What's that you're reading? (2)

After a run of novels, I'm reading some non-fiction again. Currently, I'm reading Masters of Death by Richard Rhodes. This book is hard to read, and it's got some pictures in it that you want to look away from.

It's about the Nazi Einsatzgruppen ('special task forces'). These were specially established units -- made up of SS personnel, personnel from various police organisations, and others -- that followed the German army into Poland and Russia and cleared the occupied areas of 'undesirables' -- intellectuals, communists, political activists, and (especially) Jews.

The Einsatzgruppen killed over 1.5 million men, women and children, mainly in mass shootings, between 1941 and 1943.

I've read a lot of books about the Nazi Holocaust, but every time I read about it again it's as if it's the first time. It's as if your memory blanks out the details, as if they're too unbelievable to be retained. So the horrors come to you afresh, and you sometimes do have to look away, or put the book down for a while. There's too much horror and unbelievable inhumanity in these pages.

To read the book, and to look at the pictures, feels somehow intrusive and obscene, as if the act of reading about these actions trivialises them. I haven't put that very well: beyond the horror of the material itself, there's something disturbing about the act of reading about these people's suffering, and in trying to think what it must have been like, and trying to put yourself into the minds of the perpetrators; it feels as if you are looking at something that shouldn't be seen, that you have no right to see. It's as if being an observer somehow makes you ashamed, as if thinking about these things and trying to imagine/understand them is presumptuous, inappropriate. And yet it has to be read -- you can't look away.

Julianne

Julianne is one of the characters in the novel I'm writing. This is the start of a character/background sketch for her: I'm trying to fill her out and give her more than two dimensions.

Dennis had asked her to dance one summer evening in 1951, in the crowded heat of the Paradise Ballroom. It was June, and she was wearing a cream-coloured linen dress that was cinched in at the waist, sleeveless, and -- with its deeply scooped back -- comfortably cool. She'd made the adjustments to it herself.

He held his half-empty bottle of beer behind his back, tried to forget that his mates were watching from the bar, and said, "Please will you dance with me, dance, please?"

She could tell, even in her state of bashful confusion -- she was eighteen, and had never been courting before -- that he'd been practicing variations of this line in his head as he crossed the shiny dance floor, and it was touching that his nervousness had made it come out wrong. That was sweet.

Thinking back, it was strange that she couldn't tell he'd been in the war: even though he was four years older than her, he didn't seem to have the confidence and steel that she thought a former soldier would have. She expected ex-soldiers to have certainty and solidity, and she expected them to be strong and dynamic. She expected them to be able to cope with adversity, and to have a finely-judged sense of responsibility, and of right and wrong.

Dennis was a good dancer -- considerate, graceful, and smooth. He was slim in those days, with thick hair that he brushed back off his forehead and swept into arabesques with an oily preparation. He looked dark and sleek. In his open-necked white (and slightly sweat-begrimed) summer shirt and grey turn-ups, he was quite a dish. "Do you like him?" Barbara had asked her in the ladies' while they were re-powdering their faces. "I do like him", Julianne said, her usual reticence eased away by her gin and tonic, and she realised that she did.

The touch of his smooth fingertips on her bare back as they danced together had made her shiver with uncomfortable excitement: it felt dangerous, as though she were standing at the edge of a cliff; there was a space, a void of empty air. She wanted to fall into it, even though she didn't know what was at the bottom.

Barbara was saying something (Julianne could see her red lips moving in the dim bathroom light), but Julianne couldn't hear her. There was a rushing sensation in her ears, and she wanted to get back out into the dance hall and feel the touch of Dennis's hands again: on her linen dress where it curved out at her hipbone; on the small of her back; on her elbow; and flat against her own hand, their fingers tentatively entwining.

Sunday Supplement

There are some fucking stupid people with driving licences. On your bike -- even when you're on the cycle track -- the sounds of the cars seem to be magnified and focused, and you can sense (more clearly than when you're in a car yourself) just how aggressive, and unnecessary, and reckless, and infantile some of these people's manouvres are.

On your bike, you get a bit warier of other road users, and it's always prudent to assume that they can't see you, and that they are fucking idiots. These starting assumptions are richly reinforced by experience. Like...six cars of the same model, obviously racing, on the A44, and motorcyclist joining in, veering in and out of traffic. Fucking morons. On your bike, you realise how fast cars are going, and you feel very fragile and vulnerable. (There's a metaphor here...I'll dig it out and overuse it in due course...)

Anyway. I did my long cycle ride, despite these distractions. And I did reach a decision/resolution: improve my physical and mental health by...

• Losing 2.5 stones between now and my September vacation. (I've put on 28 lbs in 18 months!)


• Re-establishing a regular exercise routine


• Breaking my current 'excessive bad nutrition' habits (biscuits, beer, chocolate, butter, wine, pies, pizza)

As a mark of commitment, I've cooked up an enormous batch of healthy vegetable curry to act as the highly nutritious base for this week's assault on Mount Lardarse. Yum.

Sunday Fragment

When the weather's like this, it's impossible not to be hopeful: the grass was all crunchy underfoot this morning, but the sky...bright blue, totally clear, and the sun shining unstoppably, dazzlingly, vibrating with light and heat. There are pre-Spring flowers in the beds -- daffs, tulips just showing, snowdrops, hyacinths nudging their way through the soil.
A day to decide things and make resolutions, with the sun in your eyes and the cold wind on your face (freshly moisturised for protection, naturally).

Bits of Sunday

You feel your age when:

1. You realise that Steve Wright isn't on Radio 1 (like you remember)


2. You realise that you'll never deliberately tune into Radio 1 again -- ever


3. You listen to Steve Wright's Sunday Love Songs and it doesn't make you angry


4. You realise that you'll never be married to Barbara for thirty five years

Race, Politics

I read a review in the TLS today, of a book about the genetic basis for racial differences.

As soon as I start reading anything about genetics and race, I get all prickly and hypersensitive. This is a difficult area, where science, history, politics and prejudice meet, in an uneasy standoff. This is a place where real data is scarce, where argument is often value-laden or freighted with unspoken cultural assumptions, and where objective scientific rigour nudges up against wishful thinking, anxiety, and the (very real and understandable) sensitivities and fears of different racial groups. There are ghosts haunting these discussions: eugenics, racism, and -- inevitably -- the Nazi concept of racial purity, and the exterminatory 'cleansing' policies that this concept influenced.

