don't know, before you ask!) Somehow very appealing, amateurly recorded in this practise room, or wherever it is. You can compare it with Pollini's version, who admittedly makes more sense of the left hand, but somehow you can tell he's older. Which is not a bad thing. Just saying :)

I'm in Oxford right now, which I didn't really get to know. It is, of course, very beautiful, and as in Cambridge, so are the students. It's bigger than Cambridge, and seems, perhaps because the town is bigger, less dependent on the University. Physically (topographically?) Oxford's less claustrophobic, which is odd considering the vast flat expanses surrounding Cambridge. Maybe that's not a valid judgement. I think Cambridge is better looking.
I'm being very well behaved, handed round my sister's girly friends, inspected, tested, and, I suspect, being spat out. It's fun and strange being the guest of one's little Sis! It's like a glimpse of a future in which things are tantalisingly fuzzy. They drink a lot these girls, which isn't Ellen's home image. I wonder how men view her? I think she's wonderfully cool and distant, and very sophisticated. I suppose I hope she's those things. A rock on which hearts could be dashed. An Estella perhaps to my Miss Havisham except I'd be using her to lure men to dash themselves on my rocks (I promise that didn't start out as quite as blatant a piece of double entendery as it has become!). What do I know? She keeps giving me challenging looks, or is verbally spikey. That's also funny. I must say being with these girls makes much of what went before in this post recede into the background. Perhaps the answer is what others have said or implied - I just need to be with people. It couldn't hurt.

There's an 'i' in prosac

2012-01-12T15:50:00.002Z

I keep coming joltingly up against the realisation that I'm not as bright as I think I am. Before you run away with the idea that therefore I must be a chastened and humble sort of person you should know that I slip easily and quickly back into thinking I'm quite as bright as I think I am, so I'm never long in that place where intelligence is something other people have. At the moment I'm in the 'I'm not as intelligent as I thought' place.

Intelligence to me is the ability to think subtly, see the possibilities in things, express them in terms of human experience, appreciate people's psychology and express one's thoughts in psychological terms. Above all I wish I understood philosophy. I screw my brain into its most concentrated mode and read the words but all too soon my brain loses interest and wanders. I want to be academic. I want, desperately, to follow the terms and the twists of an argument. It turns out I can't be arsed and when I set myself the task of thinking I metaphorically, and occasionally literally, yawn.

I think linearly (which probably isn't a word, but I'm letting it go), without depth. My mind is a single 8mm projector casting its jumpy image on a white sheet. I wish it had 3D technology. Even if I tell myself that 3D can only come up with Avatar, Despicable Me, or Night of the Living Dead, it doesn't help. It's only a matter of time before 3D film-making gets the range and it'll start hitting the target, whereas my brain has reached its apogee. Probably it did ten years ago. And it's no use telling myself that Orson Welles thing about the violent history of the Italians producing so many cultural wonders, and the settled harmonious Swiss only managing the cuckoo clock. Mostly it's no use telling myself because I've forgotten the point it was supposed to make, and anyway the whole thing originated with Ruskin, and it was some Bavarian who invented the cuckoo clock.

See! My mind's gone off the rails already. This knowledge about my brain is of no use to me. I'm educated beyond my brain's capability. I have no need of my mind and rather than trying to expand it, it would be better if I was making things. This current bout of self-castigation started because I read a brilliant explanation of a film that I had not understood. I didn't understand the explanation either, but somehow its incomprehensibility made it all the more brilliant. Why, why can't I write incomprehensibly about incomprehensible things? It seems to me that really great things are beyond comprehension, and if you can puzzle in this way then you've won the prize of being thought to have a good mind. Unfortunately I'm boringly, tediously, unforgivably prosaic, and that wins nothing.

It's galling to an out and out show off to discover this. When I was small I was obnoxious - forever thrusting myself into the limelight, flaunting a precocious talent for theatricality. I was an outrageous flirt, thought myself invulnerable, and destined for greatness in some then as yet unidentified field. But the talent turns out to be limited, my flirtatiousness landed me in dire trouble, I'm horribly vulnerable, and greatness for me is a chimera. Worst of all is the ordinariness of my mind.

Take Kierkegaard. I only recently discovered he's not Keer-kuh-gard but Keer-kuh-gor. I mean how could I, a supposedly bright, quite-close-still-to-youth, man, only learn that just as my intelligent life closes. I think it's a physiological fact that my brain cells have been dying now for about two years, so things won't get better. I could use that as my excuse of course and say 'I need no more information, concepts, philosophy, science' or whatever, and just say 'I'm full' or 'I am not capable of understanding what I've got, let alone new stuff'. Kierkegaard is the first existentialist. Why did I write that? I've already forgotten what an existentialist is. Every time it's the same. I have to go right back to the beginning and do the stuff all over again. I got through my highers like this. Learnt it the night before a paper and hoped enough of the stuff would stick. This isn't an uncommon story, but its very commonness is an indication of a lesser mind. Fortunately information did stay in my head for that brief time, but two days later it had gone leaving me (as it turned out) with paper qualifications and no knowledge. What is a Higgs-Bosen, or a neutrino, or a collider come to that? And what is it about Einstein's theory of relativity that is buggered by the suggestion that there may be a neutrino which can travel faster than the speed of light? Go now and read about neutrinos and tell me how come there are people in the world who can predict their existence and explain them? Why don't we all know? More to the point, why don't I? I hardly need go further. You have the essence of the case. Mine is a prosaic mind and I'm no nearer understanding why, or what I'm to do about it. Or with it.

I quite fancy being an architect, but it's a long training and you have to remember stuff; novelist? Nah! I can't remember enough stuff to write a novel, and certainly not an incomprehensible one which is, after all, the only sort worth writing and wins the prizes; what about a singer, or an actor, or a dealer on the London Metal Exchange . . . . . . See! I refer you back to the beginning. I'm back in that place where I'm thinking I'm obviously bright . . .

The Ring Cycle

2012-01-07T23:09:00.006Z

There are problems with Wagner. He carries with him the label of Hitler's favourite composer, and there is absolutely no doubt he was anti-semitic. He published a pamphlet containing attacks Jewish influence in the music world, and on Jewish composers. Admirers of his music have difficulty glossing over this aspect of his life. It's the case that anti-semitism was widespread in Europe in the late nineteenth century, and that it was to be found at all levels of society. I'm not offering this as an excuse for Wagner, because there were plenty of his contemporaries who saw the injustice and viciousness of the attitude, but a climate of prejudice and propaganda does have its effect on people. One would hope that people of the intelligence and talent of Wagner would see through the relentless propaganda, but it's clear that he, along with many influential people, all shored up by wrong-headed science, not only believed it but actively contributed to the prejudice.

I love Wagner's music. I've a friend and some relations who think it's primarily a young person's passion and I'll grow out of it. The argument is that I'm seduced by its loudness and bold tunes - in other words by its flashiness :) Well I am, but I don't think I'll grow out of it because it's much more than just flashy. There are no signs yet of its power on me fading. There are plenty of older people who are moved by his music. I can see that there are elements in it which deliberately work on the more susceptible emotions. I recognise that the plot lines are vaguely absurd - although one comes to accept that in opera - but they're transformed by the music. Wagner's scoring is matchless, and changed music forever.

I've been listening to Solti's 1964 recording of Gotterdammerung, the last of the three . Some of you may remember that I had a 'landlord' in Cambridge called Robbie, who has a huge collection of vinyl. It is one of his which I transferred to disc that I've been playing. It's a bit hissy, but the recording is regarded as important, not just because it was the first recording of the complete Cycle (I think), but for the sheer quality of the performances. It was remastered sometime in the 90s but I've not heard how that came out. The amazing cast includes Dietrich Fischer-Diskau, Birgit Nilsson (at her bright, metallic best), Gottlob Frick, Lucia Popp, Gwyneth Jones, the great Christa Ludwig, and many others. Needless to say I've been a bit weepy. I have a friend called Bess who is similarly afflicted by Wagner, and pursues performances of the Ring. She says she's stood outside theatres all over this country and Europe sobbing uncontrollably while kind Londoners or Mancunians, or Berliners, or Madrilenos have stood solicitously, but uncomprehendingly, by offering sympathy and tissues for what was clearly some great tragedy

I find it very odd that when I'm feeling low, it's not the lighthearted or humorous things that lift me, but serious and tragic things. Is that perverse?

This part of a documentary about the recording.

Next is a YouTube link to the session in which Solti was recording Siegfried's Funeral March. Embedding it, unfortunately, has been disabled. Please look at it for the sake of Solti's passion, and the great days of the Vienna Philharmonic's brass section. And hear it if you are able on good speakers or head phones. This is mono-recording and much of the extraordinary texture of the music is lost if you don't have good quality reproduction.

http://youtu.be/nkOiKy6sXfM

I might as well get my full Wagner confession out of the way. Unconnected with Solti's recording, this is Kirsten Flagstad, the greatest of all Brunnhildes, in my view :), in the final part of the immolation scene, conducted by Furtwangler and recorded in 1952. The first two parts are also on YouTube if those of you who haven't been into this territory before are brave enough. Perhaps you should do them in order. The majority of the sung part of the scene comes in the earlier parts. Flagstad is gloriously strong and dominant.

Love, Alec xx

Some have darkness thrust upon them

2012-01-03T01:06:00.001Z

'According to Plan' I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness

Immediately after Christmas I had a serious wobble, I mean serious. I wrote reams of anxious, depressed stuff in a post, just like the old days, but I read it back through and its tone frightened me so I deleted it. I hung on to myself for two days, fortunately two quiet hung-over days for everybody else, and miraculously got through it without anybody noticing. I say nobody noticed, but some noticed I was quiet, and kept to my room, but I claimed it was a combination of drink and feeling as tho' flu was coming on. Got away with it, altho' Rufus half guessed at it and kept people away, and talked to me. It was extremely scary, but the worst was the reinforcement of the knowledge that depression never goes away. The truth is that I'd been lax about the pills in Spain, and it caught up with me. I'm going to have to make arrangements somehow, if I really am going to stay there for some time, to get medication there. I meant to do it before, but I forgot. Not again!
This is a new year and it was meant to start and continue well, and it wasn't a good start. This blog was, is, full of my thoughts, written down, without embarrassment, just as they occurred to me. Suddenly I'm overwhelmingly embarrassed by what I've said about myself. Apprehension comes with the embarrassment. All the old refrains course round and round in my head, recognisably mine, but I want to disown them, and pretend you weren't looking at me but at a pretence of me. But I can't take it all back. It's a real shock that all the old demons won't go away and still have the capacity to attack with all of the old viciousness. Doc always said that I would have to work to stay upright. He was always urging me to be aware, to keep talking, and not to withdraw. The impulse to hide was very strong.
I'm keeping this short. Rufus and his Ed went home today. They were brilliant. I think Ellen goes back to Oxford this weekend, and the relations back to Germany on Thursday. The work of the farm doesn't stop so Dad and the Poles have well and truly left the holiday behind. I've decided, in spite of this fright, to go back to Spain next week. I feel I don't have an alternative but to push myself. I might try to find doc before I go and have a chat. That's it. I'll get out on Dilley for the rest of my time here as often as I can. It always helps no matter how desperate I feel.
I really will try to write about something other than myself, or rather something other than my pathetic self. I keep saying that but nothing happens.
Let's wish ourselves a Happy New Year. Who couldn't do with that?

Christmas and stuff

2011-12-27T14:36:00.003Z

Christmas was a lovely day. It began for some with Midnight Mass, but at long last I said no. I've usually gone because altho' I haven't been a believer for some years I liked the tradition of it. It's that old thing of confusing religion with belonging. I'm almost convinced that lots of Christians, and probably members of other faiths, observe it because they like the sense of belonging to something. There's a communal participation in something historical, and something particularly historical relating to their community that is attractive. There has to be a dash of love of language and love of theatre in there as well. I felt a bit treacherous (or traitorous?) for not going but Rufus kept me company, while Dad, Ellen, the Poles, surprisingly embracing the Church of England, and Rufus's Ed went to church.
I don't think I said that Rufus and his boyfriend wished themselves on us for Christmas. That sounds like I think it's a bad thing but I don't. It's a wonderful thing that they're here. It's also given me the warm glow that you get when you do somebody a good turn. I've (Dad really) rescued them from the grim certainties of their own parents. Regular readers will know about the harpie that is Rufus's mother, and his amiable but mostly absent father. Ed's parents, it turns out, altho' not at the same level on the grim scale, are very undemonstrative and totally absorbed musicians. Reading between the lines I'd say they don't show Ed much warmth, and their Christmases are completely taken up with musical performances with no time for hospitality and ordinariness.
I'm not necessarily praising ordinariness, but having time for your friends, conversation, humour, and story telling pretty well define 'ordinary' things, and neither Rufus's nor Ed's family seems to do any of that. Having written that I'm inclined to think I've not quite captured the sense of what I mean. If you take Ed's parents, for example, they do, apparently, have time for their friends, and the other things, but it's all conducted in a highly earnest tone. Ed's quite earnest. He actually very beautiful. He naturally arranges himself in such graceful attitudes in a completely uncalculated way. It's all I can do to stop myself moaning sometimes :) He is quite severe to look at, but somewhere deep inside him, or even not so deep, there's a guy who wants warmth and humour. Rufus can't meet Ed at any musical level, but it's the warmth and humour (even if it has to be explained :) that makes Rufus so attractive to Ed. I'll confess that all this is my take on their relationship. Rufus is a love. He frets all the time about his lack of musicality and that fretting prevents him from appreciating the rest he has going for him. Anyway I'll not bang on about it any more.

Boxing Day.

Taken up my keyboard again. Boxing Day brings the traditional Boxing Day meet for hounds all over England. This year obviously represents triumph of intellect over sentiment for me, because I said no to doing something I have traditionally done, again. I seem to be sloughing off childish things this Christmas. I used always to go to the West Norfolk's meet at Fakenham Racecourse. I went last year and I've written about it in past years. I've hunted with the West Norfolk, and they're not unhappy memories. Hunting in the country was one of those traditional things, like the Church of England. They were then such a part of my life that questioning them just didn't occur to me. So much has changed even in my life. And in me. I've moved from pro to anti-hunting. That's a bit absurd. I've come so late to the argument. The battle's won. Not going to the emasculated hunt's annual festive meeting, while it may represent a stage in my life, hardly now counts as a protest.
In theory there shouldn't be any objection now to my riding to hounds, but somehow I can't bring myself to do it. What I've learnt about the world, about the haves and the have-nots, makes me view the privileged hunting field differently. I've resisted this feeling for so long, finding excuses, and they are there, but ultimately I have to admit that it is a closed activity. and while its exponents do come from a variety of walks of country life, the majority are arrogantly unpleasant.
Life at home is closing in on me. It's changing, and I'm changing with it. Stupidly I knew this would happen, one reads about it constantly in literature, but somehow I thought it wouldn't happen in my life. I've only been away a short time, not even really fully cut my ties, but I can see that while this may be a comfortable, in every sense, place to be, without having been away from it for very long I can tell that mentally I've moved on.

Tuesday:

This post has been very bitty. There's been lots on and even tho' I sit down to write, something - cooking, games, expeditions, chats, drinks - calls me away. I have loved this time with my friends. My uncle from Germany, my Mum's brother, and his family are coming today for the lead up to New Year, so it's not really going to let up for quite a while. Today I'm doing cooking for the freezer so we have stuff that doesn't take long to get on the table. It will be quite manic I expect, and the children are hopelessly indulged. I think we must have been unnaturally good children, because I just don't remember causing the chaos that my Uncle's four do. That may of course be a self-serving recollection. As I sit here some things begin to come back to me. I remember directing Ellen in digging a hole in the lawn and filling it from a rainwater butt so that we might paddle. Mum was furious. Oh, and the incident of the large fence staples under the district nurse's tyres ... I think I may have to look on my young cousins with more tolerance. I'll wind up and try to devote my next post to something more coherent.

Familiar surroundings and rehashed thoughts

2011-12-22T17:38:00.007Z

Christmas comes round again. I'm glad to be back home. We're minus Max this Christmas whose job is keeping him in America. Dad says he's got a 'steady'. I'd forgotten about all the old's terms and references! This one apparently comes from describing a couple as being in a steady relationship - 'going steady'. Charmingly Edwardian, but weird! I think it likely that Dad is exaggerating the depth of commitment to this 'steady' on Max's part partly through wanting it to be true. I'm not saying Dad is all on fire to persuade Max of his dynastic duty, in fact I'm almost sure it hasn't crossed his conscious mind - and he'd never actually suggest it even if he thought it - but I genuinely think there are clues to his feelings coming from his subconscious brain. Fortunately I'm out of the dynastic loop :)

While I was away Peter Reading died. I wrote about him in October so I won't go over my enthusiasm for him all over again, but I think he was a very great poet. He's not easy to read, and he presupposed a high level of knowledge and education among his readers which I for one don't get very near, but then why should everything be reduced to easy pap? I knew about him because I found his books among Dad's poetry books. When I got home on Tuesday I found that he had them all out on his desk. It turned out that Dad had known Peter Reading, which I'd never realised! It was a short lived friendship, mostly because befriending Reading was difficult. Dad spent some time in Ludlow (when Reading lived there) ages ago, with his friend Jean. He and Jean had a horse breeding and livery venture going for a short while, and Dad was back and forth a fair bit. He met PR at what he described as an 'excruciating' social gathering in Ludlow. Not Dad's sort of thing, tho' he performs quite well at them. He's naturally polite :) The poet was a fish dying slowly in this arid setting, and Dad said he was drinking heavily to cover his distress (the poet, not Dad!). He was there in one of those brief periods when he thought he ought to try to fit into Ludlow society. Apparently he did this occasionally to placate his first wife. He made it clear initially that he didn't think much of Dad, and Dad said he thought he had a bit of thing about class. Anyway they got through that because Dad quite uncharacteristically cracked and made a spirited defence of Shakespeare, whose genius was questioned by some up-his-own-arse Ludlovian. PR's opinion of Dad swung round, embracing him as his indispensable friend. Not good, said Dad. PR's knowledge and scholarship were way beyond Dad's, and subsequent conversations were very one sided. Added to which PR's default position was one of contempt, and he was always on the look out for signs of stupidity. Dad was saved from exposure as a lightweight as PR, holding forth completely eloquently, was suddenly overtaken by the drink. He pitched straight forward onto the floor. He'd gone from being in complete command of his faculties to insensate in the space of a second. PR's wife had left the party by this stage so Dad, aided by Jean who knew where to go, got PR back to his home. He'd recovered enough to assure them when they reached his front door that he'd be fine from that point on so they left him on his doorstep. Jean said she learnt subsequently that a passing neighbour found him there and had put him indoors on the hall floor, and that was where his wife found him when she came down in the morning.
Dad and PR had a number of subsequent drinking sessions. He was a great oenophile (not what you're thinking :), but he had no head for alcohol. That must be the ultimate cruel trick to be played on somebody who knows a lot about and loves wine. Round about this time there was a huge, headline-grabbing, country house sale, I think one of Rosebery's houses, (could have been in the 1970s) and the contents of its huge cellar were among the things sold. PR was flush with some prize money at the time and he blew the lot buying wine at this sale. He generously opened a number of extraordinary bottles of antique wine with Dad, who particularly remembers a mid-nineteenth century sherry which was almost syrup-like in consistency and fiery beyond imagining. One of the most wonderful drinking experiences of his life he said. (Actually he said 'awesome' but he was just taking the piss out of me. Anyway I've dropped 'awesome' now that even David Cameron is using it.) It's a curious thing, which I'd not considered until Dad pointed it out, that the people who buy these expensive wines at auction, have absolutely no guarantee that it's any good. There's a considerable likelihood with very old wine that it's turned to vinegar, and this is what they occasionally discovered. Even that which had not become vinegary has very often lost all the character it might once have had. Just occasionally there was a wonderful surprise, mostly among the fortified wines, which was what PR had concentrated on. Dad said that obviously the only way to preserve the monetary value of old wine is never to open it, but that wasn't at all why PR had bought it. There is no redress, however, if your bottle turns out to be piss.
Dad and PR drifted apart, partly because PR grew even less tolerant of everyone, and Dad's interest in Jean's horse breeding enterprise ended so he stopped being a regular visitor to Ludlow. He was only, I think, a guarantor of Jean's loan.

Got some way from home and Christmas which I was going to write about :) I've been blogging two or three years now, and I feel you've been through our Christmases in the past, so perhaps I won't write about this one unless I can find something new to tell you, or update old news.

I've not had a blameless blogging existence, and there are people who know about my sins. In my defence I wasn't, when I started blogging, or social networking for that matter, in a good place mentally. I wasn't controlling myself at all well. In fact I was a mess. It's possible that how I behaved could have caused damage to other people and I can't ever apologise enough for that. It's enough here to say that I deliberately shut down blogs and my presence on networking places because I was embarrassed, ashamed, and frightened by them. I indulged in unforgivable play acting and lied. Still that's all past but now I'm feeling some danger, not of repeating those awful things, but of going over and over the fallout. The blogosphere is not just an ephemeral place to be, it's also a place of heightened emotion. I'm feeling that very much right now and I'm not sure what I want to do in almost any way you care to name.

This is all the language of my past. I'm not so much of a flake any more but I am still looking for the quiet place to be; the place where I can think. It's not a physical place, although physical places can definitely help, it's a state of mind. This post has been crassly disjointed, a sort of thinking aloud post, and I apologise for inflicting it on you. It's more help to me than it is to you. If you've struggled through this far I'd say you deserve a stiff drink or some gentle mind altering narcotic :) Anyway I'm determined to take things easy and enjoy the holiday. If you've read my posts you'll know I'm not a believer in supernatural beings, so celebrating the birth of the son of a non-existent God would be beyond silly, but I am a believer in family and friends. I both believe they exist and believe in their power to do me good, so I'm going to concentrate on them for a few days.

I'm putting a picture of the barn in here. I took it, I think, shortly before I went to Spain, but certainly sometime this year. The field's in bad condition and Dad says he's going to plough it next year. A great deal of money could be made if this barn was sold with planning permission for conversion to a house. I hope nothing of the sort will happen. It's been mooted to Dad by various advisers who say planning permission might well be easy to get, but he, thank goodness, is against it. Anyway I doubt the 'easy planning permission' line because the barn's listed. I might just start a Barn Preservation Society. So many beautiful barns have been desecrated by people converting them into houses. The results always look the same, and look bad. Unimaginative architects lay before credulous clients plans to turn these beautiful buildings into identikit house - all stripped floors, orange wood, 'minstrels' galleries, down lighters, kitchen diners, etc. etc. when their real glory is their soaring interior space. Once you start filling it with walls and floors their beauty is lost. Admittedly the use for this sort of barn on a modern farm is minimal and in farming there's not much room for sentiment, but I argue that the space occupied by the building would not be used for anything much else, buildings like this are being lost at a tremendous rate, and it could be let for other purposes which don't destroy its character. Dad doesn't want to let it at the moment, but I'm working on him.

I'm not cooking on Christmas day. My involvement with the food side of things this year has been removed from me. Not entirely happy about that, but in a none too subtle sop to my obvious disappointment, the great goddess of Christmas, the Blessed Ellen said I could 'do the ham'. In fact it's being baked as I write. The ham is first poached with onion, celery, lemon and orange, for 10 minutes per pound. When it has cooled the skin is removed and the surface of the ham scored in a diamond or trellis pattern, and garlic cloves are stuck into surface at the crossing points of the trellis pattern. Then it is smothered with a glaze consisting of a mixture of dark brown sugar, spelt flour, mustard and ground pepper, moistened with cointreau. The ham sits in a tin with wine stewed plums, apple juice and marsala and is baked, again for 10 minutes per pound. Baste every ten minutes. If you wonder why I'm working in imperial measures and not metric blame the fact that Dad has not got a weighing machine with metric markings, nor a measuring jug. This is weird considering everything else on the farm has been metric for decades. I swear he still mentally converts everything.