My hackles rise when I read about genetics and race. This is partly about my intellectual limitations -- my inability to comprehend the statistical aridities of population genetics -- and the resulting sense of frustration and inferiority, but mostly it's about the polarised political background to these questions: people on the right tend to subscribe to the idea of innate differences between groups -- socio-economic groups, racial groups -- and this assumed 'innate difference' tends to be used to rationalise/justify the way western societies have 'settled out'; that is, with strata of 'winners' and 'losers'.

In 19th century England, for example, when the population was (relatively) racially homogeneous, stratification was largely based on class/socio-economic status. These categories were seen as fixed, with a biological base...'experts' categorised people by physiognomy, by head bumps, by the distance between their eyes. The dominant understanding in establishment circles -- education, science, politics -- was that people lived in poverty, ignorance and squalor -- or in wealth and comfort -- because of their underlying, inborn physical characteristics. People were where they were because that was where they belonged in the order of nature. This is obviously a neat way to sidestep awkward questions about equality, social justice, and wealth distribution.

That's part of the political baggage I carry with me: my strong left-leaning tendencies mean that I'm wary (and suspicious) of any analysis that defends the status quo.

There are differing views in the scientific community about how much genetics can tell us about behaviour, race and difference. My reading tells me that these issues are still wide open, with insufficient evidence to reach firm scientific conclusions. Questions of equality, fairness and social justice are moral/political ones, which scientific certainty cannot speak to.

It's easy -- and comforting, if you're relatively rich, like I am -- to think that the way wealth and power are distributed are rooted in meritocracy and equality of opportunity. I just don't think that we've reached that point yet -- certainly not in the UK.

We'll always have Paris.

Incredibly, it's more than ten years since I visited Paris. Ten years!!! The thing is, I loved the city, but I visited it with some friends, and we were all heavily into drinking at that time, so my memories are a bit blurry.

I remember: February cold, fog and sunshine,; the kitsch and charm of EuroDisne; the squeaking wheels and rubber smell of the Metro; Sacre Coeur, the Musee D'Orsay (particularly the Van Gogh's, and especially the 'Wobbly Blue Church' - one of my favourite pictures).

Wobbly Blue Church

I also remember sitting on the steep steps of that museum's cafe, writing a poignantly phrased postcard to a woman I loved, but who didn't love me -- though we were great friends. I remember pouring my heart (and art) into that little white postcard space, as I wrote about the profound beauty of that Van Gogh, and what it meant to me, hoping that she would respond.

She didn't.

I still want to revisit Paris though -- strongly. This time, I'll be sober (most of the time), and I won't get lost in a haze of Kronenbourg, or have a blazing row about the best way back to the hotel. Probably. You never know though, do you?

Roll on Easter! 8o)

Bliss blip

Hah! -- so much for serenity. I fell off the horse of happiness today, and landed -- on my fat alliterative arse -- in the mire of moodiness. Had a sackload of things to finish before a week out of the office, but the morning just got stolen away, I lost my equilibrium, and a succession of trivium loomed up and swamped me for a while.

Once I'd lost the plot, I did my usual thing of getting angry with myself, and then got angry with myself for being angry (and so on, in a seemingly infinite regress).

Fortunately, though, the delivery of some sympathetic chocolates, and a few light-touch comments from some colleagues brought me back to reality and calm.

I'm a bit disappointed, though, because I've been in such a good run of moods, and I've been keeping a tight rein on over-working and over-stressing.

Particular apologies to C and C, who always get the worst of it, give me the most direct feedback, and cut me the most slack.

But it's past now, and I don't think I hit anybody, so I can now get back to that pleasant position of poise. The weekend will help.

Start again...it's just a passing thing.

What's that you're reading?

As I've got older, I've got better at abandoning books. Nowadays, I can decide that I'm not enjoying a book, and put it down. I can decide that it's a pile of poop, and deposit it in the nearest (and most appropriate) waste receptacle. In short, I can acknowledge that this particular work is not worth expending my diminishing number of minutes of existence upon. How long does a page take to read? Thirty seconds? A minute?

A book takes up a lot of your life. It has to earn the right to do that.

As a younger person, I felt guilty if I struggled with a book, or if I was tempted to give up on something because I didn't like it. (Mental. I know.) There was something of the Protestant work ethic in this, some belief that a book had innate worth, in and of itself, and that -- just because it existed, and because I had picked it up -- there was some kind of unspoken contract that I had to fulfill -- as if I had committed myself to it, and couldn't let it down. Not staying the course was an insult -- to the book, to the author, to the bookshop/library, to the world of letters, to language, to humanity, and to God h/er/imself. Jesus: guilt, guilt, guilt.

I remember when this started to change: Slowly Up the Ganges (or was it Down?), by Eric Newby. I'd been reading a lot of travel books, pining for exotic locations while travelling to work through a leaden London in winter. I understood (received wisdom, to which I was often in thrall) that Mr Newby was the doyenne of travel writers...the Ur travel writer. But I just didn't get it: I didn't like the prose, I didn't feel, see, hear or smell the places he wrote about, and I couldn't warm to his voice, or to him. So I put it on the shelf in stack 3, sector 7, with a bookmark between pages 38 and 39.

And it sat there and mocked me for my lack of application, and for my failure to consummate the relationship. I was weak, lazy -- a dilettante.

Gradually, it sunk to the bottom of the stack. Eventually, after a couple more aborted sallies, I thought, I'm never going to read this -- what's the fucking point? I don't like it. So I gave it away. I'll say that again: I gave away a book. I was twenty-seven years old. It was my first time. I'd finally done it, and my sense of shame began to diminish. It took a long time, though, and a lot of arm-wrenchingly heavy house moves, before I finally culled my immense library of books that you will never read again, you nana-head.

The books I've read that have totally gripped me, and resonated ever since, are relatively few. I've read thousands -- Christ knows how many -- books, but I bet there aren't that many that I can look back on and say That book still lives vividly in my imagination. The first ones that spring to mind are:

• Cat's Eye (Attwood)


• Bomber (Deighton)


• 2001, A Space Odyssey (Clarke)


• Still (Thorpe)


• Fingersmith (Walters)


• David Copperfield (Dickens)


• Unless (Shields)


• Tarry Flynn (Kavanagh)


• Austerlitz (Sebald)


• Remembrance of Things Past (Proust - the first volume of the old Penguin translation)


• The Prussian Officer (Lawrence)


• Holocaust (Gilbert)


• Titus Groan/Gormenghast (Peake)

Actually, there are quite a few, and I haven't started struggling yet - those all came easy.

What I'm searching for as a reader is that book that you can't wait to get home to read, the book where, as you near the end, you keep seeing how many pages are left because you don't want it to end. The book that takes you into a complete world, or whose protagonists grip you and engage you. Those books seem increasingly rare to me -- maybe I'm getting jaded. There have been a couple in the last year or so -- Austerlitz, The Emigrants, Any Human Heart.

I can't wait to find the next one.

d o g v i l l e

Just finished watching D o g v i l l e (couldn't eat it all on Saturday night).

I liked it, in some ways: Nicole Kidman was immense, and restrained, and -- of course -- beautiful as Grace, and the rest of the cast were convincing. But...but: I somehow feel that the allegorical content passed me by/went over my head. There were flashes of clarity, where I saw Grace as the innocent incomer, the wide-eyed believer in the American Dream, the symbol of the people who migrated from Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries, seeking...stuff...and who found that this particular promised land was as corrupt, and as imperfect, and as humanly frail as everywhere else. The closing titles were beautiful, and tragic, and ironic, and searingly sad. But...I didn't find her transition (to the John Hurt voiceover about moonlight on Dogville) emotionally convincing...it felt too cerebrally-led, and not reified/emotionally true enough.

But a very engaging film, overall. It's left me thinking about some stuff (which may or may not become clearer...)

a s t r o l o g y

I love this joke, even though (a) it's nicked from Jeremy Hardy's act of c.1987, and (b) I use it at least twice a week (maybe thrice...what's the word for 'four times'? "fierce"? Five times? "fice"? Anyway.

I don't believe in astrology. But then I'm a Capricorn, and we're sceptical...

It's a cracker, I tell you, a cracker. (House dissolves in laughter.)

Crabby, crabby, crabby! -- a character sketch

I've always been a bit volatile emotionally: quick to anger, fast to the blush, easy to embarrass, and slow to calm down. I've carried slights and fears around for months on end -- years sometimes. What's changed over time has been my level of awareness of mood changes, and my ability to influence them. The biggest battle has been to acknowledge my own responsibilities -- to recognize that I can do something about it, and that I'm not merely the passive victim of brain chemistry and hormones.

This cognitive element -- the act of intellectual understanding, and thereby of partial mastery -- has come into play again recently, and taken me to a much happier place after months of being pretty miserable. (As an aside, I do find myself going to happy places, difficult places, interesting places a lot lately: that 'place' vagueness is a bit of a verbal tic, like that current (?) teenaged "...and stuff." suffix.)

Anyway, I remember -- or, at least, reinterpret ancient experience as -- mood swings from a pretty young age: moments of panic for no reason (especially the feeling that people were looking at me and judging me), and contrasting spells of unquenchable loquacity.

One upshot of this latter phenomenon was the frequency with which I got sent to sit on the stairs at Sunday tea-time, the result of my 'being silly, and chattering non-stop'. At infant school I was sent to see the headmistress for the same reasons, and one of my secondary school teachers commented icily (on my Russian language report, ironically) that I "could not refrain from keeping up a running commentary of silly remarks" in class. There's still plenty of truth in that, as any of my work colleagues will attest.

The darker side of my moods is suggested (in my head, anyway) by some of the names that schoolmates called me: moody, granite face, misery guts. Those echo with truth for long periods of my life.

I guess that when I was younger, these swings seemed perfectly normal (as mild mood changes doubtless are), and I didn't have the self-awareness, objectivity or critical faculties to do any comparisons, or make any rational judgments about "how I was". I think that there was something physical, an in-built mood-swinging tendency, embedded in my brain chemistry.

As a teenager, though, I started looking around at my peers, comparing how I behaved, how I was, how they interacted with each other, how they formed and conducted relationships. I saw that I was inconstant, and I judged myself harshly - I was found wanting in so many ways. In retrospect, I think that I didn't understand about neurochemistry, or about learned behaviour, and I concluded -- rather stupidly -- that I was somehow bad, unusual and -- critically -- unworthy of love. These conclusions hardened with every discouraging experience I had, crystallising into a set of unconscious rules that governed my responses and behaviours: "you're not capable, you're ugly [schoolmates reinforced this with the usual cruel teenaged comments], you're useless." These conclusions got buried really deep, and were so woven into my thinking and feeling that I didn't realise that they were artificial, learned conclusions -- rather, they seemed to be unspoken, natural, irrefutable truths. And I kept acting as if those conclusions were true, twisting every bit of counter-evidence to fit my distorted rules.

I did that for a long time.

As I got older, I found moments of lucidness, when someone said or did something that illuminated, just for a moment, a different truth that I could see and believe in. But they always passed -- sometimes after a few hours, sometimes after a few months. I kept returning to that part-natural/part-learned persona of the brittle little boy with no confidence and no self-belief. Escape into hobbies and habits (making things, reading, an over-reliance on alcohol and food treats) kept me in this self-constructed prison for most of my adult life.

There was a period, in the early 90s, when I found a more solid place to stand, and where I developed a far more robust sense of myself. It came after a revelatory consultancy course, where I started to understand that to feel these things, to feel the tug of contrary emotions, to feel small and frightened, was a natural thing, and was not the result of badness or weakness on my part: the very fact that I felt guilty about these things was evidence to me of my twisted thinking. What made me change was that I began to understand this intellectually. Once I did that, I realised that I could also choose to think differently, and choose to behave differently. I did that for a while, and enjoyed one of the happiest periods of my life: I was warm, loving, fearless, caring and understanding.

Then I fell into a state of unhappy, unrequited, obsessive love that was Proustian in its proportions. That unhappy passage of play stripped my of my confidence and self-regard, and I drifted back into the shadows, where I found solace in academic achievement, hedonism, and overwork. I (unconsciously) fell back into those bad habits of self-reproach, self-criticality and denial. I hid away from myself, and became hollow and brittle again.

Recently, though, I have broken through into the sunshine again, and this is again based on a sudden clarity and pig-bloody-obvious sense of reality. The act of understanding, of rational and systematic self-analysis, has once again helped me to uncover those erroneous rules that have been governing my thinking and feeling. And now that I know what they are, and recognise the feelings and behaviours those rules evoke, I can neutralise them, combat them, out-think them, and beat them.

It feels wonderful -- liberating and thrilling -- to be able to take control of myself again, to see myself as I really am, and to engage warmly and openly with the world, rather than being ruled by fear an and the threat of exposure. To have the power to save yourself from yourself...that's a beautiful thing. That's freedom.

:-)

Dog racing

This was a new experience for me -- I've never been greyhound racing before. (A couple of my nice colleagues arranged it for one of their leaving do's.) There's something entrancing about all that darkness and space outside of the grandstand, and the intense detail of the foreground, illuminated by the floodlights. Add some blown snow swirling in the floodlights, and there's a really compelling backdrop for the action.