Happy Christmas everybody! I hope you have a lovely time. Love, Alec xxxx

Settling down

2011-12-17T12:58:00.004Z

I'd more or less decided, since my posts have annoyed me lately, for being very self-centred in an aggravating unwanted way, that I wouldn't write anything for a week. I'd got over, for the moment, the impulse to leave for a bigger place, and decided, just to see if it was possible, to immerse myself entirely in life here. I have been living on the fringe of it, making forays into the shop for food, or to the bar for the occasional drink, but not really involved. I decided I'd get out more and talk to people. Anyway that's what I'd decided when I had an email from Dad. So here I am to tell you about it, the no posting resolution gone by the board. Truth to tell there's not much to tell, I mean about the content of the email. He's not a longwinded correspondent, or conversationalist come to that. Scotsmen come in two forms - those who cannot stop talking, and those who don't start. Dad's one of the latter. He's not inarticulate - he is after all highly educated and knows how to put words together - nor does his quietness come from bad temper or shyness. He's happy in the company of people but he likes to listen because he likes people and wants to know about them.
I used to think Dad was a bit vampire like, sucking information instead of blood from my friends, but leaving them with enough reserves so that he could return for more. I realised that's putting it in too harsh a way. I didn't really have an understanding of what was happening. His 'victims' as I used to think of those he talked to, became animated and forthcoming when they were with him. Many of them weren't either of those things when with other people. Dad has a knack of relaxing people by being genuinely interested. So many people treat conversation as a contest to be won. I don't mean Dad was supine, nor will he say he agrees with something he disagrees with merely to placate people. He makes his points in reasoned and non-confrontational ways.
Dad, by all accounts, is the opposite of Mum, and I guess my and Ellen's loquacity comes from her. I didn't really know Mum. I was a very small child who was too young to have the knowledge or experience to judge an adult. All I knew was she made me happy, and at some point she became detached and quiet, where she had been loving, ebullient and contrary. Max is more like Dad. In fact, now I think about it, he's exactly the same in temperament, but not looks.
Sorry! How boring blogs can be. Pretty nearly as boring as other people's dreams, which is what I suppose blogs often are. Mine, altho' I try to keep it real, does sometimes become a dream of life. Perhaps all blogs give the wrong impression because they contain just those things that reflect well on us. Even relating something which might be thought not to reflect well on us is because we're secretly proud of what it says of our sophistication, or of the angst that makes us more interesting, or shows how much of an interesting outsider we are. Perhaps it is all calculation. And we concentrate ourselves into a few sentences, leaving out of account the acres of tedium that's in our lives.
It's a pernicious thing giving a lot of frivolous, opinionated, deranged, driven, political, sex mad, would be authors, people, of every age and kind, the freedom to write more or less what they want and to lay it all before the world. The temptation to embroider, to make dreamlike, one's experience is well nigh impossible to resist. Unless, that is, you are blessed, as I am, with exceptional moral fibre :)
Time was when the market determined what was bruited abroad, and publishers, editors, and proprietors stood between authors and publication. Suddenly the floodgates of literary restraint are smashed and words in their billions have flooded out all headed straight for the population at large. The consequence of the removal of censorship is indigestible quantity. Those who set themselves up as arbiters of taste, or morality, or political philosophy, or represent the ascendancy of a political idea, are still inclined to panic. What perhaps they hadn't anticipated was that the sheer quantity of stuff on the internet, from the banal, through the monumental, the genius-touched things, the dross, the disgusting things, the threatening and the unthreatening things - most of it, let's face it, unmemorable - seems to lessen ideas rather than making them more dangerous. Association with crap sullies almost anything. The shine of a good idea is made increasingly less bright as it is tossed round with recipes, s&m sites, medical advice, bingo sites, retailing - everything designed to make everything anodyne. The tedium of the blogosphere becomes the ally of the control freak.
I meant to commiserate with you over being a captive audience for my family stories, but it was the email that was the point to which I've failed to come. It just had news about the farm, and the doings of everybody, and Michal having another baby (Michal being one of the Poles who works for Dad). Dad mentioned that they'd had a farm outing to the races at Fakenham this last Monday and suddenly I was overwhelmed by nostalgia and homesickness. I longed to be there, longed for the excitement of horses, longed for the cold dampness of that Norfolk racecourse. I wanted to be there to enjoy poking fun at Dad's inability to judge racehorses, and measure it competitively against my better judgment. I wanted to be with friends to shout and cheer. It was odd that mentioning that single event triggered such a strong reaction where other things Dad described brought smiles, but not a welling up of emotion. I almost resolved there and then to leave for home.
I will go home for Christmas (I've booked a flight for Tuesday) but it's still my intention to come back here afterwards. There are so many things unresolved.

This is Nowness with a good idea and a classy video. I hope you all have a lovely time at Christmas. Curiously, for me, it's the one time that has been consistently good, except for that one time. Love, Alec xxxx

Ennui

2011-12-12T16:21:00.004Z

I wrote a while ago that I was bored. That was a lie. I was momentarily in love with the idea of being bored because it seemed cooler. It was an affectation assumed for effect. The truth is I fizz with excitement and am interested in just about everything. This is starting to sound a bit Pollyannaish. It could be another affectation. I'm pausing to consider the proposition seriously for a minute *pause* No, I'm right. I am genuinely interested in most things. Or am I? I might have just caught myself out in a half lie. I couldn't really be interested in most things. It's more that I like to think I'm genuinely interested in most things by which I mean I think it's a good thing to be thought to be genuinely interested in most things because I think that's a more intellectual thing than declaring that I'm not interested in most things. This is quite a hard game.
You see what I am trying to do is position myself intellectually in your minds as somebody who submits all things to intellectual scrutiny because I think you will think that more intellectually respectable and that therefore you will have more respect for my mind. The reality is that I'm not intellectual but a positive champion at anticipating what is the right thing to say, and indeed to think, to impress the audience I am reacting with.
Truth? I'm bored a lot. I'm bored with people who think it okay to end a sentence with a preposition, I'm bored with people who say 'bored of', I'm bored not so much with people's views (although there's enough to be bored with) but with the unthinking route they've arrived at them, I'm bored with reality tv (sooooo bored), I'm bored with pop culture (soooo bored), I'm bored with the stupidity of people who think it a triumph that we've reached a measure of agreement on climate change that thinks it's okay to start thinking about it 2015, I'm bored with all those who hate and don't see it's affecting not just their victims' lives but there own, I'm bored with the vacuousness of people who think it's okay to open another beauty salon, I'm bored with politicians who don't see that making real things is the basis of a healthy society while at the same time don't realise there has to be space for thought and creativity, I'm bored with those who deride learning for learning's sake, I'm bored with the greed, the corruption, and the venality, I'm bored that so much ingenuity and intelligence can be devoted to creating unpleasantness for other people, I'm bored with football culture, I'm bored with wags, I'm bored with nations who think they've a right to all the good things of the earth, I'm bored that it's a constant struggle to fight off the greed of others, I'm bored with people who think it okay to sneer, to frighten the weak, to steal, I'm bored with people who are not seeing things as I see them, and I'm bored that never enough people have a vision other than get rich for themselves.

Now I'm well on the way to reducing myself to tears. In fact that splodge you see on the screen is me at it, I think. Reading all this I think I must be a hippy out of time, and I'm bored that hippies failed.

Not too good here. I'm leaving soon. I'll keep you posted. And here's an appropriate song. The Sound of Arrows 'A very sad song'. I like them. Then I'm escaping with them :)

Gullible; guilt; gay; gammon

2011-12-08T21:06:00.036Z

There are lessons in history - big, important lessons that we don't always hear. We have allowed them to become such an insignificant part of us that we rarely heed them even if we hear them. Why is this? Do we imagine we cannot be fooled because we've become sophisticated and worldy-wise. We may be both those things but villainy has a habit of running ahead of us to lay traps which we did not envisage in our wildest dreams. There are limits to wisdom, and nobody is so worldly-wise that they know all the world. And if you feel for those of us who fall into traps, reserve some of that feeling for the forgetful and the foolish for whom villainy is not even put to the trouble of invention but merely has to re-use the old traps, which in our forgetfulness and foolishness we failed to recognise.

I feel the melancholy of someone who is uncertain of his reception. People I used to speak to have drifted off. In a number of cases I feel that it's because they've got beyond me; they've found the something they needed in their lives and it absorbs them. I suspect that I begin to seem like a failed person to myself, and find it hard to believe that others won't detect that. Increasingly I view a friend's world as something that has to be broken back into and I find that hard to do because I don't want to be rejected, or even worse, treated with the superior kindness reserved for those who are inadequate. Is the need for approval universal? Is this how isolation starts?

I should have written about last weekend's visit by Ruy. He came, as he told me he would, with one of his younger sisters. There's not much to tell. It was good to see them. They are uncomplicated (to the naked eye :) and very chatty. His English is much better than hers, but it didn't hinder her from throwing herself into excited conversation. I got a thorough grilling, family, friends, background, hopes, fears, likes, dislikes, everything. We talked about the last week's election (they're both PP supporters so happy with the result). They're sunny people. They knew I am gay - Ruy isn't if you were wondering - and reserve on that subject quickly disappeared. I didn't consciously suppress the more difficult bit of my sexual history - I was never in the habit of talking about it, except in therapy and then in writing here - it's just that it didn't cross my mind until much later, and that I think is a wonderful first. The interest that Maria (sorry, Ruy's sister) took in my being gay didn't seem motivated by prurience, but then they come, as far as I can tell, from a liberal middle class family of very good people. The weather was reasonable and we did go on the beach on both days, but it's cooler, and there's cloud about. Today's overcast, for example (I'm putting in weather reports for somebody but I've forgotten which of you it is!). I cooked which surprised Ruy, tho' how he thought I'd survived up to this point I don't know. He seemed to think that Maria might, which I suppose shows he's not entirely free of what we think of as a stereotypically Spanish male attitude to the relationship between the sexes. In fact I've not met a Spanish man who really fits our stereotype of them, not even an equivalent of many a British man expounding his prejudiced, illogical, and unintelligent views of the relationship between the sexes, or his views on homosexuality, in a pub. I got to wondering if Ruy had brought Maria along to do the domestic stuff. Then, rather stupidly and belatedly, I realised she could well be there as a chaperone! A bit of a reversal of roles there! Quite funny really. I'm not saying I've not looked at Ruy with his potential in mind ;D, I'd hardly be normal if I hadn't, but anyone less likely to jump his bones (that was doc's expression!) than me, I can't imagine. And yes, I know I'm probably fantasising about Maria's task! We had a good time, and they introduced me to a few people, before they drove off on Sunday evening. I felt sad to wave them goodbye. I might give this another week and then head off for some more populous place. I'm not sure what to make of myself at the moment.

I'm reading still, and drinking in a bar where I've played (badly) a few games of backgammon. It's called tablas reales here and apparently is played quite widely. I play at home with Dad or Ellen, both of whom regard playing me as a poor substitute for playing each other. Dad is too polite to say this; Ellen isn't! Dad reports both the Poles are good players so he's getting games. There was an old guy in the bar I went into who was apparently keen for a game, so I offered. I wasn't too sure if that was the protocol, but he agreed quite readily. It didn't take him long, however, to realise I'm not wonderful at it, and when his playing companion turned up he switched to him as soon as he decently could. I must say he did it with very great politeness, but the speed with which he dumped me betrayed him. However he's tolerantly played me a couple of times since, until one or other of his friends comes in :)

Not much else.

Persecuted

2011-12-06T13:26:00.001Z

My friend Rufus sent me this. He got the link from somebody he follows on Twitter. This is Jonah Mowry's video, which he made a little while ago. It's difficult to watch. I just felt torn up and helpless. There's nothing can excuse what this boy's gone through, nor should he have felt threatened with more to come. You know, because you read statistics about it, that there are thousands of people who've been or are being bullied, for a variety of reasons including their sexuality. The raw emotion of this personal story reveals the terror and bravery behind the statistics. I must do my best to try not to fail in kindness, love, protection, and encouragement those trapped in this sort of hell.
If you follow the link to YouTube, as you'll have to, you'll find a resolution of sorts for Jonah, but you can be sure there are hundreds of others, perhaps thousands, who are suffering right now as he suffered.

Storm brewing

2011-12-02T16:30:00.004Z

I'm not visual enough. Just lately words win out, all the time. In a mad, ill-formed, way I thought I wanted to be a painter. That really is so crassly arrogant. Every other body and their dog wants to be an 'artist'! Only one in two million ever is. You have to have enough talent for fuck's sake, you have to have ideas. The truth - no! Start again! - it appears to be the truth that I don't have artistic talent. I'm not bad, but haven't got the really single minded determination or ability to fight out of the middle layer of mediocrity. And I despise all that motivational crap - you know the stuff, all about pursuing your dream, if you really want something you'll do it, etc. etc.. Neither the statement 'if something's worth doing it's worth doing well,' nor G.K.Chesterton's rather clever inversion of it, 'if a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing badly' are really right. If something's really worth doing, and you are very passionate about it, you'd want it done well, then I think you should let somebody who has the talent to do it, do it, and stop fucking around with your half arsed stupid self-delusions. We ought to admit that not everybody who wants to do something really has the ability to do it: certainly not just because he or she wills it. This is the sole surviving Cadiz drawing. I mentioned it. I destroy my stuff very readily if I don't like it. I just kept this as a sort of memento. This guy was so funny. He thought he was amazingly attractive and just demanded attention. Of course he is attractive (more than I conveyed - he's looking a bit sulky) but not such a killer as he thought. It was too cool to swim, in his view, and he was too cool to swim. We all had fun tho'

Disappointment dominates me at the moment, but that doesn't mean I'm not happy I'm here. I'm learning things about myself that I need to face. Of course I'm disappointed that I prove not to have real ability. In the past I've been bolstered by people's kindness: their unwillingness to say my stuff is nice but not that good. Perhaps some of them just couldn't judge.
Am I so unlovable, am I so untouchable - can you tell I've been listening to Darren Hayes? Such imagination that guy has - each album just gets better - and he speaks straight to me.
I have had such difficulty starting painting. Good artists say they experience the same feeling. The perception that it must be easy if you've got talent is so wide of the mark - well I've written about this before so I'll not go over it again except to say it's something like depression. You keep putting decisions off, you don't commit to the canvas (or hardboard!), you find excuses. That business of making the first mark is full of terrors. It's the creative equivalent of a depressive's inability to get up in the morning. If you try to force it you knot up, and become wild and fitful, and angry. Those things I painted I've junked. I'll keep the latest, which is too big to get home, so I'll give it to somebody if they'll take it, but not before I've finished and photographed it. I'm not doing very well :(

Ruy rang to invite himself for the weekend. I'm quite pleased about that. I find that I'm almost a bit frightened of myself alone. Solitude, and it's only been a week, as a long term prospect, is looking whatever the opposite of alluring is. Unfortunately it means I'll have to tidy his family's rather nice beach house. Wash things. I'm a bit of a slut about my surroundings. Probably should have stopped after 'slut'!

In the Plaza Mayor

2011-11-27T22:55:00.009Z

He stared at the back of her head. She'd been distracted by some minor altercation in the Plaza Mayor and turned in her chair to watch. She was holding a copy of some English newspaper which had emblazoned across some rubbish about Wayne Rooney. She'd said it was the only English newspaper she could find. Normally, he thought, she didn't read newspapers. Why did she even want an English newspaper? Curious how they had become obsessed with patterns. Now they got up at the same time every morning, got ready, left the dirt cheap pension and came out, he to lay claim to what they thought of as their table at their cafe, while she stopped to buy an English newspaper. Somehow this wasn't how he'd envisaged this trip.

His irritation level was rising, but that was nothing new. He disliked nearly everything about her. The way she took an age to get ready in the mornings for one, washing her hair, laying out her clothes, applying her make-up with studied precise care, taking the pills for her mild blood pressure problem, forever smearing cream on herself - something her mother had been adamant about and dinned into her, certain that it was the only way to preserve the youthful appearance of skin. She had raised the ritual of preparation to the status of fetish. There wasn't much doubt she did look much younger than her years, he thought, but that was almost certainly down to heredity rather than to skincare creams. His mother-in-law had looked remarkably youthful into her eighties. So did his wife moving now into her sixties.

'I wonder what it is?' She said, turning back to her husband. She was referring to the argument in the square, he realised. He was used to acknowledging her conversation, usually in the right place, but he rarely listened. He had been thinking how aggravating was the back of her perfectly groomed head.

'I really don't know!' His response sounded testy even to him. How the hell should he know? That sort of illogicality was another thing that annoyed him about her. It was like that stupid thing she said when the doorbell or the telephone rang. 'Who on earth can that be?' How the fuck should he know. He felt the knot of rage in his intestine. A young man, in dirty earth coloured trousers and faded blue t-shirt emerged from the shadow of one of the arched entrances to the square. He had dreadlocks. A dun coloured nondescript dog trotted at his side. A middle-aged Spanish woman followed the young man into the early morning sunshine, shouting and waving at him.

'The dog has just deposited shit in front of her shop, and the hippy's not cleared it up.' He relented slightly, now that he had an opportunity to show off. His Spanish was much better than hers. He'd payed more attention in their evening classes, and done the homework. On this occasion, however, his translation owed as much to deduction as to knowledge of vocabulary. 'It's the law here. He's supposed to clean up after his dog.' Hippy, he thought to himself. Why did I call him a hippy. Hippies haven't existed since the sixties. Weren't they 'crusties' now? He assumed that referred to their unwashed condition. 'Traveller' maybe. He didn't know what the Spanish would call them. In fact he was quite surprised they had them in Spain, and looking identical to those to be seen at home. Even down to the dogs. Why did he assume that Britain had a monopoly of people interested in alternative lifestyles, or dossing around as he sometimes called it, if he was feeling angry. His stomach knotted again. The rage was there still.

The young 'hippy' passed quite close to where the man and his wife sat. He wasn't as young as he had appeared at a distance. Thirty-five, the man thought. His wife followed the 'hippy's' progress with a distinctly disapproving look on her face. I suppose I disapprove as well he thought, but his view was tinged with something else. Something indefinable. He would have rejected envy had it been suggested. He wasn't quite ready to make that jump. He was sure that even a hippy's lifestyle had its boundaries, its struggles for the next meal. He imagined they had money from the state here as they did in England, but he was not so far gone in right wing propaganda as to imagine that it would fund an extravagant life. Certainly not enough to render them free. 'Lifestyle'! There's a word which had been unknown to him thirty years ago. His irritation stirred again.

'We must book something in Seville.' He realised his wife was talking to him, rather than at him. 'I wish you'd let me book all our places. I don't like not knowing if we'll have a roof over our heads and a bed to sleep in!' It had been his intention to travel freely, unencumbered by itineraries and certainty of destination. 'These are major European cities,' he'd said, 'with hundreds of fully functioning hotels, cities with working transport systems, many of them better even than ours, with restaurants that serve food you can buy in M&S. Why would you not be able to walk into a hotel and get a room for the night. For Chrissake, Judy! Let's just go.' He'd been right. Using the guide, they'd gone straight to a hotel, centrally placed near the Plaza Puerta del Sol, got a double room with shower for just a few euros a night, and still she bitched.

'I'd feel happier,' she said, 'do you have a guide to Seville? We could book somewhere on line. Do it at the hotel.'

'I don't have a guide to Seville.' He enunciated clearly, with that edge in his voice that always made her more determined to rile him. Living on the edge of temper had become a game for both of them. Earlier in their marriage, if they'd have been angry with each other, they'd have withdrawn from trouble and been all contrition. Now withdrawal wasn't contemplated until one or other of them was defeated.

'Ask the waiter where we could get a guide, or a map. Guide first. So we can book the hotel.'

He was torn between demonstrating his Spanish, and not giving ground to Judy's anally retentive impulse. Showing off won.

'Por favor, donde puedo comprar un mapa de Sevilla?'

'In Sevilla', said the waiter, and looked puzzled. Was it a trick question? He seemed to find it incomprehensible that anyone would want a map of Seville in Madrid. The man, Chris, thought the waiter was being either obtuse or insolent. Either that, he thought, or his Spanish had been misunderstood? Had he said it right?

'No. I mean ... A shop. Por un plano ... mapa de Sevilla. Quiza la libreria...' What was the Spanish equivalent of Franglais. Whatever it is, he thought, I'm slipping inexorably into it. And she's no help! Sitting there almost but not quite laughing at him. The waiter was young, really very young, and quite nondescript, with a plain pasty face. Beautiful large dark eyes tho'. He was using them to stare at Chris as tho' he were mad.

'Otro café?* Solo?' Said the waiter. Chris nodded, giving up his attempt at trying to get information. The waiter wheeled away. Chris stared after him. The waiter might be plain in front, he thought, but he had a very pretty bottom. Chris watched while he swerved it between the tables with unconscious eroticism. The waiter's black trousers were cut high into his buttocks, and the material was cheap, gone shiny with constant wear. His bottom really was desirable. 'Damn! thought Chris and averted his eyes. He'd promised himself this was not going to happen.

Sex was at the bottom of it. 'No pun intended,' he thought. He and Judy didn't have sex. Not any more. Hadn't more or less since the birth of Eugénie, their daughter, and youngest child. In his heart he knew he was a homosexual - a 'homosexualist' as his father, a man of innumerable prejudices, always called gay people. Chris himself, somehow, always managed not to consider it in any sustained way. Guilt prevented him. He'd always run from the idea, fearful of the opprobrium of fully admitting his sexuality. At school, where he'd had minor sexual encounters with boys, and where homosexuality was commonplace, it was nevertheless something which if it was confessed to, as some boys did, brought only dreadful contempt and bullying. There was never understanding. It was the fear of judgement which still continued to keep him where he was. He'd followed an entirely conventional sexual path, and managed to shut out his other side. He'd had children, never contemplated sex of any sort outside his marriage, and now he had an overwhelming feeling that his life had been entirely skewed and wasted.

He knew that the cause of the anger within himself had this very ordinary, rather sad, origin. He couldn't face the problems of coming out; couldn't face what it might do to Judy, or rather the contempt of others for what his declaration would do to her; he couldn't contemplate what it might do to his children, whom he loved; he couldn't face what his relations might think; he couldn't face the effect on his colleagues.

What's more he had schooled himself to give the appearance of being scrupulously unprejudiced about gays. It was a kind of double bluff. A hidden gay man pretending to be a heterosexual pretending to be liberal about gay people. He did genuinely hate hypocrisy in all other things, and tried hard not to join in jokes against gays. He was painfully aware, however, that occasionally, so that he would appear entirely heterosexual, he allowed himself to join in with anti-gay jokes and references. In those moments he loathed the coward that he was.

'Didn't manage that too well,' said Judy with some satisfaction,'you don't really want another coffee, do you?' He didn't. She was right, but he'd been incapable of rescuing himself from the situation, and clutched at the lifeline offered by the waiter. 'There's a bookshop in Corte Inglez in Puerta del Sol,' she said. 'They've probably got maps.' He nodded, and closed his eyes. Judy continued determinedly reading her paper, demonstrating an interest in it just to confound him. His coffee came. He heard it placed on the table and opened his eyes just as the waiter smiled at him. The smile lit up the boy's face, making it momentarily overwhelmingly attractive. Chris smiled back involuntarily. 'Thank you,' he said, 'gracias!'

'Nada,' replied the waiter, briefly.

'I think you are very attractive,' said Chris to the waiter. Judy's head came up swiftly. The waiter looked puzzled.

'Senor?'

'Er. Usted un ombre muy atrativo,' said Chris, hesitantly, not entirely sure he'd got it quite right. Judy stared at him in disbelieving shock. The waiter seemed no less surprised.

'Imaginate! Si senor.' He moved away, his snake hips swivelling between the tables. He looked back as he neared the door of the café, and smiled at Chris, and shouted something to somebody inside. A woman appeared and there was a rapid conversation. Then they both stared back out at Chris, the waiter still smiling.

'What the fuck did you say that for?' Judy was struggling with astonishment, and momentarily used a word she never used. 'Did you just say you found him attractive? I mean, did you? What was that for?'

'I just think he's attractive,' said Chris, 'I've spent such a safe life not saying what I really think about things. I just felt like saying something I really think for a change.' He toyed with the idea of telling Judy that what he'd really like would be to go to bed with the waiter. Spend hours making love to him.

'Are you mad? He'll think you're homosexual, or something! It sounded so queer!' Judy invested the word with considerable venom. 'God alone knows what he thinks! He's bound to think it. For God's sake!' Her voice was getting louder. Chris shrugged.

'Do you think I should apologise?' he said. 'Explain, perhaps, that I couldn't possibly find him sexy? Do you know what the Spanish for that is?' Judy goggled at him.

'We should go!' She said, rising from her chair. 'Pay the bill and stop playing the fool! People are watching.' It was early still. Only three other tables were taken. A boy, in his late teens or early twenties, was sitting at one of them. He was certainly taking an interest. Chris couldn't be certain but he thought the boy had taken a photo of them. He was looking away now, but he was clearly still listening. So he probably understood English. Chris smiled directly at the boy when he next glanced towards them. Suddenly the contents of the boy's coffee cup had become overwhelmingly interesting to him. Certainly English, thought Chris. Hates a scene. Doesn't want to be involved. A Spanish guy would have stared back unabashed.

'Right,' said Chris. He also stood up. Suddenly his excitement evaporated and he retreated. 'Just having a laugh, Jude,' he said. 'Don't be so damned stuffy. Anyone would think the sixties had never happened. Where's your sense of humour?'

'You're too young to have been involved in anything in the sixties, said Judy sharply, 'and you were in any case never particularly sexually liberated. Bit frightened of it. Perhaps you are gay. A suppressed homosexual. Now that wouldn't surprise me.' She actually sniffed. She had quickly headed back, with obvious relief, for the solid ground that their acrimonious conversations represented. Just for the merest moment, because he had behaved not just strangely but also convincingly, she had been unsure whether or not they'd stumbled into some alarming alternate reality. Her jibe represented a world she understood. All part of the rancid verbal games they played. Neither of them believed entirely in all the things they said of each other, but they were locked in an unending and unendable conflict. Chris forced a smile.

'Oh, yes. That's me. Caught me out after all these years. Dancing at the other end of the ballroom. Batting for the other side.' He affected exaggerated hand movements and a mincing walk.

'Stop it! Said Judy, 'stop making a fool of yourself!' He suddenly attempted to take her hand as they negotiated their way through the silvery aluminium tables and chairs. It was an uncharacteristic gesture, and she didn't meet it with understanding. She snatched her hand angrily out of reach. Chris somehow controlled the rage that seethed in him. He'd drawn back yet again. Probably always would, but he feared the forces which were massing inside him. He wasn't a complete fool. He knew the dangers of suppression, but he also knew he was weak and fearful. The question was would his fear always keep him in a state of denial?

The two of them walked out of the plaza with a small but significant space between them. They both knew that feeling between them was almost dead. They were locked in an arid relationship, performing a relentless counterpoint of insult and counter insult. She didn't know, unlike him, how they'd reached this state. Theirs was a small, ordinary domestic tragedy. The gloom of the archway absorbed them. The waiter, who had watched them pass out of sight, turned and winked at the boy. The boy, embarrassed, blushed and looked intently at the photograph he'd taken.

I've just got the hang of this word, vignette, which strictly speaking is a printing term. A vignette is an illustration without defined edges, one which blends into the surrounding paper. It has come to mean other things, like a small slice of life. I'm hoping what I've written is a vignette.

I ought to point out that I didn't hear 'Chris' and 'Judy', or the waiter come to that, say any of the things I've written here. Everything about this scene is purely a fiction hung on one of last years photographs. I was looking at all my photographs and found it again. Strange the odd notions that come to you when you least expect them. I've written myself into this. The waiter did have a cute arse, but his wink to me was also an invention. I think :(

*Correction by Raul

Daily life

2011-11-24T21:55:00.001Z

It's a strange thing that solitude brings out the chatterbox in me. I've only been here a couple of days and my head races with imagined conversations and the brilliant quips I almost but not quite made in half forgotten meetings. I have this overwhelming desire to talk to people. I'm a really rubbish recluse. I need to work at it, and I will.
I tried drawing but the results were fatuous and I tore everything up, except one sub-soft porn image of a French boy on a Cadiz beach. It's horrible and I've no idea why I kept it, but he was very funny - cool, without embarrassment as only French people can be. When English people try to be cool they come over as dicks. French people come over as dicks as well, but somehow they impersonate sophistication much better. Anyway I drew this boy because he was beautiful, but the result didn't convey it. Creativity seems almost impossible. I found a lot of hardboard in a skip today and asked if I could take some. I say I asked, but it wasn't entirely a verbal conversation - a few words and more me taking the guy by the sleeve and pointing at the stuff I wanted. Anyway he said yes, but I had the feeling he wasn't absolutely sure he knew what he was saying yes to! Tomorrow I shall buy some paint - emulsion probably, if Zahora runs to anything like that. I shall buy a house painting brush and together we'll fight our way back to sanity with huge liberating strokes, probably in slightly different tones of white. If it was red and orange I might get mistaken for Howard Hodgkin. Or green. Dream on! White is the paint absence of colour choice round here.

Wednesday: my nearest shop has closed for the winter, but there is a shop open in the village, but no paint! I'm working on how to get out to a larger place to buy paints. I'm mixing up earth and other things at the moment. It's interesting trying to imagine how artists in the day when they didn't have industrial paints made their pigments stick to the surface. I'm burning things, flaking old paint, shoe whitener, all sorts and mixing eggwhite in because it rings a bell as their medium of choice. Not sure I can afford to use eggs like this! I should really be making notes of materials and quantities so that I don't repeat failures, but I thought of that too late. Now I am. If I produce anything I like I'll show you. I'm eating well. There's good food to be bought, but although this village is small there are lots of places to eat or drink. Lots have closed for the season of course, but others stick it out for the few visitors who hang on, and the locals. It's quite cool at night, but the daytime temperature is consistently round about the 20 mark. It's very relaxing.

Thursday: Reading, eating, drinking. I've tried out my makeshift paints and quite like the results. Camera need recharging, however, so you'll have to wait to see anything. Listening to The Killers at the moment. They are very derivative, but I don't care, and they charge at things with such enthusiasm that they make me dance - in a pogoish sort of way. I read other blogs to keep in touch. The very intermittent blogger, singer songwriter Jay Brannan, has posted that he's published a Christmas song - 'Dear Santa'. You can download it from iTunes, or go to his blog and link to it http://jaybrannan.blogspot.com/2011/11/my-xmas-song-is-available.html Somebody in a comment on one of my posts recently said something which was so right about JB *wait while I find it* It was Mac said it 'sometimes you can feel the whole world trembling when listening to him'. That's so right. I fell, naturally, for him and early on I used to send hopeful comments to his blog, in a stalkerish sort of way. He ignored them, but then everyone and his friend (but not some rednecks) love JB so that wasn't a surprise. I did chat with him once in a sort of group thing , but I was excessively awkward, and puzzled him more than anything. He's very inward looking and I don't think he suffers fools much. At least, that's how I justified my lack of success :o) In my defence I stopped quite quickly but it's still a bit embarrassing. Why on earth am I going over that again? Sad!

Christmas will probably see me home again, if only for a short time. I can't say that for certain, I mean I might be fed up with being away. I have a sense that I ought to think about some direction for my life. Is that the legacy of centuries of dour Scottish ancestors looking down at my hedonism disapprovingly? It's something which is always at the back of my mind, and emerges in just this sort of pathetic whining way at quite regular intervals. But then I can't keep up the flow of originality all the time! :)

Spanish election

2011-11-20T23:37:00.000Z

Spain is voting today in an extremely important general election. The rhetoric has been washing round me the whole time of been here and I've rather ignored it. I've let my angst dominate. Salamanca and Cadiz were alive with it, as is most of the country. I've rather removed myself from it by coming to Zahorna. It's definitely quieter, but the condition of small family run businesses is dire and there are naturally some of those here. Tourism has held up quite well but feeling against the socialist government is running high. They are blamed for the economic crisis and are widely perceived to have lied. 'Crisis? What crisis?' was the crass contribution of the President of the Government. The PP (Partido Popular), a reasonably moderate conservative party is looking like being the beneficiary of the people's anger and fear. I'm not sure I've got the hang of how the electorate sets about voting but I'll give it a go. Please forgive errors.
There are two houses, Congreso de los Diputados, and Senado. Rather like here the lower house can reverse an overruling by the Senado, and only the lower house can propose a vote of no confidence which if successful gets rid of the government.
I couldn't quite gather how many seats there are in the Congreso, but it seems much smaller than the Commons. The voting system makes my brain hurt, but I guess if you live with it you get to understand it. In theory there are on average 100,000 voters per constituency which makes them bigger than the average British constuency. There are 50 constituencies, roughly corresponding to the provinces. It is a proportional representation system within the provinces, and in order for a party to have deputies elected to represent the province(constituency) it has to get at least 3% of the vote. That seems to be a legal requirement. I'm not taking it further than that because, as I say, my head hurts. As far as I can gather, as everywhere, the small parties are disadvantaged.
The Senate is more straightforward with four senators from each province. You can vote for up to three, and obviously the four with the most votes win. I was quite proud of my understanding there, but I was a bit premature congratulating myself because it seems there are also a number of appointed senators and I don't know how that works. The Spanish Socialist Workers Party governs at the moment. Jose Zapatero leads the government, but he's leaving after this election. The socialists look like being in a leaderless state, and out of office all at the same time. It's a bit worse than that. Zapatero will stay on in office, leading some sort of interim government, for a while because Parliament has to meet, and the King consult the parties, before a new government can be formed. Apparently this can take weeks. So not only the socialists, but effectively, at a most important time, the country has a sort of lame duck government. Perhaps that's something we manage better, with the old PM going out the back door as the new one comes in at the front.
I've mentioned before the dreadful state Spain is in - on the edge of bankruptcy at one time according to some - but Zapatero brought the country back from the brink, by various austerity measures. The certainty is that whoever wins the election and it looks as I write, like being the PP led by Mariana Rajoy, is that they'll think they have to continue to be tough, if not tougher, on public spending. Rajoy has not really been clear about his party's policies, presumably so that he wouldn't frighten off voters, but it's reckoned that the cuts will get worse, and this is bound to affect employment which is already fantastically high. At a level I've a little experience of, I know students are worried about hikes in fees, and reductions in grants. It's all so familiar.
Part of the trouble is that Spain is not really a centralised country and the provinces control quite a lot of their own money, and they haven't all, for whatever reason followed the central government line. The movement towards devolving much more power, even self government, to the provinces is very strong - stronger perhaps than Scottish and Welsh nationalism. Spain's history is riven with regional conflict, and its sudden transformation from a polarised state in conflict with itself, through a period of authoritarian fascist government, to a modern centralised European state was dizzyingly rapid. A lot of people here think it was too rapid, and that in times of stress the old conflicts come back to the surface.
Spain is in a bit of a mess, but that's not so very different from much of the rest of Europe. There is an equivalent of the UKUncut movement, again led by students and the young protesting against unemployment and the abuses of capitalism, called los indignados.

I'm not getting deeper into this, not that I could. I'm an outsider and only have a very vague understanding of the complications of Spanish politics. I gather from the news, even tho' not all the votes are in, that the PP have definitely won.

Girl with a pearl earring

2011-11-19T09:57:00.004Z

It's all good. I decided, finally, to do what I originally intended and get to the seaside. I've really left it too late for a proper full-on sun, sand, and sangria holiday but there's sunshine still and I'd guess the temperature hovers round the 20 mark - I've suddenly become aware of weather. I must be English. The sea seems warm to me (yes! That's right! I've been swimming!) but then I'm more accustomed to the North Sea. I left Cadiz yesterday with some misgivings. I'd come to like my apartment a lot. I'd started to establish a rhythm of life and make friends. Perhaps I'm mad to go, but I want to try real solitude. I know it's possible to be alone anywhere, and I knew one girl slightly, friend of a friend sort of thing, who was tragically lonely, to the point of attempting suicide, in the middle of London. Being alone probably isn't natural to me. I always gravitate towards people and conviviality. Let's face it, I like to show off. Anybody who knows me will tell you that and I'm both sorry and secretly pleased it's all coming back to me. In spite of that, I have this feeling that I ought to test myself against loneliness. I've been putting off considering the strangeness of that impulse. It is strange because it's driving me to the point where I'm giving up things which I was enjoying.
I've come to a place called Zahora, further down the coast from Cadiz. I've rented a place from the parents of a new Cadiz (more properly Jerez) friend. Zahora, I've been told, is a quiet place but something of a summer Mecca for the young and surfers. I tried the word trustafarian on Ruy. It meant nothing, but I bet that's what they are. The holiday place is modern, but nice. It's a bit out of the village but close to the beach which is beautiful. It's backed by cliffs and pines and is somehow the scene I imagined I would occupy. That's fanciful. My Cadiz friend (and now my landlord's son!), Ruy, wanted to bring me here, but I wouldn't let him. My attempt to explain that I'm looking for solitude is not understood, and I think he's worried by it. I've always met people who've have worried about me. I've come to terms with that, but I still don't know what it is about me that produces that reaction. Do I look or seem incompetent, vulnerable, a victim, whatever? I bring out the rampant mother hen in people. I've had occasion to be grateful about that, but it's also aggravating.

I think that's enough of that. I'll write again, maybe, when I've exorcised the solitude impulse :) I do love you all, Alec xx

Sorry! Title is because, rightly or wrongly, Nataly Dawn, the female half of Pomplamoose looks to me like the girl in the Vermeer painting. The Pomplamoose things are quite demented. They make me smile. Nataly, and Jack Conte (the male half), are clearly talented, and their style transforms the songs they cover, but they're still other people's songs. I was about to wonder what they get out of it for themselves, but then I thought, 'stop analysing everything'. They're doing what people have been doing forever - performing other people's stuff. We all do other people's stuff - words, phrases, compositions, designs - there's not much, if anything, that's 'new', not even noting that's there's not much, if anythng, that's 'new'! I worry too much? I'm hoping to relax here for a while, without the need to put on an interested face for other people. That sounds bad, and isn't even really true, because I am interested in people, so I'll have to have another go at describing what I mean. Got it! :) I'm sort of tired of me, me being me, wishing I could just be somebody without any expectations - somebody who's not worried over. I am such an egomaniac!

Love and entertaining

2011-11-09T01:59:00.038Z

I wish I was in love again. Here I am, miles from everybody I know and am close to, and I wish I was in love again. Reams have been written on the subject of love. It's a difficult thing to define even within one culture. If one attempts to include in the definition what it means in hundreds of different cultures then I suspect one might conclude, even if one knew what it meant and has meant in different cultures, that there couldn't be a universal description of it. I wonder if that hot feeling, the longing that is so strong it hurts, that almost overpowering churning within oneself, the intense longing for the presence of the person you love, that feeling that you are going to cry uncontrollably, is common to all cultures. I just don't know. It feels as tho' Love like that should be. I can't help feeling that it is a primitive instinct, not something refined by thousands of years of civilization. Where other cultures and languages have many different words for different concepts of love, English has only one. It relies on context to refine its meaning, and is consequently often misunderstood. I say that I love English, that I love watercress, I love my parents, I love Bjork, I love William Nicholson, I love William Orpen, I love the tango, I love horses, I love sentimental emotion, I love logic, I love Patrick Gale, I love church bells, I love the nave of Winchester Cathedral, I love P.G.Wodehouse, I love kippers, I love Lady GaGa, I love my friends (even Sophie:), I love Norfolk brick, I love Haydn, I love cheese, open fires, Christmas, roses, cider, irises, cricket, onions, chocolate, champagne, fine Burgundies (pretentious, moi?), I love Brahms chamber music, holding hands, snow, thousands of things and people. It can't be that the same emotion encompasses all those people and things, can it? I'm aware of erotic and platonic love. I can distinguish between love and lust, and less easily between love and friendship. I know love was regarded by the ancients as a virtue, out of which kindness and compassion spring. We still believe that, don't we? There are times when I think perhaps love is just one thing, which I thought, at this point, I was going to define, but I find that I can't. I do wish I was in love again. I have no trouble defining that in my head. I want that overwhelming feeling again. I'm scared it won't revisit me, or that it might not be the same as I get older.

I went out tonight to the appartment of a bona fide Gaditano - perhaps that should be autentico! It was a secondhand invitation. I was the guest of one of his students in the department for filologia francesca e inglesa. Bit galling that they lump French and English together, and put French first :) Was a bit nervous and it probably showed. El doctor (I don't even know whether that's medical or not, but whatever a non-medical doctor is) is a much travelled urbane Gaditano who's taught in universities in France and the US and come home. I enjoyed myself. Good food and wine eased me along.
The conversation, as it mostly does with the Spanish at the moment, revolved around the economy, debt, the effect on universities and research of the cuts (how familiar!), and unemployment. And will Spain be next to fall into the abyss that's affecting the weaker European economies. I couldn't contribute much about British experience because I'm not that well informed, and there's the language difficulty. Away from money there was football, of course. They had difficulty understanding that I am very uninterested in football. Lost points :) On the other hand they got quite interested in me being distantly related, through Mum, to the Cuidad Rodrigos (I'll let you work that one out:). Things got historical then. I got the 'Drake was nothing but a pirate' routine again, which happened to me in Seville last trip. Animosity runs both deep and is long lived. I was inclined to think they were joking, but not completely it seems! They very graciously exempted me from blame for his raid, and depredations on Spanish gold fleets :) Still wasn't sure how serious this was. I've discovered that the Spanish are good at poker faces! In Cadiz they also have it in for the Earl of Essex, Elizabeth's favourite, who sacked and burnt the city. I knew nothing of this. It seems to me as tho' we forget most of our history, except obvious things which we usually remember imperfectly and garble in the retelling. The Spanish give the impression of being very aware of theirs, that it is important to them, and remembered with passion.
I was walked back to my place by the group of students who are very enthusiastic and lovely. I really must look for a cheap beach place before the weather gets colder - not that it gets really cold - but I'm getting sucked in by Cadiz and the temptation to stay is strong. Unfortunately, I can't really let Rufus go on paying for this place. I'll have to think about it. Love, Alec xx

More conventional sightseeing pics

2011-11-06T20:13:00.002Z

Plaza de San Antonio. Of course I failed to photograph the fine twin towers of the church on the left which gives the square its name but then I'm making no claims to sense as a photographer! I'm learning to appreciate the art of the set (or sett?) layer

Hot, hot day. Alley near the Catedral.

Pretty courtyards everywhere.

I knew Cadiz was a port, but the closeness of big ships to the streets is sometimes startling. In places they seem like office blocks closing off vistas. This one is an Italian cruise liner.

It rains occasionally in Cadiz. I've just realised that most of my pics are vertical. It's a place of narrow streets and vertiginous buildings. The enclosed balconies are an Andalucian thing.

Details of the door to the university rector's house

More scooters, this time in the Plaza Mina. I wonder if there's a magazine 'Scooter World' to which I could sell my hundred scooter snaps. The thing is they are all so proud of them that you can't get out of photographing them.

That hot, hot day, and another alley snaking round the Catedral.

This street leans crazily to the right, which it doesn't really, except in my photographic world.

I keep naming this the old Catedral, and it may be but it's been given another name which I can't remember. This is the trouble with photographs. So many of them become quite meaningless because what they're of becomes forgotten. I have a great uncle (still alive) who went on a tour to Russia in the 50s. He speaks Russian and got very fed up with his fellow travellers (no political pun intended!) who kept asking him what they were photographing. Dad says he took wicked delight in giving them all the wrong information. The one that sticks in the memory is of some Soviet monument in front of the University in Moscow which Great Uncle Bernard told two couples was called the Spirit of Nescafe. He says they quite bought the idea that Nescafe was a Soviet brand! Their evenings of showing their holiday photographs to friends when they got home must have been very comical.

Well, it's a street, innit!

And a dim courtyard!

The view from the old city down the coast to the newer Cadiz, which is increasingly being developed with hotels and apartment blocks for holidaymakers.

Inside the Catedral. A view across the central crossing. It's essentially a huge baroque building, completed in the nineteenth century

Not my vid. I posted it here from YouTube (where I've just found out you have to go to, to watch) because it starts off by approaching Cadiz from outer space. Always useful! At least it gives an idea of the city's setting in relation to everything else, and eventually a good aerial view!

Enough with the boring topographical shots! I promise I'll post some more personal pics soon and revert to my usual angsty self. I just have to get the sightseeing stuff out of the way :) I must be one of those dreadful people who can't help instructing people.

Having a lovely time! Really! Love, Alec xx

A few holiday snaps

2011-11-04T17:42:00.003Z

This small area is just outside my bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom. It's half open to the sky and partly glass roofed, but it has a window so I wonder if once upon a time it was a more integrated part of the building. I can get up to the roof as well from here (not by the ladder!). The awning is essential I should think in high summer but at present the temperature is very pleasant. This 'room' can't really be described as furnished, but I use it a lot

My apartment is in the building on the extreme right of this little square. The towers are those of the west end of the Catedral. And the cathedral museum is behind me, up the stone ramp. Cars are not allowed into the old centre but I'm right on the edge and a few make it this far via the sea front which is away to the left.

I thought I'd put in a few cats of which there are many. These (I didn't notice when I took the photo but if you look closely you'll see two) are sleeping just down below the Atlantic sea wall, oblivious of the crashing waves. I'd have thought there's a good chance one occasionally gets swept away.

Cars may not be allowed into the centre but scooters are, in their hundreds. I was given a ride on this one. A bit scary because the owner, Ruy (pronounced Rooee), couldn't help showing off. It's in the blood. Hanging on was a bit delicious. Protective wear seems to be optional, or else ignored. I felt very old! Like a parent :(

I'm hoping that presence in the City of one of the most important flamenco centres, Centro Municipal de Arte Flamenco la Merced, accounts for the frequent sightings of traditional costume and it's not a fake 'heritage' thing. The centre always seems closed but there are lots of flamenco performances all over Cadiz which I'll get into soon.

Rather unimaginatively this is the square in front of the apartments I'm in. I took it because of the cobbles, but also the light of the sea, which is just up the slope. In Cadiz, it being such a small peninsula, you are never away from the light of the sea. It's very special.

Students in the Plaza Catedral. I've just realised most of these photos are all from a very small area. I promise I do get to other places, but it's nice to get to know this area and the people. That's a bit presumptuous. I can't claim to know them, but I'm getting to be on nodding acquaintance with a few. Ruy is in the white t-shirt. He lent me his laptop early on and has given me the in to a university wifi provider they all use. I did originally put a picture of me on the beach with Ruy but my nervousness of pics of me in the public domain reasserted itself at the last minute. It's a real throwback. I'll put some more interesting things in next time.

Love, Alec xx

p.s. I'm going to have an LLD before I go out for something to eat. I seem much more relaxed about Spanish hours on this trip. And they really can't cope with people wanting to eat before ten o'clock!

Milonga and tango

2011-11-02T08:38:00.003Z

I was just bowled over by this. I know everybody's bowled over by the tango, but I felt I would really like to dance it with somebody who knows how. It works best when the music is played with passion and with a certain raw edge to it, as it is here by the authentic sounding Pavadita Tango String Quartet, in the Cafe Camille in Beverwijk in the Netherlands. I fell in love instantaneously. They are playing with Eva Wolff who is a bandoneon player. That is the instrument which resembles an accordion. It is popular in Argentina and Uruguay. EW comes from Belgium but now plays professionally in Buenos Aires. She was the subject of a short BBC programme in 2009 which unfortunately doesn't seem to be available to listen to anymore. (Milonga, by the way, is both the music and dance of a forerunner to the tango, or the place where tango is to be found. I'm only quoting. It's not as though I know about these things :)

A special deal

2011-10-30T19:55:00.008Z

We love to walk the shining streets of this town. We love this town. It's fortunate we do because the town is our town. Is this your town? Do you live here in Dorset Gardens? No? Not really a street for living in is it my dear. We live just along there in that hotel. No not just staying, we live in the hotel. You will notice it's no longer grand. Not like some down there on the front, but it once was. It'll be sold soon for flats, I expect, and another bit of this old fake town will be whittled away. At the moment it's still pretending to itself that it's a grand hotel. We pretend along with it but like everybody else we don't believe it. But if you come with us we'll show you its fantastical foyer. Might be straight out one of Frank Matcham's theatres. You know Matcham's early work? Plaster and gilded swags and putti, with gold and blue mosaic floor and ceiling. You'll not be able to resist its absurdity. Of course you'll notice the missing sections, the threadbare velvet, the chipped putti. Perhaps you'll put us right on the difference between cherubs and putti? No? No matter.

The two men led him along the wet street. He was so very tired, practically out on his feet. He'd hardly said a word to them. The thought of shelter and a meal was all persuasive. He didn't know them, or they him. No explanation was needed. He knew what was happening, or guessed at it. It was an unspoken transaction in which everyone already knew the terms. Some fine tuning of the conditions was missing but he was beyond caring.

There's a quid pro quo here, isn't there? You're appraising us and we're appraising you. A more or less equal exchange of goods for services is what it means since you didn't ask. It's not a pleasant night. Have a meal with us. Our hotel is the last place on earth you can still get a completely anonymous brown soup. We play a game with the chef, in which we suggest to him what went into it each night's offering. Naturally it's just a blend of leftover packets and tins. It's just another thing we pretend about this hotel, that the chef cooks. He's Moroccan. He's called Hasan, which means, I believe, 'beautiful'. He ain't, of course. In fact he's what you might call plug ugly! Not a term you've ever heard? American, but its origin is unknown to me. It's amusing isn't it? Hasan. Sounds like a fake Moroccan name doesn't it? Belongs to the world of musical theatre. I bet you think old James Elroy made it up don't you? Don't know old James Elroy? Flecker? Slipped off the GCSE radar has he? 'Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow, across that angry or that glimmering sea'. Rather a good poet. Known to Gaiman and Borges. Can't get much more diverse than that. Don't know them either? Jeez! You ain't religious are you? Hate to blaspheme to a believer. That's a lie. Only really worthwhile blaspheming if it's to a believer. Not likely you are a believer considering your situation, is it my love? I'm surprised you don't know Gaiman. He's very now. All that graphic novel stuff. Still if you don't know you don't know. 'Sandman'. That's right, love, getting there now are we? Not so dim as you thought! Isn't that a comfort, darling.
Anyway Cheffy's a real Hasan, now serving up things in this rat infested milieu which would offend the humblest tagine user back in old Tangiers. There was a place, my dear. Back in the day. Bowles and his missus! Kidnapping English schoolboys for the pleasure of the demi-mondain. Not that that was Bowles. At least I don't think it was. You'd have been a riot in old Tangiers, my love. Still let's concentrate on the boring here and mundane now. Let's get some food for you, poor darling! Did you know that an industry has grown up selling pre-cooked meals to hotels? Pre-prepared in a shed on some industrial estate in Harlesden or Kidderminster or some such place. Of course you did. Cheffy's a past master of the microwave. You wouldn't believe it would you love, considering a decade or three ago he'd never even seen a white man. Mind you the first few were mostly behind him so he didn't exactly see them. Is that too rude? Still you're a man of the world. No need to mince words with you, I'm thinking. I hope you won't think us all at the .... No, I won't tell you it's name. You'll see it soon enough. I was going to say 'de trop'. You know what that means, don't you? Of course you do. Everybody's so educated these days. Do you have five GCSEs at B or better? That's the criteria isn't it? Automatic university place, or is that harder? Has it all changed since the cuts? Here we are. Home.

They went up the three steps and in at the dark wood, glass, and brass revolving door. It wasn't really any warmer inside. There as promised was the theatrical foyer, and as promised it was moth eaten and decaying. A heavily built elderly man stood behind the reception desk. He was in his shirt sleeves and hadn't shaved for two days. He said nothing but just stared at the three men. No, not three men. Two men and a boy. Was he on the verge of saying something? No. He looked as tho' he'd spent a lifetime being on the verge of something which never happened.

That's Frank. Not Frank Matcham, of course. You can call him Matcham if you like. He won't mind. He doesn't mind anything much. He looks after us, don't you Frank? Finds everything we could ever want. Except tonight, of course. Tonight we found it all on our ownsome. Is the dining room still open, Frank? What am I saying? It never closes, eh Frank? Cheffy lives in the kitchen, doesn't he? You think I'm making that up, love? I could take you through and show you his palliasse in the store room. No? You'd rather have food first, I'm sure. Palliasse unfamiliar to you, darling? Probably not what you're thinking! We'll just go through to the dining room and see what Cheffy can do for us. After all we promised you a taste of the archaeological soup. Positively Edwardian, dear child. Lord knows what he'll find after the soup. He's been honing his Italian cuisine lately. Deep fried from frozen pizza di quattro formaggi. Keep your voice down but I think they're a knock-off. Not familiar with the term, dear? I'm surprised. I'm sure you can guess at it. Here we go.