Other positive features (at least at the Oxford Stadium) are: decent food at a reasonable price; a table full of positive spirits (even if they did relentlessly take the piss out of my selections and continual betting failures); and a very civilised mixed clientele -- couples, families, works' outings, girls' nights out. A very relaxing way to spend 3-4 hours. There's also something engaging about all those dogs, fulll of life and energy and variety, racing after that feeble facsimile of a hare in the bright lights - something very simple and intimate and exciting.

Hmm. I'm starting to sound like a municipal promotional brochure...it was good, though -- and I came home with a bit of cash -- miraculous.

After my considerate and trustworthy 'designated driver' (thanks Sal - much appreciated) dropped me off at the top of my icy-looking road, I walked gingerly down the slope. There were a few slippery tyre tracks on the frost-/snow-dusted tarmac, and the orange streetlights reflected in multiple glittery facets on the pavement. Meandering down the slope, full of lager, garlic mushrooms, roast lamb, and chocolate torte, I felt happy and contented. The icy air was invigorating on my cheeks and ample bare forehead (eat your heart out, William Hague). The sky was hazy, a few stars and the bright moon between the clouds.

If it was Friday as well, I'd be feeling sooooo blissfull. 8o)

Now I must drowse...

Ho hum. Rranduhm

Dreary Monday. That traditional slow start to the week, as if your carburettor was contaminated with calcified weasel poo - surely we've all experienced that mechanical failing? Ah yes, I can see you identifying with that universal 'dried faeces of small mammal preventing efficient combustion' problem.

I'm struggling - can't even do ironic overuse of metaphor today, so don't feel as clever as I want to feel. Trying too hard. Too self-conscious.

My dog's unusually musical. Oh really? Yep: she's very fond of Bach.

I enjoyed doing this week's homework. Thinking about a character by working away from a few posessions is something I haven't done before. I'll be trying it on the characters in my novel to see if I can bring them to life a bit more: I tend to just let them develop organically, and not really think about their back stories (except where those back stories directly concern some aspect of the novel). This means that my characters tend to be constrained, one-dimensional, and lifeless. And they all end up thinking and sounding like me, which means that their interactions are really dull - no contrast, no sharp corners, no quirks, no life. They're the lifeless products of intellect, not feeling. They're cyphers, not agents. They're passive, not dynamic. Bollocks.

another lazy Sunday

Uninspired and dozy today. All I've done creatively is my homework for this week's class: a character study based on a short briefing...

Maria

Maria is forty-six. If anybody asks her about her age, she says "early forties".

When people meet her, they sense energy, busyness, and - for some - brittleness. She is rarely still. When she's sitting down, her feet are always on the move, her eyes flicker on your face and over your shoulders, and she keeps pushing her hair back behind her left ear.

She's a sales rep in the photocopier rental industry.

She has long fingernails, and they're strikingly convex in cross section. They're strong: she taps them in rhythmic arpeggios on table tops, desks, filing drawers, and photocopiers when she's talking to people. She does this unconsciously.

Sometimes, for no apparent reason, she'll feel suddenly nervous, and she'll get sweaty under her arms: she'll worry about her sweat showing, and that will make her sweat more. When this happens, she has to go and sit outside, or open a window and feel the cool air on her neck.

When she sits in her company car after a client meeting, she'll make notes in her notebook, with the radio turned up very loud and tuned to a station playing music that's much too young for her. As she writes, she chews relentlessly through the caps of the cheap biros her company supplies. There's something comforting about the shredded plastic against her tongue, and something satisfying about that moment when the cap cracks and collapses into shards and dribble: it reminds her of spring evenings thirty years ago, when she studying for her school exams, when she was in love, and happy. But the chewing sometimes gives her headaches.

Business hasn't been great the last couple of years, but she still buys the best department store clothes she can: she chooses conservative colours, shortish skirts, and jackets that accentuate her bust. She always buys stuff that she can mix and match with her existing wardrobe - she's had the same basic look for years. The younger male reps find her attractive, but they're wary of the way that she vibrates with energy, and they can't read her. A lot of people find that talking to her makes them unaccountably anxious. Younger women think she's a bit odd, a bit bogus - "all shell, with nothing inside", as one of them had said bitchily at the Christmas party.

In her professional life, she thinks she should always look her best - especially as everyone else in this job is so much younger and - she thinks - more confident than her. She seems to spend a lot of time leaning over washbasins in motorway service station toilets, repairing her makeup - powder, lipstick, eyelashes - in bad lighting conditions. Her hair is beautiful: a deep chestnut colour, thick but pliable, and with the healthy sheen beloved of shampoo advertisers. Sometimes, before a meeting, she'll give it a good brush, and imagine herself as one of those hair-tossing, white-toothed bimbos who witter on about 'polyceramides' and 'hypoallergenic root proteins'.

New clients sometimes find her a bit odd, over the top, especially when she marches into their office with her face and lips shining glossily, her eyes bright, her hair 'volumised', her breath smelling of freshly-crushed peppermint, and trailing behind her an intense wake of strong perfume.

Her address book has 247 names in it. 212 of these are work contacts. She's probably in regular touch with 30% of the rest of them - mum, sister Anne, and the rest of the family for Christmas and birthdays. Her two best friends are Jill and Sandra, both of whom she knows from her first job. They meet up every two months and get throwing-up drunk together at a nightclub. They are usually twice the age of the rest of the clientele.

She's not 'with' anyone. In fact, she hasn't been out with a man since that bastard Derek. That was three years ago.

Sometimes, strangers - supermarket checkout women, petrol station attendants, dry cleaning shop staff - find her arrogant and impersonal. At other times, she has a softer, troubled, on-the-brink-of-tears look in her eyes, which makes people want to pat her shoulder and tell her that 'everything's OK, relax'

Astonishing, Indiscreet, Cataclysmic Drunken Self-revelation no. 1

Just kidding. Such a tease...

From the roof of a Banbury multistorey car park (1)

The wind's cuttingly cold up here, but the bright sun and clear blue sky are irresistible. The town roofscape's tiles, cornices, gables and chimneys are made vivid by the sunlight: bright colours, clear contrasts, sharp shadows, the mirage-like haze of light around the buildings that are directly between me and the sun.