The door of the dining room swung open with a thump and a squeak, and swung back after them. The low level lighting was not the result of a design consultant's plan, rather the infrequency of bulbs in the now wired gesso and gilt candelabra. There was nobody in the room apart from the three of them. It was clear that nothing had been done to clean off the discolouration of years from the once pretty blue and white, vaguely central European, decoration of its walls and ceiling. The dirt looked like nicotine staining accreted over decades, which it probably was. Ochre draylon curtains hung in unconvincing tired folds at the tall windows, clashing with the much older burgundy carpet. Nobody seemed to have dusted or removed cobwebs above arthritic arm height for a very long time. Two tables only had evidence of meals having been eaten at them. How recently it was difficult to say.

Not cheerful is it, darling? It's got so we don't notice it anymore except when looking at it with a stranger's eyes. Suits us, and we live here so cheaply. Lots of money left over for other things, I always say. You sit down here with Ade. You didn't tell us your name. Don't if you don't want to. Tom? Like drawing teeth. Relax Tom. Ade's almost as silent as you, isn't he? He does liven up. Probably needs a few vodkas, don't you Ade? Just between us he was on a promise at the Bulldog this evening but got blown out. He had another sort of blow in mind. Forgive my crudity. Still just as well he was otherwise we might not have found you. There's lucky! He's not in the best of moods so it's not surprising he's a tad on the cross side really. Not a pretty sight is he? Vodka, Ade? Perhaps you'll bring him out of himself later. Not to put too fine a point on it. I'll find Cheffy. Probably off his face by this time, but like I say he's always willing to fire up the microwave. Even if he's pissed. Just thought! Whatever you do don't ask for wine. God only knows where they get it, but it's not what it says on the label! Probably from some member of Cheffy's family. You ever drunk Moroccan wine, love? Wine is a very loose description. I don't imagine the writ of the Trades Description Acts runs as far as Morocco, but if it did then I suspect the word 'wine' would not be in the description. And don't drink the hotel water unless it's from a bottle with an unbroken seal. Lager would be best. Cheffy, you old bastard! Paying customers!

The chatty one barged through the door to the kitchen, shouting as he went. Three bowls of the foretold soup and three flaccid pizzas later, all served by a very fat, amiable, and outstandingly dirty Cheffy, who watched the boy with leering attentiveness, the three rose from their meal and left the dining room. The squeak and thump of their passing barely disturbed the somnolent Frank at his desk. They crossed the flaking fin de siecle foyer through the gloom and went up the bulbous balustraded stairs to the first floor. The extraordinary lavishness of the hotel's decor continued in the once magnificent first floor bedroom that was the home of the two older men. The ceiling was preposterously high, and it had two windows to match. The curtains, clearly, from their state, contemporary with the date of the room, and the deep draped and tasselled pelmets were so heavy that they looked in imminent danger of collapse. A huge bed, beyond king-size, of the variety called Empire, was almost unnoticeable in this huge room. Over it hung two eyecatching paintings each depicting in various shades of yellow and brown the erotic charms of young men with improbably pneumatic pectoralis major muscles. The wall opposite the windows was mirrored. The bevelled sections, silvering eroded, were divided by wooden columns which stretched up to the deeply coffered ceiling, the gilt of which was darkened by age and neglect.

Admiring the art work? Ade painted them. Completely untrained. 'Shows' were you about to say dear? No? What beautiful manners you have. Churns 'em out, don't you darling? Ghastly, but he has a certain following. Difficult to describe his style. Tretchikoff out of Hodgkin, hoping for Leighton? What do you think? Not interested much in art either then love? You are a bit of a sweet little blank canvas, aren't you darling? Emphasis very much on the blank. Well then, sweetheart, you just take yourself off to the bathroom and have a bath. I think it's been a while. Am I right? Course I am. Been down and out myself so I know what it's like. Only London, darling, not Paris. And I'm guessing I was younger than you are now. Just you seize the opportunity and have a good soak. Never know when the next one's going to be, right. Hope you don't mind me issuing all these instructions. One gets into the habit of controlling when one's surrounded by, what shall we say, brains not functioning at the top of their game. And don't put those clothes back on! We'll have those washed for you in the morning. If you'll stay the night. What do you think? Put one of the robes on. Ade and I'll make ourselves comfortable while we wait for you. We might get ahead of you on the drinks front but you're not bothered by that, are you? Don't look so nervous love! We won't eat you. Well, I can't answer for Ade. He might, but that's much later. Joking, love! Just you go and enjoy yourself.

Later, much later, the boy reluctantly returned from a surprisingly efficient bathroom, cleaner than he'd been in weeks, wearing a white towelling robe. In spite of his nervousness he'd fallen asleep in the bath and been hauled up by the silent Ade. Had he been saved from drowning? How long he'd slept he didn't know but the water was only just warm. Back in the bedroom he found Ade sprawled fully clothed on the bed, and the stream of consciousness one in a chair reading. He knew what was coming. He knew what was expected. If he had any sort of choice he would have opted for sleep. That's what he wanted above all else. He was close to being overwhelmed by his tiredness, but he was resigned to the unchanging cycle of encounters that had become his life for longer than he liked to remember. He hoped there would be nothing unexpected. Most of all he hoped there would be no violence. Simple as that. As the controlling man had understood, the boy had been appraising the men and while he had decided that hurting could not be ruled out, he thought it probably unlikely. He wondered if a porno might be the plan. He'd done a couple. They weren't bad, usually. But there was no sign of equipment. He wasn't sure about this. Straightforward sex would almost be welcome. He'd been nearly out on his feet when approached and hadn't had the sense to ask about money, or anything else for that matter. He tried now.

Money, darling? Tut, tut! You should have asked about that very first thing. Bit green are we? I expect you were tired, right? Just wanted food and bed, right? I could tell. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt, love, as they irritatingly say. You'll be alright. Anyway you weren't thinking of letting a little matter like money put you off the good bit, right? Don't look so alarmed. Were you thinking a little S&M? No. Is it that you love honour more than you fear death, as the Bard nearly said? Not much honour in this game, darling. No he's not some rap-artiste, the Bard. Is that what you were thinking? You know who the Bard is? Of course you do my little lovely. Got the GCSEs right? And no you are not in danger of death so try to look a little less like the condemned man. Unless it's from Cheffy's soup. Which ain't unlikely. Ade is wanting to pleasure you, is all. Not me, love. Can't manage it and I don't care who knows it. I won't even watch. In fact I say you can go whenever you like. All I'd say is I hope you'll have some consideration for me being left with Ade and his deep disappointment. He's certain to get all histrionic on me if you do decide to scarper. You wouldn't do that to me, would you darling? And don't worry about money. I'm generous to a fault, me.

He showed no reaction. Why would he? He was just grateful it was only one of them. He quite liked the controlling one's acerbic tone, if not the sarcasm. He'd decided he was essentially a kindly soul. So he submitted, as he knew he had always intended, to being 'pleasured' by Ade, who was surprisingly gentle and sensual. To say the boy enjoyed it might be overstating the case a little, but he came close to having a good time. When Ade was done the boy slept forever.

Frank did not stir when they crossed the foyer, and passed through the squeaking clumping door of the dining-room carrying the body. He never did. Cheffy did not wake from his palliasse in the storeroom in spite of the unusual noises coming from his kitchen. He dreamt of the kitchen in its heyday as it had been described to him by Frank - the battalions of chefs, with the chef de cuisine at their head: sous chefs, pastry chefs, line cooks, chef de garde manger - all in a blur of noisy activity, shouted commands, and wonderful smells. He dreamt of the whirling sexily urbane waiters, and the oppressive expediters, and the lowly porters who always looked as tho' they came from some netherworld into which light never penetrated. He had come to the hotel as a very young man, and already then it had been in decline. Now he found it difficult to believe it had ever been as Frank remembered it. Over the years Frank's description, through repetition, took on the formulaic aspects of myth. The Moroccan did not wake to the sounds of the dismembering of the corpse of the rapidly cooling boy on the huge stainless steel work surface, where once, in those far off days described by Frank, huge joints had been cut up, monstrous fish gutted, and game drawn. The men washed the blood down the channels into the large sink with a hose as they worked. Nor did he stir from his drunken stupor when the boy, bagged in thick clear plastic bags, was dumped with no particular concession to stealth in the most remote of the long disused cold stores. Quite a surprisingly large number of bags. A freezer standing at the back of the kitchen, crammed with frozen meals and pizza di quatro formaggi, fulfilled the hotel's needs these days. Nobody had cause to go to the cold stores. No cooking outside the heating of pre-prepared meals took place. Nobody other than the few secretive residents considered eating at the hotel. It had no reputation left which might have attracted local custom, and the visitor, the casual passerby, was repelled by the all too apparent suffocating decline of the building. It was an anachronism in the new hip city. Later, when the boiler was fired up to its laboured maximum, Ade returned to the cold store and took the parts in their plastic bags and threw them into the flames, and that was the end of another night at the hotel.

At sixes and sevens

2011-10-26T22:07:00.012+01:00

Did I ever write a post which was emotionally truthful? I don't know the answer. I conceal myself a lot. I'm not saying I don't write the truth (as I see it) but never the whole truth. Normally I'd say that providing I'm not being untruthful there's no reason why I should expose my complete self. Omission isn't always a sin, but at the moment my grip on my emotions seems like a stranglehold suffocating the life out of me. The need I'm feeling to control myself is making me so tense I think I could spend hours just screaming. I reached a point in therapy when all this seemed to be understood. I was starting to relax and realised control, altho' important, isn't the only goal. It should be tempered by things which are more life affirming. So I'm further away from understanding myself than ever, and feeling more closed away from everyone. I have a black mood on me, one which is inhibiting me in all the old same ways.

I'm a bit more relaxed since I wrote this yesterday - or even the day before. I'm getting muddled :)

The reason for putting so much South Jordan here is not because I think they're good, altho' I do, or that MDH is good looking, which he is, but because I think they seem uncomplicated. They make music like I wish I could be. I know they're a bit like a lot of other bands; I realise they articulate the usual range of traditional rites of passage anxieties; I know it's pleasant stuff rather than memorable. I still like them. I think it's possible they will develop an edge, and in the meantime I don't believe anything other than that they'll be sorted out in love and success. And if success eludes them, then they'll always have love and lots of upbeat experience. Sure, I'm creating a scenario involving them based on little evidence. I've no idea what they're like, but they do seem uncomplicated. It may not be like that, but it's how it appears to me. And yes, I could do with some uncomplicated love.

I've been reading about a sudden rash of attacks on gay people, some of it savage and unhinged. It happens here too, but is most prevalent in the touristy parts of Spain. The anecdotal evidence suggests that most attacks on gays here are in holiday places, and are against gay tourists by other people on holiday. Could it be that assaults of that nature are more reported if they are carried out by foreigners? Certainly the Spanish have an ambivalent attitude to the tourist industry and the people it attracts. They seem to expect horror stories about foreigners. The Spanish people I've met mostly seem passionate about lots of things, but when it come to life-style they are laid back and tolerant. They aren't forgiving about the despoilation of their coastlines tho', and what they view as the cheapening of Spanish culture. If the reports about who is attacking gays here reflect the truth then it suggests that there is something particularly intolerant about Anglo-Saxon culture. If the reports are wrong, and the intolerance and violence is purely Spanish, then it's yet one more society that offers a less than safe place for gays. I would be sad about that because it isn't my impression of Spain. I don't know what to say. I'd hoped to escape into a kindly place and spend time in contemplation and enjoying myself. Stupidly I hadn't imagined the world and its problems would travel with me.

Rufus leaves tomorrow (yesterday now!). I sort of feel it's not a good time, but I'm being brave. He's getting an early bus back to Seville and the airport there. He could have gone to Jerez which is marginally nearer but wanted to see the airport building at Seville because I said it intrigued me. Strange - but it is beautiful - a kind of overgrown bodega envisioned by Hollywood. I have promised myself I'm not going to be too emotional (about him going - not the airport!). Undue pressure on him. He's paid for me to stay in a smart studio apartment in Cadiz while I look for something cheap in a village further down the coast. It's really good being back here. I sort of feel I own it. Rufus is splashing his cash at too fast a rate. He's got pretty nearly five years to go before the rest is paid out. (This is old news and you'll have to change the tenses! At the moment I'm having to pay for time online at a furious rate so until I get it sorted I'll be very intermittent!)

Stating the obvious

2011-10-26T21:57:00.000+01:00

Art does change the world and isn't perfect. So much is obvious. (Thanks to Sammy whose words are usually right. I love you.)

Alec

xxxxxxx

Postcard from Sevilla

2011-10-20T23:42:00.008+01:00

We left Salamanca, which is a beautiful, confident, Renaissance city. Spain's beautiful to be in but not confident at the moment. It's anxious. The economic signs are ominous, in what has been since Franco's time, a success story. Its credit rating was downgraded a few days ago by one of those anonymous and unaccountable groups of financiers who for some reason have this power in their hands, and people are desperately worried. The international financial system is truly weird. Perhaps I'm missing something. Unemployment is high, round about 50% among young people, which is frighteningly high! There's an undercurrent of tension and it's breaking out in demonstrations about the cuts in public spending and unemployment, much as it is everywhere else.
Salamanca has a big young population, many of them students. While the students may not be currently in the job market (although many of them work part time) they are staring at a tough future. I met a small amount of hostility from a group of students one evening at a party in the flat we were staying in, not because I said anything in the discussion (Spanish still very, very basic) let alone anything controversial, but because they saw me as an affluent visitor just here to enjoy myself. I am affluent, I suppose, well relatively, and I am able to indulge my decision to travel for a while and in any case be pretty certain that I'd be rescued if I got into difficulty. That isn't the case for all of the group I was with. Some were as middle class as they come (not that they're immune from financial worries) but three were from very poor backgrounds with many members of their families out of work, and feeling as tho' they're really up against it. Financially, in fact they're already in trouble, and there is no safety net, not even from family. I just couldn't justify myself, and that together with too much drink, mostly too much to drink, meant that, ridiculously, I ended up in tears. Even that seemed an indulgence. What right had I to feel sorry for myself and be so maudlin. Tears did it! They were all contrition then, and that somehow made my state even more stupid. Them being concerned was somehow worse than them being aggressive.
I don't have much recollection how that evening turned out, although I sang quite a lot. Rufus said I sang all of the sea shanty 'The Arethusa'. It's certainly true I know it, but I don't remember singing it. Fortunately it's anti-French, not anti-Spanish. Rufus said it was completely bleargh but claimed he couldn't stop me! I'm not sure I believe his account; anyway he's no judge, he sings like a chain-saw. While I was still relatively conscious some guy tried to teach me a Galician folk song but our resulting duet, even to my ready-to-believe-I'm-capable-of-anything ear, sounded like crap. I remember trying Cosmogony from Bjork's latest album which I've been playing almost non-stop since I got it, but it wasn't appreciated! Cosmogony is so beautiful. Tears all over again. Sacrilege for me to try it really when I knew how magical her performance of it is. I'm just in love with that whole album.
The obverse of Spain's serious economic troubles is their obsessing over 'scandal'. It's all a bit like the British media. The big story while I was in Salamanca was the Duchess of Alba's projected marriage to some civil servant. She's eighty odd and he's pretty old, about twenty-five years younger, but it seems to have excited people. She's of interest here because of her immense wealth and her royal connections, but it all seems so ludicrously trivial in the face of the threat of social meltdown. Anyway the Duchess has seen off the intervention of her family, and the royal family. You feel there's an element of fiddling while Rome burns in all of this. A bit like obsessing over Rooney while Cameron fails to get any growth going in the economy. There's pretty universal agreement that the course that Cameron and Europe are following, namely big cuts in public expenditure, aren't the real answer. They just reduce the job market and that in turn reduces the amount of money in the economy; and, of course, huge sums have to be paid out in benefits to the unemployed. It all helps the downward spiral. The economics student and the historian of commerce in the flat were pretty much agreed that the British model, and the European one come to that, is not helping.
In my distress I actually considered coming home, until reason reasserted itself. If everybody went home instead of hanging around being conspicuously consumptive (?!!!) when Spain probably needs the money, that wouldn't help. Not that I'm in a position to consume much, but it's more than lots of Spaniards can. For the future I would think my chances of picking up work here are looking slim, which was the plan say in a few weeks as my money started to run out. I'll have to try and find out. I am stupidly ill-prepared, but part of my intention was that I should free-wheel.
Heigh ho! I'm about ready for another dose of Bjork! Try the album if you haven't already. She's a wonder.

Living and dying abroad

2011-10-19T18:43:00.186+01:00

I have thrown Death round the walls of my mind,
Bounced Him, made light of Him, now redesigned
Him, for another me. Tho' the contrast
Is harsh He can't regain his fearsome past
His terrifying once is undermined
And to a remote place is now consigned
His terror has become just commonplace
The fear of dullness has a harsher face
Than Death. Poor Death, looking at me in vain
Why do you worry? Sober, ill, insane,
You'll have me. I'll feel Your touch on my skin
Where others were rejected I'll let You in
Don't fret Death! I'm in love with You, take me!
Soon enough Your numbing grip will make me
Die. I've died before. I will die again.

I live with sculpted stone in gentle mess,
Sun, sea, sand, kindly men,and happiness
In carefree hedonism and fashioned words
Of writers I love while fat fuelled herds
Round me heave in bleached beached cholesterol
Waves. Dystopia's crowds, raucously roll
On an alien shore. The joke's on me
Death's in me, not in them, just see His glee!
Lotos-eating on far shores doesn't mend
My mind. Here troubles opposed do not end
In eternity's void, unless coerced.
Death's sting means nothing, no pathos rehearsed
Love is dead in me, so Reaper I say,
Implacable Lord, quickly end the day!
Die? I've died before. I can't die again.

Perhaps in everybody's writing there are echoes of other writers. I believe it to be inevitable. It's very noticeable in me. Shakespeare's there, obviously, because he's wound inextricably into everybody's English, but increasingly I've noticed I'm quoting or sounding like Tennyson. Very sub-Tennyson I hasten to say! That reminds me! I was reading about the trial of some dissident author in Soviet Russia. I can't remember now what his 'crime' was, but whatever it was it seemed very innocuous, like saying Stalin looked like a walnut, or some such dangerous subversion. Anyway in his trial he talked eloquently about how artists should be free - 'was Shakespeare constrained,' he declaimed, 'was he not free to castigate Walsingham a walnut!' (I've substituted my invented offence there - naturally it had nothing to do with walnuts) 'Ah, so comrade, you compare yourself with Shakespeare!' strikes in the prosecutor, 'What arrogance!' The prosecutor turns to the judges, and continues, 'you see, comrade judges, how this piffling scribbler compares himself to Shakespeare! What manner of man is it that is so deluded he imagines himself the equal of Shakespeare and therefore entitled to call our glorious comrade leader a walnut?' Probably the prosecutor wouldn't have used the distinctly Wodehousian 'piffling' but some conventional description more appropriate to communist terminology - 'basking cat of capitalist perversion' as like as not. Anyway the point I'm trying to make is that I'm not anything like the equal of Tennyson, and I'm not trying to make the sort of specious leap beloved of debaters (and Soviet prosecutors apparently). I seem to be entangling myself in some dystopia of my own devising here!
I love Tennyson. I've mentioned this before, but not satisfactorily explained why - satisfactorily to myself, I mean. The Tennyson reference in this thing was deliberate, but it also happens that I unconsciously use his phrases. Sometimes I see it, but maybe it's happening much more often that I realise and don't notice myself doing it. Tennyson revelled in words. He wasn't embarrassed by the richness of his imagery. A modern might be self conscious about ladling on the adjectives, and the high flown imagery and linguistic tricks, but that's partly a measure of Tennyson's influence. He invented all the overwhelming darkness, dankness, and dying fall in English poetry, well at least was the master exponent of it. Poets in his immediate aftermath were scattered in confusion. They either imitated him and were branded derivative, or else they struck out for some more minimalist shore because they were frightened of being branded derivative. His style came to be thought of as hopelessly outmoded when more astringent and terse poets gained the acendancy. His reputation's revived, but it's still possible to hear echoes of the Edwardians' disdain for the Victorian's hero. Victorians generally must have been a hard act to follow. After all they had a very long time in which to hone their Victorianness, while Edwardians had only the briefest of reigns in which to shine.
It is very hard to be original. Impossible to write in a vacuum - we all know that - but do the best of writers worry about what literary people will think of them if they show that they are influenced by other writers?
I keep saying I'm not a writer. I don't want to be one. I write sometimes but I've not crossed the notional line between being somebody who writes and being a writer. That line's important to people who read your stuff, but it's also important in your head. Perhaps there's a point when you say to yourself 'I'm a writer' and not until then are you one. That self-branding, I suspect, is crucial to all sorts of creative activity. A characteristic of artists is confidence in what they do. I don't mean they are overwheening, arrogant fools (hem! hem! You know who you are ;), but ultimately they must have belief. I don't imagine this is a permanent state with them. I know a few artists of one sort or another, and in most cases their confidence in themselves wavers. In fact it wavers a lot, but there are times when belief is uppermost, and those times are essential.
My head is like a maze of pathways and directions. I have an idea, and my thoughts head off in an undisciplined way in a particular direction and as they go they revolve the arguments for and against the idea. At some point the thoughts may have become so entangled and confused that I panic and seize on another passing thought, often unrelated to what I'd been thinking about, and head off on another path just to save myself from the argument continuing on the first path. Usually, eventually, that new thought may become as confused as the first and I leap off onto something else. And so it goes on. Very occasionally my head will resolve some thought process and leave me with that triumphant thing, an opinion or a solution. Most of the time my head fizzes with armies in different causes battling backwards and forwards. Rather than being calm and contempative, I am agitated.
As a rest from mental argument I'll construct scenarios in my head, supplying all the costumes, sets, dialogue, and the outcome; I'll rearrange the world, kill wrongdoers, comfort the oppressed, feed everybody, build great buildings, hang an exhibition, shoot a movie, ride a Grand National winner, star in my own play, love my cat (alas!), eat caviar, drink champagne, sleep with . . . Ah! Time I grabbed another passing thought and became more secretive :) It might be best if I don't grow up.

I've not been quite truthful in the poem. I've anticipated being on a beach, 'lotos eating', but at present we're still in Salamanca and likely to be here for another day. Then Rufus and I will go on to Seville, then to the Costa de la Lutz. I hope to spend some time somewhere down there, but he'll go home, probably on Tuesday of next week. I thought of trying to persuade him to delay returning to his boyfriend because I'll miss his company, but of course I won't. I'll go on alone as I intended to. I just have this feeling of unease about the alone stage, which is a bit wimpish.

I'm gone but not with Jay Brannan :(

2011-10-15T10:59:00.028+01:00

This, as will become apparent, is Jay Brannan's latest single, taken from his as yet unreleased album. I'm madly in love with Jay Brannan and can't believe he turned down my invitation to come to Spain with me. Actually I only asked him in my imagination. I have to stop, I'm told, confusing reality and fantasy. I'm timing this post to be published sometime at the weekend. Not sure why except that I will be in Spain, and while I intend to post occasionally, if I time this for the weekend it might fill what might be a gap in the continuity of my blog.

I feel slightly guilty when I'm not swept away on the tides of 'grief' that sweep over people when a loved famous person dies. I don't mean I don't understand other people's feelings, just that I don't enter into them easily. I'm confused on the subject of grief. Sometimes I think it ought to be more personal than public, but then drama, cinema, and literature sometimes move me to tears, so I'm not completely dead to the idea that people and events move one even if one has no personal involvement in them. 'Personal involvement' is not exactly what I mean. Obviously if you have an emotional reaction to something that is 'personal involvement'. Perhaps I mean 'personal knowledge'.
Is the answer, if one puts aside the infectious hysteria of mobs, that we start to feel that these famous people belong to us? Did people feel they knew Steve Jobs, and the other famous people whose deaths produced an emotional reaction in them? I don't think I have particular feelings about Jobs' death, beyond some sort of regret that anyone might feel for the passing of almost any person. Perhaps the regret is more intense because he was so creative. People tell me that what he did will almost certainly have changed my life in some way. Being almost completely technologically illiterate I have to accept that without understanding it.
My second recording is Jay Brannan again. He is talking about Steve Jobs, and he understands clearly from his own experience what Steve Jobs and Apple did for him. You will hear that JB also has a moment of not quite understanding why he is upset at 'losing' somebody whom he didn't know, had not met, nor was likely ever to have met. JB has trouble explaining the origin of his emotion. I shouldn't be the one, in view of what I wrote just now, to explain a stranger's reaction to the death of another stranger, but I think he hasn't quite realised that he explains the reason for his emotion, namely that Jobs (and Apple) provided the means for him to fulfill himself creatively. So can I say then that all these people who have an emotional reaction to the death of somebody they never 'knew' in the conventional sense is because that dead person did something psychologically for them?
I'm prepared to believe that, but I also suspect that in these moments of public 'grief' for somebody we don't 'know', we are experiencing fear of the end of things. It may be that part of the reason I don't have the impulse to surrender to this sort of 'grief' is because I'm not very afraid of the end of things. I think about the end more or less without emotion.

Shine

2011-10-10T11:16:00.010+01:00

She was uncertain, where she had been certain. It's what life does to you, she thought. She'd had a measure of success in her life. She'd done well at school, gone to a major university, got a first, and was articled to a partner in a famous London firm. As it happens a shadow fell on the shine of her life when she met her future husband, also an articled clerk at the same London firm. It wasn't obvious to a partial or impartial observer, least of all herself, that he was to be the author of all her future troubles. In fact her future husband seemed the opposite of a nemesis. He was personable, had an easy social manner, and apparently had a social conscience. He spent several evenings a week helping in a homeless shelter, giving care and legal advice. It would be true to say, far from casting a shadow on her, he had dazzled her. To his attributes should be added proficiency in seduction and sex. He'd come to the firm by a different route. He hadn't gone to university, but had got his articles at the prestigious London firm through the influence of his father, who was the senior partner in a medium sized East Anglian law firm. He was bright enough to have gone to university, but it seemed he did not relish academic discipline.

Part way through their articles she and her lawyer lover decided to marry and tranfer their articles to his father's firm. Transferring articles all those years ago was still something the profession frowned on, but for the right people with good connections it wasn't a particular problem. If she had thought about it at the time she might have preferred to stay in London to complete her articles, and perhaps gain a few years precious experience in the high powered environment in which she shone. But she was in love and made no objection so it was done. Perhaps through some subtle premonition, at the last minute, she decided she would like to transfer her articles to a partner in a rival local firm, smaller than her husband's family firm, but with a respectable reputation. She had a vaguely formed thought that it wasn't a good thing to be working with her soon-to-be husband. He, and his father, were surprised, but reluctantly used their influence to get her her wish. So the two young clerks worked apart. She qualified well - in fact very close to the top of the list - and eventually became a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales. That used to be the full title of a solicitor but since the Constitution Act of 2009 she, along with all solicitors, had been redesignated 'solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales'. A small change which she regretted. Somehow the word 'supreme' was much grander. Her husband passed some long way down the list. She looked at her certificate sometimes, signed by the then Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning, which she had hung in the lavatory. That was the influence of her amusingly irreverent husband. Secretly she would have liked to have hung it in her office.

They bought a cottage in a Norfolk village, which they did up, and soon had a daughter. When they both qualified, and their salaries improved, they moved to a larger house in a more attractive village. Shortly after that they had a son. Following the birth of both children, and after maternity leave, she returned to work. They became a popular family and couple in the village, in local legal circles, and beyond. She discovered she was an excellent cook, in fact she turned out to have an aptitude for it and their dinner parties, which provided another setting in which her husband could shine, were legendary. As with everything she took on she did the very best she could. Somehow or other the lawyer and her husband managed to edit jointly a new edition of a well-known and popular legal handbook for the layman. Truth to tell she did most of the work, which is why it was so good, and remarkably successful. This project confirmed in the lawyer's mind what she had known, but not acknowledged, that her husband had enormous initial enthusiasm for projects but that his enthusiasm rarely lasted. As much as she could, she suppressed this unwelcome insight into her husband's character.

The publication of the guide to the law had some press coverage, and her husband performed well in the radio interviews which followed. On the basis of the impression he made he was invited to contribute a regular legal slot in a local radio show's morning programme. It was a success and became a half hour weekly phone-in on the programme. She knew she didn't have the aptitude, or the easiness of manner, which her husband had which enabled him to shine at this sort of thing. Nevertheless she was forced to acknowledge to herself that she felt some disappointment that while his career was flourishing, albeit in a small pond, the shine she thought she had detected early in her career seemed to have all but faded. The solitary success of the book came to seem paltry, and in any case it was her husband who built on it. She did occasionally admit, just to herself, of course, that life as a solicitor in a country town was very dull. Her house and her children, she thought, more than compensated for the lack of intellectual stimulation in her job.

When they were of an age the lawyer's husband decided, with her agreement, that because he himself had had a bad experience of boarding school, the children would not be sent away as had been the custom through many generations of his family, but would be educated locally. Conscientious solicitors work very long hours. It was decided that to help with running the house and children, while she continued to work full time, the couple would employ a woman from the village. They also took in a young articled clerk from her husband's office on what was to have been a temporary basis, until the clerk found a flat share or room to rent. Somehow, not through design, the clerk stayed longer than anyone had anticipated, and became almost essential to their lives. She was a pretty young thing made more appealing by the pathos of her initial distress at being so far from her family in Singapore.

The lawyer realised eventually that her husband and the clerk were having an affair. When she came to this realisation she could have kicked herself for being so stupidly blind. She realised there was not so much love in their marriage as once there had been, and sex had become almost a matter of timetabling. In spite of that she did still love her husband and was angry and hurt. She determined to mend her marriage. The articled clerk was kicked out, and the lawyer demanded as a condition of mending the marriage that her husband should move to another of his family's firm's branches, away from the temptation of the pretty young clerk. She also demanded that the clerk's articles should be transferred to another master. Between them the lawyer and her husband thought they had done everything they could to repair their marriage.

Things, however, were irrevocably changed. The lawyer had been deeply shocked by her husband's faithlessness and her trust was destroyed. They worked sincerely for a while to overcome their difficulties but family life became very hard. In spite of their determination, relations between them remained strained and cold. Tension grew up between the lawyer and her daughter, who became disruptive. She was increasingly rude and disobedient, and more alarming, absent from home for long periods, sometimes overnight. The lawyer became convinced that her daughter, her underage daughter, had become sexually active. She tried unavailingly to assert her control, and recognising that she was failing, became depressed and her general physical health declined. Her husband was indifferent, claiming that he was not able to share the burden of family troubles because he was so busy. He had become successful and extraordinarily busy.

The media exposure had unexpectedly brought the lawyer's husband a type of work which, while not new, was dramatically increasing - suing for medical negligence. This period marked the start, in this country, of a huge increase in litigation for all sorts of negligence. A sudden willingness on the part of the courts to award large sums in damages, and the example of America where such actions were commonplace, led people who had suffered both real and imagined suffering at the hands of private corporations and public institutions to seek redress through the courts. The lawyer's husband began to pursue this line of work, and his firm allowed him to develop it. He increased staff, and in particular took on a woman as a medical researcher for whose young daughter he had successfully obtained a huge sum of money following a sailing school accident in which the school was found to have been negligent.

Her husband brought the researcher home on a number of occasions, and she and the lawyer became friends. At first the lawyer was suspicious but she recognised that this was now her default attitude when it came to her husband and other women. She suppressed these thoughts and gradually her suspicions died. In any case the researcher was very unlike those women whom her husband usually pursued. She was not young, nor was she particularly attractive. She also had several children by her divorced husband. They lived with her and she had struggled to support them almost single handedly until the lawyer's husband took on the case of her brain damaged child and won her substantial damages. It seemed to the lawyer that the researcher was not a threat to her marriage.

The medical negligence work began to go wrong. They were no win no fee cases - dependent for income on the successful outcome of cases which were by their nature both complicated and lengthy. It had become commonplace for groups of petitioners in cases against drug companies, for example, to instruct one firm to act for a group of petitioners. These were called group actions. The lawyer's husband and his team had two key decisions in group actions, for which they were the instructing solicitors, go against them in the courts, and one other major case seemingly completely bogged down in scientific technicalities. Her husband's father, and the senior partners of the firm, began to question the wisdom of spending so much time on cases which were producing no present income, nor showed much sign of producing any in the future. The truth was that her husband, as was his style, had become bored with the whole medical negligence business and his work started to suffer as a result. The lawyer knew nothing of this but her father-in-law took her aside at one of the Sunday lunches which were a much vaunted feature of her husband's family's life, to which friends were invited, and at which her father-in-law held court. He wanted to know if she knew whether his son had any problem in relation to work that the firm ought to know about. She was completely surprised by this question, but concealed it and assured her father-in-law that as far as she was concerned his son had seldom seemed more upbeat. Apart from her surprise, she felt that the approach bordered on the unethical. It was shortly after this, in a stormy meeting of the firm's partners, that her husband was manoeuvred into resigning from the firm. He came home to her, told her this, and at the same time announced he was leaving to set up house with his researcher.

Her shock was absolute. She had allowed herself to be lulled into thinking that although there was little affection in their marriage she and her husband had at least achieved stability through being open and honest with each other. She realised, sickeningly, how deluded she was, and how duplicitous he was. His attitude was one of indifference to her distress, and indeed to her or her children's future. He left that evening, leaving her to explain what had happened to their children. She did so, attempting to be as fair as she could while nursing murderous thoughts. Her daughter, in the middle of her A levels, took the news silently. Her son cried. Her son was something of a mystery to her. She could rarely fathom his moods. In fact she was accustomed to thinking, and frequently deprecatingly said, that he was an amiable but fairly dull child, He was usually quiet and withdrawn which she took to be his character but now as he sobbed wildly before her she was momentarily panicked into believing she had misjudged him. Perhaps, she thought, he feels things more deeply than she realised. His distress, however, seemed to be a brief episode, passing as quickly as it had come, and she swiftly dismissed it from her mind. Unconsciously she reinstated her conventional view of him.

The divorce was pushed through quickly. She was hard nosed about the settlement, forcing her husband to give way on most things. Their house, on which so much money had been lavished, was sold and she and the children moved to Cambridge. She applied for and got a job in the commercial department of one of the City's firms. She took on a mortgage larger than she was comfortable with, but was determined that her children should not have too harsh a transition to their new, less affluent life. She told herself, and there was truth in it, that the move was a good thing. Cambridge was infinitely more cosmopolitan and to her taste than a Norfolk village. She thought often, more often than she wanted to, about her ex-husband and the researcher living in considerable financial ease on the millions he had secured for her daughter's injuries.

The lawyer's daughter, in a turnaround which amazed her, and made her very happy, took her side in the divorce and its aftermath, and could only with great difficulty be persuaded to see her father. Her son also remained loyal to his mother. Both children did still see their father regularly, no matter that they were reluctant, because the lawyer, determined to be seen to be fair, insisted that they should. The lawyer's daughter, in particular, began to feed her mother titbits of information about the state of her father's work and his family circumstances, particularly if they reflected badly on him. The lawyer began to form a comfortable view of her ex-husband's new life. It was one which she didn't comment on, but in which she took some pleasure.

The truth was that the lawyer's ex-husband was not doing well. Following his departure from the family firm he had obtained consultancy work in the area of medical negligence in London. It became clear, however, that the high powered firm which employed him expected more in terms of work and results than he was capable of giving them. They terminated the arrangement at some convenient point. The lawyer's daughter reported back to her that he was now being given a hard time by the woman for whom he had left her, and to whom he was now married. According to her daughter, who noted everything, he was openly criticised by his new wife, even in company - something, the lawyer thought with satisfaction, that had never happened to him while he was with her. He spent some time writing and teaching, but eventually went back to the family firm. His father was retired by now, and there was some opposition to his return from those who had known him during his first period with the firm, but nevertheless he was taken back. Not to continue his medical negligence work however. Others had long since taken it over and he was not asked to contribute anything to that.

The lawyer's daughter went to university to read law, and in her turn became articled as her mother had been before her in a large London firm. Her daughter's relationships with men were fraught with mistakes and wildness, but she was always readily forgiven by her mother. In fact, in some curious way, the lawyer had started to live through her daughter. In her eyes the daughter who had sided with her in her battle with her husband could do little wrong. Nevertheless, in spite of her own experience of marriage, she craved it for her daughter. The lawyer created myths about each of her daughter's unsuitable boyfriends, imagining they were talented men, on the edge of huge successes, and sure to propose marriage. She told everyone who would listen about each relationship in the most glowingly optimistic terms, never learning that she would have to suffer the disappointment of explaining what went wrong. She always blamed the men, finding them to have been unsuitable and pretending that's what she had thought all along.

The lawyer's son limped through school and university, succeeding by dint of seemingly interminable retakes, in getting a degree. He then unexpectedly announced that he wanted to be an actor. This involved various new colleges and courses and the expense began to mount up. The lawyer funded it where possible by screwing money out of her ex-husband, but failing that by taking on loans. The boy thought that Hollywood was the place to be so the lawyer financed it by remortgaging her house. Her ex-husband had long since decided that his responsibilities were at an end. Eventually the son returned and lives with her still, eternally waiting to be noticed. At least, his mother thought, there are no girlfriends to disorder his life. The lawyer was gripped by the belief that in failing in her marriage she had failed her children. Her misplaced guilt drove her to give them not only everything they might have reasonably expected, but more than they might have expected. All spare money was spent on them. Even essential work on her already rundown house was neglected. She survived by being careful with money in all except her children.

When eventually the lawyer's daughter did indeed land a man who was prepared to marry her, a consultant radiologist as it happens, a pretty man, but no match for the hardened warrior who was the lawyer's daughter, the lawyer started the process of telling all who would listen what a magnificent couple they made, and how clever her prospective son-in-law was, and what brilliant careers awaited them both.

The lawyer is approaching retirement now. As I write it's getting near Christmas, and she'll probably go after the holiday. Apparently nobody will be at home with her over Christmas, or New Year. Just one of those things. She doesn't mind. Her son has the chance to go to New Zealand and he's taken it. Apparently there's a chance of some film work. She helped with the fare. Her daughter will be spending the whole holiday with her future in-laws. The lawyer quite understands. There will be other years. She has a married sister living in York but she has her own family to be with. She will be quite happy at home in front of the fire, which she lights only at Christmas, with a good book and a bottle of wine. Anyway she's doing much of the Christmas cover, so there won't in fact be much time off.

She's standing at her window, looking out across Christ's Piece. She doesn't wear much make-up these days, just a touch of lipstick and that inappropriate blue eyeliner she's worn for over forty years. It wasn't right for her fair colouring then, and it certainly isn't now. The autumn light is harsh on the dryness of her skin. She has a mild background ache in her left knee, and both hips. Her hair is washed but somehow still seems lifeless. She's unfailingly kind to clerks and admin assistants and while they like her, they sense her failure. She's always helpful to her colleagues if they ask for her advice, but they ask for it increasingly less often. They have thought for some time that she may be getting out of touch. Actually they couldn't be more wrong - she has always kept up to date, more so than many of her colleagues, with changes in legislation and with judge delivered law. Her clients always receive the most meticulous attention and expert advice. She was always good at her job, but it tends not to be noticed. She's not quick to smile, her clients think. She offers no sense that she's happy for those for whom she has good news, or sympathy for those for whom she has bad. She's a dry old stick, they think. But then her life didn't quite shine as it promised to.

[All the characters in this story are fictitious. Any resemblance to anyone living or dead is entirely co-incidental.]

Peter Reading

2011-10-08T17:40:00.002+01:00

The Review section of the Guardian this morning carried a series of short pieces by writers in which each of them described their favourite book of their favourite poet. An interesting way to while away time over coffee I thought. It struck me how much they wrote about the lives of the poets rather than their work. I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from that but it made me think about a poet I admire and how little I know about his life. His name is Peter Reading and the only stuff I know about him is what comes through his poetry, which admittedly is quite a lot because the minutiae of his life is what concerns him. He loves the forms of poetry, and plays with them. Sometimes he eviscerates the form and then reconstructs it. His poetry is often savage - mostly savage - about the people he meets, about their violence and stupidity, about their corruption and moral bankruptcy. He rails against the stupidity of rules and conventions, and the pettiness of those who enforce them. He hates cruelty.
I'm certain he lives or lived in Shropshire. I'm not certain if he's alive or dead. I've avoided reading the blurb on his books because I feel I don't need to know about him. Everything I write down somehow eats away at my vision of him, because everything anyone writes down about anyone else puts boundaries to their character and art. More than that, what I write about Peter Reading affects what you think about him, and if you've never previously come across him then what I write forms your whole vision of him. Somehow that ought not to be.
In that feeling is the kernel of what I thought about the pieces I was reading in the Guardian. The poets being written about were being pigeonholed by those who admire them. How could they not be? It was inevitable. The mini-biographers firstly know too much about their subjects's lives - they rarely avoid anecdote - and secondly they don't know not to bring that into their portrait. They create boundaries for their favourite poets which the rest of us have to deconstruct before we get through to our idea of what they mean to us. And it was all the usual suspects who are always asked to give their opinions. The sort of people who if asked to contribute to anything always say yes. They don't have the good sense, or humility, sometimes to say no.
I'm not sure where this leaves me except perhaps saying that I think it may be a bad thing to be guided because the guiding gets between you and the subject, and that guidance which is biographical may be irrelevant. The apparatus of academia wants you to reach the 'right' decision about literature through recommendation, biography, and understanding of the technicalities of literature. I half think it may be a good idea to skip all that and not read books about books until you have your own opinion.
Is this too harsh? Too grumpy? Too acidic? Am I saying all this because I'm nervous about what the future holds and want to take it out on something? Probably.

Writing and I

2011-10-07T11:16:00.004+01:00

I'm writing a short story at the moment. It seems I'm writing something pretty conventional in thought and form, and I'm not clear why I'm telling you that I'm writing it. There were thirty words in those first two sentences, and five of them were the word 'I'. There is a cod measure of how self involved you are based on how many times the word 'I' occurs compared with the incidence of other words. It's clearly rubbish to propose such an obviously unscientific method of measuring something which in any case defies scientific measurement, but in psychological terms there may be a point to the idea. I, who use 'I' a very great deal, have been slightly nervous ever since this silly 'measure' was lodged in my head.
You blog-addicted few, who are wise to the way my mind wanders, will recognise a diversion when you read one. That step sideways into the blind alley of the measurement of self-centredness is clearly a linguistic hesitation on my part. I am reluctant to approach the idea of writing, still more the idea that I might write something. The trouble is, you see, that writing is a whole lot of bad things - things that should be edited out - many, many more times than it is something wonderful.
Writing is the last refuge of the egotistical. Writing is what those who can't do, do. Writing is an adolescent dream; a retirement project; an escape from a humdrum job; a way to fame; an imagined sign of intellectual respectability; a competitive imperative; an expression of a perverted philosophy; a feeling you are doing something with your life; a demonstration of superiority; a consequence of feeling (oh! Shame!) that you have something to say; a need to lay oneself bare; an irritation that you can't find the book you need; a basking in approval; the result of your mother saying how wonderful the story was that you wrote when you were eight; the result of your alcoholic lecherous English master when you were fifteen saying how beautifully you wrote (and how beautiful are your eyes).
I blog for Chrissake! What odds that I write a short story? It's a stage in the career of many bad writers. One starts with poetry, with little or no knowledge of form or even language, and once one's expended lots of pent up sexual emotion and social anger in that, then one ventures a short story. Remember it has to have a twist at the end! Some H.H.Munro inspired savage titbit emerges. Write another, and another. Embarrassment at being a bad writer recedes - those close to you say 'how wonderful' - and you start to think you're quite good. So the bad novel follows as surely as night follows day. It might even be published. The bad writer apparently thinks poetry is inferior to prose, and short prose inferior to long prose!
The sad thing is I don't believe this is me. Surely not me! Then your watching, pitying friends, relations, and a few casual observers, take mental bets on how long it takes for you to realise how dull you are. Perhaps you never do. Perhaps you start to think, unwilling to admit to mediocrity, because you are resolutely ignored, that everybody else is at fault - unable to appreciate your talent. Perhaps you think the people who are successful are so for completely unaccountable reasons. You write better than almost anyone, you tell yourself, and have more to say. The question then is, are you at this stage pretending that you don't know, or are you really deluding yourself? My writing self, at this point, goes out and either writes what will be, in his mind, the defining novel of the 21st century, or, if he is too aware and of an extreme turn of personality, he'll go and shoot himself.
Me? I'll just finish the short story, and watch myself closely, in some trepidation, for evidence or not that I'm at the start of the career I've mapped out above :)

Watch this

2011-10-03T16:04:00.006+01:00

This film had a big effect on me aged 13 when I first saw it. Perhaps I didn't properly understand what was happening, I'm not sure now, but I certainly knew where my sympathies lay. I certainly didn't immediately understand the ethereal music, but something impelled me to play it over and over and I came to love it. I respond well to dissonance - the dissolve into chaos at the end is brilliant - and the other-worldly, almost sinister, voice of Sigur Ros's frontman Jonsi Birgisson seemed like heaven to me. The crossover into classical sound is me as well. The band's stopped working together, maybe a year ago, supposedly to pursue solo careers. They scrapped all the work they'd done on a projected album. Apparently there were stirrings of a new project recently but I haven't followed up on it. I should. I've been a bit lazy about music lately, relying on playing the replacements of all the stuff I lost, and not taking on anything new.

Up for a new life

2011-10-03T00:52:00.009+01:00

I took Ellen to Oxford this morning to start her grown-up life. In spite of those stupid people who say students are not yet in the 'real' world, university is a big change and for most students represents the first break with home. It also means being exposed to pressures, tensions, decisions, and stress that will shape their lives. Naturally the pace of growing up will be different for each student. I remember the first conversation I had with my tutor, one of only two I ever had in the three weeks I was at University - one when I arrived, and the second three weeks later when I left - during which he said there was an extraordinary change about to happen to me. He put the time for the change to become evident, roughly speaking, at a year. Come July at the end of my first year, he said, I would be unrecognisable as the boy who came up just a few months before.
What's particularly irritating about the 'real world' people is that what they think of as the 'real world' is their world. It may be full of different difficulties from those facing students, but that doesn't mean that the difficulties facing students aren't real. The 'real world' people can't conceive there are other realities than theirs, each of them capable in turn of being rewarding, or stressful, or disastrous. I know so many students who are struggling to live on very little, complete their academic work, and keep waged jobs going. I'm not saying they're all struggling with poverty and hardship, but. as in society at large, many are. They are also young, excited, and up for a good time. I can dimly remember it :) The rest of us look on and judge them, often unkindly. They aren't that different from the rest of us. That's the stupidity of it, you see, as so often with different groups in society we assume they're somehow separate. They aren't. They are part of the rest of us and belong to us.

The one who belongs to me, Ellen, long ago said she wanted me to take her to University, not Dad. This wasn't a harsh decision, it's just that she wanted to recall him waving her off at the farm gate, not an awkward farewell at a College lodge, or from her stair. This was strangely touching. I know I like to pretend that Ellen is tough, particularly emotionally tough, so perhaps I should come clean, stop poking fun at her, and acknowledge that she is as sensitive as almost anyone *right :/*. Mind, she did say she thought me going back to Oxford would be 'good for me'. I think she was thinking along the lines that I was scared of the place, and should 'man up'. Going back wasn't as traumatic as I imagined it might be. Different college to start with, but also somehow I've come to realise university is a rite of passage that I don't need. Forgive me. I'm not attempting to denigrate it, but it's just that I've discovered I don't want to do the work and I don't want to enter into collegiate life. I did when I went, or thought I did, and I have a great love of learning, but I've discovered that I'm not regretting not going. Sounds almost arrogant, and I'm sorry for that. I'm trying to be honest.
Anyway I shoved Ellen out at the College gate, with her stuff, which for a girl was amazingly little *prejudice*, and parked my beautiful Saab and basked in the envious admiration of some very pretty freshers. I'd forgotten that aspect of the place when I was bleating on about 'no regrets'. It will be the same in Cambridge about now. Wall to wall male beauty, all fresh from school, or earnest gap years. I'm starting to worry that prolonged living in a university city is creating an addiction to 'jailbait' - except, presumably, these just about weren't. By the time I got back to Ellen I was very distracted.
I took her to lunch at the Turf, and she dragged some blushing nerdy guy from her stair along with us. She likes getting people organised, but gathering up this guy in the space of half an hour tops was bloody quick. She has a reputation for attracting and organising men - all of a fairly tongue-tied, inadequate variety. Dad describes them collectively as 'Ellen's collection of weak men'. He once asked in a kindly but absent minded way of some desperately nervous Wisbech Grammar schoolboy 'which of Ellen's weak men are you?' He recovered almost instantly and attempted to mend fences by giving the boy a huge glass of single malt and engaging him in conversation about radio-controlled model aircraft (the boy's branch of sadness). Boy got more and more animated, and ultimately drunk, but left, with an incandescent Ellen, having first embraced a startled Dad and promising to take him 'flying'. Did I mention Dad can be a bit of a loose cannon? Lovely, but best not left alone with people. Not as good at 'dropping bricks' as the actor John Gielgud used to be (I'll give you some of those sometime - I've quite a collection), but close. Anyway it looks rather as tho' Ellen's starting an Oxford branch of 'weak men'. She will be brilliant here. It's a foregone conclusion. I didn't get upset about Oxford, but I did get hot-eyed about leaving Ellen. Which is pure absurdity since I never see her when I'm in Cambridge. She's been boarding somewhere or other since she was thirteen. Perhaps it was for years of not really knowing her that well, and regretting it.

Back home I'm trying to finalise plans for Spain, without having a boring plan. I'll stop here. I mean the post :)

I passed a man who wasn't there

2011-10-02T00:49:00.000+01:00

Blogging is shelved for the time being. I have no ideas or opinions (it's not tautology because an idea is not the same as an opinion, but if I have no ideas then it stand to reason I have no opinions. That isn't quite right either because I could have an opinion about somebody else's idea. And even that doesn't work because in order to have an opinion about somebody else's idea you'd have to have thought about it and therefore had an idea. You could I suppose have an opinion about an idea without having had an idea if you lied about having the opinion).

Blogging is unshelved for the time being. I have an idea, altho' I may have forgotten it. The best thing to do is sit and wait for it to come past again. Then I'll begin.

You may consider this frivolous but I urge you to reconsider. While you're at it reconsider other things. There may be things you've forgotten about, which you didn't realise you miss, and which will help.