Down below, the Saturday morning shoppers ebb and flow between the car park, the market, and the more extensive shopping precincts beyond. This early in the morning - before all the hormone-rich gangs of teenagers have surfaced from the zombie-lairs of their bedrooms - the small crowd is a mix: elderly couples in matching grey and dun, the women's hair haloed with white light where the sun slants between the buildings; couples pushing buggies; lone males; lone females carrying trays of bright spring planting; and - it seems to me - an overrepresentation of couples with contrasting body shapes - fat boy/thin girl, or fat girl/thin boy.

I notice an old bloke limping unsteadily away from the market, towards the car park, placing the point of his walking stick carefully in the brick pavement as he walks slowly, slowly. The pavement glistens with melted frost, and it's hard not to feel concerned for him. His irregular gait speaks of effort and pain. His hair is thin - he should be wearing a hat. Then I see that there's a woman keeping pace with him - his daughter? She's probably forty years younger than him, but she's matching his speed: at each step, her foot describes a slow, flat circle before she plants it back on the pavement. Her hands are clasped behind her, as if they're holding her back, or reining her in.

She looks sideways at him now and again as he puffs his way up the slight incline. The streams of shoppers part as they approach him, flowing around him as if he were a broken-down car on a busy road. As he reaches the car park's stairwell, almost directly below me, I see him pause, switch the stick to his other hand. As he starts moving again, I see him sway, starting to lose his balance, and the woman just reaches out and touches his elbow with her finger tips, as if she knows the exact place to apply the correcting force.

There's so much love and tenderness in that slow walk, in that simple touch. In that relationship, you can see yourself and your own parents. And you can see your own end.

They go into the shadows of the stairwell.

Barry Johnson's Diary

This week:
Pizzas -- 1 -- v. bad
Fish and chips -- 0 -- v. gd
Chinese takeaway -- 0 -- v. gd
Lard -- 0 -- Excellent!
Vegetables -- what? oh, some tomatoes. That's very good, very good indeed
Fruit -- some bananas, 2 apples -- outstanding
Cigarettes -- 0 - ever -- easy
Lovely lovely mushroom, spinach and pine nut ravioli -- 1 -- nice. (Oh, and the dessert too.)
Chocolate and biscuits -- oh, I've run out of ink...

Boy music/girl music

I'm not very clear about this, and I'm tired, and I'm full, and I'm not thinking too well, but...there's 'boy' music, and there's 'girl' music, isn't there? I can only talk about my own youth of course - I'm too divorced from any musical currents that started flowing after 1985 to say anything about anything remotely contemporary.

When I think of boy music, I'm thinking Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, King Crimson - all that prog rock stuff I grew up with and which I still, to my slight shame, feel a deep sense of connection with/enjoyment of. (I've been transferring a load of CDs onto my Mac, and the album covers dominating my desktop are those Roger Dean/Hipgnosis designs of the early 1970s.) These were tastes that I inherited from my big brother - he was my male role model, I guess, and I thought that his (vinyl) albums were big and clever. I thought those impenetrable lyrics and hippyish utopian covers had some deep meaning: if I could only listen to them enough times in the summer twilight, while my teenaged hormones raced and pulsed, the music's opaque symbolism and underlying structures would emerge with crystal clarity. But they never did: it strikes me now - especially Yes's stuff - as the musical equivalent of a drug-rich drunken party.

But I'm not complaining - that music did something to my brain back in the early 70s, something more subtle and insidious than anything purely intellectual, something pleasurable derived from the music's textures and colours, washing over the impressionable matrix of a teenaged brain that was still open to suggestion, and influence, and mystery. Nothing was fixed then - I was still free to believe anything that I wanted to, still open-minded enough to follow new paths and obsessions (I'll tell you about my UFO conspiracy theory phase sometime - I did that before it was remotely fashionable, sending off for mimeographed copies of some weirdo's paranoid rantings...)

There's something about the power of music and memory: its ability to fix emotions, moods, eras; did you ever watch The Rock and Roll Years? That mix of music and archive news footage penetrates deep, and drags up memories that I never knew I had: hairs stand up on my arms, and I can feel the era vibrating at the base of my skull, almost scaring me with the sense that some other forgotten memory is going to bubble up.

I don't remember seeing many women at the Yes/Genesis gigs I went to in the 70s. Was there something about the music that made it appeal only to the 'male brain'? Something about systems/patterns/lack of emotion? Something distinctly nerdy and geeky, something cold and cerebral (or cod cerebral)? I recall that it was the music and the 'ideas' (ahem) that interested me. I don't recall much emotion in the music.

I'm rambling about this now, so I'll stop. Maybe come back to this later, work through my traumatic teenaged years again...

prententious, moi?

Just went out into the garden to put something in the bin. Head down, a bit tired. There's a rough paving stone just outside the door, where the rainwater gathers in little wet shards. The moonlight was glinting in the puddles, silvery-white. There's beauty everywhere.

Rational/Irrational

So. My landlord is selling the house I'm renting. I know my landlord through my work. Him and his Mrs are lovely people. I like them. I rented their house with my eyes wide open, aware that it was a short let. Everybody was happy. It's a cosy little mid-terrace cottage in a lovely little town in Oxfordshire. I like it. I've been happy inside these walls, even though the last few months have been a bit crap in other respects.

So. Last night the estate agent came round to do his final measurements and analysis before he put the ad in the paper. He was direct, indicating that - due to the compact living room - I should do a bit of decluttering. This was not news to me - in fact, I finished his sentence for him. It was obvious, and I was happy with the idea. So I've been doing that - I want to help these nice people sell their house, and I'm quite keen (truth be told) to find a bigger place, so I can get all my stuff out of storage. Landlord says he'll be round to clear up some of his stuff and do a bit of low-level DIY. That's all cool.

So. RATIONAL = I want to help, I don't mind putting my stuff in boxes, I want to move on. Everything's cushdie.

Today, I get home from work, and the door isn't double-locked, and the front room blind's up. The landlord's been, I suppose. Inside, the smell of Flash liquid and paint. The kitchen surfaces tidied, the clothes horse folded away. A note: all the stuff they've done. It's a long list.

So. I carry on with my box packing, working up a sweat as I carry boxes of books and CDs up the vertiginous, winding stairs and store everything away out of sight. I know my shoulders and arms will be aching in the morning. I become aware that I'm harbouring feelings of resentment.

So. IRRATIONAL = It feels like I've been burgled again - you know, that feeling of invasion/violation. I feel nagged, chivvied, criticised for my slovenliness. I feel resentful. I feel unwelcome all of a sudden. I want to leave NOW.

Which is all stupid of course, but some level/structure/structures of my brain is/are quietly insistent.