Love

2011-09-29T00:16:00.001+01:00

In blogs we say a lot about people which is based, very often, on little or no evidence but just on what amounts to personal prejudice. It's a dangerous approach, more tabloid than anything else. Discerning people, and I suppose I imagine I'm one of those people, hate it in newspapers, but when we give ourselves the platform to write to a public we frequently lapse into ill-founded scorn and hatred. I do, I know it. When I actually know a lot about somebody personally I find it harder to write about him or her. Somehow or other I feel I shouldn't. It's a curious order of priority. Shouldn't I be more concerned not to rush to judgement when I don't have many facts? All this is prompted because I desperately want to express my support for a friend, and am so disgusted at the calculatedly cruel behaviour of some members of his family toward him that I want to expose it in my blog. But he gets hurt if it's talked about by his friends. He pretends to insouciance, but he's essentially a private person and defensive about his family. When all is said and done he still clings to the idea that bridges can be built.
How often do I negligently, casually, insensitively decide to throw aside the considerateness I'm exercising in his case when I write about people I have no emotional connection with? Do we just have limited amounts of consideration? Seems like it. And anger seems not to be just a default position but everybody's chosen debate setting. Thing is you get used to it.

Cuthbert Bede's photograph

2011-09-26T23:21:00.008+01:00

It's weird (how many posts begin like that?) that I am able to maintain two types of persona - more sometimes. The first group are versions of me who are on the edge. The second group include versions of me, like the one you are about to read about, who are way back from the edge and are caught up in stories, puzzles, and people. (Did I ever tell you, I wonder, that the last comma in that last sentence is known as an 'Oxford comma' - lots of people don't put a comma before the 'and' in a list of things. Either comma present or comma absent are 'allowed'. You knew that already? The trouble with writing is that you can't see the pained or exasperated looks on people's faces. Probably writing would disappear if you could.)

Do you know the comic novels written under the pseudonym of 'Cuthbert Bede'? I didn't, until Dad gave me copies of three of them called 'The adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, an Oxford freshman,' 'The further adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, an Oxford under-graduate', and 'Mr. Verdant Green married and done for'. (There was a fourth 'Little Mr. Bouncer and his friend Verdant Green' which I haven't seen.) They were books he loved and since I was going up to Oxford he thought they'd provide a light hearted introduction to the place. He realised Oxford had changed since the 1850s when the novels were first published but he suspected maybe not so significantly that it would be unrecognisable. As it happens I didn't get a chance to find out because my breakdown happened and I left the place, only three weeks in (all chronicled in gruesome detail elsewhere - that's a bit Verdant Greenish!). The books were written under the pseudonym 'Cuthbert Bede' by a clergyman called Edward Bradley.
As an aside I wonder if you've noticed how Anglican clergymen, up until the modern era, were able to devote themselves to all sort of activities totally unconnected with pastoral duties. It seems to have been an idyllic life for many of them - privileged, and with few responsibilities, or rather as few responsibilities as they wished to take on. They could even appoint young curates on next to no money to do their work if they wanted. The great Gilbert White who wrote the classic book 'Natural History of Selbourne' (which I believe has been in print ever since it was first published in 1789) was only the curate of Selbourne - the Vicar, who took most of the monies associated with the parish, was able to appoint White as curate to carry out his, the Vicar's, duties while he, the Vicar, spent his time wining and dining, and drawing yet more money, as a Fellow of some Oxford college. I'm not sure where I'm left with this line. Clergymen seem horribly privileged yet many of them. under-employed or just plain neglectful as spiritual leaders, produced fantastic works of literature and scholarship. I'll leave it for you to kick that around. I'm getting a long way from Verdant Green.
I was going to say that I also fell in love with these novels, and their setting. Much humour doesn't pass down the years too well, like the 'comic' bits in Shakespeare for example, which always seem to me to be more slapstick than wit; laboured not light. Genius Shakespeare was, but not at humour. I suspect he'd have cut an uncomfortable figure at the legendary Algonquin round table. Victorian humour, especially that published in 'funny'magazines such as Punch, seems particularly weak, but there are exceptions. 'Three men in a boat', by Jerome K. Jerome is one (and actually I prefer 'Three men on the bummel', but that's not a commonly held opinion), as is George Grossmith's 'The diary of a nobody'. Bits of Surtees make me giggle, but that's almost certainly a horse thing. I'd definitely add Verdant Green to the list of books whose humour has stood the test of time, but it's no use me telling you that because this is so subjective and you'd have to find out for yourself if you agree. Again this isn't what I wanted to write about.

On the way back from our fishing hol. we stopped in Honiton to get some lunch. There's a bookshop there, irresistable as far as I'm concerned, in spite of Amazon and Kindle. It's a good one, the bookshop, well it's got a lot in it. To cut a long story short I found the three Verdant Green novels I already have, but bound together in one volume - a fourth edition of the first book, and firsts of two and three. Naturally I'll always treasure Dad's copies, but I saw pound signs when I hit on this volume because not only were they early editions, but stuck onto a leaf at the front of the first book was a sepia toned portrait real photograph with 'Cuthbert Bede' written underneath it.
This seemed quite exciting to me (sad!) so I bought the book. It wasn't cheap, but Dad and E agreed it was a speculation worth making. Mind you they might have been being kind since I'd already bought the thing by the time they saw it. On the other hand I can rely on Ellen to tell it like it is, and even she seemed quite impressed. Now all I had to do was show that a. the book wasn't published with a photographic portrait frontispiece (because the photograph might then be rare), or better still b. there are no known portraits of Bede/Bradley, or better even than that, c. the photograph was taken by Lewis Carroll! I'm joking! Well, partly! Charles Dodgson ('Lewis Carroll') was interested in photography, and did lots of portraits, which he developed himself in his studio at Christ Church. The period's right, but did he and Bradley coincide at Oxford? Exciting isn't it :)
Well prepare yourself for disappointment (that's if you are still with this story). Bradley was never up at Oxford. It was an assumption I made that at this time all clergymen had to be, but I didn't know that Durham University had got going by the time Bradley went to university, and he went there. It's likely therefore that point c. is a non-starter. I was extremely pleased with myself up to here. Isn't it ironic, and ultimately unreal, as so much in life turns out to be, that one of the best known novels of Oxford undergraduate life is based on the author's experience at Durham and merely coloured with snippets of Oxford life gleaned, presumably, from other books. Bradley did intend the book to be about Durham, but he changed the setting, on commercial grounds, to Oxford, on the advice of Mark Lemon, editor of Punch. Rather funny really.
According to a guy in David's (Cambridge booksellers) there is a list of Carroll's photographic output. Even tho' it seems extremely unlikely that the portrait would have been taken by him, I'm still, for the sake of satisfying myself, going to check it out in the Library. I also discovered that Bradley satirised photography and photographers in a book called 'Photographic pleasures'. I doubt that Dodgson would have found that funny. He took photography very seriously. In fact it strikes me he took everything seriously, yet somehow still managed to produce the gloriously surreal Alice. Perhaps you have to be serious to be surreal.
I'll leave this story here. Not likely to return to it either although I'll continue to dig. I've stretched the indulgence of my readers pretty much to breaking point. Poor you!

p.s. Point a - immediately reneging on my promise - the book was not published with this photographic frontispiece, so somebody who had a contact print of this pic stuck it in the book. I'd now like to know if the "Cuthbert Bede" is in Bradley's handwriting or not. Point b. There are photographs of Bradley/Bede and I'm in pursuit of them to see if they're the same. Bet you never knew I had this dogged obsessive streak in me. Whaddya mean, you guessed!!!

Prose poem: let's not get dressed today

2011-09-26T00:43:00.002+01:00

This person is near the end of his tether. He's out on the margins and won't look anyone in the eye. It's all been a disappointment and he's just realising it. No more popping his collar as a sign of bravado or whatever. He's experiencing the world as it is. He needs people and he's found they don't need him. He's been drinking and he barely knows or cares what's what. His wrecked upturned bed is him clearing the room, he tells himself, as a symbol of the desert his life is becoming. Truth is he just needed to break things and he doesn't realise it. Shit! Perhaps he does but he doesn't really care. Melancholy is now consuming him. He'll cry soon, or at least tears will come but he'll know they aren't for the things he tells himself they're for and that unknowing will make him cry some more. He doesn't know what's genuine. He stares unseeing at things and feel as wrecked as his bed. He'll not get dressed today. He can't make himself. At the moment he's quite clean but he'll get dirtier. He'll sink deeper into depression without knowing why. Maybe he'll come back, but it's quite likely he won't. He hasn't really got a grip on anything much after all. Not as much as he thought he had. You see he thought he had but terrors are always waiting to take him when he opens his arms to them. They have no mercy.

What I did on my holiday: for the umpteenth time

2011-09-25T19:58:00.002+01:00

I went with Ellen and Dad fishing. I've blogged about this before, how we all four of us - including bro - used to go off for two weeks, or maybe just one, on these fishing trips. I used to fish as well, but have now given up. I read or visit places if there's anything around to visit. If you're deep in the Highlands there often isn't, so I make do with reading and music. Make do! That's completely mad. Whole lives are built round literature and music. I used to paint and draw, but it seems to have deserted me. I was going to build my life around art - thought I was going to be Britart's next sensation. Curious how you can delude yourself.
I would have blogged while on holiday, but there was no wifi or landline internet connection where we were so that was out. Even phone connection was intermittent. 21st century in one of the most technologically advanced countries on earth and one might as well have been in Kyrgizstan or Namibia. It seems strange to say it but it was curiously relaxing. We were on Dartmoor. Yet another of Dad's fishing buddies provided the accommodation and some of the fishing. I swear we could circle the earth and light anywhere and fish with one of Dad's farming, fishing, or Scottish friends. It's like some sort of mafia. It rained a lot and I cooked and cleaned. As chalet boy I did pretty well. Shame in a way it wasn't being done for a party of beautiful skiers, except, lets face it, they may be beautiful but often they're are either dense or hooray*, or both. I went with Dad and Ellen one day to Fennick(?) reservoir and I walked round it while they fished. It was about the only sunny day and it was very lovely. Best thing tho' was I met a woman angler. It's not that women don't fish (see Ellen) but they don't often go on their own. Not sure why. It's a bit of a male chauvinist activity, but not rabidly so. She had taken it up about ten years to get away from her retired husband who was driving her mad. Our talk got quite frank. She had two sons and they and her husband all disapproved of her going off on her own all day. It's not as tho' the sons were young, it's just that they all had restricted ideas about what middle aged women should do and not do. I felt mega sorry for her. She was a real breath of life and didn't deserve to be beaten down. Well she wasn't going to be! She was pretty sure that one of her sons is gay, but at present he's conforming to his father's stereotype. She started fishing for advice about that, but I didn't really offer any. What do I know. Certainly wasn't about to start issuing advice altho' I did describe my life as best I could, which makes sorryish retelling, as if that might help. As if. Anyway she left the fishing for a bit and I took her to the rather nice pub in Bridford, which is also the village shop, and she bought me lunch. I think I have friend for life!
I read much of what was on my kindle but since there was no wifi connection I couldn't add to it. For nostalgia's sake I drove out one day and used the internet in Moretonhampstead's information centre. Just wrote a few emails and assuaged my internet withdrawal symptoms. I also took Ellen into Exeter one evening to see Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which was ok but I thought it a measure of how starved we are of intelligent films that this solid piece of work, and it is good, is so raved about. I won't damn it with faint praise because it was very gripping, and as film making it was ... well I won't go on!
There are some strange people in Exeter. I got shouted at by some angry guy who was pretty threatening. I wasn't quite sure what was happening but Ellen told him to fuck off so I never quite got to the bottom of what I'd done or in what way he'd been mistreated, which he seemed to think. When we went back to the multi-storey, we found at the bottom of the usual sort of concrete stairwell, a woman dressed just in high heels and g-string posing against the hand-rail for a small photographer. I was prepared to let it go unremarked, as you do, but Ellen wanted to know what the fuck was going on (amazing what a posh girl's school has done for her language - 'fuck' is the least of it) and the small photographer apologetically said he was doing some shots for charity - something 'for our heroes' apparently. The girl, naked in the harsh light and concrete surroundings of a multi-storey car park, with a beautiful body and a face in the Wayne Rooney spectrum of ugly, was totally unfazed. I eased Ellen away, even as she continued to cross question the two of them in a loud voice. Oh, and we asked directions to the Odeon from two women, thirtyish, one with blonde hair and one with black. The black haired one was very nice and sorted us out, but the blonde was very depressed seeming. As we left them I looked back and the two of them had sat down on the pavement and upturned the blonde's handbag on the ground and started going through the contents, appraisingly. I got a bit spooked by it all, but Ellen just told me I should get out more. I love my sister, and I question which of us is best fitted for the baby sister role :)
Exeter, I learnt, was the subject of something called a Baedeker raid in the Second World War. Apparently the Germans thought our morale would suffer if they set about destroying our more beautiful and historic cities. Presumably based on information got from the Baedeker guide books. Anyway Exeter was one. Coventry is the most famous. Exeter now is one of a hundred similar identikit English towns, with crass boring buildings and all the same stuff for sale in all the same shops as any of a hundred other places. Depressing. I wonder if Coventry's the same and whether you could tell them apart. Hate to say it, but the most beautiful building - and it survived the raid, unlike Coventry's - is the Cathedral. It's chief claim is that it has the longest continuous Gothic vault in the world. It has no crossing tower so the vault from nave to chancel is uninterrupted. It's a bit special. I'm refusing to entertain the idea that religious faith produces greater works than Tesco or Macdonald's or BHS. Or even city councils! I'm explaining it away by reminding myself that in the medieval period, apart from a few nobles and the monarch, the Church was pretty much the most important patron of arts, including buildings. It would be wrong, I guess, to think that all the masons were burning with religious zeal. They worked for those offering money. Church people will tell you different.
Best book on holiday? Tough, but I think the prize goes to 'No country for old men'. Which is a tough book, but brilliant.
Dartmoor is lovely, but I'm a bit sated with moors, be they north or south. I found myself longing for a softer, lusher countryside. And some sun. I swore I wasn't going on any more of these trips but the attraction of a week with Dad and E was too powerful. I don't see too much of them these days. On the plus side, possibly, is that I am now an expert gutter and filleter (is there such a word?) of fish :( and we had some laughs.

I know I shouldn't bore you with my hols. I had a nice time away but I've got back with even less to say, and seemingly less purpose. I need energising and inspiring. And probably an affair, but I've not got the will. I hope I'm not drifting into trouble. Work tomorrow, for a bit longer. This is a pic I found on The Scottish Scribbler's blog, just by way of a compete change.
*Ooops! I'll get told off for being snobbish again! In my defense I'll say it's the truth.

Serious English matters

2011-09-16T19:37:00.008+01:00

I've just read 'The arrival of Fergal Flynn' by Brian Kennedy. It's about a sixteen year old (when the novel begins) in Belfast working out how to live with horrific violence aimed specifically at him for his despised sexuality and lack of sporting prowess, and with violence in every aspect of life around him. It's a salutory read for those of us who live at the fluffy end of society. It's probably not a great novel because altho' it's language is direct there's an air of literary inexperience about it. The ending is unconvincingly feel good. Yes, I know that occasionally 'feel good' happens, but somehow in this case it seems to betray what went before. The novel is enthralling, in the way that yellow novels or cliff hangers often are, and has the reader nervous for the hero and the disaster that threatens at all times to overwhelm him. But true to the convention of cliffhangers, suddenly the hero 'with one mighty bound was free'. At least that's how it seemed.
The trouble with blogging is that gives all sorts of whingers, such as myself, a place to vent their less than useful opinions where once we'd have had to submit those opinions to editorial control and been told they're less than useful; or paid out money to get them into the public arena. I've not published anything except a blog and yet I feel entitled to say what I think about all sort of things I know nothing about. The book was a good read, so why isn't that enough?
There are innumerable Irish novels about the Irish experience, but it's funny how they nearly always make rewarding reading. I just marvel at how many good Irish writers there are. Literature is the Irish thing. They seem to have a desire not just to write but to write with bravura. They're so different from English writers who, many of them, seem agonisingly careful not to appear enthusiastic.
I love Irish writers. My current favourites are Robert McLiam Wilson (illustrated) and Dermot Bolger. A long time ago I read something about how the English language, now so widely used as both a spoken language and a written one all over the world, and used for many years, is shaped into different sorts of English by different nationalities and their different linguistic traditions. I think I was reading something about how judging English literary competitions had become not just difficult but had reached the point where novels in Indian English, West Indian English, Nigerian English, whatever, could hardly be usefully compared with English English novels. They needed their own categories. English, seemingly awkward in spelling, grammar, and syntax, has proved amazingly diverse. The French defend their language, or attempt to, by setting the dogs of the Academie Francaise to pass judgement on new words and constructions which they consider threaten the purity of the French language. English has its own pedants about language. I'm pretty much guilty myself of correcting people, although, in my defence, mostly silently, who stray away from 'English' when in my heart I know its adaptability is a source of strength.
We're familiar now with Irish English, and its forms which presumably reflect constructions in Irish (I used to throw the word Erse around but I've learnt that's not just Irish, but an 'alternative name for any Goidelic language' ?!). Some of the best writing in English, for a very long time, has come from Irish authors.

I'm off fishing tomorrow for a week. Well I'm not going to fish, but I'm going with Dad and Ellen who are. It's in Devon somewhere. Maybe I'll blog from there. We usually go to Scotland, so Devon will be a change. I've said my goodbyes to Magda who will have gone back to Liverpool by the time I get back. And to St. Ives (with whom I had lunch on Wednesday. How about that! He'll be gone as well)! Normally all four of usl Dad, Ellen, bro and I, go, but last year, and now this, bro is otherwise engaged. Rufus and Ed will be back in Leeds sometime next week. Rufus will definitely be coming with me to Spain in October. I think that's all the details fit to print wrapped up :) I'm packing, if you can describe cramming clean but un-ironed teeshirts into a bag 'packing'. I've got the kindle and real books and an increasing range of electrical things with chargers to find. Can't think what else. I'll phone Ellen for guidance (actually instructions!) She'll like saying 'men' in exasperated tones. Love, Alec xxx

For the sake of it

2011-09-16T18:48:00.005+01:00

I don't know much about Nicholas Hoult. Didn't really follow Skins, didn't see 'About a Boy', or 'A Single Man', and haven't seen 'X-Men: First Class'. I'm falling behind at the cinema :/ In this interview, he's sticky, his appearance is definitely sticky ;P and the interviewer is a bit schticky. She's certainly loud. Curiously I like that one has to strain to catch what he's saying. Urbane tho', and realising I'm way behind the crowd I'll just settle for the role of observer *sigh* - like anything else is on offer!!! He's shooting Jack the Giant Killer, playing Jack, at the moment so I guess he's headed for mega-bucks and mega-exposure. What chance he'll get offered Bond in a some way down the line remake? I wonder if this is an arcane taste and everybody else is put off by his slightly smooth porcelain coldness. Wouldn't be the first time I've been out in the cold.

And now for a complete change of tack from Hoult, I'm making risotto for two. I think I make good risotto. People ask for more, anyway. The secret, two secrets, I think, are that the stock should be hot as you add it a bit at a time and that it's essential that the rice should be risotto rice. Arborio. Of course you knew that but it's surprising how people think they can get away with any old Basmati. Even in restaurants. Ok, not good restaurants, but still! Hold on, who am I kidding. Use what rice you like, take no notice of me! My risotto will be mushroom and chicken. I love turmeric in it, in addition to the salt, pepper, garlic, bay leaf, and onion of course, altho' the turmeric is not strictly authentic :)

2011-09-14T09:28:00.000+01:00

This is for friend Rufus who may be suffering withdrawal symptoms!
And for whoever else whose fancy is taken.

Paranoid android

2011-09-13T08:13:00.020+01:00

In my experience everything seems to go wrong at once. I shouldn't write this particular post because it will be another one of those things. I'm keeping stupidity at bay, mine as well as other people's, and I don't know how I'm going to hold out. I'm not a bad person. I hate those little sly digs that seek to persuade me I am and I'm only starting to believe them :/ I'm also starting to hate everything about this town where once I loved its beauty and softly coloured antiquity. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! It's that old paranoia blues! I've not been like this in ages.
I'm told I'm snobbish, but when I look to define it, it turns out that by all the dictionary definitions we are all snobbish in some way. I reject that I am conventionally snobbish. I don't have 'an exaggerated respect for high position', in fact rather the reverse. Always wanting to knock them off their perches even when they don't deserve knocking. I think that's called a chip. Or inverted snob, maybe. But snob? Do you ever so mind!
Do I think 'my taste in certain areas is better than other people's taste in that area'? That's another dictionary one. You bet I do. Who doesn't think that? That's called knowing what you like and defending it against other people's contrary opinions. It's not as exaggerated in me as it is in some people because I don't know that much about anything, but if that's snobbery I've already signed up for it. Seems a bit hard to label the possession of knowledge as snobbery but that's the way of the world, four-eyes! Are you gay or something? Sounds a bit more like envy of the have brains by the have not brains, which isn't snobbery, unless you add another definition - snobbery is seeking the approval and society of the unintelligent. That might be being brainist for all I know. Well? Are you gay or something?
I spy class again! The old class thing resurfacing, as if I hadn't long since sorted that one out. I do not rebuff people I regard as social inferiors, nor do I 'seek the company of my social superiors'. I'm not even sure what that means! What is inferior and superior in this context? Another fucking class construct I suppose! It goes like this: there are classes and the snobs gravitate towards people of superior class, and look down on inferior classes. That incorporates hierarchical ideas as well as value judgement. I'm supposed to be like that? Oh, my stars! I'm quoting my nanny (I thought I'd chuck that in for the anti-Alec camp, just to confirm their prejudice). Well in my case, my imaginary friend (she's imaginary because I couldn't summon up a real one - don't even think of saying it! Haha!), I gravitate towards people with the same interests. That's not the same thing as sucking up to a superior class whatever a superior class is. And what's more it's not even that I like all those with the same interests, because, being normal, I've got to like them as people as well as share their interests. I'm forced to admit that there are dicks who share my interests. How shaming!
I don't 'blatantly imitate, fawningly admire, or vulgarly associate with my social superiors'. That one quite cheers me up. I'm trying to visualise this fawning guy and I'm getting Alan Titchmarsh (did you see his recent non-interview with the Dule of Edinburgh? The DofE came across, according to one reviewer, as a 'horrid old goat' and Titchmarsh as a 'horrid old goat suppository!' I treasure that) with dashes of Winner and Paxman (to be rude to the poor people). It's making me giggle. It's me to the life. No it's not! I'm attracted to the theatricality of such a snob, a Brian Sewell perhaps, but that's the closet show-off in me. I utterly reject that it could possibly be a portrait of me! In any case my posts are full of 'I' and 'me' which could just be the ultimate snobbery. Only I am worth associating with. There's just me :D xxxx (the kisses are just for me!)

That noise you hear is the sound of my last friend turning off the light and leaving my head, declaring that apart from the mirrors, it's completely empty :(

If I don't hurry I shall be running along Cambridge streets again with a buttery face from eating toast at speed, with no time to grab coffee. Like in marathon races, I really need one of those feeding/watering stations at the side of the road on the route.

Sloe gin

2011-09-11T08:47:00.049+01:00

Dad came for us yesterday morning for the Doncaster races expedition and after we'd lost some money (and made a bit) we went home for what remains of the weekend. Richard came. After I've given him breakfast I'll persuade him to come out for a walk with me and pick blackberries and sloes. It's that time of year. I did think of putting him up on Lottie's horse (that's our Lottie, not Cambridge Lottie) and go for a gentle hack, but I've decided against suggesting it because he said at some stage that betting on horses was a passion but he'd never wanted to ride. I always have. The few times I've been away from horses, I thought about riding every day.
I come from a long long line of horsey people, mostly on my Mother's side. She was, according to everyone I've ever talked to about her, an amazing horsewoman. She died when I was six, and I really have very limited memories of her, and in the last eighteen months or so of her life nothing really stirred in her. I do, however, remember her on horses. On one occasion, which forms my strongest memory, my father was holding me up to look at the field of the West Norfolk as it passed through a gate. I think we were hoping to spot Mum. I might have been four. Mum suddenly appeared at a rush, shouting loudly at some sluggard, in a way that brooked no argument, to clear out of the way, then took the hedge near the gate. Her elegant black coat and white breeches were mud spattered, and her face was flushed with excitement. She landed in the field beyond the hedge, and was about to canter off when she caught sight of Dad and I and wheeled round to shout something at us. I wish I could remember what it was she shouted, but I can't. Perhaps it was in any case indistinct. Energy and life shone from her. She lit off across the field immediately afterwards. The horse she was on, on that day, was called Gatty (Gatacre in reality) and was what Dad called a 'bit of a bugger'. He had a red ribbon tied to his tail as a warning to others not to get too close because he kicked. You don't see that much now. Dad said Mum could handle pretty much any horse, much better than he could. It must have been shortly after this that she began to withdraw into illness.
I had little idea of what was going on when she became ill, nor did I ask; she stopped having anything much to do with bro, Ellen and I. I didn't say anything, I guess, because it's just too hard to verbalise things at five or six. Formulating questions about complex things was probably beyond me. I just tended to get upset. Bro, two years older, but still not of an age to understand, says he did ask Dad what was wrong, but Dad wasn't up to the task of telling him, or us. He's quite an 'elderly' parent, and definitely from a background which didn't talk about intimate things, certainly not to very young children. I just don't know if it would have made a difference if I'd been told how ill Mum was, but in my Dad's world, emotions and feelings which are now paraded quite openly were never discussed. It's a miracle he was able to rise to the challenge of raising two small children and a baby, and run the farm, but he did. I'm not sure if I should say I'm a tribute to him, but I can definitely say the other two are! I can also definitely say he wouldn't approve this post: on the other hand I'm 99% sure that he won't ever read it. I rely on that a lot - not just with him! :)
Sloe gin was the purpose of this post. I've got diverted by many memories that seem to have surfaced all at the same time. Really wonderful stuff, sloe gin. Drank some of last years when we got in last night. If you get the chance to get some sloes do try to make it. They are the fruit of the blackthorn, and are small hard purple fruit which resemble miniature damsons. They are now in season, altho' I have heard that they ripened very early in some areas because in this strange season they got going much earlier.
Blackthorn was often planted near gateways and field entrances because its long thorns form a natural defence against heavy beasts getting through at what is often a weak point. You need enough sloes to fill a standard gin bottle up to somewhere between a third and a half. Prick the sloes all over with a pin to help their reluctant bitter juice to come out, put them in the gin bottle, then pour in white sugar (enough to come halfway up the sloes, perhaps a bit more) then pour the gin back into the bottle up to the top. Seal tightly and shake. The aim is to dissolve the sugar and in fact you'll have to shake the bottle up each day for a while before you've done that. I keep it on the worktop to remind me to shake it. When the sugar is dissolved you can store the bottle. At Christmas when it should be ready, you decant it off the sloes. It's very simple. You can use the same principle for bigger bottles. In my experience once the family's found the sloe gin you seem to need a lot to keep them happy. And be prepared for acrimony if you happen to be the one to take the last drop. Incidentally don't chuck the sloes. They're gin soaked. Pour cider over them in the gin bottle and after a couple of days you've got another good drink. In fact you can do this more than once. I have applied to join the WI before you ask! :D
I've got out of the habit of looking at recipes, so if you feel you might be happier looking it up I'd say do. I shan't be offended.