Now, I'm back to RATIONAL: my emotional response took over for a bit, those hypersensitive and insecure bits of my psyche that can so easily dominate my existence. I need to recognise them when they kick in, analyse them, stop them taking me off down a stupid route. And I've done that. But...will I ever get used to this grey lump of complexity between my temples? I've had 40+ years, and lots of the things it does are still a bit of a mystery to me...

S i d e w a y s

Have you been to see S i d e w a y s yet, like I told you to? No? Well, there's this scene where the beardy bloke - Miles - gets drunk in a restaurant, and goes and phones up his ex-wife, just so he can be bitter, and self-pitying, and venomous, and silent to her down the line. When he comes back to the table, his mate says "Did you just drink and dial?" If I ever "drink and type", and get embarrassing, you'll tell me, won't you? Won't you?

Thanks.

w or d s i n a l i n e

One of my favourite sentences:

"Global minky trousers in an autonomous chunky monkey trouserpress"

I didn't write this: one of my workmates did. It utilises some words that I overuse ridiculously (trousers, global, autonomous, trouserpress) and combines them with some other random euphemisms. I have it blu-tacked to my monitor. It's almost meaningless. But that string of words brings me back to reality when I'm getting stressed, and roots me back in a world where I can laugh and be stupid and be myself, and where work-related problems shrink back to their deserved perspective. It's my magic mantra. (Thanks, Cathy!)

night sky

That sky was beautiful last night. But I didn't appreciate it like I used to. The stars have always been the same distance away - more or less, discounting the expansion of the universe and the orbits/rotations of earth, sun, and galaxy - but I used to feel more...connected with it. I used to have a kind of 'imaginative engagement' with the night sky, I guess.

I think I must have learned a certain kind of relationship with the night sky from the stories I had read to me as a child. I don't remember the stories, but I back-project onto them an image of five-pointed stars, big and yellow and lonely, with swirls of deep blue and blue grey around them. I remember the pages of picture books I read, their smooth pages, the pictures that were always the same every time I came back to them, but which were always suffused with a sense of wonder, projected out of my little head and its unfettered imagination. (Whenever mum was cutting my hair after my bath, creating a crooked fringe with blunt scissors, there was always something going on in my head, some silent or spoken story; making sense of my day, or spooling something out of the mystery of my part-formed personality. I can remember her fingertips on my skull as she gently pushed my head into position, and I remember the cold, hard scissors, smooth against my hot forehead as they sheared reluctantly through my fringe. I'd feel the wet curls of falling hair tickling on my eyelashes, but I couldn't lift my hands from under the towel I was draped in, so I'd stick out my bottom lip and blow upwards. The hair's long gone, but I'm still sticking that lip out.)

The Apollo programme was aiming to put a man on the moon (I only knew this later, of course). But I was aware of something about space, about the way that people were exploring it. There were images of rockets everywhere - adverts, films, ice lollies - and that seeped in. That's the first 'hardware' interest/obsession I can remember: being excited by anything to do with 'space'.

Then there was a book about Mickey Mouse and Pluto going up in a space ship, and being threatened by their arch-enemy (a brutal-looking, unshaven creature with four teeth like broken white rods, one at each corner of his mouth). I remember that that villain filled me with a sense of dread as I approached the pages where he menaced Mickey and Pluto, but at the same time there was a fascination there, too. I can recall being frightened, reading that book on the landing at Uncle Peter's house. I can't remember why.

There were films too. I remember seeing "2001: a Space Odyssey" at the pictures - I guess that was in 1969 or 1970. At that age, the big themes of the film would have meant nothing to me, but the cold, arid imagery of Kubrick (and cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth?) struck me profoundly. I projected that cool, utilitarian look onto the American and Russian spaceships when I thought about them. That internal imagery made the actual stuff feel closer to me - I felt a connection with the metal, the plastic, the fuel, the plumes of flame, the heat haze as the Apollos climbed into the unfocusable distance after lift off. It was firmly a part of my imaginative world now. (Years later, when I read some of William Gibson's grungey short stories, this cold white/silver imagery morphed into something a little more detailed, gritty, and grimy. It accreted another layer of (imagined) reality.

I got a telescope for Christmas in 1973, a smooth white tube with a metal tripod that snapped after a few months. I loved that instrument, even though it didn't have anything like the magnification or clarity of the pictures in the (increasingly scientific) books I was reading at that time - "The Look-it-up Book of Stars and Planets" and, later, "The Observer Book of Astronomy" (I think), by Patrick Moore. Looking back, I can see that this was the time when my imagination started to drift away, replaced by a much more rational view: I wanted to understand, to engage with the night sky intellectually, rather than imaginatively.

On the cusp of adolescence, I must confess that my emotional energies were starting to turn elsewhere: that telescope afforded my tantalising, half-imagined glimpses of 'ladies' undressing at half-curtained windows under yellowish electric light bulbs. This held more attraction than a blurred, reddish, oscillating image of Rigel, or the dazzling white - but shaky - surface of the moon. London's light pollution did the rest, and my thoughts moved from the stars to the earth. I focused on plastic models, ignorant fantasies of girls, dreams of pop stardom, and thoughts of joining the RAF as a navigator. I stayed indoors a lot in the evenings.

I remember being on holiday in the US in 1990, the autumn before Desert Storm, camping somewhere near Niagara. After a strange pasta dish cooked by some Dutch fellow-travellers, I sat out in the dark, finishing of the beer from the group's cooler. As all the lights in the camp went out, the starlit sky faded up to a clear, glorious beauty. I remember talking to myself, providing a commentary on my amazement. But I was ignorant now - I'd forgotten the science and logic - and I felt that my mind was moving numbly, with nothing to hold onto. I couldn't get the sky to stand still, and I couldn't focus on it (that wasn't just the beer).

And now...now I sometimes feel awed by the sky, like last night, with the half-moon, and the clear stars shining in profusion above the rooftops and the silhouetted buildings at the top of the hill. But there's something missing. I still can't fix them, hold them in my mind in a comprehensible way. I want to get that sense of engagement back, to not feel estranged from the sky. But I don't know how.

This is not a post

It is a representation of a post. And an unconvincing one at that. Thought I was getting a migraine earlier (headache, little lights dancing on my retinae), but think it's just incipient cold symptoms.

However, I have decided that I WILL NOT GET ILL. So I'll shut up, take some pharma corporation's lemon-flavoured drugs, and tuck myself up for the night. When I wake up I will be better, and strong, and fresh, and ready to cycle to work in the sub-zero darkness. The wonder of mind power.

Great night sky out there: bit of moon, Orion vast and glittery in the east, and all the rest of it spread out like...like...like a star-spangled banner. But not flat. Or made of cloth. Or something.

Note to self...

Monday, think/write about ironing, pressed hot cotton, childhood memories of mum ironing, the power of remembered music, and its ability to take you to a place and time. Also how those songs subliminally shaped your expectations and your emotional world...

Fluff

Bah. Got my 'unfocussed' head on today. I should be feeling bright and clear, on account of resuming my daily cycling routine (Sat and Sun), but I'm actually all scattered and fragmentary. Paying the price for overindulgence in food and drink at the back end of last week. Fat and flaccid is my theme of the day. I got on the scales at my parents' place, and I was surprised - shocked! - at how much weight I've managed to put on since my bike accident gave me six weeks off exercise. I need to get back in the saddle for the ride to work every day this coming week. No excuses. And just one pizza. And no fish and chips/Chinese take-aways/pork pies/continent-sized croissants.

Sunday. And now to the ironing: the glamorous, care-free life of the bachelor boy...

Close thing...

Just got back from an hour's bike ride around the county lanes that fringe the Blenheim estate. The sun kept coming out between fat white clouds, and there were darker clouds at a lower height...little trains of them rushing across the sky in the strong wind. Pedalling into the wind, I could sense the final traces of last night's Stella Artois and shredded chilli beef sweating out through my pores (ick). Just as I got back, it started to tip down with rain: it's beating on the velux at the moment.

Northern hemisphere tilt

A couple of people in the last week have said how they've felt their mood starting to lift - "something to do with the quality of the sunlight", one of them said (or maybe it was *me* that said that?). Anyway... (Bugger, can't write for toffee today: this stuff is squeezing out of my brain like the last reluctant squidge at the crimped end of a toothpaste tube.)

Anyway, I'm sure there's a set of obvious technical explanations for this sun/mood-lift feenominon: like all the other animals, we take our light cues from the angle of the sunlight, the elevation above the horizon and so on. There must be something hardwired that kicks in and says "hey, the sun's consistently 30 degrees above the horizon for 90 minutes a day! get ready to breed - come on!" (Something like that - I'm not a doctor, for Christ's sake. Whatever it is, it's better than that stolid winter misery. I wish I'd paid more attention to those kids' TV programmes that explained celestial mechanics using a melon, and orange, an apple, a cherry, several pieces of string, and a large pool of light in a darkened studio. But I didn't, and now I'm too lazy and fluff-headed to learn.

The rain's stopped, too - I've got a skylight full of bright blue, and a dazzling lozenge of light on the white-painted wall. Nice.

A w e s o m e

Andy makes hyperlinks that work shock. Proof of (admittedly simple) concept achieved. We have hyperlink liftoff.

s t r a n g e

I need a drink after all that sweat and toil.

Consumer Electronics

Does anyone under thirty (and not in extreme poverty) know what it's like not to have the means of reproducing music that you own? (ie CD/MD player etc.)

I'm listening nostalgically to Wish You Were Here, and thinking back to the days before I had a record player, or any records - let alone a cassette player. I could only play my mum and dad's records on their radiogram (one of those big sideboard things, with a sliding door on the front: more a structural fitting than an entertainment system).
I got a transistor radio for my 11th birthday: a cheap plastic thing, but I loved it and prized it - even the (single) cheap plastic earphone that was like an instrument from the doctor's surgery. I bought my first record in about 1973 (Waterloo, if you must know), and I guess I inherited my brother's record player shortly after that. Next came the big one - a portable cassette player of my own. I recall that this was a heavy manufacture by ITT, with a dense black plastic body and a fetching silver metal trim, which had holes punched in it to facilitate the flow of sound from the speaker beneath. Again, I remember love for, and attachment to, that inanimate object. Which feels odd. I guess we were quite poor then (my mum was on her own), so anything material and new was precious.

The other thing that strikes me is how constrained our choices were. You had to wait for your favourite songs to come on the radio, and hope that you had your cassette handy to tape them. Everything is monstrously accessible now. Some part of me thinks that the loss of mystery/happenstance that entails is sad in some way. I haven't thought it through, though, so I'm probably just being romantically nostalgic. "Aye, lad, I remember when you were lucky to get an LP that lasted forty minutes. You 80-minute CDers don't know you're born."

Thursday -- so good they named it once

Lunch today with a much esteemed colleage: pizza, gossip, and creative chat about writing stuff. I never did buy that line about life's a beach, but life is lunch? That would appeal.

white socks

I was walking back from the chip shop tonight, carrying my cholesterol-rich once-a-month treat. I noticed a cat walking in parallel, in the dark of somone's unfenced front garden. I made that special 'cat attraction' noise with my lips (that pouty, kiss-like 'pwoot, pwoot'), and s/he casually looked up, not even breaking h/is/er stride, and regarded me with snooty disinterest. I rustled my fried fish and chips, but s/he was still all disdain. Our paths diverged, and the cat faded into the gloom, until I could just see its four white socks, ghosting across the grass in smooth motion. Then even they disappeared. Very Lewis Carrol. A little tickle under the chin, a quick arch of the back, and a gurgly purr - is that too much to ask?

Numb bum.

I've had a geeky evening, thinking about how to build a little website where my creative writing class (CWC) and I can post our exercises (and the pieces we work on after the course). I want to be able to keep up with them, and build a place where we can share work/criticism/support/contacts etc.

So...I'm trialling different site structures and technologies, hoping to come across a combination that (a) works, and (b) is within my technical capabilities. (b) is the problem: I started my working life in corporate IT, and did some pretty technical jobs. I also edited programming/web design books for a few years. But I can't escape the fact that I'm an impatient dilettante - I want to be able to make this thing quickly, and I want it to look good, and I want it to be whizzy in the technical/usability senses. But i just don't have the in-built skills. I don't want to have to read a book, for goodness' sake - I want it all to happen RIGHT NOW. Instead, after hours of trying things out in Flash and Dreamweaver, I've got an ugly page with one little button: when you press it, a text document is supposed to load into a box on the right of the screen. And does it? Does it expletive.

Patience, patience. Back to the drawing board (and the bookshop).
Life is too short for this pfaffing around.

http://homepages.tesco.net/~andycorsham/index.html

Grrrrrrrrr. Must focus on how satisfying it'll feel when I get it (or even bits of it to work.