What's all this about the 9th November?

2011-09-11T01:22:00.006+01:00

I rather sympathise whoever said 'what the fuck is all this fuss about the 9th of November?' It's a measure of the success of American propagandising that we've adopted unthinkingly even what we call that day. It's hard to have rational thoughts about the terrorist attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York when it was used as a justification for a cynical illegal war in which hundreds of thousands of civilian people were killed, and all the while knowing that Al Qaida was as much the enemy of Saddam Hussein as of the USA. The 11th September attack was a crime made more potent because it was played out on television screens round the world. Those who've died at the hands of the west rarely get that emotive valediction. Those killed in the attack weren't heroes, except in some deranged fantasy whipped up by right wing American politicians, any more than suicide bombers are heroes other than in the morbid fantasies of terrorist groups. Those killed in the New York attack, in most attacks, are ordinary people who wanted no part in this struggle for power and profit between evil men, but were dragged into their conflicts - true innocents. As ordinary people will, many of them displayed extraordinary heroism on that dreadful day but it's not the place of governments and media to celebrate that or use the bereaved in what amounts to exploitation. It's my view that governments, political groups, religious groups, media, all who are complicit in the creation of the extraordinary world in which terrorism flourishes, long since forfeited the right to represent us or the dead. They've certainly have no right to take the grief of the friends and relatives of those who died, and turn it into propaganda, to cover their own failings. Rather they should be apologising and working for a more just world. I would ask that we look at the politicos and military lined up at the site of the World Trade Centre attack and wonder why we continue to tolerate them. They taint the memory of those who died, and have no right to be with the survivors, relatives and friends, and emergency service workers who lined up with them. The attack in New York was one of many tragedies, many bigger than the New York attack, many still going on, which are the direct result of the actions and failures of self serving politicians.

Dishonesty

2011-09-09T21:30:00.002+01:00

I have all the symptoms
My heart is in my mouth,
I can't concentrate,
My stomach churns,
I look for his messages
Despair when they're not there
And tremble when they are.
I do nothing, nothing all day
But stare into space, tears in my eyes
They come unbidden, always unbidden.
I write just for him, always him
I always have done.
I hate my dishonesty.
I know I'll always reject him,
And pain myself, more pain.
I'm trying to stop but I don't
I don't know how to stop.
Let me finish now, not in death
In over-blown emotion
Let me finish now, always in life.
Not in repetition and tears
Let me finish with him

I wrote this a long time ago. I just found it. I'm not following my rule that 99% of 'poetry' is both rubbish and not poetry and ought to be destroyed. It should be destroyed for just the reason that it won't therefore be found and give its perpetrator all over again the erroneous impression that there's something in it. You see how insidious this idea is? I'm allowing it to seduce me, and by this cunning self-deprecation convey the impression that I don't think it's any good. It's as tho' I'm letting the 'poem' through almost in spite of myself, laughing it off as youthful crap which you don't have to take seriously. In fact I'm secretly willing you to take it amazingly seriously. I mock pretend to cool detachment and to a belief that I really don't care what you think, but if you come back to me and say it's crap I'll be very upset. I won't, of course, or will I? I have now succeeded in muddling myself, so how are you faring?

Bright Eyes and all that follows

2011-09-08T19:18:00.005+01:00

How do we get to know music? We hear it, of course. Duh! Yes, alright, but it doesn't all come from listening to the radio or whatever. People tell you about things and suddenly whole new worlds open up. People have often told me about stuff I didn't know about and launched a passion. Music connects to other music, musicians connect to other musicians, and so it is with Bright Eyes. Conor Oberst is Bright Eyes and I came to him this week through an often read blog which plays lots of music (in fact the author's been on a mission to play something from his life every day for 365 days - http://www.seafrontdiary.com/ ). I've immersed myself in Bright Eyes, even in covers. He's not got what you'd describe as a good voice but he creates a world into which I fell very easily. This first video is, well everybody's been describing it as 'sweet', which it is, but it's also fragile and desperate. Lots of the stuff is and I guess it'll pall eventually but in the meantime . . .

You could use this to link you to other things by him. I like him a lot.

I've not blogged for a day or two. I've been a bit deflated, first by my nearly venture back into the world of dating, and second by the departure or imminent departure of friends who are going back to university - back to lives which don't involve me. The first of these told me something about myself which is ultimately disappointing. I discovered I wasn't so much frightened about dating and sex as not interested. There's a danger that that sort of statement is delusional, but I've examined my thoughts and reactions to the St.Ives guy and I'm reasonably sure I am reporting my feelings and thoughts honestly. I genuinely don't see the need to get entangled. I don't mean I'm heading for the hermit's grotto, just that the sexually led assumptions I've made about life don't seem that compelling to me any more. I hope that doesn't mean I'm dead!
It would be easy to think I'd got scared about sex because of my encounter with the guy who assaulted me. He lacked boundaries and his intention was to destroy my sense of where boundaries should be set. The process of doing that, where I was supposed to give in to him and allow my boundaries to be destroyed, would ultimately have made me uninteresting to him. Subjugating me and destroying my sense of my value to myself was the kick he wanted. If I were to have made it harder for him, then that would have increased my value to him. In a way it was fortunate that I was drugged, and didn't know a whole lot about what was happening. I never mean to mention that experience again, but there are times, fortunately increasingly infrequent, when my brain has to get the whole thing out again and go over it. When it reappears is unpredictable.
It's an oddity that since then I've been slightly scared of children. I see in them the same lack of boundaries. Whereas with him boundaries probably never existed, with children it's because they haven't entirely learnt them, or haven't perhaps appreciated the consequence of being without them. Children constantly push to discover how much they can get away with, and some of them, being without a fully formed moral sense, don't see why they shouldn't push a lot, a lot of the time.
The departure of friends, the second deflationary factor, is a little harder to cope with. I find that I'm kind of envious of those going back to university (not so much Rufus's departure to Italy because he's bound to float in and out of my life, I think, more or less until we've got beyond 'floating') because I'm beginning to think intellectual stimulation is important, very important, in life. I'm inclined to put it above most other things, but that may be because I feel I'm lacking it at the moment. I fluffed my chance at university. It would be easy to get depressed and blame myself, or get bitter about the things that happened to me that helped that come about. I don't think I'm bitter, and I could do something about it. University was amazingly helpful and sympathetic at the time and said they'd keep a place open until the next academic year, but I wrote and said no. I know it's in my nature to regret things, blubbing over spilt milk all the time, but I still agonise over the university thing, thinking it was too hasty a decision. I know university isn't essential for intellectual stimulation. Weirdly it's more that, even without ever having been and only being able to guess at what it's like, I seem to be missing the company I never had and the friends I never made.
So there you are. I appear to be confessing to being lonely while at the same time trying to convince the world that everything's really perfectly alright. Truth? Things are middling but might be better, and I don't know how. Does that sound like the human condition to you?

All that agonising has obscured the fact that Dad is taking Richard, my mate from the office, and I to Doncaster on Saturday for the St. Leger. This is the oldest of the five English classics, and has been run on Town Moor since 1777(?) A whole day of shouting ourselves silly, pretending we are making informed decisions based on breeding and form, followed by losing money, then eating monumentally inappropriate food, and downing warm beer. What could be nicer!!!! :D

Loose end

2011-09-05T12:25:00.000+01:00

I'm not so sure any more about using my blog just to record my doings, especially the romantic stuff, but I'm sticking with it for a while longer because this incident aroused some interest and a bit of ire. It's about the evening out with everybody to which we invited my St. Ives conquest. Needless to say they were as charmed as I had been. I don't say this just to divert the anger of those who thought I and my friends were snobbish about him. Reading back I see we weren't at all - we, or rather I, did make some wholly justified comments about his hair style, which I still maintain is an indication of the man - not the basis for a final judgement I agree, but still an indication (I seem to have got a second wind - obviously I was very needled by the comments :)
His course turned out not to be as Mickey Mouse as he had said. His excuse for avoiding telling people about it was because he thought they might not understand (now who's being superior!). Anyway the course is psychology with cognitive neuroscience, presumably a B.Sc. Where was he in the depths of my despair? Actually not qualified to help I suppose is the answer. I'm not going to tempt fate, nor did I, by talking about my little spot of trouble :/ nor my ongoing pill regime. If you are determined to make something mildly Mickey Mouseish out of his course, later (he's just finished his first year) he can opt to do the psychology of love and attraction. Personally I would think that's fascinating, and as if to confirm it, he says it's wildly over-subscribed. His hair was beautiful, a bit over-coiffed for my taste but it impressed Rufus who naturally had to say to me, deliberately loudly, that he couldn't see why I'd taken against it so. I do have the stiringest of friends! So I had to explain to St.Ives, while the rest grinned like stupid people, what was behind that, with no course, since no other likely explanation came to me, but to tell the truth. Which was embarrassing.
St.Ives proved his worth again by laughing at his own hair and what I am sure was my deep redness. We had a lovely evening in which we danced and drank lots until Rufus, Magda, St.Ives and I went back to Ida's, with Lottie of course, and we drank more and talked and laughed. I gave them a few ham, and lots of hard boiled egg and anchovy on brown, sandwiches (the latter being mostly what I had, but is also a top favourite of mine which accounts for there being the makings in my fridge). Magda went back to Cyprus Road; Rufus was staying of course; and St. Ives slept on the sofa. I like him lots; he's reasonably good looking with a beautiful body but I'm not about to have an affair with him, and I hope we'll be friends. Now does that wrap that up?

Ed came on Sunday, and this morning Dad kindly drove over and took him and Rufus to Stansted. They're resuming their Italian trip which was interrupted because Ed had to come back for his father's sixtieth birthday bash. Apparently his father's very ill, unexpectedly so, but Ed wasn't about to talk about it, at least with me. He and Rufus are going back to stay in the friend's flat in Naples. They say it's in a spectacularly decayed state but its decorative scheme must once have been stunning - the heaviest gilded, coarsest southern Italian baroque imaginable. I've seen pics, but I'd like to have gone to see it but I'll stick to the Spanish plan, if only because I've said yes to American John's invitation. Rufus is going to wish himself on us in Salamanca for a short stay when Ed has to return to Leeds, but I don't imagine he'll want to be parted for long.

I'm off to work. Love, Alec xx

Homosexuality and class

2011-09-02T18:02:00.000+01:00

This blogger ran into a bit of trouble, in one quarter, with his last post because it seemed to one of his readers that in the post he and his group were being snobbish and superior. He might have been right, but I reckon I could make a good case for why the views weren't based in class difference so much as in a group reacting to an outsider. As it happens I find group disapproval as a reason for rejecting somebody almost as silly as rejecting them because of some snobbishly perceived class solecism, but it is different. Groups treating outsiders with caution, aggression, intolerance, or whatever, are doing what all animals do. It seems to me to be an instinctive defence reaction. I realise classes are major groups within society with a raft of group conventions, rules, and shibboleths. I also think that the many divisions of society - businesses, public bodies, police, churches, for example - while theoretically classless, do in fact often become identified with a single class. Groups of friends, in theory, can be drawn from several classes. I say 'theoretically' but the reality is that they are more usually drawn from a single class. It's almost inevitable that they are since friendships arise from opportunity, shared history, and the limiting factor of received views.
I liked to think I belonged to a group of friends who came from different classes. To think, however, that my circle of friends extends beyond my family's class is more a comfortable imagining than reality. I can well see that to an objective, or even partisan, observer we appear to be of one class. I think we are. I have friends who come from very different backgrounds from mine but education and aspiration have tended to make us a homogeneous group. Some of my friends will vehemently deny that they are absorbed into the middle class but it appears to me that they are. It's a strong impulse with some of them not to abandon their origins, so even when highly educated, well off, even living in luxury, they still think of themselves as working class. It's as tho' class is a state of mind, not position.
The title of this post does not herald a piece about homosexuality being influenced by, or determined by, or differently practised in, or viewed by, different classes. I was just struck by the notion that one's class and one's sexuality are rather alike in that neither of them, is 'curable'. As it happens I do think that one can change class, but it is immensely difficult, not for material reasons, but because it involves a change in the mind's attitude that seems almost unacceptable to each of us. To the thinking person it seems somehow like betrayal. I think this applies whether one is proceeding up or down the social scale. I'm heavily influenced by the circumstance into which I was born. Class may be partly about how well off one is or isn't, but it's also about something more intangible, loyalty to a tribe.
I've worked all this out and tried to be dispassionate. I've no idea whether I'm right, and I'm not saying that the presence of class in our society, in all societies, is a good or a bad thing. I'm just trying to acknowledge and deal with its existence. I've started to notice those things in our society which perpetuate the class structure, and to recognise the forces at work whose aim is to reinforce it and preserve privilege as the right of certain groups. It's taken me long enough! The class struggle, often talked about, suddenly seems real; we see it on the streets. I wonder if it's inevitable that the problems of class interaction and the goal of a classless society can only be solved by conflict. Is it necessary that one class, reluctant to resign privilege, must be destroyed. It seems mad to do that. The victors in such a struggle would inevitably see power and privilege become their spoil of war, and they'd assume the position of the defeated class, and so perpetuate the imbalance of influence in society. The trouble is that the moderate centralists in any revolution, historically speaking, have always been wiped out and inequality of class, privilege, money, and attitude have all survived.

A group of us are going out to a bar this evening. I hardly dare say that one of us will have to suffer the inspection and judgement of the group. In spite of what's been said they're a kindly considerate bunch and he'll come to no harm and I'll be there to see he won't. I actually think he has the strength and wit to survive without any help :) We'll start in the Man on the Moon.

I met a man with seven wives*

2011-08-30T02:20:00.002+01:00

'His hair looks like Justin Bieber's!' Aghast. That's how Magda greeted the news, and bro looked startled. Did I say he was back from America? Just a flying visit. I had told them at breakfast the news that I'd all but been picked up in a pub in St.Ives. Dad said St.Ives must have changed a lot since he last went there, and left to catch up on paperwork, shaking his head. Fortunately Ellen had gone to work.
'He's good looking,' I said, plaintively. Bro looked sceptical.
'He's from St. Ives,' he said, as tho' that settled something. 'There are places where beauty resides, and places in which it is a stranger. I doubt that St.Ives and beauty ever passed within a hundred miles of each other. They'd lynch beauty in St. Ives, if they were ever able to identify it. Even the passably ordinary looking wear muddied clothes and hoods lest they give the impression they're better than the rest of the inhabitants. They talk in mutant grunts and hug the walls in St. Ives so they have the best chance of avoiding the brickbats.'
'Oh, come on,' says I, 'your clothes get pretty muddy! I bet you haven't been to St. Ives in years. I bet you haven't the faintest idea how they behave in St.Ives!'
'I have never been to St. Ives to my best recollection. I'm extrapolating from the behaviour of country folk everywhere to produce a picture of how they inevitably behave in St.Ives.'
'Oh, God!' Said Magda. 'I knew it! You're just not safe out. What actually did you say to this village Romeo?'
'Nothing! I just gave him my number and said we should get together one evening.'
If I'd said I had decided to enlist in the Serbian army they couldn't have looked more astonished. 'Was that wise?' Magda eventually said.
'Look, it's just my number. I thought a few of us could go out somewhere and invite him along. He's ok. Funny, as in witty. Not what you were thinking!'
'Ok,' said bro, 'let's give the kid a chance.' They looked at me dubiously. 'One of the things that has stuck in my mind,' bro continued, 'is a description of yourself, which came, I think from some other friend of yours. He said you were like some small vulnerable woodland creature ...'
'No!' I interrupted, 'that's not right. He said "a small woodland creature could take me". He didn't say it directly to me, but I remember the description. It made me smile, and think. I don't think that can be said about me now. And drop the condescension, and the "kid"!'
'Right. I was just suggesting you may still be quite vulnerable. Much better, but not . . .'
'You are such an older brother! I'm getting just a bit pissed off. I'm certainly regretting telling you.'
'Sorry.'
'I'm not about to do anything dangerous. I'll take my Rottweiler and other guard dogs and test the water.'
'Listen, darling,' said Magda,' "by his hair shall you know him", as the Good Book probably says, and if he's got Bieber hair then he starts with a large black mark.' It's aggravating to be told exactly what you'd thought all along as tho' you couldn't possibly have worked it out for yourself. Magda, having stopped being a loony, has got more confidence, and is now rather inclined to lay down the law to me. Not sure I care for it. Secretly I think that St.Ives guy's hair more or less killed the probability that I'd take him seriously even before it had begun. Value judgements are in the air from all sides :/
Michael Ondaatje was being interviewed today on R4 and said something to the effect that all writing is fiction. He's got a new novel out, which since it describes the voyage of a Sri Lankan (Sinhalese then) boy, alone, aged ten, to London - actually I'm not sure where his landfall was, it might have been Southampton - it is assumed to be autobiographical. Especially as the boy is called Michael. Ondaatje denies this, citing incidents and meetings in the novel which hadn't happened in life. That's when he started on the all writing is fiction thing. Famously when people who were all witnesses to some event are asked to describe it they then give different, sometimes wildly different, accounts of the event. There seem to be many different realities. That's how, in his view, all writing is fiction. We interpret events and conversations, and colour them with our reality.
I looked at the opening of this post. There's no doubt I've condensed and tidied up the conversation. I've given it more focus and perhaps represented bro and Magda more interfering than they were. Perhaps I've made me seem more put upon than I was, in an attempt to win people to my side. But this is a factual neutral account, supposedly, between people who like each other and are in sympathy with each other, so there was no need for sides to be taken. Were sides taken? Was it me against the world? Somehow I doubt it. So is the conversation fiction? In a sort of way it is, because although it conveys some of the sense of the occasion, and some of the conversation, it's my version. I'm pretty clear that bro would give a different account, and Magda yet another, yet each would convey something of the truth. Do we all edit when we report our lives? Is that a form of fictionalising?

*There is disagreement about which St. Ives is referred to in this ancient nursery riddle. Naturally I'm siding with Cambridgeshire.

Commercial pressure

2011-08-27T10:23:00.005+01:00

For Sammy, who knows about these things

Look at you with your Bieber hair
Dressed up by Ecko, Rocawear, North Face
Empty, bored, discontented with your place
Plaided, quilted, and battened there

In death's embrace fat legged parents
Heads empty, spawned you with their failing seed

Brought you forth, expectation driving need.

Knowing but spurning consequence

You're still badass, ossome, bitchin'?
Preternaturally prehensile thumbs
You jostle in the queue of pimped child bums

Loose mouths agape, tongues spit switchin'

It's another opiate then?
Aspiration fashioned down to 'fashion'
Commerce has you, and ate your minds' ration
You'll find it's not real when you're men

Do you long, but are too afraid,
To challenge today's branded aesthetic?
Do you buy labels in acts pathetic
While waiting, longing, to get laid?

Is it envy that brings your jeers
Imagination that you don't share
Creativity you want but don't dare
For fear of just as fearful peers?

Scotchnicity

2011-08-26T18:37:00.010+01:00

Strange how I don't think of myself as Scotch. Some Scottish people get a bit hoity-toity [good word Lindsay!] when the English call them 'Scotch', but I've discovered this is a bit of a modern affectation. Admittedly the contraction - from Scottish to Scotch - is an English one, but up to the nineteenth century, and even beyond, Scottish people often described themselves as 'Scotch' without a blink. It's even in the literature. The transference of this word to the national drink is not hard to understand since that's just a natural shortening of 'Scotch whisky' - in itself evidence that 'Scotch' used to be perfectly acceptable as an adjective descriptive of the people. I tried to explain all this once in a bar in Edinburgh. I rather got the impression that it was as well I hadn't tried it in Glasgow, or is that being cityist? It was fortunate, I think, that the people I was telling were kindly disposed towards me - at least at the start of my exposition they were. Things didn't exactly get ugly, but I was immensely condescended to, as only Edinburghers (and Parisians) can, by some, while others got distinctly frosty. Scottish people are so polite, even when they're not getting a perfectly valid point! I've said before I'm half Scotch (someone just said there's lots of other drinks in the 'admixture' as well - cheeky bitch! And 'admixture' is a word - the state of being mingled - I checked) because Dad is for generations right back to when his/my ancestors ran around painted in blue stuff ('some time in the 1960s, I'm guessing?' Same source. Hold on while I remove her from my shoulder [pause] ... Right. I've given her gin, a degenerate drink much loved by English golfers and ladies - and Magda! (Actually and me, but that might just be another demonstration of what I'm writing about.) Where was I? Yes! Half Scottish. That's right, the strangeness of not thinking of myself as Scottish. Scottish blood is the major component of my veins, since Mum was only half English (the other half being German). Have I told you all this? Quite instinctively I assume I'm English, and when Scotland and things Scottish are discussed I immediately view them as tho' I'm not connected to the condition. I was actually born in Germany, but that, as some wag said, was to be near my mother at the time. It was a holiday accident and quickly corrected. Putting that aside I've always lived in England, except in term time from the age of thirteen to eighteen when I went to school in Scotland. Still the fact of ethnicity plus education ought to be reason enough to feel more Scottish than I do. I'm not even, for example, ambivalent about Scottish independence - I think they should have it - but there, you see, the disassociation happened again - I wrote 'they'.
I have Scottish relatives, I mean real live Scotch people. When I go to see my Grandfather and meet his relatives they don't seem to be any connection of mine, yet they are of my blood. I'm not offhand or rude, or anything like that. I don't treat them as tho' they are an alien species; I don't pretend they aren't my relatives - in fact it feels as tho' I'm pretending they are. I don't feel the connection. I might also say this is in contrast to many English people who proclaim their Scottishness at the slightest hint of some remote ancestry; there's a woman in Cambridge I met once who claimed Scottish empathy on the basis, as far as I could make out, that she once ate an Arbroath smokie (which I do have a passion for) for Chrissake! Why do even remotely connected people have such a romantic view of Scotland and claim to feel such empathy, and want to embrace it. Perhaps, thinking about it, that's more a generational thing. Many of my English contemporaries have been and continue to be more than happy to take the piss out of my Scottishness, even as I'm struggling to find it.
Does Scotland have an equivalent of that strange oath introduced for new British citizens, to enhance their sense of citizenship? Perhaps I could take it. The British one was brought in under Gordon Brown, and in my mind is associated with the highly tainted former attorney general, Lord Goldsmith. Perhaps he devised it. No! Scotland wouldn't have anything so crass! Although Scotland does have those strange tartan hats with fake ginger hair sticking out of them. Is that ironic? And Burns night! There's other strange flummery, as well. Perhaps being Scottish has some drawbacks!
What I need is advice. It's a problem that the agony aunts I've written to (not!) have laughed off. At least I assume that's what they did since they didn't answer :(
Love, Alec

St. Ives: cruising hotspot

2011-08-25T00:30:00.004+01:00

Can I tell you something? Stupid question really because it's my blog and you can't stop me. It's been a slightly unsettling sort of day. That's not what I wanted to tell you. In fact I'm going to tell you the thing now. I was going to lead you through the day and after each section I'd say that that's not what I wanted to tell you. That would make the whole thing a calculated device and that's making me uneasy. The something is that I gave my telephone number to a guy in a pub.
I went to work as usual this morning but at about 11.30 started to feel really restless so asked Diana my boss if I could take some time owing to me. I've got quite a lot owing from untaken holiday days and overtime - I don't get paid for overtime but have to take time off instead. Since I am a model employee (should be employee of the month frequently imho!), and she loves me, she said yes, so I went to the library. I like Cambridge's Central Library and sit in there a fair bit. I wrote some overdue emails, dozed a bit (one of those library users! I'll be doing it when I'm ninety and fighting other smelly old men for the Sun - probably the only newspaper left by then - actually that's not being at all prescient. By the time I'm ninety, print will have gone, save for a few precious expensive artefacts, produced purely as collectible objects, and news, or the information government will deem it safe for you to know, will be transferred directly into your brain by some sort of telepathic process), read a bit, then went for coffee in the Guildhall coffee shop. Not my preferred coffee place. I quite like it but it's not that comfortable. Nice girls tho', who love me. (See a pattern forming here?)
One of the guided buses came out of the bus station as I was passing and on the spur of the moment I thought I'll catch one to St. Ives. I've never been on one so that was good, and I've never been to St. Ives either. Cambridgeshire has invested heavily in a guided bus scheme, using disused railway lines. Roads have been laid where the railway lines were, with grooves at the side of each narrow carriageway. An otherwise ordinary road-going bus turns onto this track, drops a fifth wheel into the groove, the driver sits back, and the bus drives itself to its destination. When it gets there the driver resumes control and drives the bus into the centre of the town. Hey presto, you're there! Don't ask me for technical details. They run on bio-diesel if that helps. This brief outline is all you're getting.
It did strike me as we sailed along, passed disused railway buildings and old platforms, what a mad idea. Why didn't they save themselves a lot of money - and it has cost MILLIONS - and just keep the railway. While the whole thing is ingenious, and reliable, Dr. Johnson and the performing dog come irresistibly to mind. Still it was a bit of fun. And there were lots of tourists on the guided bus (it serves a number of park and ride car parks) who craned to see a bus driving itself. Lots of chatter, unlike on most buses, where we sit in decent reticent silence, as English people should!
St. Ives is a bit of a dump. No interesting buildings, and all cut through with new roads, one way systems, pathetic pedestrian bits, and car parks. It's a mess. When I got there I decided to have a drink and a sandwich and chose a pub at random (looked down the street and saw one thick with flowers on its facade) and went in. I followed a young guy in, blond, with very slightly bandy legs, emphasised by his three quarter jeans. They did show that his legs were smooth, with a beautiful pale golden tan. Nothing like being sex starved for noting every detail!
Dire pub inside. Bad choice. Dark, sweaty, sticky, canned musak. No customers. I ordered a pint and asked for a sandwich, but there was no food left. This was Cambridgeshire, on a Wednesday, and gone three! So I opted for a bag of crisps. I was struggling to get at my money, in my admittedly slightly tight jeans, and the guy I followed in said 'Let me get it'. Naturally I protested, he insisted, and in the end I said yes. The barman irritatingly winked at the guy, who said to me 'Take no notice! He's an idiot!' The barman seemed to accept this without offence.
Anyway the guy turned out to be very funny, and made me laugh a lot. Typical Norfolk blonde, rather than a fenny one. His hair was a bit ridiculous - school of Bieber. It occurred to me, while I was trying not to look at it too obviously, that the style owes a lot to the combover. It's really just a series of them going in different directions. It's the hairstyle of people who've gone bald rather patchily. I couldn't quite get up the courage to ask if this was Leicester's take on the style, or St. Ives', or his own. He's at uni in Leicester. Wouldn't tell me what he was reading but said it was real Mickey Mouse stuff and he'd learnt not to leave himself open to ridicule. I determined to read Leicester's prospectus from cover to cover to find out what that could be, but in my experience most universities have quite a range of risible degree courses.
He was fun. Tall, expansive, and not pushy. When he left to go back to work (at four! He said he was working for his father and that apparently was ok!) he asked me if I'd meet him after he'd finished for the day, but I mumbled some excuse. Very adventurously I said he could have my telephone number, for when next he came to Cambridge, and he put his in my brand new phone. This is nearly the first time since Edinburgh (there was one other I gave it to when I was close to rock bottom and subsequently disgraced myself with him) that I've given a guy my number - I mean someone casual.
This will seem odd, but I swear I was more attuned to the day when I came out of the pub. I'd done something relatively normal. **Everything was very still. The sky was filled with a myriad clouds, ominously dark and flat at the bottom, hinting at their latent power, but fluffy, dazzling white, and bright gilded at the top. They hung above, completely motionless, neither changing nor touching. They looked as tho' they were the work of some naif painter who had painted them on a Delft blue ground he had worked over and over again to achieve a perfect uniformity from horizon to horizon.** (Have you ever read 'Cold Comfort Farm'? :) Actually I love the skies in my neck of the woods. Lots of people hate the flatlands, but I love them. Not that Norfolk's flat, in spite of Amanda! Cambridgeshire is tho'. The skyscapes are liberating.
Anyway that's what I wanted to say. It will seem a small insignificant act to you, but actually it's quite a big one for me. I was taken by surprise by his naturalness and openness. That was different. I'm not imagining anything will come of it, not even sure I want it to. I responded to his humour but didn't get the frisson. Perhaps if I'd felt that I wouldn't have given him my telephone number :/ Is this all too gooey? Just get over yourself, Lindsay!

Putting things to right

2011-08-22T09:10:00.004+01:00

Day off today so I'm being fitful. I started this blog last night and it got progressively more incoherent. I'm not sure I believe I believe the things in it

I'm having a crisis of confidence about what my blog is for. Again! I've not had that for quite some time. Verdi's Requiem was performed at a Promenade concert tonight. Stupid people keep bringing up the fact that it sounds 'operatic' and therefore somehow not religious. It seems to me that's because it's written in Verdi's style, which, because he's known primarily as an opera composer, people assume is operatic. Quite a compliment in a way that for some the definition of operatic is Verdi's music. Mozart wrote masses which don't sound dissimilar from his operas, nor do Rossini's, nor do Handel's oratorios, nor does the religious music of a whole range of composers. They write their music in their own style, regardless of the subject. Oh, of course, I know some composers change style for different occasions, but Verdi et al didn't, so get over it.
This isn't what I wanted write about. It's my blog and it's running away with me. The soprano part in the Requiem was sung by Marina Poplavskaya. I'd heard of her before but not seen or heard her. She sang with such intensity and emotion you felt she might break, yet on the other hand she was all sinew. She was astounding. I'm not a religious person. In fact I'm almost rabidly anti-religious, but during the Libera Me such was the feeling she put into it that tears ran down my face. It wasn't because I had a sudden revelation of God but because I had another revelation - of the beauty, intensity, and greatness of which people are capable.
Please, please, don't come back and say something like 'humanity's creativity is a reflection of the awesomeness of God'. That would be too depressing. In fact I'm getting quite irritated just anticipating it.
This is getting a bit bleargh! Today I said to somebody that we can't control people or things. They have their own trajectory and although we can sometimes affect such a trajectory, in the last analysis it's not ours to order. Doesn't stop us trying, of course, but I think we're inclined to imagine that our influence or our effect on others is greater than it actually is. And then we blame ourselves for things going wrong in the life of the person we imagine we're helping. No! Not even that. It's just that we seem to think if we're not in touch with them, or near them, they won't cope with their lives. It's nonsense of course (imao).
What is it that makes us think, when tragedy happens or monumental disaster strikes in the lives of people we don't even know, that the tragedy makes what we do pointless? That can't be right. The emotion's real enough, but it's premise is surely fallacious. Our trajectory is not suddenly pointless because others have come to grief. I think we feel upset - the sensitive among us - in an empathetic way because we didn't help, even on those many occasions when we couldn't have helped because we had no idea how to help, or even that help was needed. Our life isn't just for those in immediate trouble, nor just for ourselves, it's for all those people we know and love, and for all those we have yet to meet and know, and for all those we may never know but might know us. It makes no sense just suddenly to stop because of something which happens we weren't in time or were helpless to affect. We each of us have an importance beyond what we see of ourselves. It doesn't take genius to figure out how much poorer we'd be in every way if people gave up because of tragedy and disaster. Even tho' the tragedy and disaster may be huge beyond imagining.
Humanity, at its best, has a well of empathy for those in trouble, but there's just no point in beating oneself up when something goes wrong for others. No matter how much we empathise it is important that we keep going and do what we can to put pieces back together again.

See what I mean? How to sort out one of humanity's problems when it's late, you're emotional, and part ways drunk. You'll note I'm now covering my tracks, embarrassed that the stiff upper lip inculcated by ancestors has slipped. It's a reflection, all the same, of my ambivalence and confusion that in spite of the ancestors I'm about to publish what I wrote. Now that's arrogance :/

I hoped to find Poplavskaya's performance but so far the BBC's only put up Lux aeterna. It's okay - well, more than - but not what I wanted to demonstrate. I wanted to show the fierceness in her performance as well as the pleading quality. There it is.

Lines

2011-08-20T18:43:00.004+01:00

I must stop writing long comments on 'Comments'
I must stop writing long comments on 'Comments'
I must stop writing long comments' on 'Comments'
I must stop writing long comments on 'Comments'
I must stop writing long comments on 'Comments'
Writing lines is a concept unknown to me
The sun filtering through the dust streaked window is filled with motes
I must stop writing long comments on 'Comments'
We didn't ever write lines as a punishment
In fact the first time I came across a reference to it
(In Billy Bunter? No! Jennings! I loved those old alien school stories)
I thought they literally had to rule lines
Puzzling but in the context of the peculiarity of their world
I was not fazed by the idea
Not that
I must stop writing long comments on 'Comments'
Is any less peculiar
I must stop writing long comments on 'Comments'
A hundred times but that's a mild punishment
In the world of a nineteen thirties school story
A range of corporal punishments was permitted
Robbie* says they had a classics master, look away now children
Who had a small case of spanking implements
Which he'd deliberate over solemnly before choosing one
I must stop writing long comments on 'Comments'
(Nearly done. My finger hurts and is ink stained)
But no punishment was administered before vox populi had been consulted
Thumb up for leniency, thumb down for punishment
Barbarous boys never voted for leniency
So the tight pretty grey flannelled bottoms were beaten
Is that a faraway dreamy look in Robbie's eyes?
Hurry! I must stop writing long comments on 'Comments'
I learnt that we've got the thumb thing wrong. Quite t'other way round
Stephen Fry's QI said that. Is it right?
They were all beaten - Bunter, Jennings, Robbie, Stephen Fry(?)
It's claimed with no ill-effects
But then we don't know what they'd be like if they hadn't been beaten
Do we! Stupid argument imao
Hitting people is right and necessary, apparently!
And never did them any harm.
Right!
I must not write long comments on 'Comments'
I must not write long comments on 'Comments'
No that's not right!
I must stop writing long comments on 'Comments'
Does that mean you have to do two more, sir?
I probably will tho'
Write long comments

*Acknowledgements to Robbie, my 'landlord', for the 1950s details, strange details, in this post, but bits of the pretty bottoms section were embellished and made more suggestive by me. You guessed!

A new view of London Confidential

2011-08-20T00:01:00.000+01:00

I read Lizzie's food blog sometimes and she recently ran into difficulty over payment for work with a charming guy for whom she wrote occasional contributions for London Confidential. They had this exchange of emails which she published. It's often hard to know the kind of person you're dealing with so publicity is the only way to get the message over. Alright so her email is just a bit uptight, but the response it brought forth confirms she had cause to be. Brave to put it out there. If you read the comments you'll find the guy's not unknown for his unreason. He sounds like what Dad would call, ironically, 'a prince'.

http://lizzieeatslondon.blogspot.com/2011/08/why-im-not-writing-for-london.html

European travel

2011-08-17T00:09:00.000+01:00

This will mean nothing to most of you, but my friend Rufus is found. I write this as a way of distributing this news to a few friends, so if the rest of you don't want to be bored you can skip this post.
Naturally he didn't think of himself as lost, but he's been a complete bastard about keeping in touch. He says in his email, from Naples, that he has no phone or internet connection. I'm inclined to think he's just as lazy a little fag as I am. Except I did manage to write and blog from Spain! Anyway he was airily unconcerned about our worries. Made to feel stupid for worrying. Bastard! Seems he and Ed haven't got beyond Italy. They took a flat in Naples which he describes as being in a very old building, and very 'decrepit'. They have sunk into a quiet domestic existence in which he cooks and reads, and Ed practises on the piano (and gives impromptu recitals for the neighbours) which came with the flat. He makes no mention of sightseeing, or anything else much except they had some of Ed's friends to stay and one of them behaved creepily like Damon in 'The talented Mr. Ripley', casting a shadow of deceit and confusion over everybody. That sounded quite exciting but again he was short on detail. Anyway they've left and nobody died. It seems to me he only got in touch now because he's looking for somewhere to stay when they come back, which Ed has to do for some unspecified reason. I don't know if they're going back after Ed has done whatever he needs to do.
I graciously agreed to his coming here. He can always wheedle (he used that word) his way round me. I've no idea when he or they will come. I've told him to contact people or I might withdraw the invitation so I hope you hear from him soon. From something he said I got the impression he might want to go to Spain with me. Not too sure about that ceptin he might make a major contribution to expenses :D That's it. Keep you posted.

Mendelssohn

2011-08-16T18:23:00.001+01:00

I listened to a programme on R4 about Mendelssohn's Octet at lunchtime today. Miraculously I'd turned down an invitation to the pub. Don't know why. I was overwhelmed all over again by this music. I'd forgotten how much I'd loved this piece. I think Mendelssohn was very young when he wrote it. It's so exuberant. The R4 programme was about people's reaction to the piece, which I discovered, if I hadn't realised it before, was pretty intense. There were a number of stories but one in particular got to me.
I didn't hear the beginning of the programme, but came in as this guy was telling how a newly formed dance group in San Francisco had chosen to create a performance using this music for their inaugural performance. It was at the height of the aids crisis in that city and one of the driving forces behind the group was dying of the disease. He was a man of great charisma and wonderfully outrageous in his pomp who thought nothing of travelling on the New York Subway in tutu and heavy boots. He made it to his opening night, and the music was paused as his friends carried him onto the stage to perform some arm movements - the only thing by then he was capable of. This ought to strike one as maudlin, right? Somehow it was uplifting. The feelings of the story teller, a friend of the dancer, were too obviously real to be denied, and naturally I cried. The dancer died shortly afterwards.
I first heard the music at school, played by a group of older boys. I thought it was wonderful but I expect it was excruciating. It can't, however, have been entirely bad since it made such a powerful impression on me. I also remember being angry that I was learning to play the clarinet and not the cello. My own feelings at that time in my life were alarming me. I knew something was 'up' but didn't really realise what, and I turned a lot to music and art for distraction. This piece seemed, still does, complicated yet comforting. It struggles, but still drives forward and makes it seem as tho' struggling and carrying on is a good thing. At least it does to me.
I didn't know how to illustrate the piece. I could have gone for a beautiful professional performance, and there are lots, but then found this version. It's not complete unfortunately. The performers are about the same age (but almost certainly better) as those I first heard play it. This group decided to go and play Mendelssohn in a supermarket. It's in Norway, which is noisy and distracting - the supermarket, not Norway. These are roughly the conditions in which I first heard the piece in rehearsal at school. There the noise came from the kitchens. The Norwegians have even got a teacher (first viola) who's anxious to demonstrate in a mildly distracting way that she's in charge by exaggeratedly moving around in just the same way as Dolly Turner, who taught cello in my school, did on on the day I first heard this piece. I think the performers are pretty brilliant.
Perhaps, if you don't know the piece, I'd hoped to show that, as on the occasion I first heard it, something about the music will struggle through the distractions and make you find other performances. But then I expect you know it anyway and I'm preaching to the converted, again! :) xx

What Charlton Brooker has to say

2011-08-15T22:42:00.001+01:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/14/charlie-brooker-prevent-more-riots

I like Charlie Brooker's writing. Use this link to read his article in today's G2 'How to prevent more riots'. He's perceptive and makes serious points in most of his work. I usually end up laughing because he uses ridicule to expose some pomposity or other. I struggle, in my posts, towards the easy skill of columnists like CB, or Caitlin Moran, or Lucy Mangan, or Marina Warner, or Michelle Hanson. Trouble is I think it's unlikely I'll ever get there. I don't have the sense of the ridiculous, nor do I write fluently. When I read my stuff back it seems impossibly stilted.

Caitlin Moran, for example, sprang ready made from Wolverhampton, a writer from the word go with not a pompous bone in her body. If I was that way inclined, and overlooking the small matter of her agreement (two biggish hurdles), I'd have married her and probably drunk and shagged myself to death inside two years. She embraces life in a way that now I can only dream about. Truthfully, on reflection, I didn't much care for her autobiographical work which I talked about a little while ago. It repays reading, but I think she's best over short distances. Then she's a star. But then so are they all.

Still, nil desperandum and all that. A Latin tag reminds me how much I love P.G.Wodehouse. He comes from a much older literary tradition, but he subverted it and was humorous in ways which until he arrived, I used to think, hadn't been dreamt of. Wrong, of course! Like everybody I guess he built on what had gone before. I've discovered that there were writers whom he had absorbed, like Jerome K. Jerome and John Habberton. I think he particularly liked American humourists and developed a very English take on the wisecrack. Perhaps that's why he was able to fit into American life so well for a writer who it is assumed is quintessentially English. I would like to be able to write like old PG. I get all knotted up inside with laughter when I read his novels. Fit to bust. But I can't be P.G.Wodehouse because P.G.Wodehouse has already been P.G.Wodehouse even if I had the talent. Repetition, you see, is the antithesis of wit, except we all do it, even P.G.Wodehouse. We forgive him, whereas repetition in nearly everybody else is unforgivable.

Groove Armada

2011-08-15T18:30:00.004+01:00

Groove Armada are sort of local to Cambridge, well were! They're London based now, but that's not why I like them. That's confused! I meant I don't just like them because they were local and because I knew them from the beginning. No misplaced local patriotism here! Maybe that sounds as if I'm saying I don't believe there's such a thing as society, but I don't see why it has to be 'big'. Sorry! My brain is jumping around. I was naively just going to ask why can't society just be what at its best it always used to be - everybody looking out for everybody else. Cameron, of course, wouldn't know anything about that. What a great big empty opportunist waste he is.

And get ready for Red Light!

And an 'oldie'

Waiting

2011-08-13T10:54:00.001+01:00

It must be hellish hard to be Stephen Fry. I love him to bits but the pressures on him are immense. Somebody said he's got three million followers on Twitter. It makes him influential but can hardly make for fun? Well I'm not in any case going to be Stephen Fry so I can cross that off the things I need to worry about. Doesn't stop me worrying about him tho'. It's a weird life I lead. I worry about so much I get all knotted up, and I promise it's really not all about me. Naturally quite a lot is, but not all.

Day at the races today! Dad and Ellen are calling soonish to take me and Richard, my racing enthusiast friend from work, and Magda (who's not an enthusiast and has to be fed lots of food and drink to stop her becoming bored) off to Newmarket. It's ages since I've been to any 'live' racing and I'm hopping around, when away from this keyboard that is, with excitement. Newmarket is a strange place. It's a town entirely devoted to racing, and many of the stables are in the town. The over privileged hand of the Jockey Club, which operates the course, and many others, looms over the place. Rides to the gallops criss-cross the town, and it's almost impossible to buy anything which isn't approved by the racing fraternity. I like the place, but maybe wouldn't if I had to have any prolonged association with it. But I'm not required to approve of the Jockey Club to look at horses, jump up and down during races, and experience the thrills and (more likely) the disappointments of having a bet.

Talking sport (do I need to make links in a post? Can't I just randomly shift from one subject to another?) I should mention the amazing Alastair Cook. The overly beautiful Alastair Cook. Twenty-six and already scored 19 hundreds for England. The silent Rufus, still touring Europe (I assume) with his inamorata, is besotted with the muscular grace, square jaw, and dark good looks of Alastair Cook. I don't know whether he's aware of AC's 294 at Edgbaston, but I expect like me he would be envious of those who were able to pat our hero's hot bottom when he returned to the England dressing room. I'm half Scottish and it's some relief to be able to support England, without too much guilt, in the absence of a credible Scottish presence in cricket. Fortunately I don't have to choose between the two countries in other sports since other sports, apart from French cricket, non-competitive kite flying, and snooker, leave me completely cold. Oh, and I like lawn tennis, i.e. tennis on our lawn.

I hear people, hopefully Dad and Ellen, downstairs so I'm cutting short this eulogy of a stupidly oblivious, sporting god (how can he not know!) and going to make coffee. Love, Alec.

Riots part deux

2011-08-12T23:29:00.002+01:00

I hate to say I told you so, but Dr. David Starkey on Newsnight just now rather bore out what I thought might happen in the wake of the Shopping Riots. It will be all wildness and crackpot theorising, and the right will seize the opportunity to become ever more illiberal, and whittle away at our civil rights (while at the same time, apparently, continuing to whittle away police numbers). One could write the script were it not all so depressing. Owen Jones, who wrote the book 'Chavs' I mentioned a little while ago, was part of the discussion. His contributions seemed pretty sensible, and particularly he made the telling point right at the end that we won't be able to deal with the underlying causes of the riots if anybody who attempts to suggest that there might be a cause beyond mere criminality is assumed to be supporting the riots. Rationality is the first victim in most arguments.
We have the most absurd media. We have a few riots - significant, dangerous, and frightening for those immediately affected by them, but pretty small beer in terms of riots worldwide - and suddenly journos go completely overboard. I'm pretty sure life as we know it will not end because of these riots, tho' to read and listen to the comment you'd think otherwise. We've had worse riots in the past, and we'll have worse in the future. So long as we don't apply the poultice of more repression the patient is likely to survive. So long as we punish the wrongdoers, and try hard to mend the cause of their wrongdoing - and there are causes in spite of fool Cameron et al - we'll likely be alright. Just don't go on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on about it.
If I was a conspiracy theorist I might be tempted to suggest the riots were engineered by agent provocateurs of the government, anxious to divert attention from the Government's appalling handling of the economy, away from Osborne's complete lack of action, and to provide something for their right wing supporters to get their teeth into and rally round. Of course that couldn't happen! No, silly suggestion! They have been quite convenient tho' . . .

Rat leaving

2011-08-11T23:13:00.003+01:00

Seems these riots might contain a pleasure
Devastation's unexpected treasure,
Michael Winner's leaving.
If I had known I might have heaved a brick
True it's a drastic way to lose the prick,
Hope he's not deceiving.

Emotion

2011-08-10T18:37:00.001+01:00

This is the song by the odd Sarah McLachlan that I liked very much when I was younger. For the life of me I can't remember how I stumbled on it, since it was old then, and not my sort of thing at all. It's very calculating music. She's very schmaltzy and a bit samey, but the adolescent emotion the song revives is pure remembered pain. In the end, I think, such emotions become a sort of ideal. I have what almost amounts to a fear that one never quite recovers them, or feels with such intensity again. It would be good to be wrong about that except that it was such consuming, overwhelming feeling. Emotionally mature people claim that experience lessens the power of emotion to overwhelm. Dad says in the end you attach more importance to a good meal, friendship, fireside drinks and your slippers. He's probably only half joking. I'm hoping that in the right circumstance such emotion might not be a thing of the past, but the thing about it was you couldn't predict the circumstances, just the tsunami of feelings.

Consumer riots

2011-08-10T10:32:00.006+01:00

I thought I was reluctant to write about the riots in this country because every sententious commentator will leap on the subject and it will be endlessly and fruitlessly analysed - fruitlessly because nobody will face up to their responsibility, and much rubbish will be talked and written. Then I thought, I have an opinion, it's not worth much, but my blog is for my opinions, so write. I listened to a guy called Darcus Howe talking the other day. I've never heard of him before, but Robbie says he's not seen him for years but he always used to be trotted out to talk about race. I felt sorry for whoever he's represented because he's clearly immensely dense, and incapable of logic, or putting thoughts together in sequence. Perhaps he used to be different, but he was just the sort of pompous git we have foisted on us by the media on this sort of occasion. Currie emerged with her particular brand of toxic nonsense; Gove predictably talked about discipline; Cameron, looking more than ever like Steve Bell's condom headed caricature, berated 'gangs of criminals' through his unpleasantly thin, weak lips. So it goes on.
My opinion? Well of course the rioters are criminals, altho' the phrase has curious echoes of repressive regimes down the ages who've always sought to characterise protest as the work of criminal gangs. Assad in Syria is using this language right now. In saying this I'm not saying I think the present riots are an expression of legitimate political grievances, altho', in the last analysis, everything is political. We may come to view the present riots as the result of a system which sets consumerism up as the ideal. The highest aspiration of many is to have 'stuff'. When lottery winners are interviewed they talk about new cars, new houses, 'stuff', and holidays, and then usually run out of inspiration. A Premiership footballer builds a house in the Cheshire countryside in the Tesco vernacular style, buys a Bentley or two, and has a beautiful completely artificial woman, done all over in Ronseal, on his arm, then, having got as much 'stuff' as he can imagine, pisses his life away in clubs. When the ideal is 'stuff' what occurs to the have-nots to do when the flood gates break? They set out to acquire stuff, and along the way their frustrations emerge in acts of brutality and violence.
I can hear it being said that many people are poor and don't run amok. I know this and I don't excuse the rioters. They both anger and frighten me, but I think it should be acknowledged that we all cope with stress in different ways, and each of us will behave in a different way when the internal controls break down. Some will behave well, and those who are brutalised or made to feel inadequate by society will behave badly, very, very badly. And when the riots peter out, or are brought under control, what then will happen? The work of re-directing society would be protracted and immensely difficult, and in the nature of things it's a rare politician who pays more than lip service to long term solutions, especially if they don't, as our politicians apparently don't, see the need. When winning the next election is the main goal, changing people's aspirations is too long a project. Politicians prefer what they see as the more reliable greed route of promise and temptation. I'm deeply pessimistic. What I think we'll get is the same 'patch-up and see if the thing still flies' solution. Perhaps we'll have a commission, or an enquiry, or both, to obscure the events. It would be too much to hope, wouldn't it, that 'events' will have demonstrated that cutting funds to those who dedicate their lives to building communities and helping those in need may not be the way forward? How naive am I?

p.s. Since writing this earlier today I discover that Zoe Williams in an article called 'Everything must go' in the G2 section of today's Guardian, has said much the same as this, and more. Hers is much better written, with more psychological insight, and cross-referenced with the opinions of others. It's good.