Diddly dum.
I had an idea for a film of a novel today. When I say 'had', I actually mean 'assembled'. Or maybe 'stole'.* These are all verbs that could be defended. Unlike my prose style. Which. Today. Is. Very. Stac. Atto. Odd.
Anyway, back to the fillum.
EXT: We fade up from black to a ground-level distance shot of the horizon. It's twilight. A winter’s day. Grey tree shapes misting into the dusk, with some iron and purple colours where the sun’s setting. There are frozen furrows in the foreground. Blimey, it’s cold.
EXT: We crane up from the frozen field and pan across some frozen trees. {we realise at this stage, incidentally, that my film-making language is limited, and mostly uninformed bollocks; fortunately, there are no auteurs or pedantoid anoraks reading this, so we don’t care.}. There are a steady stream of car lights moving beyond the trees. We crane up again, through the trees [careful!] and out over the six lane motorway. When we reach the farthest lane, the camera does a weird swooping turn and dive, down towards – and then through – the rear window of one car in the stream.
INT: Car. Orange dashboard lights, and a sense of clutter – you’d imagine the smell of stale fags, spilt coffee, and old burger wrappings. And you’d be right. We get the driver’s head in profile, see his dribbly moustache and tragic mullet haircut.
MUSIC: [Fade up to loud] Eddie and the Hot Rods – “Do anything you wanna do”. There are unusual instruments in this mix's accompaniment: middle eastern bagpipes and stringed instruments - this adds an off-center skirl...
INT: Car still. The driver starts nodding his head in time to the music, drumming his hands on the steering wheel. The dusk landscape flashes past the driver’s window. It feels like Friday evening – liberation and joyous free movement.

EXT: Long shot of the city, with smoke, mist and lots of lights. The essential northern English industrial smokestack of the – what? 1970s? pre-Thatcher, pre-monetarism, pre- deindustrialisation. Happy days, but dirty. On the horizon, just visible in faint tonal contrast, are three pyramidal spoil heaps. Pyramids. Note those.

INT: Empty pub interior. It’s not opening time yet, so there are just the tables and chairs, and the dimmed yellow lights glinting on the glossy wooden bar, on the taps, on the bottles and mirrors behind the bar. There’s a fat, bald man leaning on the bar from the serving side, looking morose. The camera fixes on his face for a moment, and we hear the deep tick of the clock, then the gears moving in the clock, just before the chimes…

EXT: Dribbly moustache mullet man has parked his knackered old car in a side street, and is locking it up. We hear the shouts of distant yobs. We wouldn’t want to be here, in the cold and dark, alone on a winter’s night. But the mullet looks comfortable. A big fella, in denim and a capacious leather jacket. Camera adopts his POV as he walks along the street. The pub lights come on, and he pushes open the door.
INT: Pub again. We track across the pub, onto the bar top, and veer to the right, following the wood surface along to the end, where there are jars of pickles, bottles of condiments, and trays of knives, forks and spoons. We zoom in among the bottles and jars, and one of the labels is revealed as a small spotlight fades up:
CLOSE UP: Pickled eggs – the label on the jar. The main branding on the label is a stylised cat – in that classical Egyptian style. We zoom in on the contents of the jar: over the glossy curves of the eggs, and through the distorting lens of the murky vinegar, we can see other labels – and they’re also themed on Egyptian mythological lines: jackal-headed beasts, scarab beetles (damn, that’s all the Egyptian clichés I know).

INT: The pub, filling up. Customer headwear is predominantly flat caps, but there are also fezzes.
{pause}
The premise here is of a world where the familiar western industrial city culture is melded with elements of the ancient Egyptian world. I’d develop this is a black comedy piece, I think, with some faux-profound journey across the city’s nightscape: this would mirror/interleave with another journey, through the land of the dead. It’d be a mixture of grit, whimsy, pithy Victoria Wood dialogue and observation, and ritual slaughter and mummification. Nice.

*This ramble emerged from a reference to mummification I got in an email from a new friend in Japan, and a brief discussion about Egyptological terminology with a free-associating colleague. I enjoyed following this idea along. (Feels like I’ve done my writing for the day now…) :-)

In an attempt to reinvigorate my novel (it's beached at the moment, gasping for air...), I'm taking a creative writing evening class. This is, by turns, fun, informative, frustrating, depressing, and satisfying. Mostly it's interesting and rewarding, though, and I always get home and feel mentally inspired to write. But it's late, it's Monday, and I've had a day full of meetings at work. So I sit and eat crunchy nut cornflakes and swear that I *will* write tomorrow night. It *does* happen occasionally, but not often enough.

Below is one of the pieces I wrote for my homework a couple of weeks back. The exercise title we were set was "box".

Box

Nan’s dead, and we’re clearing her house. The council gave us a week.

The last cardboard box is wobbly, soft with age. It’s dusty, too, and the top flaps sag into a central hollow. When I lift it out of the car it feels too light for its size: it comes up quickly, and the parched cardboard scratches against my chin.

The other boxes are stacked in my living room. Hemmed in on the settee, I imagine that the blank cardboard harbours the faint, accumulated odours of nan’s house: boiled bacon, carbolic soap, cat food, embrocation, coal, and burned fat from last year’s chip pan fire.

That fire was the first sign of the end coming: after her panicky phone call, we’d driven over to find her sitting on the stairs weeping, hunched and vulnerable, a shivering, diminished imitation of the foul-mouthed, vitriolic dynamo we’d all been afraid of. In the kitchen, there was a sodden, burned tea towel on the cooker, and flakes of ash floated in the air, circling each other like black gnats.

I open the last box, and there, in a nest of desiccated receipts and utility bills, is the musical box. It’s shaped like a Swiss chalet, with a canted roof and a square chimney. When I was a child, I would nervously unearth it from the cupboard in nan and granddad’s bedroom, feeling blindly for its angles with my fingers while I looked over my shoulder, listening for anyone coming upstairs.

My fingers remember the musical box’s weight and shape, the knobbly carving of the roof tiles, the dry wooden underside. The mechanism never worked, but I know that if I open the roof I can draw my fingernail across the tuned strips of metal and make the old plucked music come.
I weigh it in my hands, staring at the past. Nan’s sitting on the stairs, weeping. I put the musical box back into the cardboard box, and fold over the flaps.

Sunday. Dank and cold. Murky. Anybody would think it was winter.

A kind person mailed me about my blog. I realised how parsimonious I've been with my posts. Pithy, I like to think: you don't get any filler with me. Or any content at all, most of the time. This could change, of course. I could become one of those logorrheic types who just can't help but spill everything out. People used to have the decency to keep it in their diaries, but now we can self-publish our verbal incontinence. I haven't quite decided whether that's a good thing or a bad thing... ;-)

I have returned again, and maybe I'll be a bit stickier this time.

Saw "Sideways" last night and laughed. A lot.